The Arts For All?

Josh Landy
Should artworks be accessible to everyone?

Ray Briggs
Is it elitist To make art that’s difficult to understand

Josh Landy
Or is popular art just trash?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking: are the arts for all of us?

Josh Landy
I definitely think the art should be for everyone. Like, I think we need to subsidize museums so everyone can get in for free. Too many people get excluded because they can’t afford those exorbitant ticket prices.

Ray Briggs
That’s a start. But it’s not the only kind of exclusion there is. Let’s say we implement your generous ticket policy and now everyone can go to the museum. What are they going to do once they’re in there?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. Look at the pictures like everyone else.

Ray Briggs
But how are they going to understand them if they haven’t been to snooty high schools and fancy colleges like you? You need to know a ton of stuff about art history just to make sense of half of the paintings. Who has time and money for that?

Josh Landy
well I mean, that’s not unique to art. I think about video games, rock music, or even even memes. I’m a middle aged guy and I often have trouble understanding my students’ jokes. There’s nothing snooty or fancy about memes. It’s just that if you don’t get the reference, you don’t get the joke.

Ray Briggs
Gee, Josh, that’s a real Galaxy-Brain take.

Josh Landy
What’s a Galaxy Brain?

Ray Briggs
My point exactly.

Josh Landy
No, my point Exactly. Lots of domains require background knowledge: memes, medicine, philosophy, even sports.s Smetimes conversations just get a little—what’s the word—inside baseball. There’s nothing special about art in this regard.

Ray Briggs
Well, okay, maybe. But there is something special about art. And that’s the art gives you cultural cred. Knowing lots of baseball stats might be fun. But knowing who painted Guernica—that shows that you’re sophisticated.

Josh Landy
Well, even if that’s true, I don’t think the solution is making all painting simple. Why don’t make our education free as well as museum tickets? Let’s level up, not level down.

Ray Briggs
I see you’re agreeing with me. You want all artworks to be accessible.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s not exactly what I’m saying. I actually think we’d lose something really important if there were no challenging artworks out there in the world.

Ray Briggs
Oh, please—what would you lose, your smug self-satisfaction?

Josh Landy
Touché. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, things like the ability to get us thinking really hard about important questions, or to expand our horizons and challenge our perceptions.

Ray Briggs
That’s fine and dandy, Professor Landy. But how do you make those benefits available to everyone?

Josh Landy
Well, think about it this way: when artworks challenge you, it’s not always because there’s something you don’t know. Oftentimes, it’s just because there’s something they want you to do. I mean, think about Breaking Bad. That show asks us to make some pretty difficult moral judgments. But you know, it’s a really popular show. You don’t need to have gone to a snooty prep school to enjoy it.

Ray Briggs
Maybe not, but still getting to watch TV for hours on end is a luxury. It’s not for people who have to work three jobs. It’s for people with lots of time on their hands.

Josh Landy
So what, you’re saying every single artwork should be immediately clear in every way to every human being?

Ray Briggs
Finally, you’re getting it. Art should be for everyone, no matter where they come from, or what they do for a living. Every human being deserves to have a life rich with aesthetic experiences, to feel that special sense of community to have their imaginations stimulated—to be raised above the mundane.

Josh Landy
Every human being—why stop there? How about cats and dogs? Don’t you want Blossom to be raised above the mundane?

Ray Briggs
Funny you should ask… Actually, there is a whole world of art for dogs out there. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out about it. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Before you judge, meet Dr. Robert White-Adams. He goes by Dr. Bob. He’s a vet based in Somerset, England.

Robert White-Adams
And a few years ago I was involved in a project where we created a art exhibition or an art museum for dogs.

Holly McDede
In preparation for the exhibit, he taught the artists involved to experience the world like dogs do—through a dimmer color palette and a profound sense of smell.

Robert White-Adams
They’re smelling what yesterday and three days ago and a week ago was. So their worlds that they build inside their head has a whole extra dimension that we don’t experience minute-by-minute. They have time built into their their vision of the world in the form of smell.

Holly McDede
The exhibition featured an open car window simulator that blew out aromas like old shoes, giant-sized dog bowls, paintings and colors to match a dog’s color spectrum, dancing waterjets that leapt from one dog bowl to the next. The dogs appeared to be enjoying themselves.

