Theory and Practice

The stepfather of Netochka Nezvanova, the eponymous heroine of Dostoevsky’s unfinished novel, is a self-taught violinist and minor celebrity in his provincial hometown. A model of artistic obsession, Efimov believes himself to be the greatest violinist alive. Until, that is, a “real” musician, educated at the conservatory and famous across the world, comes down from Moscow. Efimov attends the concert, is crushed, never touches the instrument again, and descends into alcoholism and madness. The moral seems clear: to make real art requires education, technique, and a deep understanding of the theoretical principles underpinning the form. To think otherwise—to believe that your untutored scraping can compete with a trained professional, however many thousands of hours you commit to it—is a risible self-delusion.

Reflecting on this story, the narrator of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015) reads it differently. Drawing on his own experience as a young poet who was brutally cut down by the “great critic” leading a writing workshop (“you need to learn to walk before you can run”), he proposes that it was the conservatory-trained musician who was the imposter. Where he played “an art that followed the rules, the centuries-old canons” that anyone could appreciate, Efimov was “too great and too new and too out of nowhere to be truly understood,” making music that could only be perceived as a “boundless light.”1

So who is the fraud and who is the “real” artist in this story? The academic technician or the autodidact madman? The musician who learns the rules and applies them, or he who invents them in the doing? These questions beg others. Should a work be constructed out of abstract principles or born of the maelstrom of feeling? Are you a follower of Apollo or Dionysus? Should art be expressive of order or disrupt the status quo? Come from the center or periphery? Or, to put it in the terms of this month’s guiding principle: theory or practice?2

These are not necessarily binary choices, of course. That an artist has been educated does not mean that they are not also inspired; that they are schooled in traditions does not prevent them from breaking them, and so on. Theory—in the general sense of a systematized body of knowledge organized according to a set of internally coherent logics—is not entirely the preserve of those centers in which the most powerful academies, universities, and conservatories are based (for all the historical claims to the contrary). To make art in an indigenous tradition, for example, is not to work “outside” of theory but within a different set of rules and validating structures. The image of the famous musician coming down from the metropolis to enlighten a backward populace and humiliate their native exponents of the form has uncomfortable resonances in the present, and so reflecting on these questions might help to crystallize some of the most pressing concerns in our increasingly divided culture.

In the context of this publication, we might ask where the critic stands in all this. If the art historian is, almost by definition, the steward and upholder of canonical traditions, then perhaps the critic—an amateur, more partial and political—might be more sympathetic to Efimov’s genius. Or is the critic, whether or not he or she is “great,” always bound to be the police officer of the official culture as painted by Cărtărescu? There are many different critics, might be the answer, with as many different positions, and it is the responsibility of a publication such as this to broadcast them. This month’s program foregrounds exhibitions—from architecture festivals to animal rights, from the economic and cultural legacies of the plantation to the daily lives of immigrant families in major western capitals—that play on the tension between theory and practice, mind and body, ideal and action.