Last July, I watched a movie with my mother and grandmother. I was surprised by what I thought and felt. This essay is an elaboration of my surprise. As a contemporary artist working in academia, I am well aware of what low brow creations count as artistically valuable and which do not (whether or not I agree with those valuations). The movie I watched that night was what most art people I know would call bad, and not bad in a good way like B horror movies for example. In my world, these are unarguably trendy. This movie was not trendy. By “serious art people” standards of taste, it had no redeeming qualities. The movie, Ordinary Angels starring Hilary Swank, is based on a true story–the story of an alcoholic woman who relentlessly fundraises to pay for a dying child’s liver transplant. Sentimental, predictable, but also …real? Girl, [aesthetic considerations are] so confusing, as Charli XCX sings in the song of the same name from her recent album Brat, which has taken over the internet. (Bracketed text added by me). I evoke Brat throughout this essay (italicized text) because of how, like Ordinary Angels, the album messes with ideas of what’s good and not good artistically, how we form our own judgements, and who, at the institutional level, gets to decide what should affect us significantly and what should not. Brat also deals with subjective experience, which I think is the best means for understanding art or anything else. A clear picture of one’s personal, subjective experience and how that relates to the external world is, in my opinion, the necessary precondition for consequential artistic action. As I wrote, phrases from Charli’s songs flitted in and out of my mind, cutting to the quick of my ideas and emotions. I include them where they entered my thought process, not because I view them as artistically superior or valuable, but because they were with me at the time of my experience of the movie, and then of writing. Their inclusion carries additional weight now, in August 2024, as Brat has been propagandized by the Democratic party, with Charli’s support, for the Harris-Walz presidential bid. I rely on descriptions of my lived experience even as I think through art ideas because I believe it grounds my thinking. Though my thoughts about art can become convoluted, my momentary experience just is. It flows and guides me and remains open for me to interpret as memory. It tames and slows my mind, quelling tangents and bringing the most relevant ideas to the surface. As with my art, my best thinking emerges with memory. What follows is my description of the event of the movie, Ordinary Angels, from my perspective and how it led me to a realization about the relationship between subjective experience and art. —— As the opening scenes played, I was condescending and distracted. Hilary Swank’s over-done down home Tennessee country accent, the absurdly hot roofer dad whose daughter needs a new liver banging away at roofs in tight jeans and with that popular hot guy mustache, heartfelt AA meeting shares and alcoholic table dancing, cancer stuff…I was sitting there on my Nana’s couch barely able to contain my disdainful smirks and scoffs. I was also glued to my phone, deleting and re-downloading instagram over and over again because I’m addicted to it, trying to stop looking but also obsessed with imagined messages, likes, follows. My eyes darted between the TV screen and my phone screen. My disapproving laughter, barely audible, must have emerged somewhere between the screens and my fiending social media engagement. My Mom dozed, bored. Periodically she’d stir, giving me looks that said “Don’t be condescending.” I’m ashamed I’m still so immature, but so is my Mom. When she wasn’t sleeping she’d catch my eye and laugh-smile as the roofer dad cried for the first time in front of his daughters, as Hilary Swank convinced multiple CEOs to make their private planes available in case a distant liver popped up, as the cute bad-liver daughter beamed behind jaundiced eyes while getting her first (possibly-drunk-Swank-administered) make-over. Probably about an hour into the movie my phone got really close to dying and I had to plug it in. I got up from my snuggly spot on the couch and asked my 93 year old Nana (who just lost her 95 year old husband, my Pa, about a month and a half ago) if I could unplug her iphone and plug mine into her charger. “Of course!” she said, always ready and willing to accommodate. In my mind’s eye, I see myself shuffling in my bare feet from the couch to the chair where the phone charger sat. I see my stare, beady-eyed. I was then on a mission to sustain my connection to instagram communications, judgements and evaluations of quality, social game playing, how I stack up. Lol, why I wanna buy a gun? My focus was squarely on my self, but my self-awareness was nil, my awareness of others even less, though I’d come to my Nana’s house to be with her…just to be with her. To watch movies with her because she loves it and it unites us during a hard time, the time after Pa’s passing. Girl, so