For a record number of Americans in this ever more secular era, their real religion is politics, their faith is their political ideology, and their church is their political party. This seems especially so in the most secular professions like entertainment where an unprecedented number of actors, singers, writers, comics, and athletes now routinely use their fame to push their political agendas.
Way back in 1972, Americans were shocked when, during the Vietnam War, the actress Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam to propagandize for our communist enemy. Similarly, people were stunned in 1973 when Marlon Brando refused to accept his Godfather Oscar because of Hollywood’s portrayal of American Indians. But when was the last time you saw an awards show without many performers interjecting their political views, and often with the ugliest
obscenities?
No wonder ever more Americans refuse to “separate the artist from the man,” choosing instead to boycott entertainers who use their bullhorn to promote public policies they dislike. In fact, the ratings for awards shows has plummeted in recent years, and Hollywood has long been in a terrible financial slump.
As a libertarian, I totally support everyone’s God-given, constitutionally-protected right to express whatever opinions you please. Furthermore, if you are not free to say what I least want to hear, then you are not really free.
But I enjoy an equal right to avoid movies, TV shows, novels, records, games, and other works of performers who use their platform to push grossly irresponsible government actions, dangerous drug use, public profanity and coarseness, promiscuity, and out-of-wedlock births, all of which have wreaked substantial damage on our culture. Why should I subsidize folks assaulting the religious values, norms, and way of life I cherish?
However, as a Christian libertarian southerner, if I let artists or athletes’ pronouncements or decadent lifestyles dictate whose performances I patronize, I would likely see very little art or entertainment – and my life would be significantly poorer.
One of my favorite novelists, Harry Crews, wrote that “What the artist owes the world is his work, not a model for living.” Basketball superstar Charles Barkley bluntly declared, “I’m not paid to be a role model… Parents should be role models.”
Yes, I think Pablo Picasso was an egregious egomaniac and a complete narcissist who abused a slew of women, wrecked many lives (especially his family’s), and was a communist to boot (even during Stalin’s reign!). But I also believe he was the greatest artist of the 20th century, and I appreciate a lot of his paintings. To let what I judge to be his private and political wrongs prevent me from enjoying his public work would be my loss.
My favorite filmmaker is Woody Allen. Not only are we politically far apart, but I cannot condone his dating an ex-girlfriend’s daughter who was 21 when he was 56. But he committed no crime and they have remained a couple since 1991 and reared children together. Is Allen’s off-camera life any of my business anyway? Plus, I adore his movies. Indeed, how many fewer laughs my film-going life would have suffered without seeing them.
I don’t like the politics, alcoholism, or sordid private lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. But their writings are magnificent, and how all the more impressive that they transformed painful personal strife into compelling literature that still inspires.
Try finding a major writer, composer, or artist whose biography has no appalling chapters. The only ones I know are Johann Sebastian Bach, Emily Dickinson, and Eudora Welty.
If I need surgery, I want the best surgeon. While I would ideally prefer a strait-laced, good Christian or Jew, I still want the finest doctor for the operation – even if he’s an atheist communist and serial adulterer. Some of the most obnoxious students I ever taught nevertheless got A’s in my classes – because their work earned them.
Should it matter if a performer might not qualify to join our own political or private club? With the exception of Jesus Christ, who is without sin or living in a glass house?
So should we still buy art we like provided it is not distasteful propaganda? Or so long as the artist is not too aggressively inflicting obnoxious views or misbehavior in public?
I remain ambivalent. While I generally do not mind seeing a film on TV starring someone whose politics or personal life I deplore, I am less inclined to pay for one at a cinema. I’ll purchase a singer’s records I like but avoid his concerts if I learn he insults my beliefs between songs. Nor will I buy a ticket to any benefit show whose proceeds further a cause I oppose.
Frankly, I would just rather not know the politics or lifestyles of entertainers. But I do know that this political science professor emeritus will be politically influenced by what some ill-informed, narcissistic, virtue-signaling actor, singer, or athlete says about politics when he cares what I say about acting, singing, or sports. Indeed, when playing with balls confers moral or intellectual authority, I’ll consult the neighbor’s dog.
I have no problem enjoying the art while despising the artist and I really can’t understand how anyone else can’t.
I have separated the art from the man for years. Jimmy Carr is a leftie but I like his comedy. Everyone has different opinions and are allowed to voice them. These people just have a decent platform to make their stands on and the use it.
It is when they cross the line though that I will cancel them and no longer watch their works. Child exploitation, support for children mutilating themselves, Treason, support for terrorists and other moral issues is when I won’t separate them. Many people have shown their true colours over the last few years. Let them wither on the vine.
Although I try very hard to separate the Artist from the Man I still find that my awareness of his stupid, often horrid, often evil views colors my appreciation of a work, sometimes just a bit and sometimes a lot.
BTW, I think Pablo Picasso is one of the most overrated artists of all time.
It was ever thus.
For example, I admire the sculpture and architecture of Bellini – but when a lady offended him, he hired a thug to slash her face with a razor. He was an evil man – but he produced beautiful work.
