1、How Do You Know Its Good?by Marya MannesDo you love art? Can you tell which art pieces are good and which are not? Are there any standards for judging arts? Read the following article and see how Marya Mannes answers such questions.Suppose there were no critics to tell us how to react to a picture,
2、a play, or a new composition of music. Suppose we wandered innocent as the dawn into an art exhibition of unsigned paintings. By what standards, by what values would we decide whether they were good or bad, talented or untalented, successes or failures? How can we ever know that what we think is rig
3、ht?For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion in criticism or appreciation of the arts has been to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to make the words “good“ or “bad“ irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, as a set of standards, first acquired
4、 through experience and knowledge and later imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a popular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judgment and the public of the necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by
5、 calling them open-minded, it comforts the confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of equality which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect, “Who are you to tell us what is good or bad?“ This is the same cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass media who in
6、sist that it is the public, not they, who decides what it wants to hear and see, and that for a critic to say that this program is bad and this program is good is purely a reflection of personal taste. Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy more succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly i
7、ntelligent president of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications Commission, this phrase escaped him under questioning:“ One mans mediocrity is another mans good program.“There is no better way of saying “No values are absolute.“ There is another important aspect to this philos
8、ophy of laissez faire: It is the fear, in all observers of all forms of art, of guessing wrong. This fear is well come by, for who has not heard of the contemporary outcries against artists who later were called great? Every age has its arbiters who do not grow with their times, who cannot tell evol
9、ution from revolution or the difference between frivolous faddism, amateurish experimentation, and profound and necessary change. Who wants to be caught flagrante delicto with an error of judgment as serious as this ? It is far safer, and certainly easier, to look at a picture or a play or a poem an
10、d to say “ This is hard to understand, but it may be good,“ or simply to welcome it as a new form. The word “new“in our country especially has magical connotations. What is new must be good; what is old is probably bad. And if a critic can describe the new in language that nobody can understand, hes
11、 safer still. If he has mastered the art of saying nothing with exquisite complexity, nobody can quote him later as saying anything.But all these, I maintain, are forms of abdication from the responsibility of judgment. In creating, the artist commits himself; in appreciating, you have a commitment
12、of your own. For after all, it is the audience which makes the arts. A climate of appreciation is essential to its flowering, and the higher the expectations of the public, the better the performance of the artist. Conversely, only a public ill-served by its critics could have accepted as art and as
13、 literature so much in these last years that has been neither. If anything goes, everything goes; and at the bottom of the junkpile lie the discarded standards too.But what are these standards? How do you get them? How do you know theyre the right ones? How can you make a clear pattern out of so man
14、y intangibles, including that greatest one, the very private I?Well for one thing, its fairly obvious that the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped youll be to practice that art of association which is at the basis of all understanding and judgment. The more you live and the more you lo
15、ok, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as night and day underlying everything. I would call this pattern and this rhythm an order. Not order an order. Within it exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos the wild
16、cells of destruction sickness. It is in the end up to you to distinguish between the diversity that is health and the chaos that is sickness, and you cant do this without a process of association that can link a bar of Mozart with the corner of a Vermeer painting, or a Stravinsky score with a Picass
17、o abstraction; or that can relate an aggressive act with a Franz Kline painting and a fit of coughing with a John Cage composition.There is no accident in the fact that certain expressions of art live for all time and that others die with the moment, and although you may not always define the reason
