Chapter 11

What Makes Great Art or Art and Soul

Although any child, every child, can draw that picture, all results are not equal.

Here’s a third definition for “soul,” according to Webster’s: “emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.”

What makes a work of art great? Soul.

What constitutes soul in a work of art? Here’s the deal according to Vonnegut, speaking here through his character Rabo Karabekian, who is assessing another fictional painter, Dan Gregory:

But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away.

Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments.…

Let me put it yet another way: life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way. Even a picture of a bowl of pears on a checkered tablecloth is liquid, if laid on canvas by the brush of a master. Yes, and by some miracle I was surely never able to achieve as a painter, nor was Dan Gregory, but which was achieved by the best of the Abstract Expressionists, in the paintings which have greatness birth and death are always there.139

Gary Kuehn. Practitioner’s Delight, 1966, steel, fiberglass, and enamel. Collection MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Former Rolf Ricke collection at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Courtesy of the artist.

I mourned the destruction of Dresden because it was only temporarily a Nazi city, and had for centuries been an art treasure belonging to earthlings everywhere. It could have been that again. The same was true of Angkor Wat, which military scientists have demolished more recently for some imagined gain.140

Now, at this writing, it’s Syria’s time to be ravaged of art treasures “belonging to earthlings everywhere.” So it goes.

In Deadeye Dick, while dedicating an arts center, a Reverend Harrell

declared that the most important arts centers a city could have were human beings, not buildings. [He points out a playwright.] “There in the back sits an arts center named ‘Rudy Waltz,’” he said.141