The composer Richard Wager produced some (in my opinion) excellent music (although there are certainly better composers – such as J.S. Bach and Mozart) – but for most of his life his politics were utterly vile, and NOT just on “the Jews” – his hatred of private property, especially in the means of production, was also both mad-and-bad – like Karl Marx, Richard Wagner (who had much the same dates) wanted to do away with real money and with privately owned factories, mines and so on.
With modern artists there is a less of a problem – as their work, whether it be in music, film, painting, architecture,….. is seldom of much merit.
Probably as late as my mid-20s, I took the view that having idiotic political and/or economic ideas was more or less part-and-parcel of being a decent artist or entertainer, and I find the fairly recent phenomenon of Lefties being shocked at celebrities disagreeing with them absolutely frickin’ hilarious.
But of course, it’s not just about politics. Can we separate a genuinely nasty person from his art? I think it’s one of those awkward situations where… it depends. It depends on what the “crimes” are (especially if they’re actual crimes), and what the art is. I have no problem still admiring Gill Sans for its merits despite Eric Gill’s, er, lifestyle, because a typeface bears no reference to it, but his figurative art is trickier.
I’ve always believed that art which has to be explained is bad art. Art is a communication medium. If it doesn’t communicate well, it isn’t doing its job. By the same token, if a bad man’s badness is communicated through his art, they clearly can’t be separated. However it’s still conceivable that he can do good and uplifting work.
I know a lot of people who absolutely can not do that, really a lot actually.
I think that politics becoming more and more polarised and acrimonious nowadays may be down to ever expanding governments in Europe and the US. Big government means that politics matter more because they have a much bigger effect on people’s lives, mostly negative in my opinion.
I have my own opinions of artists, and treat them accordingly. I like Wagner’s music, and Pink Floyd’s, despite their behaviour away from the recording studio.
I dislike Woody Allen intensely. He and Jerry Lewis are of a kind, though Lewis falls on his ass and Allen falls on his integrity. They both expect applause out of it. They’ve made one or two movies I liked, but I avoid their films. That’s not because of their sins, but because they are assholes and it leaks out into their performances.
And then we come to Jane Fonda. In that case I murmur “Hanoi Barbarella” and leave the conversation. Might as well tie her love of communism to a movie she regretted starring in, and leave it at that.
We all have our opinions and hot buttons. I react by ignoring the do-ers of evil (if I can) and dropping a really scathing comment when needed.
I have no problem enjoying the art while despising the artist and I really can’t understand how anyone else can’t.
It depends on how loud they are about it and how much it seeps into their work. I mean if you can’t see their work without thinking about their political advocacy because they put it out there, it is pretty difficult to ignore. Michael Jordan told us that Republicans buy sneakers too, and it is a shame more people don’t realize this. And when it slips into the art that just makes it unwatchable. Movies are so trivial these days. I mean who wants to see another Marvell movie or another Star Wars movie? So when they brought out Conclave I was excited to see it, something interesting and different. And it was good until at the end they utterly ruined it by jamming their politics down my throat.
But I also wanted to rant a bit about the artists the OP mentioned. I live about thirty minutes drive from Oak Park, IL, birthplace of Hemmingway, where he is worshiped as a god. I think he is the most overrated novelist of the 20th century, in English at least. I’ll grant that I haven’t read all his novels, but the ones I have read convey this utterly bullshit idea of masculinity, and this utter trivialization of women. I’m no pink haired looney thinking that some guy checking out a chick at the gym is the worst criminal of the century, but there is such a thing as toxic masculinity or disrespect for women, and his novels are full of it. But that is the least of their faults, his staccato writing style seems like an offense to the richness and fullness of the English language. And, if a novel is to do anything, it is to explore the characters of the protagonists in depth, and yet all his protagonists are jejune stereotypes. Of course my bias might come from being force fed it in high school where, in my memory, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” is about seven million pages long, each one suicidality depressing. I’m told “The Old Man and the Sea” is better, so maybe I’ll get around to reading it one day.
And then there is Picasso who I think is the most overrated painter of the 20th century. He strikes me as a painter who wasn’t very good, so who invented this new simplistic style to con the ever gullible art critic and art glitterati into thinking that they were really profound, and only the sophisticated would understand. Exclusionary of the mere plebeians like me. His early work, this being perhaps the most famous example, just isn’t very good. I mean better than I could do, but not in the same league as serious artists. And perhaps the most famous of his new style is Guernica which to me feels like a high school senior group project with a bunch of teenage girls thinking they are being really profound. Compared to the work of the great Italian painters or French Impressionists it is just not in the same league. Who can compare this with this and not conclude the Picasso could not hold a candle to Vermeer by any measure whatsoever.
Anyway, rant over.
How do you feel about Henry James?
Just curious.
Cannot listen to Springsteen anymore. Cannot watch DeNiro, or a host of others.
Went through teenhood reading every Stephen King book written. Still like them even though he is crap.
