From Jean Anouilh's play, Becket
KING HENRY II: You love work, don't you? If you love anything.
THOMAS BECKET: I love doing what I can do and doing it well.
HENRY: You'd be as efficient against me as you are for me, wouldn't you?
BECKET: If fate had arranged it that way.
HENRY: So what in most people is morality, in you it's just an exercise in--what's the word?
BECKET: Aesthetics.
HENRY: Yes, always aesthetics.
When first I heard that exchange--on a New York stage with Laurence Olivier as Becket and Anthony Quinn as Henry--I felt a shock of recognition. I realized that I am rather less concerned with right and wrong than I am with beauty versus ugliness, order versus chaos, harmony versus meaningless noise. Morality requires judgements about the actions of oneself and others that I don't feel qualified to make. There are too many unknowns and, possibly, unknowables, even in contemplation of one's own motives and decision-making. Is the id ever fully discoverable?
I'm afraid I'd make a very bad fundamentalist.
But having been immersed in art of one sort or another since the dawn of my consciousness--thank you, parents and teachers--I feel much surer about aesthetic judgements. This does not mean that art is easy.Kitsch, cheap, facile pseudo-art--like the previously-cited paintings of enormous-eyed children and Rod McKuen's versification--is easy to take and probably to make, but it soon becomes stunningly boring. It's like "wallpaper music." It doesn't demand any work of its audience.
Genuine art, though, requires more attention and continues to yield new facets every time it is encountered. I probably have seen over 25 presentations of Hamlet.Every time a new production comes my way, my first reaction is, "Enough is enough!" But always the play lures me back, and each viewing gives me something new to appreciate:Hamlet, walking slowly in circles, beating a tambourine left behind by one of the Players,as he delivers the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy; Gertrude's tone of voice correcting Claudius about their visitors' identities as she says,"Thank you Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz. At this juncture, small stuff maybe but delightful discoveries nonetheless, and, for me, worth the price of admission.
Hamlet brings me to the point that, while an art work must manifest order, its own coherence, pattern consistent with its premise, it need not be pretty. Tragedy ain't pretty. And folks don't leave the concert hall humming snatches of twelve-tone or atonal Berg and Schoenberg compositions. Abstract expressionist paintings are arresting, but probably aren't going to do much to complement the sofa upholstery.
For a while I had a "day job" selling Macy's reupholstering service. I always preferred the clients who strove to make the furniture go with their art rather than vice-versa. Taking us far beyond mere decoration,art that asks prolonged and profound involvement with and in itself can, more surely than the catechism, methinks, guide us to an understanding that, finally, salvation means making of our own lives--even if they be tragic--something beautiful. Ultimately, Keats is right: "'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
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