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On Talent
by Miles Mathis
In countering David Hockney’s
theory of artistic advance as due to lenses, projection, or photography, two
main types of arguments have predominated.
The first argues that the encouragement of raw talent is the central
cause of artistic advance, in any milieu.
In Greece, in the Renaissance, and in the high cultures of Europe before
1900 highly talented individuals were encouraged and paid well to complete
large and difficult projects. In the middle
ages, they weren’t. Large projects were
mainly group projects (such as the building of churches) and the individual was
expected to be more humble. Modern
artists are also not asked to create ambitious works exhibiting large amounts
of raw talent. They would go against
the beliefs of this age.
The second
explanation offered is that artistic advances have always occurred
simultaneously with advances in other areas, especially science. By this argument, the Renaissance was
caused by a broad cultural flowering.
Discoveries or rediscoveries of things like perspective, field depth,
complex composition, and the perfection of the use of linseed oil as a binder
allowed artists to transcend the woodenness of gothic art. Likewise, the Greek Naissance was caused by
cultural factors. What allowed Greek
art to reach levels never before imagined in history was a broad cultural
flowering. Specifically, the advanced
science of the ancient Greeks rubbed off on the artists, and all the various
boats of art and science were floated on this cultural and scientific
tide. And finally, the 19th
century is offered as the latest example: a time when all things cultural were
being perfected. Science was blooming,
as were medicine, industry, populations, etc.
All contributed to the art produced at the time.
In current scholarship, the first argument is seen as rather
facile and reductive. It seems a gross
oversimplification, for one thing. It
also ignores culture, for the most part, and so it goes against the beliefs of
this age that most things are predominately or completely determined by
culture. For this reason, the second
answer is preferred. Those who can see
through Hockney’s theory are more likely to offer some from of argument two as
proof against it. Argument two is much
richer; it allows for much more to be said with very little effort, since
cultural arguments spring to mind five at a time. And it is less egocentric.
It gives credit not to the individual, but to the broadest possible
group—the culture. Finally, it is
current wisdom as well as traditional wisdom.
The Renaissance has always been explained in these terms, from the time
of Vasari to now. Vasari gave more
credit to the individual artists than current scholars would like to give them;
but, subtracting out his flowery praise to Michelangelo and others, it is easy
to find the beginnings of the cultural explanation in the Renaissance
itself.
Despite all this, I am going to argue that the various
artistic advances cannot be logically explained by argument two. Argument one comes much closer to
explaining them. This is because
argument two only has the appearance of richness. In reality, argument two is the more reductive and
simplistic. It richness is only a surface
richness, a plethora of available examples and subjects for discussion. That is, it is rich only because culture is
complex. There is a lot to talk about. You can spin the argument out in a million
different directions. But obviously
this has nothing to do with the truth of the matter. An argument is not to be preferred for its richness, for the
number of things that can be said. An
argument is to be preferred for its consistency. Argument two is inconsistent.
At first glance, argument two is
very seductive. It seems to make sense
because all its assumptions are both true and commonsensical. It is true that artistic advances have often
gone hand in hand with scientific and cultural advances. It is true that there
has been cross-pollination between the various sciences and arts and that
culture certainly affects all things in that culture. It is therefore easy to jump to the conclusion that culture caused
artistic advances. That is to say,
artists in the Renaissance were better because they benefited from a superior
culture, one that taught them perspective, supplied them with good materials,
and so on.
However on closer inspection this conclusion begins to
break down. The conclusion goes far
beyond the assumptions. First of all artistic
advances haven’t always gone hand in hand with scientific and cultural
advances, and the 20th century is the best example. No matter what you think of modern
governments or economic systems, it is undeniable that the 20th
century was the most advanced technologically and medically. It was also the most advanced in terms of
equal opportunity, giving unheard of freedoms to women, children, minorities,
workers, the poor, and many others.
And yet art has deconstructed or self-destructed.
