In contrast, serious art is not a matter of amusement, spectacle, and
increasing doses of narcotic. It engages with ordinary life. The genuine
artist will attend to ordinary life, with all its“tedious and irritating
concerns,”and to the conditions of modern labor and of the reproduction
of social life. Genuine art will present the stuff of ordinary life as a
subject matter of feeling, as it arises in the responsive artist and is
communicated creatively through the expressive work. Honest work will
be presentedasworthy of respect; tedium arising from meaninglessness
will be presentedasdispiriting; self-importance will be lampoonedas
dangerous and comical.The faithful presentation of modern life, and
especially of conditions of work and of social reproduction, as subjects
for feeling, is a central office of genuine, expressive art. One might think
of Philip Roth’s reverent presentation of the process of glove manufac-
turing in 1950s Newark, New Jersey, inAmerican Pastoral, or Cindy Sher-
man’s investigations of Hollywood“processing” or“counterfeiting”of
women’s identities, or Sam Mendes’attentions to various repressions,
distractions, and discoveries of AmericansuburbanlifeinhisfilmAmeri-
can Beauty, among many other examples. In Wordsworth’sphrasing,the
aim here is“truth which is testimony”^18 about how the phenomena of
life are to be felt about. The genuinework of art expresses and communi-
cates participation in apt feeling.
Any expression theory of art that builds on this thought must further
provide answers to three closely interrelated questions:
(i) What is expressed in art? In particular, is it the individual artist’s feeling
or attitude, or is it a collective-cultural feeling in which the artist
participates?
(ii) How is artistic expression achieved? In particular, is there a distinctive
psychodynamic process of expression, or is expression rather a matter
more either of surface,“physiognomic”similarities between works and
human facial, vocal, and postural configurations or of the successful
formal working of materials in a medium?
(iii) Why does artistic expression matter? How, and how well, does an
account of our interest in expression elucidate our interest in art?
(^18) Wordsworth,“Preface toLyrical Ballads,”p. 454.
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