mills

Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was extraordinary; as a journalist, Communist, anti-Communist, Leftist internee under the dying French regime while Hitler invaded, and essayist, he saw as much as anyone the consequences of opinion, of weak morality, of deference to evil.

Koestler was also a wife-abusing rapist whose treatment of women was uniformly brutal: impregnating and abandoning them to dangerous abortions, cowing them and beating them, permitting only sycophancy in them, he repels even if one admires Darkness at Noon.

Julian Barnes, whose own personality emerges from Nothing to be Afraid Of and Flaubert’s Parrot and other works as utterly decent, considered him a friend. In 2000, he and an author of a biography of Koestler fought over the deceased author’s reputation, and in their dispute one encounters again these same questions:

• Should deeds (and opinions, which can be a kind of deed) beyond the creative work of an artist or thinker matter in the consideration of that work? Does it matter that Heidegger was a Nazi? Does it matter that Polanski was a rapist? Does it matter that Anderson feels Polanski should not face justice?
• If we set an arbitrary point at which we say such things do matter -we forgive Ted Kennedy but not Polanski, or vice versa; we accept Alec Baldwin’s political declarations but not Jon Voight’s; we despise Heidegger for being a Nazi but not Sartre for defending Stalin; there are endless examples- must we accept that all arbitrarily-set limits are equivalently defensible?

These are difficult questions for which I have no answer and in which I lose interest; artists and thinkers are precisely as human as we all are, with the same preponderance of flaws, some unforgivable; what matters to me is the work. Indeed, while most of us do not commit overtly immoral acts it is easy to see how we might be detested. For example: did you vote for Obama? He has increased out use of Predator attack drones vastly; when, years from now, you opine in an interview after your latest book has been released that you loved Obama, the scores of relatives of the innocent collateral damage will loathe you and consider you immoral, and what will you say? Let your handler deal with it! And let’s not think of what our exes and enemies would say of us!

Morality and Aesthetics

But there is something interesting here: I do not think we are merely arguing about whether to, say, boycott Wes Anderson’s movies because we disagree with him. We regularly buy products from companies which do worse than sign petitions! We pay taxes which fund policies with greater negative impact than op-eds or signatures or the odious opinions of some long-dead author!

I think the greater issue is that when a thinker takes a position we consider immoral we begin to doubt the value of their work, a fact I find fascinating. In Heidegger’s case it is perhaps not surprising that we would ponder whether someone who found Hitler reasonable can be trusted to reason -though we might ask Hannah Arendt- but it is notable that we are concerned by Wagner’s anti-Semitism.

What does music have to do with racism? It seems to me that there is a common sense that art or thought of any value must have some moral core, that there is a moral basis to aesthetics without which they lose their value, that creative work implicitly expresses the morality of its creator and loses much of its meaning if said morality is dubious in itself or contradicted by the creator’s behavior.

If painting, photography, philosophy, film, literature, and so on are problematized by their creators’ failed, repudiated, or incoherent moral codes, then we must accept that morality is more integral to art and thought than we ordinarily suppose, particularly in an age of disputed moralities, of negotiable and relative moralities.

Do we restrict the requisite morality of all art to the universal proposals almost all accept: that violence is to be abhorred, that compassion is a virtue? Or do we permit more specific moralities -the morality, say, of feminism, or the “revolutionary morality” of Marxism, or the morality of Christianity- to inform the aesthetic judgement of a work?

That is, are these statements equivalently defensible:

1. I cannot believe that a man who supports a child-rapist can make movies worth a damn; he lacks compassion, a sense of humanism, and an understanding of justice; everything he makes will be shallow and unfeeling.
2. I cannot accept that a novel written by a rapist will have any insight into the humanistic concerns of literature; if he cannot feel for his victims, how can he feel for his characters? Everything he writes will be brutally atavistic.
3. I cannot abide music which promotes extramarital sex sung by someone who has been convicted of un-Christian, immoral acts with children; it is repellant and demonstrates a soulless amorality which places him far from real love.

When do opinions become deeds? When do deeds become universally detestable? When are you comfortable stating that your morality is sufficient to judge another by? When does immorality impugn art’s credibility? Are there aesthetics without morality?

My parents just returned from Spain, and my father wrote to me about the magic square on Josep Subirachs’ Passion Facade of the Sagrada Familia, the amazing Cathedral by Antonio Gaudí still under construction in Barcelona. I was there more than ten years ago, but I don’t recall noticing the square.

