A Half Dozen Thoughts on Aesthetics

1. I just don't get the whole Marilyn Monroe thing, the Marilyn gestalt. I know she was a smart person who played a dumb blond, and her blondness was in and of itself a thing, but it all leaves me bored. Same for the whole decadent Berlin of the 30s thing. I don't particularly like the look of it, and that transgressiveness theme always fails to thrill me. While we're at it, I don't like that frilly-dress Moulin Rouge look and feel either. There. I think that covers it. Oh, so what do I like? Everything else.

2. Jackson Pollack created his drip paintings by making very particular marks and gestures, except they were three feet above the canvas. That's what poetry is: Painting three feet in the air. There has to be a particularity at the core, but enough ambiguity to allow for chance associations to enter and resonate.

3. I never cease to be fascinated with the endurance of painting as an important cultural and spiritual endeavor. Why do we spend so much time analyzing and appreciating what has transpired on a mere canvas, perhaps just a couple feet high or wide? It seems to be that it was luck or fate. Why is 70 feet the perfect distance from home plate to first? Shorter or longer wouldn't work. Much has been made of art moving beyond the canvas into installations and "happenings." Yet the canvas is an ideal arena for humans to seek complex expression, and paint is the perfect medium with which to conduct the struggle.

4. Can a song change the world? No, of course not. But people who are inclined to seek beauty and meaning in something so ephemeral as a song, will themselves change the world, albeit in subtle ways, ways which perhaps don't translate so well into politics. Indeed, an overtly political song will never change anything. That's why the stance among some artists and musicians to see themselves as revolutionary amounts to little more than self-flattery. Real revolutionaries kill people, and it's ugly as hell.

5. Bob Dylan's new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, seems tossed off, with all those photos there to provide the illusion of substance. That's my take based not on reading the whole thing but from browsing it a couple times and reading all the reviews online. This is not to say there isn't worth there. Since it's Dylan, there will be. And the main takeaway of the book, as I understand it, is Dylan's conviction that the meaning and worth of a song (or work of art) is entirely what is produced in the mind of the listener, the chain of associations that gets kicked off, all those synapses that start firing. That's how I judge a Dylan song. I value it to the extent that it sets my mind reeling. That's why I value Idiot Wind more than Visions of Johanna. The former sends me into reveries, the latter not so much. But for many people the opposite is true.

6. Some conservatively minded people allege that many of us use art as a substitute for God or religion, and that it is ultimately inadequate to the task. Well, guilty as charged -- to an extent. I don't see art as a substitute for anything religious, but I do see a life oriented toward aesthetics as one that can be highly salutary in ways that might approach the spiritual. Above all it helps one to become comfortable with mystery, it opens one to the sublime, it encourages responses to difference that are creative rather than conflictual, and, crucially, it discourages any propensity one might have toward cheap moralism. None of this means God doesn't exist. Indeed, I believe God might see the aesthetic path as pleasing and, shall we say, headed in the right direction.