art

Do You Choose What I Choose? More Alternatives

By in ai, aphorisms, art, foolosophy No Comments

If only you could discern all the nonsense which, in a man’s mind, ends up by producing things of beauty, and all the things of beauty that have gone to the making of this or that piece of nonsense!

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Friedrich’s wanderer looks out upon an immense, mysterious world, inviting contemplation of something beyond himself. Gaskovski looks at the same painting and finds yet another occasion to contemplate AI. Ah, well. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, as George Eliot wrote.

“One advantage of familiarizing yourself with real art…” is, amusingly, the language of instrumental value, the very sort of language she’d presumably find objectionable if it appeared in an essay about leveraging literature to optimize cognitive performance. Imagine somebody recommending Shakespeare because he’ll make you better at identifying low-quality content. Wouldn’t we ask if that is what Shakespeare is for? Must even aesthetic contemplation be justified as another way of improving our filters for the information marketplace?

More interestingly, let’s imagine somebody who knows nothing about art. He sees the AI Friedrich without knowing who the painting is imitating. It speaks to him. He begins thinking about his own insignificance against the immensity of nature, perhaps even about mortality, solitude, or the sublime. Is the experience fraudulent? Is his contemplation tainted because the image wasn’t a digital reproduction of the very pigments that Friedrich himself daubed onto a canvas? And let’s not even entertain the vastly more complicated possibility of a master forger who spends years producing indistinguishable “lost Friedrichs.” When the fraud is exposed, the paintings become objects of contempt, though not a brushstroke has changed. Was the artistry fraudulent, or only the attribution? What if AI prose can say something profound to a reader? What if AI painting can inspire a viewer with a sense of beauty and contemplation?

Once provenance starts doing the work of aesthetic judgment, it’s tempting to imagine beauty as an inherited trait: beautiful intentions producing beautiful works, which in turn produce beautiful thoughts in the viewer. But Friedrich’s original might cause a viewer to think of something silly or low instead. Someone could look at it and think, “That fellow has a splendid coat!” Another might be reminded of an unpleasant hiking trip. Someone else might find the whole Romantic sensibility pompous and theatrical. The imitation, in turn, might inspire genuine contemplation. There is no guarantee that beauty begets beauty, generation after generation. Aesthetic eugenics might only produce aesthetic inbreeding.

But Valéry’s point isn’t merely that the aesthetic bloodline occasionally needs an infusion of lowborn nonsense to remain vigorous. He’s suggesting that there was never a pure bloodline to begin with. Beauty and nonsense have been consorting promiscuously all along, and nobody can reconstruct the family tree without discovering some embarrassing ancestors. Gaskovski might insist that familiarity with the Old Masters protects us from being taken in by nonsense. Valéry, an Old Master of sorts himself, seems to be warning us that familiarity with beautiful things offers no immunity whatsoever against producing nonsense of our own.

Human ingenuity can produce exquisite frauds; mechanical processes can produce unexpected beauty; masterpieces can inspire banalities; banalities can inspire masterpieces. The ancestry of a beautiful thing is not necessarily beautiful. Nor is its progeny. And personally, I find that to be a beauty worth contemplating. The world will always be a little stranger than our limited theories about it.

Come Back, Signal, Fill This Void

By in ai, art, foolosophy, music, writing

Me, I’ve been existentially depressed ever since people stopped making music purely by vocalizations and started using artificial “instruments” that don’t exist in nature. It’s all been downhill ever since clicks, hoots and whistles. An animal gut stretched across a resonating box?  Suspicious. Somewhere in the Upper Paleolithic a cultural critic looked at the first bone flute and thought, So this is it. We’re outsourcing the human larynx. That first flute was Big Tech’s war on hooting.

Seriously, though, he seems to feel that either humans “produce” culture or machines do. The actual situation is already spreading itself across a huge continuum. Someone can type “write me a song about heartbreak” and upload the first result. Someone else can write the melody and lyrics, use AI to generate an orchestration, reject half of it, rewrite the rest, sing the vocal himself, and mix the recording conventionally. Somewhere else a musician may improvise against an AI-generated part and discover a musical idea neither input contained straightforwardly beforehand. Which of these is “no longer produced by human beings”?

