Bob Dylan – Seeking Mirth and Beauty Substack #9

“She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist she don’t look back”

Kevin Kane
May 31, 2026

Art is a deliberate and fixed expression of a certain sort of human brain activity. Picasso used lines and fields of color and shapes deliberately, to fix various and sundry expressions of his brain’s activity, to convey what he saw and felt to us. So did John James Audubon, Keith Haring and Johannes Vermeer. And many others.

Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp used dancers to make manifest what they were thinking and feeling—and they employed choreographic notation to mark down their dance company’s movements so that those dances could be mounted again.

Betty Crocker and The Barefoot Contessa, and Ms. Julia Childs, who was an artist if ever there was one, used recipes as templates for recreating tastes and textures of food so that we can experience in a fixed and deliberate fashion just what they experienced with the meals they created.

Songwriters use words, melodies, rhythms, performances and recordings to convey emotional narratives or states of mind. Maybe a New York state of mind, for instance. Mozart used musical notation on paper. So did Tommy Dorsey and Philip Glass. John Lennon, Irving Berlin and Jimi Hendrix didn’t read or write musical notation, so they either played the new songs they’d come up with for the rest of the band, or they made demo recordings for the other musicians to listen to—and then made recordings for us that created a fixed expression of what they had in mind. There are many ways of working, but art is always some sort of fixed expression of an activity in the mind.

Art is not a part of the natural world. It is a construct—a human construct, that effectively provides an manmade, artificial interpretation of the real world. Artificial interpretation is not AI. As a conceit, art can only be a creation of the human mind. Consciousness is required—as well as self-awareness—for there to be art.

There are sunsets in the real world; they are real—but there are no actual re-creations or renderings of what a sunset actually is or of what a sunset provokes in us. There are paintings of sunsets and poems about sunsets, but the conception of being beautiful in an array of natural colors or of being art is only in the mind. Art is not found in nature, but rather solely in the endeavors humans go through to express a response, a state of consciousness and emotion. That is to say, art doesn’t recreate natural beauty, art more actually renders in a fixed and deliberate way an activity of the brain.

Until Dylan, most songs were about something. Going back thousands of years, songwriters have looked out into the world and written songs for us about what they saw or experienced. There were songs about false-hearted lovers or about couples breaking up or about trains. There were songs about historical events and songs about teenagers in love and songs about cuckoo birds flying and highwaymen robbing stages and about unfaithful butcher boys and just about everything else under the sun. There is a song that the late singer/songwriter Guy Clark sang that was about homegrown tomatoes. Good song too. They are all songs that gaze outward. Some of those songs may reflect a feeling that’s inside us—but the feeling is about something in the world at large. Bob Dylan did something new and something different.

There were many songs that used events to indicate ideas or interior views before Dylan came along, but none that were so wholeheartedly and unabashedly artistic manifestations of purely interior understandings like desolation, love, foreboding, joy, or justice. There were few songs before Dylan came along that were recognized more wholly by their effect than for the story they told. Maybe Ella Fitzgerald’s abstract-expressionist scat singing, or Louis Armstrong saying with his horn what words couldn’t; maybe they approached the way Dylan worked, but Dylan was the one who hit it square on the head. He was the one who fixed in an articulate and deliberate way an activity purely of the mind, using lyrics, melody and rhythm.

Until the advent of Modernism in art, and Abstract Impressionism, with its stress on feeling or emotional experience rather than physical reality, most paintings and drawings were about something—a starry night or a sunset or a bowl of cherries and apples and nuts or maybe a nobleman’s face. Or a nobleman’s wife’s face in the case of the Mona Lisa.

The paintings and objects that we consider when we think of modern and abstract art are just what they are. They are not about anything. What is a Jackson Pollock or a Barnett Newman painting about? Nothing. What issue, event, or thing does it concern itself with? Not one. Art historian Kirk Varnedoe famously called them “pictures of nothing” in his seminal book by the same title. Modern art or abstract art doesn’t look like anything—it is just color and lines, shape and texture. It is just paint on a canvas. Something to look at or to experience unto itself—and something that is related to nothing else. Modern art can be this, much in the way that clouds can just be clouds—without them having to look like a wooden ship or a rooster.

Clouds can be something that are just good to see and it’s worth our while to stop and take a good look at them once in a while. Or we can stop and smell the roses. That’s time well-spent too. Those things are not art though, because they are neither deliberate nor fixed. Dylan’s songs too, often have that aspect of being objects of a certain beauty that are worth our while—though they are art, being deliberate. Maybe “objects of a certain beauty” is the wrong phrase, because Dylan songs have little to do with beauty. Let us just say they’re objects that are “worth our while”—and they’re art.

In the world of songwriting the change from representational to various degrees of abstraction was more precipitous and abrupt than it was in the art world. And Bob Dylan was largely the agent of that change. He changed the way songs were written and performed, and by doing that, he altered the way that songs are heard. He made the change largely by himself, over the course of about four years, starting in 1965, and he has continued to work with his off-the-charts methods to this day. And while some songwriters have stepped somewhat in that direction, no one has mastered or fulfilled the possibility of abstraction with which he alone unlocked the doors to the tiny square rehearsal rooms down at the Brill Building, over on Tin Pan Alley—opened those doors wide, and then went in, pulled down the curtains, and broke out the windows.

That isn’t to say that every Dylan song since then has been of that sort. Not even most of them. But there are thirty or so songs, of the many hundreds he’s recorded, that are pure impressionism or abstract artistry, and there are parts of many more, and all of them are worthy of our attention.

There is no good explanation needed for Dylan songs. There is no need for further understanding, nor for explication—and there needn’t be a need for understanding or for explication. And that doesn’t mean that Dylan songs are purely abstract in the way that Jackson Pollock’s flung-paint paintings are. Dylan’s songs do have commonplace and definite objects at their core—objects that draw his focus—and direct ours. Sometimes he looks out as a means of looking in. His songs sometimes do relate events in a dramatic and somewhat linear fashion. There are certainly things that happen and there are clearly depicted figures, but the songs are not about the figures or the event that’s at the center of them.

Joey might be, to some extent, about the gangster Joey Gallo, but it might actually be more about dignity. And Dylan’s song “Dignity” might not be about dignity at all. Just like, for all its exquisite detail, “Black Diamond Bay” isn’t at all about a bay, and it is not at all about a tiny man, a Soviet ambassador, or a volcanic island erupting in the Caribbean.

Seeking Mirth and Beauty is the title of a new book of musings about songs and art, centering on the work of Bob Dylan, from which this essay is partly lifted.