The sources of art (capital 'A')

Where does great literature and art come from?  [ETA: A more accurate version of the question might be: How is it produced or generated?] Herewith a couple of perspectives, not original of course (though the labeling may be).

The first could be called Individual Genius Meets An Imperfect World.  The artist converts personal misery into art (consider, e.g., how much mileage Dickens got out of his relatively short time in the 'blacking' factory).  The misery can be collective rather than strictly personal (e.g., no Napoleonic wars, no War and Peace).

The second perspective could be called Individual Genius Meets Its Predecessors.  The artist struggles to carve out her or his own terrain in conversation with, or response to, what others have done.  This is about the anxiety of influence, in Harold Bloom's well-known phrase.

The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive.  A given work can respond both to an external event and to the influences of the artist's predecessors (or perhaps contemporaries).  

Does great art require the prod of misery, frustration, injury, imperfection, unhappiness, injustice?  Would there be great art in a utopian society?  My impression is that some sketchers of utopias (say, the nineteenth-century utopian socialists, or Skinner in Walden Two) have not been much concerned with this issue.  Where is the Marxist tradition on this?  Is the whole notion of great art a decadent bourgeois concoction?  Are the question's assumptions irrelevant or meaningless in a communist society where, as Trotsky apparently thought, the average level of human creativity would rise to heights never before seen?  In the absence of empirical evidence on the last point, I guess we're all free to speculate.

Serendipities

Joseph Bara, once (and maybe still?) a widely-known name in France, was a drummer boy in a French republican force fighting in the Vendée when he was killed at the age of thirteen in December 1793, having refused to surrender some horses when captured. Helped along by a speech by Robespierre, who portrayed the boy as having died crying "Vive la république!," Bara became a republican martyr.

I ran across Bara's name last year in David Bell's The First Total War, which carries as one of its illustrations J.-L. David's painting of the death of Bara. Then the other evening I happened to pull from my bookcase Robert Gildea's The Past in French History, saw the book's cover painting, said to myself "what is that?," turned to the back of the paperback, and discovered that it is J.J. Weert's painting Death of Bara, done in the 1880s. The Wikipedia entry on Bara reproduces both of these paintings (as well as a third one). The Weerts in particular should be viewed full size (click on the image).

Added later: For those too busy to click through to the Wiki entry, here is the Weerts painting:

Eyes tight shut

A statue of a sleepwalking man has stirred controversy at Wellesley College (via). I have nothing to say about this because ars longa, vita brevis. Or something.

Mitzen on Pinker

Although I've probably mentioned Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature here before, I haven't previously discussed it at any length, for the excellent reason that I haven't read it. However, Jennifer Mitzen's review of the book in the current Perspectives on Politics is worth a post [the link is to a gated version; I haven't searched for an ungated version but there probably isn't one].

As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."

It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.

With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?

Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).

Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."

Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait. 

This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.

Quote of the day

In The Abolitionist Imagination, Andrew Delbanco mentions an 1862 article by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Chiefly About War Matters," which Hawthorne published under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. After quoting a passage from the article in which Hawthorne, referring to a group of fugitive slaves, wrote that "For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger's land...," Delbanco observes (pp.28-9) that:

...this was an example of Hawthorne doing what he always did: arguing with himself. As F.O. Matthiessen put the matter, "the characteristic Hawthorne twist" was his habit, after making any decisive assertion..."to perceive the validity of its opposite." And so, in the Atlantic article, he not only acceded to the editors' insistence that the essay could be published only if accompanied by dissenting footnotes, but he supplied the annotations himself. "The author seems to imagine," he wrote in one note, that he has "compressed a great deal of meaning into" his "little, hard, dry pellets of aphoristic wisdom. We disagree with him."

Pepper spray and Seurat: a Pointillist Event (Pointillist or pointless?)

Pablo K at The Disorder of Things has a long post on "body politics" which reproduces, toward the end, several "meme-ifications" of the "pepper spray policeman" -- in Guernica, in Tienanmen Square, in Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and so forth.

(Click here for the Seurat image.)

What is the point of this particular juxtaposition? The linked post refers to it and similar images as "jovial and sardonic in the face of callousness, but also now repeated for their own sake." I think the post and comments are worth reading, though written in a style not everyone will take to. The author asks parenthetically in comments: "Does someone want to theorise this in terms of the Event?" Thanks, but I think I'll pass on that. For now, at any rate.

Cultural diplomacy and 'smART Power'

The U.S. State Department has long sent "cultural ambassadors" abroad, but in recent years, as this New York Times article from last October points out, those envoys have been mostly performing artists (dancers, actors). Last fall the Obama administration decided to start sending visual artists abroad too, under a $1 million program called smART Power to be administered by the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

It's tempting to make fun of this, but I'm not really in the mood for that today. I'll content myself with noting that the State Dept., according to the article, is spending more on cultural diplomacy now than it has in quite a long time: in 2010 the budget for this was $11.75 million, no doubt a small fraction of State's total budget, but not nothing. At a time when budget pressures are acute and may lead to cuts in U.S. government programs aimed at alleviating extreme poverty and fighting disease in poor countries, one does wonder whether sending a sculptor to, say, Islamabad or Lahore to create a public artwork is a wise use of funds or, to be blunt, just ******* crazy (yes, Pakistan is on the list of places for smART Power; so is Egypt; so is a Somali refugee camp in Kenya -- this last might make more sense). However, I'll leave this question for readers to ponder. (Note: I don't know what the current budget imbroglio has done, or is doing, to smART Power's appropriation -- if anything -- or to the broader cultural diplomacy appropriation.)
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Hat tip for the article to HC. It only took me five months to get around to reading it.

