another plea that we not value the arts and funding for arts education on metrics, with a lengthy sidebar from Adorno on bourgeois art religion

Carter Gillies has a piece called "the consistency illusion"
https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/consistency-illusion

Arts Council England (ACE) is preparing to launch a quality metrics scheme that will be mandatory for England's largest arts organisations. Explaining why, Simon Mellor, the organisation's Deputy Chief Executive for arts and culture, said in his blog: "At the very least, I am confident that in the future we will all be better able to talk about the quality of the work we help create in a more consistent and confident way."

There is a fascination with the idea that quality in art ought to be consistent - but unfortunately, consistent quality for the arts is a fiction. It is a fiction that seems to matter to some people though, so it is important to address the question: "Who, precisely, is this supposed to matter to?"

The people invested in the idealisation of consistency see the world in a particular way, which does not always align with the way that art (and indeed most of our lives) is conducted. The expectation is for things to actually be consistent and to be understood confidently. This is symptomatic of a larger and more complicated issue for society.

We are conditioned to justify the things we feel matter, but this is an attitude that needs to be examined. It’s not that there aren’t moments in our lives where being justified isn't of the utmost importance – it’s just that being justified is not the whole of the story.

Our real problem seems to be the need to compulsively justify anything and everything. Why else would being 'consistent' or 'confident' matter? We have the spurious idea that we can only be confident if we are justified, and we can only be justified if there is consistent and objective support for our judgments. This is a myth we ought to be well rid of.

Underlying the development of quality metrics seems to be the question: "Are the arts justified?" In other words, we are looking for evidence. This is the opening the quantifiers of the world need. Witness the attempts to find the value of the arts in their instrumental benefits to society, to the economy and to things like cognitive development. Not that these things can't or shouldn't be measured. It is just that they are not the reasons for art to exist. No child ever picked up a paintbrush to benefit the economy.

...

As bromides go you can't contest that no child ever picked up a paintbrush to help the economy by way of painting a picture of a cat, but if a child ever picked up a paintbrush to help the family paint a fence ... does the case still apply?

Measuring what would be best to direct funds to is not necessarily the same as insisting that something is to be valued or not valued on the basis of those metrics.  If in a music education program you discover that more people want to say, play the guitar or make music using a laptop and microphones than want to perform in a woodwind quintet do you insist that people take up the bassoon or the oboe because those instruments are considered endangered at a pedagogical level for the sake of the future of the orchestral repertoire?

Take this old 2014 article from Australian coverage.
https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/australian-oboe-and-bassoon-players-in-drastic-decline/

The plight of the double-reed family could soon become a crisis for our orchestras if nothing is done.

There are just not enough people playing oboe and bassoon worldwide. Not enough people start young and nearly all schools struggle to find double reed players for their orchestras and bands. This causes a knock-on effect with popular community orchestras facing the same problem, a shortage of teachers and into the profession, with a major shortage of freelance players
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or from The Telegraph earlier this year.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/28/big-beasts-orchestra-could-become-extinct-arts-chief-warns-youtube/

Now I love the oboe and bassoon.  I've been beating this drum for a while now but I don't see it as a given the future of the classical musical arts and disciplines as automatically being symphonic.  Chamber music is more my interest.  The d'Amore Duo has, what four or five CDs out and it's an oboe and guitar duet, about which I want to write stuff somewhere down the road.  There's oboe and guitar literature aplenty.  There's even bassoon and guitar literature, and there's a CD of some of that music recorded by Yvonne Kershaw, for instance, I heartily endorse. 

But my point is to ask whether a solution to the perceived decline of interest in the double reeds is to insist on allocating funds to those programs to keep them going.   Not necessarily, or to fit within the polemic in the link above, if people value X less then dumping money into teaching it won't make it more popular.  If there's an extent to which this kind of appeal in the age of what gets called neoliberalism can boomerang this could be an area.  You might think pedagogy should "catch up" to discussing the music people want to make rather than teaching stuff that people want kept that might not win in metrics--or if people want to produce hip hop or rock does music pedagogy shift away from centuries of Western musical heritage to adapt to ... market demands?  Sometimes it seems that critiques of neoliberalism by appeals to tradition get stuck with poelmics that can be brought out by neoliberal or even progressive approaches that plead that pedagogy "catch up" to current actual demand ... even if such an appeal-to-the-market approach has proven in some times and places to be a double edged sword.

