Christopher Benson

Christopher Benson is a fabulous painter living in New Mexico. Here's an essay he wrote recently that I am proud to share.

What Art Is Good For

Art has no power beyond its ability to affirm the truths we already know, but resist admitting. It reminds us what the world is actually like, as opposed to how we wish it were. In bringing such realities to light, the artist draws them fresh, enabling us to see them again as if for the first time.

Apart from this, art can do very little. It can’t stop wars, or right political injustices. It can’t free slaves or level the economic inequalities from which so much of its patronage flows. But when it refrains from the impulse to flatter its patrons, or to appease the culture’s insatiable craving for a grandiose self-reflection, then sometimes it allows us a glimpse of our true selves. It awakens us, however fleetingly, from the dream state of our perpetual wanting. Only through our willingness to own art’s truths does it have any power to change the world – by changing us.

And it is a world we want so badly to change: a place too much defined by man’s propensity to act out his most shortsighted, self-serving impulses on both an intimate and a global scale. We are beset on every side by endless, intractable conflicts. We persist in tearing apart the fragile environment on which all humanity depends for its survival. We routinely turn a blind eye to those most in need of our help. If anything is worthwhile in such a world – one that could easily convince the most hopeful among us of our worthlessness as a species – it is the occasional discovery of some persuasive evidence to the contrary. We crave reassurance that even with these imperfections, our existence is at heart a redeemable endeavor. That reassurance is what art, at its best, has to offer.

What complicates the business of unlocking that message is that art’s most credible reassurances so often come in guises that don’t appear benign at all – that challenge us to look at what we do not wish to see. This is art’s intention: to press us to look past our reflexive yearning for what is familiar and comforting, and see what is true.

That seeing can happen in a variety of ways: sometimes the artist witnesses an event and feels moved to record it. Sometimes, in the painstaking task of describing some internal vision, the reality of the job of transcription overtakes the illusory intention that inspired it. Here the work manifests an aesthetic truth that becomes analogous to all other kinds of truth. Whatever their original motives, the most potent works of art challenge the status quo of the artist’s – and by extension, our own - desires. They undermine and contradict the idealized narratives that we work so hard to project to ourselves, to one another, and on into posterity.

In practice, of course, few works succeed in being such clear or dependable mirrors. We periodically allow art to become trivialized by reducing it to a status symbol, or just another of the many ephemeral artifacts of the popular culture. Over the past decade some contemporary artists have attained a star-like status and mystique similar to that of film actors, popular musicians or sports heroes. The sums of money fetched by their works have also become inflated far beyond any measure of plausibly intrinsic value. But such celebrity is a poor fit for art’s deeper purpose. Great works rarely result from the attainments of popularity or market success, but rather in spite of both. The true artist is not the rock star or the trend-setting fashion icon, but something nearer to a journalist for our collective being. He or she is society’s perennially thoughtful and indispensable crank.

The most lasting works of art report on the human condition from the trenches of life’s dogged campaign. They demand much of us as viewers, but finally reward the labor of our looking with works that speak clearly enough for us to understand. Picture Francisco’s Goya’s painting of citizens about to be massacred in The Third of May 1808, or Diane Arbus’ photograph of a grimacing boy clutching a play hand-grenade. Think of the unflinching naturalism in Lucien Freud’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth the Second (at once funny, grotesque and poignant) or Vija Celmins’ brittle still-lives of bombers and warplanes in mid-flight. Look at Chardin’s picture of a boy watching a top that he has just spun – the toy frozen forever between its final rotation and the inevitable tumble. The common thread in all these works is that they acknowledge, in various aesthetically compelling ways, the essential imperfection in which our humanity is suspended like the pigment in its binding medium. These are not polemics shouted from a soapbox, but meditations into which the viewer is invited to join as co-participant. They are reflections of our real nature and of the nature of the world we inhabit.

This interpretation of an artistic purpose may seem simplistic and unglamorous, stripped as it is of the arcane language that would lift art’s meaning beyond our grasp and make it the exclusive property of the powerful or the initiated. But time brings all man’s works down to that inevitable earth. Only when they land there do we finally discover what messages of enduring value, if any, they have left to impart. The artist who only celebrates the all-eclipsing character of the contemporary moment will likely remain stuck within it. His or her work will cease then to be art at all and instead become artifact – a remnant of history for archeologists to study and connoisseurs to critique, but which finally tells us little about ourselves.

Only that work whose message is broader than the limits of its briefly blanketing cultural context will speak to those who come to it from some other place or time. We who look at art crave a dialogue with it in which the complex truth of our experience (which we think so personally and culturally unique) is ferried back across the seemingly impassable span of difference between the maker and us. That is the moment when whatever intervenes between two otherwise unconnected minds – the chasm dividing one culture from another, or past from present – is momentarily collapsed and bridged. That is when art has the power to bring us home to ourselves. “Yes” comes the voice from out of the void, “My world was not so different from yours after all.” “Yes, I was like you.”