Earlier this week, Professor Mann sent me a link to this fantastic article about How to Behave in an Art Museum, which was related to a conversation we had a while ago about awkwardness.
At first, I found it hard to say why I liked the article so much. It wasn't just that the author made a good point, or that he seemed endearingly self-aware and neurotic, while still being generally good-natured. And it wasn't the subject matter, although it interested me, at least enough. I realized after a while that what I liked most about it was the only thing the author didn't make explicit: his premise — or maybe it was his conclusion — that awkwardness isn't just an annoying and embarrassing phenomenon, a result of bad planning or ineptitude, but an indicator that something complicated is going on under the surface, something difficult to articulate. In this case, he's arguing that the feeling of awkwardness most of us experience in museums is indicative of our conflicted feelings about "high culture" and what constitutes art.
It's a daring piece, in a way: he's braving awkwardness himself by looking the problem in the eye; and when he manages to articulate the exact nature of museum-awkwardness, it's as though he's defeated it and vanquished it with words.
A while ago, a friend of mine interviewed a guy who'd written a bunch of novels imagining how Sherlock Holmes would behave in various settings, including on the Enterprise, and the writer (Nicholas Myers) argued that the reason Holmes is such a popular figure is that he stands for the belief that "life can be understood," that rational thought can parse even the most emotional and confusing events. I think a lot of the "lowbrow" things that tends to appeal to smart and curious people (i.e. "dorky" stuff like Star Trek, House, comic books, et cetera)(i.e. everything I care about) share that premise. Even though most of these productions/pieces don't seem to have been made for the purpose of being studied too closely themselves, they're enjoyable, at least in part, because it's fun to spend time in a world where people (or fictional people) believe that things can be understood. It's uplifting somehow.
The author of the Museums article actually alludes to that premise, at least obliquely, when he writes that
The closer we get to the top, it seems, the more likely we are to believe, or pretend to believe, that the ladder we’ve been climbing leads nowhere—is meaningful only to those who stare at its innumerable rungs from below. Self-improvement, we discover, is a sham. We were better off when we were just kids, when we knew what we liked effortlessly, when our passions were not learned. And so we end up in MoMA’s romper room, doing somersaults on the carpet, hoping to return to a state of innocence.
He seems to be saying that the awkwardness in museums is related to our innate desire to find things understandable, neatly-ordered, and objectively comparable, and the way abstract art threatens that instinct. But what's subtle about it is that instead of caving to the desire to lie down and close his eyes to the museum, he explores its source — and that's what ultimately separates him from the other visitors. He doesn't say it, but it seems to me that by doing so, he's implicitly taking a stand.
And I found that inspiring — not in a rational way, but viscerally: after I finished reading the piece, I felt charged, soaked through, with the same heady feeling I had my first year of college in Professor Lilla's class: the feeling that I had a lot of work ahead of me, a lot of big questions to consider. I still don't know, for instance, how I feel about abstract art. I certainly maintain a healthy dose of cynicism about nonrepresentational artwork, operas, and writing, sometimes to my detriment; but I believe in poetry; I believe that if done properly, saying less can express more. (And I wish I were better at that.) (More on this subject later.)
I spent a few subway rides this week thinking about what a year it's been and how I want to do things differently when I'm 22 and what promises I'm going to make to myself. But I realized that what they all boiled down to (with a few pragmatic exceptions) was the feeling that I needed to recommit myself, somehow, to the endeavor that felt so urgent back then: the struggle to understand things, to figure out what I believed, and to parse the ambiguities and tensions I'd been living with once and for all. The premise of the article is that emotions are intelligent and studying them, and attempting to articulate them, is intellectually fruitful. When I felt most sure of that, my intellectual efforts felt like noble battles, struggles that one could win or lose on a daily basis. My favorite classes have shared that premise and produced that effect; that's what I need to hold into when I graduate, when I won't have access to those rare individuals whose commitment to those ideals never wavers. Leo once called this clarity of purpose "strength," for lack of a better word in English; I told him his word worked just fine. I just need to be strong.
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