Found Art: A Garden For Its Own Sake

"All art is quite useless," Oscar Wilde once wrote. Immanuel Kant thought of taste as disinterested satisfaction and beauty as having no external purpose. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Susan Sontag and doubtless others I haven't heard of elaborated this idea that art is something about which the viewer is emotionally detached. It's not only that art inspires or guarantees detachment in the viewer; he bears some responsibility for his experience: "However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction--so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art--must be detached, restful, contemplative," Sontag wrote in her essay "On style."

Yesterday, The New York Times published an article about another kind of purposeless treasure. "The Good-for-Nothing Garden" portrays a man, James Golden, who raises a garden that is useless by design. "I don’t want it for anything utilitarian at all," he told the Times reporter, Michael Tortorello. Golden considers the purpose of New Jersey garden, called Federal Twist, to be "aesthetic, ornamental, even emotional” and sees gardens as places "to sit in, think about, look at the sky in, live in,'" Tortorello reported. Golden seems to respond to his garden the way great thinkers believe people should respond to art. 

Appreciating things for their own sake is endangered in a world in which more and more aspects of life come with a cost-benefit tag. People make attempts to justify art, but in doing so, they risk undermining it altogether. For example, a recently published study found, to speak very broadly, that reading literature makes people more empathetic. In an NPR story, study coauthor David Corner Kidd is quoted as saying, "We're having a lot of debates right now about the value of the arts, the value of the humanities," and goes on to say that empirical evidence, such as that provided by his study, about the value of the arts is missing from discussions of whether or not to fund them. But looking for the value of art is missing the point. Once you discover how art can be useful and approach it with that mindset, it's no longer art. In the same vein, once a person starts visiting a garden in order to...do anything but "visit a garden," the aesthetic quality is weakened.

A potential retort to the "garden as art" idea is that Golden feels emotions in his garden and is therefore not emotionally detached. Yet to say that art involves emotional detachment doesn't mean that it inspires no feelings; on the contrary, art is known for tapping into our emotions. Emotional detachment means, I think, that the emotions inspired by art are separated from the world outside the artwork. When I listen to music, for example, I feel love...for music. It's a contained emotion. Paintings of nudes viewed as artwork, do not (in theory) inspire desire for sex--something external to the art--the way pornography does. There's also something to be said for a state of contemplation allowing feelings to rise to the surface, ones that may have little to do with the thing contemplated. 

Seeking nature as a place to think and reflect is so common it's cliché. Some poets really do get ideas on walks in the woods. Staring at the ocean is my form of natural contemplation, and it is an aesthetic, emotionally-detached experience. The movement of the waves has nothing to do with me. I don't affect the ocean (in that moment), and it won't react to me. A lobsterman might not be able to see it that way. 

To some extent, beauty is in the mindset of the beholder.

UPDATE: 10/21/13: In the last paragraph of "On style," Sontag addresses the idea of the aesthetic experience outside what's traditionally seen as art: "So many items in our experience which could not be classed as works of art possess some of the qualities of art objects. Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a 'style,' and being both autonomous and exemplary."