Beardsley’s aesthetic theory of art is built on his definition of art. In Art as Aesthetic Production, he proposes the following definition of art: “An artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest.”2 Of particular importance is his emphasis on satisfying the aesthetic interest. When an artist produces something, she aims to not only produce an artwork but also consciously desires and intends to produce an object capable of evoking an aesthetic experience in those who encounter it. When having an aesthetic experience, the one appreciating the work experiences it “independent of any expectation of the use or consumption of those objects that might in turn be dependent upon the possession of the objects.”3 Beardsley explains what it means to have an aesthetic experience this way:
[When we receptively] view, listen to, contemplate, apprehend, watch, read, think about, peruse, and so forth an artwork . . . we find that our experience (including all that we are aware of: perceptions, feelings, emotions, impulses, desires, beliefs, thoughts) is lifted in a certain way that is hard to describe and especially to summarize: it takes on a sense of freedom from concern about matters outside the thing received, an intense effect that is nevertheless detached from practical ends, the exhilarating sense of exercising powers of discovery, integration of the self and its experiences.4
To have such an experience requires us to have an intense experience where the different features or components of an object are unified into a coherent pattern.5 We can have such intense experiences by looking at Seuss’s artwork, especially his oil paintings.
Take Seuss’s painting, Cat Carnival in West Venice,6 for example. This painting figures a humanoid Seussian cat wearing an absurd and elongated hat on its head. The cat, male I presume, also wears a handsome suit as he leads a lady down a red, blue, and grayish-blue flight of stairs. The stairs descend into darkness. The lady is shaped like a petite, porcelain figurine. She wears what appears to be an elegant dress perfect for a carnival in West Venice; it resembles a nineteenth-century dress with a flowing ruffled train. She also wears what appears to be an elaborate, almost-translucent headpiece on her grayish-blue hair. Thick, vibrant lines take up the entire right side of the painting. Once these elements are seen together, an alluring scene emerges before our eyes. As we look at Seuss’s painting, we are transported from our everyday reality to a magical scene. We witness a handsome cat walking a pretty lady down a flight of stairs, perhaps on their way to a carnival in West Venice.
We can now see how Beardsley’s aesthetic theory would explain why Seuss’s Every Girl Should Have a Unicorn would be art. Just like Cat Carnival in West Venice, this painting transports us from our everyday reality into a surreal scene. We are transfixed by the intersecting, curving lines dancing across a dark background. We are surprised by the nondescript, naked girl riding a unicorn in the lower right-hand corner. Almost hiding there, she playfully rides the unicorn as it walks down a green-blue hill.
We can also use Beardsley’s aesthetic theory to see how Seuss’s children’s books are artworks. Take Seuss’s first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. In this book Seuss’s illustrations convey the story line at least as much as the actual text and lets children who can’t read follow along. His illustrations let the readers’ imaginations roam free as they lose themselves in Dr. Seuss’s world. The surreal scenery, the absurd characters, the almost doodlelike, unfinished quality of its characters—all these features lead the reader to imaginatively fill in the gaps; to let their eyes wander around the page and tie everything together in a flowing narrative. This style remained a prominent feature of Seuss’s children’s picture books from the late thirties well into the sixties.
What also makes Seuss’s children’s books artworks is his efficient and economical use of language, language that is understandable to young children. For example, The Cat in the Hat uses only 237 different words to create “a fast-paced, intriguing tale with vivid characterization, eliciting a high degree of reader participation. . . .”7 This efficient and economical use of language is coupled with rhyming couplets, nonsensical words, and a playful arrangement of words. These stylistic features are further coupled with his tendency to ink his strong lines boldly to offset the often unfinished quality of his illustrations. Taken together, these stylistic features were what enabled Seuss to create books that made it easy for children and adults alike to have aesthetic experiences while reading them. Beardsley’s aesthetic definition of art gives us a means of accounting for how Seuss’s style can invoke aesthetic experiences in his readers.
Beardsley’s aesthetic definition of art seems fine since it allows us to explain why Seuss’s paintings and children’s books are artworks. However, his definition of art entails at least two things that many philosophers of art and art critics are not willing to accept. First, some art critics and philosophers of art are not willing to accept that very young children can create art, regardless of how bad it might look, as long as that child creates it spontaneously. Second, many art critics and philosophers of art are not willing to admit that well-done forgeries are artworks in their own right. Yet sometimes forgeries appear to be works of art in their own right. One example of this phenomenon is when Dr. Seuss painted a faux-modernist painting in the mid-fifties. Seuss’s parody of modernist art began when his friend Edward Longstreth, a patron of the La Jolla Museum of Art and a lover of modern art, gave him a condescending lecture about modern art. He decided to trick his friend by concocting a story about a great Mexican modernist named Escarobus. He then told Longstreth that he owned five original Escarobus paintings. Upon hearing that news, Longstreth asked to see one of Seuss’s Escarobus paintings. Since none existed at the time, Seuss had to create them from scratch. So in one night, Seuss created the first original Escarobus using the following method: He “peeled the wood off a soft pencil, scraped the lead lengthwise across art paper, dipped small hunks of bread in the vodka he was drinking, and dragged the soggy bread across the paper. Next he painted [Lady] Godivas on the smudges, bisecting and trisecting them so that it was impossible to tell that they were naked ladies.”8 Longstreth liked the first Escarobus painting so much that he purchased it for $550 and wanted to buy the other four original paintings. Seuss’s first wife had to stop him from playing along with Longstreth and selling him the “remaining” four. I take this incident as evidence that a forgery can be considered a work of art in its own right.
