Weekend thoughts

I went to see the Hopper exhibit yesterday at the National Gallery. If you're going to be in Washington DC before the exhibit closes, I highly recommend seeing it. As we walked through the exhibition, we were discussing friends who hate Hopper (I have a few), and why they do. One friend theorized that it's because he's accessible, and I have to concede some of that, but I wonder if it isn't also that to some extent he's been spoiled by his imitators. After all, that same friend conceded he'd hated the recent Turner exhibit largely because it's far too reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade. Hopper is even easier to imitate--badly--than Turner, and hence he's the stuff of half the hotel paintings between here and Sacramento. Similarly, I've been listening to a lot of 19th century composers in the last year, and I've struggled to get over the fact that their minor themes seem to have been so shamelessly pillaged for the construction of 1940's movie scores. This makes me ponder the social value of fair use. Perhaps I'm more willing to contemplate its downsides because of David Balan's weekend post defending what I would normally consider indefensible: the standard cries of "selling out" whenever an artist becomes more accessible.

I want to offer an argument that the original fans are (or at least can be) right to feel betrayed. Most people regard art to be an important part of their lives. But artistic products are, by their nature, things that you can't fully appreciate until you consume them. Moreover, they aren't even "experience goods" in the traditional sense that once you've experienced them you know everything there is to know about them. Rather, art exercises its influence over you subtly and gradually, and in ways that you cannot fully predict or control. This means that you are, to some extent, at the mercy of artistic gatekeepers: it is inevitable that the people who feed you art, who tell you what is and what is not "good," have real power over an important part of your life, and that power is partially unaccountable in the sense that you will not necessarily ever know whether your gatekeepers have been acting as a faithful agent in your interest (i.e., acting to help you achieve the richest possible artistic experience), or whether they are taking advantage of you for personal gain. This means that you must trust other people to look after this aspect of your well-being, with the knowledge that they may have interests that diverge from yours. And where there is trust, there can be a betrayal of trust. And as a practical matter, it makes sense to direct your opprobrium at anyone you actually catch violating that trust, in the hopes that this will serve to deter some of those would-be betrayers whom you would not have caught.

I'm not sure I buy the legitimacy of "gatekeepers" of art. But art clearly is constructed in the sense that it is not just the piece itself, but our associations with the piece, that create our experience. So anything that creates bad associations--an awful subsequent album, a bad piece of fair use, or even a poorly judged licensing--has the power to destroy our enjoyment of something we otherwise consider good art. I don't mind Hem selling out to Liberty Mutual, but the eHarmony ad has permanently put me off "Everlasting Love", and for that matter, Natalie Cole. Not that I think we should do anything about this, mind you. But for now, I'm preserving my right to get mad.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/01/weekend-thoughts/2479/