PAINTINGS WITHOUT PICTURES: Terry Teachout of About Last Night asks: Do you only like music that has words?

…Well, yeah, mostly. I far prefer music with words, with the romance of the human voice. I like musical instruments that sound like voices (violins and also fiddling; sometimes trumpets; sometimes cellos and oboes; sometimes pianos). I dislike attempts to make human voices sound like musical instruments (this is why I have a hard time with opera).

But that’s more my problem than my aesthetic stance. A better answer is that the musical vocabulary used by non-vocal music has been far better developed than the visual vocabulary used by most nonrepresentational painters. There’s a common musical language, and the point of most nonvocal music (even fairly experimental stuff) is to use that common language to speak. This musical language is in some ways like the language of lighting and camera angle used in moviemaking, or panel shape and layout in comics. It’s also sort of like the half-onomatopoeia that derives from our associations of certain sounds with certain images or sensations–Walker Percy points out that although “boom,” “pow,” and “tick-tock” are obviously onomatopoetic, there are all kinds of other words like “spatter” and “slice” that feel onomatopoetic because “the signifier and signified have been interpenetrated through use by the sign-user” (i.e. we socially create associations and thus create “false onomatopoeia”).

Most contemporary/recent nonrepresentational painters, by contrast, seem to be attempting to avoid common visual language in order to strike out on their own. This gets either purely sensual or wilfully obscure, IMO. (Or, of course, both.)

…Another reader brings up the common “Man, I could do that with a toothbrush and a bucket of paint” complaint. I think I disagree that this is a valid objection to a piece of art. Ordinary people, who do not think of themselves as artists, should be able to make art. Ordinary people sing and have insights and tell stories, yes?

And in fact, part of the problem I have with the “stripey people” is precisely the way in which it’s not true that “my kindergartener could do that.” There’s either pure sensual joy in color and shape, which a kindergartener could do and that’s wonderful but is also much more like craft than like art; or there’s such a high level of cerebration and involved mental processing (“involved” as Milton uses the word, folded in on itself like a coiling snake) and isolation in the artist’s own skull that there’s just no way a kindergartener or any average person would think to paint such a painting.

I should repeat that I’m exaggerating my problems with the “stripey people” in order to explore whether this is just a personal problem of mine or whether it’s a valid aesthetic objection. More research is needed!