Understanding of Art

« sub-structure of a society (see Marx, K. ).

The understanding of the work that this would yield would not, however, be relevant to judgments of artistic merit.

In the next two sections we shall look more closely at such attempts toseparate understanding and evaluation.

4 Understanding, truth and morality Much of the debate about art and understanding is a debate about how much of what might rightly be called an understanding of art is relevant toquestions of the evaluation of art.

Bell, for example, would not have denied that it is a fact aboutFrith's Victoriannarrative painting Paddington Station that it is a representational painting.

To understand that is to understand something about the painting.

What Bell would have denied was that this understanding had anything to do with theappreciation or value of the work.

Bell's denial of the relevance of an understanding of the representational aspectsof a painting, however, seems merely by fiat to eliminate aspects of paintings which people unhesitatingly enjoy andwhich, asWollheim and others have argued, are highly relevant to aesthetic effects.

We may take as a morepromising example of the debates about the relevance of certain sorts of understanding the vigorously controversialissue of the relevance to evaluation of an understanding of the truth and morality of a work of art.

Some, includingWilde, have denied that works of art can be true or moral at all.

But among those who concede that a work of artmight contain truths (as Kafka is said sometimes to have captured a truth about the human condition) and mightarticulate a moral stance (as Jane Austen is often said to do) there are those who deny that an understanding thata work truly has these aspects has any bearing on its evaluation.

As to morality, there is a perfectly good sense inwhich anyone who missed the fact that a certain moral outlook pervades a novel by Jane Austen has notunderstood that novel.

The question is whether that understanding is involved in the assessment of the work, aquestion to which F.R.

Leavis categorically gave an affirmative answer and to which Croce gave an equallycategorical negative reply (see Art and morality §3 ).

When we come to relevance of an understanding that a work of art articulates a view of life, including a view that can be characterized as morally correct, matters are initiallymuddier because of the complexities involved in assessing views of life.

(How is pessimism to be weighed againstoptimism?Fielding against Kafka?Jane Austen againstSartre?) One very important approach, adopted by certainMarxists, relates understanding the point of view of a work intrinsically to its evaluation.

Suppose we allow that awork of art can articulate a view of life, and that to understand that work is, in part at least, to understand theview of life that it articulates.

But, on one reading, Marxist theory claims to possess a privileged understanding ofthe objective laws of historical progress.

In terms of those laws it is possible for a Marxist to say that such andsuch a state of society is a defective stage of human organization, to be surpassed in the forward march of history,and, further, to say that anyone endorsing that state of society shows a defective understanding of history.

Thenthe way is open for a Marxist to say that a worldview articulated in a work of art can display a defectiveunderstanding of social relations (as some alleged was the case with Dickens's Hard Times ).

It would seem narrowly prescriptive to say, without further argument, that this judgment is irrelevant to an assessment of a work of art.For it attributes to a work a lack of understanding, perceptiveness, and possibly imagination.

It certainly treats it asthe expression of an inadequate state of social consciousness.

But then, it seems that there is at least oneaccount that links understanding a work of art with its evaluative judgment.

For to understand the work of art is tounderstand it as the articulation of a worldview, and to understand that aspect is to open the possibility ofassessing the work in terms of the adequacy of the worldview it articulates as well as the adequacy of itsarticulation of it.

Whether such an account can ever be made to work depends on the truth of the Marxist claim -vigorously contested - that they have a privileged access to the objective laws of history.

Even if such a claimwere false, it should not be forgotten that part of our understanding of a work may involve an understanding of theview of life articulated in it, and, further, that our reaction to a work is often very much bound up with our feelings,not merely about the quality of the way in which that view is expressed, but also about the view itself (see Art and truth §4 ).

Hence Wittgenstein's frequent comment that he could not understand and engage with some works of art, for example the music ofMahler, as opposed to the works of Brahms, because he could not see the world fromthat viewpoint ( 1966 ).

5 Criticism as retrieval Many have spoken as if the central task of all our dealings with art is evaluation, and other activities, such as the understanding of the whole context of a work, are irrelevant tocriticism and appreciation.

The element of truth in this is that we tend to embark upon enquiries into genesis andcontext after we have made the decision that the work is worth it.

We study the origins of The Waste Land because, prior to any such study, we found The Waste Land rewarding.

However, we cannot conclude from the fact that we are prompted to learn more about the circumstances of a work after it has impressed us favourably thatinformation discovered about it subsequently is irrelevant to our assessment.

Things that emerge on further enquirymight produce radical alterations in assessments (as when we discover that we were taken in by the excellence ofa parody).

Second, on reading a work, we may find things in it that puzzle us.

Beardsley and others are right that itis a fact about some works that they are puzzling.

It is possible, however, not merely to settle for the knowledgethat a work is puzzling.

That leaves a gap in our understanding which we can plug by seeking reasons for why the work is as it is.

The positioning of the figures in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon will not change when we examine its very many drafts and sketches.

But puzzlement as to why they are as they are will be replaced by abetter understanding.

Finally, it is too easy to talk as if evaluation in some narrow sense were all there is to theappreciation of art.

There is also such a thing as a love of a work of art, which, as is often the case with love,wishes to know all there is to know about the object of love and ultimately to understand it as fully as possible.

Tothe lover of the work nothing about it is ultimately irrelevant.

And this is related to the view that Richard Wollheimhas defended of criticism as 'retrieval', where that involves: the reconstruction of the creative process, where thecreative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of artitself.

The creative process reconstructed, or retrieval complete, the work is then open to understanding.

(1980: 204) Understanding and appreciation cannot be divorced, if for no other reason than that to understand a work of art may just be to hear, read or look at it with a certain kind of appreciative enjoyment.

AsWittgenstein remarks,understanding that a Brahms rhythm has a certain queer quality is inseparable from experiencing that quality in it(1966: 20 ).. »