Robert White-Adams
I had my own dog with me. She was a nine-year old retriever then. And you can’t help thinking there must be some doggie-equivalent of bafflement, intrigue.

Concepción Cortés Zulueta
Most people thought it was kind of a joke, so I tried to take a look at it from a more serious standpoint.

Holly McDede
Concepción Cortés Zulueta is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Malaga in Spain.

Concepción Cortés Zulueta
And I usually work around the presence and identity of animals in contemporary art.

Holly McDede
Her eyebrows raised when she heard that the exhibition was billed as the world’s first for dogs. She’s the author of papers such as “The Seagull Stole My Camera and My Shot: Overlapping Metaphorical and Physical Distances in the Human-Animal-Camera Triad.” So she knows her stuff. She can think of at least two art exhibitions for dogs that took place back in the 70s. One was held in a seaside village in Spain. Two artists held the exhibition with their dog, Chispas Luís.

Concepción Cortés Zulueta
He was there all the time, and so the dog became naturally involved in the collaboration.

Holly McDede
They made music together. Paintings paid tribute to sausages and old boots. And at times, the artists began to act like canines

Concepción Cortés Zulueta
Because they were like territorial artists, like trying to win the other one.

Holly McDede
In a separate show, one of the artists later recorded the sounds of sad dogs howling for the public. The humans enjoyed the show, but the artist recommended the canines stay away because

Concepción Cortés Zulueta
the dogs were like aware of the meaning more than the human companion.

Holly McDede
And many decades later, the humans haven’t stopped creating exhibits for four legged creatures. Jessica Dawson runs an exhibit and a concept called Dogumenta with Mica Scalin and a morkie named Rocky. When Dawson moved to New York City, she was overwhelmed by the artwork. Not Rocky.

Jessica Dawson
He was unleashed into the gallery space, and went straight up to an artwork, sniffed it looked around, just gave his whole body and all his senses and energy to the work around him. And I felt that I’d lost some of that.

Holly McDede
It was clear she had a lot to learn from Rocky. The work in their first show followed in the tradition of art history—like one sculptural piece that was simple and blocky.

Jessica Dawson
It had a grid, light blue, delicate grid of paint, pigment, reminiscent of Agnes Martin, another minimalist artist. So these are clear references—this is more for the humans, these are references for humans.

Holly McDede
But in this show, these references are obsolete. Because this is a show for dogs! During the day, the pups began to mark the piece. And by mark, she means “mark.” This created a kind of drip.

Jessica Dawson
almost like a Jackson Pollack drip at that point, because the pigment dripped down. And this was made by the pups who came through the exhibition.

Holly McDede
The piece changed over time, like the kind of interactive artwork very much in vogue these days. You could say it had similarities to Warhol’s oxidation paintings. But more importantly, everyone was welcome to enjoy this space. People who had never been to art shows before showed up with their dogs. Lizards, turtles, and even cats showed up. It might seem ridiculous. But sometimes, it’s necessary to be transported away from the human world.

Jessica Dawson
And I’m grateful to Rocky and all his four-legged friends for giving us that.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that excellent Rover Report—I mean, Roving Report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking whether the arts should be for everyone.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Catherine Abell, who’s a professor of Philosophy and Art at the University of Oxford, and author of “Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis.” Catherine, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Catherine Abell
Thank you very much.

Josh Landy
So Katherine, you’ve been writing about the arts for some time now. What first got you interested in the topic?

Catherine Abell
Well, when I was young, my mother used to drive drag me to lots of art galleries, and I always found it incredibly boring, but not something must have sunk in because when I went to graduate school, I was drawn to philosophical topics about the arts, and I found I had, you know, clear opinions. about them in ways I don’t about about other philosophical topics.

Ray Briggs
So Katherine, what do you think? Should all art be accessible?

Catherine Abell
Well, all art should be accessible to at least somebody, because if it’s not accessed art, I think art exists to be appreciated. And if it’s not accessible to anyone, it’s failing to do that. But I don’t think all art should be accessible to everybody.

Josh Landy
So why not? Why not say, you know, democratize, make all art accessible to every human being.

Catherine Abell
Because I think the reasons why we value and appreciate art as such that sometimes you do require background knowledge to appreciate them. And when people don’t have that background knowledge, they those artworks are inaccessible to them. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be produced.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that there’s some art that should be accessible to everybody?

