Week 14, entry one

“Criteria for Negro Art” and “The Negro Artist and Modern Art”

DuBois’ piece, “Criteria for Negro Art,” helps illuminate the unanswered questions by Bearden in “The Negro Artist and Modern Art.” Bearden’s aesthetics do not account for commercialism and his fundamental chain concering social critique (“The artist must be the medium through which humanity expresses itself” (141)) becomes stressed when talking about commercial viability. Bearden writes that the artist ought to channel humanity through his or her art, in some ways this meets DuBois’ criteria that art ought to be a communal artifact channeling the values or aspirations of that community: “Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of back folk to love and enjoy” (DuBois 103). Bearden’s concept of humanity-artist-art only seems to work in a vacuum, in a world without the prejudices DuBois describes in his essay. The wonderful creative process Bearden describes: “…[T]he artist with vision, sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personal,” would likely fade into obscurity because DuBois argues the audience for black artists expect a distinctly stereotypical as opposed to distinctly personal narrative.

Bearden talks at length about the relationship between the theory of art, an aesthetics, and the subsequent development of worthwhile art: “We need some standard of criticism then, not only to stimulate the artist, but also to raise the cultural level of the people. It is well known that the critical writings of men like Herder, Schlegel, Taine, and the system of marxian dialectics, were as important to the development of literature as any writer” (Bearden 140). DuBois’ work seems to reflect the public consciousness Bearden hopes an aesthetics for black art will cultivate when he writes that black artists simply hand over their work to a “white jury” (DuBois 104). The goal, unstated in Bearden’s piece, is that developing an aesthetics empowers a minority voice, which then in turn encourages the production of truly authentic art from minority artists.