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The question of what art one should make feels strange because we don't expect non-artists to raise it. We implicitly believe that artists should decide what they do, and according to processes that they don't themselves entirely understand. We are in the grip of a Romantic deference to high art that regards it as a quality so mysterious that outsiders can't, and shouldn't try to, interfere with it. However, this reluctance by non-artists to give guidance to and make demands on artists fatally weakens the power of art and reflects an underlying fear of addressing the question of what art is for. Since we don't know in a clear way what we want from art, we lack the confidence to ask for specific things; we abandon to chance the hope that our key needs will be covered by the unstructured and mysterious inspiration of artists.
Such haphazardness has not always been the rule. For long periods of history, religions and governments have considered art as a fundamental shaper of personality and public life, and therefore believed it was in the interests of the wider polity for the artistic agenda to be led by more than just individual inspiration. Religions and governments wished to direct art according to their particular understanding of the needs of the soul and of society; artworks might have to be created to guide people to the values of sacrifice and redemption, or else to inspire respect for manual labour and the renunciation of capital. These religions and governments were unembarrassed about using a term that has now become one of the most poisonous in the lexicon: propaganda. For them, art was quite simply propaganda for the most important ideas in the world.
Take van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece: the central panel of the lower section depicts a lamb on an altar (43). The lamb bleeds into a golden cup; to the left there is a wooden cross and two figures are holding a spear and a crown of thorns. Above, in the centre of the sun, we see a dove with outstretched wings. Van Eyck produced an extraordinary visualization of a set of ideas that were worked out in great detail by others. The society in which he lived did not demand that, on top of his ability to make paint seem like blood and to evoke sorrow from pigment, van Eyck should also be a philosopher or theologian. It rewarded him for his creativity - not for the ideas themselves, but for the visualization and rendering of the ideas.
What
Kind
of Art
Should
One
Make?
The widespread loss of trust in the particular agendas of religions and states (in particular, of Catholicism and Communism) have brought the entire notion of an agenda for the use and commissioning of art
The artists didn't pick the topic themselves, but their work is still great.
43. Jan and Hubert van Kyck, Ghent At tar piece «г The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1423 -32
into disrepute. The self-aggrandizing actions of numerous tyrants and dictators have tarnished what was not necessarily a bad idea: that an agenda for art can come from outside the artist's own imagination, and reflect the needs of society and the viewer's soul.
At this point, a nagging worry comes to mind: who is to decide the agenda? What will happen if I don't agree with it? Could 1 be locked up in prison? We associate propaganda with enforced belief, but the liberal societies painfully built up by our ancestors are founded on consent. Even the most ambitious corporations or political parties have to win market share or votes by persuading people of the worth of their products or policies. Falling congregation numbers in the twentieth century demonstrate that even a long-established, wealthy and prestigious institution such as the Catholic Church, with many educational resources to hand, can only dream of imposing its doctrines in democratic, market-orientated states. There is no mechanism by which assent could be fully compelled here-
Therefore, suggesting an agenda for art has. today, nothing to do with enforcement. We are not faced with a choice of being dragooned into a police state or abandoned to the whims of chance. We should feel safe enough to be able to think of art as propaganda for some rather nice - and important - things. We can imagine a commissioning structure that would be akin in its sharp definitions to those given by the Catholic church or the Communist state - but the commissions would be focused on achieving entirely different ends, and would not be interested in coercion. The agenda for art in a liberal society would be to assist the individual soul in its search for consolation, self-understanding and fulfilment. Commissions would flow from the seven basic themes discussed. Artworks would look to commemorate, give hope, echo and dignify suffering, rebalance and guide, assist self-knowledge and communication, expand horizons and inspire appreciation (see Appendix: An Agenda for Art, page 234).
Consider the third theme: the need to find a dignified echo of our sorrows and the power of art to help us feel less alone with and confused by it. At present, this need is very fitfully handled. In a large museum we might find one or two artists taking this on in unrelated ways, in stark contrast to the systematic ambition for art set by the Catholic church with its canon of'sorrowful mysteries'. In the early Middle Ages, five episodes of suffering from the life of Jesus were carefully analysed by theologians to bring out their intimate resonance. Artists were then repeatedly commissioned to create works around these precise themes.
The artist reached for a ready-made theme.
44. Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden ofOlwes. 1889
Imagining a new post-Christian canon for art.
45-Jessie a Todd I iarpcr. TJte Agony in life Km hen. 2012
The first of these. The Agony in the Garden', refers to the terrified loneliness of Jesus the night before he was put to death (44). It provides an immensely prestigious focus for a distinctive aspect of grief: the feeling that one is utterly alone and that a dreadful but unavoidable task awaits one in the morning.
Such art seeks, as best it can, to help us at particular times. In the Christian artistic schema it is sequentially linked to the second sorrowful mystery, The Crowning with Thorns', which addresses humiliation and cruel mockery. Considered as a whole, the cycle of sorrowful mysteries constitutes an elaborate psychology of sorrow that shows us the role of suffering in life and seeks to offer a perspective that strengthens our capacity to bear our afflictions, inculcates sympathy and removes the stigma that sometimes attaches to admissions of anguish.
Since this canon is framed within a very particular set of religious beliefs, its power is dimmed in a secular age, but it offers inspiration for a neglected, albeit potentially very rewarding, endeavour: the deliberate and systematic harnessing of art to our inner sorrows. Imagine a secular world in which one of the key ambitions for art was for it to be a mirror for sorrows. This would be connected to a psychological agenda as purposeful and rich, in its own way, as the theological agenda set by the Catholic church for Jan van Eyck. Consider just some of the essential sorrows we face: the inability to find love, panic around money, unhappy family relations, frustrating work, adolescent uncertainties, mid-life regrets, anguish in the face of one's own mortality and unfulfilled ambitions.