Catherine Abell
I think all other things being equal, being accessible is a good thing. And the more accessible, the better. But I think sometimes we appreciate artwork, for reasons that we need some background knowledge to appreciate. So for example, originality, you can’t tell if a painting is original, unless you know what paintings came before it. And that requires some knowledge.

Ray Briggs
That is a strange example, I think, because I might well be able to appreciate the painting without knowing its original, like, I might be able to appreciate what it’s about. Is that a case where I have some but not complete access do you think?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I think that’s exactly what’s going on in those kinds of cases. And many artworks operate on different levels. And they might be partially accessible to people without being wholly accessible.

Josh Landy
I like that thought about different levels, you know, it makes me think maybe it’s not a simple on off switch, right? In artwork is accessible or not accessible. But you think about, you know, Shakespeare’s plays about how popular they were because they appeal in a really direct way, or some of that game of thrones, you know, which is obviously a wonderful series of books and a wonderful series of TV show TF TV episodes. But, you know, a lot of people can watch it, some people will just enjoy the plot and the characters and others will get really stuck into the difficult moral questions. Does that seem like a reasonable way of thinking about it? It’s kind of a, it’s a spectrum. It’s not just accessible, on inaccessible off?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I think in the case of most artworks, that’s exactly right, especially artworks that have representational content, right, because most people can see what a picture depicts and appreciate that, even if they don’t have the kind of understanding of the process involved in producing that painting to understand exactly how the artist would have had to go about painting it and the sort of skill involved.

Ray Briggs
So I’m thinking about my appreciation of historical artworks and noticing that I can’t have been in the intended audience for most of those. And yet they’ve translated across cultures so that I can appreciate them. Do you think that there’s something about some works of art that makes them more likely to translate in that way?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, sometimes it’s something to do with the work of art. So sometimes, artworks have universal themes, or speak to universal issues, and this guarantees that they translate across different historical periods. But it also might just be a contingent fact about which artistic traditions have endured and which haven’t such that we can understand works from the past, that are in part of familiar traditions, whereas other traditions might have died out and we find the arts in those traditions sort of more inaccessible and difficult to understand.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about whether the arts should be for everyone with Katherine Abell from Oxford University.

Ray Briggs
Are there poems you love that other people don’t get? Or their novels you hate because they’re needlessly obscure? What’s the point of making art works that not everyone can understand?

Josh Landy
The aims of art—plus your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule / But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

is it cruel to the viewer when a painting is inscrutable? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the arts for all with Catherine Abell from the University of Oxford, author of “Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis.”

Josh Landy
The art of slowing a pandemic means we’re pre-recording this episode from the safety of our respective homes. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls today. But you can always email us comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Catherine, why would an artist choose to create an artwork that not everyone can readily understand?

Catherine Abell
That’s a very good question. I think sometimes, artists have goals that they can only pursue at the expense of accessibility. So sometimes we value artworks because they teach us something about the world we live in they they have cognitive value. But if the author of a literary work, for example, wants to write a historical novel that his that accurately portrays how things were at the time, that issue, she might have to write something that not every contemporary view is going to relate to. So consider a historical novel in which all the female characters do exactly what they’re told by the husbands or their fathers. modern audiences not going to relate to that at all. But historical accuracy requires might require things to be represented in that way.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s a great example. And that’s, that sounds like a case where the difficulty is basically background knowledge. But I want to come back to a distinction that Rana will making in in our opening conversation. Some artworks are difficult because they have the required background knowledge. Other artworks are difficult, because they require us to work hard. Or a bit of both. So I’m curious about those cases, because I think some of my favorite artworks don’t necessarily require much background information. But goodness me do they put us through our paces, right? They’re like Virginia Woolf, they’re really the language is so beautiful and dense and, and you’re not always sure whose perspective you’re in. And, and you don’t quite know where the author stands on certain really important moral questions. So So what’s the value of that kind of difficulty?

Catherine Abell
Interesting question. I don’t know that. I don’t think difficulty in and of itself is valuable. But there might be some aim that an artist is trying to pursue that results in that sort of difficulty. So for example, take an artist who’s trying to express a very complex emotion, or a very complex attitude towards a set of events that might result in something that doesn’t wear its message on its sleeve, that we have to work really hard to get it.