But the tacit and even explicit claim that we shouldn't need evidence for everything we value ... can't that come off like a basically religious appeal?  I have my various disagreements with Adorno but op ed pieces like the one above seem to be exemplars of a kind of bourgeois art religion that many an artists and arts teacher would imagine is not what they exemplify.  Pleading that we stop trying to justify the arts and funding for arts education based on the metrics of their profitability could be a lea in which "arts" gets replaced with "religion" and the funding of anything because it should be worth any cost as an emblem of the highest most divine qualities of human experience and beauty ... that could be art-as-religion of the sort Wagner championed. 

Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Continuum

ISBN 0-8264-6757-1

Page 2

… As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself.  …

I.e. in the attempt to extricate art as an expression or distillation of religious dogmas and devotions and rites, the arts were divested from throne and alter doctrines at the expense of intensifying "the spell" that art has on its consumers or observers.  Art may have "broken the spell" that Church and State had over it in terms of formal power but the power of the spell art cast over those who observed it or participated in making it became all the stronger as art became more and more "autonomous".  In breaking art free from religious obligations or obligations to the ruling castes art became more frenetic and frantic in religious devotion but as a devotion to art-as-process, or art for the sake of art. Instead of appeals to humanity as bearing the divine image in Judeo-Christian religious traditions Art became the new god who imaged humanity back to itself so as to reveal a new kind of divine image in humanity.  

With no life to come, the power of the spell art holds over us becomes all the stronger because the spell itself of art becomes the most potent thing we can experience if we set aside all the usual other suspects of food, drink, sex, community, etc.  Without a world beyond to imagine the most art can do is affirm the world as it is.  Ellul wrote that Adorno more than most others perceived the double bind in which the arts found themselves in the 20th century but I'll have to write about The Empire of Non-Sense later.

Ellul merely alluded to the aporio, Adorno explains it a bit here:

Page 39

…

The artwork is not only the echo of suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the same time the organon of the neutralization of suffering. Art thereby falls into an unsolvable aporia. The demand for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden of their guilt; therefore this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the antithetical demand for irresponsibility. The latter is reminiscent of the element of play, without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory. As play, art seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of its semblance. Art is in any case irresponsible as delusion, as spleen, and without it there is no art whatsoever. The art of absolute responsibility terminates in sterility, whose breath can be felt on almost all consistently developed artworks; absolute irresponsibility degrades art to fun; a synthesis of responsibility and irresponsibility is precluded by the concept itself. [bold emphasis added, italics original] Any relation to what was once thought of as the dignity of art—what Holderlin called that "noble, grave genius"14—has become ambivalent. True, in the face of the culture industry art maintains that dignity; it enrobes two measures of a Beethoven quartet snatched up from between the murky stream of hit tunes while tuning the radio dial. By contrast, modern art that laid claim to dignity would be pitilessly ideological. To act dignified it would have to put on airs, strike a pose, claim to be other than what it can be. It is precisely its seriousness that compels modern art to lay aside pretensions long since hopelessly compromised by the Wagnerian art religion. A solemn tone would condemn artworks to ridiculousness, just as would the gestures of grandeur and might. [emphasis added] Certainly, without the subjective form-giving power art is not thinkable, yet this capacity has nothing to do with an artwork's achieving expressive strength through its form. Even subjectively this strength is heavily compromised, for art partakes of weakness no less than of strength. …

The more art presents itself as sublime the more ridiculous it can seem.  Art may be sublime in what it depicts and what it resembles but when art itself seeks to present itself as sublime it can be absurd.  I'll put it this way, I watched Das Rhinegold last year and it frankly seemed to me not unlike a Michael Bay Transformers film.  Paul Dini, I think it was, once said in a commentary about an episode of Batman: the animated series that there's a saying in the television industry--you don't actually win the Emmy by going for the Emmy. Wagner was, so to speak, going for the Emmy.  

