Chinese Art and Me (One of its Audience Members)

I went to see the second of this year's A.W. Mellon lectures today. This year's series is being given by art historian and all around erudite Scotsman, Craig Clunas of Oxford University.

The topic he has chosen to hold forth on is Chinese Painting and Its Audiences which, as you can imagine, is right over my head. Whereas Dr. Clunas is an authority on art from the Ming period, my insight into their body of work begins and ends with the knowledge that they made vases. That ignorance, however, is the reason I decided to show up to the National Gallery today and last week to get some art facts jammed into my largely recalcitrant head-bone.

Last week's lecture, I hate to say, was all intro. The gist, as well as pretty much the rest of it, was that "Chinese art" as a concept is a blunt term that is applied both unwittingly and wittingly by various audiences of the art that has come out of China. It has been applied perhaps more wittingly (shut up it's probably a word) by the Chinese themselves and tells us something about their relationship to the creation and perception of art.

Today's lecture dealt with how courtly and erudite gentlemen of China past interacted with art of the Ming and shortly post-Ming period. (I could be wrong about the eras because, as I intimated above, I'm about as sharp as a potato when it comes to Asian art of any stripe. A clever, but fairly ignorant potato.)

Anyway, knowing very little has seldom stopped me from forming an opinion that I will gladly come to blows over, so I chose to discount the lecture's main theme and develop my own. While Professor Clunas was suggesting (I think) that the active viewing of art was a form of encouraged self-improvement in China's Ming dynasty and that the meta-paintings (the paintings being perused within the paintings) gave form to a notion of capital-A art peculiar to China at the time, I wanted to know what social and spiritual benefit the appreciation of art was supposed to have at the time.

It seemed to me that the meta-paintings being reviewed by the characters of the paintings tended to have a great deal of correspondence with the paintings in which they appeared. This was most true in the paintings wherein the meta-painting was not fully displayed, but was on a scroll that curved so you could see just a lower portion of the meta-painting's subject. I noticed that often the visible portion of the meta-painting mirrored in subject or at least form the corresponding right or left hand section of the actual painting.

This would make sense if the idea of viewing a painting was to appreciate more ideally the essence of what was being depicted. If art was supposed to bring a truer sense of the natural and sublime, in the same way I understand calligraphy was supposed to refine the thoughts of the calligrapher, then this trope makes a lot of sense. If not, then I'm back to being a dopey art monkey. I wish there were a Q and A after the lectures. Maybe there is and dopey monkeys aren't invited.