It strikes me that we are talking about two separate things when we complain about the commodification to mass art (art for mass consumption) and also about the idiocy of modern art. The average person looks at a signed urinal and decides this is stupid, which is why the vast majority of modern art is disdained by the vast majority of people. The reason there is any market at all for modern art is because there is a community of (mostly wealthy, mostly well-educated, often left-wing) types who want to signal their disdain of both “good taste” and “average art.” They intentionally like art which exists solely to defy convention and to “prove” that beauty is a myth and aesthetics are meaningless. I don’t blame capitalism for that, but rather the intentional project on the part of some to reject both traditional aesthetic criteria, and consumerism (to prove that they’re “cultured”).
This isn’t original to me, but a lot of the complaints about mass culture are the same as the complaints going back centuries that the rich had about how poor people have bad taste. When you got an age that produced more democratic art (ie art for the majority population, not just the elites), you ended up with a lot of the cheap, low-brow stuff people disdain as “mass culture.” Why? Because capitalism gives people what they want and this actually does represent what the average human being wants. Most elites can’t come out and say they are snobs who look down on the taste of the poor, because they have to pretend that they’re on the side of the working man/proletariat (including to themselves). But the truth is that the fault isn’t capitalism, but human nature. Not everyone is intelligent or cultured or sophisticated. Like it or hate it, this is what we are.
Finally, Irving Kristol pointed out that the communist countries never produced good communist art. All the good socialist/communist art was produced in capitalist countries. It turns out capitalism really does work better than anything short of oligarchy (Rome, medieval Europe, etc.) at producing art. If more art is produced to meet a growing market for art consumption, the average art will be average, some art will be bad, and some subset of it will be good.
Agreed. Blaming the decline in Art on capitalism is lazy. There are always forces looking to take advantage of whatever captures public attention. As you mentioned, this happens as well in communist countries. The difference is that, in capitalist societies, people still had the freedom to create, and no one knew in advance what was going to trend.
To me, the downfall is simply because we produce less exciting new art. In the 50s and 60s, the US and France were capitalist, but it saw the rise of “New Hollywood” and the French New Wave in Cinema. Capitalists profited from it but it was at least interesting, original art. I explore that more in my article but maybe there comes a time where all the “low hanging fruits” are gone it’s just really hard to make something new, profound and relevant within a certain medium.
I think there's something to that idea that the low-hanging fruit is gone. So much of music and "literature" produced today are just imitations of what was innovative in the 60s and 70s. But on the flip side, that means that the bar for greatness is higher, and if people keep trying and keep taking risks, eventually someone will produce something that clears that bar and is truly innovative. If the easy innovations are gone, the innovations that are yet to come will be that much more important.
Yes, that's also what I'm hoping for. It could also lead to a completely new form of Art that we're not imagining yet (AI/virtual interactive story telling… who knows).
By the way, the repetitiveness is even worse in Cinema. Last year, literally ALL the top 10 box office hits were sequels, prequels or remakes.
1: Adorno apparently wants art that shows truth about life, but is without reference to politics, economics or any of the other things people care about in life. That strikes me as a problem.
2: I wouldn’t blame capitalism for Marvel slop; the market is punishing them pretty hard for their inability to make movies people want to watch. One might debate why they are such garbage the past 10 years, but definitely capitalism is not to blame for their Marxist creators.
I can’t comment on Taylor Swift… my wife likes her stuff, but it all sounds the same to me, as my music does to her. I can only assume she has terrible taste.
We all share a sense there is a problem with modernity. Adorno deals with the problem by drawing distinctions between "high art" and "low art," but his arguments are not forceful. I recommend Baudrillard's powerful essays about commodification and representation (aka, "simulacra.")
Duchamp's urinal (titled "Fountain") was the essence of Dada, the revelation of nonsense in the heart of efforts to take ourselves seriously. It's a cheap place to hang out. I think a lot of people have missed the joke. I find something worthwhile in an artist's careful, exploratory pursuit of abstraction, but that is a far cry from a banana taped to a wall.
