I
At the outset it will be desirable to state that when I speak of
the future of art I do not mean the “art of the future”. Art can
be considered from either an inside or an outside point of view;
that is to say, we can deal either with its nature, problems, and
performances--art itself, or with the amount and quality of the
interest taken in art by men and women--the “art-life” of the
community. The latter subject is that dealt with here.
The “art-life” of the civilized world is at present in a transition
period, which is fraught with distinct, though maybe unrealized,
dangers. Its problems are only indirectly related to the present and
the future state of art-production: whether we foresee development or
retrogression in modern tendencies in literature, painting, music, and
so on, these dangers will need to be faced, or they will, at least,
minimize the value of the creative work of to-morrow. For we are
concerned not with the production of art but with the enjoyment and
appreciation of art. As the latter is the more important, since without
it production would be sterile, it is an essential preliminary that
the conditions necessary for the healthy growth of a more widespread,
deeper-rooted love of the beautiful should exist. We are now viewing
the situation as sociologists, as men, rather than as artists. The
artist can be satisfied when he attains a certain level of performance:
at least he can work with content and happiness while he is seeking to
reach a may-be unattainable perfection. He is, naturally and rightly,
concerned with absolute values; and the critic and the individual
lover can maintain the same attitude. If a painting or a poem reaches
perfection, he asks no more. But the sociologist must take a different
attitude. To the artist and the critic the work is the end; to the
sociologist it is the beginning. It is not enough for him to know that
the painting is great, since to him it is only the means by which men
attain artistic enjoyment; it has no significance until it has acted
upon the minds of men. That being so he must ask other questions about
it--firstly, _How many_ men can see it? How many are able to appreciate
its value intelligently, gaining the full aesthetic, spiritual, or
intellectual stimulus from it?--in short, What is the aggregate of its
human significance?
It does not follow, of course, that we can relate the quality of a
work of art to the “quantity” of its appeal; it would, in fact, be
absurd to suppose that it is necessarily better that 100,000 should
know and appreciate the second-rate than that 100 should love the
finest--neither, with certain reservations, need this necessarily be
untrue. The point I would urge at present is simply that the value
of art to humanity does depend very largely upon the desire and
opportunity of men to take advantage of it. The poet whose works are
ignored saving by the very few may be as impotent as a mute inglorious
Milton.
Therefore there are two factors--production and reproduction, or, shall
we say, creation and distribution. A musician composes a symphony,
a dramatist writes a play, a novelist a story--that is the first
factor. If no one ever performed the symphony, produced the play, or
published the novel, of what importance would this creation prove to
the world?--Practically none. The art-product must be distributed
before it can accomplish any part of its essential purpose. It
necessarily follows, moreover, that the _wider_ the distribution, the
more adequately will it function. This is all very obvious, though
often forgotten, and will disclose the next step in the argument,
which is that, were it not for certain tendencies, increased means of
reproduction and distribution would lead to a better developed, more
valuable, and more active artistic life. That being so, the present,
which is a period when mankind is enjoying the benefit of recent and
important reproductive inventions, should be imbued with hopeful
tendencies--Is it?
Yes and no. Let us take stock of our position. Reproduction is
almost entirely a mechanical matter, depending upon non-artistic,
purely material factors. Production is the business of the creative
artists; reproduction that of the scientists. The latter have given
us within recent years inventions which have revolutionized artistic
conditions--the mechanical processes and innumerable secondary
inventions such as stereotyping, and mechanical composition and
binding, which have facilitated the reproduction of printed matter,
the three-colour and other photo-mechanical methods of reproducing
pictorial matter, the gramophone, the piano-player, and wireless to aid
the distribution of music, and so on, throughout the range of pure and
applied art.
Until recent years the percentage of the population who were in direct
contact with the fine arts had remained much the same in civilized
countries from probably the earliest times. Art had almost invariably
depended upon direct patronage of some kind or other, religious or
secular, if not entirely at least to an important degree. I would
not denounce this; one cannot, when one remembers that the system
fostered art which has not been equalled under the new régime. But
direct patronage by the few is rapidly declining and is to-day almost
negligible. It has been replaced, simply as a result of the mechanical
factor, by a more democratic economic basis. Some arts are still to
some extent produced for the few, but others entirely for the many. The
important fact is that wherever reproduction is easiest that art is the
most democratic--books and music, for example; wherever least possible
its range is narrower and its support less democratic, e.g., sculpture,
household decoration, etc.
* * * * *
The character of our artistic experience has therefore to a very large
extent been decided by purely non-artistic factors. That which _can_
be reproduced has been reproduced, and opportunity has developed
taste. This is a generalization, though not a fallacious one. We
may assume that the artistic needs of men have been led into their
different channels partly as a result of personal inclination, but
very largely through the influence of opportunity. If a number of men
were cast upon a desert island with only books to minister to their
aesthetic needs, the majority would take what was to hand and be quite
content. I am not saying that this is a good tendency but that it is
a true hypothesis, applicable to modern life, and a contention which
is tenable on historical grounds. The favourite pursuits of early
civilizations were not those of to-day, and it is very unlikely that
any one factor has done so much to change taste as the development of
means of reproduction. The pursuit of once-popular arts need not die
out; it need not even decline, since the numbers of those interested in
all the arts is increasing; but the proportionate or relative interest
alters. This being so, can we ignore the influence of the mechanical
factor? It is operating in a striking manner to-day when _relatively_
music is being appreciated by more and literature by fewer people, when
the theatre is attracting, relatively again, fewer every day than the
cinema, when the graphic arts are becoming more significant than the
plastic arts.
To ignore the mechanical factor is to put effect before cause.
Certainly the character of taste has influenced the direction of
invention to some extent, since the scientist would naturally turn
first to fields where his work would be most effective. This aspect
should not, however, be magnified. Sooner or later science has given
all it was capable of giving to _every_ form of art, regardless of its
importance or popularity.
And so we realize that the _character_ of public taste--that is to say,
the proportionate amount of interest in the various arts--has been
dictated by the mechanical factor. We can go still further and assert
that its _quality_ has been largely determined by this same influence.