There is also something revealing about the nostalgia implicit in that phrase. Produced how? Apparently there exists some blessed technological moment at which human cultural production was sufficiently pure. Was electric amplification all right? Photography? Word processors? Photoshop? Sampling? MIDI? Spellcheck? Search engines? Dictionaries? Editors? Session musicians? Ghostwriters? At some point the natural human apparently fell from grace and began cheating with artifacts. AI may be an unusually powerful and strange extension, perhaps strange enough eventually to require new ideas about authorship. But “artificial means entered the creative process, therefore the result ceased to be human” would condemn an astonishing amount of civilization.

A musician may say, “I invented this chord progression,” but in one sense the progression was always latent in the combinatorial space of tonal music. What he really did was discover it as meaningful for this song. Likewise, an aphorist does not invent the English language or even all the conceptual relations inside a sentence; he notices that certain words, placed together under the pressure of a certain thought, suddenly become exact.

AI can widen the field of discovery enormously. But widening the field does not tell you what to notice. If ten people ask for “an unusual chord for the bridge,” they may receive overlapping suggestions. But they will not hear those suggestions identically. One person hears pretension. Another hears melancholy. Another hears the exact pivot the song needed. Another thinks, “Interesting, but if I lower the third and move the bass note…” The machine output becomes raw material the instant it encounters judgment.

The creative act often consists in selection under pressure from a particular project. The musician hears or encounters something and thinks: that. There. Which means the genealogy of the input is often secondary. He might find the chord in a theory book, steal it from Coltrane, stumble into it by mis-fingering, hear an HVAC unit hum a strange interval, or have an AI propose it. Those routes differ historically and perhaps ethically, but they don’t necessarily differ in the part that matters artistically: the musician perceives a fit between an external possibility and an internal intention. The refrigerator compressor making a weird noise is not “collaborating” in any ordinary sense. It has no conception of the song. Yet it can still trigger something decisive because the artist already has a receptivity shaped by the work in progress. A thousand other people hear the same noise and hear only an appliance. One person hears the missing texture in the bridge. That seems very close to what inspiration has always been. The world throws off material constantly; the artist’s mind is a selective field.

AI may be to intellectual and artistic work what the Industrial Revolution was to material production: not the abolition of human agency, but the mechanization of tasks that once consumed large amounts of it. A writer once had to search books, wait on memory, or labor through dozens of possibilities to find the right metaphor or rhetorical device; a musician might spend hours experimenting before stumbling onto the right chord or texture. AI industrializes that search. It can generate possibilities at machine speed and scale, just as machinery multiplied the output of physical labor. That does cheapen some forms of accomplishment and may displace particular skills, but it also shifts the scarce resource elsewhere — from producing possibilities to judging, selecting, combining, and directing them.

The deeper continuity is human temperament. Industrial machinery did not make craftsmanship, ambition, laziness, ingenuity, or mediocrity disappear; it gave them new conditions in which to operate. AI will likely do the same. Some people will use it to avoid effort and become little more than approval buttons. Others will use its abundance as cognitive leverage: more examples, more counterarguments, more metaphors, more experiments, more practice — and thereby enlarge their own capacities. The machine can make fifty suggestions; it still cannot decide which one belongs in this particular human project, or why the project should exist at all.

A chainsaw and a violin are both elaborate artificial extensions of the body, but their social and psychological effects are completely different. A typewriter, a search engine, and an LLM all intervene between thought and finished prose, but they intervene in different places and alter different capacities. So the useful questions become more local: What does this tool make easier? What does it make unnecessary? What skills does it cultivate or atrophy? What new possibilities does it create? What dependencies does it introduce? What kinds of people and institutions tend to form around it? That’s much more difficult than saying “technology went too far after X,” because you lose the clean moral geography. You can no longer live conceptually in the Good Village on one side of the river while the Satanic Mills smoke on the other.

Bad Tattitude

By in art, foolosophy

Theodore Dalrymple:

One of the reasons my thoughts on this subject remain so speculative rather than empirical is that I am reluctant to ask people the reasons that they had themselves tattooed. I have read some first-person intellectualised accounts, even some by professional philosophers, but I doubt that they are representative of what one of them called ‘the tattooed community’ (all people these days with something in common are called a community), or that their philosophical justifications for tattooing are any more than post facto rationalisations for what they have done. The reason for my reluctance to ask is that the question is almost impossible to put neutrally: even to ask it is to imply criticism and thus provoke antagonism—rarely a stimulus of frankness and truth-telling.