Ray Briggs
So this is making me think actually, of the poet Kathy Park Hong, who writes in English, Spanish and Korean, and has said that she specifically aims to achieve a kind of disfluency in her poetry. That’s meant to mimic the disfluency of being in a culture that wasn’t really built for you. So I wonder if that’s an example of a case where we’re difficulty is actually part of the point.

Catherine Abell
Yeah, that sounds like, yeah. And by making it difficult for the viewer, she’s putting us in her shoes, it sounds like.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I think that’s a lovely example. Because you’ve got all these different possible aims that an artist could have, right? One, they’re transmitting some idea about the world, another, this beautiful one here of of helping the reader feel what it’s like to be someone in that position to be the author. What about cases where artists are trying to help us cultivate certain mental skills? Right, I think I think about, for example, you know, Plato’s dialogues, where they’re kind of weird and wacky at times, and some of us think that the point is to make us better reasoners. So there’s no, there’s not necessarily a particular message from a stretch of weird argumentation. But it’s designed to help us cultivate our mental skills. And in that case, there might be an kind of unnecessary difficulty, right? That might be something that’s not immediately accessible to everyone. But there’s a reason because it makes us active, and if we’re active, we practice and if we practice, we’re more likely to get perfect. What do you think about that way of thinking about it?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I think there are, especially cognitive values that art can provide us with that do exactly involve outwards, trying to train us up at something. So Martha Nussbaum discusses Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, which is notoriously inaccessible. I mean, I tried reading but, uh, she thinks that what’s valuable One thing that’s valuable about that novel is that it involves attention to all the morally relevant aspects of the situation it represents. And that it can train us. I don’t know if I agree with her, but she thinks it can train us as readers to become people on whom the morally relevant aspects of a situation are not lost. So better moral observers better moral people, by by virtue of being better at recognizing morally relevant aspects of the situation.

Ray Briggs
So actually, I have a question about morality and difficulty that also relates to an example that you gave earlier, of historical novels with about societies with sexist rules. So I think actually, for a lot of, for a lot of readers, the main barrier, there is not information like, it’s not that hard to know that there have been a lot of patriarchal societies in the world. But there’s a kind of burial barrier of like being able to morally empathize with people with really different values from your own.

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it’s, it’s very difficult for authors to get us to empathize with people with very different values than those we have. I mean, how can we sort of think of a character as being fundamentally decent when he beats his children or something when they do something wrong? Although that might be what he takes himself to pay for it.

Ray Briggs
Do you have thoughts on how to write historical fiction where realism kind of demands that you portray people in not the best light, but empathy demands that you portray them? And at least a light were reader can care about them?

Catherine Abell
Not really. I mean, I can see how tricky it is. But I’m happy to leave that job to the historical novelist, I guess, I think it’s an inevitable trade off, I really don’t see how you can do both those things.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the arts for all with Catherine Abell from the University of Oxford, and we have an email from Nancy. Nancy says, I think all arts should be accessible and taught in schools. So do you think about that? Catherine, you were saying that your mum dragged you to museums, when you were a kid? It didn’t always go so? Well. I, I won’t share my experiences, but I think they’re somewhat similar. What do you think? Do you think art should be taught in schools?

Catherine Abell
I guess it depends what’s meant by taught, I think schoolchildren should be exposed. But I think it’s probably better for them to be able to respond to it in their own way, and find their own way to the kinds of things that has to offer, rather than being told find this, you know, engaging for this reason, or you can steer people to appreciate art, but I don’t think you can force them to, to find things valuable that you find valuable.

Ray Briggs
So one aspect of art education that I tend to care a lot about is not just teaching people to look at art, but teaching like giving them space to make art. So visual arts classes, music classes, do you think that this is a good way of making art more accessible to people by educating them in what it is to actually have to create a work of art?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s crucially important, you know, when you’ve tried to make a painting yourself, you’re much better place to appreciate the kind of achievement involved in other people doing painting things. And the same goes with music.

Josh Landy
You know, one of the things that I think about when I think about the question of art for everyone, is the idea of everyone making art. Right? So I think, you know, one way of thinking about it is, let’s have art makers make art that is really accessible. Maybe it works on multiple levels doesn’t have to be simplistic, but you know, should be accessible the first level, and then there’s lots of depths that you can dive into. But another way of thinking about it is, you know, the French portlets the Amal said poetry must be made by all not by one. So let’s have everyone write poetry. Or we could think about you know, Brecht Brecht wrote plays to be performed. But he also wrote plays that in a in a sense, the audience performs ready he wrote plays where the point was not that you sit there passively and launch but the you get involved and there’s something to be learned from the experience of being an actor, maybe even co writing something or you do improv or something like that. So what about this, you know, art for all in the sense of everyone’s making art?

