“There are two kinds of taste,” said William James, “the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.” I think it’s safe to say that contemporary American politics is entirely about the emotions of recognition. The GOP is officially the party of entrenched hatreds; the Democrats are trapped in cathectic demonizations. The public, watching the 24-7 cable news has acquired the taste for emotive confirmation and you don’t have to be an artist to know that isn’t going to get you very far.
In the art world emotions of surprise are not prescriptive–that is, they can be spurred in a variety of ways. Sometimes the artist is the enfant terrible, troubling the public nerve (the bourgeoisie) with outrageous pictures–Robert Mapplethorpe comes to mind, but so does Walt Whitman and Baudelaire. While the city elders of Cincinnati fumed about Mapplethorpe, America was starting to take on the AIDS epidemic despite the log-jammed emotions of recognition, the old confirmatory and small minded emotions.
Sometimes the artist simply shows us what was already there but shows it to us in a fresh way. I’ll argue that Theodore Roosevelt did this when he created our national parks; Ansel Adams did it with his photographs; the poet Robert Bly does it in his lovely short poem “Watering the Horse”.
In these times America needs a leader who trusts emotions of surprise rather than the talk radio and poll driven emotions of confirmation. I think President Obama should talk more often to our current poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin. Let’s surprise the nation with boldness, which is what the people are desperately waiting for.
Planet of the Blind 