Aimez-vous Brahms? *

Do you like art? That worries me, but the way people dislike art worries me even more. It is not there just to be approved or rejected. Spending so much time with art, I have a wide range of responses available. Quick ones, like 'yes, yes, yes' or 'please take that away before I lose all faith'. But also many slower ones, like 'hang on! there's something going on there'. In effect, I too like liking art and it hurts me to have to admit that some piece or another has nothing likeable about it. When something strikes me as really bad I wonder who is failing whom, its perpetrator or I for giving up on it. But 'liking' is never enough.

Art presents an enormous range in itself, from the sublime work that literally takes your breath away, to trash. I reckon that we should give it our attention down to about seventh-rate. Below that it is bad for us, the way bad food is bad for us. For art to thrive, it needs a rich, deep loam. No culture, no institution can possibly produce only great artists, nor would we know them to be great but for a wider context. A wider context for them and for ourselves: a broad view of the history of art, and awareness of the art of the present.

That awareness must, alas, include the realization that a lot of busily promoted art is really bad, and its promotion pollutes the loam & our stomach for art.

When people tell me that they like art, or like this or that piece of art, I wonder what it is they are liking. I suspect it is often the subject: a particular piece of scenery, a pleasing animal or person, the anatomy and pose of a painted or sculpted figure. Possibly the manner: the delicacy of the way something is depicted, or (more often) the vehemence, the passion. I remember Beverley Nicholl's account, in some magazine long ago, of how Van Gogh produced a Sunflowers painting, crudely reproduced on the same page. According to this, the painter, driven by creative frenzy, rushed out into the garden, seized these flowers and (figuratively, no doubt) 'flung them across his canvas' - or words to that effect. Anyone who looks at Van Gogh's Sunflowers paintings can see with what care each brushstroke was worked, the deliberation with which the colours and tones are weighed against each other, and the flowers and vase against the tabletop and background. The most passionate artist is usually the one who works with the greatest care. There is a wide-spread assumption that impetuosity signals authenticity. Urgency can be a pretence. Deliberation too can be a pose but it is a less attractive one since it involves thought, time and control on the artist's part and attention on ours.

Writers write for all sorts of purposes and occasions. We read a lot of what they set down, news good and bad, instructions, gossip, reports of many kinds from sport and fashion to the arts, biographies, poems, fiction. They can all be done well or badly, or in between, but it is particularly in the area of fiction that we demand pleasure. Pleasure can come from sweet romantic stuff, but there are pleasures of other kinds, pleasures that surprise us and enlarge us and connect us to the world rather than shelter us from it. So we go out to meet Anna Karenina, say, or To the Lighthouse, and find ourselves carrying them with us always, like deep friendships. I like Brahms, whom I discovered in my teens. I relish the warmth of much of his sound, the structures sustaining it, and those moments of bliss when the clouds part and he surrounds us with his light. And I know there are even more remarkable composers. Number eight of my Desert Island Discs would be of music by a modern composer whose work I still do not know well enough: music to discover, to engage with, to know intimately.

Art is not there merely to reassure us or go with the curtains. It should move us, in the sense of moving us along. Liking it too easily or quickly (I remind myself) is not good: it might well be full of cholesterol. Enjoying disliking it - I see people going into exhibitions, almost always of modern art, with 'what's this rubbish?' running across their foreheads like an LED message - is cultural anorexia.

* The title of one of the early novels of Francoise Sagan, who died recently. It was not about liking Brahms.

 

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