Viewing the Past With Eyes Wide Shut

"Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Charles Murray has historically promulgated racism and profoundly stupid culture war claptrap, but  he has a recent piece for The New Criterion about today's supposed lack of powerful, enduring art that's actually worth grappling with. To be sure, it's essentially an elaborate "get off my lawn" demand. But it is an argument that a great many people likely find compelling, and it is at least responding to actual issues, so it's worth unpacking how wrong it really is.

Murray begins by saying there is a dearth of great art today, meaning the next generation that will create tomorrow's art has nothing to draw on.

The insight that great accomplishment begets more great accomplishment goes back two thousand years to a Roman, Velleius Paterculus, who first analyzed the clustering of genius in Athens and concluded that “genius is fostered by emulation.” In the modern era, that insight has been confirmed in rigorous quantitative studies, and it is one of those social science findings that shouldn’t surprise anyone. If children who have the potential for creating great art are watching a Leonardo da Vinci set the standard, they are more likely to create art like Michelangelo, Dürer, or Raphael did. This is relevant for thinking about the future of American accomplishment in the arts because, as far as I can see, we do not have any great models in the current generation who will produce greatness in the next generation.

Murray lists the exhaustion of forms ("What’s the point of writing a great symphony in the classical style (from the ambitious composer’s point of view), when we already have so many of them?"), and the persistent obscurity of abstract, nonrepresentational, and atonal work among the general public among reasons for concern. Hamlet can only be written once; with hundreds of years of low-hanging artistic and literary fruit having been plucked, artists have to push into ever more esoteric forms in order to break new ground.

The key to innovation, thinks Murray, is technology, which opens up new forms of expression. This is true, though it's largely premised on the idea that nothing of value is being created in the old fields, which the creators and audiences would vehemently dispute. Notably, Murray makes something of an exception for film:

The richest new organizing structure of the twentieth century was the motion picture. It is also the only organizing structure that does not show signs of being filled up. A plausible case can be made that the film industry is still making products that rank somewhere among the all-time best, and there is reason to hope that even better are yet to come.

I suspect this has less to do with film's superiority as an artistic medium or even its relative youth, than with its ease of transmission. Movies require a relatively short investment of time, are promoted across TV and the internet by multi-million dollar ad campaigns, and are easily reproduced and distributed so that they can leave an enormous cultural footprint. The most brilliant work of art will never be canonized if there isn't a mass awareness of it first. Theatre and the fine arts struggle with this, as well as books, a non-visual medium in an image-saturated media environment (book trailers are illustration of this dilemma).

More importantly, technology has lowered the barriers to entry in many creative fields, and paradoxically made it far more difficult for any single person or work to tap into the multiplicity of zeitgeists. This is to say nothing of the replacement of 'high culture''s previous trickle-down significance with popular culture--fifty years on, I think it's safe to say that posterity remembers the Beatles more than it does, say, Phillip Glass.

All of this, it ought be said, is enabled by the moral promiscuity of post-industrial capitalism. The entertainment industry cares for no virtue but profitability. Robert Bork glimpsed this truth when he sighed that "“You almost began to want to put the [Berlin] wall back up,” because of crude American rock music's unimpeded flow into post-Soviet Union Eastern Germany. Murray is not so observant as the already obtuse Bork, but as it turns out, he shares with him a similar reactionary strain.

*

All the discussion of form and medium is actually peripheral to Murray's bigger argument, which stands on much shakier ground. The deeper problems, he thinks, are a nihilistic mindset, characterized by a rejection of God and religion, that has gripped the intelligentsia and now the culture at large. This has led to an absence of the transcendent, of a sense of "the good," that animates great art:

Beauty is not the only transcendental good that the arts require. A coherent sense of the good is also important—perhaps not so much for great music (though I may be wrong about that), but often for great art and almost always for great literature. I do not mean that a great painting has to be beautiful in a saccharine sense or that great novels must be moral fables that could qualify for McGuffey’s Readers. Rather, a painter’s or a novelist’s conception of the meaning of a human life provides the frame within which the artist translates the varieties of human experience into art. The artistic treatment of violence offers an example. In the absence of a conception of the good, the depiction of violence is sensationalism at best—think Sam Peckinpah. When the depiction of violence is taken to extremes, it can have the same soul-corroding effect as pornography. But when it is informed by a conception of the good, the depiction of violence can have great artistic power—think Macbeth. So whereas some great works of art, music, and even literature are not informed by a conception of the good, the translation of this concept to the canvas or the written word is often what separates enduring art from entertainment. Extract its moral vision, and Goya’s The Third of May 1808 becomes a violent cartoon. Extract its moral vision, and Huckleberry Finn becomes Tom Sawyer. 

