Artist Interview with Professor Jerome Lowenthal

Marina Lee

Can you trace out the shape and function of the subject’s artworld?

Professor Lowenthal’s artworld is many-layered and multi-faceted.  It is characterized by interactions with different institutions, among which venues, conservatories and festivals are especially important to him.  In terms of their roles, shapes, and functions in Professor Lowenthal’s artworld, they can be equated to the multiple hats he wears in his illustrious and long career. 

First and foremost, being a famed and successful concert pianist puts him in touch with many important venues, both domestically and internationally.  His role as a concert artist affords him the opportunities to utilize his talent in various meaningful ways, such as sharing beautiful classical music with the audience and educating the artworld public with new perspectives.  He takes these responsibilities very seriously.  According to him, this role is not just to entertain concertgoers, but also to disseminate important knowledge and messages relevant to specific works.  One interesting example he gave is as follows: when playing the four Schubert Impromptus Op. 90, he added harmonic transitions between the works.  An audience member caught on the unexpectedness of the variation and cried, “That’s not Schubert!”  Professor Lowenthal states, “Now that didn’t bother me, you see, because I felt that he was listening.”  Professor Lowenthal sees his intention as telling the audience a series of stories in which he has his own interpretation of the well-known work.  While the audience member’s reaction was not positive, Professor Lowenthal explained that the member understood his message and had taken it in, thereby triggering the reaction.  Even though Professor Lowenthal does not want his audiences to express hostility, a negative reaction is better than no reaction at all, for a lack of reaction means that the message has failed to reach the audience.  With this interesting anecdote, we can clearly see the artist’s unique way in interacting with the audience by presenting art with his own modern spins, and his desire to engage his audience.

Second, as an art teacher in one of the top conservatories in the world (the Juilliard School), he seeks to transmit and transform tradition.  He hopes, with understanding of the meaning of tradition, that he can create something new.  According to him, his teaching role allows him to take, “on the one hand, a traditional pedagogical point.  And on the other hand, it’s trying to give personal vitality to something which we’ve inherited.” That’s why he said, “I want a student to reproduce exactly what Beethoven has written and make it your own, so that it has a new meaning.” One interesting area about conferring the tradition with personal new meaning can be seen in the choice of pairing together pieces from the traditional canon with less well-known works of a contemporary period in a concert program.  His opinion is that doing so makes the program a more holistic approach to classical music.  In addition, the selective grouping helps dispel the eminent dangers of a canon that is based on a “star system”—star works from star composers. 

Third, his collaborations with fellow concert artists when participating in festivals have allowed him even more opportunities to reach other artists in the music artworld, and this further expands and enriches his creation horizon and process.  As Dickie describes how an artworld is built on the many networks between institutions, Professor Lowenthal acknowledges the importance of working with colleagues and receiving inspiration from them.  He is able to adapt his art to the rules and principles of each institution he interacts with, be it his performer’s, teacher’s or colleague’s artworld.  Professor Lowenthal’s personality and practice stand in sharp contrast to that of an artist such as Yayoi Kusama, who rarely collaborated with other artists, and seemed to be more at odds with tradition than trying to develop it.  In this sense, she is more skeptical and disapproving about tradition and collaboration.  This could be just simply because Professor Lowenthal has a vastly different personality and upbringing from Kusama.  Also, Kusama’s art emphasized a high degree of forward-looking and avant-garde nature.  It is natural that she saw the outside world as at best indifferent and at worst hostile to her avant-garde aesthetic.  When she had to form networks with her friends, protest groups and art curators, she charted that each experience was a struggle: having her trust and hopes won over only for them to be dashed yet again.  Kusama would be a counterexample to Dickie’s theory that art should be institutional, since she expresses deep distrust with established institutions.  (Even at the Venice Biennale, a prestigious art festival, she displayed her dissent through the Narcissus Garden mirror-ball exhibition in which she tried to sell the balls as a gesture mocking the elitism of the art market and challenging the belief that true art ought to be lofty, priceless and out of reach.)

Another important issue related to Dickie’s theory that Professor Lowenthal points out is the idea of the audience.  According to him, to an artist there is always an “imaginary audience” speaking as real, public audiences would.  He states, “We present what we believe in and what we feel, and we hope that the audience will like it.  But there’s nothing wrong with being aware of the taste of the audience.  And of course, this brings up the very subtle question of program-making and how much you want to please the audience, how much you want to educate the audience, or how much you want to annoy the audience.”  He takes similar approaches with critics, citing how he learns to take reviews, favorable or not, in a neutral manner and to keep a distance when befriending a critic who has given a positive review.  As critics are integral to the artworld and gatekeepers to its boundaries, it is imperative for an artist to understand the opinions of a critic when entering the institution and thus artworld shaped by the creed of those critics.  Professor Lowenthal’s viewpoints resonate what Dickie expounds in his Institution Theory of Art.  According to Dickie, within a flexible artworld, institutions are responsible for preserving and transmitting art.  When exploring uncharted terrain in a new artworld, Professor Lowenthal often seeks to understand the reactions of the receiving end in an open-minded way, from student, audience and critic reactions.  He details in the interview memorable interactions with receptive audiences during concert performances.  While their reactions are not always encouraging to his avant-garde approach to interpreting traditional music, their reaction means that they have been listening and, therefore, dialogue has been successfully achieved. 

