There are two ways to be discredited in this world. One is by embracing what has no merit; the other is by failing to embrace what does. In the lineage of culture, the latter has proved far more costly, to individuals and to humanity.
Some circumstances suggest themselves. A Roman soldier, against orders, kills Archimedes. It takes 2,000 years for his successor to show up and pick up on the study of calculus. When Newton does appear, he reads a paper on optics to the Royal Society - is LAUGHED at, and rather than face more ridicule, just sits on the scientific revolution for a generation, until there is a kind of intervention. Lavoisie, who was the the founder of modern quantitative chemistry, is also a tax farmer underneath the Ancien Regime and has his head chopped off with a guillotine. Supposedly a witness in the audience says that the mind severed only took a second and will probably take a century to replace. We’re still waiting!!! We are still waiting for someone to write opera even slightly capable of rivaling Mozart, or achieve timelessness worthy of Vermeer.
Art and artists are especially vulnerable. Some really great ones go largely, sometimes tragically unappreciated in their time. To put a bit of perspective on it - Philosophy, unlike art - has no external modes of validation; it does not need them. It’s business is not elaborating theories or calling for opinion or taste.
Less than any other human intellectual endeavor, philosophy unlike beauty, requires no audience. Luckily for culture, it has sometimes had one, or the scientific method it conceived would not have borne fruit. We would have only a shadow of modern science and technology, and anyone reading this (all two of you) would most likely never have been born.
Philosophy carries onward by force. Art wins its audience largely by seduction. But society has nevertheless been unforgiving of certain refusals to be seduced.
Which returns us to art. And Van Gogh. He is often now appraised one of the most popular artist in history, and placed at the highest tier of art’s pantheon only slightly more than a century after he is ignored to death by curators, collectors, dealers (his brother excepted), and almost all critics. Such a general circumstance is not without precedent, but the massiveness of the error in Van Gogh’s contemporary assessment is sufficient, in society’s estimation, to point to something more than a simple and forgivable mistake: to confirm, instead, something fatally flawed.
Maybe the failure of just appreciation is so awful it discredits the entire art establishment.
Try the following experiment. Tell people that you sent your art to MOMA, or any such place, and they sent it back, and you will hear, almost verbatim and without hesitation, “What do they know?” The unprecedented pluralism of modern art can arguably be traced to the case of Van Gogh’s eviscerating any serious authority the art establishment can claim, top to bottom, then or now, likely irreversibly, once and for all.
Some “mistakes” are so great, they move mountains—reduced to paper mache.
