As you can see from your comments, people hate it when someone says something they like isn't art. But I think Collinwood makes a very interesting point, interesting enough for me to request a copy of his book from the library.
To say something is "amusement" isn't an insult, any more than saying something is a sandwich or a mammal. As a theater professor who taught courses in dramatic literature, I can tell you that it is darn near impossible to teach a play that falls in the "amusement" category, because it was created to be an experience, not something for later reflection. So a play like, say, Michael Frayn's "Noises Off" is absolutely brilliant, but there isn't much to talk about once you get past "That one moment when the character did this thing was hilarious." And Frayn wrote it to be so -- it's the nature of farce.
Yes - in class I would use the word "entertainment" instead of "amusement" to let students know we don't need to disparage it. I don't know of *anyone* who consumes art-proper with no room at all for entertainment - statistics I have seen indicate that the number of Americans who listen solely to classical music and opera is in the low single digits, and even they would be prone to tuning in to an episode of Morse, if only to bond with a character of similar sentiments.
There is very good entertainment (and bad art). Collingwood wants us to distinguish between what the authors of works are trying to do, and I think that is right. I would also agree that while no one lives by pure art alone, neither should one live by pure entertainment alone, since that is to miss out on what is magnificent in our civilization.
I wish Collingwood had chosen a more neutral term than "art," although I don't know what it would be. I look forward to reading his book when it arrives.
We could discuss border examples forever--is a film like, say, "Do the Right Thing" art or magic?--but I think Colliingwood is broadly helpful in grouping works of art. I doubt anyone would argue that "Snakes on a Plane" is amusement/entertainment, nor that "Hamlet" is art, nor that (I don't know) "The Cradle Will Rock" is magic. Within those categories, there are levels of excellence.
You hint about the return of magic in the form of political works, and some of the frustration some people have is that they consider theater (we'll stick with theater) to exist for amusement/entertainment, and occasionally art, but magic work should be elsewhere.
Thanks for this very thoughtful post. But I fear that I am too stupid to understand the distinction between "art" and "amusement".
Is Beethoven's 9th symphony an example of "art"? Most people would agree. What about a Bach fugue? This is very abstract music, and it doesn't clearly express any identifiable emotion. Does that mean that it's not "art"?
Is there any popular music that satisfies your definition of "art"?
Is *Kind of Blue* "art"? How about "Bitches Brew"? What about "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or "Dark Side of the Moon"? I'm pretty sure that if you asked the people involved in these recording they all would have taken them very seriously, and would have objected to the suggestion that this was mere ephemeral "amusement".
I'm especially puzzled by your suggestion that Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again" is somehow not "art" according to your definition:
"An artist has a different motive, an attempt to express an emotion in a way intelligible to herself."
Do you think that maybe Taylor Swift was doing this when she wrote the song? What do you think Taylor Swift would say about your characterization?
Thank you for this reply - here are a few thoughts...
Bach and Beethoven do express emotion, and it is identifiable through knowledge of their place in the history of music and careful listening and thinking. It is not easy, and is not expressible in words - see the Isadora Duncan quote in my post.
On jazz, and rock and roll: these are two genres that began quite unambiguously as entertainment - they were dance music, and sometimes really good. In the 1950s in jazz, and the late 60s in rock, we see musicians wanting to try something different, but I think you also see a distinction - you raise Sgt. Pepper, but not "Please Please Me" or "Eight Days a Week", because those songs are so clearly meant as nothing more than entertainment.
Is it art? The number of pub conversations about this must now number in the millions. My boring take: maybe. But that doesn't make it necessarily *better*. One writer (Kingsley Amis?) once wrote that he lost interest in jazz when the performers began *literally* turning their backs on their audience. There is great old-school dance band jazz and bad, pretentious, cacophonous contemporary "art"-jazz. As for The Beatles, as a fan since I saw them on Ed Sullivan when I was four years old, and who still has the vinyl discs from my youth, when I want to listen to some Beatles I reach for Rubber Soul or Revolver, maybe Side 2 of Abbey Road, but it must be decades since I put my Sgt. Pepper on the turntable. Does anybody now listen to Tales from Topographic Oceans?
And finally, to Ms. Swift. "We Are Never Ever..." is an entertainment, and I can't see how she would claim otherwise. She is a great entertainer, no doubt. But the media, and academia (!) efforts to present her as something else are just silly. When she writes a lyric "take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die", I think she is self-aware enough to know that Wordsworth was up to something quite different than she is.
