Art and Individual Taste

By now everyone should know that the things they like and don’t are often the result of factors outside their own choices. We’re never left alone when it comes to cultural consummation, the stakes are just too high. Whether it’s advertising for a certain perfume, watch or car, or newspaper articles letting readers know that a singer’s record is a classic before it’s released, or the technical complexities involved in filming a soon-to-be released film, our minds are constantly bombarded with information to make things seem essential.

Politicians are aware of this. Public opinion is shaped; it’s too dangerous to be left alone. Notable examples are those coming out of the Cold War at the Paris Review and the various strategies behind the ascension of abstract expressionism.

I recall reading the liner notes of a disc by Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, where Harold Shoenberg, the music critic of The New York Times, referred to his playing as virtuosic but cold and machine-like, reflecting how the Soviet regime produced machine-men without souls… a bit like Dolf Lungren in one of the Rocky films. This is better than what happened to you in Soviet Russia if they thought you were on the wrong side. For more on that, read The Gulag Archipelago.

It's not difficult to understand. Politicians aren’t artists, they have different concerns—helping their unthinking constituency along the difficult path of reasoning. But consider the deleterious long-term effects of their decisions. Just think of how many people stood in front of hideously ugly paintings, thinking they were masterpieces, trying to understand why they just didn’t get it, feeling like morons and then having to tell everyone how much they loved them.

It’s not just advertising and publicity agents, governments and spies. Investors also play a major part in what gets seen and what doesn’t. Recently I was in Venice for a few days. I used the occasion to visit the Guggenheim Museum. There they all were, all the names we have come to know and love: Magritte, Picasso, Kandinsky, Calder, etc. And what a frame to see them in: a beautiful house, the Grand Canal, the storied Guggenheim name, the romance. Not to be seduced would be brutish.

I was struck to see that many artists in the Guggenheim are also in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Here’s a partial list: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still… Chalk it up to coincidence.

I asked myself: Do I really like these works? I’ve been exposed to them for my entire life, told they are masterpieces, and feel a sort of Pavlovian loyalty to them, but do I like them? I couldn’t answer that question.

I asked a young guard what she thought about the Picasso hanging on the wall. An intern studying art history, sje spoke about the importance of the work, specifically how it reflected fears surrounding the then-looming Second World War. She was very nice but it was a parrot’s recitation. I’d heard it all before, almost word for word. It’s almost impossible now, without sounding like an uncultured slob, to risk an unfavorable opinion about any of these artists. Who’d risk their reputation and say they don’t like Paul Klee? A bit like the litany from H.G. Well’s The Island of Lost Souls: “What is the Law?… Not to walk on all fours! Are we not men?” Anything to avoid The House of Pain.

I went out on the front terrace of the museum where there was Angel of the City by Marino Marini, whose work is also found in the BMA sculpture garden. This work (pictured above) features a man displaying his full virility while riding on the back of a horse. A woman was there, photographing her two young adult children who were, on the left and right of the statue, grasping the rider’s extended member. She saw me looking and said, “There’s a story behind it.” She was right, there is, but will we ever know it?