Why are people grudgeful about art?

Or not?

Well, I could go either way on that one.

Inward and outward? Or Yarraward and CBDward?

I had an idea about this today. Abraham Maslow said that humans have a "ladder of needs". There are five levels, with food and shelter as the basic rungs at the bottom, and self-expression as the top need. The needs higher up depend on the needs further down; in other words, you have to achieve all the basic material stuff before you can even begin to think about the self-expression. Many people never get that far.

Now, a certain kind of person (let's say a middle-class Londoner, home-owner with a mortgage) looks at artists and calculates how much they must need to live, given the cost of living in London. They get a big figure. They assume that the artist is amazingly rich, has a trust fund from his parents, or whatever. They feel resentment, and speak about the artist grudgefully. (This petit bourgeois impression of the great artist's great wealth is compounded by the fact that these people probably only read about very successful artists, people like Damian Hirst who are always opening their own celebrity restaurants and so on.)

The realities of art and life, though, are very different for most working artists. They aren't rich, and they don't have trust funds. Many live much more modestly than the average petit bourgeois. They reach the "self-expression" part of Maslow's ladder of needs by keeping their more basic needs thin and spindly. They are "aristocrats of the spirit", not of the purse or title. But of course this too is held against them, seen as "elitism" or "snobbishness".

Anyway, just for fun here's a link to someone I consider an "aristocrat of the spirit". It's the new exhibition by Eye Yamataka in New York.

Maybe their ladders are constructed with the rungs in a different order?

I guess one's ladder of desires can be in a different order, but not one's ladder of needs. Even the most sacrificing artist needs to eat somehow.

grudgeful?

Yeah, crap word but the meaning is clear.

Not really. I have no idea if he's talking about artists getting catty about other artists, yuppies v. artists (the Momus comment), working-class people v. artists (which is more like working-class v. yuppies), etc.

Fair enough; the thread-opening premise remains vague to me too. I guess I'm taking Momus' interpretation for granted.

Because I really should have sung "Bridge Over Troubled Water" myself.

"Grudgeful" is not a crap word in this case; a simple caveman is referencing The Fall. Right (?)

it's because the stakes are so low.

jealousy.

seriously. i have never been artistic, yet people for some reason think that i am because i was a music student. i have this photo major friend, and i constantly find myself hating her for talking about the "artsy" things she is doing and thinking they are all bullshit and that her photos are lame and predictable and all the same.

Lyrics to Why Are People Grudgeful by The Fall.

caveman, i would like to know exactly what you mean. an example, perhaps?

You call this a thread? My kid could have created a better thread!

Picasso said: "When I was 8 I could make a thread like Momus. But it wasn't until I was 80 that I could make a thread like mark s."

The Fall song was a cover of a Sir Gibbs original, which was part of a row with Lee Perry.

I can't work out what this thread is about. I'd have thought the comfortable middle classes that Momus refers to were among the biggest consumers of and fans of art, and I don't have any idea what the thread starter has in mind. There is resentment here and there towards people who the resenters think are just producing crap and they should get a real job and all that, but this seems a pretty small element to me.

Well, the emergence of 15Peter20 as a minor British satirical archetype might tell us something.

Is a simple caveman pointing to the idea that the concept of the rather self-concious artist role, and galleries etc is a fairly recent development?

Couldn't you argue that self-expression is not at the top of Maslow's hierarchy?

As far as I can recall the top was "love/fulfillment". I'd have thought doing something you love and enjoy for a living was just below that, according to Maslow anyway. Though I did study Maslow in BUSINESS STUDIES at school, oddly, and I never paid much attention. Miss Stack was definitely grudgeful about art.

Maslow's "hierarchy" stops working as a hierarchy after the bottom two levels (and maybe even before that) - the top three are shifting priorities, not a ladder (or else it implies that all artists are happy in love, for instance). I think there's always a 'road less travelled' half-jealousy attaching to people who choose different priorities from you, which you can see in some people's crass dismissal of art and in some artists' protesting-too-much attacks on bourgeois straw men.

Well, I don't think it's fair to portray Maslow as saying all artists have to be happy in love. If you follow the link on the diagram you'll see that the "Belonging - Love" level is quite widely defined:

"Humans have a desire to belong to groups: clubs, work groups, religious groups, family, gangs, etc. We need to feel loved (non-sexual) by others, to be accepted by others. Performers appreciate applause. We need to be needed."

Very few artists -- not even Samuel Beckett -- have bypassed this and survived as artists.

Yes but surely one still prioritises within the upper 3 levels? That is to say nobody thinks "now I have friendship, that's all I want from this level, I can move along to the next one".

I am fairly sure too, that the pyramid is not always shown that way, because of what Tom says, the final 3 are not in terms of importance really.

We only think the upper three tiers are not the most important because we're no longer humanists. Maslow is a humanist psychologist.

No I don't think they're less important, I just don't think any one is definitively more important than the others.

Life is not an ordered list of needs!

6th level = cheese.

No disrespect to Maslow - everyone was pilfering Buddhist ideas at the time (Maslow's theory is a complex of kundalini and zen ideas, reframed in ego psychology terms) - but what I love most about reading him is the narcissistic aroma surrounding his theory: he himself is is self-actualised, as are some of his friends, and the teachers he admires. We, too, are invited to read his writings and suspect that we, too, are at the top of the hierarchy. That's how he sucks us in he is a salesman, staking a claim on a new theory of consciousness and trying to establish his name in 50's and 60's US psychology.