A painting? I can look at a painting without regard to the person who painted it. In my mind, it stands on its own.
But a performance involving the artists? Nope.
So, take the artist out of the equation, and I can separate. Books, paintings, etc. But leave the artist in the context – performing music, acting in movies, etc – and the artist matters to me.
Per Robert Heinlein:
“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits”.
“The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for “art” that leaves him unmoved–if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such”.
“Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce — render emotional — his audience, each time”.
There is real pleasure in ignoring the art of the obnoxious, and it is greater than any contemplation of said “art” could provide.
Eric Gill is perhaps an extreme example.
I agree with Sam about Gill Sans (it’s the London Underground typeface – which is weird because he was very against anything mechanical) but…
… I need to say his “lifestyle” as Sam puts it is despicable. He had sex with his own young daughters and if you think that’s the nadir of behaiour he also fucked his pet dog. Yes. He. Did.
His art also decorates the exterior of BBC Broadcasting House.
Dear Old Auntie Beeb. Gill on the outside, Savile on the inside.
bobby,
I think there is quite a bit of truth in what you say.
First of all: People should be free to make their own choices, whether to separate the artist from the man, or not.
My own choice(s), in case you are interested, are influenced (but not determined) by whether “the man” is separate from “the artist”, or not.
Let’s discuss concrete examples.
–Let’s start with George RR Martin and JK Rowling.
Both have “”left-wing”” views (except Rowling on trans issues, but that was after she completed the H.Potter canon).
But their works do not reflect that in any way, as far as i can see. In fact, i detect conservative messaging in them. (Also, Machiavellian messaging in GRR Martin; and i mean that as a compliment.)
Of course, great works of art are open to different interpretations; but i won’t dismiss authors just because other people might interpret them differently.
In conclusion: for me, Martin’s and Rowling’s political opinions have no importance whatsoever in appreciating their work.
–Another example of interest to me is Scandinavian Noir, as i have recently discovered the Martin Beck canon. In this case (as in the case of Kurt Wallander and Lisbeth Salander) the politics of the authors do percolate into their books.
Does that bother me? a bit. But i tolerate it, because it helps me to understand how the Scandinavian people thought (wrongly) about their social problems.
Sorry, me bad. Gill Sans is derived from the London Underground typeface but he had worked on it with Johnston. Oops!
@IrishOtter49
How do you feel about Henry James?
I have no feelings about him, never having read any of his work.
BTW I am bitching about what I don’t like but there is lots of art I do like. The classics from the Brontes and Austin, Everything by Orwell and Huxley, and I like a lot of science fiction (reading Ian M. Banks’ Culture series right now.)
For painting, I love the Impressionists, and I’d also mention I am a big fan of Jack Vettriano. Not because I think he is necessarily super skilled in execution, and some of his work is a bit too boobs, butts and lingerie to actually hang on my walls (much though I am a fan of boobs, butts and lingerie). But I like him for the exact opposite reason that we are discussing here. He is utterly loathed by the art establishment. He has the audacity to produce work simple people like me can enjoy, and he is extremely successful and popular. I mean it is almost like we don’t need the art critics to tell us what we should like. And I love how he didn’t come up through the usual channels of the curated art colleges, favored and fetted by the glitterati, but was just a Scottish coal miner who liked to paint. He seems like the sort of guy you could have a pint with.
Fraser orr:
Sorry, but Picasso painted this when he was 15 years old. And you’re telling me he ‘wasn’t very good’
Fraser Orr- you’re entitled to your opinions and I’m entitled to sneer at them. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is the one book I recommend to non-readers to start their exploration of literature, and the one book I reread every ten years or so. The hundred or so pages in my edition, of the killing of the fascists is, IMNSHO, the most powerful piece of prose in my experience. There’s not much otherwise of Hemingway’s I like, but that’s another story.
I think Picasso was pretty good too.
I think the greatest author ever, in any language, was Nikos Kazantzakis, and though I separate the art from the artist, knowing he was a devout catholic academic who never wrote any fiction until he was 65 years old, I still greatly admire the man who could write like that. I usually recommend “Zorba the Greek” to readers but sometimes, if I want to shock someone who knows me as a militant agnostic, I recommend “Christ Recrucified”.
‘Fraser ORR
I do not want to add to a pile-on but I think you should read The Old Man and the Sea.
I take what you say about Hemingway’s misogyny – I too find it offensive, but to contrast with Henry James, what Hemingway tried to do was to “show, not tell”. His stripped-down prose, which was not a product of a lack of facility but a conscious attempt to get rid of the ornate descriptors which do not show was, I think masterful. It was, at least in part, a reaction to authors such as Henry James, who spends most of Portrait of a Lady telling you how clever Isabel Archer is whilst showing her acting in an irredeemably stupid fashion.
You rarely hear any Gary Glitter songs on the radio any more. Some of those songs were quite catchy, but his conviction (not just rumour) for one count of attempted rape, one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13, and four counts of indecent assault killed his career.