My oldest friend from high school got her first tattoo the other day: a tiny sigil near her wrist. Her college-age son was getting one and asked her to join him. I razzed her: “In my day” — which was also her day, of course — “a tattoo said to your parents, ‘I reject middle-class respectability. I intend to spend my days consorting with sailors, prostitutes and motorcycle gang members.’ Now they’re doing back-to-school BOGO deals for mom, smdh.” But that’s the point: when even a middle-aged, middle-class professional woman gets inked as a mother–son bonding exercise, whatever taboo tattoos once carried has been successfully laundered through the culture. At this stage, they’re less a symbol of rebellion than another suburban rite of passage, alongside senior pictures and college visits.

I’ve lost track of how many times Dalrymple has written some version of his case against tattoos. If I didn’t know (and share) his feelings on psychiatry, I might urge him to seek therapy. In fairness, there’s some good stuff in it. He’s right that “self-expression” as an unquestioned good is idiotic; Mein Kampf was self-expression too. And he’s right that people now talk about “self-censorship” as if it were always cowardice, never just ordinary tact or basic self-control.

But the further he goes into tattoo territory, the more he starts diagnosing a phenomenon he mostly refuses to look at. By his own admission, he’s reluctant to ask people the reasons that they had themselves tattooed. For a man who spent his career talking to patients and prisoners, this sudden delicacy is bizarre. You don’t have to cross-examine anybody. You can just smile and ask, “What does that one mean?” or “What made you decide to get it?” If you can’t imagine posing a neutral question about something people are proud to display on their skin, that’s just squeamishness. And it’s very convenient squeamishness: as long as you never ask, you’re never at risk of your tidy theory being complicated by the messy fact that different people had different, sometimes perfectly sane, reasons. Instead, he relies on a tattoo-culture magazine full of militant kitsch: “my body is my secret technicolour garden,” “each tattoo is a victory,” and so on. It’s like judging the practice of reading by an end-cap of “Live, Laugh, Love” gift books. Of course the rhetoric is insufferable. Anything run through the machinery of lifestyle journalism will sound like a narcissist who swallowed an Instagram caption generator.

I have around seventeen hours of tattoo work on me. When I got them, in my late teens and early twenties, I wasn’t trying to become “InkGuy Virginia Division,” or to manifest my “secret technicolour garden.” I was a young adult with a head full of books, music, and half-formed convictions, trying to mark that new, tentative self on the only canvas I knew I’d always have. They were my way of saying: this matters to me, enough to hurt for it. I don’t feel romantically about them now; I don’t preen in the mirror and whisper “my scars that I have chosen.” But I also don’t regret them. They’re a record of a younger self I’ve outgrown without disowning. Dalrymple wants tattoos to be evidence of a “desperate search for public recognition and individuality,” even a covert desire to dissolve one’s individuality into the herd. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re just what they were for me: a more or less clumsy, but honest, attempt to put down a stake in one’s own life. If we’re going to pathologize that, we might as well condemn diaries and adolescent bands while we’re at it.

If I were eighteen now, in an age when every barista and HR manager has a sleeve, I’d probably do the contrary thing and stay blank. The fashion has definitely made many tattoos boring. But that’s precisely the point: once something has become this banal, this distributed across classes and temperaments, it stops being a clear “sign” of anything except the human urge to decorate and commemorate. People love to say, “But how is that going to look when you’re old?” As if the worst thing about old age is the prospect of looking a bit silly. When I’m old, I expect to be a lot more concerned with my prostate, that suspicious lump under the skin, or whether my heart remembers how to keep time than with whether my upper arm tattoo has sagged like an overripe fruit. The fixation on “you’ll look ridiculous later” actually strikes me as adolescent: an inability to imagine anything worse than awkwardness or uncoolness. Adulthood is when you realize that no matter what you do, you will look ridiculous eventually — wrinkled, sagging, patched together by medicine — and that this is the least of your problems.

They May Say, “Those Were the Days”

By in art, foolosophy

We fret over improving things, that posterity may be happy; and posterity will say as usual: “In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.”

— Chekhov

Roger Scruton defined oikophobia as “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’” A conservative disposition in general, according to Michael Oakeshott, meant “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

I would suggest that many people of a conservative disposition are perhaps paradoxically inclined toward an intellectual or aesthetic oikophobia. They affect derision toward the art, music, and popular culture that is identifiably “theirs.” While they are rightfully scornful of political posturing based upon contempt for one’s own benighted nation, they style themselves as globe-trotting cosmopolitans of the aesthetic imagination, easily capable of feeling at home in ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, nineteenth-century Europe — anywhere but here and now in this decadent, vulgar time.