This is not the most telling counterexample, though. A greater problem is encountered when you
look at the time period between the Greek Naissance and the Italian
Renaissance, and attempt to explain the reversion to a naïve technique. We are fairly certain that the Greeks could
paint as well as they sculpted, although no masterpieces by artists such as
Apelles survive. Whether he painted
like Titian or the slightly more naïve Botticelli is not really to the point
here. My belief is that although he could
have painted like Titian if he had wanted or needed to, he purposely chose to
paint in a more stylized manner, even when doing portraits. Reasons behind this belief will be shared
later; for now it is enough to assume that the Greeks had reached a level of
art on a par with the High Renaissance in most ways. If this is true, it becomes difficult to explain the loss of
this ability in the middle ages.
Customs change, but abilities are not lost so easily. I have two reasons for saying so. One is that it is counterintuitive to assume
that a talent for drawing or painting can be part of the human package in one
age, and gone a few hundred years later.
Can the Gothic painters and sculptors really have just forgotten how to
look at the world closely? Could they
have lost the basic ability to notice that things that are farther away look
smaller? Could they have forgotten how
to put things in complex arrangements?
If so, we might imagine that their flower arrangements also became
simple and vertical, that their language became terse and stilted, and that
their dances became short and robotic.
And we must imagine that all these things became true because they were
no longer capable of anything else.
They quite suddenly became stupid; and then, just as suddenly, became
smart again, only because someone rediscovered perspective, dug up some old
statues, and began to read some old books.
The second reason I doubt that abilities can be lost so
easily is that my own experience contradicts it. In using this as a reason I must make a small digression, for you
will ask, “How can personal experience be a counterexample to a movement of
history, or a theory of history?” Quite
easily, actually. Personal experience
is generally not accepted as a serious argument due to the fact that it seems
so feeble next to the experience of culture.
Scientific and cultural knowledge is a compilation and distillation of
the experiences and discoveries of thousands or millions of individuals. It must therefore trump all personal
experience. But this could be true only
if a culture were judging the argument.
In fact, a culture can do no such thing. A culture cannot read one book, make one distinction, or come to
a single conclusion. Only individuals
can do that. And if you look at any
theory of knowledge from the perspective of an individual, you see that
personal experience is actually the most certain knowledge of all. Not for the reasons Descartes gave, or for
any idealistic reasons either (as in the Idealism of Berkeley). Personal experience is the most certain
since it is the only set of facts that any of us has that is verifiable both
internally and externally.
What I mean by that is that each of us gets our information
from three possible sources: 1) Dead people, 2) Living people, 3) Our own
experience. From dead people we get
history, which is always liable to have been polluted by other dead people as
well as by living people. We don’t know
whether to trust old books, and we don’t know whether to trust living
people. So history is potentially
doubly compromised. Dead people can be
lying in the books, and living people can be lying about the books. Likewise, information from living people is
also doubly compromised. Living people,
even if they aren’t outright liars, can be hedging, they can have an agenda,
they can be spinning. And even if they
are completely scrupulous and transparent, they can be badly educated by dead
people (books) and living people (teachers) so that all their information is
useless.
Modern psychologists tell us that our own brains are just as
likely to lie to us as other people are, and logic implies that we ourselves
may be just as poorly educated as anyone else.
And yet I would argue that there is still a degree of transparency in
analyzing ones own thoughts that is unavailable anywhere else. I have never accepted the behaviorists’
claim that subjective experience is the most useless thing of all to science. Other people’s subjective experience
may be useless to me as a scientist, since that experience is not verifiable by
me beyond what they say or do. But my
own experience is verifiable, since I can easily prove a correspondence between
what I say and what is in my head. I
have direct access to both places.
You will say that this direct access is useless to you as
the reader. It is unless it happens to
be the same experience that you have, and you can verify it by looking within
your own mind. In which case it becomes
more certain than anything else can be.
You will have verified my statement by your own internal system, in
which case it will become to you as your own truth. My verification becomes your own verification. This is how real agreement and understanding
is reached in the real world. And it is
why shared experience works as a justifiable standard of truth. [Not fully justified—as in absolutely
certain—but justified as in having good reasons, or as in being preferred to
that which is demonstrably less justified (such as taking someone else’s
word for it)].
Now back to the central thesis of the paper. My personal experience as an artist
contradicts the historical explanation of artistic advances in the Renaissance
and of regression in the middle ages.
It does so because I know that the state of culture had absolutely
nothing to do with my own innate abilities or my progress as an artist. My ontogeny does not recapitulate the
phylogeny. My personal progression does
not verify art history. It flatly
contradicts it. If culture causes, or
even influences, artistic ability, then one would expect that artists in any
age would have to learn art from their culture. If Renaissance artists knew perspective and Gothic artists did
not, then it is because the Renaissance artists were taught perspective. If they had not been taught perspective,
they would have been ignorant of it, like their grandfathers. On the other hand, if knowledge of
perspective is innate, even in some artists, then culture cannot be assumed to
be the cause of artistic advance.
I myself had an innate knowledge of perspective, and I have
proof of this not only in my own mind—as in having a memory of knowing what I
know and having never been taught it—but also in the form of early drawings
that show it incontestably. In my
babybook there is a train that I drew when I was three where the back of the
train gets progressively smaller. It is
dated and my mother has written below it what I said at the time. She asked me why the caboose was
smaller. I said, because it is farther
away. My parents were not artists; we
had no art books in the house. My
parents never talked of perspective and certainly never showed me how to look
at a train, much less a painting. I
have never seen a drawing that either of my parents ever made. I am not sure they can draw anything with
perspective even now, not even a table or a box.
I was drawing portraits by the time I was four. By the time I was six they were
differentiated and recognizable as individuals. By the time I was eight they were precise renderings, simple but
accurate. When asked to explain my abilities, I was straightforward: I simply copied what I saw. There was nothing mysterious about it. In my own mind it was exactly the same skill
as forging a signature, another thing I was proficient at by age 10. I saw a complex line and I copied it,
disregarding whether that line outlined a head or looped into a signature. In second grade I was already known for
being able to reproduce any of several comic strips. Not trace or copy, but memorize and produce on demand, to the
delight of my classmates.
Before I could walk I was copying figures. My mother was working on her PhD in
mathematics during my earliest years, and she would sit at a card table doing
her equations. I would sit under the
table in my diapers and try to stay out of trouble, I suppose. One time she got up to answer the phone or
the door and a pencil and paper fell to the floor. By the time she got back, I had copied her equations in a
wavering baby line. She was horrified
to think that I was some sort of mathematical freak [Discovering that I was an artistic freak was comforting for some
reason—I can only suppose because it could more easily be ignored. A mathematical freak was just far enough
from normalcy to be scary. An artistic
freak was so far outside the experience of my parents that it did not even
register.]
At age 11, I took a two-week summer class at the Garden &
Art Center. This was my first art
class. Even before the class I was
already producing fully shaded drawings, mostly of animals. I made these drawings freehand, either by
copying other drawings or by copying magazine photos. I did not trace, nor did I use sight-size, calipers, rulers, or
any other devices. I could already
blow images up or down at will. I
was able to do this the first time I tried. Of course I could also draw from life, provided my subject sat
still (I did not produce any cougars or deer from life for obvious
reasons).
I learned
nothing of use in the class, my only benefit being the bit of prestige I gained
by being further singled out. My
teacher at the Art Center was mystified by my ability, and she asked me
(privately) if I drew from light to dark or dark to light. I had to think about it. I still have to think about the answer,
since I don’t really do either and never did.
I never had a conscious method.
I certainly didn’t draw from light to dark, since by my way of thinking
in a pencil drawing you only draw the darks.
The lights are what are left over.
But you don’t draw from dark to light either, since you start with the
outline—which is never the darkest dark.
In a nutshell you draw the most important things first, and these
include the outline, the placement of the eyes and mouth and other reference
points (like the belly button or areoles in a nude, or the points of
intersection in a complex design).
Now my answer would be that you start with the midtones and work out
toward both darks and light simultaneously.
But I did not discover this until I began using pastels, where you had a
range of lights as well as a range of darks.
Some may argue that my use of the word “innate” is
imprecise here. It would be just as
easy to claim that I taught myself perspective by noticing, on my own and very
early, very subtle differences in my environment. In this case, the knowledge was not innate, since I was not born
with it. In fact, I agree with this
distinction. I do think that all babies
learn by automatically abstracting out certain features from the totality of
experience. The idea of distance is one
such abstract feature. Some artistic
toddlers go a bit further and notice what we call perspective, a subtler
refinement of distance. However, in
either case my contention is supported by the facts, since whether perspective
is innate or intuited in the first years makes no difference. Culture is not responsible for either innate
ideas or intuited ideas. And, beyond
this, it is obviously quite easy to say that the ability to resolve complex
ideas from experience is innate, or that the ability to intuit (to learn
without being taught) is innate.
All this goes to show that artistic ability may be, and in my
opinion usually is, no function of the culture at all. Critics might retort that my experience
would only be possible in a culture saturated with images. But this doesn’t explain my experience, not
by a long shot. No doubt I was
influenced by printed images from an early age, from Dr. Seuss and Charles
Schultz in my early years to magazine photos in my teens (TV was always beside
the point, since you couldn’t draw from TV images—they were strictly equivalent
to real life moving “images.” It is
impossible to claim that ancient artists would have benefited from TV, since no
artists have ever been short of moving images.) But these images were in no way the cause of my
progression. For one thing, none of my
experiences up to age three could explain my understanding of perspective. Images in toddler books are not much help in
teaching perspective. And besides, the
cultural argument requires that one be explicitly taught perspective, since it
is not something that a person would notice without being taught. Otherwise the Gothic artists would have
picked it up from their toddling experiences.
Beyond that, I was drawing portraits from life before I was
copying images from magazines. I did
not learn to look at people like photographs.
I knew how to look at both people and photographs (and signatures and
comics) more closely than other people did.
It was innate. It was what used
to be called a talent.
One of my best friends has related his experiences, and
they are the same. He never learned any
techniques, never took any art classes, never went to college, never learned
about perspective, sight-size, or anatomy.
Never did dissections, never studied optics. Never read criticism.
Knew nothing about art history.
And yet he could always draw or sculpt anything he wanted to, as far back
as he can remember. He knows some art
history now, and has caught up in many subjects, but all these readings were
after the fact. They could not have caused
his ability, since they postdated it.
He is as lousy at explaining his method as I am, since in his mind he
just copies what he sees. He explains
color mixing this way: “If I want it bluer I add blue, if I want it redder, I
add red.” Hard to argue with that.
It is not a popular method or ingratiating technique to mention
talent, especially ones own. But
someone must broach the subject, and it is best to do so with full
honesty. I believe that my argument
will be convincing to many other artists, since it will correlate with their
own experiences. Drawing and perspective and color mixing and the recognition
of color harmony and composition are all innate abilities. They can all be improved with practice, but
they are there from the beginning, already in advanced form in some
individuals. These individuals do not have
to be taught. Many will admit this, but
few have seen that this is a nail in the coffin of the cultural explanation of
artistic advances in history, and of stylistic differences between ages. In the middle ages, artists didn’t forget
how to look at the world or how to draw.
They just weren’t encouraged to draw, and in the rare cases they were
encouraged to draw, they were encouraged to draw in the way they drew. If a child drew a realistic figure he was
punished, or it was thrown away or lost.
If the child drew an iconic looking figure, he was sent to the monastery
to paint icons. It is obvious what sort
of figures a child would draw under such circumstances, a child who does not
want to spend his life hoeing corn.
By this reasoning, culture cannot cause ambitious
or complex art, it can only prevent it.
Culture has much more power as a negative factor than as a positive
factor. This is not to say that
culture has zero influence as a positive factor. Lorenzo de Medici was certainly a positive factor in the life of
Michelangelo, as were the various Popes.
But they and other people of the age made the various artistic works of
the age possible only by making a place for them, not by some sort of cultural
construction. Michelangelo didn’t have
to go through a long period of schooling where he learned perspective, anatomy,
optics, criticism, composition, and so on.
He was creating advanced works in his teens, before he had read any of
the great books of his time or the various treatises on art or culture or
technique. His culture did not create
him, it simply got out of his way. The
Church had been holding artists back for centuries and in the Renaissance it
simply stopped doing so, in many ways.
Society no longer wanted small flat icons or humble decorations. It wanted grand decorations and large
complex sculptures. The artists were
almost immediately able to produce these works. If it took a few years to perfect the system, it was not to give
artists time to stoke up their genes or to read texts or to go to school, it
was to broaden the studio system enough so that the few with the most talent
were found and added to it.
No doubt there were youngsters in the middle ages with the
innate talents of Raphael or Titian.
There was just no call for such paintings. The talent therefore remained dormant. As soon as there was a call for the talent, it was expressed, for
this is exactly what the Renaissance was, in the first instance. It was not a cultural flowering, it was a call
to talent to awaken. The awakened
talent caused the flowering, not vice versa.
Culture did not create talent, talent created culture. Culture’s only use was to encourage talent;
not, as I have already said, by teaching it or creating it, but only by finding
it and giving it things to do. There is
certainly a give and take here, a sort of hermeneutic spiral, but talent is its
driving force, not culture. Culture
cannot create talent, but talent can create culture. Culture is simply the summation of the outputs of talent.
A skeptic will ask me how to explain the gradual advance from Gothic art to Giotto to Massacio to Verrocchio to Leonardo. According to my theory, why did Giotto not paint like Leonardo or Holbein to start with? If the talent was already there, in latent form, why did it not flower immediately? There are many reasons, but the most basic one is that Giotto was not Leonardo. He was Giotto, working with his own limitations. Barriers are broken down by degrees, and opportunities do not reach everyone in a culture at the same time. It wasn’t that Italy created artistic equal opportunity overnight, by edict or proclamation, sending out invitations to every household in the land to apply for positions. There wasn’t a national search for talent, like dance masters from the Kirov spanning Russia to find the next prima ballerina. At the time of Giotto, the barriers were just beginning to crumble, and Giotto was an insider who benefited. The limitations of his art are therefore a combination of his own limitations and the limitations of the system he was a part of. His successes accelerated the process, so that more interest was generated in art, and more freedom granted to it. More young people considered art as a possible vocation, and more families looked at it that way also. The guilds expanded and so did the markets. This was an invitation to talent. This process played itself out over the next century, until a few of the most talented (mostly male) youths in Italy were drawn into the field. Even then, we have no way of knowing that Leonardo and Michelangelo were the most talented people in Italy. It is possible that even greater talents were wasted in the fields or in the wars or wasted by being not being male.
Leonardo did not stand on the shoulders of giants in the way
that is commonly meant. He did not
somehow internalize the knowledge they had gained over the past century. He did not study Giotto and the others,
zipping through a hundred years of education and progression in just a few
months of study. They made him possible
not by education or example; they made him possible mainly by perfecting a
system in which he could be free to do as he pleased. Verrocchio did little for Leonardo except provide a studio in
which he could be discovered. He
provided him with nothing but a precedent he could immediately surpass.
Why was Leonardo better than Verrocchio? He was better
because he had more talent. He was
always going to be better than Giotto or Masaccio or Verrocchio, no matter the
cultural context, as long as the context was enabling in any way. Leonardo’s culture was no more a cause of
his talent than it was a cause of Verrocchio’s. Italy was encouraging to them both. Verrocchio was just lucky that the system hadn’t been in place
long enough in his youth to have yet found many Leonardos.
Another example is the
technical advance that took place in the Renaissance. Current and traditional wisdom has told us that the perfection of
various oils as binders (and other technical inventions) was partial cause of
the Renaissance, and this is chalked up as another gift of culture. However, it was not culture that discovered
and perfected the use of oils as binders, it was individual artists. The van Eycks made perhaps the greatest
contribution in the use of binding oils.
This implies that great artists will make great art with or without
previously established methods. They
will do what needs to be done in each circumstance, and if a technique is not
already available, they will immediately invent one. Many other artists in the Renaissance had personal recipes that
varied to a very great extent, concerning binders, mediums, grounds, and
supports, as well as the making of brushes.
Some of these have turned out to be less permanent than others, but this
is beyond the question at hand.
The same could be said of Greek painters, who may or may
not have had techniques as useful as those of the Renaissance and
post-Renaissance. We know they were not
permanent, but they may have been as permanent as the most permanent techniques
in history. For example, Titian’s
technique is the most permanent known to us, but it has been tested for only
500 years. Apelles’ paintings may have
lasted 500 years, but they would still have crumbled some time in the first or
second century. All of this is beside
the point, though, since what is being debated is whether the techniques worked
at the time. They obviously did so,
since we still hear of Apelles’ fame.
Likewise with Leonardo. The
Last Supper was a great success (even technically) for a few years at
least, otherwise it would not have been as famous as it was. The technique used was invented for the
specific occasion by Leonardo, therefore it was not a gift of culture. It was a free invention by an
individual.
Fresco painting was also invented by an individual, as was
everything that we know of. Culture can
invent nothing, since culture is an abstraction. Everything in culture came from the mind of some person. Culture is not creative; culture is not even
active. Culture can do nothing. Culture is the name given to a summation of
actions or inventions or ideas that all came from real people. Not people acting as groups, but people
acting as individuals.
A critic will answer, what about votes?—votes are group
actions that have cultural implications.
They are creative and they are active.
Yes, but they are also direct summations and so further prove my
point. Group votes are ultimately
explainable as individual choices. Just
look at the way we get a group vote: we add the votes together. That is the definition of a summation. The total vote count has no content that is
not in the content of each individual vote.
The whole is not greater than the parts. The whole is the parts.
But nature and history are not
democratic. Very little that has been
done in history, and nothing that has been done by nature, are democratic. Art history has never proceeded by vote or
general will. Art history, indeed all
of history, is hierarchical. The
progression of art history has been decided by a few thousand artists among
billions of people in world history.
The movement of art history in the Renaissance was determined only in
small part by culture as a whole, by the input of writers, connoisseurs, Popes,
and princes. It was not determined at
all by the masses. The extent that
non-artists affected art in the Renaissance was limited to their roles as
providers of projects and of encouragement.
By far the greatest determination of the progression of art in the
Renaissance was provided by a handful of artists—Leonardo, Michelangelo,
Raphael, and others. Fueled mostly by
innate abilities and instincts, they led the way and the centuries have
followed. When the centuries have not
followed, it has been due to the innate abilities and instincts of other great
artists, artists who freely invented or synthesized new forms, techniques, compositions,
or subjects.
In my mind, this has always
been self-evident. It is proved by my
own experience, by my readings of history, and by every analyzed idea I have
ever encountered. It has taken me many
years to realize that this is not current or traditional wisdom, that it is not
accepted by the majority of writers or critics, and that it is no longer even
the go-to opinion of the uneducated or naïve.
It is not a majority opinion for a simple reason: it is an opinion that does not benefit the
prejudices of the majority. It is an
undemocratic and unegalitarian opinion.
Its content is that people are not equal and that they do not contribute
equally to specific arenas, like art or science or even history. Not only am I saying that not everyone is
an artist, I am saying that culture as a whole has very little say about
art. Not only are the masses left out
of the equation, but even princes and Popes and writers and critics are left
out of it. The cultural influence on
art, from almost every quarter, is usually negative, the only possible positive
influence being the creation of projects and encouragement.
Of course this says nothing about equal opportunity or
democracy as a principle in government, or about fairness, or about universal
rights. It can very easily be argued
that although nature is not fair in her disbursement of abilities, people
should be fair in their treatment of one another. I am very far from arguing for any type of social Darwinism or
fascism. Although I believe that
hierarchies must and should survive in governance, I do not believe these
hierarchies should be based on class or wealth or sex or race or age. They should be based on the ability to
govern, that is, on the ability to comprehend complex situations, make
impartial judgments, and lead by example.
And equal opportunity is just as logical a first principle in
hierarchies as it is in communes, since it is the primary guarantee that talent
and ability will be found, whether that talent is for governance or for
creating great art.
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