Growing Ideas: How Do You Like Your Beef?

Though I was not sufficiently entertained to watch through to the end of Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts, it did have its moments. In the movie, modern art (including Chaim Soutine's sexy side of beef below) serves as a metaphorical parallel to a young teacher's struggle against top-down authority in an ultra-conservative, all-girls school. Thankfully, she stayed true to herself and didn't let anyone tell her what to think . . . or at least I hope so; I didn't see the end!

Along the way she asked a pretty good question: "What is art? What makes it good or bad? And who decides?"

I don't know what the right answer is, but certainly we can at least say that no one else should be able to tell us what the answer is, right? I mean, that was the whole point of the movie. Challenge authority! Who are they to tell us what to appreciate? What if Hitler really was the Michelangelo of landscape art?! World War II could have been avoided if only we had noticed in time.

But really, who's to say what's good art and what's bad? Is it all just a measure of control, or is there really something to it? Does some art have value and other art not?

Ok, there are a lot of questions here without much space in which to answer them.

So I won't.

I'll dig deeper because maybe we're starting at the wrong end.

Can we at all fathom what art is without understanding what an artist is? Is the artist a creator? a reflector? an illuminator? a bricoleur? Is the artist accountable to someone? to nature? to God? to art? to us?

The way we answer these questions (and though we may not be able to articulate our answers, we have indeed answered them) will determine what we see when we look at art. It will help us decide which, if any, of the pictures below really is art. Each of these answers is also tied to a philosophy, an epistemology, and a way of looking at the world. Though Julia Roberts' character was able to maintain her intellectual freedom (which in Hollywood = integrity) despite the tyrannical pressures of the thought police, we in the real world are unlikely to be so lucky. If we probe deep enough, I expect that each of us will discover that somewhere along the line we were told an answer to these questions, and we believed it.

That's OK.

At the same time, it might be a good idea to take some time and try to figure out from whom, what, or where those answers came. I'm still working on that part.

I think I like the Rembrandt best, but the Soutine is a close second.