For all his faults, Theodor Adorno was correct! There is such a thing as good art and bad art! Adorno is wrong to blame capitalism at least 100% for the decline in the quality of art over the past couple centuries. The other half of the story was a movement called Impressionism. It at first simply loosened artistic standards but retained some elements of discipline. The first two generations of the movement were unbelievable and gave us geniuses like Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. But over time it devolved into not merely loosening artistic standards but doing away with them altogether. Thus we arrive at where we are today where a bag of feces, a giant carving of someone’s rear end, a banana taped to a canvas, some cinder blocks, a bench, or a pair of glasses dropped on the floor is considered art. Here’s the problem with that, if everything is art than nothing is art. If art becomes so subjective it can be literally anything that defeats the whole purpose of art in the first place. Art is supposed to be beautiful, stand out from the ordinary and be something to behold. A pencil dropped on the floor and broken in half, a Kleenex full of boogers or a toilet is NOT art! The Mona Lisa, the Scream or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. That is art! Also, Adorno could not have been more right that art is NOT supposed to be universal or appeal to everyone. Everyone is NOT supposed to understand it! That’s the whole point! It’s supposed to introduce you to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world and make you think long after you’ve left the gallery or the museum! You’re absolutely right Liza, we need to consume art critically and parse out the quality stuff from the junk. For instance if we’re talking about film, examples of good art would be Frankenstein, Dracula, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Seventh Seal, The Wizard of Oz, George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol, The Maltese Falcon, the Original Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Dictator, The Invisible Man, Modern Times, The Battle of Algiers, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the original Godzilla. Examples of Bad Art would be Howard the Duck, Gigli, the Garbage Pail Kids, Battlefield Earth, Planet 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?, Baby Geniuses, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. In terms of literature, examples of good art would be The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, Two Soldiers, Intruder in the Dust, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, King Lear, The Flea, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I Heard A Fly Buzz. Examples of bad art would be Bad Feminist, Orientialism, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, The Hate U Give, and American Dirt. In Music, examples of good art would be: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louie Armstrong, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Prince, Phil Collins, Selena, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Frank Zappa, and Roy Orbison. Examples of bad art would be Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Pitbull, Will I Am, Fergie, Jacob Satorious, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, and Kesha. Phenomenal article worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, Liza!
OTOH, one should be very, very wary of looking at the writers of today and assuming that pop-culture disqualifies some from this category. Plays in the Elizabethan era were pop-culture and Ben Jonson was decried as foolish and arrogant for putting out his plays in a book -- and worse, one titled "Works."
Good stuff. I guess I’ll add this-there is plenty of great art and artists. And writing and writers. The question you raise is what is elevated for mass consumption—what can we actually find and see. capitalism can make the great popular. It can also make trash popular. We have had fortunate eras from time to time where the former held true, perhaps due to patrons with good taste—I don’t pretend to know the answer. What I do know is that right now we don’t have a very good filter—such that one is more likely to pick up garbage at a bookstore, or see garbage at a major metropolitan art museum than one is to see greatness. I think economists would best describe this as a market failure, and I would hesitate to turn for solutions to anyone who would think jazz is part of such a market failure. The solution? I doubt there is one other than time.
Adorno is somewhat pompous and elitist in his approach to art. The distinction between high- and low-brow art is not that clear cut nor does it strictly follow broad or niche appeal. In the same vein as Adorno, Bourdieu argued that cultural winners couldn't be financial winners, but that's simply not true. You can make art and be financially successful.
I’m perfectly fine with a broad definition of art . I don’t think there is much point in denouncing someone like Jeff Koons or Tracy Emin as non artists. No they’re bad artists who exalt banality and mediocrity.On Adorno , I’d be careful. My memory of him is hazy but I remember my past impression was that he was actually rather incoherent. Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable? Great art can emerge within and from an existing tradition. I have the sense that Adorno thought art was supposed to challenge in some sense the status quo. He was far too sophisticated to be an advocate of agitprop but you get a sense he was what my film history professors called Brechtian . Art must be actively taken in a manner which aims for demystification. In this process the non passive observers consciousnesses is raised and his sense of the cultural contradictions
of capitalism raised.Ok that’s nice but it’s actually rather fanciful.Art comes out of any number of things and has varied effects and functions. Adorno like most Marxists is trying to create an ideology of art. Not necessary or even healthy!
"Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable?"