Reading your original post and this in-depth reply, it seems to me that you believe that there is "art" and there is "entertainment" but there's not much overlap between the two: once something is determined to be "entertainment" then that immediately precludes the possibility that it could be "art". That's a rather extreme point of view, and it's unfortunate because you have to exclude an awful lot of people that we would like to think were producing "art". Mr. Shakespeare and Herr Mozart are two immediate casualties, and you could throw in lots more people such as Charles Dickens, Joseph Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, pretty much all opera, Jane Austen, etc.
"'We Are Never Ever...' is an entertainment, and I can't see how she would claim otherwise."
I agree with this statement, because it's telling us that you have a limited understanding of the appeal of Taylor Swift. She would be gratified to learn that you think highly of her as an entertainer, but I suspect she would object to the suggestion that she's not expressing any emotions. In fact, a large part of her appeal is that many people feel that she engages with the emotions that they deal with in their own life.
I appreciate your writing; I think the division between "art" and "entertainment" is one that is intuitively appealing and yet really tricky to pin down (perhaps it's enough to say that there are two ways of defining a concept; one by drawing a boundary, the other by identifying representative examples. We can easily think of example of "art" and "entertainment" but drawing a boundary is almost impossible).
I think of Joe Jackson's "The Man Who Wrote Danny Boy" (which calls "Danny Boy" a work of art that will live along with Shakespeare): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RyzO56vCI
If you accept "Danny Boy" as a work of art what about "Fairytale of New York" . . . etc.
Thank you for this! I think there is a category of songs that fit into Collingwood's "magic" category - Loch Lomond, Shenandoah, Danny Boy - which have absolutely beautiful melodies, but where we hear them as something more than pure music: a connection to the past, a belonging to a people
To push on the definitions from a different angle. I was thinking about the Isadora Duncan quote, and one of the things that came to mind was the movie "Sita Sings The Blues" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues
Part of my sense, watching it, was that it existed because there wasn't an easy way to explain in words why the music of Annette Hanshaw was so meaningful to her during a difficult period of her life, so she made a movie to explain it instead.
It's clearly made with an eye toward evoking responses in the audience but, to my impression, it also exists to communicate a series of emotional connections, which couldn't have been easily put into words.
My point in thinking of examples like this is, first, that it's interesting, but second to underline that it is, as you say, "not a problem of classification that has simply eluded us up to now but will one day be sorted out."
The examples are intended to show that the boundaries are ambiguous, even if the classifications make rough conceptual sense.
This comment prompted me to re-read the post and have a better sense of how expansive Collingwoods "magic" category is. I think I disagree that it makes sense to group all folk art as "magic" but I understand why he's doing it.
One of the questions that I have, as I mull it over, is whether it really makes sense to speak of the intention of the artist, rather than the experience of the audience (each way of approaching is solves some problems and introduces others).
If your simplest statement of the categories depends on whether the artist, "is concerned with what he thinks his audience will respond to" or is attempting, "to express an emotion in a way intelligible to herself" there are clear examples of contemporary songs that would fall into the latter category and I doubt that many great artists are completely unaware of or unconcerned about how the audience will respond.
"It is more like, I’ll be going to the bathroom or walking to the kitchen or something, and I’m just humming something and it just kind of rumbles up in me. It comes out and my brain just says, 'Oh, we are doing a record now, let’s think!' It turns on and starts thinking of subject matter. It is a real accidental sort of situation. I’m sure it is more purposeful than I realize. I am kind of closed off once it is hitting. I don’t talk to a lot of people for a while once I’m writing except for Buddy. I’ll get some musical thing in my mind and I can tell him how it goes, and he can play all the notes. "
Take "I Been Around," a wild and otherworldly stomp that arrived in Julie’s brain one night. “I was asleep upstairs, and Buddy was downstairs in the studio,” she recalls. “I got up, walked downstairs, and sang a few notes for him to play on guitar. I sang the whole song in one take, then went back to bed.” She promptly forgot all about it. Buddy tinkered with it a little more that night, then he too forgot about it. “It almost got thrown away,” he says. “I only found it by accident, when I was erasing some old sessions. If it'd been erased, it would have been like it never even existed.” He loved what he found, which he describes as a “spontaneous mess,” like a signal from another world. Julie was less impressed. “I didn’t have any memory of it, and at first I wasn’t about to let it get out! But we played it for some friends and they all liked it. So I just gritted my teeth and let it go.”
