Sontag, Arbus, and Art’s Raison D'être

Art simplifies existence into something we can begin to understand

Two weeks ago, I sat at a cafe in Panajachel, Guatemala, and suffered a moment of moral panic.

I was reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography — specifically, the essay “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” which focuses on the work of Diane Arbus. Sontag is largely critical, calling Arbus’s approach to photography “deliberately naive” and arguing her photographs, which were mostly of so-called “freaks,” make “a compassionate response feel irrelevant.”

Sontag is a great writer, one who assumes an authority and makes her reader believe in it — and so I found myself trusting her critiques implicitly (I’ve since learned the essay is much maligned among photography experts). And then I asked myself that all-important question: What was the point of these photographs, the ones being so harshly judged in the essay? If presented with the chance to see them in a museum, I’d surely go. But why? What purpose does the artwork serve?

For a moment, I thought thusly: Well, if nothing else, the photos gave Sontag something to write about! But then, with the persistence of a curious child, I continued my questioning. What makes me think Sontag’s analysis of the photography has any real purpose, either?

And there began my crisis.

I’m an art-lover. That I live through art is perhaps the preeminent feature of my entire self-conception. If art’s for nothing, I’m for nothing.

There in the cafe, on a patio set back from a tourist-filled street, that oft-intangible nothingness became a shiver-inducing chill. Yes, Arbus’s photos gave Sontag a subject, which gave me something to read. But what purpose did that serve? All I could acknowledge was that it kept me entertained as my cappuccino cooled, and in a way that allowed me to feel a delicious intellectual superiority relative to the phone-scrolling patrons around me. So then, what — the purpose of art is to allow those who participate in it to feel superior? That was far from reassuring. It was sickening, actually.

I couldn’t help but think of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, his insistence that art should be a religious activity intended to increase the audience’s moral goodness. This argument, from an ethical standpoint, might well be valid. And yet I’ve always rejected it because I’m a secular twenty-first-century Westerner, because I’ve been subjected to a lifetime’s worth of irony, of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake.

I was stuck, bound to reject a moral conception of art that’s at once beneath me and ineluctably above me, and simultaneously unable to appreciate “art for art’s sake” when the whole endeavor, as my Arbus/Sontag ruminations suggested, was nothing but an exercise in vanity.

Then I drank my cappuccino and observed the tourists walking by. I thought back to the content of Sontag’s essay. I realized I was being melodramatic.

Sontag does more than analyze Arbus’s work. She positions that analysis within a larger consideration of the social world in which that work was created and received. She places Arbus within a historical and class context, noting that Arbus was like others in her era from upper-and-middle-class families in seeking out the psychological adversity their own sheltered upbringings had denied them. She also reflects on photography’s pervasiveness and considers the effects of living among so many “representations” of reality. These are surely useful observations and arguments, and they have value beyond the mere understanding of the photographs themselves.

People like to create. It seems a natural instinct. That means art — or at least artifacts — are bound to exist. Understanding the context for these works and artifacts, as Sontag does in the essay, is useful because it provides genuine insights into the social world. She doesn’t explain Arbus. She uses Arbus to explain the world in which Arbus lived.

Indeed, this capacity for enhancing understanding may be art’s superpower, maybe even its raison d’être. Because artworks are representations of reality, they’re bound to be simpler than reality itself, which is infinitely complex (and infinitely unknowable). A novel about factory workers during the Industrial Revolution, whatever its brilliance or complexity, is bound to be simpler than the actual reality of factory workers during the Industrial Revolution with their intricate web of irreducible personal and social concerns. A portrait can be perceived with a directness that a moving, breathing person would never allow. An essay analyzing a photographer’s work finds a “way in” to larger discussions of social realities that could never occur if the photographs didn’t exist. That’s why art is so valuable as an object of contemplation. It simplifies reality into something we can at least begin to understand. In the realm of analysis, it gives us a “way in.”

I’m an enthusiastic fan of the philosopher Albert Camus, and I’ve long been struck by a pronounced habit of his: He uses as examples in his analyses not just real people or historical figures, but fictional characters. The Myth of Sisyphus draws not just on the titular rock-roller of Greek mythology, but also Kirilov, a character in Dostoevsky’s Demons. Camus’s The Rebel similarly treats the Dostoevsky character Ivan Karamazov as a significant player in the history of metaphysical rebellion, placing him alongside Nietzsche as a vital figure in the post-God thinking of the late nineteenth century. Why the constant analysis of fictional characters? Because Camus was writing, with remarkable nuance, about some of the most complicated social and psychological features of the human race. Discussing them without the assistance of simplified representations (even if those “simplifications,” as Dostoevsky’s tend to be, are still incredibly rich and complex) would have been impossible. Art gave Camus his “way in.”

Needless to say, this line of thinking left me feeling much better.

My crisis was over. I paid for my cappuccino and, feeling a wee bit jittery, enjoyed a slow walk through the rain.

***Exciting news! My story “Enzo and Miranda” was published on Fiction on the Web, where it was named a “pick of the month.” Check out the story… and the comments underneath (it’s always exciting to see people responding to my work!).