Testimony from a non-musician: I've listened to him often enough and found something interesting in his music, even enjoyed some of it, even among his thorniest serial pieces (the 3rd and 4th quartets, for example). However, I consider him highly overrated and have to be in the mood for any of it. (For the first six months or so after my ear cracked his code, as it were, when I was 22 or so, I listened to him compulsively. Then I simply stopped. Of the big three in his line, I might add, Berg is better and more listenable, though Webern I find worse.) Serialism can have subtle effects once a sense of tonal center has been dissolved, but usually, especially among his academic epigones, there's not much else on offer. In any case, there's so much else in 20th century classical music that I prefer to seek out, and in a more comprehensive view I think Kyle Gann has it right--serialism is a limited technique, not a fundamental revolution in music: https://www.kylegann.com/PC050320-Once-More-into-12-tone.html
Good to see a young person see through Adorno's mire.
However, that is past. The Left has collapsed and its destructive ideas shown for what they are.
More important, is rebuilding. That can only be done by learning from the traditions of the past, refreshed and renewed: the creation of those new works based on far better ideas which supplant these grotesque perversions flooding museums, the airwaves, the poetry journals, the theater, etc.
Thanks for the outstanding column! And introducing me to Adorno.
For better or worse, 'art' is whatever the 'art world' says is art. There are no standards.
When I was a university student, 'Living Theater' was the rage. Critics loved the fact that the actors became their characters, the script was minimal, the audience was directly part of the action.
I thought it would be great to write an MFA thesis on Professional Wrestling as the Epitome of Living Theater, since it met all the definitions, except it was an extremely popular, non-elitist version of it. Unfortunately, I enjoy thinking but not writing.
I recently shared my thoughts about Living Theater with a professional wrestler that I know. He commented that he saw his profession as being an actor in Theater in the Round, but he had to reach the audience in the furthest seats in a large sports arena.
A thought - rather than referring to our society as 'Capitalist', an economic system, consider referring to it as an 'Open Society' that encourages individual inquiry and expression. For more, read any of Karl Popper's political works, but especially 'The Open Society and It's Enemies'.
do you remember the bizarre rant in the Dialectic about donald duck? i dont think im imagining this.
hes like an anthropologist who vastly inflates the importance of penile sheaths to certain tribes, seeing ritual, symbolism, and purpose in plain-jane mundanities
Excellent piece! You echo thoughts I've had for many years. I do want to push back on one idea:
"While it is true that capitalism requires artistic sacrifices in order to drive profit, a Marxist system not only requires similar sacrifices but demands them to a far greater degree (consider the Soviet Union and the degree of artistic standardization necessary to maintain order)."
I disagree that capitalism requires artistic sacrifice. I would argue that both terms (capitalism and sacrifice) are widely misunderstood today and that a much more harmonious idea is possible if we reconsider our understanding of these concepts.
A sacrifice is a net loss—giving up something that is worth more to you than whatever you get in return. And capitalism is a complete separation of state from economy *except* in cases where someone's rights have been violated; in such cases, it's government's responsibility and obligation to correct and punish the rights violation. A capitalist economy is one in which government has *zero* power to intervene in business except to protect rights; this is very clearly not the economy we have in America today, nor has a truly capitalist economy ever existed anywhere else.
I would argue that a truly capitalist society maximizes freedom, opportunity, and the protection of rights for all and so also maximizes artistic expression throughout the society. If more artists were freer, wealthier, healthier, and happier (as I think they provably would be in a capitalist society), the overall quality of art in general would soar—and good artists who don't compromise on the quality of their work would be financially well-rewarded for their work in most cases.
I think capitalism versus communism is only part of the debate. Certainly the arts became the rope in a cold war tug-of-war (cf. the article in JSTOR's newsletter, https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/). This was very much in line with the US response to Sputnik (let's show them up by getting to the moon first.) Modern art of course was well on its way before the 1940s, but this cultural cold war gave it a huge push. As the article states, there was also pushback (not from the Soviet Union, but from the American public).
Although the JSTOR article focuses on the visual arts, there is clear evidence that the CIA also funded modernist/post-modernist writing at the prominent Iowa writing workshops, to less effect but to equal puzzlement from the public. Apparently, the opposite of art so controlled that it lacks all individuality is art so individual that it lacks all control. This was the culture war of the 1940s and 1950s, which in part set the stage for the current culture war.
