he who has ears

I think I’ve written before on this blog about my simplistic definition of art. What is it that actually lies beneath the surface of art that distinguishes it from superficial pop fare where there is nothing below the proverbial epidermis? Pop tells the listener all there is to tell. There is no more. Art doesn’t have to tell the listener anything. Art can serve as a catalyst for images, sounds, memories, and information that allows the listener to formulate the story that the artist intended.
In this way, the listener is involved in the telling of the story to himself; he creates scenery, meaning and application based on his own knowledge, memories and experiences. He is the discoverer, and one is much more likely to be affected by and claim ownership of his own discovery than by something he is told by someone else. The artist then, causes one to call upon himself and engage with the artwork in a way that allows him to assimilate his own experience and knowledge, even identity, in ways that he hasn’t previously done, to arrive at new insight and understanding.
Thus, art requires an education to fully mean. That is not to say that one has to be educated to understand or be affected by all art. Though art may use elements that one’s experience doesn’t include and therefore require knowledge of them, the education that I am talking about can be purely experiential. The wonder of most art is that it contains something for everyone, regardless of the level at which they can experience and understand the work.
At this point, I am talking about more than appreciation. We often use that word when we really mean respect for something that we don’t think we can understand. We respect it as something we think is too big for us, but we don’t really appreciate it, or even know what is there for us not to understand. We are always suspect then, of people who seem to or say that they understand it on a deeper level.
In class, for the past couple years I’ve used an unlikely example of my concept of art as an attempt to help my students understand what I’m talking about with experiential layers. The example I’ve used has been the “Ozzy’s Nightmare”, Pepsi Twist commercial that premiered during Superbowl XXXVI. I felt like that commercial better summarized and commented on loads of stuff about 30 years of pop culture in 30 seconds than any piece I’ve ever seen that intentionally set about commenting on and summarizing 30 years of pop culture.
The reason that I use that example is because my students can easily see the layers of experience that they have or don’t have. Preceding the commercial, was an original campaign featuring a darling little girl named Halley Eisenberg with whom Pepsi drinkers had fallen in love. That campaign was tweaked when Pepsi twist exemplified the morphing of Pepsi with the girl morphing into Halle Berry. Halle Berry, in turn morphed into Barry Bostwick for the final disappointing twist on the process. This name-related sequence of unlikely connections was very clever, and the first experiential requirement to understand the Ozzy commercial on its most superficial level.
At the time of the commercial, Ozzy and his family were the talk of a nation with their reality tv show. Everyone felt that they knew the quirky, irreverent, dysfunctional family. At this level, even the kids watching tv could enjoy the commercial even if they didn’t recognize the other characters that invaded Ozzy’s dream. But the real truth and art of the short spot was reserved for those who not only knew who Donnie and Marie were, but had experienced them and a culture that embraced and celebrated the tv persona of a squeaky clean, bright smiled, purity of the brother/sister team - direct antithesis of Jack and Kelly Osbourne. (The Osbourne/Osmond name thing being connected to the original “twist” commercials is nothing short of a gift from God.) Finally, the depth of the commercial goes back a few more years to nod to those who are old enough to have experienced a culture that embraced the Brady Bunch as the definitive sitcom family and Carol Brady as the antithesis to Sharon Osbourne. Sure, all these shows have probably been seen by even the youngest viewers in eternal re-runs on cable, but the culture that produced them can never be re-run. You either were there or you weren’t. You can only learn about what was, not why and what it felt like.
But you also have to have experienced everything in between to see the commentary on a grafted household of half-siblings run by a man, morally supported by a woman and held together by a maid as opposed to an original surviving family unit, with a man unable even to open a garbage bag, much less run his family. The real commentary here is that Ozzy had no counterpart in the commercial. He is our pop culture’s icon of masculinity. Bumbling, unkempt, confused, incoherent, laughable, and filthy rich. The woman in both her manifestations takes up the slack and saves the day. And the children provide the evidence.
But all that is just a digression.

I would like to say then that art should never be qualified by its age or appreciated timelessness, or even its mere beauty. What does it do in the eye or ear or mind of its beholder? The Mona Lisa, or the Venus de Milo, or Antigone, or Les Miserable, are wonders that will live on, but their role has changed. We can’t possibly hear from them what they originally, in their contexts, said to those in their contexts. It is ironic that we save the definition of art as that which has stood the test of time. The test of time has changed the role of those works and therefore our definition. Ironic that we won’t designate anything as art that is new, for it is in art’s original context that it has the ability to do what art originally does – speak. We close our ears to it and wait to see if it is still around years from now so that we can appreciate it because it is old rather than for what it has to say. In most cases, when we come to appreciate it, it will no longer have anything to say, except maybe, “I’m pretty.” Perhaps with this mindset, we sell short not only new art, but also the stuff that we revere, by expecting less from it than it has to give.