I'll Take a Masterpiece...and Make it Snappy

I grew up in a family of DIYers. From building an extension on the house (or building the entire house from scratch) to renovating the kitchen or bathroom to taking apart the car's engine to diagnose a problem, the members of my extended family (both men and women) dove right in, manuals in hand, and got it done. That same attitude applied to recreation and arts, as well. My father would often draw, my mother mastered an endless number of crafts, we kids picked up the guitar or taught ourselves piano. We were quite far from the leisure-class family you imagine in some Victorian novel (we did these things out of economic necessity mostly), but we cared enough about such things to make the sacrifices to actually buy a piano or guitar or drawing essentials.

Then things began to change. I recall the first time I heard my father took his car into a mechanic to have it worked on. I was quite literally shocked. Why not fix it yourself, I thought? I had spent untold hours assisting him in my youth as he lay under the engine, mildly cursing, covered in grease, impatiently requesting some tool from his massive toolbox (ah, those were the days). All through my teens and college years, I never once took my jalopies into a shop. If I couldn't fix it myself, there was always Dad.

So what happened? Well, mostly cars became much more complicated. Advanced electrical systems, and then computerized this or that, made it impossible to do-it-yourself anymore. When some ticking noise or clanking sound emerged, it became foolhardly to take it apart himself, so my father had to take it in to a specialist.

This all came back to me while reading Michael Kimmelman's review of an exhibition titled “Teaching America to Draw” at the Grolier Club:

[A] show called “Teaching America to Draw” provides a refresher course in pencil-pushing and other sorts of sketching as a collective pastime. It’s about that golden era, from the time of the founding fathers nearly to Cooke’s day, when educated Americans drew as a matter of course.

Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.

From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations. Not many of these manuals are still intact because they were so heavily used, worn down like church relics, which supplicants rubbed smooth from caressing.

Kimmelman then offers an insightful analysis of what it means that we no longer draw, as a pasttime, in our nation:

Something happened between then and now, and it wasn’t just the invention of gadgets that eliminated the need to draw.

There was also a philosophical change, away from drawing as a practical endeavor and toward art appreciation. From dexterity and discipline to feelings and self-esteem: the shift in values is implied by some of the later books in the show. Consciously or not, they parallel changes in modern art, which threw out the rule books of draftsmanship and proposed a new, free-thinking attitude.

[...] With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers.

[...]

[As] with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available...most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.

What Kimmelman laments is not a loss for American art, per se. In his review of the Greater New York exhibition he noted:

Drawing is the new painting. There's one much-promoted trend. Everybody draws so preposterously well now that it's almost boring.

But rather, he deplores the loss of a collective culture:

Rembrandt Peale published one of the drawing manuals in the Grolier Club show. Besides being an artist, Peale became Pennsylvania’s first high school art teacher in the 1830’s, hired by Alexander Dallas Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. People, Franklin pointed out, can often “express ideas more clearly with a lead pencil or a bit of chalk” than with words. “Drawing is a kind of universal language, understood by all nations,” he reminded Americans.

We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.

As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”

You can draw the analogy.

I see two intriguing ideas in all this. First is that perhaps the national resentment toward artists is similar to that toward athletes. Sure, the die-hard fans still worship selected heroes, but who would you say the entire nation admires (or even knows)? Not as many as we used to.

Second, is this notion of specialization in art, and what that leads to. I don't exactly resent the mechanic who knows how to fix the car, but he's certainly never gonna replace my Dad. Getting my car fixed had been a special time for bonding and joking (inbetween dodging the hurled crescent wrenches). But it became just another item on the ever-expanding "to do" list, another in a series of business transactions.

Perhaps there's not so much a resentment toward artists today, as there is an expectation that they should provide a service, accept payment, and not expect so much devotion in return. Moreover, just as we select our service providers according to who caters best to our existing needs, perhaps this leads us, as a nation, to expect artists to cater to our existing tastes. "Don't challenge me, you fool, this is just another in my ever-expanding list of commercial transactions."