Groggy and bedeviled yet utterly spellbinding in its rawness and directness, “I Been Around” became the centerpiece on the fearless In the Throes, an album thorny with desire and blame.
I really like them. I'm not sure about that particular song -- it's fairly strange; I find myself wanting more polish but I also really respect them going with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQOquxf18wM
I wouldn't exactly argue that should be the model for Art in songwriting, but it's very clearly not written as an entertainment, and I think it shows the challenge of defining the category based on the artist's intent.
It's a recording of Rosalie Sorrels singing a song written by Utah Phillips, and it raises some questions about who counts as the artist of a work (given that we're making a judgement about the intention of the artist). Phillips wrote the song when he was young (just out of the army) and never recorded it. Sorrels recorded it at age 75 and, I'd argue, finds a depth of meaning that Utah Phillips wouldn't have been able to when he was young.
It probably falls into the category of "magic" but in this case we're talking about a minute-and-half recording of a contemporary(-ish) song I'm not sure that it makes sense to categorize it as having a ritual significance.
But, to say that it is an entertainment which, "is all about the moment" feels like it ignores the significance of Sorrels choosing to record this song, from her friend of 4 decades, near the end of her life.
I edited a book of aphorisms by my mentor, Walter Darby Bannard, titled Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art (Allworth Press, 2024). One of the aphorisms is "Art is entertainment." He comments, "Entertainment is disparaged as cheap and common, something below art. This is wrong. Art is merely a kind of entertainment that brings us something we value very highly, and it is made for those who are entertained by it. If you are not entertained by art, don’t bother with it."
Darby was an abstract painter, and it's interesting to think about his work as a form of entertainment, given that he was friends with Clement Greenberg and as deep in high modernism as anyone in history. I think he's correct - entertainment can be understood meta-medium for art, not that entertainment always delivers it. Art, then, is a layer of wonder atop entertainment.
As you can see from your comments, people hate it when someone says something they like isn't art. But I think Collinwood makes a very interesting point, interesting enough for me to request a copy of his book from the library.
To say something is "amusement" isn't an insult, any more than saying something is a sandwich or a mammal. As a theater professor who taught courses in dramatic literature, I can tell you that it is darn near impossible to teach a play that falls in the "amusement" category, because it was created to be an experience, not something for later reflection. So a play like, say, Michael Frayn's "Noises Off" is absolutely brilliant, but there isn't much to talk about once you get past "That one moment when the character did this thing was hilarious." And Frayn wrote it to be so -- it's the nature of farce.
It's not an insult to say something is amusement.
Yes - in class I would use the word "entertainment" instead of "amusement" to let students know we don't need to disparage it. I don't know of *anyone* who consumes art-proper with no room at all for entertainment - statistics I have seen indicate that the number of Americans who listen solely to classical music and opera is in the low single digits, and even they would be prone to tuning in to an episode of Morse, if only to bond with a character of similar sentiments.
There is very good entertainment (and bad art). Collingwood wants us to distinguish between what the authors of works are trying to do, and I think that is right. I would also agree that while no one lives by pure art alone, neither should one live by pure entertainment alone, since that is to miss out on what is magnificent in our civilization.
Noises Off is very good entertainment indeed.
I wish Collingwood had chosen a more neutral term than "art," although I don't know what it would be. I look forward to reading his book when it arrives.
We could discuss border examples forever--is a film like, say, "Do the Right Thing" art or magic?--but I think Colliingwood is broadly helpful in grouping works of art. I doubt anyone would argue that "Snakes on a Plane" is amusement/entertainment, nor that "Hamlet" is art, nor that (I don't know) "The Cradle Will Rock" is magic. Within those categories, there are levels of excellence.
You hint about the return of magic in the form of political works, and some of the frustration some people have is that they consider theater (we'll stick with theater) to exist for amusement/entertainment, and occasionally art, but magic work should be elsewhere.
Thanks for this very thoughtful post. But I fear that I am too stupid to understand the distinction between "art" and "amusement".
Is Beethoven's 9th symphony an example of "art"? Most people would agree. What about a Bach fugue? This is very abstract music, and it doesn't clearly express any identifiable emotion. Does that mean that it's not "art"?
Is there any popular music that satisfies your definition of "art"?
Is *Kind of Blue* "art"? How about "Bitches Brew"? What about "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or "Dark Side of the Moon"? I'm pretty sure that if you asked the people involved in these recording they all would have taken them very seriously, and would have objected to the suggestion that this was mere ephemeral "amusement".