Catherine Abell
Why not? I feel I see no cost to that.

Josh Landy
Do you see a value to that?

Catherine Abell
Yes, I do see a value to that. I mean, not just the value that I’ve already talked about in, you know, the price, trying to make stuff, giving you a better appreciation of, you know, what’s involved in other people making it. But also, I think, you know, thinking about what, what you have to contribute, the kinds of things you can offer that other people might be able to appreciate, artistically is a wonderful thing for everybody to do.

Ray Briggs
I’m also wondering about the role of audience members in making art accessible to ourselves. So I, as a reader of, say, a novel from a different culture, I have choices like I can choose to look up words that are unfamiliar, or to go read some history of the culture that the novel is from. And so if an awful wasn’t accessible to me, and I could have worked harder to access, it isn’t. Isn’t that on me?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I mean, I guess we have limited time and resources. And we have to decide which, which things we’re going to follow up on in that way. So I suppose there needs to be an initial level of accessibility to prompt you to think I need to find out more about that culture or look up that would,

Ray Briggs
I have thought a little bit about this, in my capacity as a poet, which I is a hobby that I sometimes published in. So I remember a reviewer complained about my first book that I put in footnotes at will really end notes at the end of the book, where I told you what some of the philosophical ideas were that was referencing in the poems, and where you could read more about them. And the reviewer said, Look, wouldn’t it be better to leave the audience to figure this out for themselves instead of browbeating with them? bribe me with it. And I disagree, but I sort of wonder if there is sort of also a value in leaving the audience to figure things out for themselves.

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I mean, I think if if you think the process of figuring it out from for yourself is going to result in some sort of discovery, not contained within the footnotes, then it seems worthwhile letting people figure it out for themselves. But it doesn’t, it seems to me fine to have footnotes in great many cases, right. But perhaps there’s sometimes greater value in imaginatively projecting yourself into well, I mean, thinking about the philosophical ideas for yourself, rather than just having them explain to you.

Josh Landy
That seems right to me. I mean, I think of a I think of a number of really extraordinary artworks, like, you know, Toni Morrison’s novel a mercy Spike Lee’s do the right thing, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where there isn’t a clear statement, or a clear guiding belief there. They’re really interesting and important questions, vital questions. But we’re being asked to do an awful lot of work ourselves in coming down on where we stand. And I think there’s a genuine value to that. I mean, there can be value in other kinds of artwork, too. But could you say a little bit more about that? Why? Why does so many of these truly extraordinary artworks? Ask us to do this work? Ask us to take a stand make a decision, they they deliberately withhold judgment on some really important questions?

Catherine Abell
Well, I guess there’s a big difference to just being told something as a flat statement. And coming to that, to believe the content of the statement yourself. And when you form beliefs, you look for justification for those beliefs, and perhaps that’s what going on in cases like that. When we think about what’s you know, what’s going on, and work it out for ourselves. We have reason. We have good reasons. For the kind of views we form in a way that we don’t if they’re just sort of handed to us.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve got an email from Marianne, who says, in the future, there’s going to be less work, and we’re going to need more art to fulfill our times as human beings. So what do you think?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, maybe. Well, she hasn’t any way she could start making her own art, can she?

Josh Landy
I mean, it seems like a great thing to do. I mean, it’s right. Some, some might even argue, maybe this is a little hyperbolic, but it’s that it’s that kind of thing that constitutes human flourishing, right? Not just doing your, your job to make money to, you know, earn food. There’s that lovely line from Dubois right the aim of colleges Meet the aim of college is to understand the value of that light that life that meat nourishes. And, well, art is one of those things that gives life its value. Would you go that far? Catherine?

Catherine Abell
Yes, absolutely. I’d go that far. You know, I think it’s no accident that people with tons and tons of money, spend it on paintings or artworks. Because the it’s not the money that’s making them happy. They’re looking for some. That’s just pop psychology, isn’t it, but they’re looking for some source of value. And and I think, yeah, it does play that role in people’s lives.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about arts for all with Catherine Abell from the University of Oxford, author of “Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis.”

