What does it mean for the artist & their artwork when we liken their work to others? This is what we call simile, a figure of speech meant to emphasise one present thing with one absent thing.

What are we doing when we use simile in the presence of art? We are definitely doing something that involves a transformation from one thing to another, that cannot be simplified down to relation or emphasis, lucidity or poetics.

In an art education setting it could be said that to refer to another artwork or artist is a way to provide historical examples, precedent & permission for the artist to digest, recycle & move in a new artistic direction, one that has been taken before, but a beaten path lined with trees that, beyond the shade, proffers lush & long grasses to trample anew.

And yet simile is a reification of the present moment, of making something fleeting, like ideas or time or art more “concrete”, as poet Friedrich Schiller put it in a letter to a fellow poet: “I will make my idea more concrete by a simile.”

It is uncanny how metaphor is defined sometimes as suggesting a “likeness” to another thing, while simile, in its coy dissimilarity, hinges on being “like” another thing. Being like a thing in respect to difference, & being or becoming a thing outside of the thing being referenced, is the difference (& sameness) between simile & metaphor, dependency & independence, concrete & air.

Susan Sontag’s book ‘Illness as Metaphor’ (written when she herself was sick) is a critical offensive against the cultural suspicion that illness is a metaphor for repression, lack of passion, moral failings or punishment, what we call “victim blaming” today. In this instance illness is not like repression, but is manifestly ‘repression’ itself. Whereas illness as simile could only result in making illness — something we invariably repress because of its emotional & physical gravity — to something more concrete, something more manageable, something more liveable.

Thing is (if we are speaking of things) metaphor can become more than the thing itself, whereas simile is always less. Simile is a detached exemplar to elucidate an impression of something in the world that lacks reality or lucidity.

Leonard Bernstein — culturally resurrected (as simile or metaphor?) in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro — says that music & poetry want to attain the level of metaphor, not simile. This is nothing new. Since Aristotle’s belittling of art as mere mimesis of reality, the artist’s objective is to make art that both becomes & goes beyond reality, beyond simile, which is not a given.

Simile or metaphor. Is the artist to blame for invoking simile (not metaphor) in their art? Or is the viewer at blame for invoking simile because they cannot deal with metaphor in themselves, or in the case of artists, in metaphor that is not their own, metaphor being the thing & not the thing…

📸Leonard Bernstein as Leonard Bernstein & Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein