What Makes Art: The Subconscious, The Reactionary, or The Forster Order? It is mid-afternoon on a Saturday at the Highline: a trajectory of abandoned railroad tracks the city of New York converted into a public park. The banks of the park are full of plants and sculptures, and street art is scattered within and around all of the Highline. Tucked into a gravel bed, beneath the shade of a green sapling, sits an upright rectangle. About five feet tall and two feet wide, the face of the rectangle is a dull mauve color, and at the center of the rectangle rests a bean-shaped oblong, jutting out like a flaccid balloon. It’s a fetus, one may think, or a bladder...but what is the point of the piece? The exact purpose of the art piece, the meaning or explanation is not written there plainly. To understand a piece of art like this, one must engage in their own interpretation. Some people appreciate art because they consider it beautiful; some consider it pointless; some consider art necessary to society, and many refrain from further evaluation of art. In his essay “Art for Art’s Sake,” E.M. Forster explores precisely what this essay title proclaims. Forster acknowledges his argument is an “unpopular” one, but strives to ratify some misconceptions about art for art’s sake.
In my initial reading of the essay I am not exempt from resisting the idea of art for art’s sake. Immediately, the notion seems to say that art can have no effect on society, and be appreciated nonetheless. I would like to believe, as a green and optimistic young artist, that art should and does have a purpose in society, and Forster’s support of art for art’s sake seems frivolous and occasionally slightly pretentious. To explain why art is in fact eternal, according to Forster, he writes that art has “internal order,” a unique quality that allows the significance of an art piece to last even as time goes on. By the logic of this argument, the pink, rectangular, fetus-rearing sculpture at the Highline could be looked at 2,000 years in the future and maintain relevancy to any potential viewer. On a basic theoretical level, this seems true, but artists and viewers change over time. As Tony Kushner explains in his essay, “Some Questions About Tolerance”: an artist’s views will “find expression in the work he or she creates” (Kushner 118) because artists respond to the world around them with their art. The social, political, scientific, and other miscellaneous changes that society goes through, change the way artists make art, and the way viewers perceive art and the world. Therefore, the order that art gives the world seems much more tied up in society than Forster alludes in his essay.
To support his claim, Forster dispenses how a number of major facets of human life, i.e., politics, science, religion, attempt and fail to give the eternal order to the world that art gives. In Forster’s argument, art is successful in transcending time and change because the order is “evolved from within,” which suggests art may be seen as a microcosm of life that creates its own order. Unlike order from art, Forster describes the orders sought by science and politics, for example, are “pressed into shape from outside,” (Forster 12) which suggests they enforce ideas of order upon the world. Once the inside of that world changes, Forster explains, the external order will collapse. Forster’s idea of art’s unique order seems constituently true; the different orders that Forster offers art and science/politics have may each be legitimate. The means of measuring and comparing the eternalness of order, however, is undeveloped. A reader may want to believe Forster’s argument, but exactly how one can compare the order of disparate facets of life (art, politics) must first be elucidated.
Though Forster does not do this directly, he points out that when change occurs in the world, the order science or politics enforce may collapse. Scientific discovery, Forster writes, may constantly be disproved by a greater discovery which may contradict the prior. For example, the idea that the earth was flat was once considered scientific fact that shaped the way people perceived their world, but later discovery disproved this theory and ruptured the order the theory attempted to give the world. Similarly, the order or stability politics may establish, Forster explains, may also easily crumble were a scientific discovery or a shift in human psychology to change the perception of political order. For example, monarchies ran kingdoms and countries until the perception of power and order changed, and revolution occurred. There seems to be a constant human need to find order or pattern in the world, simply to understand it, which manifest primarily in science, politics and art. Art, according to Forster, provides society with order that can be found nowhere else. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, serves as one of Forster’s examples of art proving eternal order: beyond the historical merit or the dramatic technique of Macbeth, Forster claims the play is “a world of its own...existing in the virtue of its own poetry” (Forster 12), which allows Macbeth to be read and produced again and again. This suggests the play’s “world” has a reality and a gravity that does not enforce any order on the world of the audience, but can reflect that world clandestinely. Macbeth may reveal some aspect of the human condition to us, no matter where in time or space we are, and Forster names this quality of art the “internal order.”
Unfortunately, a possible hole in Forster’s argument about art’s internal order is that the art making and experiencing are inherently subjective processes. Therefore, art’s order is perhaps only less disputable than the order of politics or science. In the realm of theatre, Peter Brook, says something about this subjectivity--between playwright and actor--in his book, The Empty Space. Brook explains the playwright’s careful deliberation of each word in his play: an actor can only attempt to evoke the word’s meaning in performance based on his subjective opinion of them. Brook considers each word in a play not simply a word, but “an end product which beings as an impulse,” (Brook 11) which the actor cannot guarantee to understand when he attempts to inhabit the world of the play. The actor must bring his existence to the imaginary world and, ideally, the two will synthesize together to create a new experience of, for example, Macbeth. On top of that, each audience member will bring their own existence to the production, and a myriad of other experiences will form. Because art employs the subconscious and subjective responses of a person, I may argue perhaps it is only the form of the art that remains concrete, while the intangible experience of art is constantly morphing into someone else’s experience, as it is passed through the hands of artists and audiences and critics and back again. Chaos, then, more than order, seems to live here.
Although it may breed chaos when in regards to art, the subconscious has a golden power which, Mark Doty may argue, gives back that order to a human. In his essay, “Souls On Ice,” Doty is struck by the sight of a black mackerel fish. The scales of the fish remind him of other images--soap bubbles, stained glass--which eventually lead him to a greater metaphor about collectivity vs. individuality in the world. To reach this conclusion, Doty’s mind has to engage in the abstract nature of discovery. He describes personal experiences and subconscious feelings that had to surface and mingle with his witness of the world in order for Doty to realize his final metaphor. In his conclusion, Doty notes, “our explanations [of the world] will fail, but it is our human work to make them” (Doty 40) because they bring us back to the “collectivity” of the world. The conclusion his metaphor unearthed for Doty is that we all exist so briefly in the “streaming school of humanity” that he finds more significance in collective humanity than in each individual experience. His metaphor brings the author a distinct meaning or order to his life on a different pathway than Forster describes the order art brings, but they are not dissimilar. Perhaps the internal order Forster writes that art possesses originates from the fact that art comes from both the individual and the collective human experience. If we assume art acts the same way Doty’s metaphor does for him, art is an outlet for realizing our collective human experience. Our art, like Doty’s metaphor, may often hold a core truth or revelation that we may not have understood otherwise.
Do not politics and science tug at your mind in a way that also pulls out revelation? What is the difference in the way art does this? Forster’s essay claims the order politics and science bring is external and therefore temporary. Can science not, like art, pull out the nature of being human that connects us all somehow? And does communism, a political system, in theory not also have the “internal harmony” that Forster talks about art having? I’d like to argue that politics, art, and science are much closer than Forster explains them to be in his essay; that “the art” of politics, “the art” of science, and “the art” of anything--cooking--really, have the same internal order that art does. I would like to suggest that science and politics have internal order only until they are applied to the world. Forster points out in his essay that when science “seeks to apply, rather than discover,” humans come up with things like the internal combustion engine, and the A-bomb, and so on in a list of discoveries that become horrifying destructors of our universe. The science behind the products however, is still intact and true despite where or who you are in that universe. Similarly, I would suggest that when politics are applied or enforced upon the world they fail to hold themselves up, because the politics will not agree with every part of society once they are put into concrete terms. The “art” of the political idea, however, remains intact.
In the same way science and politics lose their order, there are cases where even art, one may think, loses it’s internal order. Art may evoke emotion, create connection, and incite discovery, when it is reflective of the world and ourselves, but when art is applied to a cause, things like propaganda art may surface, which has potential to harm and brainwash a people. The internal order in this forceful kind of art seems less universal, as it may attempt to enforce order externally. I have also encountered art, however, that says little to nothing at all. And this is no better. Some art holds such vapid and infantile meanings, or relies so heavily on the form and spectacle of the art that I question, perhaps art should strive to have a practical impact on society, at risk of losing it’s eternal quality. To return to Tony Kushner’s claim in his essay, “Some Questions About Tolerance,” Kushner writes how art must reflect culture, and how “the artist’s desires for society and social change...will find expression in the work he or she creates” (Kushner 118) by default. This seems to be more of Kushner’s personal belief, and/or a call to action for artists to do something impactful with their art, but perhaps this call is an important one, particularly in this turbulent social era where some revolution seems inevitable. Doty explained to his readers in “Souls On Ice” how metaphor (and, likewise, art) has the potential to bring us to Doty’s “collectivity” of the human race, to unify people so we can mobilise collective change. A dichotomy is formed between art that says little about society (the term “fluffy” art would fall under this category,) and art that attempts to make tangible change in society. Art with little to say risks art becoming a wasteful and indulgent pastime of those who can afford it, and art with a direct challenge to society risks becoming a tool of propaganda, whether the message is reactionary or institutionalized.
These revelational effects art has on humans seem a more compelling reason to appreciate art, than for Forster’s idea of art’s internal order. Additionally, it is unclear whether the internal and eternal order of art is really unique to art, or if it is just more common. There seem to be too many examples of art greatly impacting the human and society, for Forster’s idea of art for art’s sake to be vital. Perhaps it is true, but Forster’s essay neglects a significant part of where art comes from: the world around us. The context of an artistic creation seems almost inextricable from the piece of art itself, if we accept the notion that art is the artist’s direct response to some fragment of the world (Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Mark Doty’s mackerel metaphor, etc. were the artists’ response to some fragment of their world.) True; personal interpretation of the piece of art alone can be evocative, but the conception of the art was rooted in some part of the human experience, and that is what makes an audience’s interpretation evocative. That cannot be forgotten. Forster’s argument of art for art’s sake is an unpopular stance, and I commend him for he supports his claims well. Many of the ideas in his essay present interesting ways of thinking about and perceiving art. Despite Forster’s rationales for art for art’s sake, there seem to be significantly more profound reasons to appreciate art.

Works Cited
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Atheneum: Penguin Books, 1984. Print.
Doty, Mark. “Souls On Ice.” Writing the Essay: Art in the World, The World Through
Art. Ed. Benjamin Stewart, Darlene Forrest, Randy Martin. New York: McGraw Hill
Education, 2013. 37-40. Print.
Forster, E.M.. “Art for Art’s Sake.” Writing the Essay: Art in the World, The World Through Art.
Ed. Benjamin Stewart, Darlene Forrest, Randy Martin. New York: McGraw Hill
Education, 2013. 11-16. Print.
Kushner, Tony. “Some Questions About Tolerance.” Writing the Essay: Art in the World, The
World Through Art. Ed. Benjamin Stewart, Darlene Forrest, Randy Martin. New York: McGraw Hill Education, 2013. 117-120. Print.