(Somehow the title of this essay reminds me of The Rutles song Living in Hope. They sound alike and pose equally absurd questions.)
I don't think any human being can live without art. For that would mean to live without beauty or emotion. Yes, this requires extending the definition of "art" to include things that do not hang on the walls of museums. In every way a human being has created beauty, there is art. Even the gaze at, and simple caress of a loved one's cheek is a moment of art. Consider how many artists have attempted to recreate such moments in a painting, and our emotional response to them. How much more beautiful is the actual moment created by our lover?
So I would never say we should not live in art. The question I have is at what price? And cannot we create better, so the price is as low as possible?
I'll argue that we all want, at a basic level, to live with beauty. And, to my immediate point, we want our built environments to be beautiful. While we many want to pursue every other emotion in our lives, from the thrills of climbing mountains to the sustained stresses of pursuing a career, we want our homes to be places of beauty and nothing but, because we want them to seem perfect in every way--without challenges of any kind. We want our homes to meet all of our needs (whether they stay constant or change). To never be inadequate, useless, or annoying. Our homes should never be cold or hot, always just right. Our feet should never ache. Our heads never hit a thing, what we store in our house should always be right at hand, never needing a search. We should be able to perform all bodily functions in our house with ease, from eating and drinking to sleeping and shitting. What we want to be public in our house should be public, and what we want private should be private. It should be secure and safe, and never cause us anxiety in any way. Every aspect should please, no aspect should distract. The utopian house... for I know of none that are beautiful in this way. We can spend a lifetime feathering our next, striving towards the completion that is beauty.
Now, many contemporary artist have turned their backs on beauty, considering it a naive representation, and have preferred to explore other ideas and emotions. And so we get rotting sharks floating in tanks and the like. It's all enormously expressive, but it's not beautiful in any but the most extended sense of the word. Call me a conservative, but at the core of human joy, happiness and creativity is beauty, the experience of an intuitively harmonious perfection. But apparently I am in a strong minority these days.
To my point: the famous Farnsworth House designed and built by Mies can der Rohe, the colossus of 20th century architectural design. He considered it perfect in every way, perfectly designed, perfectly built. His client, Dr. Farnsworth thought otherwise, and sued him, primarily for cost overruns, but also, according to her attorney, because the house was "unlivable."
What made it unlivable? Mies sited it on the flood plain of the Fox River, just a few feet above the last known maximum flood. His attitude apparently was that Dr. Farnsworth could use a canoe to get to her house, if need be. And she did need to, because, of course, the house has been flooded many times over the years. Then there was the greenhouse effect from the all-glass walls, creating an oven of the place in summer. And the fogging of the uninsulated glass, making it impossible to see outside. And, and, and...
Mies called his work baukunst, which can be translated as architecture, but more accurately as building art. His work was cutting edge, experimental, novel, and his clients were (mostly) willing pilgrims into the unknown. What's a canoe trip or two to get groceries when you get to "live in art"? And Dr. Farnsworth agreed. All the positives did seem to outweigh the negatives. After she lost the lawsuit, she lived in the house for something like 30 years, if memory serves.
Would you put up with a house that turned into an oven on a sunny day? That flooded every couple of years? Where you had nowhere to hang a picture? No door to your bedroom? Dr. Farnsworth did, adapting to an environment that was nowhere near as comfortable as other contemporary houses, as no compromise was made for mundane living to achieve his aesthetic artistic masterpiece, his baukunst.
How have you consciously and unconsciously adapted to the compromises of your home? This isn't to inspire a sudden malcontent attitude towards your living arrangements, however satisfied or not you already are. It is to inspire questioning towards awareness that we can do better tomorrow than we have done today.
Return to the question: would you live in this kind of art? What sacrifices would you make for mundane comforts and the simpler beauties of daily life to dwell in the conceptual realms of genius?
That depends. For all of us. We will all have different answers. I would say few of us would suffer sleeping on stone floors to have the opportunity to live in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Much better to visit for a few hours. Same with the Farnsworth House, now a museum. A great place to visit, but....
If art is to be appreciated primarily for creative beauty and emotional response, what emotional responses do we want to have in our homes.
Each of us will have a different reply, of course. Some of us love advanced camping. Some of us have a comfort zone between 71.5 and 72.5 degrees, otherwise are intolerably Too Cold or Too Hot.
The built environments we have today are all compromises of economy, competence and coordination. They (almost) always have been. To achieve a higher level of living, in which we both get to live in high art, as well as mundane art-- in a Farnsworth House that doesn't flood or bake our bones, that inspires our minds as well as satisfies our guts--what do we need to do? What new, or old, approach can we take to have our cake and eat it to?
I think the answer lies in the idea of the Unknown Architect who pursues empathy and respect as foundational qualities of craftsmanship and artistry in the creative process. For that to happen, we must value empathy and respect as a universal good, not a trivial feminine emotion found mostly in California and Sedona.
Currently, our society is trending away from these values, toward the adulation of bullies. They can be impressive to watch while they destroy people and institutions, as the show satisfies our inner anger, hurt, and impotence. But destruction, well, only has a positive value when it is creative, which is to say the first step in making room for for something better -- which is to say that destruction is only valuable when it is empathetic, and respectful, in a conscious process toward a better future.
We can live in our art, I think, when we learn to create art that we want to live in.
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