Collaboration

Collaboration=Art

Like shovels and sleeping pills, works of art are human artifacts, produced and distributed for a purpose – objects and instruments of intentional action. And like shovels and sleeping pills, some are good, some are not so good – Nicholas Wolterstorff Art in Action T.S. Eliot knew good shovels from bad ones. Like truth for Nietzsche (“truth takes two”), Eliot believed good works of art were produced collaboratively. Bad art came from the Romantic notion that art was produced not particularly for public interaction, but for individual valorization. Critic Jewel Spears Brooker in her examination of the poet and essayist’s “obsession” with understanding the proclivities of art-making performs a close reading of Eliot’s essays and criticism from 1917 to the early sixties, in “Common Ground and Collaboration in T.S. Eliot” in Author-ity and Textuality: Current View of Collaborative Writing. Brooker sets the stage for her thesis paying particular attention to Eliot’s admiration of Dante contained in a 1929 essay; she also examines Eliot’s 1944 essay on Virgil. The essays and her exegesis principally provide an ars poetica of her subject from which Eliot’s over-arching view of art could be discerned. In both Dante and Virgil, Brooker writes, Eliot found the exemplary artist or poet, one, “popular with the general public because [the art] will have spring from a community of taste, a community of ideas.” Once Brooker establishes Eliot’s belief that art was a “harmonious marriage” of originality and collective participation, she advances that it becomes clear why Eliot found modernity’s art lacking. Modernity and its conditions of historical instability failed to provide what Eliot termed, “common ground.” By this term Eliot meant universality; a common language, common mind and culture. The “lamentable metamorphosis in the character of history,” is of utmost importance to understanding not only Eliot’s premise, but also Brooker adds, it is “crucial” to understanding atlength the artist community of his time. But this lamentation of historical crisis, echoed by Brooker, that Eliot decries as foundational to problems of art-making in the early twentieth century is rather vague here. Brooker writes the early twentieth century was in “crisis” and that this fact – axiomatic it appears – is “commonplace.” And yet the charge goes largely unaddressed with specificity – Brooker mentions the works of Jose Ortega y Gasset and his theory of crashing worldviews; there are passing references to the dethronement of this idea or this theory; quotes liberally from Heidegger’s “Between” explanation for epistemological crises and finds Eliot’s main concern with this time as the result of “belief itself,” having died. The plural of anecdote is not data. But the utter decimation of “common ground,” of communal intellectual understanding and wont is a perquisite for launching into Eliot’s diagnosis. “Eliot

required common ground because he thought of art as collaboration, and collaboration is contingent upon common ground.” What remains then is how Eliot formulates good shovels from bad shovels. Great art comes not necessarily from the best and brightest, but from artists “willing and most able to collaborate.” And by collaboration Eliot meant a trifecta of participation – collaboration with audience; collaboration with philosophy and collaboration with other artists.Artists like Marie Lloyd, a music-hall comedienne, and Thomas Middleton, the Jacobean dramatist, provided Eliot with exemplars of collaboration, artists who “avoided gestures which would have attracted attention” to themselves or were “indifferent to personal fame.” And crucial to this operation of the impersonal artist making good art is an “extra-temporal” engagement of present and future publics. Artists must be “compelled” to acquire a historical grounding, a common ground; and, audiences must be encouraged to engage in a dialogical relationship with the artifact before them. Brooker ends her chapter drawing general conclusions from her exegesis to name Eliot’s malaise: “When the members of a culture share no basic intellectual assumptions and no framework for interpreting experience, artists must purge art of ideas and construct their own mental frameworks.” The beast built refers only to itself. Sounds like postmodernism to me.