Ray Briggs
What can we do to make art more accessible for everyone? Should all museums be free? Does the art world need to do more to include disabled patrons?

Josh Landy
Painting for the people—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Chuck Berry
Roll over Beethoven, dig to these rhythm ‘n blues.

Josh Landy
Why should Beethoven just roll over and make way for something more accessible, like rhythm and blues? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m RayBriggs. Our guest is Catherine Abell from the University of Oxford. And we’re thinking about the arts for all.

Josh Landy
So Catherine, I wonder if we could come back to something we’re talking about earlier in the show about a particular kind of accessibility, accessibility for people on low incomes, people with disabilities? What can the artists in the art world do to to solve those kinds of prompts to make art accessible to as many people as possible in those particular ways?

Catherine Abell
Well, I think artists can make works that talk to the experiences of a more diverse range of people is one thing. And art galleries and other arts institutions can provide ways of experiencing their artworks that speak to a wide range of people. So just to use one example, let people touch the sculptures.

Ray Briggs
Right. So I actually wonder about sort of some, I guess what people would call low art, too. I cannot tell you how many shows I’ve been to in basements that required stairs, or events, places that smelled like something. Um, is there a way on a budget also to make art more accessible?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, I think so. I think one interesting issue here is the distinction between art that’s reproducible. And that’s not so you know, an a novel, for example, is infinitely reproducible. So lots and lots of people can have access to copies of a novel. And we think of the visual arts as not being like that, you know, there’s only one of a painting, and often prints come in limited editions, but there’s no reason actually, why many prints shouldn’t be infinitely reproduced in the way that works of literature.

Josh Landy
Ah that’s really interesting. It makes me think about our artworks like bridges, you know, we were lucky enough to be in a town that has the Golden Gate Bridge, architecture, sculpture that’s out there in the world. And that definitely, you could touch and climb on and interact with. Maybe that’s it could, could that kind of thing be a way to bring the aesthetic to masses of people, you know, many people drive over the Golden Gate Bridge twice a day, you know, five times a week. What do you think about that?

Catherine Abell
Yeah, and I think it’s a sort of element if he’s taught stoical accident to what we call Art and what we don’t I think, you know, bridges are conceived as aesthetic objects, and they’re out there in the world. And we should look for the aesthetic dimension of the things that we all do have access to.

Ray Briggs
I’m also wondering about this concept of art as dialogue, which I sometimes find useful. So in order to participate in a dialogue, I need to have like, it helps to be talking to somebody who’s similar to me, rather than different from me, although it’s not essential. But I also need to have like the space to engage with the other person. And do you think that there are ways of giving all of us more space in our lives to engage with us that I call objects?

Catherine Abell
Good Question. Um, what do you mean by that exactly?

Ray Briggs
I think I mean, I need to not be thinking about other things too hard. Like, I not need to not be thinking about my job, or like my bank account at that moment, and I need to be able to focus in on the art. Maybe I need some quiet and leisure.

Catherine Abell
Yeah, that seems right. But I suppose you know, one issue here is where we situate work, going back to Josh’s, talking about the bridge and things. Maybe put artworks in places where people go when they are taking time out from their jobs, etc, etc, but not in the way where they have to make a special trip to the gallery. But you know, just going for a walk.

Josh Landy
I’m still curious about, about artworks that seem inaccessible, because many of my favorite artworks are words that are really tough. You know, I think about, again, Toni Morrison’s novel and mercy that starts that really confusing way. And it’s also a novel that deliberately invites us tempts us to make a mistake. And I love what works like this, you know, proof does this. Jane Austen does it in Pride and Prejudice. She just I mean, there’s no way to avoid making a very specific mistake about what happens. So is there a value in that kind of I mean, it’s, it doesn’t make it totally inaccessible. But it does, it makes what what rageous referred to as the dialogue, a really interesting dialogue between the author and the reader where the author is, is setting a trap. For the reader that’s supposed to be salutary in some way it does that seem just kind of snobbish and cruel and unfair to you? Or does that seem like a cool thing that art can do?

