Style is the death of art

I hate style. When I hear an artist say she has finally found her ”style,” I get nauseous. Style is not what art is about.

Style should be the way something needs to be said. I see too much art wherein the artist has chosen a clever style, as if it were a shirt from a J.C. Penney catalog, and then tries to stuff it with something.

Artists who read art history and try to figure out where it is going next will always be shortsighted. Art is going where it will next because of some great imagination whose vision of reality cannot be expressed in the old vocabulary.

Younger artists tend to need style tricks more, just as older artists seem to strip down their style, like the final Kurasawa films or late Tolstoy.

As an example: The greatest writing survives translation well. Lesser, more refined artists often are untranslatable because their substance is the fugitive stuff of style. Tolstoy, Homer, Dostoevski and Dante are all powerful despite language problems. They each concerned themselves with powerful searching problems and explored the mazes of those problems with shocking honesty (in the terms of their times).

The search within

Artists and writers now need to search their innards for analogous problems. Our answers won’t be Dante’s answers, but art on the level of importance as the Paradiso is needed.

Rembrandt; Picasso; Beethoven; Dostoevski; Dante; Michelangelo; Raphael; Hokusai; Bach; Homer; Shakespeare; Cervantes; Chaucer; Neruda; Matisse; Durer; Sophocles. . . . Does LeRoy Neiman, after all, belong on that list? Or Howard Terpning, or Frank Frazetta?

Four modes

There are four modes of producing art. I don’t mean discrete modes, but that they are four points on a spectrum. They are:

–› The artist connects with something real in the world or the medium and, because his discovery cannot fit the molds cast by previous artists, he forges a new style. Picasso and Beethoven are representatives of this mode. Inner drive and a sense of the insufficiency of the old styles cause the creation of a new style.

–› With some other artists, the interaction with authentic experience causes no feeling of the inadequacy of the existing styles. The connection with something real is still there, but accepted style merely becomes the mother tongue to discuss or develop the connections. Brahms, Andrew Wyeth and Rachmaninoff are possible examples.

The next two modes differ from the first in that the prime aim of the artist is not to express some genuine engagement with the world, but rather to manipulate style.

–› One is an imitation of the first mode, wherein the style is foremost and the artist attempts to create novelty rather than express something larger. Many students, too young to have anything real to say, are guilty of this mode.

–› The last is an imitation of the second, in that the conventional style is used with limited substance. Montovani, Cowboy artists or the truckloads of ”starving artist” oil paintings are prime examples. Neither message nor style is genuine, but only imitates the ”look” of art.

Like all those people who think they can paint like Jackson Pollock.

Style is seductive

Style is a demon that seduces us. Audiences often choose by style and not by intrinsic worth: Jazz listeners listen to Kenny G pop jazz before listening to Mozart; Classical fans will listen to Zelenka or Ditters von Dittersdorf before listening to Louis Armstrong’s Struttin’ With Some Barbecue.

If we consider the actual function of art, the problems become clear. Art organizes, on a primary level, the undifferentiated chaos we find around ourselves. If the world does not seem chaotic to you now, thank the artists who have gone before you and struggled with the problems of perception.

To an artist, who is a person not entirely enculturated, the things we take for granted — the things that seem self-evident — are not to be trusted. Is perspective a realistic portrayal of how we see? That is suspect. Is nuclear war an entirely bad thing? Maybe, on a deeper level, it would be good for an overpopulated planet drowning in its own sewage. Maybe. Is the world of dreams all in the mind? Or is it as valid a reality as the one with digital watches and brothers-in-law? Maybe more valid. What are the true relationships between men and women? Why do otherwise reasonable people commit horrors and atrocities? Maybe it is a normal function of being a human. Maybe.

The artist won’t necessarily answer these questions, but he will consider them, or questions like them, and will engage with his explorations and exit the labyrinth with a canvas gripped tightly in his mitts, and with a wild look in his eye.

Style is a means of avoiding these tough issues, substituting a disengaged, shallow cleverness.

To make new art, the artist should not attempt to find novel juxtapositions, but should go back to that primary undifferentiated chaos and attempt to find an order directly from it. Too much mediocre art comes from people trying to be new rather than trying to be real.