Seeker After Truth by Idries Shah

Author:Idries Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ISF Publishing
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Confusion of Superficial and Perceptive

Q: The appreciation of art must surely be a higher-perceptive function? When Sufis speak of the secondary self, which is composed mainly of the emotional and the learnt, do they not use the artistic sense to break through that barrier, testifying as it does to images and values far beyond the superficial? Surely everyone is agreed that artistic perception is on a much higher level than lower ones?

A: Theoretically this seems to be true. The Sufis say, however, that what most people take to be art is not art at all, but emotional and conditioned sources of stimuli. This does not mean that there is no real art. It does mean that Sufis hold that even acceptedly aesthetic people have confused learnt and automatic responses with perception.

Q: This sounds very much like a posture to me. After all, how can Sufis establish that art experts are superficial?

A: Sufis do not have to establish it, as it has already been established by the art experts themselves. You will recall (in my Learning How to Learn ) how a man who wanted to get rid of the crowd around Van Gogh’s pictures carved something out of corned beef and mounted it as ‘Van Gogh’s Ear’, and by this stratagem attracted the art-lovers away from the paintings. This was a proof that art lovers, among whom were surely some experts, were more interested in what was in fact corned beef than in what was acceptedly art.

But if you want a further example, there is the one of ‘Sunset over the Adriatic’, exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Indépendants, painted by Boronali. An Austrian collector bought the canvas, after it had received acclaim by the experts as an outstanding example of the Excessivist School. It was then revealed, by Roland Dorgelès and a group of artists, that the picture had been ‘painted’ by a donkey, to whose tail a brush had been tied. ‘Boronali’ was formed by a rearrangement of the letters in the name of Aliboron, the donkey in La Fontaine.

Matisse’s painting, Le Bateau, was hung for 47 days at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, when about 120,000 people saw it without realising that it was upside down.

There are many true stories of this kind, which surely go far enough to establish that artistic appreciation and ‘higher perception’ are not connected in the kind of art which is generally regarded as such. No, what is currently considered to be art does not belong to anything higher than emotion and implanted belief: and this has already been well illustrated, no matter what people may imagine.

I have myself, in a certain artist’s studio, witnessed a crowd of distinguished visitors, including eminent critics, rapturous over a bundle of rags which, as the embarrassed master painter confessed, were the pieces of cloth on which he wiped his brushes, and not works of art at all....

So the conclusion seems to be the very reverse of what you believe. It is possible

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