.The second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, which is a bit slippery on a couple of fronts. Sometimes it simply means go out, or go online and replenish art supplies - stock up on paper, paint, markers, etc. Get frames to frame pieces I have printed out. Hang stuff on my “gallery walls.” Very prosaic stuff. Literally gather the tools necessary to create works in whatever genre I am playing with at the moment. Baseline “enabling.” But obviously just having the tools creates only the most tenuous path to beauty - along the lines of get a huge chunk of marble, a hammer and a chisel and hammer away all the marble that doesn’t look like The David. Ta da. That there, that’s yer beauty.
A few rungs up the ladder of sophistication, brings us to the notions of environment and permission. Making most art is messy, which is why artists of all stripes try to claim some type of "studio". A place where the tools of the trade, as it were, can spill out. Do a search on “Video of Jackson Pollock working” for some glimpses of a messy studio on steroids. But even an artist who works primarily digitally needs a space that can contain post-it notes, print outs of rough drafts, trays for snacks, etc. I remember, many years ago, stumbling across a potter’s studio during a sort of touring art show somewhere in northern Michigan. And the only thing I remembered the entire “tour” is this awesome studio. Huge space, almost all windows looking out on a stream winding into a forest. I remember thinking “anyone could create here!” Silly, I know, but that was my thought at the time.
I was ignoring the vital aspect of permission. It's not just about having the space in which to create. Not only is art messy, but it requires large chunks of uninterrupted time. “Doing Art” regardless of the medium is all about flow. You really cannot “hold that thought” or “save that line” “wash your hands and come here for a minute.” Artists do those things, and may be able to come back to the “moment of interruption” and move forward, but the piece created “post-interruptus” will be different from that which would have been created without the interruption. It is not necessarily a case of better or worse, just different. So, it is probably best for an artist to try to create a personal and professional environment in which the permission to spend large amounts of uninterrupted time “doing art” is acknowledged. Where stepping out of your "creating space" is not necessarily seen as an invitation to be set another task.
Yet, all that being said, - with obvious apologies to my better half - the stickiest issue lies ahead. The whole Beauty thing. I was watching a video the other day about a well-known New York art figure, Ann Freedman, former president Knoedler & Company Gallery, who had been widely acknowledged as selling forgeries of paintings - literally "made in China," that she steadfastly contended were authentic. When asked what her initial impression of a forged Rothko that she had sold, she replied, “I thought it was just beautiful!” I pick on Rothko for a couple of reasons. First, the “gallery forger” did acknowledge that while she still maintained that her Rothko was “real,” he was “easy to fake.” Secondly, some of my best friends are Rothko lovers. And some Rothko lovers are art experts with impeccable credentials. Rothko is unquestionably an artist of significant stature.
Now, let me sidetrack for one of my favorite stories about my Dad. When he was in his early 90s Christine and I took him to lunch in Long Grove, which, at the time, was a lovely little town northeast of Chicago. While it has fallen a bit on hard times, there was - and still is, I think - a neat art gallery cum gift shop. Maybe called "The Studio"? Anyhow we were walking around the place, which was “gallery-ish” enough that you keep your voice down. Well, most folks did. However, Dad had been studying an abstract piece hanging on the wall for several minutes before declaring in a definitely non-lowered voice, “Why, I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!” We quickly decided it was time for lunch and scurried out the door.
Point is, with his expertise fully acknowledged, I feel the same way about Rothko. It mattered naught to me that our purveyor of forged Rothkos, Pollocks, etc., thought her Rothko was “beautiful,” I would have to side with what I think Dad’s assessment of Rothko's work would be, and it would not be "My, that is just beautiful." The point lies in this aphorism: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in the case I would like to explore a little further; in the ear of the listener.
I am addicted to music. I am trying to think of a time during a normal day when I am not listening to music, and I’m having trouble. “How about right now?” you may ask. Well, right now I am typing on my Mac while listening to a classical piano track on Pandora which is, simultaneously, being accompanied by a rain storm track on Naturespaces. “OK,” you say. “How about when you are asleep?” Same blend. Pandora and Naturespaces, all night long. And I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that I either sleep with my headphones on, or in the guest room. So I guess that the only time I am not listening to music is when I am watching some type of video - which usually has a sound track. Sigh.
All of which has led to consider what characteristics in music do I find most beautiful. While realizing that my characteristics will probably differ from yours I thought it would be fun to share those thoughts and some of that music with you.
I suppose it is not strange that often the music I find most beautiful shares a close relationship with tenet number three, Distill Complexity. It is not that I am unacquainted with complex musical forms. In high school I sang, competitively, in an octet. We had a brilliant conductor who had previously worked with Johnny Mathis and the Young Americans. He was quite demanding and it was largely because of his expertise that we won statewide contests several times. In college, I sang one of the leads in the opera based on James Thurber's children's book Many Moons. So, yes. I am familiar with complexity in musical forms. And occasionally I quite enjoy them. A couple of concerts in Venice; one Vivaldi and unique version of Rossini's Barber of Seville, are among my all time favorites. But I don't always enjoy complex works. Singing in the Thurber opera was genuinely terrifying, as the two female leads, both of whom could read music, possessed a couple of the sweetest voices I have ever heard. Which may in part explain my preference for pure "distilled" vocals.