To generalize my argument regarding the importance of the transcendental goods, I believe that when artists do not have coherent ideals of beauty, their work tends to be sterile; when they do not have coherent ideals of the good, their work tends to be vulgar. Without either beauty or the good, their work tends to be shallow. Artistic accomplishment that is sterile, vulgar, and shallow does not endure.

Murray singles out Peckinpah as an example of sensationalist violence that "can have the same soul-corroding effect as pornography." The Wild Bunch's vision of humanity--summed up in its opening scene of children setting a fire ant colony after a couple scorpions during a preacher's sermon--isn't especially uplifting, but it still has considerable power forty years on. A much more accurate target would be something more tawdry and commercial and disreputable; the Saw franchise, perhaps, which certainly doesn't lack for sensationalism and aims for gross disgust rather than any deeper horror.

Moreover, the accusation of 'cultural nihilism' is just a broad-stroke evasion. The "rejection of traditional religion... among intellectual and artistic elites" didn't just happen in a vacuum. The intellectual groundwork was already laid in the 19th century by challenges from the usual suspects, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche. Since the 1990s, the period with which Murray is most concerned, the moral authority of the traditional American religion has collapsed, both with the Catholic Church's complicity and conspiracy in child rape and in conservative Christianity's archaic views on sex, birth control, and gays. To call this nihilism is to take the moral rectitude of Christianity and its institutions for granted, regardless of their real-world effects and the changes in attitudes surrounding them. Merely wishing a return to the older, more comforting zeitgeist is not going to bring it back, nor is it even necessarily desirable.

This is not to say that the current order is without its problems. In the arts, the absence of a guiding moral sense can lead to solipsism and a self-impressed cleverness (Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists are for me some of the worst offenders). Yet it isn't like no one else was aware of this. Most visibly, David Foster Wallace grappled with the perils of postmodern irony and its tendency toward hall-of-mirrors vacuity:

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

Wallace, though, was a part of the group under examination and had a stake in seeing the art redeemed, unlike Murray, who uses the state of the arts as a Trojan Horse for attacking the current liberal social order.

*

Toward the end of the essay Murray gets to his real point, which is (what else?) to criticize the welfare state. Essentially, ours is an aging society, such that in 50 years the old will outnumber the young. Part of the reason for this is extended life expectancy, which Murray believes robs people of their sense of urgency in life and their motivation to make great art:

In a world where people of all ages die often and unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life. If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live until at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and you’ll get to it pretty soon? To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to leave a mark?

Naturally, this mindset finds its fullest expression in the conservative bogeyman of Europe:

I believe this self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When I have spoken in Europe about the unparalleled explosion of European art and science from 1400 to 1900, the reaction of the audiences has invariably been embarrassment. Post-colonial guilt explains some of this reaction—Europeans seem obsessed with seeing the West as a force for evil in the world. But I suggest that another psychological dynamic is at work. When life has become a matter of passing away the time, being reminded of the greatness of your forebears is irritating and threatening.

Murray looks at European history and sees only its intellectual achievements. These are vast, no one would argue otherwise. But it is simply willful blindness to not see that as enlightened as these advances were, they stand amid a backdrop of serfdom, high infant mortality, and any number of scourges and follies that the modern liberal project has devoted itself to minimizing if not outright eradicating. Goya and his audience could afford to be great--the peasantry, not so much.

Which all to point out that Murray is complaining about standards of living being higher than they ever were.

It's of a poisonous reactionary nostalgia that has gripped the right of late--whether in the form of fundamentalist Christianity, neo-conservative war hawkishness, or the Tea Party, whose shrieks about big government (at least that which isn't benefiting the "deserving" them), Murray's gripe matches best. The urge to turn back the clock, whether with sexual mores, military glory, or anti-government individualism comes from a blinkered view of history and an inability to cope with the world as it is today. To the extent that there exist postmodernism's discontents, a retreat into the past is no solution at all but intellectual surrender.

It may well be that under the welfare state, and the consumer capitalist system that exists alongside it, life accomplishment is viewed with less urgency than it was in more trying times (though I seriously doubt it--ask any creative person if she doesn't feel a "'this-is-what-I-was-put-on-earth-to-do' motivation to create great work," and while you're at it, ask a poor person if, living "In a world where people of all ages die often and unexpectedly," he feels inspired to live out his full potential). But even if we were to grant all this, it would not make Charles Murray's complaints any more valid. Art is inextricably tied with the circumstances surrounding its creation. It's circular to say that 19th century art could have only been produced in the 19th century, but there you go. Really, I'm eager to revisit this argument forty years down the line, if only because at that point I may be filling Murray's role; after all, today's liberal is tomorrow's conservative.

Break Fast Off Duchampians

Instead of watching the Super Bowl I ended up streaming Exit Through the Gift Shop, a riotous documentary of sorts "by" English street artist Banksy. Ostensibly the product of 10,000 hours of footage obsessively shot by eccentric L.A. Frenchman Thierry Guetta, it follows a number of notable street artists at work before zeroing in on the ever mysterious Banksy, and then flipping when Guetta rechristens himself Mr. Brainwash and goes on to sell over a million dollars worth of work.




Questions of authenticity have been dogging the film at least since its Sundance premier, but that's actually not a strike against it; if anything, the possibility of a hoax actually enhances its potency. The third act, the most easily contested, depicts Mr. Brainwash as an unlikely overnight success whose tacky Pop Art (dig the Warhol "Marilyn" morph series) is more audacious than considered or skillful. His success is like a bad joke. Shades of Damien Hirst. Banksy himself wonders aloud what art is supposed to mean when rich collectors shell out thousands of dollars for hackery. What indeed does it mean when Mr. Brainwash's Don't Be Cruel" sits alongside their Warhols, Klees... and Banksys? If Fairey's political-pop-culture stencilings and Shepard Fairey's sincere-ironic iconography graffiti is art, what of Mr. Braindead's empty derivatives? (If Mr. Brainwash is indeed an elaborate hoax, the awfulness of his largely Banksy-ripped-off work indicates a fine self-awareness on the "real" artist's part.)

Exit Through the Gift Shop's approach thus makes for one of those great form-content marriages: the question of "is it real?" goes hand-in-hand with the deeper question of "is it art?" It's also very clever and funny, which is so much more preferable than stodgy debate. The redefinition of art, its severance of labor from merit, was begun by Marcel Duchamp's signing a urinal. What better approach to reappraising this idea, then, than to take the piss out of it?

Squishy Culture Jam

Banksy's Simpsons intro is getting lots of attention. The video's been removed from YouTube, but here's a bootleg:



Depicting Korean slave labor grinding up kittens and chaining unicorns in service of producing the show's animation is supposed to draw attention to the plight of cheap foreign labor--an important issue I'm sure--but its effectiveness is questionable. Like fellow graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, Banksy's work, at least here, is steeped in irony and turning giant cultural forces against themselves. This is fine for taking the piss out of the powerful, but for advancing a positive argument the effect is muddled. Is he serious? one must ask. Even the master ironist Stephen Colbert breaks character when it comes time to actually make a point:



Irony can also lead to a certain infinite regress: The Simpsons mocks its own harsh labor practices...by using harsh labor practices!

It comes down to effectiveness: is this really going to make anyone sit up and say, "No more!" or will the viewer chuckle, concede that he's probably right, and then move on to the next cute animal montage on YouTube?




P.S. Clerks' Korean labor gag was funnier.

Notes on Notes From Underground

Credit where credit’s due: the idea of seeking out Notes From Underground was first seeded by Matt Yglesias’ list of influential books from a few months back. Had I not read that, I might not have picked it up at a used book sale, or at least been compelled to read it so soon. He calls the first section of the first half “the greatest stretch of prose in human history,” but the rest is hardly slack. As polemical writing goes, it’s some of the best one could come across in any language, of any persuasion. Take this passage from Chapter IX:

Yes, man is a comical animal, and there’s obviously a joke in all this. Still, I say that twice two [makes four] is an unbearable notion, an arrogant imposition. This twice two image stands there, hands in pockets, in the middle of your road, and spits in your direction. Nevertheless, I’m willing to agree that twice-two-makes-four is a thing of beauty. But, If we’re going to praise everything like that, then I say that twice-two-makes-five is also a delightful little item now and then.

