In the Eye of the Beholder: the Authenticity of Place
Editor's Column from LCV Winter 2008-09

At its best, art is one of the highest and most complex forms of human expression, a soaring manifestation of spirit and intellect. One of art’s purest forms, music, appeals directly to a single sense, and in so doing also stimulates links to other human intellectual endeavors such as higher mathematics, astronomy and physics, and even yields metaphors such as the harmony of the spheres.

One of art’s myriad dimensions is to instill beauty in our lives; for example, to invest human-made space or architecture with grace and inspiration such as that achieved in the resounding vaults of great cathedrals, or the harmonious spans of bridges, or even in the classic symmetries of center-hall cottages or even more vernacular buildings. Art’s intrinsic connection to grace and structure has led fine architecture - at least in earlier eras less wedded to demonstrating how fragmented and brutal reality can be - to be described as “frozen music.”

The visual arts, too, enrich our lives, whether in the humble cast of a turned vase or cup, a wooden spindle or woven cloth, or in its more elaborated forms, in paintings and sculpture that help redefine and reshape how we see. Through art we understand that objects are really forms, forms are really masses of color and color really light, and that perspective and especially symbol can be weighted or manipulated. As such, art can define and reinforce, or in our more challenging modern, post-Einsteinian and Heidelbergian sense of a less harmonious and consistent universe, challenge and even assault our sense of order and the harmony of creation.

Clarion Caveat
Our present post-Katrina moment in Louisiana, and especially in New Orleans, offers an opportunity to revisit anew how we want art to be manifested in our lives. We are poised to consider the architecture of a rebuilt city and how we want to define the place we inhabit, of what kind of music ought to evolve as our aesthetic and even our ethnic identity evolves, even the visual dimension and media by which we express ourselves. A city so historically rooted as New Orleans has only harmed itself in a quest for modernity. Just look at the anonymous commercial structures of the Central Business District and the plethora of California bungalows and suburban split levels of Lakeview or the East. Succumbing to a nationalizing tendency towards postmodernism is not likely to serve us any better, rather, it only submerges us further in anonymity. A postmodernist sensibility embraces the notion of meaning as being elusive, structure being mutable, narcissistic expression as substituting for epic and common values; contemporary art too often mistakes challenging complacency with thinking it has a better alternative to offer. New Orleans’ historicity is already a better alternative as even the so-called New Urbanists are discovering.

We are not the first to encounter these contradictions and struggle with their implications. One of the great masters of many arts, Pablo Picasso, late in his career, encapsulated many of the same conflicts: “In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit being sincere.”

So, as Picasso poses the question, do we, too, succumb to being a public entertainer, to merely pandering to the moment, to meeting the contemporary appetite for imbecility, vanity and cupidity and without knowing ourselves, without asserting our own authentic true identity as it has evolved here unique within the United States? Am I alone in being tired of being sneered at for not wanting New Orleans to look like Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York, let alone Atlanta or Charlotte? What we need is a manifesto of New Orleans’ own cultural identity, not frozen in time and antiquarian, but dynamically linked to our own past and rich with our own and not some other city’s traditions or the current aesthetic of schools of architecture.

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief