I have finally started to post my art biography / criticism blog at [link] . My first post is a little too theoretical, perhaps, but they are likely to get more personal and interesting in the future as I go along. I've included my first entry below, if you're curious but don't feel like following the link.

Freud as Poet

I will start out this series of outrageous opinions and intuitions with a confession. I take any sort of pronouncement on the meaning and purposes of art with a grain of salt.

The simple truth is that Art is a cultural product with such a long and diverse history, that anything a person might say about it would either be so general as to be meaningless, or so particular as to be factually incorrect with regard to a compelling number of counterexamples.

For example, an art historian might say that Art shows the evolution of man's attempt to understand the world by representing it symbolically. This isn't particularly earth-shattering (or useful for making distinctions, which after all is the only way that we can test the validity of an assertion) because too many other notable things such as language, mathematics, science, computer programming, and (for that matter) human minds also represent the world symbolically. His thesis is technically true, but much too vague to be of use to the rest of us.

Yet at the same time, our imaginary art historian may very well create an entertaining book which looks at the ways that the techniques of art have developed over the years to better represent the world symbolically to a series of changing cultures. A meaningless theses, if applied in a thoughtful way, may turn out to be the key to a new insight.

Anyone who looks through our libraries and museums with a clear eye will see that our greatest cultural products are the result of fuzzy and wishful thinking. Like a reader who willingly suspends disbelief to enter the world of a great novel, sometimes we have to set aside the strictures of logic in order to experience the textures and internal necessities of art as well as its criticism.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't stand back and refute critical theories that amount to nothing more than destructive tautologies (more about grandstanding theorists who build careers on useless provocation in future posts...but you know who you are....), but it does mean that we can view even the structures of intellectual theories with which we vehemently disagree as cultural products that can be analyzed and appreciated as though they were works of art.

I am going to say that one more time. If we want to, we can even view crazy theories as works of art.

Which brings us to Freud. I am not a Freud scholar, but I have read quite of few of his books in translation. I am not qualified to say anything about Freud. So of course I am one of the people who feels free to mention a fact that seems strikingly clear about Freud's cultural legacy.

I can only truly appreciate the work of Freud when I view his books as creative writing, and judge his ideas based on their literary merit rather than their scientific accuracy.

Clearly, Freud intended his work as medical science, but his works range far beyond clinical examples. His source materials include surveys in the then-emerging science of anthropology, collections of myths, travel accounts, and the musings of armchair philosophers, which he combined into an astonishing array of just-so stories about the origins of the human mind and culture. And his attempts to interpret humor, verbal slips, and dreams--though capable of sparking personal insight among the devotees that follow his techniques--can only be truly appreciated when you think of the techniques as a system of divination, a sort of Victorian elaboration on the I Ching.

Even if his science doesn't survive the advent of the brain scan, his mysticism has already transformed the popular consciousness (if not subconscious) in a way that is comparable to Shakespeare and Homer. In addition, his works are surprisingly well written, and have a place on the bookshelf beside the works of a handful of other philosophers and prophets whom we can no longer believe, but whose works provide a moving vision of humanity that touches us in a way similar to great literature.

In the end, Freud's greatest legacy may not reside in the scientific validity of his theories, but in the poetry of his effect upon our imagination.