The triangle is too unidirectional. Each one of the levels could feed into any one of the others - for example, the top four could reinforce the bottom level directly. There isn't much justification for making the model a pyramid, leading 'higher'. I'm sure I detect a certain patrician, Platonic quality in Maslow, where the top of the hierarchy is occupied by those with money and time, who are now free to think of higher things - and, of course, to rule.

can I be crazy in love rather than happy in it?

The triangle is missing many things and as others have said can switch order depending on the person. Many artists (probably the better ones) don't need recognition or respect to pursue inner talent.

In my view the triangle is not a hierarchy at all - and therefore not a triangle. It's a group of circles with bidirectional arrows connecting them all. The 'higher, ever higher, rising above the common throng to the peak of the pyriamid' thing is the narcissistic component of the theory.

For the original question, I think some of it is that there is too much Art Made for Artists or Art For Art's Sake, and really the quality of much art is just lacking. Postmodernism eliminating absolutes of quality leaves people who feel greater appreciation of simple quality left out.

That's right A Nairn. Quality was an objective Thing before those meddlin' Post-Modernists came along.

Postmodernism is the sealing of a genre against application you see. It's a form of academic defence. It ensures that theory is all important - and this is good for academics, as they can be employed in the field.

Objectivity is such a dirty word because it implies a test of some statement. People don't want their statements tested - it might prove them wrong. They will lose face. Some people don't want their art tested either - that's why they'll make useless objects in preference to, say, a chair.

The problem with divorcing art from craft is that it encourages an art that is calculated to appeal to academics, as these are the ones who write about art and therefore are its publicity agents. Now, academics have an obvious financial and social stake in propagating the preeminence of the spoken and written word over all else. Academic postmodernism blossoms thickly by generating many, many concepts. As a result, there is plenty of scope for theoretical research, and everyone can keep their jobs. They try to colonise art, because art is a matter of public interest. If conceptualisation can penetrate the art world, academics can colonise a popular sphere and become famous. For the same reason, they like Madonna, or whoever else is famous right now.

The public dislikes such art, as they feel disenfranchised. Art, many people feel, is not a field on which academics can hone their conceptual sparring and get ahead. It has, many people feel, some kind of teaching purpose: good art is subtly but profoundly instructive and actually makes people feel more grounded in the real world. This is interesting, as many artists believe the same thing; and these artists may describe their perception as founded in sensory observation, not in concepts.

I don't like the too-much-art-is-made-for-people-into-art argument. Cars are made for people who like cars but you don't see me complaining. Oh, I just have.

I think the conspiracy theory of aesthetics is laying it on a bit thick. Objectivity is a dirty word because it's been applied to fields that can't be tested, like Art. All Objectivity meant, when it was taken seriously, was an appeal to an established canon of rules, whether they be Aristotle's or Leavis'. The problem is that there was no objective quality in the real world for the rule-makers to derive their rules from, they tended to represent the ideological assumptions of the society that produced them.

What the public likes or dislikes might be as valid a set of standards for Art as any other, but it's hardly objective. Impressionism, which is many people's idea of "proper" art today, was avante-garde bollocks to the 19th Century public.

In my opinion, Duchamp's "Fountain" was an attack on the critical establishment, not the public. He was suggesting the most radical possible interpretation of beauty being in the eye of the beholder. In some ways, the idea of a separate area of production called Art and belonging to galleries and critics is dead after Duchamp, tho its corpse is still twitching like crazy. But I don't think the urge to create or to apprehend creation is so flimsy that it has to pretend to have a measurable basis.

I don't think the objective-subjective thing is at either extreme. Some "proper" art does slowly change over time. (like Impressionism as the example you gave) But I personally believe there is some small amount of appreciation of "properness" in art that is part of human nature. Things like functionality, excitment, or beauty slip through. Most people would rather sit on a chair that will hold them then on one that wouldn't, or most people would rather look at a painting of beautiful lady than a pile of poop.

What about a beautiful picture of a pile of poop as opposed to an ugly picture of a beautiful "lady"? ;)

Also, I don't think any serious definition of Art has a lot to do with "what one would prefer to look at". Aesthetic pleasure is a deal more complicated than emotional pleasure, isn't it?

fwiw, neither a pyramid nor the phrase "hierarchy of needs" necessarily imply that need A is met first, then B, etc. just that, in general, the larger, lower elements listed are of greater importance to one's well-being.

Maslow posited a hierarchy of human needs based on two groupings: deficiency needs and growth needs. Within the deficiency needs, each lower need must be met before moving to the next higher level. Once each of these needs has been satisfied, if at some future time a deficiency is detected, the individual will act to remove the deficiency.

The problem is that all the alleged directions of growth are open to question. One can certainly be forced into a crative realisation, for example, through the absence - not the presence - of gratification at the lower stages. And any level can feed into any other level. So - why the need for levels?

I find Maslow's theory interesting as a recent statement of what Wilber calls 'ascending' theories of consciousness, which imply that one moves towards heavenly things from earthly things (so to speak). It's sort of a gnosticism. I somewhat dislike ascending theories as they frequently conflate repression of instincts with growth. They also lack dynamism - unlike the kundalini approach, where the higher chakras are actively powered by the base insinct chakras. I think we're entitled to be suspicious of any theory where there are separation lines, rather than arrows, between levels. They imply some kind of repression on the part of the theorist concerned.

As far as artistic expression is concerned, it has a great deal less genuine insight in it than those theories of consciousness which posit a kind of letting go, a risky ego-dissolution, in the process of artistic creation, followed by a reabsorption of the projected artistic results in the interests of ego growth. That one has shamanic origins, but is best expressed in the language of psychology by Freud, Ehrenzweig and, most recently of all, Michael Washburn.