Adorno had some scorn for those who insisted that art communicates directly, a la this or that art directly conveys the feelings and emotional experiences of the artist. There are always forms and always mediating conventions, constraints and possibilities:

Page 350

…To whoever remains strictly internal, art will not open its eyes, and whoever remains strictly external distorts artworks by a lack of affinity. Yet aesthetics becomes more than a rhapsodic back and forth between the two standpoints by developing their reciprocal mediation in the artwork itself.

As soon as the artwork is considered from an external vantage, bourgeois consciousness tends to become suspicious of alienness to art, even though in its own relation to artworks bourgeois consciousness tends to disport itself  externally to them. The suspicion must be kept in mind that artistic experience as a whole is in no way as immediate as the official art religion would have it. Every experience of an artwork depends on its ambience, its function, and, literally and figuratively, its locus. Overzealous naivete that refuses to admit this distorts what it considers so holy. In fact, every artwork, even the hermetic work, reaches beyond its monadological boundaries by its formal language. Each work, if it is to be experienced, requires thought, however rudimentary it may be, and because this thought does not permit itself to be checked, each work ultimately requires philosophy as the thinking comportment that does not stop short in obedience to the prescriptions stipulated by the division of labor. [emphasis added] ...

…

With respect to the art of music what this can practically mean is that music is an art of conventions and these conventions have external and internal elements as processes of performance and interpretive cognitions.  You're not just hearing music disembodied from vibrations in the air.  But when you look at a score you can observe thematic developments and structural relationships from the score even if you can't hear a live performance of the music.  In this sense a Scruton can say somewhat accurately that classical music has an "argument" but that would be true of a roughly two and a half century stretch of music from the common practice period.  You could observe a great deal about the music from the pages even if you can't hear the music.  On the other hand, at another level if you can't hear the music what's the point of reading the score?  The score is the recipe for a dish that is to be cooked and the pleasure and sustenance are in the eating.

What teaching the arts allows is for the full mind to be engaged in the learning of and the creation of and the continuation of the arts.  I'm all for that ... but that doesn't oblige me to be in favor of what a Richard Wagner or a Theodore Adorno described as an art religion.

Instead I could invoke Hans Rookmaaker who proposed that modernist art may have gone so far off the rails in contrast to applied or practical arts because the fine arts were asked to do, expected to do too much--painting could not just be painting, it had to be iconic or continue a role that had previously been iconic.  It might be ironic that a Rookmaaker and an Adorno, probably on opposite sides of the Marxist/anti-Marxist divide if I had to guess, could paradoxically have some agreement that the art religion that fostered modernist art was revealing itself to be a dead end.  Or at least that's what I'm mulling over at the moment.

The case that we should invest in art and teach it because we value it without getting into why can seem like a bluntly but implicitly religious claim.  A Christian can say "I believe Christ is risen and that Jesus is Lord" as a statement of faith and provide cases for the basis for such a profession and confession.  "Art is valuable because it defines who I am" or "Art is valuable because it allows me to discover how I can be human" is still functionally a religious kind of claim.  If you took these things away from a person would they stop being human?  Not that you should, mind you, but I am making a point that there are things people use to define themselves that are not so much necessary as so desirable to preclude alternatives.  People who are drawn to the arts tend, in the West, to not wish to think of themselves as strictly economic or transactional beings.  I get that, I totally get that ...

but the older I get the more it seems that arts education falters in the West by not admitting that it is a religious discipline in many respects.  Make art because ... artist!  Would you make art even if it was a monetary loss for you your whole life?  Would you make art even if you were not formally published?  Would you sacrifice in that sort of way to be able to make art?  It hardly seems difficult to see how that can be a form of religious devotion.  For someone like Johann Sebastian Bach it was, obviously, an act of religious devotion and an act of careerism, too.  What artists in the West seem to want is to invoke the artist as seer, artist as prophet, artist as outsider-who-speaks-truth-to-power and, oh, I should also be able to pay all my bills and my food expenses doing this, too, and have some nice medical care and ... they don't get how this would make them a new kind of priesthood along the way?