Laissez-Faire Aesthetics

Posted on Jan 30, 2013

Eakins Press

(Page 5)

What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with—in the museums, the galleries, the art schools, and the art magazines—is a weakening of conviction, an unwillingness to ever take a stand, a refusal to champion, or even surrender to, any first principle. More than anything else, what laissez-faire aesthetics threatens, with its insistence that anything goes, is the disciplined imagination without which an artist is rudderless, a wanderer in the wilderness. Some will say that what has finally been eclipsed is the modernist adventure, with its celebration of a well-defined set of artistic principles and values: purity, progress, formalism, abstraction. This is not necessarily to be regretted. The way art is understood will of necessity change over time. But what is now in doubt is much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the freestanding power of artistic experience, which we discover in works of every time and place, from the Tanagra figurines and the Romanesque manuscripts to the paintings of Rembrandt, Poussin, Corot, and Mondrian. There is nothing laissez-faire about any of these masterworks. When we contemplate them in all of their particularity—in the insistent singularity of their poetry and in the almost delusional extremism of their endlessly various visions—we see that they are anything but easygoing, that they are, each in its own way, relentlessly, triumphantly intolerant. An artist’s vision is always a solitary kingdom.

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