[MD] The Quality of Art

[Platt Holden]

Hi Ham -

While you take the intellectual road towards art, I follow the mystic 
path. Of the two, I think the mystic path is better because it 
challenges the artist to achieve a higher degree of excellence. What do 
I mean by the mystic path? Ken Wilber in his book "Eye to Eye" 
explains: 

"That, of course, was the central definition of 'beauty' from time to 
Plato and Plotinus to the Scholastics: an object possesses beauty to 
the extent that is transparent to the Divine, that is it allows the One 
to shine through it. Likewise, a work of art is beautiful (and good and 
true) to the extent that it is translucent to nondual Spirit, that it 
allows that which is beyond itself to shine through - as Mondrian said, 
to the extent that it aesthetically expresses the universal. Finally, 
artworks, such as Buddhist icons, themselves serve one and only one 
main purpose: they are supports for contemplation. By gazing on the 
artwork, the viewer is invited to enter the same meditative and 
spiritual state that produced the art in the first place. That is, the 
viewer is invited to experience nonduality, the union of the subject 
with all objects, the discovery of universal or transcendental 
awareness, in an immediate and simple and direct fashion - and that is 
the purest reason one views art in the first place." 

For fun I took a passage from Lila in which Pirsig describes the 
mystic's objection to intellectual metaphysics and substituted a few 
words to apply it to art:

"Of the two kinds of approaches to art I consider the mystics' approach 
the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the 
door to analyzing art you can say good-bye to any genuine valuing of 
it. Thought is not a path to valuing art. It sets obstacles in that 
path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is 
prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that 
something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to 
subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you 
do that you destroy real valuing. The central reality of art is not a 
intellectual chess piece. Art doesn't have to be defined. You value it 
without definition, ahead of definition. Valuing art is a direct 
experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions."

Where we come together in our approach to art is agreement on the  
benefits accrued by wide exposure to it. The more one directly 
experiences fine art, the more she is likely to become, to use your 
word,  "discerning" in her judgments of it. Intellect can play a role 
to be sure. But IMO, its role will always be secondary to the direct  
experience itself.

Best regards,
Platt