On collecting (Kimmelman)

It is taken for granted that Rembrandts are worth collect-

ing because they are art and expensive, but collectors, as Dr.

Hicks proves, will collect pretty much everything, without

necessarily thinking that what they collect has aesthetic or

monetary value. Prestige, like taste in art is often in the eye

of the‘ collector, and true value may be greatest when the

value is only symbolic. Collected objects become symbolic

when they lose their utilitarian purpose. A former prisoner in

a Stalinist labor camp, for example, collected keys to locks

that were no longer in use. A key is no longer just a key if it

belonged to the Bastille, nor a sewing kit just a sewing kit if

Betsy Ross sewed with it. As Philipp Blom, a writer on col-

lecting, has put it: “As often as not the objects collected are

the cast-offs of society, overtaken by technological advance,

used and disposable, outmoded, disregarded, unfashion-

able.” Their uselessness becomes their asset: they turn into

totems and fragments of the lost worlds they came from. So

the arm of Teresa of Avila is prized not because it is practical

to medical science as a specimen of muscle and bone but be-

cause it is connected, as Blom says, “with otherworldliness,

as a key to heaven, to a world infinitely richer than our

everyday existence.” It becomes a holy relic.

just as art promises wonderment——an access to a realm

beyond the everyday, through the experience of which we

may understand the everyday better—-—a collection of things,

even everyday things, promises wonderment, too, as these

things become no longer everyday, having been enshrined by

a collector. Walter Benjamin, who collected books, said that

“one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment

when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a

thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely

and abandoned on the marketplace and bought it to give it its

freedom—-the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in

‘The Arabian Nights.’ ” He added, “To a book collector, you

see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his

shelves.”

For Benjamin, collecting makes sense of a senseless

world. Collectors take up “arms against dispersal. The great

collector is touched to the core by the confusion and the dis-

persal in which things are found in this world.” 

+ + + + + + + + + + + + +

Connoisseurship entails making distinctions through slow,

comparative observation, whether it involves paintings or

wooden ducks.

Partly it was a desire for a more methodical approach to

collected objects a system for spreading connoisseurship,

that ushered in a new age of museums two centuries ago.

Museums began to specialize. Elks’ hooves went one way,

paintings another. The balance tipped from delight toward

instruction. The new museums set out more systematically

to categorize things, to create order, or at least to imply that

there is an order to life. René Descartes, who called wonder-

ment the first of all the passions, also wrote that an excess

of wonder can “pervert the use of reason.” The age of won-

der cabinets turned into the age of Descartes and the ency-

clopedists.

But the spirit of the wonder cabinets never altogether

died. Art museums, and even modern collections of light-

bulbs, though they may not be true wonder cabinets, preserve

what’s marvelous to show us what is rare and what we can’t

see otherwise, and thereby help us see, with heightened

curiosity, what is around us. 

Cary Grant

Agnes: Now there's a guy who never goes out of a girl's mind. He just stays there... like a heavy meal.
Her date: What am I?
Agnes: Orange juice

Kimmelman again, on art as the marketing of sensibility

Ancient Greeks, the historian David

Freedberg reminds us in The Power of Images, used to chain

statues to prevent them from fleeing, while Buddhists in

Ceylon believed that a figure in a painting could be brought

to life once its eyes were painted.

Call it aura. Art always has had to do with aura———

spiritual aura in the past, individual aura in modern times-

and this applies not just to visual art. Religious music, for

example, was written to express piety and honor the church.

Court music was composed to compliment the king. But in

the modern era, secular symphonies arrived. What were they

supposed to celebrate? The temperament of the composer.

As the pianist Charles Rosen has written, pure instrumental

music came to have “its own law, its own reason for existing:

it [was] produced by the artist not for a purpose but because

he must——out of an ‘inner necessity”’ Which is to say that the

new musical artist sought to make a living by selling his

soul———his individual sensibility.

