A screed from one of the masters
Gerard Van der Leun writes at
American Digest and had some things to say about
Art and Politics.
Wonderful thoughts and wonderful writing:
The Political Art and the Art of Politics
THE CLASSICAL THEMES of art have always been -- virtue, nobility, patriotism.
Since I practiced none of these in my youth, and throughout much of my career worked actively or passively to under-mine them, I came -- at last -- to yearn to discover what they could possibly be in this blighted age. After all, I was not alone in my abnegation. My entire generation, one way or another, had tossed virtue, nobility, and patriotism over the side of our Ship of Fools thinking to lighten the vessel and keep it upright and afloat. As the Not-So-Great Generation, we did not understand the physics behind removing the ballast when all aboard were struggling to climb over each other to get as high as the very top of the top gallants.
Since the beginning of this century, the more I surveyed the vast and troubled social sea on which I had finally awakened adrift with the rest of the wreckage, the more I saw that these virtues -- in a shriveled and shrunken form -- seemed only to be found in the scattered sanctuaries of the Church and what remained to the Republican Party. But looking long at both these institutions I found I could not fit in either one or the other or some amalgam of both.
Perhaps art could be my refuge, my refiner and restorer? It was, I knew, folly to even think so. The "art" of our age , in the main, had been for so long mired in a swamp of the impish and the perverse that, mirroring the tainted soul of my generation and, in the absence of the classical themes defining it, art had no power to uplift, but only the power to degrade its central soul, beauty, until even that sunk beneath the surface of the expression of an age defined by human wastes. The celebration of shit as art had, at some point in the 1990s, gone beyond metaphor and been enshrined in the cathedrals of art, the museums, and subsidized by the government. Shit as art had become, by default, the official art of the era.
Of our popular arts, worse still was to be expected from them and they did not disappoint. Where the "higher" arts merely expunged beauty, truth, virtue, nobility and patriotism from their vocabulary, the popular arts actively substituted ugliness, lies, evil, degeneracy, and sedition.
He goes on for a few more paragraphs, naming names and taking no prisoners. That guy can write!
Posted by DaveH at July 5, 2005 10:52 AM