Engagement with art is useful because it presents us with powerful examples of the kind of alien material that provokes defensive boredom and fear, and allows us time and privacy to learn to deal more strategically with it. An important first step in overcoming defensiveness around art is to become more open about the strangeness that we feel in certain contexts. We shouldn't hate ourselves for it; a lot of art is, after all, the product of world views that are radically at odds with our own. Sebastiano Ricci believed angelic messengers could bring life-changing instructions to holy people. Sargent's sitter was convinced that people are not born equal and that some individuals are entitled to rule the earth because of their ancestry. The Chokwe people thought their masks would help adolescent boys to understand the sexual and emotional needs of their women. Therefore, an initial negative response - the feeling that the object has nothing to offer - is comprehensible, even reasonable. Beliefs in angelic orders, aristocratic entitlement and magical intervention are at odds with most reasonable views of modern life.
Museum curators tend to assume the existence of an audience that, broadly, already likes the kind of art on display and just needs help with the details of particular works, which is blind to the way in which someone might be deeply resistant to an entire aesthetic category. If you were looking at the picture of Saint Bruno with a curator they might try to help you to engage with it by telling you a variety of factual details: that this man was the founder of the Carthusian monastic order in the eleventh century, that the sleeping man on the far left is a pictorial reference to the disciples who slept while Jesus was awake the night before the Crucifixion; that the work was owned in the eighteenth
century by a certain count Algarotti, and that the skull (lower right) and wings were particularly well painted in ways that bear comparison with Titian.
Such information might be helpful to some, but not a person who is turned off by, and maybe hostile to, this kind of work in general. Expert knowledge too often presupposes that the viewer is already interested, but has one or two points of detail they would like cleared up. Museums display a lot of religious art, but rarely give much attention to what reaction this is likely to provoke in a largely secular, scientifically minded audience. They put up pictures of aristocrats, but seem to forget that class differences provoke intense reactions in meritocratic democracies. They organize exhibitions of African art, assuming that an invocation of ancestral deities will be relatively unproblematic.
To harbour doubts in these areas can, of course, feel rather embarrassing. We are socialized never to give voice to ambivalence, so a false assumption is maintained: that sensible people are already interested in such things. The taboo can be explained in part because museum curators are a self-selecting category so immersed in their fields that some of them can't remember what it was like to share the assumptions of an ordinary member of their society, which nowadays usually means someone secular, democratic and unacquainted with magical thinking. Unless they have, and listen to, children, they don't meet anyone who could frankly ask them with blunt but useful naivety, 'Why do you spend time bothering with African masks or dark pictures of medieval saints?' They are not best placed to ask what are, for many people, the urgent and basic questions. Like any close-knit professional group that socializes in a specialist world, curators run the risk of forgetting precisely how unusual their interests are.
What, then, would help us engage with some of the categories of art we find most offputting? How could one learn to find aristocrats interesting? How not to recoil from a work of religion? How to get interested in African art? The first and crucial step to overcoming defensiveness is to be highly alert to its reality: to be generously aware of how normal it is to harbour strongly negative views about things. The second step is to make oneself more at home with the seemingly alien mindsets of people who created some of the world's most revered works of art. Ricci was truly convinced that spiritual messengers could give life-altering instructions to mortals. The makers of the African mask are convinced that spirits can dictate who in the village is ready to take a wife. The aristocratic portrait-sitter resolutely did not believe that everyone is
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How can you make a very famous work your own*
33. Diego Velizqucz, Las Mi nimis or The Family of Felipe IV, r .1656
created equal, and trusted that ancestry legitimates power. The major galleries should be more frank about these ideas, admitting and warning us that 'you are about to walk into a room with some very peculiar things on display', rather than merely, 'and now we come to room 22'.
A third step on the path towards resolving defensive responses is to look out for points of connection, however fragile and initially tenuous, between the mindset of the artist and our own. Although their work may seem very odd, there is likely to be an aspect of their ambitions that we can. with sufficient self-exploration, relate to in a personal way. One might - many years ago, on a crowded underground train - have had a moment's thought about whether everyone really is equal in temperament and nature, or whether there aren't natural classes of humans, some fundamentally better than others. The thought went nowhere; it didn't fit with our era and temperament, but it flitted across our consciousness nevertheless and might form one of the blocks of the bridge we would seek to build between ourselves and Lord Ribblesdale. Similarly, with religious art, despite our atheistic impatience with anything connected to the supernatural, perhaps we did once have a moment of panic and collapse in which we longed to be scooped up in the arms of a father figure who wasn't anything to do with our own father, someone with the power to reassure us that things would be all right, and that we would make it through our present difficulties. These moments are awkward to remember once they have passed, but if we attempt to bring them to consciousness, they can help foster sympathy for works of art that feel painfully alien.
In other words, one has to reach out for quite fragile bits of the audiences experience in order to build an understanding of certain kinds of art: flickers of interest and enjoyment which mean that the object, or the artist who made it, are revealed not to lie entirely beyond comprehension. With the right prompting, we can locate the points at which the mindset of the person who created a work overlaps, even if only briefly, with our own values and experiences.
Another way we can learn how to surrender defensiveness and still be ourselves around something that at first feels alien is to examine how artists engage with each other's work: they can be models of non- defensive reaction. Las Meninas is at first glance a perfect example of realistic, highly skilled courtly art (33). The suave gentleman-artist is painting a portrait of the king and queen who are dimly reflected in the distant mirror. The young princess and the ladies-in-waiting, from whom the picture takes its title, are in attendance. The luxurious clothes
Remake it to suit your needs.
34. Pablo Picasso, Las Meninas, 1957
shimmer, the texture of skin is exquisitely conveyed. It is, at first sight, almost the polar opposite of the kind of painting we associate with the great names of the twentieth century. What could it offer - what could it matter - to such an inventive and experimental artist as Picasso? Why did Picasso spend much of 1957 (when he was seventy-five) creating his own versions of this great historical work? (34)
How should we imagine what Picasso was up to? What did he get right? Instructively, Picasso likes the idea of inhabiting a classic. Rather than feel that this is a sacred object that must only ever be treated with chilly reverence, he allows himself to play around with it and to view play as a valid way of engaging with it, rather than the sad outcome of ignorance and lack of sophistication. There is something thoroughly child-like about Picasso's version. Two of his own children, Claude and Paloma, were aged ten and eight at this time and were often running in and out of his studio. The dog in the foreground is slightly cartoonish; arms stick