Henry Davis writes:

>For some months I've been exploring the music of Richard Wagner, in this ...
>avoidance is therefore easier, perhaps even essential.
>
>So much for my recent Wagner journey.  Would enjoy your response.

None really, everyone has their baggage, and sometimes people recognise in
an artist a fellow traveller and penitent, and sometimes they don't.  There
are many roads, and many meccas, and it is foolish to hope that everyone
you meet on every road is on the way to the same salvation...

Usually comments like yours would elicit a stronger response from me,
because it is clear you don't understand the works, don't want to
understand the works, and therefore have come to a sound misunderstanding.
I'd have argued against these misunderstandings, heaped one on top of the
other, but again, anyone who can't see them as misunderstandings doesn't
really care to know any better.

- - -

There are really two kinds of audience members, two kinds of experiencing
art.

One kind of person exists through the stream of art - whether it is
reading, painting or music.  They experience themselves only in and as
a reader or listener.  Such people give themselves wholly over to teh
art they take in, and have the most urgent desire to speak about that
experience.  This because their self existed while and through reading or
listening, and hence the more intently they read or listened, the more they
experienced that word called "I".  TO talk about that experience is to talk
about themselves.  To attack an artwork they love is to attack their sense
of self, and is replied to much in the kind of a personal insult.  To love
an artwork they abhor is to offend their personal sense of aesthetic.  The
purpose of art is the self, and the expression of self.

For them, art is self.

Another kind of person lives their artworks.  The world of art is not their
sense of self - but their life or experience.  To such people the substance
of their memory, the order of the world itself, is the compound of their
experience of art.  In many cases they demand that art be ordered in a way
that reflect their sense of how the world is ordered, in many cases they
demand depiction, of one kind or another, be at the center of art.  Art
which does not make sense to them, is madness, it is like an experience
which breaks the laws of physics or confounds all expectation.  There is
something wrong with the world.

For them, art is life.

Each kind of audience member demands different things from the art world,
each has a different role in the realm of art, and each seems to believe
that the other does not exist.

The first kind of art audience is immersed in the questions of style.
They will respond to empty style, because the act of experiencing the
style is their act of being.  They are the avid readers of John Updike,
the people who see Henry James purely as a modern.  They are also the
majority of those who write about art, its directions, its meanings, they
are the majority of the critics.  Not merely now, but at any moment in
time.  This because they can earn a living being themselves, and they have
are the majority of avid readers about art or literature.  Commentary on
literature being the same thing as literature - a way to the self.

For them, mediocre art which they can feel themselves in is far more
important that great art, and they confuse the two constantly.

The second kind of art audience are marinated in the sense of the world of
art existing for them.  They are the attendees, they are the people who are
often working very hard behind the scenes of art.  They fall in love with
works which adhere to their sense of life, and their personal narratives.

For them, bad art which plays out their emotional dramas is as beloved as
great art.  And they often do not care to notice the difference.

The first group are the present of art, they are interested in "art of our
times" because this really means "us".  The second group is always the
future of art, this because they are not looking for a sense of self, but
wish to explore, and the past, as has been pointed out, is a foreign land.

- - -

Wagner's music is primarily for audiences of the second type, and it has
every trait that most audience members of the first typoe abhor - it does
not make them more aware of themselves, but instead of their experience of
living, and it makes the very nerves and tissues of their body into a fifth
column for its messages.  Beyond this, there is rather little to say.

Stirling S Newberry
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