Common Viewer

Saturday night and I'm watching the formidable John Updike (wondering, how many things are younger than John Updike?) on C-Span talk about the colonial New England painter, John Singleton Copley. Updike describes Copley shortly before the Revolution in romantic longing for what he imagines to be the bold and free painting of England, and cites a letter in which Copley complains that his new world compatriots consider painting to be as useful a craft as say, carpentry or shoe-making, but not to be, as Copley believed, one of the noblest pursuits. My first thought was, is painting even as useful a craft as carpentry or shoe-making? Or as useful a field as say, biochemistry or mechanical engineering? (Not craftsman, but autoCADsman). Maybe that's a slightly ridiculous question. And "useful" is a tricky word here. But as someone who cares about painting, and also as someone who asks myself fairly regularly, "why care about painting?" it's interesting to consider Copley's complaint. What is so noble about making art?

What kind of audience for painting existed in the pre-Revolutionary colonies? I'm not sure. (I'm also not sure what kind of audience Copley had in militant Boston as a pro- English Tory sympathizer.) It does make a certain amount of sense, though, to believe that art in general held a similar position that it does now—as something somewhat esoteric and something very, very important within an extremely small niche of people.

In a small book I read recently, Anne Fadiman talks about The Common Reader, and quotes Virginia Woolf, who writes, "The common reader… reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing." Art certainly commands a following, and certainly has an audience that is not scholarly, an audience that looks at art because it's pleasurable. But I'm not sure to what extent there can be a common viewer under the definition Woolf lays out for the common reader. This is in part because art is simply not engaged as readily and as easily as a book. To see art usually means going to the museum, or to a gallery, or looking at reproductions in print or online. Books are everywhere, and collecting them is not necessarily for a select few.

Still, I very much like the idea of a common viewer in the terms Woolf lays out for reading. And this idea of the reader gleaning different pieces to create some kind of whole makes a lot of sense in my formulation of approaching text, but also art, and in my formulation of learning in general.


Henry