The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it’s a quality found in many beautiful things.
Rebecca Solnit from her book Orwell’s Roses.
I would like to hone that a bit and say that integrity, wherever it is experienced, imparts beauty. Further than that, I think that considering the integrity of a work of art can provide us with useful perspectives on the role art performs within culture.
The root of the word denotes a binding of things together. It signifies a structural connection, a reason for their interacting with one another, a reliance upon the whole for this relation of elements.
To be integrated does not simply mean to belong, but rather to be included, involved, accepted.
Parts of a machine which are integral are the ones which cannot be done without. To lose one means that the system ceases to function as intended.
The root of these words speaks to an interconnection that carries with it a special sort of relationship and meaning. It is a binding of things one to another such that the sum becomes greater than the pieces.
Solnit, at another moment, clarifies the meaning of this word by reminding us that the active opposite occurs within the word disintegration, the thorough separation of constitute parts, the ultimate unbinding of a whole unto absolute destruction.
It is within this context that the word Integrity sharpens. It means moral consistency and commitment, not as static badges earned and worn, but a necessary layer of character that emerges through the binding of other elements of living.
Integrity, as a quality, plays out in time like a song. It can be witnessed in action, or identified by the clues it leaves behind.
I want to explore how integrity is related to art in two ways. Or rather, two spectrums of understanding on which art may fall in relationship to integrity
Language is a bit fragile here and certainly isn’t doing me any favors, so let me try and separate these two spectrums out by introducing two terms by which we can bring the matter into focus.
Connectivity and Clarity. By describing these two aspects of a work of art we can talk about the work’s integrity.
Connectivity is a spectrum relating to what the work of art is attempting to do. Does it seek to connect or separate?
My premise here is that works of art act as interpreters, or perhaps mediators, connecting the viewer to a conceptual object. The art seeks to bring the viewer and object into some sort of juxtaposition.
A landscape may seek to bring the viewer into relationship with nature itself, or man’s mastery thereof, of the feeling that the place invokes, or the history attached to the scene and subject matter.
A portrait might seek simply to introduce the viewer to the person who is depicted, though it might also be seeking to put the viewer into relationship with a more abstract concept of power or fame, or the concept of legacy.
Art need not settle on one object, but it will place the viewer into relation with at least one, or else it cannot be thought of as art.
Building connections is one end of the spectrum, but art can also seek to break them. Some of the most powerful and affecting works aim to challenge our preconceptions, our allegiances and our blinders for the way we imagine the world to be.
Identifying what the work is seeking to do, is one way that we can talk about its integrity. Does it seem to build connections, or break them? This is what I mean when I talk about connectivity.
Clarity.
What a work seeks to do is not always in alignment with how the work came to be, or how it is presented to us. Clarity seeks to place a reference on the origin, formulation, or presentation of the work.
Clarity is whether, and in what form, we have a sense of how the work is. Can we trace it back to the original conception or idea, to the cultural moment or theoretical treatise which sparked it? Can we read into it the seed from which it grew? How has it been presented to us? Do we feel that the true intentions of the piece are in alignment with how it claims to exist?
One way to think about clarity is simply visibility into process. Can we read the brush strokes, as in an old master, or can we actually see the work being created, as in a tik-tok behind the scenes studio video?
Another way to think about clarity is to frame it as genuine as opposed to disingenuous. Or, think of it in terms of ends and means.
Clarity can be read on a spectrum, but exists within three general modes: that which is clear, that which is opaque, and that which is misleading.
What is clear can be traced and understood. It is the detailed, journal notes, the process sketches, the studio shots, the iterations, the artist speaking about their work.
What is opaque is a presentation of a finished product which seems to have no history. It is a final image that seems to spring forth fully formed from the ether. It is, at its most extreme form, the AI generated image which cannot be fully explained even by the artist from whose prompts it was derived.
The disingenuous is that which is purposely obscured, or twisted, to appear as something it is not. It is the Banksy which destroys itself, or the carefully crafted videos of smiling people in pharmaceutical commercials.
Integrity is the assessment of these two axes, clarity and connection. Is the work seeking to build connections and sharing with us where it came from? Or is the work seeking to break connections while being fed to us through filtered social media? Or, as it certainly the case with nearly everything we will encounter, does it exist within a more nuanced threading and shading of these two?
To be clear and to build connections is to have high integrity, and to be the opposite is to display low integrity within this framework. It isn’t one aspect or the other which dominates, however.
In a following post I would like to tease out how this framework might be used to evaluate actual works of art. Then, following on that, I would like to dig deeper into the reasons why such a framework might be important for how we continue to talk about art.
Ultimately, what I would like to propose, is a moral lens for discussing art. A way of looking at art while being able to say with shared language whether a work is acting morally or not within the culture.
Dangerous and slippery ground perhaps, but something I feel is ultimately necessary for the next phase of artmaking and cultural health.
Thanks for muddling through with me on this first stab at describing something I am still finding words for. I look forward to hearing thoughts about where I am heading, and what this might mean for how we encounter and think about art.
EDIT: see the post Reading Integrity in Art for ways in which this framework might be applied to a range of works of art, as well as some further examples of the terminology in us.
Wandering Path Arts 