David A. Smith: High art doesn't need to be impediment to the masses

by David A. Smith
Thursday March 15, 2012

It's springtime, and the impressionists are once again descending on the Lone Star State. Last year it was a beautiful exhibit from the National Gallery of Art visiting Houston. This time it's 70 pieces from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., in an exhibit at Fort Worth's Kimball Museum that opened last weekend.

The art critic for The Dallas Morning News calls it the one must-see exhibition for the next three months. Given the breathtaking roster of artists involved, one would be hard-pressed to disagree.

A DFW television station showed a line of visitors on opening day snaking around the building. Those who are prone to hand wringing over the condition of the audience for high art in contemporary America can, for the moment at least, take comfort.

Such exhibitions aside, however, a better argument needs to be made for high art. The problem actually begins with the label — it's not high at all, if that word is understood to mean unattainable or snooty. But there's nevertheless that perception.

Sometimes institutions try to dispel all the trappings of whatever the word might imply. Organizations such as symphonies and theater groups fall all over themselves to show they're not too highbrow.

Advertisements for everything from Shakespeare to Ibsen are often as salacious as a Desperate Housewives commercial. "Casual Fridays" at symphonies assure the skeptical that their Bermuda shorts and polo shirts are as welcome as tuneful playing. It's almost as though they feel guilty that their patrons dress or act a certain way.

There is the impression that "high art" and pop culture are widely separated, one for the elite, the other for everyone else, but by no means is there an impenetrable wall between them. It's worth remembering that Shakespeare was once considered entertainment for the masses, and the timeless jazz of Louis Armstrong thought of as mere noise.

Conversely, great art filters into popular culture as well. Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's first curator of contemporary art, said "the false dichotomy between the elite and the populist is one that drives me up the wall. It's a continuum: If great music isn't written by a Wagner and a Mahler in the late 19th century, then the pop tunes of the 1920s, '30s and '40s are not going to have any place to come from."

Great players like Armstrong knew the value of the old masters like Bach, Haydn, and Liszt.

"I played all the classical music when I was in the orphanage," Armstrong said. "That instills the soul in you."

One of the things that timeless art does is capture a moment and distill the emotion behind it into a tangible form. Art can translate glimpses that would otherwise be momentary into an understanding that's permanent — part of what Armstrong meant by instilling the soul.

It's true that high art and popular culture are not the same thing but we should never let the ease and ubiquity of the latter prejudice us against the former. Nor should we blithely assume that popular culture has the same capacity to enrich our lives as what we call high art.

Part of the reason that we, as a culture, seem ambivalent about great talent and the art it has produced is because today we're far less comfortable with the notion of a standard of excellence rooted in the past that nevertheless continues to exert a justifiable claim on us.

But William Faulkner pointed out that "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past." As a great artist, he would have known this intuitively.