Catherine Abell
I think it’s in the category of as a cool thing that art can do. I think it’s, it’s nice to be reminded not to be complacent, as an audience, as an appreciator of art. And just sort of think, yeah, I know the geeky, I know exactly how this works and how to, you know, interact with this work. I think it’s good to be reminded to be an active reader to engage our intelligence. But I also think that it’s part of what others are sometimes doing when they make difficult art is pushing the rules and, and innovating. And not just sort of taking for granted the sort of art forms that exist as they exist, but trying to do something new. And that that is going to be very difficult to engage with and understand, but worthwhile ultimately, because it opens up new possibilities for art that didn’t exist before. And new possibilities for audiences, perhaps too.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I think about Manet’s Olympia, which was famously scandalous when it first came out, and no one can understand everyone else did it. And now we all love it. And it’s expanded the range of what’s possible, and what’s beautiful for us. I totally agree with you.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I also have been thinking about art that is difficult for some audiences, and not for every audience. So art for me is an English speaking American that’s difficult, might be really easy for somebody from another country to understand. So when we say accessible, like Who are we really talking about accessibility for? Is there a really a generic reader for whom art can be accessible?

Catherine Abell
No, I think the answer to that is it is a pretty clear No. But obviously, even though there isn’t a generic audience member, I don’t think for any art form, it’s still possible for artwork to be more or less, less accessible, even relative to you know, an intended audience or the audience that in fact reaches for it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So So then. Again, I’m kind of curious, when I’m making decisions for an artwork that I’m creating. Like when when do I try to make my audience work hard? And is there like sometimes value in making some of the audience work harder than other audience members? So So I’m also thinking about, like, work by sort of queer and trans authors that doesn’t take regular like heteronormative assumptions about about What relationships look like, as its starting point. So is that like, in a sense that’s more accessible? And in a sense, it’s less accessible, depending on who’s doing the reading or the looking?

Catherine Abell
That’s right. And in cases like that, it looks like there can be valued value in being unaccessible. or hard to, for certain groups to access, because because the very process of trying to understand what’s going on, helps educate people about perspectives other than their own. And I take it that’s can be part of the point of the work.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and of course, building and cementing communities I think, is a really important feature of it. I mean, some of these more difficult artworks get us talking together and, and that that cements us in terms of our social relationships. I wonder if like, what are the right slogan might be something like some art for all all art for some, right? I think it’s awesome that there are TV shows everybody watches, like Game of Thrones or whatever. But it’s also great. There’s niche stuff. And the cool thing is everyone can have niche stuff, right? There’s niche art. For you. For me, for everyone. It might be different niche stuff. But there’s, there’s something for everyone. What do you think about that? Like that? You know, it’s it’s okay for some networks to, to strive for a limited audience or to end up with a limited audience. Because, you know, well, maybe you’re, you’re not in that audit that works. Audience, but you’re in this one. And that’s a good thing.

Catherine Abell
Yeah, that seems exactly right. To me. I mean, people are different. Not everybody’s the same. And so if all that strove to be accessible to everyone, we’d end up with something that was pretty dull to everyone. I imagine.

Ray Briggs
Now, we just have to ask, What’s your favorite nice artwork?

Catherine Abell
Oh, gosh. Like so I, I really like the novels of this woman called, uh, Anita Brookner. And they’re kind of inaccessible in the sense that they’re very, very depressing. So I’m not quite sure why I like them so much. But you know, and she just talks about one lonely woman who has an opportunity to happiness and then misses it. And all her novels are a bit like that. I don’t know if that’s inaccessible. But I kind of really love them, despite the sort of limited scope and the kind of unremittingly depressing, tone.

Josh Landy
That makes perfect sense to me, right, that some of us resonate with more depressing works or works that address a particular facet of the human experience and others resonate with others. So I say why not? Do you think that there are any works that you’d want to say something negative about this concert, or any works that are just too nice or too exclusionary, too? snobby, elitist, something like that?

Catherine Abell
I certainly think it’s a possibility. And sometimes, I think bad art tries to pass itself on off as niche, when really it’s just, you know, a nation nation sake has got to be a bad thing, right?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I can’t say there are many artworks I love that are like that. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us.

Catherine Abell
My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

Ray Briggs
Our guest has been Catherine Abell, Professor of Philosophy of Art at the University of Oxford, and author of “Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis.” So Josh, what are you thinking now?

Josh Landy
Well, inevitably, I’m thinking about Proust, I suppose, because I always do. I mean, that’s a 3000 page novel with crazy sentences that are up to four pages long. But it’s so worth it. I mean, there’s just nothing like it is an experience of reading and it can be genuinely life changing.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, Proust, that sounds like fun. I’ll be over here listening to Lizzo. We’ll put everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Josh Landy
And if you have a conundrum that’s bedeviling you—a personal dilemma in your life that might benefit from philosophical insight—send it to us conundrums at philosophytalk.org, and maybe we can think it through together on the air.

Ray Briggs
Now, an acquired taste if there ever was one—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The Woke culture has wounded the Great Beast we call Art history. It’s all dead white men, and excluded people want to be Seen. And it’s not Safe. Too many sad naked women, battles, alcoholic fantasies of unhappy expressionists, we don’t feel comfortable. It’s not okay. Of course the idea that arts should be challenging is relatively new. If art had a little bite it was in the execution, not the subject, which was dictated by the marketplace. So you did a portrait of Napoleon on his mighty pony, or the wife of Lord PooBah, or a great silly landscape that took up a wall, buying you time to concentrate on your canvas of Flemish demons devouring peasants. Now, I love going to museums. I’d be a highly cultured guy if I had the stamina and money. Grab a show, a late dinner, catch a jazz act, wind up tap dancing down the street with a sexy beatnik mama just as the street cleaners come round. Culture has always hinged on a couple things, education and money. You have to know who Renoir is, if you want to see him. You have to shell out big dough to see the war horse at the Met. And the center of it all was New York City. Until recently, the arts belonged to gay white men and rich old white ladies. The gay white men to curate the art, and the rich white ladies to own it. The rest of us to glimpse for one brief shining long weekend in the Big Apple, and then take the bus back home to Indiana. But now political correctness has thrown big wrenches into art appreciation. We used to be amazed at the play of sunlight on a stream of milk in a Vermeer, maybe read up on the pigments he made from crushed pebbles imported from Turkey, what kind of pig he bred to make his brushes, but now that’s all elitist cisgen objectifying patriarchal hoo ha. Museums now offer video loops. Installations. Abstract sculptures made of scabs, sandwich bags, and worn down bars of soap. I think. I haven’t been to a museum since the Covid hit. Between social distancing and white imperialist shaming I’m amazed we have any culture left to shun. But lately I’ve been wondering where statues fit into all this. Sculptors used to be the bomb, art wise. Massive. Big bronze depictions of Atlas holding up the world. Trojan guys in marble wrestling big twisty snakes. Corporate appreciators would commission giant cubes toppling in the square in front of their headquarters, a thirty foot tall metal sheet in front of the bank that passersby avoided because they were afraid it might fall on them. And back in the late 19th Century, statues of confederate generals began to be erected in town squares all across America. Their construction coincided with the Jim Crow years, from 1890 to the mid 1950s. Paid for, I have no doubt, by white ladies whose deep purses also funded museums, symphonies, and southern historical societies. This was probably a huge boost to the sculpture industry. There are only so many places to display marble depictions of Stonewall Jackson the size and weight of a 1973 Buick Riviera. Small town parks stepped up to that plate. I’m not sure anybody asked the townspeople if they wanted a statue of a loser general cluttering up the commons, but once it was there, it was fine, especially if you count the more obscure ones, like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was also the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It was educational and epic. Like having your own Rushmore a block away from the hardware store. It was also a part of the great whitewash of the Civil War, where the south became noble in defeat, full of juleps and cotillions, and slavery was not talked about at the supper table. Then came the death of downtown. No more statues, and only Santa, Easter Bunny, and Halloween Superstore at the Mall. Seasonal, not historical. Throw in Black Lives Matter, the new distaste for representation in art, and those statues were coming down. A little foresight might have meant making a warehouse museum for them like they did with the Soviet heroes. But oh well. Styles come and go. But if we ever do go back to hero praising in the public square, and if we’ve lost the war, keep a close eye on your generals. In the park one day, hauled to the dump on a flat bed truck the next. Avoid the heartbreak, small town America. Turn to gazebos. Bring in a trad jazz combo on a hot summer night. Sit and fan yourself while the kids chase fireflies. And if bored teenagers graffiti the thing up some drunken midnight, well, you know, that’s art too in some quarters. And much easier to export to New York City than Robert E. Lee surveying the battlefield on what was the name of his damn horse? Traveller. I can’t believe I remember that. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
the views expressed or mis expressed on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University, all of our other funders,

Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Seinfeld
He transcends time and space. He sickens me.