I'm especially puzzled by your suggestion that Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again" is somehow not "art" according to your definition:
"An artist has a different motive, an attempt to express an emotion in a way intelligible to herself."
Do you think that maybe Taylor Swift was doing this when she wrote the song? What do you think Taylor Swift would say about your characterization?
Thank you for this reply - here are a few thoughts...
Bach and Beethoven do express emotion, and it is identifiable through knowledge of their place in the history of music and careful listening and thinking. It is not easy, and is not expressible in words - see the Isadora Duncan quote in my post.
On jazz, and rock and roll: these are two genres that began quite unambiguously as entertainment - they were dance music, and sometimes really good. In the 1950s in jazz, and the late 60s in rock, we see musicians wanting to try something different, but I think you also see a distinction - you raise Sgt. Pepper, but not "Please Please Me" or "Eight Days a Week", because those songs are so clearly meant as nothing more than entertainment.
Is it art? The number of pub conversations about this must now number in the millions. My boring take: maybe. But that doesn't make it necessarily *better*. One writer (Kingsley Amis?) once wrote that he lost interest in jazz when the performers began *literally* turning their backs on their audience. There is great old-school dance band jazz and bad, pretentious, cacophonous contemporary "art"-jazz. As for The Beatles, as a fan since I saw them on Ed Sullivan when I was four years old, and who still has the vinyl discs from my youth, when I want to listen to some Beatles I reach for Rubber Soul or Revolver, maybe Side 2 of Abbey Road, but it must be decades since I put my Sgt. Pepper on the turntable. Does anybody now listen to Tales from Topographic Oceans?
And finally, to Ms. Swift. "We Are Never Ever..." is an entertainment, and I can't see how she would claim otherwise. She is a great entertainer, no doubt. But the media, and academia (!) efforts to present her as something else are just silly. When she writes a lyric "take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die", I think she is self-aware enough to know that Wordsworth was up to something quite different than she is.
And thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Reading your original post and this in-depth reply, it seems to me that you believe that there is "art" and there is "entertainment" but there's not much overlap between the two: once something is determined to be "entertainment" then that immediately precludes the possibility that it could be "art". That's a rather extreme point of view, and it's unfortunate because you have to exclude an awful lot of people that we would like to think were producing "art". Mr. Shakespeare and Herr Mozart are two immediate casualties, and you could throw in lots more people such as Charles Dickens, Joseph Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, pretty much all opera, Jane Austen, etc.
"'We Are Never Ever...' is an entertainment, and I can't see how she would claim otherwise."
I agree with this statement, because it's telling us that you have a limited understanding of the appeal of Taylor Swift. She would be gratified to learn that you think highly of her as an entertainer, but I suspect she would object to the suggestion that she's not expressing any emotions. In fact, a large part of her appeal is that many people feel that she engages with the emotions that they deal with in their own life.
I appreciate your writing; I think the division between "art" and "entertainment" is one that is intuitively appealing and yet really tricky to pin down (perhaps it's enough to say that there are two ways of defining a concept; one by drawing a boundary, the other by identifying representative examples. We can easily think of example of "art" and "entertainment" but drawing a boundary is almost impossible).
I think of Joe Jackson's "The Man Who Wrote Danny Boy" (which calls "Danny Boy" a work of art that will live along with Shakespeare): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RyzO56vCI
If you accept "Danny Boy" as a work of art what about "Fairytale of New York" . . . etc.
Thank you for this! I think there is a category of songs that fit into Collingwood's "magic" category - Loch Lomond, Shenandoah, Danny Boy - which have absolutely beautiful melodies, but where we hear them as something more than pure music: a connection to the past, a belonging to a people
To push on the definitions from a different angle. I was thinking about the Isadora Duncan quote, and one of the things that came to mind was the movie "Sita Sings The Blues" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues
Part of my sense, watching it, was that it existed because there wasn't an easy way to explain in words why the music of Annette Hanshaw was so meaningful to her during a difficult period of her life, so she made a movie to explain it instead.
It's clearly made with an eye toward evoking responses in the audience but, to my impression, it also exists to communicate a series of emotional connections, which couldn't have been easily put into words.
My point in thinking of examples like this is, first, that it's interesting, but second to underline that it is, as you say, "not a problem of classification that has simply eluded us up to now but will one day be sorted out."