18、s, you can ask the questions. What does an artist say that is timeless; how does he say it? How much is fashion, how much is merely reflection? Why is Sir Walter Scott so hard to read now, and Jane Austen not? Why is baroque right for one age and too effulgent for another?Can a standard of craftsman
19、ship apply to art of all ages, or does each have its own, and different, definitions? You may have been aware, inadvertently, that craftsmanship has become a dirty word these years because, again, it implies standards something done well or done badly. The result of this convenient avoidance is a pl
20、entitude of actors who cant project their voices, singers who cant phrase their songs, poets who cant communicate emotion, and writers who have no vocabulary not to speak of painters who cant draw. The dogma now is that craftsmanship gets in the way of expression. You can do better if you dont know
21、how you do it, let alone what youre doing.I think it is time you helped reverse this trend by trying to rediscover craft: the command of the chosen instrument, whether it is a brush, a word, or a voice. When you begin to detect the difference between freedom and sloppiness, between serious experimen
22、tation and egotherapy, between skill and slickness, between strength and violence, you are on your way to separating the sheep from the goats, a form of segregation denied us for quite a while. All you need to restore it is a small bundle of standards and a Geiger counter that detects fraud, and we
23、might begin our tour of the arts in an area where both are urgently needed: contemporary painting.I dont know whats worse: to have to look at acres of bad art to find the little good, or to read what the critics say about it all. In no other field of expression has so much double-talk flourished, so
24、 much confusion prevailed, and so much nonsense been circulated: further evidence of the close interdependence between the arts and the critical climate they inhabit. It will be my pleasure to share with you some of this double-talk so typical of our times.Item one: preface for a catalogue of an abs
25、tract painter:“Time-bound meditation experiencing a life; sincere with plastic piety at the threshold of hallowed arcana; a striving for pure ideation giving shape to inner drive; formalized patterns where neural balances reach a fiction.“ End of quote. Know what this artist paints like now?Item two
26、: a review in the Art News:“.a weird and disparate assortment of material, but the monstrosity which bloomed into his most recent cancer of aggregations is present in some form everywhere.“ Then, later. “A gluttony of things and processes terminated by a glorious constipation.“Item three: same magaz
27、ine, review of an artist who welds automobile fragments into abstract shapes:Each fragment.is made an extreme of human exasperation, torn at and fought all the way, and has its rightness of form as if by accident. Any technique that requires order or discipline would just be the human ego. No, these
28、 must be egoless, uncontrolled, undesigned and different enough to give you a bangfifty miles an hour around a telephone pole.“Any technique that requires order of discipline would just be the human ego.“ What does he mean “just be?“ What are they really talking about? Is this journalism? Is it crit
29、icism? Or is it that other convenient abdication from standards of performance and judgment practiced by so may artists and critics that they, like certain writers who deal only in sickness and depravity, “reflect the chaos about them“? Again, whose chaos? Whose depravity?I had always thought that t
30、he prime function of art was to create order out of chaosagain, not the order of neatness or rigidity or convention or artifice, but the order of clarity by which one will and one vision could draw the essential truth out of apparent confusion. I still do. It is not enough to use parts of a car to c
31、onvey the brutality of the machine. This is as slavishly representative, and just as easy, as arranging dried flowers under glass to convey nature.Speaking of which, i.e., the use of real materials (burlap, old gloves, bottletops) in lieu of pigment, this is what one critic had to say about an exhib
32、ition of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art last year:Spotted throughout the show are indisputable works of art, accounting for a quarter or even a half of the total display. But the remainder are works of non-art, anti-art, and art substitutes that are the aesthetic counterparts of the social d
33、eficiencies that land people in the clink on charges of vagrancy. These aesthetic bankrupts .have no legitimate ideological roof over their heads and not the price of a square intellectual meal, much less a spiritual sandwich, in their pockets.I quote these words of John Canaday of The New York Time