But that also affected the music industry, reducing the value of residuals and other merchandising opportunities. I cannot say I’m too bothered as it should encourage businesses and organisations to pay more attention to their ‘star’s behaviour’. In a better world, of course.
I once saw an old Top Of The Pops rerun and saw the Human League doing a Glitter cover. Presumably dating from before his fall from grace.
More bad news- J.R.R. Tolkein never condemned plastic! How can anyone ever read ‘Lord of The Rings’, knowing that?
N (UJ) G,
He was pretty down on the fires of Orodruin though!
Fraser,
Yeah, Jack Vettriano… The academy hate anyone who isn’t one of them and successful. You get a lot of this with literature in particular. The academy hates “genre writers” who are successful. It really boils their piss when they see how many volumes Christie, King, Clancy, Rowling, Tolkien et. al. shift. Yeah, I know JRRT was a Prof but he wore a tweed jacket and didn’t address intersectional issues which are of course much more important than mere trifles like the nature of good and evil… They also seem to conveniently forget that Shakespeare wasn’t writing to be discussed in earnest and baffling ways in terms of Freud or Marx or Foucoult* but essentially an impressario. It would amaze Will that these days his plays are put on largely because they get funded by the government!
I once saw an academic paper in Eng. Lit. (I dated an English Lit. Postgrad) and it contained the term, “Faecal dialectics”. First rule of English Lit grad. school is the more incomprensible it is the cleverer it must be. At the time I said, “Tallking shite?”.
With a nod to dear old Sigmund I call it “Physics Envy”. They saw all those funny squiggles and thought we gotta be even more difficult to understand… Difference is those funny squiggles mean real stuff. Ask the mayor of Hiroshima.
I’m off to re-calibrate my Heisenberg compensators.
@Mila s
Sorry, but Picasso painted [“First Communion”] when he was 15 years old. And you’re telling me he ‘wasn’t very good’
I think it is good, maybe? very good for a teenager. But there is a large step between “good enough to getting be an A+ in art class” to “best painter of the century”. I know a couple of high school girls who could paint something of a similar quality (if they had the time anyway) and I don’t expect either of them to be the best painter of the century. In fact, I doubt they’d even make their careers in art.
And if you look at his work as an adult, I mean some of it is better than others, but none of it is in the same league as the ancient masters. Most of it is extremely ugly, and a lot if it is iconoclastic entirely for the purpose of being iconoclastic. I’m in favor of art breaking the rules to make a point. But breaking the rules just to break the rules is just masturbation.
In my initial comment I compared his “Woman in Blue” to Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earing”. It is hard to think of any measure in which the former is superior to the latter.
Many of the ancient masters feed the soul; his work is mostly ugly and jejune.
Fraser,
Obviously beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Picasso is, rightly, in my opinion celebrated not so much for the quality of pieces but for how broadly he influenced almost every aspect of C20th art. And I don’t think that is merely revolution for the sake of it. Art was very tired by about 1900 and it had to do new things because… photography.
You must know some very talented schoolgirls.
@NickM
Art was very tired by about 1900 and it had to do new things because… photography.
Just a brief thought to this. Although photography is now ubiquitous, painting of portraiture is still a thing. And I think it is relevant why this is so, for reasons that have little to do with art. We can get all the music we want for almost nothing through Spotify or YouTube yet still Taylor Swift just completed a hundred billion dollar world wide concert tour. Why? Because directly interfacing with the artist is a different category of pleasure than listing to her music on an MP3 player. And similarly an oil painting of a person is a very different experience than a digital photograph.
And I think that that is something to think about as we move into a world where everything is being done by AI and robots, and we humans are wondering what our place is in the world. I think there is always going to be a place for humans interacting with humans producing art and goods that could no doubt be better produced in terms of intrinsic properties by machines, just as a photograph captures better an actual image of a person than even the best painter could. But part of the experience is the human connection, the relationship with the creator, too. Which of course brings us full circle back to the OP — when you are consuming a good or service where part of the value is the relationship it creates with the creator, then who the creator is because vastly more relevant in that interaction.
One of the big questions is, where does the money we give the artist for the privilege of enjoying the work go? And what will it be used to do? As a Catholic, I will not pay artists like Dan Brown or Philip Pullman for the rope they are trying to use to hang my faith and Church with, and that Brown is merely a philosophical grifter while Pullman is actively anti-Christian does not help. Richard Wagner, on the other hand, was a terrible anti-Semite in life, but for a while one could rest easy that a ticket to the Ring Cycle would pay nobody but the performers. (Now, I am no longer sure that any given opera company is not donating to the wrong causes in that area, however.)
I like to think I can objectively assess art’s quality even if I philosophically disagree with its artist. But just as the artist owes the audience only his work, not his character, I owe the artist only a fair chance to entertain me, and not a millisecond of time beyond his failure to do that — and if his known public character is why his work does not entertain, he has only himself to blame for that.
@NickM
celebrated not so much for the quality of pieces but for how broadly he influenced almost every aspect of C20th art.