Why Seuss’s Art Is Art: Danto’s Philosophy of Art
Even though many of the consequences of accepting Beardsley’s aesthetic theory are fine, there is a consequence of Beardsley’s aesthetic theory that I think we should reject. That is, his theory would occasionally require us to regard some things that are normally considered artworks as being nonart. Indeed, it sometimes would require us to regard some artworks that are epoch-making artworks as nonart. For example, Michel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) would be an epoch-making artwork that would no longer be considered art if we accepted Beardsley’s aesthetic theory. I think this is a sufficient reason to introduce a second philosophy of art that can account for things like Duchamp’s ready-mades being artworks. So we now turn to Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art.
Danto’s philosophy of art is built on an insight he had in the early sixties; namely, that evoking an aesthetic experience is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for an object to be art. This would allow us to claim that Duchamp’s Fountain is an artwork. He reaches this conclusion by studying the philosophical significance of the pop art movement of the sixties. As Danto attended the exhibit of Andy Warhol’s boxes in New York, he noticed that the Brillo Box Warhol created was visually indistinguishable from the large Brillo boxes used to ship Brillos from the warehouse to the supermarket. Both boxes had attention-grabbing, aesthetically pleasing designs; yet only Warhol’s Brillo Box was considered art.
That fact led Danto to reject the idea that evoking an aesthetic experience is a necess
ary condition for an object to be art. Danto has dedicated most of his philosophical career after the sixties to formulating a philosophical definition of art that would admit that two outwardly indistinguishable objects could have different statuses—one could be considered art whereas the other could not be.
Danto’s insight is the result of his idiosyncratic art history.9 For Danto, art history began in the fifteenth century when some Renaissance art critics claimed that the arts are essentially mimetic activities. That is to say, the goal of the arts is to represent people, events, and things as realistically as possible. The visual arts became the paradigm for the arts because they seemed to represent people, events, and things more realistically than the nonvisual arts. This visual paradigm of artistic excellence is identifiable with the theory of art called representationalism.
Modernism, in terms of artistic representationalism, began in the 1880s when photographs and later movies could depict reality better than any painting in terms of realistic representation. For many artists and art critics, art became a means of representing how artists interpreted reality or expressed a reality that can’t be represented mimetically. Such a concept of art opens the door for many types of nonrepresentationalist art movements (e.g., Dadaism and Cubism).
Until the emergence of pop art in the sixties, the future of art (at least in the United States and those non-U.S. art communities influenced by the New York art scene of the fifties) was abstract expressionism, as practiced by the New York School of painting in the fifties. Representatives of abstract expressionism of this time period included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. It seemed as though abstract expressionism had “defeated” the remaining remnants of realism in painting by the fifties, hence supplanting the over six hundred years of Renaissance paradigms in painting where artworks were evaluated by how well they realistically represented someone or something.
Danto contends that the pop art movement had ended the modern period of the visual arts and hence thwarted the future envisioned by abstract expressionists and modern art theorists such as Clement Greenberg. Moreover, the pop art movement ended art history itself; it did so by teaching people that there is no overarching purpose to art. That movement taught us that the nature of art had nothing to do with better embodying any particular purpose. Of course, this means that no art form or art movement is better than any other. What is left for art and artists after the end of art history is an endless permutation of movements and styles.
When it comes to the philosophy of art, Danto is a historicist and essentialist with respect to the concept of art.10 Danto is confident that there are necessary conditions that, when combined together, are sufficient for an object to be a work of art. Two of these necessary conditions are (1) that an object must have content, or be about something, and (2) the content expressed by that object is embodied using material mediums. Yet, Danto thinks that we have not been able to formulate a definitive list of these necessary conditions due to the historically indexical nature of the arts. For example, pop art as a style of painting was not imaginable for artists living in the thirteenth century. Indeed, according to Danto, the very idea of being an “artist” was not imaginable in the thirteenth century. Yet pop art is a recognized style of painting today because we live in a historical and sociocultural milieu where Cubist paintings are recognized as legitimate artworks.