34、s as an example of the kind of criticism which puts responsibility to an intelligent public above popularity with an intellectual coterie. Canaday has the courage to say what he thinks and the capacity to say it clearly: two qualities notably absent from his profession.Next to art, I would say that
35、appreciation and evaluation in the field of music is the most difficult. For it is rarely possible to judge a new composition at one hearing only. What seems confusing or fragmented at first might well become clear and organic a third time. Or it might not. The only salvation here for the listener i
36、s, again, an instinct born of experience and association which allows him to separate intent from accident, design from experimentation, and pretense from conviction. Much of contemporary music is, like its sister art, merely a reflection of the composers own fragmentation: an absorption in self and
37、 symbols at the expense of communication with others. The artist, in short, says to the public: If you dont understand this, its because youre dumb. I maintain that you are not. You may have to go part way or even halfway to meet the artist, but if you must go the whole way, its his fault, not yours
38、. Hold fast to that. And remember it too when you read new poetry, that estranged sister of music.When you come to theater, in this extremely hasty tour of the arts, you can approach it on two different levels. You can bring to it anticipation and innocence, giving yourself up, as it were, to the li
39、fe on the stage and reacting to it emotionally, if the play is good, or listlessly, if the play is boring; a part of the audience organism that expresses its favor by silence or laughter and its disfavor by coughing and rustling. Or you can bring to it certain critical faculties that may heighten, r
40、ather than diminish, your enjoyment.You can ask yourselves whether the actors are truly in their parts or merely projecting themselves; whether the scenery helps or hurts the mood; whether the playwright is honest with himself, his characters, and you. Somewhere along the line you can learn to disti
41、nguish between the true creative act and the false arbitrary gesture; between fresh observation and stale clich; between the avant-garde play that is pretentious drive and the avant-garde play that finds new ways to say old truths.Purpose and craftsmanship end and means these are the keys to your ju
42、dgment in all the arts. What is this painter trying to say when he slashes a broad band of black across a white canvas and lets the edges dribble down? Is it a statement of violence? Is it a self-portrait? If it is one of these, has he made you believe it? Or is this a gesture of the ego or a form o
43、f therapy? If it shocks you, what does it shock you into?And what of this tight little painting of bright flowers in a vase? Is the painter saying anything new about flowers? Is it different from a million other canvases of flowers? Has it any life, any meaning, beyond its statement? Is there any pl
44、easure in its forms or texture? The question is not whether a thing is abstract or representational, whether it is “modern“ or conventional. The question, inexorably, is whether it is good. And this is a decision which only you, on the basis of instinct, experience, and association, can make for you
45、rself. It takes independence and courage. It involves, moreover, the risk of wrong decision and the humility, after the passage of time, of recognizing it as such. As we grow and change and learn, our attitudes can change too, and what we once thought obscure or “difficult“ can later emerge as coher
46、ent and illuminating. Entrenched prejudices, obdurate opinions are as sterile as no opinions at all.Yet standards there are, timeless as the universe itself. And when you have committed yourself to them, you have acquired a passport to that elusive but immutable realm of truth. Keep it with you in t
47、he forests of bewilderment. And never be afraid to speak up.(2395 words) TOP你怎么知道艺术品的优劣?玛丽亚曼尼丝 你喜欢艺术吗？你能说出哪些艺术品好哪些不好？是否存在评价艺术的标准？读一读下面这篇文章，看看玛丽亚曼尼丝如何回答这样的问题。设想没有评论家告诉我们，对一幅画，一个剧本或一段新乐曲怎样反应。设想我们无意间步入一个未署名油画的画展。我们依据什么标准，依据什么价值来评判它们是优是劣，是天才的还是没有天才的，是成功还是失败?我们又怎能知道自己的想法是正确的?近 15 或 20 年来，在艺术批评与欣赏上，流行否认任何
48、合理标准的存在，认为“好”与“坏”是无关紧要、无足轻重、无可适用的字眼。我们被告知，根本不存在先通过知识与经验获得，然后加在讨论的对象上的一套标准。这种方法一直受到欢迎，因为它解除了评论家评判的责任，公众也无须知识。它迎合那些不愿受规则约束的人，把头脑空空者奉承为思路开阔，并使不知所措的人得到安慰。在民主平等之旗的掩护下当然不是我们祖先所说的那种平等它实际是在说：“你是谁，要来告诉我们什么是好，什么是坏?”这与大众传媒制作者的一贯伎俩如出一辙。他们坚持认为，由公众而不是由他们决定听什么和看什么，而评论家说这个节目好而这个节目不好，这纯粹是个人趣味的反映。关于这一点，哥伦比亚广播电视公司聪明绝顶
49、的总裁弗兰克斯丹坦博士表达得极为简明透彻。最近在联邦通讯委员会的一次听证会上，他在接受询问时脱口而出：“一人眼里的平庸之作，却是另一人的佳作。”最妙不过的说法是：“没有一个标准是绝对的”。造成这种放任观念的另一重要因素是：畏惧感所有艺术形式的观察者们都有唯恐猜错的担心。这种担心极易遇到，谁没有听说当初饱受世人指摘的艺术家后来被称为大师？每个时期都有一些评判者，他们不和时代一起前进，无法区分进化和革命，风行一时的时尚、业余的实验与深刻的必然的变化之间的区别。谁愿意作出这样严重的判断错误而贻笑大方?安全得多，当然也容易得多的做法是：看着一幅画，一个剧本或一首诗，说道：“它很难懂，但也许很好”；或者干脆把它当作新形式加以欢迎。“新的”这个词尤其在我们这个国度具有魔力般的涵义。凡是新的都是好的；而旧的则极可能是不好的。如果评论家能用无人理解的语言描述新事物，那么他就更为安全。倘若他掌握了说话的艺术，用精巧复杂的言辞，却什么也没说，日后就无人能够说他曾经说过什么。但是我认为，所有这一切实质上都是对评判责任的背弃。艺术家在创作中表现自己，而你则在欣赏中有自己的承诺。毕竟还是观众成就了艺术。欣赏的气氛对于艺术的繁荣不可或缺。公众的期望愈高，艺术家的表现就愈好
