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Why Difficult Art Is Important

BY: RACHEL HYMAN

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and life and what art can do and should do and all I have to talk about these things is a single introductory art history class (20th Century Art) under my belt and my own observations [and these two things are what are bringing up these thoughts, in large part] which may lead to something very dilettantish or amateurish but this is the only way I know how to talk about these things, is on my blog plus through a quasi-academic lens, and at least I can use SAT-level vocabulary to talk about how I can’t talk about things…right? So. Much of my tangled thinking has been sparked by two texts we read in my art history class. One of them I attempted to give a quick sketch of in my last post (Modern Art, Avant-Garde, and Literature): Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” [PDF] which talks about how art should require of spectators a prolonged concentration. In Shklovsky’s view, art should defamiliarize us to what’s around us and make us look at it anew, thereby revitalizing our consciousness and apprehension of the world around us—not just of art. The content of the art is almost beside the point, for Shklovsky—the act of perception is an aesthetic end in itself. AD Jameson over at HTMLGIANT has been riding the Shklovsky train for awhile and productively applies his theories to contemporary art and literature in particular; he can give a more nuanced and better summary of Shklovsky than I can.

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