Now earlier than this (and this is the part I think needs more emphasis) there came a separation between arts and crafts. One still hears the phrase "arts and crafts" as if they were the same thing, much as the parallel phrase conflates "science and technology." And certainly they go together. However, look what happens when there is craft without art: you get "craft projects" sold at "craft stores," in which by following meticulous instructions the consumer can produce a result indistinguishable from a mass-produced item. The "crafter" is reduced to little more than a human 3-d printer.
Conversely, art without craft leads to absurdity. I saw a gallery piece once which was a simple blob of paint on an otherwise blank canvas, accompanied by a page long artist statement which was a manifesto (nay, "screed") on the importance and meaning of the piece. Now when you have clearly put more effort into your artist statement than into the art itself, you are not an artist. You are a poseur. Your art consists solely in the intention that some object you present should be taken as art. Accordingly, you place your object(s) in a context (gallery or museum) in which the expectation of art leads people to regard it as such. Then to ensure that they "get it," you either explain it in a statement of give it an evocative title which "makes them think." The "emperor's new clothes" effect will do the rest (except of course for those recalcitrant folks who insist on forming their own opinions).
[Sidebar: Liza has already noted an another article that "show, don't tell" should not be an absolute dictum in writing. I agree with that, but here in the case of the visual arts I would argue that it really should be an absolute dictum. If the statement you want to make involves having people think about the implications of a banana duct-taped to a wall, then the honest thing to do would be to write a poem about such a banana. But of course, you can't then sell the poem for six figures. Also, that might require (gasp!) craft, perhaps even skill.]
Why the separation between arts and crafts? I don't know. I suspect it is because there are many people who want to feel that they are making something special, and have some skill but no originality. They buy craft kits and think they are making art. There are others who also want to be makers, and have some originality but no skill. They take workshops on "promoting your art" and learn how to get their pieces before the public in venues which define them as art. Actually good art requires that small overlap in the Venn diagram of craft and originality. It is therefore difficult and unpopular with aspiring creators.
This is not to say that all skill is equally easy to appreciate. Certain kinds of virtuosity are obvious, others require a certain background to appreciate. For instance, Pound and Eliot wrote in ways which counterpointed the melody of literary culture. To those who don't know the melody, the counterpoint is meaningless, uninterpretable, perhaps even dissonant. Similarly, jazz musicians improvise constantly, but they do so against a known musical context. There are things in jazz which jazz musicians (and listeners steeped in jazz) can hear that I cannot (I am the only non-musician in my family, so I know how it feels).
Why is that important here? The rise of craftless art undercuts appreciation for this kind of cultured virtuosity. People know that they are seeing a lot of apparently meaningless "art" or "poems" or "stories," but it is hard to tell whether they are truly worthless or whether they only seem opaque because of the lack of a cultural context for appreciating them. Trust is lost, and few people believe that there is even such a thing as true "high art." They assume it is all just bilge, and throw the baby out with it. I can't blame them for that -- there is so much bilge out there that it is difficult to believe that there is anything else.
After reading some of your previous articles, I had made up my mind that your arguments lacked nuance; this demonstrates a truth quite to the contrary.
I still can't fathom a world where Joyce's aesthetic choices are reducible to mistake or the political divorced from aestetic expression, but your insights here are such delicious food for thought.
You criticize Marxism above all else, it seems. I do not consider myself a Communist by any stretch of the word, but my own observations lead me to believe that Marx's dialectical materialist framework is instrumental in promoting greater overall social welfare, even in the context of an ever changing political arena. In the United States this is generally accepted as ideally: a. Direct Democracy, (which we have to a limited extent in the form of free expression, referendums on ballots, etc.,) and b. Representative Democracy (which by all appearances is a corrupt institution due to current liscentiousness to unchecked spending by ultra-powerful people and their self-serving agendas).
Anywho, I am sure I will enjoy disagreeing with you again, and take pleasure in your wonderful intellect.