It should go without saying that none of this is meant to imply Shakespeare being on the same level of quality as reality television, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe being the equivalent of the stories of the Greek pantheon. But as John Gray likes to say about Richard Dawkins-style atheism, it’s a curious sort of “humanism” which disdains the most popular and enduring ways in which humans have imbued their world with meaning and value. Or, as Clive James suggested, what if much of what we now call “the classics” were thought of in their own time as meretricious and merely fashionable? How might our vulgar age appear through the rose-tinted glasses of a 23rd-century antiquarian?

Obiter Scripta, no. 83

By in art, eric hoffer, obiter scripta

When I go through a shelf of books on a subject I begin with the thin volumes. Now and then I find a thin and a thick book by an author on the same subject. Usually, the thin book is of an earlier date; and it often turns out that in the thin book the author reveals what he knows and in the thick book he tries to conceal what he does not know.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

“Tell me your thoughts, not the thinking of your thoughts.” Is that an actual quotation? If not, it should be. I have to say, I find it generally disappointing to hear writers or musicians talk about their “creative process.” As Isaac Brock sang, “I guess all us snakes find our tails pretty damn tasty.” I’m fully aware that a finished artwork can, and often does, grow from banal origins. Analyzing those origins in detail, though, often produces a deflation as undignified as a whoopee cushion. Give us the transcendent result of your imagination, but leave the rest shrouded in mysterious silence, please.

Lucubrations, no. 23

By in art, atheism, books, lucubrations, religion, science

Andrew Klavan, “Can We Believe?”:

Murray’s objection to faith, however, is more coherent. He believes that science and historical criticism have done “most likely irreversible damage . . . to the literal-truth claims of religion.” If he is right, it makes no difference whether faith is required; faith is impossible. You can’t ask a society to pretend to believe in what isn’t so.

But is Murray right? Have science and criticism truly undermined Christianity? Or is it simply that disbelief has become the intellectual’s default conviction?

Mark Dooley, Conversations With Roger Scruton:

Despite having ‘served an apprenticeship in atheism’, Scruton has, I suggest, never been an atheist per se. ‘On the contrary, I have always assumed that religion is necessary to human communities on sociological and anthropological grounds, as well as on metaphysical grounds. People need something with which to root their beliefs, and also their conduct, their sense of themselves and their relation to others. We are fundamentally related beings and all the religions are shaped by this great need. Take religion away and nihilism is the first result, and then chaos, which is what we’re seeing now. That, of course, doesn’t mean that the doctrines are true. This is the great difficulty for people like me who begin from that anthropological sense of what religion is: how do we make the Kierkegaardian “leap of faith” into the actual affirmation of a doctrine? That is something with which I have wrestled all my life.’

When did this wrestling begin? ‘It was a “puberty moment”. When, as a boy, I went in secret to the Anglican Church, I was affirming my own independence and my incipient love of the English way of doing things. But that didn’t last: my life was very soon swept into disorder by the need to leave home and to fend for myself. At Cambridge, I did become fairly atheistical and I have since been persuaded that the truth about our world is given by science and not by any theological doctrine. That is what science is: an attempt to give the truth about our world. It can make no place for the “divine hypothesis” One must therefore find another, non-scientific way to resuscitate the basic contours of a religious worldview, and that is really what I have been doing in my writings. I share with Richard Dawkins the image of the completeness of the natural sciences and the view that there isn’t anything that they leave unexplained, other than the great fact that there is something, and not nothing, a fact that is for that reason inexplicable.

‘I have been very influenced in this by Wagner, and by his attempt, not just to show that art gives you an alternative approach to the deep truths about the human condition that religion advances, but also that it enables you, to a great measure, to resuscitate the idea of the sacred — which is the idea upon which human communities ultimately depend. The sacred is something which one has to find in one’s own life if one is to live that life correctly.’

It Is Not Meet That Every Nice Offense Should Bear His Comment

By in art, bread and circuses, the statusphere

Will Lloyd:

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping?

…Imagine living in a world where Mrs Dalloway and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon exist and thinking that Game of Thrones (which is entertaining, don’t get me wrong) is a work of art. Then imagine making a career out of typing up little takes about it. And then imagine this defining your career as a critic!

Critics who only write about shallow subjects will only produce shallow writing. How television became the most critically examined art form of our century remains a baffling mystery.

