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Art For Whom and For What?
As the title suggests, we are here addressing the most fundamental Who is man? What is art? What is the bond that unites man, nature and art? The argument at the heart of this book is that what should be common to all men and women-a natural affinity with the sacred that holds out the promise of spiritual experience in everyday life- is in fact made all but impossible by the very nature of modern society. For what the modern world has set in place is nothing other than a pattern of life that prevents us from being what we truly are. The destruction of man that is part and parcel of the scientific, industrial view of our destiny cannot do otherwise than in turn destroy those values and meanings that have always been the bedrock of normal human existence. At a time when the inadequacy of modernism has become apparent, the author returns to the challenge of the English radical tradition of thought (Blake, Cobbett, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Gill and others), with its critique of the industrial-now post-industrial-way of life. Through a series of highly original studies of several major English artists and craftsman, and by addressing key themes that relate to the spiritual, cultural and environmental crisis that now confronts us, the author offers a positive development of the radical perspective. Can modern man survive the process of self-mutilation he has embarked upon? In this unique study of our present predicament, the author suggests we cannot do so by turning our back on the perennial wisdom that has always informed the wisest philosophies of life, with their intuition of the sacred nature of reality.
- GenresArtPhilosophy
194 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
21 people want to read
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March 26, 2012
Brian Keeble, the founder and editor of Golgonooza Press in England, has come out with a book that proposes much more than a revolution in the arts. Keeble realizes that his critique of some of our society’s most basic assumptions is a shot in the dark: “On the face of it nothing could be more futile than to bring into question both the direction and the apparently unstoppable impetus of our modern technological society. It is, after all, this by now global process that has delivered a great many material rewards to a significant proportion of the world’s population.” For instance, no one can deny the success of the “human genome project”—the results of which promise, researchers say, cures for such terrible diseases as diabetes and multiple sclerosis. How, can we criticize a system that produces such liberating effects? Keeble is unambiguous about this: human beings are better at surviving than we used to be, but the price for this seems to be that we are a lot worse at knowing who we are who have mastered survival—an oversight which in fact (and ironically) threatens our existence.
In the pressure and artificial urban habitat that is characteristic of modern cities, and which is gradually becoming the inevitable destination of populations world-wide, man’s physical aptitudes are less and less given their natural expression, his psychological constitution shows every sign of breaking down faced with the imposed strain, and his spiritual destiny is simply abolished by a conspiracy of silence. Which is nothing less than to say that man himself--for whom this state of affairs [of technological progress] has been pursued—seems likely to be obliterated by the very process set in train for his benefit.
There is so much good sense in what Keeble says—the implication, for instance, of believing that modern science is the apotheosis of human knowledge, making all earlier ways of knowing irrelevant: “we have no choice but to conclude that our ancestors were, to say the least, immoderately deceived.” If modern materialistic science is superior in every way to the knowledge offered by the great saints, mystics, and poets of the past, then we might expect “the culture that surrounds us and which is the expression in its own sphere, of that secular, scientific mentality” to have many instances of art and thought that surpass, in depth and magnificence and beauty, the greatest works of the past. And yet clearly this is not so.
Keeble’s argument, expressed in various contexts throughout this volume, can be summarized as follows. The purpose of art (and we will see that Keeble means a lot more by this word than the “fine arts”) is “to situate man within a cosmological frame of reference that takes account of his ultimate destiny.” Human action and creativity are answerable to a supernal order; human beings, paradoxically, are not fully human until we “transcend our humanity. . . . Only by relating everything to the deepest interior principle of our subjective being can we become ‘objectively’ what we truly are.” Obviously this is a central teaching in all the world religions, and Keeble is quite explicit about his adherence to the philosophia perennis. In an essay on Eric Gill, Keeble explains that Gill used the conceptual framework of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes—formal, material, effective, and final—to put human activity in perspective, since this doctrine “situates the uncreated at the beginning and at the end of all created reality”: it shows that man’s nature is as a “being beyond doing.” It follows from the foregoing, of course, that culture cannot truly sustain and nourish us, it can’t actually be substantial and real, unless it has a metaphysical context and reference point. Keeble criticizes the unchecked scientific mentality and its effects on areas of activity and experience that it can’t account for or adequately guide:
The modern mind is above all characterised by its undeniable tendenc[y to value quantitative over qualitative thought]. So much so that it regards metaphysical and spiritual intuition as, at worst, inadmissible and at best an abstraction. . . . This tendency lends it what seems the natural bias of naive materialism, ascribing a higher ontological status to the perceptions of external phenomena, with its counter-tendency to devalue intuitive and imaginative modes of apprehension. In the fields of the arts this has led to a far higher status being placed on aesthetic sensations than on cognitive value.