It strikes me that we are talking about two separate things when we complain about the commodification to mass art (art for mass consumption) and also about the idiocy of modern art. The average person looks at a signed urinal and decides this is stupid, which is why the vast majority of modern art is disdained by the vast majority of people. The reason there is any market at all for modern art is because there is a community of (mostly wealthy, mostly well-educated, often left-wing) types who want to signal their disdain of both “good taste” and “average art.” They intentionally like art which exists solely to defy convention and to “prove” that beauty is a myth and aesthetics are meaningless. I don’t blame capitalism for that, but rather the intentional project on the part of some to reject both traditional aesthetic criteria, and consumerism (to prove that they’re “cultured”).
This isn’t original to me, but a lot of the complaints about mass culture are the same as the complaints going back centuries that the rich had about how poor people have bad taste. When you got an age that produced more democratic art (ie art for the majority population, not just the elites), you ended up with a lot of the cheap, low-brow stuff people disdain as “mass culture.” Why? Because capitalism gives people what they want and this actually does represent what the average human being wants. Most elites can’t come out and say they are snobs who look down on the taste of the poor, because they have to pretend that they’re on the side of the working man/proletariat (including to themselves). But the truth is that the fault isn’t capitalism, but human nature. Not everyone is intelligent or cultured or sophisticated. Like it or hate it, this is what we are.
Finally, Irving Kristol pointed out that the communist countries never produced good communist art. All the good socialist/communist art was produced in capitalist countries. It turns out capitalism really does work better than anything short of oligarchy (Rome, medieval Europe, etc.) at producing art. If more art is produced to meet a growing market for art consumption, the average art will be average, some art will be bad, and some subset of it will be good.
Agreed. Blaming the decline in Art on capitalism is lazy. There are always forces looking to take advantage of whatever captures public attention. As you mentioned, this happens as well in communist countries. The difference is that, in capitalist societies, people still had the freedom to create, and no one knew in advance what was going to trend.
To me, the downfall is simply because we produce less exciting new art. In the 50s and 60s, the US and France were capitalist, but it saw the rise of “New Hollywood” and the French New Wave in Cinema. Capitalists profited from it but it was at least interesting, original art. I explore that more in my article but maybe there comes a time where all the “low hanging fruits” are gone it’s just really hard to make something new, profound and relevant within a certain medium.
I think there's something to that idea that the low-hanging fruit is gone. So much of music and "literature" produced today are just imitations of what was innovative in the 60s and 70s. But on the flip side, that means that the bar for greatness is higher, and if people keep trying and keep taking risks, eventually someone will produce something that clears that bar and is truly innovative. If the easy innovations are gone, the innovations that are yet to come will be that much more important.
Yes, that's also what I'm hoping for. It could also lead to a completely new form of Art that we're not imagining yet (AI/virtual interactive story telling… who knows).
By the way, the repetitiveness is even worse in Cinema. Last year, literally ALL the top 10 box office hits were sequels, prequels or remakes.
Great essay, thanks. 2 points:
1: Adorno apparently wants art that shows truth about life, but is without reference to politics, economics or any of the other things people care about in life. That strikes me as a problem.
2: I wouldn’t blame capitalism for Marvel slop; the market is punishing them pretty hard for their inability to make movies people want to watch. One might debate why they are such garbage the past 10 years, but definitely capitalism is not to blame for their Marxist creators.
I can’t comment on Taylor Swift… my wife likes her stuff, but it all sounds the same to me, as my music does to her. I can only assume she has terrible taste.
We all share a sense there is a problem with modernity. Adorno deals with the problem by drawing distinctions between "high art" and "low art," but his arguments are not forceful. I recommend Baudrillard's powerful essays about commodification and representation (aka, "simulacra.")
Duchamp's urinal (titled "Fountain") was the essence of Dada, the revelation of nonsense in the heart of efforts to take ourselves seriously. It's a cheap place to hang out. I think a lot of people have missed the joke. I find something worthwhile in an artist's careful, exploratory pursuit of abstraction, but that is a far cry from a banana taped to a wall.
For all his faults, Theodor Adorno was correct! There is such a thing as good art and bad art! Adorno is wrong to blame capitalism at least 100% for the decline in the quality of art over the past couple centuries. The other half of the story was a movement called Impressionism. It at first simply loosened artistic standards but retained some elements of discipline. The first two generations of the movement were unbelievable and gave us geniuses like Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin. But over time it devolved into not merely loosening artistic standards but doing away with them altogether. Thus we arrive at where we are today where a bag of feces, a giant carving of someone’s rear end, a banana taped to a canvas, some cinder blocks, a bench, or a pair of glasses dropped on the floor is considered art. Here’s the problem with that, if everything is art than nothing is art. If art becomes so subjective it can be literally anything that defeats the whole purpose of art in the first place. Art is supposed to be beautiful, stand out from the ordinary and be something to behold. A pencil dropped on the floor and broken in half, a Kleenex full of boogers or a toilet is NOT art! The Mona Lisa, the Scream or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. That is art! Also, Adorno could not have been more right that art is NOT supposed to be universal or appeal to everyone. Everyone is NOT supposed to understand it! That’s the whole point! It’s supposed to introduce you to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world and make you think long after you’ve left the gallery or the museum! You’re absolutely right Liza, we need to consume art critically and parse out the quality stuff from the junk. For instance if we’re talking about film, examples of good art would be Frankenstein, Dracula, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Seventh Seal, The Wizard of Oz, George C. Scott’s version of A Christmas Carol, The Maltese Falcon, the Original Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Dictator, The Invisible Man, Modern Times, The Battle of Algiers, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the original Godzilla. Examples of Bad Art would be Howard the Duck, Gigli, the Garbage Pail Kids, Battlefield Earth, Planet 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?, Baby Geniuses, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. In terms of literature, examples of good art would be The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Cask of Amontillado, The Raven, Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, Two Soldiers, Intruder in the Dust, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, King Lear, The Flea, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I Heard A Fly Buzz. Examples of bad art would be Bad Feminist, Orientialism, Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, The Hate U Give, and American Dirt. In Music, examples of good art would be: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louie Armstrong, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Prince, Phil Collins, Selena, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Frank Zappa, and Roy Orbison. Examples of bad art would be Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Pitbull, Will I Am, Fergie, Jacob Satorious, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, and Kesha. Phenomenal article worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, Liza!
OTOH, one should be very, very wary of looking at the writers of today and assuming that pop-culture disqualifies some from this category. Plays in the Elizabethan era were pop-culture and Ben Jonson was decried as foolish and arrogant for putting out his plays in a book -- and worse, one titled "Works."
Good stuff. I guess I’ll add this-there is plenty of great art and artists. And writing and writers. The question you raise is what is elevated for mass consumption—what can we actually find and see. capitalism can make the great popular. It can also make trash popular. We have had fortunate eras from time to time where the former held true, perhaps due to patrons with good taste—I don’t pretend to know the answer. What I do know is that right now we don’t have a very good filter—such that one is more likely to pick up garbage at a bookstore, or see garbage at a major metropolitan art museum than one is to see greatness. I think economists would best describe this as a market failure, and I would hesitate to turn for solutions to anyone who would think jazz is part of such a market failure. The solution? I doubt there is one other than time.
Adorno is somewhat pompous and elitist in his approach to art. The distinction between high- and low-brow art is not that clear cut nor does it strictly follow broad or niche appeal. In the same vein as Adorno, Bourdieu argued that cultural winners couldn't be financial winners, but that's simply not true. You can make art and be financially successful.
I’m perfectly fine with a broad definition of art . I don’t think there is much point in denouncing someone like Jeff Koons or Tracy Emin as non artists. No they’re bad artists who exalt banality and mediocrity.On Adorno , I’d be careful. My memory of him is hazy but I remember my past impression was that he was actually rather incoherent. Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable? Great art can emerge within and from an existing tradition. I have the sense that Adorno thought art was supposed to challenge in some sense the status quo. He was far too sophisticated to be an advocate of agitprop but you get a sense he was what my film history professors called Brechtian . Art must be actively taken in a manner which aims for demystification. In this process the non passive observers consciousnesses is raised and his sense of the cultural contradictions
of capitalism raised.Ok that’s nice but it’s actually rather fanciful.Art comes out of any number of things and has varied effects and functions. Adorno like most Marxists is trying to create an ideology of art. Not necessary or even healthy!
"Even with what you cite, we’re supposed to think Schoenberg is THE exemplary modern artist because his art was “ autonomous “ but is he actually listenable?"