Even worse, imagine being an enlightened critic who has scaled the heights of True Art and nonetheless is compelled to hawk his bloggy wares in the marketplace like any other word-merchant, forced to take his cues from whatever the fishwives are yakking about today! Is there no dignity? Is there no honor? Ah, fie, fie upon’t.

I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. However, in one of those strange twists of fate, I have seen almost all of the Marvel movies in the last few months. I didn’t plan this. No, seriously, I swear on my sainted grandmother, last December, I suggested to the Lady of the House that maybe it would be fun to read Shakespeare together. Out loud, on winter evenings, sitting around the fire, and all that. Somehow — and I’m not clear on the precise details — that project morphed into me reading Shakespeare and us watching the MCU productions together. (Cue Henry Higgins singing, “But let a woman in your life…”)

I kid, I kid. For me, popcorn entertainment falls under what the Stoics called “preferred indifferents.” It’s not something I would normally seek out, but it’s not something I’ll make a pretentious spectacle of refusing, either (in this case, when the movies are available for rental at the library we’re already patronizing, sure, why not). I have little patience with those who stack the deck by assembling a greatest-hits compilation of artworks from the previous few thousand years, comparing it to the last few years of pop culture, and sniffing about what a tragedy it is that they should have been born in such a pigsty of an age. I’m of the more sanguine opinion that there is uplifting and ennobling work to be found in many surprising places if you work hard enough to look for it. Profound conversations about perennial themes of human nature can sprout from humble origins, like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, willing to sacrifice love to his “ends justify the means” vision of a grateful universe in “balance” under his enlightened oversight. Some of the Marvel movies were indeed terrible, but then again, some of Shakespeare’s work doesn’t recommend itself for re-reading either. That’s not an endorsement of relativism in aesthetic judgment, of course, just an assertion that your antiquarian taste alone won’t get you into heaven.

When we last left Mr. Lloyd, he was connecting tendentious dots to claim that Marvel movies were somehow slightly responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It may be ad hominem, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes: when so many people like this come across as bitter, sour, old cranks, why am I supposed to be motivated to contemplate the things they insist I should? Whining and complaining is repulsive. Okay, so you spend your time marinating in the most sublime art ever produced. Is it because of or despite that that you appear to be a stuffy, humorless scold? I understand from reading this that Mrs. Dalloway and Barry Lyndon are the sorts of books and movies I should be enjoying if I want to be thought well of by curmudgeonly critics, but if there are good reasons for doing so, he couldn’t be bothered to elaborate here. All that does is encourage the all-too-common scourge of signaling. Like CliffsNotes for social climbers, these dyspeptic rants provide cues without context. It would be far better to write a paean to the art you love rather than moaning that other people are enjoying the wrong things, but it turns out that even our moral betters are prone to finding fault rather than providing a better example. I find that one of the most tedious characteristics of conservatives, both political and literary: too much darkness-cursing, not enough candle-lighting. It’s easy to get the impression that they’re not lamenting wasted intellectual and imaginative potential so much as the disappearance of a cultural caste system that favored them.

A Fever of the Mad

By in art, free speech, the great awokening

John Pistelli:

When I was a teenager, I joined the political left because I understood it, in that era of the religious right’s now-almost-forgotten hegemony, to be the side that stood for freedom of thought and speech. I was warned by several older people that this was not the case, but with the certitude that can only come from youthful inexperience, I did not listen. 15 years ago, depressed and afraid, I wrote all day on Livejournal (remember that?) about how George W. Bush was going to put us in prison camps and had done 9/11 and would start a nuclear war, about how both climate change and peak oil (remember that?) would end the world within the decade, and about how only proletarian and Third-World revolution would save us.

It only took a year or two, and professional acquaintance with some fellow travelers of this creed, to show me how wrong I was about its reliability as a guide to both facts and ethics. Apocalypticism is always a racket; dystopia is an abuse of the speculative intellect, a genre fit for children, and perhaps not even for them. And if the world ends, you can’t do anything about it anyway. Chekhov said that artists should only participate in politics only enough to keep themselves safe from politics. We need to cultivate our gardens, after we secure our right to them in the first place. The autonomy of art is not incidental to secular freedom but its bedrock. It is logically, because politically, prior to almost every other right. The enslaved were not permitted to read; freedom of speech, thought, and art grounds and founds every other freedom.