Sorry, meant to say — yeah, but isn’t that the point? 20th century art has been absolutely horrible. It is the art where we put a crucifix in piss, or make things out of cow shit, or tape a banana to a wall, or paint a canvas with a big red spot or spill some paint on a canvas. Then we call it art and sell it for a million dollars. All of this finds its matrix in these radical, early 1900’s painters including Picasso.
I don’t think this is a good thing at all.
Fraser,
That analogy doesn’t work at all. I have been to some of the great galleries of this planet and I never interacted directly with Rembrandy or Da Vinci or Van Gogh. Taylor swift is alive, they aren’t. In anycase there is a huge difference between Swift performing and Vermeer painting. It is the difference between a performance and a finished product. I also regard photography very highly. I’m quite good at it.
I have to disagree about C20th art. You are cherry-picking some utter shite but some is brilliant*. If we go further back it is much the same. Over hundreds of years there have been some beautiful paintings and an awful lot that are at best “meh!”.
*I would list but the Carabou Cup is about to kick off!
Snorri Godhi – Mr Martin is a difficult one, because he never finished his main work “A Song of Ice and Fire”.
However, that may be because something in him revolted against a standard leftist ending – the rich get destroyed and the poor masses of King’s Landing get lots of free food, and free everything else.
Better no ending than a stupid ending.
The American left is older than Karl Marx – it goes back to Thomas Paine, all the standard features of the American left (at least the non Marxist American left) are already present in Thomas Paine – support for fiat money (he opposed monarchies issuing it, but supported Republics issuing it), support for high “Progressive” taxes on property owners, free XYZ, income support for the poor, and on and on (see “The Rights of Man – Part Two” and “Agrarian Justice”).
All this made sense to Mr Paine, perhaps because (to be blunt) he was drunk most of the time (although he was a nice person – who opposed murder) – but to someone who is sober there is a voice of reason saying “this will not work”.
Perhaps if Mr Martin got drunk or stoned the idea of – all we have to do is tax the rich a lot – then the poor will be made comfortable – would make sense to him. Without the nagging voice of reason.
Even the clever sayings fall apart when one examines them.
“Hereditary legislatures are as absurd as hereditary mathematicians”.
So ELECTED mathematicians are supposed to be better than families that make mathematics their traditional vocation?
Or is the idea that if the majority of people vote that 1+1=3 then 1+1 suddenly does become 3?
Just in case people do not know who founded the American right (Mr Paine founding the American left) – the founder of the American right was the rather grim (grim – at least till you knew him well) Roger Sherman – Christian (rather than sceptical) in religion, strict in morals, opposed to the hollow fraud that is fiat money, and tight fisted when it came to government spending.
NickM
There were indeed excellent painters, sculptors, architects, composers (and so on) in the 20th century – but you will not tend to find them in most books or television documentaries on the arts, because they were considered “reactionaries” – who rejected the “spirit of the age”.
For example, just in my home town, Alfred Gotch the architect and Thomas Gotch the painter spring to mind.
Ah, Picasso! I don’t know much about his personal life, but in my opinion (his early paintings and his Blue Period) he knew his way around a canvas. Don’t much like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon nor much of his later art. I’d rather look at a Dali painting. But what do I know? I’m a cartoonist.
When it comes to Rowling, as far as I know the whole thing began when somebody was being fired because she’d said something to the effect of trans being a delusion, and there are only men and women. Rowling didn’t think that was a firing-worthy offense. That sounds more Libertarian than Left. But then the shrieking hordes attacked her. That’s the sort of thing that gets people making horde-unfriendly statements. I’m trans myself, and I didn’t give a damn.
Nationally – Sir Edwin Cooper was forgotten, such buildings as the old Port of London Authority (now the Four Seasons Hotel at 10 Trinity Square) were not considered “modern” – even though it was finished in 1922, it was against the “spirit of the age” you see (which indicates that the “spirit of the age” is an evil spirit). And his Lloyds Building was almost entirely torn down – to make way for something designed by Sir Richard Rogers (I am not sure this something should be called a building – as its systems are exposed, it looks unfinished and is nightmare to run).
Even Sir Edwin Lutyens, the best British architect of the 20th century, was left out of most books on British architecture.
Just as Frank Salisbury (the best British portrait painter of the 20th century – although he produced much other fine art as well) was left out of books on modern British painting – even though he lived till 1962.
Even his house was attacked by sneering “moderns” – a fine house that he had built (in Hampstead) in the 1930s. On his death he left his house to the British Council of Churches – but they gutted the place (selling off the furniture) and then sold the house itself – fortunately the house still stands (in private ownership).
Do not trust institutions – they have all betrayed the principles they were founded to defend, including the Churches.
The opening paragraphs of A Farewell to Arms: purely brilliant writing.
@NickM
That analogy doesn’t work at all. I have been to some of the great galleries of this planet and I never interacted directly with Rembrandy or Da Vinci or Van Gogh.