When we examine Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street from the standpoint of Danto’s historicist and essentialist philosophy of art, we can better appreciate just how important historical and social context is to determining whether (and when) an object can be interpreted to be a work of art. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was originally not recognized as being a legitimate children’s picture book. Twenty-seven publishers rejected the manuscript that eventually became the book during the winter of 1936–1937.11 Many of the characters in this book appeared to be unpolished, in fact almost unfinished; sketches and doodles of mythical childhood creatures playing with frumpy people. It took one of his Dartmouth classmates, Mike McClintock, introducing him to the president of Vanguard Press, James Henle, and an editor of that press who later became its president, Evelyn Shrifte, to find a receptive publisher.12 Once Vanguard Press decided to take a risk and publish Dr. Seuss’s unconventional children’s picture book, some critics acknowledged that Dr. Seuss had written and illustrated a legitimate and worthwhile work. One memorable review of Seuss’s first book shows how it was accepted into the realm of legitimate children’s picture books: “Highly original and entertaining, Dr. Seuss’ picture book partakes of the better qualities of those peculiarly American institutions, the funny papers and the tall tale. It is a masterly interpretation of the mind of a child in the act of creating one of those stories with which children often amuse themselves and bolster up their self-respect.”13
So, until the community of children’s literature writers, critics, and librarians recognized his style of writing and illustrating children’s books as permissible, Seuss was not recognized as a publishable children’s book writer. It probably did not hurt that Seuss’s illustrations resembled impressionist and surrealist paintings that had become legitimate artistic styles in the United States during the decade or so prior to the publication of his first children’s book. It also didn’t hurt that his style integrated elements associated with the cartoons and parodies popular during the twenties and thirties. After all, he began his artistic career as a satirist and cartoonist, beginning with his work for his Dartmouth College humor magazine, the Jack-o-lantern, and later for several magazines including Judge, Life, and Liberty Magazine. It would’ve been natural for him to retain those features of parodies that kept readers’ attention—for example, mocking people by imitating their mannerisms in a humorous fashion. And this style was most prominent in his political cartoons and parodies, especially ones intended to convince people of the foolishness of the U.S. isolationist policies prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and later to promote the U.S. war effort during World War II, published in PM from January 1941 until June 1942.
Yet his artistic style forecloses the possibility that any of his artworks could ever fit the classic model of artworks. That is to say, none of his artworks were truly beautiful.14 Take the hundreds of fictional characters Seuss drew: the Zooks, the Zax, Yertle the Turtle, the Grinch, the Sneetches, Gertrude McFuzz, and so forth. Some of them might have been cute, but none of them were beautiful if what we mean by beauty is either (1) the aesthetic pleasure we experience by appreciating an elegant design or (2) the aesthetic property possessed by an object that evokes disinterested pleasure in us. And even when Seuss sought to draw alluring, beautiful human bodies, for example, the seven naked protagonists in his early book for an adult audience, The Seven Lady Godivas, he was unsuccessful. Apart from the curvatures meant to represent a woman’s breasts and hips, their bodies were as neutered and sexless as any of his nonhuman fictional characters.
Danto’s philosophy of art reminds us that sometimes when someone creates an object determines whether that object can be a work of art. In Seuss’s case, if he had attempted to write his children’s books prior to the thirties, his books probably wouldn’t have been considered art. They would have not lived up to the expectations, say, of middle-class European American parents living in the United States during the 1820s. These parents would have expected children’s stories to teach their children moral lessons. These parents would have expected children’s book authors to be moral tutors to their children, not playful compatriots. In other words, reading children’s stories would have primarily been exercises in moral education.
This approach to writing children’s stories was never Seuss’s approach to writing children’s books, however. When he began writing children’s books, he responded to editors who rejected And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street for lack of a clear moral message by saying to his wife: “What’s wrong with ki
ds having fun reading without being preached at?”15 And even when Seuss wrote polemical books, he privileged exercising children’s imaginations over giving them clear-cut moral lessons.16 And we all should be thankful that in the late thirties there was a publisher willing to flaunt the conventions of American children’s books and bet on a first-time children’s book author who actively protested the bland moralism of American children’s literature.
Nel on Dr. Seuss, the Cultural Critic
Nel’s cultural studies approach is the third and last aesthetic theory I would like to discuss. Unlike Beardsley and Danto, who are philosophers of art, Nel is a scholar of children’s literature and American studies who has written a book-length study on Seuss, Dr. Seuss: American Icon. In that book, Nel incorporates several different analytical methods into his approach, including formalism, historicism, art history, and biographical criticism. After all, Seuss’s artistic career cannot be described exhaustively by any single analytical method. His artistic career is too multifaceted for such a reductionist approach. Imagine describing the artistic career of someone who was, among other things, a satirist, a cartoonist, a documentary filmmaker who won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1948, a script writer for two films and two television programs on art and museums for the Ford Foundation in the forties and fifties, a children’s writer, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 using just one analytical method. Something of his artistic career would be excluded.
We should admit that this section is not meant to explore Dr. Seuss the artist in all his complexity. Rather, this section is meant to introduce how Seuss’s work comes out when we view it using Nel’s cultural criticism approach to aesthetic theory. For our purposes we can limit our application of Nel’s approach to an examination of how Seuss’s concerns about communism, fascism, racism, environmental pollution, and U.S. policies in the Cold War “inspired him to write activist books like Horton Hears a Who!, ‘The Sneetches,’ The Lorax, and The Butter Battle Book.”17 I regard The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book as being the two books where Seuss engaged in cultural criticism most effectively—with The Lorax being a compelling critique of crass U.S. consumerism and its blind desire to maximize profit at all costs,18 and The Butter Battle Book being a thoughtful critique of the Reagan administration’s nuclear deterrence policy.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy Page 31
