On Art and Other Modernities

Letter to Don Ignacio M. Giribet

This letter will make sense if you read the brief but intense text that Don

Ignacio M. Giribet

wrote a week ago about an exhibition he did not attend out of good taste. You can access the text here. I understand it’s in Spanish, but I also understand that AI can do a pretty good job at translating. I recommend DeepL.

Read it first, come back later, so that no one will ever again sell you the nonsense that art is whatever provokes an emotion, or worse, insist on explaining to you that beauty is relative.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard my revered father quip, half in jest, that if someone throws at you the tired phrase ‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ the proper, polite but firm reply should be: ‘You are mistaken, taste has been studied extensively… though it seems you might have missed that class in school.’

Dear Sir,

I am taking the liberty of writing to you, moved by a keen desire to share some thoughts that, after reading your latest essay, have been occupying my mind for several days.

As I mentioned earlier, I have thought a great deal about your words, which have transported me back to 1994, when Doña Carmen González introduced me to art history.

I won’t lie to you: although I was fascinated by the subject—because that’s what good teachers do, they leave an indelible mark—I didn’t pursue it beyond my freshman year of high school. The sad reality of the education system dictated that one could not enjoy history and have fun translating De Bello Gallico in Latin class and become a doctor. So I chose the science route, and my knowledge of art is limited to those few months that transported me from the caves of Altamira to the brothels of Carrer Avinyó in Barcelona, guided by Picasso, stopping first to pay my respects at the burial of the Count of Orgaz (may God rest his soul). And with so little have I survived so many years, which, in certain circles, would only serve to disqualify me as an art critic, as if one had to be educated to enjoy art. Here, Don Ignacio, I must pause to quote your wise words:

‘The exclusion of the common people from the artistic debate means that it takes place on the margins of society, depriving it of its impact on everyday life.’

(I.M. Giribet)

Faced with such truth, one can only, figuratively speaking, stand up and applaud, and perhaps whisper: ‘Goddamn it, finally someone said it’.

You mention Veronese and Frangelico, Michelangelo and Brueghel, just after sidestepping whether your discussions with DF ever came to blows. I would not be the one to begrudge you if blood had been shed after hearing someone talk about aesthetic relativism. Because it is true: one man’s weed is another man’s rose, but shit will always be shit, and one doesn’t have to taste it to know one won’t like it.

But going back to your friend’s question — the one that profound people ask themselves — ‘What is art?’ Well, let’s take to the etymology of the word, so we can understand where things were headed when the term was invented.

The word “art” comes from the Latin “ars”, which was used to designate knowledge learned through practice, and is equivalent to the Greek term “téchne” (τέχνη), from which the word “technique” derives.

I remember Doña Carmen telling us how obsessed Giotto was with the concept of volume, which he couldn’t quite achieve in his virgins, which is why they all look like they have goitres. The importance of anatomy, perspective, and technique. I remember Michelangelo’s muscular madonnas and Da Vinci’s sfumato. I remember the fascination with light in Vermeer, and the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. I remember the heroic monumentalism of Géricault and Delacroix. And I remember Millet's intimate nationalism, how he subtly slipped the colours of the republic into his work whenever he could.

But what I remember most are the stories told by the artists, from those who lived in caves to the ones that lived in royal courts. Because that, in my opinion, is the function of art: to tell stories, of the sacred and the mundane. Hence the endless repetition of themes. How many representations of Saint John’s head on silver platters are there on the face of the Earth? Judging by the latest exhibition by this Céleste Boursier-Mougenot you mention in your letter, clearly not enough.

I must confess that I have not read either Safranski or Nietzsche, but I am glad that you have and that you have offered us such an accessible summary, which is within the grasp of this humble doctor, who feels more comfortable reading about kinases and DNA replication. Because, you see, how right the two philosophers you mention were when they said that the social function of art is to represent our lives: both our intimate and the life we share with our fellow human beings, so that we can understand and thus respect them and ourselves.

I will tell you about the last time I went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. I think I was in my fifth year of medical school, and there was a temporary exhibition by two Asian artists. One was Cai Guo-Qiang, whose work with gunpowder impressed me with the technique and his ability to generate beauty with a method that seems very difficult to control. The other artist, whose name I have chosen to forget, presented a series of manga sculptures that could have been found in any aisle of a Toys-R-Us in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Because no one taught me to appreciate injection-moulded plastic sculptures of a Son Goku lookalike masturbating and making a lasso with his sperm... Call me stupid, but the erotic fantasies of an old man don't strike me as... artistic? (I’m, today, at a loss for words, just as I was, back then, at a loss for words when I thought about what I had paid to get in: 50% refund NOW!).

I own I’m one of those people who spent hours in the Musée d’Orsay one long summer, because no one paints flowers like Monet, you can almost hear the rustling of the skirts brushing against the tall grass. Then I would go and eat a waffle, without having to explain to anyone that I had paid the entrance fee to look at the water lilies again.

Nowadays, going to an exhibition feels more like a social obligation than an act of appreciation — clocking in, snapping a photo, posting it on social media to let the people in the circle we long to belong to know we came, we saw, we… conquered? Maybe that’s why artists have stopped trying: why put in the hours if no one really looks anymore? Even the waffles are keto.

Perhaps that’s what Instagram stole from us: our intimacy with art. And so art left, tired of the pantomime.

I remain at your feet, hoping that from the artistic shipwreck we will at least be left with bowls that are useful for serving noodles.

With sincere gratitude,

Ana

Expert in almost everything.