The Arts, Narrative, and Visual Art

 

Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1912), Ask Me No More (1906)

            Do people enjoy the arts or do they appreciate more a story?  For example, consider music; often the cliché is that “music is the universal language” because, well, it sells so much whether it was records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, or currently MP3s.  Everyone likes music! The question is whether all those recordings were music as music or music as songs.  Big difference!  So what does this mean?

            It means that maybe most of those recordings were songs more than they were music.  Yes, I know, songs are lyrics sung in a particular melody; i.e., it’s still “music.”  That’s true, though my point is that people like the tunes, sure, but mainly because of the story behind the tune.  Have I taken a survey?  No, I haven’t done that.  Nonetheless, there’s another way to see behind the belief that “everyone likes music!”

            I’ll use myself as a point of discussion and not because of ego but it’s simply what I tend to like when I listen to music (though I don’t listen much).  And what I’ve noticed over the decades is that what I like contrasts with the majority of people I know and confirmed by simply looking up what sells.

            Okay, so what kinds of music, what genres, do I like the most?  I like jazz, soundtracks, and orchestral music, the latter comprising the last 300 years of western music, and occasionally eastern too (India, Chinese).  But do these sell well?  Nope.  Statista presents data that Stage and Screen (I presume this means "soundtracks") constitute 2.7% of sales, whereas Classical and Jazz each make up about 1% of the sales to the American population.  Granted, it’s an old list from 2018 but I doubt it’s changed much.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/310746/share-music-album-sales-us-genre/

            What does this mean in the visual arts?  I think it’s comparable in that most people want stories in visual art since it’s difficult for them to appreciate shape or color or value contrasts alone.  Similar to orchestral or jazz music, visual compositions without a narrative and intended for display on their own merit will be a challenge to most audiences.  By contrast, I’m sure most people today would prefer Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Ask Me No More (shown above) to any non-representational painting by Kandinsky around the same time.  Thus, if a visual or musical artist presents work that does not include a narrative, then they better be ready for a smaller audience.  That’s neither good nor bad, though it may be sad, but just the reality of the situation in those art forms.