confusing. Experience is disjointed when I zoom in like this, analyzing a moment that passed quickly and wasn’t overtly consequential as it occurred. Why couldn’t I focus on my Nana if I was there for her? Why couldn’t I let go of my dumb art life, social media, and my phone? Why was I compelled to react negatively to the bad movie? Haven’t I proved that I know what’s good art and what’s not? Haven’t I proved that I can hold my own artistically, in my judgements and in my work? Why is my consciousness so divided, so out of my control? And why do I struggle so much with locating my morality, with behaving in a way that reflects my ideas, my desires, and with accepting that behavior? Why I can’t even grit my teeth and lie? In the experience of watching the movie with my family, I create my morality by oscillating between 1) proving I have good aesthetic taste through disdain and then 2) by denying the importance of taste, setting it aside to be present for my family (and judging myself for not doing that). Both moralities are more about my self-creation than about right or wrong action, which I’ll return to later. —— With Nana’s blessing, I unplugged her phone, an older iphone, and set it down on a chair with a bright, busy upholstered pattern of deep blue-green and pink. I plugged in my less old but still old iphone and shuffled back to the couch without it. My experience of the movie up to that point had been filtered through my social media engagement. Comparison, judgment of others, self-judgment, active communications about art (and about who wants to consume and engage me) had roiled beneath my presence in my Nana’s living room. I don’t wanna share this space I don’t wanna force a smile This one girl taps my insecurities... As I snuggled back into my couch spot and refocused, I noticed my experience was different. There had been a shift. Was it in the movie or in me? Was it in my Mom? She seemed to be paying more attention. Nana stared straight forward. She isn’t sentimental and she notices everything. I knew she’d heard my scoffing, and I knew she saw now when my demeanor changed. Normally this would have embarrassed me into being more engaged but I was very distracted by my self during this time. A transition in the plot from light, conflicted action to a revelation of deep emotional wounds and how those drag out, play out in hard times had begun to transpire on screen. A montage set to sad music rolled. Hilary Swank had started drinking again. The hot roofer dad was ghosting her and she couldn’t see the kids. He hid his crying from everyone (except the movie audience), shaking with sadness alone in his bedroom. His hugeness and hotness and mustache made the crying scenes more sad to me. I started to cry around that time. After that, I couldn’t stop crying. When the score told me to be sad, I was. I felt everything with the family. I felt uplifted as scenes of the rural Tennessee community coming together to get the bad-liver girl into a helicopter during a blizzard so she could finally have her liver transplant evolved on screen. Tears pooled in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as the big hot dad finally said “Thank you” to alcoholic Hilary Swank as he climbed into the helicopter with sideways snow blowing around him after months of resenting her constant, unwanted presence. Instead of laughing at the bad art, I remembered all the times I’ve needed people and how truly amazing they have been. I’ve certainly despaired. With my self-centered personality, despair is kind of increased from the norm I think, simply because I emphasize my own experience so much. Thoughts about my own despair didn’t drive my tears, however. Memories came after my eyes were wet and I was in my emotion. My response was instantaneous, visceral. Philosopher Brian Massumi describes this phenomenon in his essay The Autonomy of Affect, pointing to the primary nature of affect–how it comes before thoughts–as well as to its power in the experience of art. We remember and cling to affective experiences. Intellectual experiences can’t compete with affect. Affect supercedes thought, and even self-consciousness, launching us immediately into a stratosphere of connected experience, through art. What a feeling. Bad tattoos on leather-tan skin, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign…fall in love again and again, winding roads , doing manual drive…Everything is romantic. Ordinary Angels and a moment with my family, who are not art sophisticates, captures the essence of my being so much that I am compelled to return to the moment in this essay. I opened up during this experience, I loved it, I want to think about it again and again. In this way, it is more powerful than any gallery experience in my recent memory. I’ve always been sensitive, emotionally, physically, etc. I remember crying during a Coke commercial while also making fun of how contrived it was in my teens and realizing this doubleness and reactivity is just part of who I am. I’m a live wire, and I experience opposite ideas or feelings at the same time, with