Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
Perhaps what we see is not just a distinction but a definable difference between the rational and the irrational in the human motivating spirit.
Sandefur’s (and Gillespie’s) point is a reasonable one, but to be fair perhaps we’re still too close to 9/11 for a meaningful assessment of its art. The Grant Memorial, which is the subject of that essay on Civil War art you linked at the end (a terrific piece, by the way; thanks) wasn’t dedicated until 1922, a full 57 years after the end of that war. Give it time.
It’s about politics? And here I thought abstract art was all about minimizing effort and maximizing returns. Throw a few splatters of paint on a canvas, tell some bs story to a sucker, and sell it for a few thousand. Nice work if you can get it.
Hello Jonathan,
Perhaps you might like ’25th Hour’ where Ground Zero is an element of the atmosphere. Twin columns of light dominate the skyline, and fade into the dawn. The background is one of stunned grief that matches the plot. The film is about freedom, confronting the past, and loyalty, but at times, reality overwhelms fiction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGp92X4NK84
It’s about what is fashionable, or “cool”.
9/11, while deeply significant to many in a sort of patriotic and tragic way for the sheer enormity of the crime which cannot be hid, does not have the required connotations and associations, the nouse, to be well in there with established superiority memes.
Perhaps if they’d taken out the UN building there might have been more artistic interest?
Sadly the artrist who produced the statues at the Vietnam war memorial is now dead.
He opposed the art establishment (no art school graduate he), and would have been an ideal person to produce memorial art to remember the events of 9/11 and honour the victims.
Well, duh – that is the definition of elite, no?
The only reason an artistic elite exists at all is because it is supported by the political elite (we, the plebs, are paying for both, of course). That said, I don’t harbor automatic like or dislike of neither the ‘elite art’, nor the ‘friendly and accessible’ kind – it solely depends on a particular work in question. And, what Laird said.
What is generally called art in the modern world is the debased and degraded remnants of the world’s artistic traditions.
Debased by intellectual betrayal. Degraded by collectivist ideology and state subsidies.
The reason there has been no meanignful artistic response to 9-11, or to just about any other significant event of recent memory, is the tragic fact that meaning in art has been abandoned as outmoded.
As is painfully obvious, the very essence of art in the modern sense is its utter lack of any meaning whatsoever.
Any culture that can go from da Vinci through Monet and up with some bozo enshrining toilets or scraping together piles of dirt and sticks has lost any claim to artistic validity or substance.
The art crowd wanted ephemera, and that’s what they got.
Momentary, forgettable, meaningless. Congratulations.
As long as artists get, or aspire to get, their income from any source other than the general public then the views they express will differ from the views of the general public
Flight 93 is absolutely superb. Paul Greengrass is a hardcore Guardian-reading lefty, but he’s also an honest and fair man, and did a superb job, and insisted on talking to everyone involved who’s still alive before making the film.
In much the same way as Hollywood made Biblical epics in the 50s to avoid being blacklisted by the state, I think pro-civilisation anti-barbarism filmmakers today are getting their message into films that pointedly have sod all to do with 9/11 and its aftermath today to avoid being blacklisted by Hollywood. Ridley Scott has made Black Hawk Down, showing the bravery and morality of the US military, Kingdom Of Heaven, showing Jerusalem as a Christian city inhabited by ethnic Europeans and invaded by conquering Muslim armies and containing a rather fine speech about how we didn’t start this fight but we should damn well win it, and now Robin Hood, where he appears to be trying to teach the masses that Magna Carta is worth fighting for. I, Robot quite superbly skewered the benign paternalism that leads to tyrrany. The message is getting out there, but making it too obvious is career suicide.
Mr. Sandefur has a good point about the failure of artists to respond to 9/11, but I think he is confused about the motives of both the terrorists and the artists.
The terrorists were not anti-capitalist, anti-science, or anti-technology. They were against anything which obstructed the dominion of Islam, but only as it did so. They were anti-U.S., anti-Christian, anti-secular, anti-Western, anti-any personal liberty which conflicted with Islamic law.
The artists are anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-U.S., anti-Christian. (Religion is tolerable only if non-Christian, as a hobby.) And anti-marriage, anti-chastity, anti-“heteronormativity”.
Thus there are far more conflicts than parallels in the two sets of motives. However, the anti-Western/anti-U.S. bent of the artists is so strong that they reflexively sympathize with anyone that shares it, regardless of other issues.
For me, the best artistic memorial for 9/11 in New York would be to have simply rebuilt the twin towers exactly as they were originally. Perhaps with stronger internal steel though.
Art is supposed to move you emotionally. The triumph of capitalism over superstitious nonsense this would represent would bring me to tears.
I know he’s a bit of a leftie and Obama (and even Kerry) supporter and so on, but Bruce Springsteen’s album “The Rising” is, for me, the best artistic response to the whole episode. It captures the bleakness, sense of loss and the defiance brilliantly, at least if you set it to skip the ghastly “Let’s Be Friends”.