I encountered one such piece, which remains in my top five, while sleeping. Well, not actual asleep but not really awake either. The clock radio was set to NPRs This Country in the Morning, and as they often did, they were featuring some musical selections. Today it was Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and I waited, just a tad apprehensively for Judy Garland's iconic rendition. But only a few notes in I realized that whoever was singing this was better than Garland - much, much better. If you haven't heard Eva Cassidy's version, I'll paste a link in here. Realizing that - like my perhaps minority take on Rothko - "beauty" is subjective, you may still prefer the Garland version. But do give Eva a serious listen:
It is the purity of the sound - the "non-complexity" if you will, that captures me. It is music that just floats you away. You fear that the vocal support, will drop out, fade out somehow, but it never does, and you wonder how she can do that, and then you wish she would never stop. And it is that purity of sound that comes through on this next piece.
Amazing Grace/My Chains are Gone was recommended to me by a student in one of my media classes. This version is done by a woman's group from Brigham Young University called Noteworthy. I think this link is the cleanest path to them, but they too are worth the search: https://byurecords.lnk.to/HowSweetSoundID
Those works, among a few others brings me to this thought: “Beauty induces a spontaneous inhalation.” And yes, at first glance that may seem to say the same thing as the old saw; “I don’t know much about art, but I know it when I see it.” But version one uses bigger, albeit fewer words, hence you would use the second version if you were being paid by the word. However, word count is not really the only difference. Let’s break it down a bit - a close reading if you will.
“Induces.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, when something “induces” something, it acts upon the will to lead us to a specific behavior. So in our brief version beauty “acts upon the will.” We don’t choose to take a deep breath, beauty "induces" the behavior.
"Spontaneous." Coming freely and without premeditation or effort.
"Inhalation." The act of inhaling or breathing in.
Put them together and what have you got? Bibity, bopity, Boo? You have something - in our immediate context, a piece of music - that literally takes your breath away, leaves you gasping. And while at the moment we are talking about music, beauty can arise from any stimulus. It can be found in something created by an artist in any medium or genre. It can be, and often is, found in the natural world - from microscopic particles, to the latest high resolution images of a black hole currently making its way across the internet. So can anything be beautiful if beauty is defined by a spontaneous subjective reaction to some external stimulus? Was Ann Freedman's declaration of the forged Rothko as "beautiful" legitimate? Possibly. But other aspects of her assessment give me pause.
For me to be party to "enabling beauty," the created stimulus to which I am reacting, and which I wish to enable, must manifest some combination of three other characteristics: awareness, honesty and intention. And it important to note that notion of "created stimulus." Awareness, honesty and intention applied to occurrences in the natural world take us into the world of theology and metaphysics - is there intentional beauty in a sunset, a rose, in a baby's smile, in your lover's eyes? You can see why I don't want to go there. But those notions certainly can be brought to bear on works created specifically to engage the mind - and the pocketbook - of an audience, be they a patron or a target demographic.
Let me simplify. Ann Freeman's declaration of the "beauty" of her forged Rothko loses credibility because most of the evidence implies that she was aware that the work was dishonest and was created with the sole intention of defrauding wealthy collectors.
Problematically, while that simplification resolves most of the ethical complexities in The Case of The Lady and the Forger, it leaves the "beauty" of the forged painting in limbo. The artist, Pei-Shen Qian, is apparently somewhat of a genius [see https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/nyregion/struggling-immigrant-artist-tied-to-80-million-new-york-fraud.html?] able to forge a number of contemporary artists at a level that fooled a number of "experts."
So what of the works themselves? If upon seeing one of these works I experience a spontaneous inhalation. Is that work - for me - truly beautiful? Do I have to be aware that a work - in any genre - is a fraud to remove a created work from my personal realm of the beautiful? Can the work itself somehow be questionable - less beautiful - because of the fraudulent chain of creation and ownership that led to its existence? I'm inclined to believe not. Can a work of art be held responsible for the motivations of the hand that created it? Again, I choose not to go there.
And if that wasn't bad enough, welcome to the world of non-fungible tokens - NFT's - a type of digital image file one of which sold at Christie's for about 70 million dollars on March 11. No actual physical "painting" changed hands, nor is the general public barred from downloading the file and printing their own version of the file. No, I do not understand. Feel free to google "JPG file Sells for 69 Million." However, I did search for the image online. I experienced no spontaneous inhalation. So for me, for the immediate future, beauty appears to be safe from the attack of the NFTs.
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