Scale, purpose, context, and economics

Random artistic/critical concept time, about assessing a piece of art or design, or anything else in life. 

Assessing meaning “liking things or not.” Everything, all around us, every day, we’re surrounded by little things we like-or-not. It’s all about immediate experience, not about forming opinions for its own sake. I’m not a connoisseur, or a critic, or an opinion guy. 

Scale is an important idea. Scale in art refers to something’s size relative to something else— to the space it inhabits, and the things surrounding it, and to the person viewing it. 

Size is different than scale. This Fiat Cinquecento looks tiny parked on the side of the road in Kansas, but it seems positively enormous sitting in my bedroom. St. Peter’s in Rome is larger than the Duomo in Florence, but the Duomo is more impressive due to its scale vs. the surrounding architecture, it’s the Fiat in your bedroom. It’s a relative thing. How big is it relative to its context.

You can also think about how good something is relative to its purpose, context, function, and economics. How much do I like a thing for what it’s for, for what it cost me, and for how it came to me. 

Take the song Muskrat Love— a stupid pop hit in the 70s, by Captain & Tennille, that recently came on in a theater before the movie when I went to see Jaws. It was enjoyable to hear it in that context. I could appreciate the vibe and craftsmanship, even though it’s basically aesthetically repellent to me as music. 

Here, enjoy:

So music we enjoy waiting to watch something awesome, we might not listen to in the car, or at home. Or it might be good in a concert setting, or bad when not in a concert setting. But my baseline for whether something is ultimately good for me, is that I would enjoy listening to at home, on a recording. 
 

What is the artist trying to do, and how well has he achieved it? 
– William S. Burroughs


That’s a good guideline not harshly judging things you don’t personally dig; but my taste now is plenty expansive and accepting, I don’t need further education in that. I mostly don’t care what the creator’s goal was, I’m concerned with a thing’s usefulness and meaning to me

Increasingly, I need the economics have to make sense. What a particular experience of a thing costs, how the cost is scaled to its function, how well it satisfies its function for its cost. Usually I’m attracted to things where the cost is properly scaled for everyday use by normal people— whatever that means for the thing in question. 

For example: beer, that ordinary beverage. A people’s drink.

Desirable qualities for such a product are for it to be pleasurable to consume regularly in reasonable quantities without impairing you, and without bankrupting you. If any of those elements is off— it’s not pleasurable to drink, or drink regularly, or it would be impairing to do so in social quantities, or it’s too expensive— the economics are wrong, the beverage fails. 

People do get into having tasting sessions and comparing “notes”, but that is entirely missing the point of it. As Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master said, “Do not be too interested in Zen.” Order a beverage and drink the f*in’ thing, and talk to somebody. 

Or consider the coffee cup: you want it to hold a normal serving of coffee, and be pleasant to look at and hold onto. It is a coffee cup, so I’m not going to think too long about it, or dedicate too much of my life finding the one I find ultimately pleasing. I’m happy if I find a nice one with minimal effort, that is inexpensive. A perfect coffee cup that costs $400 might as well not exist, except as an affront to humanity. Scaled to a coffee cup’s purpose in your life, you’re more forgiving aesthetically than you might be if you were in a museum looking for an object you want to look at for 30 minutes. 

Visiting an art museum, you want something that is worth looking at for 30 minutes. A lot of things placed in museums become problematic because they were not intended for that purpose, they were intended to adorn a home or business. Many modern works are intended to be a very short viewing experience— large scale, but short. And many they’ll have an industrial finish, which is not very interesting to view up close. So you look at them with the feeling that you’re supposed to take a long time with it, and you get annoyed that the picture doesn’t support that.

In fact museums are a difficult context for art works. The need to be lived with, without the pressure of needing to be impressive to a lot of tired people with sore feet who are doggedly trying to be impressed. Or they should be making a public space look amazing as people pass through it doing other business.

Those works might be more meaningful seen as a reproduction in a book, someplace where you’re relaxed and have time to think about it. That’s a context where you can enjoy them, in a form that is economically sensical, and intimate to your own life— you can afford the book, and have it around to look at whenever you actually feel like it. Many works benefit from the distance as well— they’ll be better scaled in the reproduction, and you’re not distracted by the banal object itself.   

Famous masterpieces, works by famous artists in general, suffer from having a reputation out of all scale of a mere painting’s ability to dazzle and impress the kind of people who are drawn to swarm around them.

The amount of money involved in the arts economy is also a problem, people get upset with the price tag put on some very loose or minimal modern works. That is the fault of modern capitalism, not a reflection on the works themselves. A Jackson Pollock painting may sell for $60 million because of the nature of fame and the art market, the painting itself may not thrill you to the tune of 60 million. You have to look at it as the work of a working class artist guy with some personal problems, working by himself in a barn out in the country. Maybe he was a genius that day, maybe not.

In the 70s you could pay your $6 and see Bill Evans play in a club, and you could keep it in perspective if you thought he didn’t play great. Everything has to be personal, so long as the price tag isn’t excluding you from experiencing it in a normal way.

The whole need to “rate” things is messed up. That’s not you being smart saying what’s good, that’s you missing the point of everything. Something might be good for this moment and place, and of no interest beyond that. Or it can be something to organize your whole life around. Decide if you like it based on the scale of its place in your life.

Maybe it’s all obvious. It’s good to hear obvious things, so you just are clear on them and accept them and stop getting pulled around wondering about it.

Posted in art

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