The examples are intended to show that the boundaries are ambiguous, even if the classifications make rough conceptual sense.
This comment prompted me to re-read the post and have a better sense of how expansive Collingwoods "magic" category is. I think I disagree that it makes sense to group all folk art as "magic" but I understand why he's doing it.
One of the questions that I have, as I mull it over, is whether it really makes sense to speak of the intention of the artist, rather than the experience of the audience (each way of approaching is solves some problems and introduces others).
If your simplest statement of the categories depends on whether the artist, "is concerned with what he thinks his audience will respond to" or is attempting, "to express an emotion in a way intelligible to herself" there are clear examples of contemporary songs that would fall into the latter category and I doubt that many great artists are completely unaware of or unconcerned about how the audience will respond.
But in terms of art as a way of making something internal intelligible to the person Consider Julie Miller's description of her songwriting process here: https://thebluegrasssituation.com/read/buddy-julie-miller-in-the-throes-of-a-joyful-creative-and-life-partnership/
"It is more like, I’ll be going to the bathroom or walking to the kitchen or something, and I’m just humming something and it just kind of rumbles up in me. It comes out and my brain just says, 'Oh, we are doing a record now, let’s think!' It turns on and starts thinking of subject matter. It is a real accidental sort of situation. I’m sure it is more purposeful than I realize. I am kind of closed off once it is hitting. I don’t talk to a lot of people for a while once I’m writing except for Buddy. I’ll get some musical thing in my mind and I can tell him how it goes, and he can play all the notes. "
and: https://www.buddymiller.com/about
Take "I Been Around," a wild and otherworldly stomp that arrived in Julie’s brain one night. “I was asleep upstairs, and Buddy was downstairs in the studio,” she recalls. “I got up, walked downstairs, and sang a few notes for him to play on guitar. I sang the whole song in one take, then went back to bed.” She promptly forgot all about it. Buddy tinkered with it a little more that night, then he too forgot about it. “It almost got thrown away,” he says. “I only found it by accident, when I was erasing some old sessions. If it'd been erased, it would have been like it never even existed.” He loved what he found, which he describes as a “spontaneous mess,” like a signal from another world. Julie was less impressed. “I didn’t have any memory of it, and at first I wasn’t about to let it get out! But we played it for some friends and they all liked it. So I just gritted my teeth and let it go.”
Groggy and bedeviled yet utterly spellbinding in its rawness and directness, “I Been Around” became the centerpiece on the fearless In the Throes, an album thorny with desire and blame.
Thanks for this! I’ll need to listen, I only have their first record (which I really like)
I really like them. I'm not sure about that particular song -- it's fairly strange; I find myself wanting more polish but I also really respect them going with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQOquxf18wM
I wouldn't exactly argue that should be the model for Art in songwriting, but it's very clearly not written as an entertainment, and I think it shows the challenge of defining the category based on the artist's intent.
One more example; one that I was thinking about yesterday: https://substack.com/@earnestnessisunderrated/note/c-85170800
It's a recording of Rosalie Sorrels singing a song written by Utah Phillips, and it raises some questions about who counts as the artist of a work (given that we're making a judgement about the intention of the artist). Phillips wrote the song when he was young (just out of the army) and never recorded it. Sorrels recorded it at age 75 and, I'd argue, finds a depth of meaning that Utah Phillips wouldn't have been able to when he was young.
It probably falls into the category of "magic" but in this case we're talking about a minute-and-half recording of a contemporary(-ish) song I'm not sure that it makes sense to categorize it as having a ritual significance.
But, to say that it is an entertainment which, "is all about the moment" feels like it ignores the significance of Sorrels choosing to record this song, from her friend of 4 decades, near the end of her life.
I edited a book of aphorisms by my mentor, Walter Darby Bannard, titled Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art (Allworth Press, 2024). One of the aphorisms is "Art is entertainment." He comments, "Entertainment is disparaged as cheap and common, something below art. This is wrong. Art is merely a kind of entertainment that brings us something we value very highly, and it is made for those who are entertained by it. If you are not entertained by art, don’t bother with it."
Darby was an abstract painter, and it's interesting to think about his work as a form of entertainment, given that he was friends with Clement Greenberg and as deep in high modernism as anyone in history. I think he's correct - entertainment can be understood meta-medium for art, not that entertainment always delivers it. Art, then, is a layer of wonder atop entertainment.
Thanks for the introduction to Collingwood.