…Anyone who speaks of morality while controlling or harming others does the devil’s work. It might even be true, sometimes I suspect it is, that anyone who speaks of morality ever, at all, instead of silently doing all the good that can be managed in this crooked world, is the devil’s assistant.

It was much easier to consider oneself a liberal in those days. As we entered adulthood, we were able to get away with defining ourselves negatively — against bigotry, against organized religion, against greed and war and pollution and other bad things. Against censorship too, of course. Religious conservatives were the self-righteous hypocrites who wanted to bowdlerize books and music and prevent the kids in Footloose from dancing; we were all about the liberation of individuals from intellectual and social restraints. Within a couple decades, though, in one of those twists of fate that make a mockery out of Whiggish notions of linear progression in history, everything went topsy-turvy. Racial segregation, political censorship of art and popular culture, and moral panics over sexuality came back into favor as cutting-edge progressive positions. A liberal Rip Van Winkle closed his eyes in 1995 and awakened in 2015 to find that he was now a conservative, if not a Nazi, which was basically the same thing. In a paradox of political physics, it turns out that you can traverse the spectrum from left to right by simply standing firm on certain principles.

Thomas Jefferson famously thought that the tree of liberty needed to be refreshed every twenty years or so with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Chekhov’s delicate balancing act isn’t quite as romantically stirring, but it’s more necessary. There may not be actual wars every generation, but the same stupid ideas and impulses will have to be repulsed again and again. Taoists warned us centuries ago that people who seek power ought not be trusted with it, but we’re still willing to envision career politicians as secular saviors. Scripture reminds us that true morality never seeks to call attention to itself, but our cultural discourse is dominated by transparent virtue-signaling. Out of ignorance, resentment, or simple boredom, people forget that a society in which politics has the power to tap you on the shoulder or knock on your door is not one any sane person should want to live in, and they redouble their efforts to fuse the personal with the political. The cosmetic details will keep cycling in and out of fashion, but the true resistance will always be waged by the devotees of art’s deeper truths against the political monomaniacs. To the extent that we must temporarily participate in politics for self-defense, we can only hope that the spirit of Cincinnatus watches over and protects us from the temptations and delusions of power.

The Heart of a Heartless World

By in art, media/propaganda, moralizing

James Walker:

Art and culture, for our new generation of social critics — in no small part due to the the neoliberal milieu which bore them — is primarily an object of consumption. It is a means of moral and political nourishment. It can either be healthy (positive representations of women and minorities) or unhealthy (representations that reinforce “power structures”). It empowers or silences. A work of art is better or worse in accordance with whether or not it serves “the interests of the marginalized” — the skill, the craftsmanship, the care that the artist exhibits in creating an aesthetic experience only attains importance in its effectiveness in advancing the political message.

Let me state from the outset that this is an outstanding essay. I wholeheartedly endorse it. But rather than excerpt any number of other sections, only to chime in with a simple “Hear, hear,” I’m focusing on this one because disagreements often stimulate more interesting thoughts.

“Neoliberal” is one of those words that I’ve come to hate. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with it — it’s just that in most social media contexts, it’s an empty leftist epithet. It tells you more about the writer than the target. When I see someone complaining about neoliberalism, it’s often a safe bet that they’re motivated by a nostalgic or futuristic vision of social democracy, and I have limited patience with either. Yes, yes; sometime in the 1970s, we were banished from the Garden of Welfare Statism, and since then, we’ve been wandering the shopping malls and suburbs like the accursed descendants of Cain. As myths go, this one isn’t very profound.

In this instance, Walker has written an essay championing the power and necessity of culture against those who would subordinate it to politics. Immediately, then, you may think: what’s specifically “neoliberal” about that mentality? Haven’t there been plenty of leftist totalitarian states, to name an obvious example, who forced artists to conform to a party line? Clearly, they weren’t motivated by an anti-government, pro-free-market ideology. The problem is that within that term, he’s conflating two different enemies of culture. Let’s call them consumers and philistines.

The bourgeoisie have been an object of aristocratic and artistic scorn for centuries. Derided as self-centered, acquisitive and shallow, they are the types who look at great art and ask, “What’s in it for me as I am right now?” Rather than a portal transporting them to a wider perspective beyond their petty concerns, art becomes a mirror reflecting their own perspective right back at them, reinforcing what was already there. The secondary effects of familiarity with high culture, such as increased status, are what interest them. Religion, another means of transcending one’s selfish short-sightedness through grappling with the inherited wisdom of millennia, is likewise transformed by a grasping consumerist mentality into the “spiritual-not-religious” identity, where, coincidentally enough, it turns out that your pure, untutored heart has always contained the only wisdom you ever need, and all sorts of exotic belief systems from around the world have been preaching a version of Western, middle-class, twenty-first century ethics all this time. Wherever they go, there they are, indeed.