awareness. I respond to most everything with intensity, mostly by mimicking and then riffing. I would like to dance more than I do because it feels heavenly to me to copy and respond to movements. That’s certainly why I like to draw so much. It’s moving with the world. My condescending attitude isn’t as ingrained as my artistic responsiveness, though it can be prominent. It came from a feeling that I need to be perceived as knowledgeable in the art world once I realized my abilities, class status, money, and education, each of which are meager, weren’t going to get me very far. I’ve been counseled many times not to think this way by well meaning people trying to build my self esteem, but we all know status matters in art professions. Condescension isn’t the way, but neither is faking naivety or an inability to feel fear or resentment. Practically, condescension is probably an evolutionary stage in becoming a self-sufficient, competent art professional. The observation that matters to me about this experience and that made me want to write had to do with the simultaneous and equal status of my derisive, mocking thoughts and the sincere and visceral emotion that led to my tears. It isn’t that one state of mind is right and the other wrong, or that one is more real, or that one is better behavior. They are of the same status within me, at the moment of viewing. They both occur. They are both self- creating mechanisms for me in terms of the morality I discussed above. By this I mean that in both cases I’m more concerned with who I am for doing either behavior than with how that behavior affects those around me. It’s a morality that is about self. Contemplating this self morality is what I do to prepare myself for presentation to and consumption by others. Morality is only one part of this, though it’s an important part. It’s probably impossible for me to answer questions about affect, thought, the nature of self/consciousness and morality in one essay, especially with all the art I’m making and want to make. So here I choose to let my thoughts meander around them. Taste, though, I feel reveals itself in my experience of Ordinary Angels. I’ve long had issues with taste in contemporary art discourse and social settings, having noticed during my art world indoctrination as an undergraduate at SAIC that I could convince myself of the high value of any art, regardless of medium, style, origin, skill, form, etc, by recontextualizing it. Simply by surrounding the art with admirable art people, institutions, appropriately cultivated white cube (or self-consciously anti-white cube) spaces is enough to venerate a previously outcast artwork. Do it yourself. Imagine Ordinary Angels (or any Hallmark style movie) in MoMa or wherever else strikes you as the height of contemporary taste. Imagine a person you admire discussing the bad movie with reverence or interest, maybe calling it a film. You’ll see the thing transform, most likely. It doesn’t matter if you like the film or not. What matters is that you could reasonably imagine it taken seriously by others. Art matters less than its viewing circumstances when it comes to taste. I take this for granted, which means that, when considering art as a cultural tool, as socially performed taste encourages us to do, I don’t overvalue skill, nor do I put too much stock in the number of hours spent laboring with materials or ideas or people. These may be important activities in some regard, but they are likely extraneous to the mobilization of one's work in the power structure of art on the basis of taste. It’s sometimes hard for me to accept that my ability to recognize quality in art doesn’t emanate from some deep understanding of its inherent value because it feels like it does, but I believe in the argument I made above because I see it play out all the time. Art’s inherent value is a separate question to me, and in my opinion, should be discussed first in terms of a private act of making, specifically the artist’s aesthetic experience, and second in terms of how an artwork functions socially, affectively, economically, after it has left the studio, and third, in the relationship between these two scenarios. It’s a separate essay. Instead of equating taste with value judgements, consider how it functions socially. What are its effects? Where does it emerge? My experience shows me that taste is something I communicate to others in the social arena. It isn’t a private thing at all. What I like isn’t my taste. It’s my preference (and even then at some times of life it is likely affected by what I think others think I should prefer and enjoy). I might privately prefer and enjoy many things that I wouldn’t want to reveal to art professionals, because to do so would be a demonstration of my (poor) taste, as long as I’m unaware of their (poor) taste, and whether we agree on the “real value” of some embattled low brow creation. B horror movies, reality TV, memes, porn, any variety of kitsch stuff is up for grabs, but letting on too soon that I’m into any of this could jeopardize my status with a powerful art figure of refined (aka different) taste. This scenario reveals taste as a social tool used to communicate a public understanding of trends, and possibly personal shared interests. I privately prefer aesthetic experiences that I enjoy. Publicly, I demonstrate taste. I show the world that I have studied the social hierarchy of art systems and can read its language and trade its currency. Taste refers to trends, not to the spiritual or intellectual value of art. Nietzsche makes this distinction in his book of musings, Beyond Good and Evil (Part Two, The Free Spirit, section 32). He describes the importance in modern human history of understanding the significance of things by their consequences instead of by their origin. If I analyze taste in terms of its consequences, I see that it is social. If I analyze taste in terms of its origin–in terms of artistic intention–many interesting problems arise, but they all have to do with the private mental experiences of others, phenomena we will never be able to observe. It was Immanuel Kant, in his treatise on the relationship between the mind and external reality, Critique of Pure Judgment, who popularized the idea that thought is separate from the external world. Ideas, and presumably artistic genius, are the product of a God given spark, a pure mind unadulterated by impure experience. According to this thinking, artist intention trumps any consequence my art has in the world. My experience of Ordinary Angels foregrounded my recent thoughts about taste, demonstrating the power bad art has over me, even as I am immersed in (dubiously) sophisticated art discourse and related social hijinx. Maybe the most interesting thing about my experience with Ordinary Angels and the thoughts that followed is that Kant wrote his Critique of Judgement over 230 years ago. Nietzsche’s direct critique of Kant in Beyond Good and Evil was published about 140 years ago. They are both well known thinkers. Kant has been canceled innumerable times by several artistic and philosophical movements. Nietzsche, who directly critiques Kant, is currently popular. Despite our apparent consciousness of this history, its ideas, and what they mean for art, our aesthetic philosophy remains Kantian, privileging artist intention over the effects of art objects, while our participation in art society is, as ever, about the consequences of taste demonstrations, aligning to Nietzsche’s thinking. We could make more interesting art and have more interesting art engagements if we emphasized (and analyzed) the consequences of work, it's affective power, its social power, over artist intention. Nietzsche rightly points out that our obsession with our own minds, our ideas, our experience, comes from Kant’s thesis that God is causing us, in private mental experiences, to have inherently valuable thoughts that determine actions (art), which must therefore carry similar value. This is a view based on the religious philosophy that centers on the human mind and its essential specialness and holiness. In this view, external forces are subordinated by human thought. 140 years ago, Nietzsche suggested that we might try letting go of this ideology. Seems like a worthwhile exercise, and several materialist political and artistic movements have attempted to do so. However, our engagement with art is a weird pastiche of contradictory philosophies, some practical, and some basically spiritual. I do not know exactly what this means, but I see it weakening art’s power, and that’s what bothers me about it. I care more about the moving experiences produced by art than anything else, so it’s not trivial to me that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been viscerally moved by art in a gallery or museum. The other times have been in less controlled settings and they are innumerable. I don’t know what this means, exactly, but I often feel alienated and unmoved during the art viewing experiences I’m expected to enjoy as an art person/professional/whatever it is. I don’t know if I belong here anymore…Charli sings of the music industry in “I might say something stupid.” I often think this while in the midst of some inspired revelation while watching reality TV, annoyed at the art world that it never happens in museums. Ironically, I feel a simultaneous desire to become a part of my art community in a way that I never have before. I want to participate, I want to share, I want to be fully present. I want to understand my fellow art people, to leave my own mind with its dubious, untested judgments and see how my presence and thoughts are met in real time. I want to see their consequences play out. I’m reaching out. I’ve understood myself enough, and now see it as the means for connection. Talk to me, talk to me Oh talk to me in French, talk to me in Spanish Talk to me in your made-up language Doesn’t matter if I understand it Talk right in my ear, tell me your secrets and fears Once you talk to me, I’ll talk to you And say, “hey let’s get out of here Shall we go back to my place –Jessamyn Plotts, August 2024