I think you have. Not in the same way you might have interacted with Taylor Swift (had you been a teenaged girl, which I assume you aren’t 😉) but in a different way. By going to Ms Swift’s concert no doubt Ms Teen never actually spoke directly to Ms. Swift but she interacted in a different way, she captured something beyond just the notes of the music. When I look at that Vermeer, or Starry Night, there is more in the painting than just the photons that hit his eye. I’m very much a materialist, so it is hard to articulate exactly here, but to use the language of the spiritual, the paint captures some of his soul too. And so you are interacting with the painter, even if it is a one one relationship.
This is just as true of Picasso, it is just that the soul he reveals is extraodinarily ugly and toxic.
FWIW, I’m not much of a fan of Van Gogh either, though I do like some of his nocturnes like the aforementioned Starry Night. In fact I have a print of one in my house. But some of his work absolutely looks like something out of a high school art class. But, for me it captures more of who he was, a man reduced by madness, rather than the deep toxicity I see in Picasso. Though, FWIW, both Picasso and Van Gogh seem to me to be both popular due to aggressive marketing rather than how the art plays (for Van Gogh through his sister in law, post mortem.)
I also regard photography very highly. I’m quite good at it.
I didn’t mean to dis photography, I too like it, and certainly by some great photographers it certainly is beautiful artwork. I, on the other hand, am not very good at it.
I have to disagree about C20th art. You are cherry-picking some utter shite but some is brilliant*.
Of course, and I overstated the case. But what is “shite” is the stuff that is born out of people like Picasso. That is almost all “shite”, sometimes literally. Which I suppose is the case I was making.
I think the Pompidou Centre in Paris is actually worse than the Lloyds Building in – at least the Lloyds Building has a certain slender tallness (for want of a better word) to it – the Pompidou Centre looks like a building site, it was Rogers – extracting the urine.
It also shows how much Modernism has infected France – the French elite love of abstractions is double edged sword, when the abstraction is good the French elite take it to its logical conclusion – but when the abstraction is bad, the French elite do exactly the same thing.
The Italians seem to have more earthy common sense (they are less pretentious than the French elite) – when someone pretends that bovine excrement is fine art, an Italian is apt to say that it is bovine excrement. I am reminded of when as famous tower collapsed in Venice – various Modernist designs were proposed, but the locals said “where it was – how it was” and stuck to that (bless their spirit).
As for the United States – the collapse of taste after World War II (part of the “International Style” of Modernism) is well known, but it really started before World War II.
To take two examples (with a similar function) from the same city – Harris County Courthouse and Houston City Hall (the latter a 1930s building) – the artistic decline is obvious. Houston City Hall is not bad by modern standards – but it is nothing like as good as such a building would have been a few years before (and lack of money, the Great Depression, is NOT the only factor at work).
I am aware that two of the architects for the Pompidou Centre were Italians – but I do not believe they would have got away with this scam in Italy.
Someone would have said, about this ugly and defective (it is always needing urgent “renovations”) building – “The Emperor is naked”.
No rational person* could consider Picasso anything other than a ‘journeyman’ artist, albeit one with an impressive PR operation and ideological fellow travellers. There is simply no comparison with the great works from the Low Countries or what is now Italy from the 14th to 18th Centuries. As the late, great Auberon Waugh put it, ‘The more people call themselves artists, the less art is produced.‘.
*In that I include any true Scotsman.
I think y’all need to settle on one definition of “art.”
Can you draw a cow that looks like a cow?
-or-
Does this combo of shape and color trigger an emotional reaction in most who see it?
Finally, a rational argument 🙂
bobby b – I go with “a representation that helps me to see the world as the artist sees it”.
Fraser,
If I dare say the reason it is difficult to articulate is that your statement is self-contradictory. “materialist” and “soul”?
Furthermore…
The timeless masterpieces of the fixed visual arts are, well, timeless. The performative arts, whether Kyung Wha Chung playing the Sibelius violin concerto or Blondie at CBGBs are, to quote John Lennon, “Be here now”. Live music can be great but it intinsically transitory in a way that something that has been in the Louvre for generations isn’t. Two totally different things. You can see exactly the same painting twice. Not so a concert.
To get somewhat back to the OP… John Lennon was a git and his music is spectacularly over-rated. So… in his case there is no issue in seperating the man from the music. Both appalling as a man and in his creative output.
Anyway, computer games are the one defining art form of this century. So far. I dunno what comes next but that just makes it more fun.
For the record I think Taylor Swift is great and I am not a teenage girl. I would enjoy, to use your term, “interacting” with her but my wife would divorce me and a certain Kansas City Chiefs player would kill me.
Compare the 1930s Houston City Hall to the City Hall that was built a few years before (photographs still exist – you can find them even on Wikipedia) – set in a bustling market square. The latter would be a proud addition to any town or city – the former, the City Hall in use since the 1930s, would not be missed.
Picasso – he could paint, he choose to abandon truthfully portraying the human figure and general reality, for ideological reasons NOT because he lacked technical skill.
To bring things up to date – look at the Vietnam Memorial.
The wall of names I could do – I could produce that, I am NOT a great sculptor – I am not an artist at all, something that I could produce is NOT great art.