The philistines, by contrast, do care about something greater than themselves. They just happen, in this case, to care more about politics than culture. Fixing society’s problems takes precedence over artistic consolation and contemplation. Even pop culture is too important to be left to individual choice — we don’t have to look far at all to find yet another philistine insisting that the most important aspect of popular novels and music is the race and gender of the artist. Subjective discussions of taste and quality are replaced by the ersatz objectivity of mathematical ratios — artists should be promoted or devalued depending on whether doing so helps to rectify past injustices, to even the aggregate score in the assumed competition between races and genders. Art and culture are merely tools to help achieve political goals; they’re too dangerous, too trickster-like, to be handled without supervision. These seem to be the people Walker primarily has in mind — those whose moral fervor on behalf of social justice can be intimidating to proponents of “mere” aesthetics.

A different perspective might be what’s sometimes called a “tragic” vision. This is one I endorse. From this perspective, life always defies our expectations and best efforts, good things are inherently fragile, and the consolations of art and culture are the closest we ever get to heaven. They are not progressive or cumulative — great art expresses timeless truth and sublime beauty in the most skillful way, but great artists don’t “improve” on their predecessors any more than one mountain peak “improves” on the previous one. Mountains and artists aren’t “going” anywhere in a progressive manner; they’re just climbing higher than anything else around them and bringing a little bit of heaven within reach, before sloping down into the valley of everyday existence again. The cycle goes on, heedless of individual desires or teleological fantasies, rewarding those capable of appreciating something beyond immediate gratification or agitprop.

The Chinaman Is Not the Issue Here

By in art, jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, the cult of multi

Also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature…

I asked the Coens to respond to criticisms that there aren’t more minority characters in the film. In other words, why is #HailCaesarSoWhite?

“Why would there be?” countered Joel Coen. “I don’t understand the question. No—I understand that you’re asking the question, I don’t understand where the question comes from.

“Not why people want more diversity—why they would single out a particular movie and say, ‘Why aren’t there black or Chinese or Martians in this movie? What’s going on?’ That’s the question I don’t understand. The person who asks that question has to come in the room and explain it to me.”

As filmmakers, is it important or not important to consciously factor in concerns like diversity, I asked.

“Not in the least!” Ethan answered. “It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity—or it might not.”

“It’s an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, ‘Why aren’t there this, that, or the other thing?’” added Joel. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how stories are written. So you have to start there and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

He continued: “You don’t sit down and write a story and say, ‘I’m going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog,’—right? That’s not how stories get written. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about how stories get written and you don’t realize that the question you’re asking is idiotic.”

I already loved the Coens’ films anyway. Hearing them tell the philistines in the Aesthetic Affirmative Action Brigade to go fuck themselves without consent is just a sweet, sweet bonus.

I Believe in a Thing Called Art, Just Listen to the Rhythm of My Heart

By in art, books, conspicuous crusading, the cult of multi

William A. Henry III:

The emphasis on tribalism, tokenism, and toeing the political line is, if anything, more painful in the realm of culture, which traditionally represents the highest aspirations of the individual, than it is in other realms of the life of the mind.

This book was published in 1994. Like a few others I’ve recently discovered, it examines the last wave of political correctness from the perspective of a self-proclaimed liberal. And like those other books, the examples of language-policing, feminist excess and general lunacy it offers could have been plucked from online media within the last week. It just goes to show what a sad holding pattern progressive politics have been stuck in for the last few generations. Fighting the same old symbolitical battles over and over again. Culture war re-enactors make a killing nowadays, me, oh, my.

The problem is, as progressives find themselves repeatedly running up against a solid wall in the political realm, their frustration inevitably leads them to turn their attention to other areas where they can assert some measure of control. Art and pop culture prove to be especially irresistible targets for neophyte commissars.