What is the purpose of art according to the subject?

According to Professor Lowenthal, art itself does not have a purpose.  Instead, the artists have a purpose, as they can agree or disagree with society by creating art that expresses their beliefs.  As he states, “Artists have very different purposes which they use their art for or justify it for, and they can be aesthetic where they can be political, or they can be personal and emotional and so forth.”  Professor Lowenthal further explains the point, “It’s the artist who can do these things, who has a right to do them, who has perhaps even a duty to do them.  But that doesn’t mean the art is.”  However, even with this clear position about the purpose of art, he emphasizes that ultimately, it is the art’s inherent and intrinsic value that will determine its lasting power.  Professor Lowenthal says, “In the art society, it [the art] certainly can have an influence.  You see, art can change its meaning.”

Art itself is neutral, as he elaborates using the example of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  The novel started out as a political satire, but the context evaporated over time and the story came to be known as a classic of children’s literature.  Professor Lowenthal quotes his close friend, the famous composer Frederic Rzewski as having said, “When the political context is gone, it [the art] must then depend on its own merits to survive.”  The artist can only convey a message to a certain extent that an audience is willing to take it in.  This phenomenon brings up the importance of pre-existing knowledge for the audience to understand or reciprocate the artist’s intentions. 

A good example about this point would be the artist who explicitly states that there are political implications to his work, Ai Weiwei.  He works toward overturning the concepts of rules and guidelines established by institutions in a manner directly against Dickie’s theory.  In Ai’s documentary film Never Sorry, the photo for the poster shows him flipping off various monuments around the world.  Without a political context to place the artworks in, though, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and his backpacks-on-the-wall exhibition, his art can be hard to understand.  As his art is geared toward making the audience think rather than pleasuring their artistic senses, Ai leans very firmly on the political background.  His kind of art, known as conceptual art, is an exact counter-reaction to Dickie’s theorem.  Dickie states that a work can only be called art if it has been approved by an institution and an audience with pre-existing knowledge.  A famous example of Ai’s protest-charged work that directly goes against an institution would be his smashing of the Han Dynasty urns.  The symbolism here is double-layered.  First, when Ai smashes the generations-old antique, he is metaphorically telling the story of the suffering his family had to go through in the Cultural Revolution, when all that was considered old was destroyed in the name of a new government and system.  Second, in Ai’s view, the “new” system was not necessarily better as seen in the tragic results of the 2008 earthquake.  His vocal and vehement protests against the government bring out the issues with the new buildings, many of which were cheaply built and thus could not stand up to the disastrous forces of the quake. 

However, Professor Lowenthal’s viewpoint implies that there is a certain limitation to Ai’s art as it can only be understood in its political context.  Since the interview implies Professor Lowenthal’s belief that great art should transcend politics, a work of art that can be appreciated out of a specific sociopolitical context may in this sense be more powerful and long-lasting.  It is just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which can take on so many different interpretations for different periods of time and societies and still be considered an all-time classic.

What kind of society is best for artists and artistic production?

To Professor Lowenthal, a society with the free market is best for the creation of art, but he says that in an ideal situation, an enlightened socialist system may work even better for artists.  In general, he does not take a strong or dichotomous stance on a capitalist, communist or any prevalent social structure, because they all have their pros and cons.  He states, “In the free market, of course, you have private patronage and private patronage has been the miracle of our society.  Private patronage is supported by the government because it’s tax-exempt, and that of course makes a very big difference.  So what I’m saying is there’s this kind of society, there’s that kind of society, there’s another kind of society.  Obviously, certain societies are very bad for art.  And certain societies are very good for art, and I would not want to say that it’s capitalism that’s good; socialism, that’s bad, and aristocracy that’s medium.”  Rather, Professor Lowenthal chooses to substantiate each system example with citations from history, showing the helpful and harmful sides of both.  He does give credit to some societal systems as better than others, but generally gives a fair, rational view.  In his words, “Everything depends on the attitude.  In America, the free market means you don’t do anything unless you make money with it.  And that works against art.  But free market can have a different point of view.  Similar way, the Communist model, which we disapprove of but actually they did a great deal for art which the free market didn’t do, but they controlled it in a very harmful way so there’s no simple way of saying free market or government support is better.”  His conclusion is that most systems are neutral and can be used for both good and evil, and everything depends on the attitude.

He states, “Art goes deeper than left or right, or Marxist or capitalist.”  The approach the government uses depends on existing societal values and views, just as, in Dickie’s theory, the appreciation of art depends on pre-existing knowledge from the audience.  Professor Lowenthal cites the transformation of an out-of-use railway station in Paris into the famed Musee d’Orsay, which has since become one of France’s main attractions, before contrasting that example with a similar station in New York, Pennsylvania Railroad station which was torn down in the name of a quick profit.  Professor Lowenthal explains that the kinds of societies which could arise from differing systems are immense in number because of the different beliefs and perceptions of the people.  He sums it up:  “It depends on each society.  It depends on the people.  It depends on the way it functions.”

What institutions of the artworld does the subject interact with, and how do those institutions affect them?

As mentioned previously, Professor Lowenthal mainly interacts with venues, conservatories, and festivals.  In terms of how these institutions impact him, it can be summarized succinctly that performances in venues propel him to experiment with different programs and interpretations to keep his music young and interesting.  Teaching at conservatories helps sharpen his focus in transmitting and transforming his art, while participating in festivals expands his artistic horizon through exchanging ideas with colleagues and other artists. 

All along, Professor Lowenthal is aware of the power and influence of institutions.  One particularly important way that institutions can affect today’s artists is through the technological progress, and the dominance of social media.  Professor Lowenthal states, “We’re all affected by these things…So, of course, it affects us and it affects my students, which is very much part of my life.  So this is a very important part of an artist life today.”  Indeed, social media impacts the artist’s life today.  Social media influences the artist’s career today more than ever since its birth.  News of a concert can spread quickly through sharing just as articles written by critics can be distributed with the click of a button.  Gradually, social media has since become an institution of its own.  

Whether the quick dispersal of news content can be deemed helpful or harmful is, again, a matter of how it is used.  The ends to which a method is used is a common thread running through Professor Lowenthal’s responses.  He states with an example, “The particular use is TV.  Well, sometimes it produces a lowering of standards.  But other times it can be very ennobling and you know, when I was young, people thought of Hollywood movies as cheap commercialism.  And today we think of that as a great art, which is, in a way, vanished, actually, because, I mean, there are still movies, but there they have a different point of view.  And so, I would say no.  Media does not harm art unless it’s used harmfully.”

The global pandemic today has further accentuated the importance of the functions of social media in sustaining artworlds.  Unfortunately, at the same time, this force has also greatly limited many conventional institutions.  Students have been forced to attend online classes and even have to have their lessons through Zoom.  Festivals have been cancelled or moved online completely.  Here, we can see the limits of conventional institutions.  However, with the help of social media and new technology, the channels are not completely blocked.  The art will still keep traveling and gradually open up the doors for possible new ways in bringing the artists and the audience together, in a virtual rather than a physical manner.  This metamorphosis of the form of institutions is the best concrete example where external changes will force institutions to adjust and the artists to adapt.  In time, it leads to the formation of new institutions.  This setting is one of the most telling examples that corroborates with what Dickie describes in his theory, in that an artworld has to be flexible in order to keep up with the changing standards and principles of institutions.  It is a circular path: the change of institutions will necessarily entail, impact or affect the artist’s choice of what, where, how and for whom they will present.  At the same time, all of the artist’s choices about these important issues will become new input and loop back into the evolution of an institution.  Ai Weiwei’s presentation of his work on social media is a ready example to see.  Even it happened around fifty years ago, Kusama’s choice of using her naked happenings to protest war can be seen another way to challenge the conventional institutions.

For this point, Professor Lowenthal acknowledges the limitations set on concert artists by the pandemic, but also brings the positive aspects to light: “The pandemic has enforced a questioning of a certain kind of privacy now that the business of music has practically ended, for the moment.  So that one can free oneself from the preoccupation over this has to be done, that has to be done.  And I also think that the development of technology, and I say this reluctantly, but we owe a lot to the pandemic, actually.  And I’m sure that the post-pandemic world will be grateful…So in that way, the pandemic, the virus may produce unexpected results artistically, as well as scientifically otherwise.  I just wait for it to end.”  This statement again mirrors one of Dickie’s important idea is that the only constant for institutions is change, and thus the context of artworks will change over time with the institutions they are in.

Jerome Lowenthal. Personal interview. 4 Nov 2020.

Works Cited

Dickie, George.  “The New Institutional Theory of Art” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, 1st ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), pp. 47-54.

Kusama, Yayoi.  Infinity Net:  The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama.  Translated by Ralph McCarthy.  London: Tate Publishing, 2013.

Weiwei, Ai, Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, (2012; New York: United Expressions Media MUSE Film and Television/Sundance Selects, 2012), documentary.

Copyright © 2021 Marina Lee