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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Excellent article from AC Grayling, which addresses many of the concerns of the Carey thesis regarding Intellectuals and the Masses, but perhaps neglects to consider aspects of the production of art, rather than its consumption."In one corner of this fight lies the question of high culture in literature and the arts, automatically defended by the Right - who, it is clear, sometimes do not know what they are talking about, since much in high culture is profoundly subversive of what they cherish: think of the anticlerical Voltaire, the adulteresses Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, Madame Butterfly living in sin with Pinkerton, the liar Odysseus, the communistic New Testament, and endless examples besides, which, if they knew of it, would certainly affright America's gun-and-family-loving right... But almost all other art forms are capable of transcending barriers, and appreciators of the high culture of their own tradition are for that very reason well placed to appreciate that of other traditions. Consider the enjoyment of Chinese porcelains, textiles and ink paintings in the west, and the Chinese passion for Dickens and European and American music in return. Consider western relish for Mughal miniatures, Indian dance, African carving, and Japanese netsuke. Consider the excellent practitioners of western classical music who come from China and Japan; and consider the admiration felt by western visitors to the exquisite Forbidden City treasures displayed in the National Museum in Taipei... It was the African figures in the Louvre that inspired Picasso. That one fact alone could serve to remind us how porous high culture is, in both directions, and how symbiotic the existence of all cultures is, especially in the globalised world."
The only state in the modern developed world to have retained an integral role for art and culture within its society was the Soviet Union (one is inclined to doubt whether this might still be the case). Art, while a creative impulse specific to an individual is in many ways a form of collective expression and symbology (what we mean by the phrase 'striking a chord') which has found it difficult to adapt to the modern conditions of individualism and the atomised society (bear in mind that the concept of art is always referred to in the singular, we never speaks of arts except when referring to differing mediums; and even that is a move away from the eighteenth century conception of art).Labels: Art, Literature
posted by Richard 4:00 pm
