Art Is Always Experienced in A Narrative Frame

A group of bloggers are in a circle at the party arguing about art, and there’s no way I’m not wandering over there to join in. This is a response to Scott Alexander’s recent post on taste. Your experience of this post will of course be enhanced by reading his, but I’ve tried to construct it such that it should hold water on its own. I enjoy this discussion but I think it’s important to hold it lightly. Despite how much ink has been spilt theorizing about art, the beautiful thing is that this is one area where the theory matters very little. Art is ultimately not something we participate in after rationally deciding we should, it’s an emergent phenomenon in human behavior that many of us find it inherently meaningful. How we talk about this behavior is always secondary to the practice and appreciation of the thing itself, which is incredibly individual. Art is Not Raw Sensory Input Every issue that Scott raises about art and taste feels grounded in a fundamental perspective. This perspective is best illustrated by his opening “Parable of the Steakhouse” where he describes feeling disappointed as a young lad to learn that food critics do not rigorously blind taste test the food. Shouldn’t food critics strive for total objectivity? Shouldn’t your opinion as a critic be based entirely on the raw sensory input of the taste of the food itself, while removing cumbersome attributes of the dining experience like the restaurant’s ambiance, which could bias your opinion of the food? Scott reveals towards the end of this section: “I’ve since made my peace with real-world restaurant criticism. I suppose it’s true that real people go to a restaurant and soak in the ambience, and that’s part of what makes restaurants fun. I suppose it’s true that making a visually appealing dish succeeds at delighting the senses no less than making something delicious.” I’d posit that Scott’s perspective throughout his essay, despite what he might say, seem to reflect that he has not actually made peace with this.1 His view as expressed seems to be that the purest experience of art is one’s apprehension of the raw sensory input associated with the work, and that we should be somehow suspicious of the elements of the experience that surround the work of art when we attempt to evaluate its worth. I’ll grant that wanting to strive for the objective evaluation of art on the basis of certain qualitative values (like taste in food, or technique in painting) is appealing. We all want to know if the $200 bottle of wine actually tastes better than the $20 bottle, or if people are just being fooled by labels. Thankfully, we’ve studied this. Plassmann et al in “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness” shows that the “experienced pleasantness” of the wine the subjects tasted was impacted by price. Importantly—it’s not just the participants “reported enjoyment” that was impacted by price. The researchers performed brain scans which reveal that the subject’s measurable experience of enjoyment within their brain itself is actually modulated by price. It’s not like the participants are just saying they prefer the more expensive wine for social status, they’re actually experiencing more enjoyment from the more expensive wine—when they know it’s more expensive. We intuitively understand that this applies very broadly to many aesthetic experiences in life. Not just because of price, but due to countless aspects of the context that surrounds the art itself. Our perception of Michelangelo’s David does not just emerge from the work’s qualities as an artistic object in isolation, it is also from the historical and physical context in which we view the piece—all of which constitute a narrative frame. Now, I suspect Scott might interpret this Plassmann et al’s findings as proof that his view is correct. The impact of the price of wine on our enjoyment is exactly why we should rigorously isolate the sensory experience of the work from its context. But I’m arguing this is exactly why a critic shouldn’t try to evaluate a work in isolation. Doing so is nice in theory, but the problem with this approach is that it is hypothetical. We do not look at a painting or sit down to eat a meal in a hermetically sealed research environment. If the critic evaluates the art within a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial, they aren’t actually evaluating the experience that the public will have. If context like price literally alters our perception of the experience itself a useful critic must work within this context. Central to my argument throughout this essay is that all art is experienced within a narrative frame, which inherently effects our perception of the art. Trying to remove the frame does not get us closer to a more “pure” or “objective” experience of the art. Art consists of objects and symbols that elicit a response, but that response in deeply, inherently tied to the context in which we experience it. Even the blindfolded food critic who doesn’t know where the food is coming from would not be representing an “objective” experience of the food free from context. They’d still bring with them the narrative frame of their personal preferences, all the food they’ve ever eaten before, how they’re feeling that day, the way the progression of the different foods effects their palate, etc. With art, the narrative frame that surrounds the work consists not only of the environment in which it’s displayed, but also its position within art history, whether its in our native language, our personal life experiences, every other work of art we’ve ever seen, and much more. I can understand why we’re hesitant to accept the inevitable influence of the frame. None of us want to think that our aesthetic experience is influenced by something as profane as price. But there is a sacred corollary. What about the museum, cathedral, or cinema? The religious icon—situated within the cathedral it was commission to exist within—will hold a different kind of meaning than the icon or the cathedral would on their own. Does this mean the experience of the icon is delegitimized in some way, because its presentation within the space is part of why it is regarded it with a certain eye? Sure we might get more pleasure out of a bottle of wine with an expensive price tag. But we also get more pleasure from a meal served to us by someone we love, after a day of hard work when we’re starving. Watching Interstellar in 70mm IMAX is not the same experience as watching it on a airplane. Why would we deny the humanity of the frame as part of our experience of art? It’s easy to turn our nose up when we perceive that a profane narrative frame (the price) makes something more enjoyable, or if we perceive that a “sacred” narrative frame (the museum) is being used to give something profane the appearance of profundity (Duchamp’s Fountain). But why do we think the work has to speak for itself in isolation? Nothing we ever experience actually exists in isolation. In the face of this we might be tempted to throw up our hands in defeat, or to dogmatically insist (as I believe Scott to be doing) that we should seek to ignore the frame. But I think the appropriate response to this is to acknowledge and integrate the existence of the frame into our understanding of the art itself and how it effects us. Being able to do so is one of the attributes that contributes to what we often refer to as taste. Ultimately trying to isolate a work from its context is a nice idea, and attempting to do some might provide one approach we can use to learn more about how art works. But it’s just that. An idea. An approach. If you eradicate the frame surrounding the work, that clinical sterility itself becomes the frame. It doesn’t represent a more “pure” experience of the art itself. Scott reluctantly admits that context does effect experience, but treats this context as something dubious that we should try to ignore, rather than an ins…