But I could NOT have produced the sculpture of the three servicemen that is a few yards from the wall – I could not have created what Frederick Hart created.
Frederick Hart was a sculptor – take him back a 100 years, or a 1000 years, or whatever number of years, and people would have recognized him as a sculptor, he was quite modern – in the sense that he only died a few years ago (and he died young).
The argument that people who paint, or build, or sculpt, or compose, or write, in a way that is not Modernist (Modernist as opposed to modern) are against “the spirit of the age” and their works are “pastiches” comes from Hegel – why should one agree with Hegel? Rather than with the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears?
And if Hegel was around today and could see and hear what passes for painting, music, architecture, writing, and so on, now – I believe (very much believe) he would reject his own argument.
The idea that there is a telos (a purpose) in history meaning that everything ends up as progress to something better, is just WRONG – “history” is just what people do (and natural disasters as well – for example a volcanic eruption destroying a city is part of history) it is not necessarily “progress” – people can make things worse – not just better, and things that seem bad in the short term do NOT always turn out as progress in the long term – in the long term they can also turn out to be bad.
That being said, I do NOT deny that the Prussia of the 1820s was a better place than the serf ridden place that existed when Hegel was young – what I am saying is that Hegel mistook a specific thing (Prussia in the 1820s being better than it had been when he was a boy) for a general philosophical law of history.
But Hegel is still better than Karl Marx – Hegel was pointing at a real society, the Prussia of the 1820s and arguing (correctly) that it was a better place than it had been, Karl Marx was pointing to a fantasy that existed only in his own mind – and insisting that fundamental laws of history led to the fantasy that (in reality) existed only in his own mind.
When Karl Marx writes (in “The German Ideology”) that, in the near future, everyone will be able to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and be critical after dinner, just as they have a mind to – without ever being a hunter, a fisherman or a critic, for society will organize production” it is astonishing that such ravings were ever taken seriously.
What does “society organize production” even mean – especially as Karl Marx refused to explain, insisting that it would be “unscientific” to explain what he meant (“I will not write the menus for the restaurants of the future”) – even the much mocked “Utopian Socialists” had tried to explain how their schemes would work – Karl Marx refused to explain anything, yet his followers dominate the universities (and much else) of the world.
And how can “society organize production” if everyone can do anything they want to do (hunt, fish, discuss the arts – whatever, without any specialization of training or experience) whenever they want to?
Karl Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head – put reality as the foundation with ideas in a secondary place, but, in fact, Hegel (in spite of mistaken opinions) was far closer to reality – in that he started with reality, the Prussia he could see around him, Karl Marx did not start with reality at all – he started with wild fantasy (dream-scapes – for he never even tried to work out how anything would work) and stayed in wild fantasy till his death. The so-called “materialist” was not interested in material reality at all.
And Karl Marx is the lodestar of modern “intellectual” life – including, if one traces back the influences, the arts – including architecture, with vast “capitalist” corporations the slaves of socialist architects.
@NickM
If I dare say the reason it is difficult to articulate is that your statement is self-contradictory. “materialist” and “soul”?
That isn’t true. Soul doesn’t necessarily mean an immaterial essence. I am referring to the way in which an artist can bring their purpose, meaning, personality, feelings, philosophy and so forth and somehow, I’m not exactly sure how, it is rendered as part of the artwork. As I said, there is more in there than a copy of the photons that hit their eyes.
You can see exactly the same painting twice. Not so a concert.
I don’t agree. An experience with any type of art is always an interaction between the artist and you and you are different each time. To go back to the Vermeer, sometimes you might see it and be drawn to the excellence of his execution of lighting in the pearl, other times you might be drawn to the soulful look on the girl’s face — maybe you just broke up with your girlfriend — other times you might see the dark background and the person standing in that darkness — maybe you are feeling isolated. And so on. This is just as true of music. The variation in each instance of the concert in, for example, Ms Swift’s international tour is very small indeed. It has to be to prevent surprises in all that staging. And for sure I have watched a concert from the same artist twice and they are basically the same. But again, I brought myself different each time and so the experience was different.
To get somewhat back to the OP… John Lennon was a git and his music is spectacularly over-rated.
I’m not enough of a music expert to say he is overrated. The Beatles in general definitely dramatically changed music in a way similar to Picasso, and most of the Beatles music was relatively inoffensive, cheerly little tunes, so I don’t object. Of course “Imagine” is a horrible song; do people actually hear the words they are singing when they tearfully sing along? In a sense I think it illustrates what I was talking about above — how people bring their own self to a piece of art. The essence of this song I think for many people is captured in the word “imagine”, the idea of imagining a better world. And that is why they love it, and that is what they are bringing to it. That, despite the fact that only a tiny number of people would “imagine” that the world Lennon is proposing in the song is desirable. But the meta idea of the song allows them to project their hopes and imagination onto a catchy tune, while riding an emotional experience related to Lennon’s murder.
Anyway, computer games are the one defining art form of this century. So far. I dunno what comes next but that just makes it more fun.