What prose! The mingling of abstraction and concrete imagery! The immediate, sneering tone! And is it too much to think ‘twice-two-makes-five’ as a form of individual revolt, was the basis of Orwell’s reworking of that formulation as a summation of totalitarian’s absolute mastery over the individual? The delight that swaths of our current population takes in this sort of brute counterfactualism ("Keep the government out of my Medicare!") need hardly be mentioned. Nihilism scarce had a better apologist than the Underground Man of the Notes' first section.

The second half is less effective, though I would like to think this is by design. For the first half is entirely theoretical and, on its own terms, quite effective; we may not like the Underground Man, but damn if we don’t respect his crude integrity. The second half puts this philosophy of ultra-pessimism into action in several case studies—a desire to get an officer’s attention, a sadomasochistic imposition on his schoolmates’ dinner, the emotional manipulation of a beautiful young prostitute—and all of them find the Underground Man to be increasingly repulsive and, more important, impotent. The caustic wit of the first half is almost comically helpless against his irrational compulsion to debase himself before people whom he holds in the highest contempt, who couldn’t care less about him anyway. What before seemed a compelling if distasteful stance against faith in progress is revealed to be an ineffectual and embarrassing revel in one’s own misery.

Misery was key to Dostoyevsky’s outlook, of course. His later novels (Crime and Punishment is the only other I have read) go on to develop the notion of man’s bestial nature and its only hope lying in divine salvation. What is striking about Notes is the almost complete absence of this notion of penance. The Underground Man expounds on it at length in his discourse with the prostitute Liza, and it is on these precepts that she ostensibly begins to turn her life around. But the Underground Man repudiates everything he’s told her as soon as he has said so, and his failure to go after her in the end is painted as a grotesque redemption of sorts:

“And isn’t it much better,” I mused later, back at home, trying to soothe the living pain with my fantasies, “for her to bear this humiliation as long as she lives, because humiliation is purification, because it causes the most corrosive, the most painful awareness? I’d have soiled her soul and tired her heart no later than tomorrow, but this insult and humiliation will never be extinguished in her; whatever filth surrounds her, my insult will elevate her, purify her through… through hatred… well… maybe through forgiveness…. But will it really be easier for her now?”

No. But let me ask a question now on my own behalf: what’s better—cheap happiness or lofty suffering?* Well, tell me—which of the two is better?

The Dostoyevsky of later years would seem to elect the former—-after having stewed plentifully in the latter, to be sure. Following several days of guilt-fueled delirium, Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov finds solace in another woman, Sonya Marmeladova, and the two of them await their reunion that will follow when his sentence in Siberia has been served. Dostoyevsky was all about redemption through suffering, but in this work, at the beginning of his mature period, the only reason one seems to stand any chance of improvement and moral regeneration is by rejecting false saviors, and even that’s hardly a guarantee. It’s all suffering and no redemption.

That is why I find it hard to believe the Underground Man’s stance is meant to be taken at face value. The especially acid outlook on human existence he conveys has been thought to be a function of Dostoyevsky’s personal distresses at the time of its writing, but it could also be he intended we be seduced by the Underground Man’s anti-philosophy, in order to more acutely understand the dead ends—the inherent stagnation—it leads to when practically applied. I suspect a mixture of the two, that at that point in his life Dostoyevsky felt this pessimism quite intensely but also knew that, taken to its logical conclusion, it could only terminate in bootless misanthropy, that there must be a better solution to the problem of man’s baseness.

On those grounds, I think Yglesias’ description of Notes From Underground as “an illustration of the power of great writing to convey radically unsound or even totally nonsensical ideas” doesn’t give the author quite enough credit. But then again, Dostoyevsky was a very damaged individual; perhaps he meant it all, and, fittingly, I am not giving enough credence to the man’s irrationality.

*Sartre considered Notes a seminal text in Existentialism, so it is not at all surprising to see in this line a precursor to Hamm's "Can there be misery loftier than mine?" in Beckett's Endgame.