Magic squares are mathematical puzzles; all rows and all columns add up to the same sum, in this case 33, the age of Jesus at his death. This is not a true magic square, as some numbers are duplicated.

Readers of Steve Martin’s wonderful novel The Pleasure of My Company might recall that magic squares have an interesting history, and were evidently enjoyed by Albrecht Dürer, among others. The presence of one on the Passion Facade is perhaps interesting, or is perhaps reflective of the sort of aesthetic and philosophical ideas that made Subirachs’ additions so controversial; my father, for example, detests them. I don’t like that he ignored Gaudí’s vision and I suspect his work will not endure: its style seems to me preoccupied with its own revolt against tradition; it is indifferent to its audience.

Here is the Nativity Facade (photo by Brian Colson; more photos of this facade are here):

Although radical, its quality is primarily organic; it seems to me as though it is carved on the inside of a cave. What is remarkable is that it remains extravagantly ornate, but is not ostentatious in its ornateness; that is an achievement. Here is the Passion Facade, made many years later by Subirachs, shot by the same photographer (more here):

Details are particularly revealing of the differences, the former as lush as stone can be, alive, corporeal, the latter austere, severe, modernist, angular. See details here and here, for a good encapsulation of the differences.

Cathedrals once, and evidently still, take centuries to build, and styles changed as they were constructed, although with less speed than is presently the case. The incorporation of many styles and subsequent additions generally delights us now, and perhaps this will as well someday. But, to be very simple about it, I find Subirachs’ work ugly and dispiriting.

One of the most famous of E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans’ Storyville district, where sex work was legal from 1897-1917. See below for more.

Ernest Belloch Photographing a Prostitute, George Schmidt.

When Abby was last in town, she, Will, and I visited the gallery of George Schmidt, a New Orleans artist, to deliver a canvas stretcher. He treated us to a polymathic and monological tour de force as we wandered around his building, discussing the very high and the very low with equal enthusiasm. He laughed at his own constant and usually ribald jokes while showing us a work in progress I’d give my car for.

The painting above is of a man more commonly known as E. J. Bellocq, well-known for his photographs of prostitutes in Storyville, a district in which New Orleans legalized prostitution from 1897 through 1917 (as is always the case, the goddamn Feds eventually interfered for their own selfish reasons).

His photographs are amazing; this is from 1912:

Bellocq and Schmidt are both part of and concerned with the idiosyncratic and unusual side of New Orleans that is inimitable; Schmidt’s current painting treats in a manner both comic and reverential -the archetypal New Orleans Catholic stance- of the city’s four holy figures in a scene I can scarcely describe. Hopefully I’ll be able to share more on both of them in the future.

Detail of The Dog, as it’s called, by Francisco Goya.

Leonard Knight’s recliner at Salvation Mountain; see Been Thinking’s wonderful post and Flickr set for more.

I love Knight’s work, and that of his fellow amateur builders in Zack Godshall’s documentary on them. One need not resent the preening textuality of much contemporary art -which as often as not needs an essay to explain its purpose, a quality which has the admirable effect of keeping employed many thousands of otherwise useless, overeducated pedants like me- to adore folk art. But perhaps it helps.

As is the case with popular music or regularly intelligible jazz, it is a pleasure to experience visual art that requires no curatorial explanation. This is not to say, of course, that there are clear distinctions between the straightforward, the complex, and the overly-obscure (if there is such a thing); all of us have our own thresholds of comprehension, and what is difficult is often rewarding. But the immediacy and power and vitality of, say, Howard Finster, thrills me.

I bet that it’s quite nice to sit in that chair.

You might consider reading Maira Kalman’s “I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door,” an illustrated narrative of life on Earth -from dinosaurs to motorcycles- and the United States, culminating in some reflections on immigration and beauty. I saw it thanks to Ayjay.

Freud makes an appearance, as do the Native Americans, the Europeans, the residents of the primordial soup, and some striking photographs.

If you do read it, I would be interested: what did you think of it? Was it too political? Too personal? Silly? Sweet?

The Christ of the Abyss, off the Italian coast at San Fruttuoso some fifty five feet below the surface. Commemorating a diver who perished near the spot, the statue has many iterations around the world, one of which was, according to Italian police, vandalized by Satanists who removed its arms.

More photos on Flickr.