My political hopes are quite modest. I assume things will always be some degree of fucked-up, and no one will ever be happy with things as they are at any given time. I’m in favor of the least worst version of fucking things up, whatever that may be. But there’s still a glimmer of idealism in me nonetheless. I believe in the enduring power of art, even popular art, even escapist novels and rock music, to change the lives of its audience in subtle ways that cannot be reduced to, or predicted by, the gender/race/ideology of the artist. Policies and politicians will come and go, and I couldn’t give two shits or a half-fuck about them, but as long as people indulge the urge to express themselves artistically, I still hold faith in the trickster-like nature of reality to defy our attempts to get everyone marching in one direction in unison. Strange, unpredictable things happen when people share artistic visions. Allowing your imagination to be carried away by enchanting prose or a sweet melody can subtly alter your thinking no less than your mood. And thus, I agree with Henry: philistines are the worst of the worst, and currently, most of our philistines are of the leftist variety.

These philistines want to annex the territory of criticism and turn it into a political resource to be allocated on an intersectional basis. Critical judgment and taste, after all, are particular. They’re not fair or unbiased. A reviewer may tend to prefer certain styles and authors over others. Equality of outcome is never a likely result when people are allowed to make honest choices and distinctions. Still, the point is not to “transcend” all biases and particular perspectives, as if that were even desirable or possible, but to encompass and understand them. But being that we’ve long since lost the ability to talk about values without shrieking about oppression, we try to default to the “objective”, utilitarian standard of quantification. “Quality”, as Robert Pirsig could tell you, is devilishly difficult to define, so we might as well just focus on the things we can measure, like racial and gender disparities among published authors.

Here you see a typical example: critics who profess to be concerned with “quality” and “editorial judgment” above identity politics are covering up their “failings” with “grand claims”. The implicit understanding, familiar to anyone conversant with Foucault and his disciples, is that “grand claims” about culture are merely cynical attempts to mask the power structure, which in turn justify even more cynical attempts to seize power for one’s own identity group. The important thing about criticism is to see it as a pie chart to be divided in service to social justice goals. Books and music need to be requisitioned and used as materiel for the war effort on behalf of racial and gender equality! Well, I suppose I’m prepared to be shot as a hoarder, then.

Writing That Wears a White Coat

By in art, philosophy, science

Ray Monk:

The search for explanations and theories in philosophy, Wittgenstein believed, was linked with this worship of science. Intoxicated by the success of science, philosophers had forgotten that there was another kind of understanding. ‘People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them’, he once wrote in a notebook, ‘poets, musicians etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.’

Russell, of course, was horrified by this attitude. ‘The later Wittgenstein’, he wrote, ‘seems to have gotten tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.’ If one thinks that ‘serious thinking’ and ‘science’ are the same thing, then this remark is precisely right.

In a recent series of emails, Arthur unknowingly, almost eerily in his precision, echoed this very stance:

What applies to Dante applies, on a lower level of course, to the writers cited by Watson. Kafka’s work is not “robbed of its meaning” by the obsolescence of Freudianism, it is far too weird and original, pre-Freudian and post-Freudian, for that. What galls me here is that uncomprehending and condescending assumption that artists are just wayward students of intellectuals—as if they were not themselves intellectuals, and highly independent and original ones, at that. (Inside every artist is an intellectual, the saying goes—but not vice-versa.) What bites my butt is the assumption that the kind of writing that wears a white coat or talks about wages and surplus value is the model of knowledge and adult thinking, while art is just what happens when the kids are let out into the playground at recess.

Now, if you’re like me, you may have had an “A-ha!” moment when confronted with such clear and elegant imagery. Even though there is no argument being put forth, technically speaking, the limitations of a scientistic approach become suddenly and vividly apparent. It becomes obvious why, for example, looking at fMRI images of someone’s brain as they look at pieces of art will tell us nothing useful about the nature or meaning of art. The parallel lines of artistic and scientific understanding will never meet. Wittgenstein seems to have had something like this in mind. Monk again:

Analogously, in his later work, Wittgenstein treats all philosophical doctrines as confusions, though now he thinks the confusion has arisen because, as he puts it, ‘a picture held us captive’. His task is to free us from that picture. Because the picture that held us captive and that gave rise to the philosophical problem is assumed in everything we say, it cannot usually be dislodged by argument. It is, as it were, too deep for that. What is required to free us from the picture that holds us captive is an enriched imagination, and this cannot be given to us through argument, it must be acquired through, as it were, therapy. Wittgenstein’s later work, then is aimed at the pre-philosophical, rather than the philosophical, level. It addresses, not our argumentative faculties, but our imagination.

1 2 3 4›»