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Art and Artifice
July 2024 Issue [Readings] Art and Artifice Download PDF Adjust Share by Donna Tartt, From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F.
This hoarse cry from the Belle Époque is as bracing as it ever was, especially here in our own burned-out landscape where Art as Whistler defined it—Art with a capital A—is all too often viewed as an antiquated construction ensconced behind velvet ropes, not very relevant except as a standing resource to be boiled down to blunt cultural agendas, picked apart by theory, aped by predictive formulas, pillaged and parodied for commercials and computer software, if not ignored altogether in the glitz of technological stimulus. Art is a vehicle for putting us in touch with the Real—Real with a capital R—a concept that for Martel has nothing to do with realism as a critical stance or literary device, with scientific or materialistic understandings of realism, or even with that commonly understood consensus reality that Groucho Marx was talking about when he said, “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” Instead, the Real that art helps us come into contact with is something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter Benjamin called the “true surrealist face of existence.” This is not the surrealism of predictive AI—endlessly recircling within its own sidewindings and elisions—but the bizarre wide-open Real out on the edges of experience, which has a good deal less to do with the measurable, quantifiable, empirical world than with the unseen possible: whether hidden aspects of the future simmering invisibly in the present, or mysteries so giant and unpredictable that science can’t begin to approach them. But in helping us think with the world, instead of about it, art—which has no agenda other than being itself—always reminds us that all human-created systems are contingent, for if we wade around inside a great work of art, all sorts of rifts appear, ambiguous open spaces free of opinion and preconceptions, where light breaks through unpredictably, revealing trapdoors and hidden connections—and even possible escapes.
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