Keeble writes especially penetratingly about the deterioration of human labor, “artistic” or otherwise, as an essential medium for reverie and self-realization. In this he is a descendant of a “school of radical thought that has questioned the very basis of industrial society”—writers and artists such as Blake, Cobbett, Carlyle, Morris, Gill, David Jones, H. J. Massingham, and, in the United States, Wendell Berry. As for most of the more recent people in this list, Ananda Coomaraswamy is a particularly important mentor for Keeble. One of Keeble’s and his mentors’ main points is that the “ultimate value of work is as much related to the needs of the soul as to the needs of the body.” But in a society such as ours, whose ruling principle denies the inner human being, “the inspired moment [of making something well is] comprehensively betrayed by the industrial process whose sole concern is for the economic advantage of the final product regardless of the means employed” (emphasis added). This means is what Keeble focuses on; in our society, he says, we tend to be interested in what we get from work, rather than what we get by working. In his essay on Eric Gill, Keeble describes Gill’s complaint about the process of machine manufacture, that it “curtails man’s intellectual responsibility for what he makes—and this is because there is a fundamental difference between making things with a tool and making them with a machine”: the latter “reproduces in a predetermined way”; the worker is denied the right of making aesthetic judgments in his work. “The tool-user or craftsman works according to occasion and convention to re-create after a type, whereas the machinist attends a process that re-produces a duplicate. The distinction is one of kind and not of degree.”
Keeble’s critique of the industrial system, unlike most radical critiques, focuses less on the injustices done to people by people, and more on “the system’s injustice to man as man.” Or, as Keeble says about David Jones: “Jones saw that we must begin to find answers [to our social and cultural crisis] by starting, not from where we are, but from what we are.” As Keeble points out in many places in this book, if human beings don’t actually have a soul or a spiritual dimension, why, in a place and time that offers so much to our bodily appetites, are we still so lacking in contentment and peace of mind? Keeble often refers to the medieval Scholastic idea (Scholasticism is the background to much of his thought, as it was to Gill’s) of man as homo faber. It’s remarkable how this way of looking at it helps to do away with the elitism and preciosity often associated with art in our era. “The artist . . . as [David] Jones [understands him] is not a self-sufficient ‘genius intent upon upsetting accepted values and conditions on the basis of personal innovation’, but one whose ‘self-possession’ is the unifying principle in the integration of not only his own individuality but also the collective body politic.” Our society, says Keeble, tends to teach most of us to dread work as a time in which we are engaged in activity that corresponds to nothing within us—so we are offered the promise of “leisure” which is a “parody of contemplation,” that is, “a state of being . . . [in which] . . . we are released from the necessity to re-act to the demands of the external world.” And this split is manifest in all we produce: “In the industrial society we have an art that is a formalism of shapes, textures and colours that offers aesthetic stimulation for its own sake, standing in opposition to subhuman standards of manufacture applied to technical contrivances from which our spiritual needs have been expressly eliminated.” We are demoralized, in other words, by the enormous gap in our society between art and ordinary work.
The sampling I have excerpted from this book should be enough to demonstrate that the ideas it expresses are of singular importance and that Keeble does an excellent job at synthesizing and expressing them. My one significant disagreement with him relates to what I feel is an overly dismissive attitude (in the above quote, for instance) towards modern (post-Renaissance) art. Keeble is justified in his censuring of the aesthetic relativism of the recent times—what Gill called “art nonsense.” Like Gill, Keeble turns to Scholastic and other traditional doctrines that viewed art as an analogy of God’s creative power, “since art has no ontological power to create the real as such.” And he is certainly right to criticize modern aesthetics for stopping at “aesthetic emotion” without reference to the world or to anything “outside the artistic process itself.” But Keeble should give more credit, I think, to the post-Renaissance artists and thinkers who not only have offered heterodox approaches to the great questions of life, but also have created a body of work that perhaps contains the seeds of a new dispensation that is still inchoate and fragmentary. The modern religious artist often must enact an honest struggle, especially characteristic of our time, between faith and honest doubt, piety and irony: these too are aspects of the inner life. And when Keeble claims that “with the advent of modernism beauty was jettisoned altogether,” I can only respond by pointing out that this simply isn’t true: one has only to think of Yeats or Stevens, Matisse or Chagall. The best art in the modern age has had a great deal to offer people who are seeking identity and meaning in the sense that Keeble describes.
This book is comprised of ten essays, six that explore specific aspects of the above themes—with titles such as “Work and the Sacred” and “Are the Crafts an Anachronism?”—and four that examine individual artists: the essay on Eric Gill, plus ones on Samuel Palmer, David Jones, and Michael Cardew. The latter essays are opportunities to read about these important artists in terms with which they themselves would have been in sympathy—a rare thing, in our academically-dominated critical culture. The essay about Samuel Palmer, for example, examines six of Palmer’s visionary paintings of 1825, the ones in which Palmer, at twenty years old, broke from eighteenth-century naturalism. Palmer, of course, was a disciple of Blake, one of a group of young artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients and visited and adored Blake in his later years. Blake’s woodcuts illustrating Virgil’s Eclogues were an important influence on Palmer’s visionary nature paintings (the ones discussed in Keeble’s essay are nicely reproduced in black and white), which Keeble refers to as a record of “an hermetic vision of nature.” For Palmer, as for the other artists Keeble discusses, “art” means synthesis: its task is to resolve the duality inherent in being human, that between the inner, essential human being, and the natural world perceived by the senses.
In the pressure and artificial urban habitat that is characteristic of modern cities, and which is gradually becoming the inevitable destination of populations world-wide, man’s physical aptitudes are less and less given their natural expression, his psychological constitution shows every sign of breaking down faced with the imposed strain, and his spiritual destiny is simply abolished by a conspiracy of silence. Which is nothing less than to say that man himself--for whom this state of affairs [of technological progress] has been pursued—seems likely to be obliterated by the very process set in train for his benefit.
There is so much good sense in what Keeble says—the implication, for instance, of believing that modern science is the apotheosis of human knowledge, making all earlier ways of knowing irrelevant: “we have no choice but to conclude that our ancestors were, to say the least, immoderately deceived.” If modern materialistic science is superior in every way to the knowledge offered by the great saints, mystics, and poets of the past, then we might expect “the culture that surrounds us and which is the expression in its own sphere, of that secular, scientific mentality” to have many instances of art and thought that surpass, in depth and magnificence and beauty, the greatest works of the past. And yet clearly this is not so.
Keeble’s argument, expressed in various contexts throughout this volume, can be summarized as follows. The purpose of art (and we will see that Keeble means a lot more by this word than the “fine arts”) is “to situate man within a cosmological frame of reference that takes account of his ultimate destiny.” Human action and creativity are answerable to a supernal order; human beings, paradoxically, are not fully human until we “transcend our humanity. . . . Only by relating everything to the deepest interior principle of our subjective being can we become ‘objectively’ what we truly are.” Obviously this is a central teaching in all the world religions, and Keeble is quite explicit about his adherence to the philosophia perennis. In an essay on Eric Gill, Keeble explains that Gill used the conceptual framework of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes—formal, material, effective, and final—to put human activity in perspective, since this doctrine “situates the uncreated at the beginning and at the end of all created reality”: it shows that man’s nature is as a “being beyond doing.” It follows from the foregoing, of course, that culture cannot truly sustain and nourish us, it can’t actually be substantial and real, unless it has a metaphysical context and reference point. Keeble criticizes the unchecked scientific mentality and its effects on areas of activity and experience that it can’t account for or adequately guide:
The modern mind is above all characterised by its undeniable tendenc[y to value quantitative over qualitative thought]. So much so that it regards metaphysical and spiritual intuition as, at worst, inadmissible and at best an abstraction. . . . This tendency lends it what seems the natural bias of naive materialism, ascribing a higher ontological status to the perceptions of external phenomena, with its counter-tendency to devalue intuitive and imaginative modes of apprehension. In the fields of the arts this has led to a far higher status being placed on aesthetic sensations than on cognitive value.
Keeble writes especially penetratingly about the deterioration of human labor, “artistic” or otherwise, as an essential medium for reverie and self-realization. In this he is a descendant of a “school of radical thought that has questioned the very basis of industrial society”—writers and artists such as Blake, Cobbett, Carlyle, Morris, Gill, David Jones, H. J. Massingham, and, in the United States, Wendell Berry. As for most of the more recent people in this list, Ananda Coomaraswamy is a particularly important mentor for Keeble. One of Keeble’s and his mentors’ main points is that the “ultimate value of work is as much related to the needs of the soul as to the needs of the body.” But in a society such as ours, whose ruling principle denies the inner human being, “the inspired moment [of making something well is] comprehensively betrayed by the industrial process whose sole concern is for the economic advantage of the final product regardless of the means employed” (emphasis added). This means is what Keeble focuses on; in our society, he says, we tend to be interested in what we get from work, rather than what we get by working. In his essay on Eric Gill, Keeble describes Gill’s complaint about the process of machine manufacture, that it “curtails man’s intellectual responsibility for what he makes—and this is because there is a fundamental difference between making things with a tool and making them with a machine”: the latter “reproduces in a predetermined way”; the worker is denied the right of making aesthetic judgments in his work. “The tool-user or craftsman works according to occasion and convention to re-create after a type, whereas the machinist attends a process that re-produces a duplicate. The distinction is one of kind and not of degree.”
