Literary Salon: Can art really be great if no one else thinks so?
A discussion about the role an audience plays in making an artist great
I asked this question on Twitter last week and found the conversation completely enthralling. I’d love to know your thoughts.
Think of all the “great artists.” Then answer this question:
Can art really be great, if no one else thinks so?
If one person beyond the creator of the art/music/story considers it great, then it's great. If thousands of people consider the work great and discuss it often, then it's famous but not necessarily any greater. Of the millions of people who have gone to The Louvre, I wonder how many of them really consider the Mona Lisa their personal favorite?
Reading over the conversation thus far, I’m also reminded of G.M. Hopkins’ twin concepts of “instress” and “inscape.” Inscape is like the hidden architecture of an object, the stuff that makes the object just itself and nothing else — it exists entirely independently of the outside world. Instress, on the other hand, is described as a kind of “pressure,” the pressure of witnessing. For religiously-minded Hopkins, an object comes to its full completion in some way through its instress, and in some way we as humans are designed by God in order to witness (e.g. to appreciate a beautiful mountainscape, say). He was mostly a poet of the natural world, so I don’t know of any comment he had about the inscape/instress of human-made objects, but I think such concepts are what a lot of us are gesturing towards in the comments.