Testimony from a non-musician: I've listened to him often enough and found something interesting in his music, even enjoyed some of it, even among his thorniest serial pieces (the 3rd and 4th quartets, for example). However, I consider him highly overrated and have to be in the mood for any of it. (For the first six months or so after my ear cracked his code, as it were, when I was 22 or so, I listened to him compulsively. Then I simply stopped. Of the big three in his line, I might add, Berg is better and more listenable, though Webern I find worse.) Serialism can have subtle effects once a sense of tonal center has been dissolved, but usually, especially among his academic epigones, there's not much else on offer. In any case, there's so much else in 20th century classical music that I prefer to seek out, and in a more comprehensive view I think Kyle Gann has it right--serialism is a limited technique, not a fundamental revolution in music: https://www.kylegann.com/PC050320-Once-More-into-12-tone.html
Serialism is the ACDC of classical music.
When you've heard one track you've heard them all.
Good to see a young person see through Adorno's mire.
However, that is past. The Left has collapsed and its destructive ideas shown for what they are.
More important, is rebuilding. That can only be done by learning from the traditions of the past, refreshed and renewed: the creation of those new works based on far better ideas which supplant these grotesque perversions flooding museums, the airwaves, the poetry journals, the theater, etc.
Thanks for the outstanding column! And introducing me to Adorno.
For better or worse, 'art' is whatever the 'art world' says is art. There are no standards.
When I was a university student, 'Living Theater' was the rage. Critics loved the fact that the actors became their characters, the script was minimal, the audience was directly part of the action.
I thought it would be great to write an MFA thesis on Professional Wrestling as the Epitome of Living Theater, since it met all the definitions, except it was an extremely popular, non-elitist version of it. Unfortunately, I enjoy thinking but not writing.
I recently shared my thoughts about Living Theater with a professional wrestler that I know. He commented that he saw his profession as being an actor in Theater in the Round, but he had to reach the audience in the furthest seats in a large sports arena.
A thought - rather than referring to our society as 'Capitalist', an economic system, consider referring to it as an 'Open Society' that encourages individual inquiry and expression. For more, read any of Karl Popper's political works, but especially 'The Open Society and It's Enemies'.
do you remember the bizarre rant in the Dialectic about donald duck? i dont think im imagining this.
hes like an anthropologist who vastly inflates the importance of penile sheaths to certain tribes, seeing ritual, symbolism, and purpose in plain-jane mundanities
Excellent piece! You echo thoughts I've had for many years. I do want to push back on one idea:
"While it is true that capitalism requires artistic sacrifices in order to drive profit, a Marxist system not only requires similar sacrifices but demands them to a far greater degree (consider the Soviet Union and the degree of artistic standardization necessary to maintain order)."
I disagree that capitalism requires artistic sacrifice. I would argue that both terms (capitalism and sacrifice) are widely misunderstood today and that a much more harmonious idea is possible if we reconsider our understanding of these concepts.
A sacrifice is a net loss—giving up something that is worth more to you than whatever you get in return. And capitalism is a complete separation of state from economy *except* in cases where someone's rights have been violated; in such cases, it's government's responsibility and obligation to correct and punish the rights violation. A capitalist economy is one in which government has *zero* power to intervene in business except to protect rights; this is very clearly not the economy we have in America today, nor has a truly capitalist economy ever existed anywhere else.
I would argue that a truly capitalist society maximizes freedom, opportunity, and the protection of rights for all and so also maximizes artistic expression throughout the society. If more artists were freer, wealthier, healthier, and happier (as I think they provably would be in a capitalist society), the overall quality of art in general would soar—and good artists who don't compromise on the quality of their work would be financially well-rewarded for their work in most cases.
I think capitalism versus communism is only part of the debate. Certainly the arts became the rope in a cold war tug-of-war (cf. the article in JSTOR's newsletter, https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/). This was very much in line with the US response to Sputnik (let's show them up by getting to the moon first.) Modern art of course was well on its way before the 1940s, but this cultural cold war gave it a huge push. As the article states, there was also pushback (not from the Soviet Union, but from the American public).
Although the JSTOR article focuses on the visual arts, there is clear evidence that the CIA also funded modernist/post-modernist writing at the prominent Iowa writing workshops, to less effect but to equal puzzlement from the public. Apparently, the opposite of art so controlled that it lacks all individuality is art so individual that it lacks all control. This was the culture war of the 1940s and 1950s, which in part set the stage for the current culture war.
Now earlier than this (and this is the part I think needs more emphasis) there came a separation between arts and crafts. One still hears the phrase "arts and crafts" as if they were the same thing, much as the parallel phrase conflates "science and technology." And certainly they go together. However, look what happens when there is craft without art: you get "craft projects" sold at "craft stores," in which by following meticulous instructions the consumer can produce a result indistinguishable from a mass-produced item. The "crafter" is reduced to little more than a human 3-d printer.
Conversely, art without craft leads to absurdity. I saw a gallery piece once which was a simple blob of paint on an otherwise blank canvas, accompanied by a page long artist statement which was a manifesto (nay, "screed") on the importance and meaning of the piece. Now when you have clearly put more effort into your artist statement than into the art itself, you are not an artist. You are a poseur. Your art consists solely in the intention that some object you present should be taken as art. Accordingly, you place your object(s) in a context (gallery or museum) in which the expectation of art leads people to regard it as such. Then to ensure that they "get it," you either explain it in a statement of give it an evocative title which "makes them think." The "emperor's new clothes" effect will do the rest (except of course for those recalcitrant folks who insist on forming their own opinions).
[Sidebar: Liza has already noted an another article that "show, don't tell" should not be an absolute dictum in writing. I agree with that, but here in the case of the visual arts I would argue that it really should be an absolute dictum. If the statement you want to make involves having people think about the implications of a banana duct-taped to a wall, then the honest thing to do would be to write a poem about such a banana. But of course, you can't then sell the poem for six figures. Also, that might require (gasp!) craft, perhaps even skill.]
Why the separation between arts and crafts? I don't know. I suspect it is because there are many people who want to feel that they are making something special, and have some skill but no originality. They buy craft kits and think they are making art. There are others who also want to be makers, and have some originality but no skill. They take workshops on "promoting your art" and learn how to get their pieces before the public in venues which define them as art. Actually good art requires that small overlap in the Venn diagram of craft and originality. It is therefore difficult and unpopular with aspiring creators.
This is not to say that all skill is equally easy to appreciate. Certain kinds of virtuosity are obvious, others require a certain background to appreciate. For instance, Pound and Eliot wrote in ways which counterpointed the melody of literary culture. To those who don't know the melody, the counterpoint is meaningless, uninterpretable, perhaps even dissonant. Similarly, jazz musicians improvise constantly, but they do so against a known musical context. There are things in jazz which jazz musicians (and listeners steeped in jazz) can hear that I cannot (I am the only non-musician in my family, so I know how it feels).
Why is that important here? The rise of craftless art undercuts appreciation for this kind of cultured virtuosity. People know that they are seeing a lot of apparently meaningless "art" or "poems" or "stories," but it is hard to tell whether they are truly worthless or whether they only seem opaque because of the lack of a cultural context for appreciating them. Trust is lost, and few people believe that there is even such a thing as true "high art." They assume it is all just bilge, and throw the baby out with it. I can't blame them for that -- there is so much bilge out there that it is difficult to believe that there is anything else.
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Kendrick Lamar, prized by English teachers … and today’s Super Bowl performer.
Wasn't this all settled in 1920?
After reading some of your previous articles, I had made up my mind that your arguments lacked nuance; this demonstrates a truth quite to the contrary.
I still can't fathom a world where Joyce's aesthetic choices are reducible to mistake or the political divorced from aestetic expression, but your insights here are such delicious food for thought.
You criticize Marxism above all else, it seems. I do not consider myself a Communist by any stretch of the word, but my own observations lead me to believe that Marx's dialectical materialist framework is instrumental in promoting greater overall social welfare, even in the context of an ever changing political arena. In the United States this is generally accepted as ideally: a. Direct Democracy, (which we have to a limited extent in the form of free expression, referendums on ballots, etc.,) and b. Representative Democracy (which by all appearances is a corrupt institution due to current liscentiousness to unchecked spending by ultra-powerful people and their self-serving agendas).
Anywho, I am sure I will enjoy disagreeing with you again, and take pleasure in your wonderful intellect.