Keeble’s critique of the industrial system, unlike most radical critiques, focuses less on the injustices done to people by people, and more on “the system’s injustice to man as man.” Or, as Keeble says about David Jones: “Jones saw that we must begin to find answers [to our social and cultural crisis] by starting, not from where we are, but from what we are.” As Keeble points out in many places in this book, if human beings don’t actually have a soul or a spiritual dimension, why, in a place and time that offers so much to our bodily appetites, are we still so lacking in contentment and peace of mind? Keeble often refers to the medieval Scholastic idea (Scholasticism is the background to much of his thought, as it was to Gill’s) of man as homo faber. It’s remarkable how this way of looking at it helps to do away with the elitism and preciosity often associated with art in our era. “The artist . . . as [David] Jones [understands him] is not a self-sufficient ‘genius intent upon upsetting accepted values and conditions on the basis of personal innovation’, but one whose ‘self-possession’ is the unifying principle in the integration of not only his own individuality but also the collective body politic.” Our society, says Keeble, tends to teach most of us to dread work as a time in which we are engaged in activity that corresponds to nothing within us—so we are offered the promise of “leisure” which is a “parody of contemplation,” that is, “a state of being . . . [in which] . . . we are released from the necessity to re-act to the demands of the external world.” And this split is manifest in all we produce: “In the industrial society we have an art that is a formalism of shapes, textures and colours that offers aesthetic stimulation for its own sake, standing in opposition to subhuman standards of manufacture applied to technical contrivances from which our spiritual needs have been expressly eliminated.” We are demoralized, in other words, by the enormous gap in our society between art and ordinary work.
The sampling I have excerpted from this book should be enough to demonstrate that the ideas it expresses are of singular importance and that Keeble does an excellent job at synthesizing and expressing them. My one significant disagreement with him relates to what I feel is an overly dismissive attitude (in the above quote, for instance) towards modern (post-Renaissance) art. Keeble is justified in his censuring of the aesthetic relativism of the recent times—what Gill called “art nonsense.” Like Gill, Keeble turns to Scholastic and other traditional doctrines that viewed art as an analogy of God’s creative power, “since art has no ontological power to create the real as such.” And he is certainly right to criticize modern aesthetics for stopping at “aesthetic emotion” without reference to the world or to anything “outside the artistic process itself.” But Keeble should give more credit, I think, to the post-Renaissance artists and thinkers who not only have offered heterodox approaches to the great questions of life, but also have created a body of work that perhaps contains the seeds of a new dispensation that is still inchoate and fragmentary. The modern religious artist often must enact an honest struggle, especially characteristic of our time, between faith and honest doubt, piety and irony: these too are aspects of the inner life. And when Keeble claims that “with the advent of modernism beauty was jettisoned altogether,” I can only respond by pointing out that this simply isn’t true: one has only to think of Yeats or Stevens, Matisse or Chagall. The best art in the modern age has had a great deal to offer people who are seeking identity and meaning in the sense that Keeble describes.
This book is comprised of ten essays, six that explore specific aspects of the above themes—with titles such as “Work and the Sacred” and “Are the Crafts an Anachronism?”—and four that examine individual artists: the essay on Eric Gill, plus ones on Samuel Palmer, David Jones, and Michael Cardew. The latter essays are opportunities to read about these important artists in terms with which they themselves would have been in sympathy—a rare thing, in our academically-dominated critical culture. The essay about Samuel Palmer, for example, examines six of Palmer’s visionary paintings of 1825, the ones in which Palmer, at twenty years old, broke from eighteenth-century naturalism. Palmer, of course, was a disciple of Blake, one of a group of young artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients and visited and adored Blake in his later years. Blake’s woodcuts illustrating Virgil’s Eclogues were an important influence on Palmer’s visionary nature paintings (the ones discussed in Keeble’s essay are nicely reproduced in black and white), which Keeble refers to as a record of “an hermetic vision of nature.” For Palmer, as for the other artists Keeble discusses, “art” means synthesis: its task is to resolve the duality inherent in being human, that between the inner, essential human being, and the natural world perceived by the senses.
May 12, 2023
A necessary book on understanding the role of art in the human life. Art is seen as an itegral part of human activity that requires mastery of a skill and creativity in one person, as opposed to the industrial division of the labor. It is an essential human need that must be satisfied for a person to become truly himself.
A must-read for those interested in understanding the place of art in daily life, a fallacy of "work-life balance" concept, and why modern jobs are getting less satisfying.
A must-read for those interested in understanding the place of art in daily life, a fallacy of "work-life balance" concept, and why modern jobs are getting less satisfying.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews