mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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"Art is truth"; but can truth be political?

Andy Sturdevant of South 12th posted an excellent essay about John F. Kennedy’s assertion that “art is truth,” which comes from a speech Sturdevant excerpts, compares to Glenn Beck’s remarks on art, and partially disputes.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

Kennedy was likely contrasting the art of the West with Socialist Realism in particular, the Russian movement directed by the Soviet government to support official party policy. Art that didn’t directly support Communist principles or “inspire” the “workers” was considered not merely useless but bourgeoisie and reactionary. What was personal, individual, interior was deplored: “The private life is dead in Russia for a man with any manhood,” and this was true for the scribe as well as the soldier.

To be preoccupied with such a scale of life -love, death, family- in a time of global proletarian struggle was clearly anti-social solipsism, and therefore anti-Socialist sabotage. So Bulgakov is censored while Gorky thrives.

For many, particularly survivors of Soviet domination like Milan Kundera, the idea that politics is incompatible with art is axiomatic. But Sturdevant notes several artists, and there are many, who exemplify his claim that “Art canbe an ideological weapon in a free society, obviously, and there have been plenty of times in American history where it has been used as such.”

While I tend to dislike political art -which is not exploratory but expository, which does not seek truth but rather tells us where to find it, which is not existential but teleological (and therefore often dull and dated)- I am interested in what seems to follow from Kennedy’s claim. If art is truth and art cannot be political, is it fair to say that what is political is necessarily untrue?

I think it perhaps is, since what is political is aggregatory, reductive, and systematic, all qualities I associate with the subtle falsity of reason run amok. Kennedy seems to suggest as much when he says that truth emerges when the artist “remain[s] true to himself and… let[s] the chips fall where they may.”

That is: undirected fidelity to the individual, concern with the human, yields meaningful artistic truth. As all politics are teleological and subordinate the individual to theory, the chips cannot fall where they may. Their artificial arrangment may be moving, moralistically affecting, beautiful, but tied to the moment it won’t be enduring.

But that is just one view, and the point is: Sturdevant’s post is awesome.

Tags: art culture philosophy politics milan kundera socialist realism
“…these philosophies have their perverse charms. If you look at it in the right way, it’s liberating that, as Derrida believes, there is no experience that precedes language, or that poems, as de Man says, are just persistant namings of the void, or that knowledge, as Foucault argues, is a function of a diffuse and vaguely malevolent ‘power.’… From the point of view of an english major, it was intoxicating because it promised to replace art. Why was that attractive? I think because I was impatient. Art was messy and small, reeking of lies and mistakes and humanity. Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic. No longer was I a lowly grad student parasite clinging desperately to Joyce’s belly fur; now I was a carnivore, hunting down the text and killing it. It was kind of like making art yourself, except you didn’t.”

Gary Kamiya, quoted by Little Potato. I am hostile towards theory for many reasons, not least being its unintelligibility and its falsity, but I think this precisely exposes what is worst about it: it exists as a means for the suppression of the artist by those who claim to love art.

Indeed, I think most theory serves this role: masses of gnostic, oppressive, symmetrical, self-referential language smothering whatever natural and human life exists beneath it. Political theory: a means of subordinating the individual to the striking diagrams of some universal set of ideas and logic. Literary theory: a means for denying the import of the author (through the absurd ‘intentional fallacy’) and establishing narcissistic “readings” of “texts” that “explode” meanings and position the tracer of lexical lines as some kind of creator. Explode is a nicely violent word for it, too.

The very clever resent art just as we resent the world; we want to control it, reduce it, bring it to heel with our fine phrases and semicolons and footnotes. Thus we must establish that art isn’t what it claims to be but some secret cipher only we can decode, a hidden message about the sexual anguish of the painter or the unreconstructed bourgeosie sentimentality of the composer or the imperialism of the poet; just as we say to the world: you’re not really happy, with your false consciousnesses!

“Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic.” When reading Chomsky’s infamous assessment of literary theory -that it is all idiotic- one might wonder: how did it come to dominate our intellectual landscape? I agree with Kamiya: what exalts will win favor, and in a world dense with people eager to be involved with art but, unfortunately and undemocratically, without talent, there existed this need: to justify the labors of the academic and critical class.