I started my career writing video games, near the start of the video games revolution. Does that mean I am like Picasso too?
OK, I think I have tortured this subject to death now. Thanks, it was interesting hearing your perspective.
The association between abstract and/or modern art and ‘cultural marxism’ (an idea going back to the national socialist derision of ‘entarte kunst’)
Is curious. In actual fact modern art, and American abstract expressionism in particular, was heavily promoted by the CIA during the cold war as an example of authentic American art in opposition to what was seen as the anti idividualist and conformist aesthetic of soviet social realism.
Fraser,
I too have enjoyed our discourse. I think it’s time to put it to bed. It was getting somewhat OT anyway… I hope you had fun back in the pioneer days of video games. I only played them. Does it make you a Picasso? I dunno. Perhaps a more apposite qyestion is does it make you a Nolan Bushnell?
Mila s – the association of the far left with these art movements goes long before the National Socialists existed.
See, for example, H.G. Wells – who often casually mentions (for example in his “In the Days of the Comet”) that all traditional buildings and other forms of art must-be-destroyed. Mr Wells was just as much committed to the destruction of private property in the means of production as Karl Marx was – and he and Mr and Mrs Webb and H.G. Wells (and so on) were soon singing the praises of the Soviet Union.
If you really do not know that Modernism in the arts comes from the socialists (including the open Marxists) then you should know.
As for the National Socialists – the plans for Berlin (to be renamed “Germania”) show they were very much Modernists themselves – they were also cultural revolutionaries – see Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddinhn on this subject.
On the CIA – I am aware of their efforts to defeat leftism with leftism – for example backing moderate socialists in Chile and so on in the 1960s, “land reform”, nationalization, and all the rest of it.
Modern Art was part of this.
It does not take much effort to work out what I think of this CIA strategy of trying to fight leftism with leftism.
For those who do not know – the American intervention in the elections in Chile in 1964 (yes in 1964) was part of of a general American policy in Latin American and elsewhere (including Canada – yes Canada, but also around the world) – to push “reform” – with “reform” being defined as leftism, in short the American government was trying to use leftism to defeat leftism – which is mad. “Reform” whether a bigger government economically (more government spending on services and benefits, more regulations, and so on) or in social policy (trying to destroy the family and the rest of Civil Society) leads to more “reform” (more destruction) it does not prevent it.
This madness goes back long before the CIA – for example the “Conservative” Prime Minister Balfour said that “Social Reform” (bigger government) was the alternative to socialism – he was exactly WRONG – as by making economic and social (cultural) ills worse than they otherwise would be, “Social Reform” (going back to Disraeli and Derby – and Russell and so on) leads in the direction of the breakdown of society and the rise of socialist tyranny – it is indeed socialist tyranny by the installment plan. This was the plan of the Fabian Society from the 1880s – and, in the cultural realm (the arts), the aim of the degenerate Bloomsbury Group (with their connections to various groups in Cambridge – such as the “Apostles”) from at least the early 1900s (but even long before – for example Oscar Wilde was committed to the destruction of private property in the means-of-production – he was NOT just about sexual practices) – and similar groups existed in other Western nations, with the same evil aims of undermining society, economically and culturally.
As for the radical left (most certainly including Marxists – Karl Marx is the lodestar of the modern left, just as Rousseau was before him) desiring the destruction of beauty – of traditional art, architecture, sculpture, music (and so on) and replacement with ….. with stuff that is not good (to put the matter mildly) – this is indeed what they wanted and what, to some extent, they have done.
To say “that claim was made up by the Nazis” is false – as it does not take research to find out that this was under way before the National Socialists even existed. Indeed it was never a secret that the new “artistic” movements (in everything from painting and literature to architecture) were committed to the destruction of “capitalist” society – both economically and culturally, most certainly including the family – the essential foundation of society.
The damage done, especially socially – culturally, by the leftist control of such things as education, and the media (especially the entertainment media, and, indeed, the arts) has been terrible – and the damage to society was deliberate, it was the point – from the start.
When someone like, for example, the socialist George Bernard Shaw said he wanted every person to have to justify their existence to the satisfaction of a government board – or be executed (MURDERED) he smiled – but it was NOT joking.
The socialist H.G. Wells with his desire to destroy everything that was beautiful, and corrupt every human being (and wipe out whole races – just as the “liberal” Hobson wished to do), was not joking either.
Nor were the others joking – for example the sickening Mr and Mrs Webb.
These cultural icons of the Modernist Progressive movement were evil – utterly evil.
The British establishment, cultural and political, took them to its heart – with predictable results. Indeed the results could have been far worse – and probably will be far worse in the future, for we are still on this road to Hell.
The same is true in many other countries.
It has been pointed out to me that supporting the moderate left in 1964 in Chile may have been the only way to defeat the totalitarian collectivist Allende – and whilst he only got 38% of the vote in 1964, this argument may be TRUE.
But it remains the case that in the 1960s the United States supported Big Government “Reformist” candidates – around the world.