For visual artists, this sensibility came to be most com-

monly measured by touch. The Industrial Revolution, providing

machine-made objects to the masses, distinguished touch

even further as a virtue. “The artist’s touch became the basis of

aesthetics and connoisseurship,” as Arthur Danto has put it.

And it was against this backdrop that Marcel Duchamp

bought his machine-made objects like shovels and urinals,

signed them, and declared them art, and thereby did more

than just question traditional standards of beauty; he chal-

lenged the prestige of the handmade. Duchamp was upend-

ing the notion of art as an object of physical and material

distinction, individually put together. It was a short step

from the urinal to Duchamp’s bottling of Paris air and call-

ing the “empty” bottle a sculpture. If bottled air were art, the

only question left was, What was art not?

On awe and the sublime

Caspar David Friedrich’s

spectacularly suave and rapturous views from mountaintops

exemplified romanticism’s radical elevation of landscape

painting to a status previously occupied by religious painting

and epic poetry. In America, mid-nineteenth-century painters

gave a certain parochial spin to this new equation of landscape,

and in particular of mountains, with the sublime. Nature,

being abundantly present in the vastness of the American

West, was said to express God’s infinitude. From there, it was

only a short leap of faith for many Americans to conclude

that Manifest Destiny was a matter of Christian duty and

divine right, a viewpoint self-consciously underscored in

the mountain paintings of Frederic Church and Albert

Bierstadt.

By Cézanne’s time, painting a mountain had already be-

come a familiar device. He recognized this, and it’s signifi-

cant, I think, that he chose to paint views of his mountain

but rarely the views from it. He must have realized that the

view from it would have seemed too much like every other

mountaintop view, which had lost its power to surprise us be-

cause it had become so commonplace in art—but also that

the view of the mountain could still be distinctive, like a por-

trait, and that beauty derived from the particular, not the

general. 

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY American landscapists saw

beauty as intrinsic to mountains, which is to say natural, be-

cause they thought God spoke directly through nature. But if

beauty is actually in the eye of the beholder, then it is not a

matter of nature or science or something that can even be

easily named. People have the ability to see that something,

like a mountain, is beautiful or they do not, in the same way

that you may describe in great detail a piece of music to a

deaf person, and that person, despite having rationally ab-

sorbed what you have said, will still never quite know what

the music sounds like. Meanwhile, real beauty in art cannot

only be a quality intuitively recognized, something plain on

its surface, because then it might be shallow. The philoso-

pher and art critic Arthur Danto has made the point that

beauty, if it is not to be solely decorative, should also have a

deeper rationale for being in art; it should be intrinsic to the

meaning of the art. 

Danto’s theory implies that beauty, which for our pur-

poses could include an aesthetic appreciation for the sublim-

ity of mountains, requires an effort of decipherment on our

part to grasp its deeper meaning. Danto, where he cites

Motherwell, also quotes the philosopher David Hume, who

separated natural beauty from beauty in art, saying that nat-

ural beauty just hits you in the face——it is plainly there, and if

you fail to recognize it, too bad, no rational explanation of

nature’s beauty will redress your failure—whereas beauty in

art depends on reasoning and critical analysis: people may

come around to seeing beauty in art through reasoned argu-

ment. 

It occurred to me that, having enjoyed the mountaintop

but not felt an epiphany on it, I was perhaps in need of fur-

ther rational enlightenment. Notwithstanding what Hume

said about nature’s beauty hitting you in the face, all deep

understanding of beauty may in fact be acculturated.

 I wondered if anything had replaced the

mountain as a new paradigm of sublimity. It almost seems

odd to talk about the sublime today We are programmed

now to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are there-

fore doomed to be disappointed when, inevitably, we don’t

feel it. It is the disappointment that many tourists experience

when they go to see the Mona Lisa, a sublime painting, en-

cased behind protective glass. This is because when nothing

is truly strange or foreign any longer, everything having been

predigested, we then demand to be shocked, shock being an

experience that still seems genuine to us. Thus we mistake

shock for awe.