Shepard Fairey Post-Script

This review of one of Shepard Fairey's exhibitions in 2009 says many of the things I do, and better, and with more knowledge at its disposal:

To this day, he insists that his oeuvre expresses no ideology, that its cardinal message is simply "question everything." Aside from being a lowest-common-denominator philosophy, this is doing a disservice to the urgency of his work’s better messages -- his environmentalism, his anti-war views, etc. Presumably, Fairey actually wants to move people with these works. At the same time, the dictum’s vague character reflects Fairey’s own political vagueness

His bottom line:

Still, at the end of the day, it is Fairey’s aura of idealism -- that his art actually gets out of the gallery and does stuff, that it speaks a popular language, that it feels righteous and relevant -- that has given this show such tremendous resonance. And if there is one thing that his success shows, it’s that images and ideas can take on a life all of their own, and transcend their source. In the political realm, the Obama campaign has inspired hopes, demands and even activism that go far beyond President Obama’s policy prescriptions, which are, after all, pretty limited. If Fairey’s success has something of this effect for the art world, that’s a good thing.

Everybody Draw Mohammad Day

I'm posting this late, but why confine blasphemy to a single day?



This criticism of Everybody Draw Mohammad Day is valid as far as it goes, which is to say, college campuses. Going out of one's way to be obnoxious towards particular fellow students is, well, obnoxious (I did it to a Mormon teacher in high school, and yeah, I'll admit I was a dick). There's nothing to be gained in such a localized setting.

The real target is global, which is why this broader critique misses the point. To recap:

- South Park once inserted Mohammad into the show, in the Super Best Friends episode, without incident in pre-9/11 2001.
- When they attempted a Mohammad appearance so as part of an episode about the Danish cartoon controversy, Comedy Central refused to show the scene.
- When they recently made fun of Mohammad's non-appearance by having him "appear" in a bear suit, some twats from Revolution Muslim passive-aggressively stated that South Park's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, would suffer the same fate as Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered in broad daylight.
- In response, Comedy Central did not rerun the episode, nor did they stream it online. They also removed Super Best Friends from online view.

Some additional context:

- Many news outlets refused to show the offending Danish cartoons when the story broke in 2005, and several of the editors involved in those that did were fired.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script and provided the voice over to Theo Van Gogh's Submission film, was threatened in a note pinned to his body and at one point had to collect donations to cover her security costs.
- Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, was attacked with an axe in his home while he was taking care of his five year-old granddaughter.
- A Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, who drew a picture of Mohammad's head on a dog's body was head-butted and had his house set on fire, having already been the target in a foiled murder plot.

Everybody Draw Mohammad Day is a response to intimidation and suppression of free speech. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone are to be threatened with death for depicting the prophet, the theory goes, then so will the rest of us. It's a debased version of the Danes all wearing Stars of David to protect their Jews from the Nazis, except that--given the different circumstances--this time the participants mock a religious icon rather than honor it (also, this event has the benefit of having now actually happened).

I admit this is bullshit symbolism with no practical benefit in itself--which I usually hate--but putting this on the internet for all to see, potentially, if remotely so, puts its participants at risk. Any violence to occur as a result of it would make the point all the more obvious and strengthen the cause, which is more than can be said for the usual plant-a-flag-for-Darfur crap.

Ahmed Rehab, the author of the objection to Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, complains about a campaign that would willingly offend Muslims, which this no doubt does. My only response is a question: which is more offensive: this?



Or this?

Picasso at the Met

I'm a relative neophyte to the art world. I grew up wanting to draw comic books and became pretty good at drawing, but the closest thing I've taken to a proper art class lately was the British art component of the prep course I had to take for the London trip I went on through my school. The London trip itself--with trips to the Tates Modern and Britain, the National Gallery, and others--expanded on the introduction I got from the class, and since then it's been a matter of absorbing what I can from the museums I visit and the books I pick up along the way.

So when The New Republic complains about the Picasso exhibit at the Met being unwieldy and unfocused, I don't really have any response. If I was better versed in the Spaniard's body of work, I suppose I would agree. As you can see here, there is a lot of material crammed together.




But given my limited background, I was more than happy to have so much of it there for me to take in. I had a vague idea of Picasso's range, mostly due to the masterworks at MoMa, but I never knew just how many styles the man went through in his life time, as all that schoolchildren are ever told about is Cubism. To the layman, it's not immediately obvious that creator of Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table, above, had earlier painted The Blind Man's Meal:




or this self-portrait:



and would go on to make something like Las Meninas and Gentlemen in the Sierra



Discovering all this, in roughly chronological order, was a joy, and so I'm going to call this a win for egalitarianism.

An Islamist and an Atheist Walk Into an Art Museum...

