In the Eye--or the Mind--of the Beholder : Art: Alice Walker’s criticism of the Robert Graham art echoes the small-mindedness of her own critics.

Novelist Alice Walker, named a “state treasure,” says she was shocked when she saw the award, a statuette of a nude woman’s torso. She called it an embodiment of society’s acceptance of the mutilation of women. But the only thing mutilated in this episode was respect for art.

Walker initially was not going to accept any award from the state for political reasons. Excerpts from her beautiful, complex and engaging stories caused a furor among religious conservatives when they appeared in a state test of student aptitude; state educators caved and Walker was rightly maddened by the whole affair. The mess was finally resolved in a manner acceptable to Walker, and she agreed to accept the state’s honor on behalf of those who had fought for her work based on its unmistakable merit.

But she who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

“Interpretation,” Susan Sontag wrote, “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” For several decades now, that observation, stretched well beyond art, has been the modus operandi of our political discourse. Christian conservatives join with gay-rights advocates, the NAACP, Islamic fundamentalists and just about anyone else with a grievance against someone in mining every work of art and every public utterance for some mother lode of offense. And given the peevish and testy character of our age, the unavoidable complexity that runs through both art and life provides an endless source of peas to bruise our princess-tender psyches.

The paradox of Walker’s offended sensibilities is breathtaking. The statue was designed by one of the most gifted sculptors of our time, Robert Graham. Without getting into the fascinating and complicated beauty of his work--now in a number of Los Angeles public areas and museums worldwide--it should be enough to point out that Graham’s vision and execution are evocative precisely because they are not simple. His works elude easy explanation in exactly the ways that make Walker’s work so brilliant--and so troublesome to those who see art as mere propaganda.

Art is large, and we are too dedicated these days to reducing it. I was appalled when the state first caved in to the religious zealots seeking to remove a passage from Walker’s story “Roselily” from the aptitude test. The excerpt was viewed as promoting unwed motherhood, but that cramped view robbed the passage of its complexity and thus its beauty. Students could agree, disagree or a little of both with the ruminations of a pregnant young woman just before her marriage. The passage provoked thought--exactly the kind of thing that makes for a good essay. Diminishing it to some kind of commercial was an aggressive act of interpretive violence, worthy of the strongest condemnation.

Walker’s reaction to Graham’s statuette was the same kind of reductive aggression. Starting only from her own sensitivities, Walker “read” the statue as a “message” about domination and violence. But the statue contains a message only in the sense that “Roselily” contains a message about pregnancy before marriage or Walker’s great novel “The Color Purple” contains a message about lesbianism. “The Color Purple” speaks to the heart, and no featherheaded translation is needed.

Perhaps, as W.H. Auden said, those to whom evil is done do evil in return. Perhaps Walker is lashing out at other artists because her work has been the subject of so much unfair interpretation. But hyperinterpretation is our chosen mode of artistic suicide these days. When offense is the standard, interpretation works against art with toxic efficiency. Offense is a purely subjective experience, an entirely solipsistic exercise. When it is made to appear objective--when the offense I take is construed to be the offense anyone will take--only the least objectionable art will make it into the public realm. Anyone can be offended by anything. Walker may have felt offense at Graham’s work, but if an artist cannot see how beauty transcends offense, how a work of art has meaning that transcends a meaning, how can we expect anyone else to?

At best, Walker was ungracious in accepting an honor the state bestows on too few genuine artists. At worst, she has given aid and comfort to those seeking to dismantle the greatness of art by turning it into a particularly pernicious branch of advertising, the better to control it through the politics of the marketplace.

If Walker thought the statue was ugly, she could certainly have said so. That subjective standard is the one that applies to art. As long as Walker views Graham’s art as advertising rather than as an aspiration to beauty, she should not complain when non-artists look at her, too, as a propagandist rather than an artist.