Now we have an unending rain of essays on how Kafka’s Odradek is about sodomy and need of an army of graduate students to parse and respond to them in their own jargon. This is part of the academic-industrial complex! Complexity of language is their technique for obscuring how little is really being said, and I think many of the participants can even recognize how astray we’ve gone; but just as with the military-industrial complex, there are forces at work here that none can contain: ego, pride, student loan debt, etc.

Update: with apologies for the polemical nature of this post, I want to note that this is what I did with most of my education. I don’t mean to offend.

Tags: academia art culture literature criticism
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

Aldous Huxley, quoted by AZspot and cited by Daniel Holter (who are both great). I have never cared for this form of analysis, which establishes a perceiving elect -generally the very educated- as capable of distinguishing ‘authentic’ happiness from suggestible, hypnotized ersatz-happiness. Note the wording: the clever leaders can trick people into “loving” their servitude.

A feat of some skill: the total manipulation of the rebellious, recalcitrant, omnivorously demanding, inconsistent, fickle human species! What brilliance these leaders possess, mastering mass psychology as none ever have from their smoke-filled rooms and lulling us all into our “false” happiness!

And only the hero-savant to tell us: “No, you’re not really happy! You’re not really free! You don’t want what you think you want, love what you think you love! Read my books and learn of your secret slavery!”

It is parlor-game intellectualism; Huxley will always have the trump card: “You only think you’re happy!” But if you have any respect for the individual, for the moral agency of man, you see at once how ludicrously elitist and epistemologically unjustifiable it is. If the individual says he loves his life and is happy, how can we falsify this claim? With Huxley’s aesthetics! “No one could be happy with such a life!”

But democracy means we accept that people are not all pleased by the same things, and Huxley’s vision of profound conditioning is merely a very fancy form of condescension and snobbery: the ordinary man, what a lump of clay his mind is! So easily tricked! And television: what trash!

This is the first step towards tyranny, of course: reduce the individual to the status of a passive and malleable animal. Shall he be rescued from the capitalist democracy he thinks he favors? A revolution may be needed! A war is already underway, it’s just undetected by the sheep! Violence may be required to free humanity, whether they think they’re enslaved or not, whether they want liberating or not!

(See also: A New Nadir’s very good response about Huxley and social criticism in general).

Tags: politics huxley history ideology culture philosophy
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.

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.

Tags: art religion culture sculpture
“To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts, and divorces! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that such is the normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such heartbreaks!”

Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and tortured and, in essence, killed by the Soviet State, in her memoir Hope Against Hope. Osip himself noted that

Only in Russia is poetry respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Such histories can make one despondent, but there is also the consolatory power they posses: what we endure is nothing alongside the anguish of our forebears, and what they endured too pales in comparison to our distant ancestors, and so on.

Tags: history art culture russia cold war soviet poetry love

Should Empathy Have Been Invented?

From Figures in the Carpet, which I’ve referenced before:

“The distinction between sympathy and empathy -feeling with and feeling ‘into,’ with the greater intensity of identification with the object associated with the latter- is a product of early-twentieth-century psychology and aesthetic theory. Prior to Theodor Lipps’ invention of the concept of einfühlung, translated as empathy by E.B. Tichener in 1909, the idea was folded into the meaning of sympathy.”

Putting aside the interesting problem of how isomorphic our terms for feelings are to our feelings, the text continues:

“[Previously thinkers] configured the relationship between the psyche and the world of others in such a way that they saw no difference between the two modes of feeling. The invention of the concept of empathy actually redefined the meaning of sympathy by drawing a distinction where there had been none before, in effect defining sympathy as ‘not empathy.’”

It seems clear that this distinction is part of what might be termed a politico-aesthetic drift in culture away from hierarchies: sympathy is often related, unfairly in my view, to “pity,” which is rejected as being offensive to the pitied for its implied hierarchy of power and privilege. The essay in question refers to this as “the necessary inequality between those giving and receiving sympathy.”

Is this a case of (1) ideologically-driven language manipulation, occurring well in advance of any comparable change in the nature of human emotion or the structure of culture, (2) an appropriate reflection of our ambition to be democratic and non-judgmental, however far short we fall, (3) absurd, as one cannot invent the concept of a feeling, instead being able only to reframe the same human feelings in fashionable, but specious, verbiage, or (4) something else entirely?

(Answers will govern whether I continue to use the term ‘empathy’).

Tags: culture politics language
Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943. Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption. There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable  to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are. Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us? Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler. That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism: It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.” In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state. As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted: The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why. The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all. (Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).

Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose resistance group; killed February 22, 1943.

Clive James, despite his atheism, wrote that Sophie Scholl “was probably a saint” and compared her to Jesus Christ; her face on German postage stamps is as great a symbol of transformation as Saul’s conversion, a demonstration that neither a state nor a human is ever beyond redemption.

There is some question, however, as to whether every member of our species remains human; in their spellbound, somnambulistic stupor, the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s can be said at the very least to have permitted as inhuman a machine as was imaginable  to assemble itself from their institutions and indeed their very body politic: the infernal Nazi state which defies credulity and has thus become myth. We feel that the Germans, the Wermacht, the Nazis, the Gestapo, must have been monsters, not ordinary typical humans as we are.

Whatever they were, there were few dissenters in their midst; and even if one objected to Nazism, one knew one could do nothing; and had one a family, what would running out into the street to be shot down by the SS as they came to capture one’s neighbor do anyway but assure that one’s child, too, would die in a camp, or at least be orphaned? Against sufficient power, morality is purely sacrificial; even if we can accept this for ourselves, can we accept it on behalf of others who need us?

Perhaps this is why the White Rose was comprised of the young, though not exclusively. A small, hopeless band of Germans who resisted the Nazi regime, they engaged in the simple, chiefly symbolic act of circulating essays which attempted to wake readers from the sociopathic trance in which they seemed to have been lulled by Hitler.

That students, powerless and doubtless aware that they faced assured death were they caught, turned to the essay as a means of protest is significant; they were using the expression of the West’s cultural heritage, its literary and rational tradition, as means to combat the negation of that heritage: irrational authoritarianism:

It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialism because it is not an intellectually defensible program. It is false to speak of a National Socialist philosophy… At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies. After all, Hitler states in an early edition of “his” book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): “It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it.”

In their leaflets, which quoted Goethe and Aristotle, they argued both for intellectual resistance and for sabotage, and called attention to the slaughter of the Jews, the Poles, and others, asserting every argument against the Nazi machine they could muster: on theological, practical, political, patriotic, historical, artistic, and moral grounds they fought the lies of propaganda and the delirium of the trance-state.

As they surely knew would happen, they were caught; in 1943, all were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed. There is a great deal more about their story here; it is as moving as anything I know. As one playwright noted:

The fact that [these] little kids, in the mouth of the wolf, where it really counted, had the tremendous courage to do what they did, is spectacular to me. I know that the world is better for them having been there, but I do not know why.

The emphasized last line seems crucial to me; I can only suggest that in their sacrificial courage, their refusal to abrogate their innate moral duty -which tens of millions of their peers had happily neglected-, and their sagacity despite their youth, the White Rose confirm that there was the finest sort of humanity even in the midst of that infernal machine. Maybe it is that they remind us that heroism is possible for all.

(Note: I’d written and abandoned dozens of posts about them several months ago while briefly fixated by ideas about morality, resigning myself to the customary sense of oafishness one feels when speaking of the very precious, but was reminded of them again by the eminent B. Michael’s note about Holland, 1954, a Neutral Milk Hotel song which mentions them. It isn’t surprising that Jeff Mangum alludes to them; one can easily grow as obsessed with the White Rose as with Anne Frank, and I find it hard not to search photos of Sophie Scholl for signs of her core, the source of her heroism, the looming loss).

Tags: culture history morality
“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.”

Sigmund Freud, quoted by Wolf and Fox. Psychotherapy in its infancy seemed like an effort to scientifically objectify artistic knowledge about humanity and its fears, longings, dreams; much reads like literature, and some -like Jung- sounds religious. It is emblematic of the 20th century that we attempted this translation of poetics into science.

Art reminds us endlessly that human life is essentially unchanging, that we are not different from our forebears, whose concerns and fears and dreams we share, that history is more cyclical than linear. Science tells us the opposite: that history is linear and progressive, that the world and human society are perfectible, and that we are ever-advancing: it is a kind of post-religious eschatology.

Some time ago, writing about Chaplin and Einstein, I wasn’t precisely sure why we now so strongly prefer science to art, but I partially suspect it is because science offers a much more alluring myth than art does, and consoles us in our mortality by telling us that with every decade our species advances towards an unspecified state of angelic or utopian transcendence.

As with the perpetually preparatory model of life offered to a modern citizen, in which every phase of education, employment, courtship, and leisure is measured by its capacity to position one for the next phase, the implied anthropology of a scientific / technocratic model is one of promise: diseases cured, inconveniences conquered, understanding attained, life extended. The purpose of humankind is to perfect itself and the universe, it is suggested, and this will occur; we are thus part of a narrative journey into an ideal future (and as Frankl and James have noted, deprived of a sense of futurity we tend to collapse).

I mean to take nothing from science in noting that although it is among the finest achievements of humanity, certain facts remain which art is better-suited to convey: that despite the Large Hadron Collider and jet airplanes and vaccines and psychotherapy, we remain deeply strange, hopeful, fearful, loving, jealous, giving, deranged, ingenious creatures as mortal as we’ve ever been, and that whatever humanity’s future evolution every one of us lives and dies alone.

It is well that science incrementally improves us, our world, and our understanding of the universe, but it is not surprising that Freud felt as though he was following poets: art, free from rationalism, epistemological restraint, or the need to solve the problems it finds beyond cathartically bringing them into our awareness, often arrives first, and sometimes goes deepest.

Tags: culture art
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Duke Ellington, memorably stating his view on the problem of art’s relationship to entertainment. Clive James argues that it is not an idle lyric but an assertion of aesthetic philosophy made at the time when jazz began to mirror other arts of the 20th century in declaring that anything enjoyable was unserious. The contrast here, then, is between what swings –what can be danced to and whistled and enjoyed by most- and what requires cerebral engagement of a more seated sort: say, late Coltrane (a favorite of mine who comes in for much criticism in this essay). Ellington and James favor the former.

The latter, an obsession with formal considerations and technical problems in the visual, musical, and literary worlds, is the result of artists turning away from audiences and towards one another, or worse: towards critics and academia. That this inward-orientation, this preoccupation with art about art and concerned mainly with other art, has weakened the arts is obvious enough; what audience pays to be ignored? Who wants to watch artists discuss themselves, once the novelty of the formal invention wears off? I once used a simple test in evaluating any work: if an essay is packaged with it, pasted on the wall alongside or as a program before the performance, to explain why it’s not meaningless, the work ought to have been an essay and is in its present form meaningless. If an essay is needed to convey the point, convey the point in an essay! It’s cheaper and easier and better for the audience.

Hundreds of objections to this stance come immediately to mind, however: how low ought to be our denominator in judging intelligibility? How much erudition, education, sophistication, or even simple intelligence can we say is required before we say the piece is insufficiently apprehensible? In other words: whose capacity to dance sets the limit on what we can swing to?

The problem is highlighted by James’ bizarre attack on Coltrane:

“Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity…supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration… nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones.”

I adore James, but I could scarcely imagine anyone being more confused about the aesthetic interests of an artist than he is about Coltrane’s. Indeed, this is a perfect demonstration of an unfortunate fact: when someone draws a line in art’s history and says that beyond that point art loses its way, it is in nine cases out of ten merely a declaration of the speaker’s failure to understand. It is comparable to the derided declamation of the aging that this or that technology or style of dress is undermining social mores: it represents the point in history at which the speaker jumped off the train.

Art makes wrong turns; much of modern art (and much more of so-called ‘postmodern art’) is wretched, but most of art has always been wretched; it is just that now most bad art is forgotten. The consensus editorial filtering that takes place over time reduces the chaff of previous eras and makes it seem as though our own is populated by self-involved hucksters selling gimmickry as profundity. Hence the amusingly constant concern on the part of the elderly of every generation that nothing is as good as it was in the old days.

Ellington’s assertion is debatable, but it’s important too. I wish more artists would keep it in mind, even if just to override it after some internal struggle. But when I was eleven years old listening to Coltane’s Ole, nothing seemed emptily virtuosic or cacophonous about it to me; it had as much swing as anything I’d ever heard, and still seems to. Art’s progress requires that we learn to dance to novel rhythms, and I hope not to mistake unfamiliar music for swingless noise. (But I’m sure I will).

(Update: Topherchris feels that I have the swing whether or not it means a thing).

Tags: art culture duke ellington john coltrane clive james criticism

Lying Las Vegas

Las Vegas is a vast, astounding, and expensively-developed product. Like any product designed to attract those who don’t need it, it contains within its marketing the assumptions it makes about its target customers. Every adult knows that we don’t win at gambling: we give progressively more money to the house until we quit. Thus the narrative Las Vegas sells itself with must inspire an irrational, indeed anti-rational, fervor in its visitors, a powerful hostility to reason. This narrative is made manifest in spectacularly coordinated fashion across all sorts of experiential fronts: Las Vegas, in dozens of ways, works furiously to subvert your realistic critical discretion.

This is not news, but I was stunned by the discipline with which Las Vegas produces its message and the complexity of its strategy. In a city where corporations privately fund $11 billion dollar developments nothing is an accident, and the interweaving of media methods and acousticovisual attacks on your reason is brilliantly executed.

The key theme is that to dream, to fantasize, is itself fun; that is, to believe in what isn’t true is itself exciting. Implied is how terribly dull it is to ground oneself in reality (the reality in which striptease dancers don’t come home with you and slot machines safely favor the casino). The best-marketed dreams consist of evocative symbols rather than literal descriptions, as we are justly ashamed of the theme of these dreams, the infantile pleasure principle run amok.

Hence the obsession with magic and illusion. Where else in the world do so many flock to see magicians? Dozens of them in the major casinos perform their elaborate special-effects tricks, announcing that “magic is real” and “seeing is believing” and “illusions happen here” and giving you “the power to believe.” One notes that his magic makes childhood dreams come true. And audience members pay to be further encouraged that the most magical trick of all -taking a statistical improbability comparable to being struck by lightning and spending hundreds or thousands of dollars pursuing it- is real. They have the “Power to Believe!”

Hence the proliferation of “fantasy” aesthetics. Excalibur is a castle-casino with Arthurian legends alongside its slot machines and a “Tournament of Kings” nightly. It sits across from the repurposed cinematic lion of MGM. Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe and countless evocations of pirates and cowboys and adventurers beckon the tourists on the strip, every casino wearing its own memetic mask. Why should adults care for such hackneyed fantasies? They are the fables of youth, the story-worlds of childhood dreams: they resonate beneath our faculties.

Hence the repackaging of pre-Christian mythologies: the vast Caesar’s Palace isn’t alone in its utilization of Greek and Roman statuary, although it isn’t outdone. In its shopping colonnade, the gods speak to shoppers and everywhere references to their power are depicted. In the Egyptian aesthetic of the Luxor one finds the same curious use of dead culture, despite Americans’ famed lack of interest in history. That’s because it’s not history that is offered but (1) a world free of Judeo-Christian moral strictures, (2) an alternative metaphysic of deprecated gods and superstition, and (3) ever-more exoticism to take you away from this moral, modern, rational universe (and your mortgage).

Hence the lavish reproductions of cities -Venice, New York, Paris- which announce that we are free to believe in the miracle of teleportation: we are not in the dull ordinary world of our hometowns or even of hackneyed Las Vegas: we are in Paris, and in Paris why shouldn’t one play craps or buy some Versace? This further surrealization of reality and enactment of spectacle is shockingly expensive: a sure sign that its return on investment is demonstrable.

Hence the boundless repetition of suggestive phrases to describe shows, casinos, shops, and the like: provocative, exotic, titillating, glamorous, exclusive, hot, cool, shocking. All mean little or nothing but ably set the expectation: we are free and transgressive here, and you should be too. The napkins challenge you: you aren’t safe, are you? You aren’t sexless, neutered, weak? You aren’t dull are you? Don’t you have the confidence to get out there and try your luck?

Hence the satiation of longing at a safe distance: delivered call girls and strip clubs and nude shows provide consumable sex but not the vastly more terrifying romance; drive-through wedding chapels make fast-food of lifelong commitments; buffets allow gorging without requiring the anxiety-inducing debate that accompanies selecting an entree. You can have it all without engaging anything!