Said Qutb was the intellectual godfather of today’s Jihadists, articulating anti-American animus as no Islamist had before. He spent time studying in America in the 1950s and gave people an earful when he returned home. The excerpts provided in The New Republic’s consistently great The Book make for fascinating reading.

Some of his opinions are offensive to the point of being funny—he makes no attempt whatsoever to disguise his anti-black racism:

“Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other.

Would that he had lived to experience Lil Wayne.

His criticism on ‘higher’ culture later on is, shall we say, more measured, and I daresay many would agree with him. It boils down to Americans taking everything they have for granted. To begin with, interpersonal relationships are devalued to the point of, ‘who have you met?’:

As for friends, it is enough that one be invited to get-acquainted parties. There he encounters their faces for the first time, and the host acquaints him with the attendees one by one (men as well as women)[5], and he asks whoever of them wish to do so to write down their names and addresses, and so they in turn do with him. After some time, his notebook is full of names and addresses. And see! he has a great number of friends (men and women)[6], and perhaps he is even victorious in the competition undertaken in pursuit of this goal. How great, how strange are the competitions here!

This is almost verbatim the case against Facebook. And he applies it to American notions of travel—reduced to brief and shallow sightseeing—and especially its wealth of art. This term is meant literally, as fortunes are spent procuring rare, often foreign works for American museums. And all of it, to him, is a waste, as Americans only patronize museums to say that they were there, with no special consideration given to the art contained therein:

Again I arrived at the point where [I could say that], out of the great mass of visitors comprised in my enumerations, only a rare minority comprehended anything of these tremendous artistic riches that the dollar has gathered from all the places on earth; all that remained for the dollar to do was to create artistic sensation, but apparently that does not respond to the dollar’s charms!

The cinema, to him, is the most egregious exemplar of American vulgarity, in that it is the one medium in which they lead over any other nation, but it too is squandered. Yet instead of producing riches of creation that the multitude ignores, it directly panders to masses and only occasionally bothers to produce something of artistic merit:

In the great majority of American films, one sees manifestly primitive subjects and primitive excitement; this is true of police/crime films and cowboy films. As for high, skillful films, such as “Gone with the Wind,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Song of Bernadette,” and such, they are few in comparison with what America produces.

Not only are these observations true, they are still true today. But they are not the whole truth. For to find common ground with this man is to be in very uncomfortable territory, with very unpleasant implications. Dinesh D’Souza thought Qutb was onto something in his criticism of loose American morals and sexual depravity (and conveniently neglected to mention that the licentious Americans of which he speaks were of at least a decade before the sexual revolution), and he too betrayed a fundamental misconception of America and American freedom of culture.

The American polity was not founded on the stringent ideals of the Puritan colonies, but on the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers, which emphasized among other things egalitarianism. Qutb and other such snobs—for condemning an entire people to death and damnation is snobbery taken to homicidal extremes—fail to understand that at the time of America’s founding was an extreme cultural stratification and aristocratic tradition. The multitude did not have the time or the money, probably not even the right, to patronize the symphony, the ballet, the museums. They probably do not in many Muslim countries today. Western Enlightenment egalitarianism as applied to culture ensures that more than just the extremely wealthy few will be able to partake of high culture. Naturally, in trying to appeal to the masses, there is considerable dumbing-down (Shakespeare is the greatest victim of this by far), and much of it is taken for granted. But this is not restricted to Americans by any means.

As I said in my take on the Facebook criticism, it will always be the case that only a dedicated few will ever fully explore the depths of what life has to offer, be it friendship or high culture. Additionally, hit-and-run sightseeing is not a simply American phenomenon; I spent 45 minutes in London last year with a Nigerian woman who was hell-bent on being photographed in front of the London Eye and double-decker tour buses). And I will go even further and add that what disinterested museum-goers lack in sufficient appreciation of the arts is compensated by an intimate knowledge in some other field, often a given person’s career: an art critic can no better rebuild his car’s engine than the mechanic can identify a Francis Bacon. We can argue the validity of prizing one over the other, but rare is the person who is so completely moronic as to have no expertise to offer. Sarah Palin would have made an excellent sports journalist, I hear (it’s what she went to school for, after all).

I hate lowest-common denominator crudity just as the next art snob. But given the nature of people, and the alternative of an even more artistically impoverished mass culture, we should rejoice at the kitsch, the commercial appropriation, the gaudy Broadway musical, the museum drifters. It's not like the original work is harmed (at least, not usually). Their many dollars help make important work possible, and the egalitarian attitude that affords them their disinterested patronage are afforded to those who would make the most of their opportunity to stand with the classics.

And besides:

Tarantino, Sugar Daddy

Quentin Tarantino has been for a while, and is now more than ever, the primary backer of The New Beverly, a movie theater in L.A. that shows cheap double features of often obscure movies. He saved it from ruin, and now his financial support is what keeps an unprofitable but culturally valuable institution afloat.

Is this a sign of things to come in other arts ventures? For Theatre? The Internet continues to demolish the old cinema business models, forcing movie studios to rely on 3D gimmickry to entice viewers. Major theatre companies already rely on corporate sponsorship to turn a profit and keep prices remotely affordable, resulting in an often bland homogeneity. The less mainstream, more experimental theatre groups are on even less stable ground, because corporate donors don't want to invest in artistic risk. The Tarantino-New Beverly example should serve as a model: seek out wealthy individuals who share the same artistic ideals and would want to support such organizations.

(This sounds incredibly, perhaps condescendingly, obvious, but bear in mind I say this from a great geographical distance from the cultural centers where these issues are playing out.)

The Recession and the Arts, Ctd.

It occurs to me that I'm probably being much to snobby in my dismissal of popular plays like Doubt, Proof, etc., although The Rabbit Hole managed to irritate me quite a bit). I will instead redirect my objection away from these kinds of plays (which I might call Pulitzer-bait, but nevermind), and not even the plays themselves, but to the theaters staging them. For these plays are by far some of the most produced in the country, and I could have guessed this just by personal experience. I was in a community college production of The Laramie Project; my high school put it on the following year; my community college did Proof the same year we went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and saw The Rabbit Hole; and last year Boise Contemporary Theater did a reading of Doubt.

The fact of the matter is there is far more to the theater world than the ten or so plays on the WSJ's list and on Broadway's marquees. Not even taking into account the neglect of new works (there was a recent study published on how financial solubility is becoming more impossible for contemporary writers, but for the life of me I can't find it), there are plenty of under-appreciated gems of old that don't try so hard to wrap themselves up in respectability. But respectability is the name of the game, as theaters are chasing what they think audiences want. Middle-class domestic melodrama.

I'm plenty cynical about it all, but I would like to think audiences are savvier than we give them credit for. Granted, the success of middle-of-the-road approaches would suggest they don't want to be pushed out of their comfort zone, but might it be that we haven't tried enough to know? I would bet audiences are willing and curious enough to take anything on, provided it's done well, and the reason they eat up the popular Tonybait plays is that we don't give them any alternatives.

The Recession and the Arts

The New Republic has been burnishing their culture credentials lately, with great success. The Book is a fantastic compendium of essays and literary writing, including some gems from decades past, and on the arts front Jed Perl now has a biweekly column on the arts. His inaugural post asks how much arts institutions should take fiscal considerations into account in the midst of the Great Recession, noting that MoMa spent $2 million on a new building during the Depression, when it would have looked positively suicidal. "When culture is at stake, financial considerations cannot be allowed to rule. Cultural institutions must be fiscally responsible. They must also be artistically responsible," he concludes.

This is a lofty outlook, but not necessarily reflective of the way things are. This may be my cultural philistinism talking, but museums that shell out millions for diamond-crusted skulls, sharks preserved in formaldehyde, and beds covered in tampons seem to have neither fiscal restraint nor good taste in mind. I really don't have much ground to stand on, though, as I don't follow fine arts world.

For the broader arts, namely theatre, I'm not much more optimistic. Judging as a somewhat-outsider hoping to eventually make his way in, the fact of the theatre world is that garish Broadway musicals continue proliferate because they sell. They cost a lot, too, and how much of that actually has to do with the extra staff needed and how much is pure waste (whatever that is), I couldn't tell you. For regional theaters, they seem to be perfectly happy to be regurgitating the same plays (Proof, The Rabbit Hole, and Doubt come immediately to mind) because they have the prestige of a Pulitzer Prize, a small cast, and an easy translation to film, so literal-minded do we seem to think our audiences.

Personally, I'm less concerned with creating new structures and programs than finding ways to compensate the artists we have.

(I've to go to work for a little while now. Might pick this up later.)