Yesterday I revisited a portion of Damon Young’s Distraction, a fifteen-page section called ‘Looking More Closely’ within a chapter on the philosophy of art. This book section examines why ‘many of our encounters with art are duds,’ straddling Marcel Proust’s early flop experience at the Balbec Cathedral, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s equation of art genre with socioeconomic class, and philosopher/poet Friedrich Schiller’s fusing of sensory soaking with intellectual imagination. Young counsels us to employ ’sensitive, imaginative attention to art.’
Some weeks ago I’d joined Melbourne’s unexpected (at least to me) and laudable stampede to see the Dali exhibition in its last days, and yesterday it struck me that at that exhibition I had managed to achieve a fledgling form of looking ‘a little more closely,’ as Damon Young expresses it. I joined the queues snaking through the packed gallery in walking clothes, tired after a day-long outing, so I was physically sated, unwired. Emptying my mind, at least to some extent, enabled me to take what I could from Dali’s dizzyingly eclectic output. At the end, I wasn’t even able to categorise my ‘best pictures’ or even to ‘judge,’ but what I carried away from those shrouded rooms was a fond fascination for the artist, coupled to a desire to both see more (but when will that ever be?) and to learn more (about Dali, about his art). The experience, at the time hardly revolutionary, now seems to me wholly successful.