The Power of Art

When I caught Simon's Schama's great BBC documentary series The Power of Art a while ago,  although I found it stimulating and very well done (how perilous, how dangerously tacky historical dramatization can be... but they pulled it off!), the thing that most struck me is the extent to which his otherwise deeply informed and sensitive interpretations about the art and the lives of the artists he was presenting were inflected by rhetorical requirements. The requirement to tell a good story, because it's tv; the need to appealingly make oneself into a bit of character — the wordly and knowing racconteur, perhaps, who's seen it all, the grandeur and wretchedness of humanity, without blinking; and most damagingly, I think, the need to compose a clever commentary, showcasing how informed and sensitive one's interpretations really are.

Fruitful and necessary though they are, there is something deeply pernicious about criticism, about commentary. It's something one often experiences writing essays: this compulsion to "be brilliant", to take the ill-fitting fragments of one's raw perception (of art or whatever) and force them by sheer cleverness to fit together neatly to form a picture that doesn't so much represent the object one was trying to analyse, but rather reflects one's own earnest striving, or limitations, or desire to shine... Setting out to express something meaningful about a work of art we are confronted with, we often find ourselves deflected, tripped up by the words and their own logic — and manage only to express distorted projections of our own selves. We are trapped by the mechanics of rhetoric and our egotism. Especially dangerous in essays is the necessity of completeness, which will lead us to all types of chancy constructions, just to be done with it, to get to the end — and also to escape the sinking feeling that comes when we glimpse the truly unfathomable complexity of experience, by plowing through it using ad hoc synthesis.

Accomplished essays and synthesis are very fine I'm sure, but sometimes one feels fragments, grasping sketches, inchoate mumblings are just more honest.