'The African Renaissance' in stone

I haven't referred a lot to Africa here, especially not recently, but I found this post by Timothy Burke, with accompanying photo, interesting. (More substantive remarks on it later, time permitting.)

Those revolutionary Brillo boxes

I happened to pick up a copy of Arthur Danto's new book on Andy Warhol (called, surprisingly enough, Andy Warhol) in my local public library. Although it's a short book, I didn't and don't have the time or inclination to read it from cover to cover. I did dip into it, however.

For those who don't know, Danto is a philosopher and art critic who has written about the philosophy of art, among other things (see Louis Menand's piece in the current New Yorker). In a nutshell, Danto thinks Warhol was a revolutionary artist because he threw into question the definition of art more sharply than previous artists (such as Duchamp) had. If Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which consists of stacks of Brillo boxes, is art, the definition of art must involve something extra-visual or non-visual, since there is no significant difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes that could have been found on any grocery store shelf. "What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye" (Danto, Andy Warhol, p.65).

Similarly, Warhol's 1964 movie Empire, consisting of "an uninterrupted view" of the Empire State Building and running for "just over eight hours" (p.77), throws into question the definition of a movie. Empire "showed...that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move" (p.79).

Danto's book also contains some humor. This R-rated passage (pp.76-77) is an example:

"In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It [i.e., the film] was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University...in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of 'He shall never come.' ... Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started."

Memo to whom it may concern: the "art community" has no "special rights" under the First Amendment

A poster at Reason opines that artists have a duty to question authority because the First Amendment gives the art community, as "counterpart" to the press, special rights (or, in other words, singles out artists for specific attention).

Um, no. The First Amendment, in relevant part, reads: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...."

Nothing about special rights for artists, and as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has not interpreted the First Amendment as giving artistic expression any higher level of protection than that afforded to speech generally. Law school was a long time ago, but my recollection is that speech deemed commercial can be somewhat more easily regulated than political speech, and that artistic and literary expression is also (with the exception for obscenity) at the core of the First Amendment. But special rights for artists, because they are "counterparts" of members of the press? No. You can still argue, of course, that artists have a duty to criticize those in power, but any such duty cannot convincingly be rooted in the U.S. Constitution or the system of checks and balances. The press as an intended check on government power, yes. Artists as an intended check on government power -- I don't think so.

[Hat tip: The House of Substance]

The poetry of empire

In 1897, barrister and writer Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) published a poem called Vitai Lampada, which said, in essence, that fighting for the British empire against African "natives" demanded the same qualities of teamwork, loyalty, and sacrifice required of a schoolboy cricketer. In the poem, a soldier, far from home and facing almost certain death in a hopeless situation, imagines himself back on the school cricket close, feels his team captain's encouraging hand on his shoulder, and manfully proceeds to do his duty for monarch, country, and empire.

'Vitai Lampada' (rough translation: [they pass] the torch of life) arguably belongs to the same genre as Kipling's better-known "The White Man's Burden" (1899); today one can still find references, almost always deprecatory or satirical, to the refrain of Newbolt's poem: "Play up, play up, and play the game." If one ignores its imperialistic, militaristic, jingoistic message (a big "if"), 'Vitai Lampada' is undeniably stirring, though its strictly literary merits are slight to nonexistent. It was very popular in some circles in Britain in the years leading to the First World War and less popular, for understandable reasons, thereafter.

With this as background, you will perhaps appreciate my surprise at finding 'Vitai Lampada' reproduced in a kind of handbook called The Mammoth Book of Boys' Own Stuff, which I recently saw prominently displayed in a bookstore. This book is full of chapters on how to do various (if I may be permitted a sexist phrase) boy things (e.g., build a model rocket, camp in the wild, etc., etc.), but it also has a section with a few poems, of which 'Vitai Lampada', identified simply as a "patriotic" poem, is one. Reproducing an ode to Empire in a sort of bloated scout manual aimed at 12 and 13-year-olds, and published in 2008, is somewhat bizarre.

For those who may be curious, here is the poem.

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night,

Ten to make and the match to win

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play, and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat

Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,

But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red -

Red with the wreck of the square that broke.

The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed its banks,

And England's far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks -

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,

While in her place the school is set,

Every one of her sons must hear,

And none that hears it dare forget.

This they all with a joyful mind

Bear through life like a torch in flame,

And falling fling to the host behind -

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

P.s. See also the post More on Newbolt and the sports/war equation.