A Disquisition on the Infantilisation of Art Or why your child couldn’t have done that…
It has become, in our debased epoch of instantaneity and aesthetic illiteracy, a weary commonplace to hear the ignoble ejaculation, usually proffered between sips of tepid Chardonnay, “My child could have done that,and he is three, and cannot even feed himself.” To this pronouncement,at once smug, banal, and profoundly jejune,I can only reply with the most strenuous execration.
The phrase itself is the reductio ad absurdum of what the ancients termed homo incultus,the unlettered man, devoid of paideia, bereft of the capacity to discern between the puerile scrawl of a toddler and the deliberate, tectonic gesture of the artist whose hand participates in a tradition stretching back to Apelles and Giotto, to Caravaggio and Kandinsky.¹ That one should mistake apparens facilitas,the appearance of simplicity,for genuine simplicity is symptomatic of a civilisation in thrall to surface phenomena, blind to the depths of intentionality, and unwilling to acknowledge that behind every authentic work of modernist or postmodernist experimentation lies a palimpsest of discipline, negation, and historical dialogue.
To declare that “a child could do it” is, in fact, to unwittingly confess one’s own artistic nescience. A child cannot do it. A child cannot inscribe a line freighted with pathos and irony, with historical resonance and ontological inquiry. The child’s mark, however charming, is a-logical,a mere effusion of motor impulses.² The artist’s mark, by contrast, is logos incarnate: at once apophatic and kataphatic,³ speaking through silence as much as through form, a gesture simultaneously toward Being and beyond Being.
Nor is it accidental that the critic of the “my kid” variety nearly always couches his disdain in terms of alimentary incompetence,“he cannot feed himself.” What curious projection! As though the capacity to wield a spoon were somehow homologous with the capacity to negotiate the abyssal dialectics of colour, space, and negation. It is an argumentum ad culinarium, and thus doubly risible.
The barbarians at the gate imagine themselves defenders of common sense; in truth, they are the very enemies of sense itself. They resemble those Athenians whom Socrates rebuked for their incapacity to distinguish sophistry from wisdom. *Ignorantia artis non est argumentum contra artem.*⁴ To disparage what one does not understand is the oldest, cheapest, and most ignominious form of pseudo-criticism.
One ought rather to approach even the most seemingly infantile abstraction with reverence, or at least humility, recalling Aristotle’s admonition that wonder (thaumazein) is the beginning of philosophy.⁵ The great canvases of modernity are not playground scribbles, but metaphysical laboratories; they are sites wherein Being itself is interrogated with a force unavailable to the literal-minded bourgeois and his anecdotal offspring.
So let us consign this wretched cliché,“My child could have done that”,to the dung-heap of philistine platitudes, along with “It doesn’t even look like anything” and “I could have made that.” For in truth, you could not. And your child, tender though he might be, cannot. The work of art remains what it always has been: an impenetrable mystery, an object of numinous dread, a manifestation of the human spirit struggling against the inertia of the merely given.
Notes
1. Cf. Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), wherein even “natural facility” presupposes years of training.
2. See Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (1971), for the crucial distinction between spontaneous gesture and artistic symbolisation.
3. On the apophatic/kataphatic dialectic, cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology (c. 5th century).
4. Loosely adapted from Cicero’s dictum: Ignorantia iuris non excusat,ignorance of the law excuses not.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.982b: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise.”
About the Author
Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)
Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,
Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.
