Is the world any less real when we imagine it with our eyes closed? Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash
What does the color blue look like when your eyes are closed? How does the wind sound when you dive underwater? What words fill your memory when you recall your first kiss?
Almost a century ago, the great American photographer Alfred Stieglitz made a series of photographs. He called them “Equivalents“. For the uninitiated they don’t look like much. They show wisps of cloud shot in black-and-white, soft focus, no context. The purpose of the series, he said, was to depict intangible aspects of the world that were essentially equivalent to any other deeply felt artistic expression. Music was equivalent to sculpture, which was in itself equivalent to poetry, which was in itself equivalent to the photographs that Stieglitz was trying to capture. He even named an early series of these photographs in a way to convey this philosophical relationship: Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs. Later he would continue this theme with a series he called Songs of the Sky.
Now in our self-consciously technological, capriciously digital, media saturated days, the deeper question continues to captivate: is there one form of creative expression that genuinely rises above all others? Are there creative enterprises that have greater value than others, or is everything equivalent to everything else? Does my poem outweigh your selfie, and honestly, who cares in the first place?
Ancient cave paintings transmit human narrative over millennia in ways that words might never have endured. Music disappears the moment it’s springs to life, regardless of how well it may be recorded on paper or preserved through electromagnetic recordings. Dance beguiles those determined to preserve its spirit, even as its visceral nature literally moves us to feel its message. Words, arguably, have the value and virtue of being spoken over and over, narrative time capsules of a sort, but that’s hardly the same thing as a winning case for creative supremacy, especially considering how words are notorious for being re-interpreted.
We’re playing a fool’s game. None of these outweigh the others, but that doesn’t mean that every creative person should be equally facile with all arts and crafts. There’s no argument that qualitative differences separate some singers and painters from others. There are arguments, however, about where those differences reside. Ask any classical music aficionado to comment qualitatively about Nirvana’s Come as You Are, and you’ll likely find yourself in a short, terse conversation. The distance between disparate styles of music may simply be too great for each to appreciate. I generally not a grunge-y aficionado, but okay, Come as You Are has a groovy hook that makes me grin. It’s adolescent, sure, but adolescent with a smart hook. The challenge is not about whether Nirvana supersedes Mendelssohn. The challenge is to ask better questions of how and why creative work matters at all. There may be legitimate arguments about why one has more merit than another. I find that a brief, hooky, teenaged cri de coeur doesn’t sustain me as much as something less improvisational (or noisy), but again, the reasons as to why frame the conversation we should be having. Mere declarations about one being better than the other abrogate critical thinking, which in my mind means an express route to abrogating people we might not immediately understand, and these days that’s something we should seriously strive to change.
Stieglitz was on to something profound with his precious wisps of cloud. Through those experimental images and others designed simply to compel us to ponder, we’re left to consider authentic meliorism based on honest dialogue. It’s one thing to appreciate art by itself. It’s another thing to appreciate art in the context of larger culture. A culture capable of critical qualitative considerations is far more tolerant than a culture that can only differentiate ideas by placing them in arbitrary, hierarchical order.