In her 2004 Jefferson lecture, Helen Vendler raised a series of questions:
The arts have the advantage, once presented, of making people curious not only about aesthetic matters, but also about history, philosophy, and other cultures. How is it that pre–Columbian statues look so different from Roman ones? Why do some painters concentrate on portraits, others on landscapes? Why did great ages of drama arise in England and Spain and then collapse? Who first found a place for jazz in classical music, and why? Why do some writers become national heroes, and others not? Who evaluates art, and how? Are we to believe what a piece of art says? Why does Picasso represent a full face and a profile at the same time? How small can art be and still be art? Why have we needed to invent so many subsets within each art–within literature, the epic, drama, lyric, novel, dialogue, essay; within music everything from the solo partita to the chorales of Bach? Why do cultures use different musical instruments and scales? Who has the right to be an artist?
Whoa! I was reading along somewhat complacently, even a bit sleepily through this rather comprehensive list, when that last question pulled me up short.
Who has the right?
As if one must be vetted by some latter day HUAC in order to be an artist. Or perhaps by some committee of scholars who guard the canon.
A poet might think that every editor of every literary quarterly and e-zine claims the right to decide who has the right to be an artist.
But that gets to the question of “Who evaluates art and how?” In this series of questions, I think Ms. Vendler is making a case for her own profession: academic critic of the arts.
In the USA, I’d say anybody has the right to be an artist. It’s a right protected by the First Amendment.
It’s the follow-up question that may be the rub:
How does one claim that right?
The obvious answer is that one claims the right by making art.
Implied in the question is another: what is your aim in making art?
Last night I watched a documentary called Give Me the Banjo In it, Mike Seeger talked of going into the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia to find musicians whose artistry was not meant for performance. What he seemed to mean by that odd statement — since music must be performed — was that it was not meant for public, professional performance. It was music of the sort my grandfather and his neighbors used to make seated on sweet-smelling feed sacks in the back room of Sweet Owen General Store. Music performed for love and community.
These musicians are artists, some of excellent and original talent. But they are not professional.
I suppose we could relegate them to the ghetto called folk art or primitives. But I’d rather not.
Somehow I see relevance in this passage I found this morning in Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens (ed Holly Stevens, Knopf, 1966). It is quoted from “Effects of Analogy” in The Necessary Angel:
The truth is that a man’s sense of the world dictates his subjects to him and that this sense is derived from his personality, his temperament, over which he has little control and possibly none, except superficially. It is not a literary problem. It is the problem of his mind and nerves. These sayings are another form of the saying that poets are born not made. A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noonday.
An artist makes art and has no more thought of rights* that does the wren who built her nest in an old fishbowl in our attic.
*In totalitarian countries where arts are suppressed, artists must consider not so much rights, since they have none anyway, but personal freedom.
When Pete Seeger was blacklisted by HUAC, he continued to perform on college campuses. According to Wikpedia:
The Smothers Brothers ended Seeger’s national blacklisting by broadcasting him singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on their CBS variety show on February 25, 1968, after his similar performance in September 1967 was censored by CBS