Hence the strong presence of televisual media themes. As we are assured by television that Las Vegas is a sinful yet safe and magical place by TV, so when we arrive to deposit our savings into bleeping televisual gaming machines we are constantly reinforced in our flight from awareness by TV’s forms and contents. Everywhere are screens, on buildings and in tables and in walls, and everywhere are television personalities, but not those of today: always distant relics from earlier eras, the Osmonds or some actor from the Brady Bunch. When a casino spends $75 million dollars on fountains, it can afford whatever entertainment it wants; but it wants these relics, because they help lull us further into the somnambulistic suggestibility of our childish TV dreams: here are the Osmonds! Here are the Bradys! Here is the magic of your lost youth! Here are the knights of the round table! Here is Paris-as-symbol! This is a play world of play possibility!

But the money is real, of course. And I suspect that is why on every overpass I saw the most complete and elaborate suicide-prevention fences I’ve ever seen, why the faces of those pulling the slot levers were never expressive of this endless fun but rather of the pedestrian fact that fantasy isn’t a pleasure; it is the source of most displeasure. To dream of what isn’t is to awaken to what is with a heavy heart, and perhaps a light wallet.

And I believe this also explains why, wherever one goes in Las Vegas, dozens of people are taking photographs: an experience created by and supported through media fantasy disappoints in reality. Standing before the reproduction of the Trevi Fountain, one knows one is supposed to feel something like awe, but one knows as well that this cheesy recreation is not actually awesome. Still, having been promised through media that this experience will be richly meaningful, one reaches for the lens to mediate the experience until it is a depiction of itself: the ‘fun’ of turning your life into an advertisement or television show in real-time is needed when the absence of actual fun threatens the mood.

Someone who lies to be liked may develop the skilled mendacity of a method actor, but to see truly spectacular deceit one must find a grifter: someone who needs to be believed else he starves. Our best actors are in police stations, prisons, boardrooms: wherever livelihood depends on duplicity.

And that is why Las Vegas puts to shame Hollywood’s best efforts, for in Las Vegas music and light and sound are coordinated across all art forms to monetize the escapist fantasy life we tourists are told is so much fun.

And when the escape fails and we return home to real life, we can pull out the photos and the tag line -“What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas”- and wink, wink, nudge, nudge our friends about all the supposed fun we had, the whores and the liquor and the poker and the magic and the roller coasters and the shows and so on, and maybe we’ll never have to accept that we sat sadly in a sea of slot machines dreaming of riches and sex while paying to get fleeced like sheep.

Tags: las vegas criticism culture
“Were we to describe the so-called “Copernican Revolution” in brief, we might put it this way: predictive power grew ever more irresistible.”

William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.

Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.

Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.

Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.

I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.

“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.

Tags: scientism walker percy william vollmann culture history science copernicus
“To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil.”

Alfred Polgar. “You must help him to an awareness…” Derision is not help; brutal exposure of perceived logical errors is not help; sarcastic decimation of straw-men is not help. Also: neither agreement nor acquiescence nor victory are synonymous with awareness.

This relates to a previous post on moral vigilantism, and I think well-summarizes why much of what is written against those we oppose is merely intended to pleasure ourselves: rhetoric is often onanistic.

Tags: morality philosophy culture

What is Wrong with Bad Art?

I’m still not sure why failed or bad attempts at art are “immoral”. -Dad commenting on this.

This is a controversial point, but it wasn’t for Plato. The quality of art he despises in The Republic is that it misleads. It conditions us to expect and hope for what will not come, in his view; it is a saccharine lie or an ideological lie or an incompetent lie. One needs only to think of propaganda to know what he meant, but one can also imagine a middle-American mom disappointed that her camping trip doesn’t look like a Thomas Kincaide painting or shattered that her romance isn’t reminiscent of The Notebook.

Art’s mission has changed since Plato’s time; it now serves less often as a vehicle for explicit messages than as a vehicle for quasi-impartial exploration. That is hugely important, and why art as we understand it emerges from the Western tradition first: it is bound up with notions of liberty and the individual.

But bad art naturally remains. When Plato forbids poets and painters from his ideal city, he does so for the health of the populace: they must not be deceived about the world or their place in it. When I watch television or read pulp novels or see movies who serve mainly to reinforce body dysmorphia and status anxiety, his argument resonates.

That is: bad art obscures reality, lulls us into a stupor in which we are confused about who and what we are and how the world is, manipulates us cheaply and in a way that reinforces our worst habits of feeling, and drives us further from any sort of awareness.

When we read bad books or savor bad movies, we sometimes tell ourselves that they have no effect: they are just for fun. But not only is the human mind too porous for that to be true, even how we have fun is something learned; we condition ourselves through exposure such that choosing the worst over the best is a perverse way to deform ourselves.

When I play violent video games, my dreams get bloody; what will happen if I immerse myself in television, then? We think we are stronger than we are: too many fairy tales heard, too many bronzed and plastic bodies seen, and we cannot accept reality; we want its televisual simulation more. We will close our eyes when having sex to preserve the dream.

The radically inaccurate expectations we have of each other, of the world, of ourselves, the confused sense we grow up with that life is something happening tomorrow and that we will attain happiness if only we find someone attractive enough (or are attractive enough ourselves): these are easily identified as the wounds of bad art. But art that is marginally better is no less harmful; I remember thinking how American Beauty would further embed certain terribly shallow memes into our psyche and incline us to reduce our fellow humans to caricatures.

In sum: good art increases one’s understanding of the self and the world through exploration, simulation, provocation, and so on; bad art decreases it persistently and does so by its sentimentally exploitative nature as much as its incompetence. It violates the purpose of art and does damage to us all: hence its immorality.

Tags: art morality culture philosophy
“Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery.”

Eugenio Montale, quoted by James. This is not a condemnation of experimentation, but an observation about the relationship between an experiment’s purpose and its result’s endurance. The purpose must not be the experiment itself.

Milan Kundera said that the “sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

As a fan of much abstract and experimental art, Kundera echoes Montale: both assert that whatever the formal nature or concerns of a work, its attention and aesthetic must be directed towards apprehending or expressing something like knowledge or truth, and in a new way. The truth pursued is existential, experiential, human, by and large; this is the most important sort. Indeed, Kundera says that the obligation to seek it is moral and that art which fails to meet this standard is not just “pulp” or “ordinary” or “bad” but in fact immoral.

This is radical among men as modern as they because it is so traditional; in my view, it is also true.

Tags: art culture clive james eugenio montale milan kundera
Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971) I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think). But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks: The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death. In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s? And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night? The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on. It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of tragedy, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry that “play” gets harder. (None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).

Mao, Roy Lichtenstein (1971)

I am partly persuaded that postmodern ‘playfulness’ is a very good thing, that by desacralizing images, words, and concepts we can more exhaustively interrogate them, sorting out what matters and why and developing our understanding of the world. This has been my first -but not only- line of defense on behalf of works of art that violate whatever boundaries of taste, sensitivity, or custom, and I extend the defense to utterances among friends (as do most of us, I think).

But it is always arresting to remember that some images have correspondences in the world of human experience that seem beyond “play.” I wrote previously of the associations one cannot avoid between the wonderful work by the amazing Cursive Buildings below and September 11th, associations which first forced their way into my awareness when rewatching Brazil after the attacks:

The image of Mao above, and those many Maos fashioned by Warhol below, reminds me of this. Mao was as evil as any human being has ever been, as evil as any can be; that he was ostensibly driven by ideology to pursue, acquire, and deploy maximum individuated power in no way absolves him. Several tens of millions of people died because of Mao, many at his direct instruction; many were tortured to death.

In some senses we are all their kin, but of course those victims must have living relatives, too. One wonders how they feel about images like the Warhol below: do they find them an interesting reclamation of signifier and symbol, or a kaleidoscopic horror? How would you imagine it if the face were Hitler’s, or Pol Pot’s?

And indeed, how do you feel about the Dead Kennedys’ song “Holiday in Cambodia”? Or about this Stalin / Colonel Sanders KFC / KGB brand mashup? Is it as funny when one thinks of the weeping, begging sisters and brothers marched through the Lubyanka to be shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night?

The older one gets -the more one knows about the lives of others- the greater the number of images, symbols, narratives, histories, and jokes one can no longer take lightly. One knows someone who lost a child; the “dead baby” meme loses its luster in light of her tears. One knows of a city that washed away and someone whose life was wrecked: you change the station if “When the Levee Breaks” comes on. And so on.

It doesn’t mean terribly much about the things in themselves, as philosophers say, but it means something about the things in oneself, the widening sense one has of the seriousness of tragedy, the importance of history, the fragility of life. And year by year, I worry that “play” gets harder.

(None of which is to say I can’t take a joke; I still laugh at many of these things, but now with some slight concern that wasn’t always there).

Tags: art politics culture