File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1999/avant-garde.9903, message 111


From: "Lowther,John" <JLowther-AT-facstaff.oglethorpe.edu>
Subject: here's the deal for those interested
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:35:45 -0500



March 14, 1999

BOOKEND / By MICHAEL LIND
Defrocking the Artist 

Recently I happened to be reading, around the same time, Anthony Heilbut's
''Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature'' (1996) and James Anderson Winn's ''John
Dryden and His World'' (1987). I was in for a surprise. When I was in
college, Mann meant far more to me than neo-classical poets. Today, Mann and
his concern, in his early work, with the relationship of the artist to
society and of morbidity to genius seem more remote -- even alien -- than
Dryden and Pope and their world of clubbable poets and scribbling
polemicists. According to an unscientific survey of friends and
acquaintances, I'm not alone. 
Like the Augustans, we live in an age of political pamphleteering, popular
drama -- and coffeehouses. In cultural time, A.D. 1999 is closer to 1699
than to 1899 or 1799. This is the result, I think, of a single profound
change in Western culture: the recent and abrupt collapse of the Romantic
and modernist religion of art, and the marginalization of its central
figure, the angelic/demonic Originalgenie. The death of the religion of art
is as remarkable as the more or less simultaneous death of Marxism, another
secular creed of the 19th and 20th centuries. 
In 1900, new styles of music and painting could provoke controversy, even
riots. In 1999, the educated public is so indifferent to style that only
programmatic obscenity can attract attention -- and even that stratagem of
last resort has become boring. To be sure, cities are still building
monumental art museums and subsidizing symphony orchestras -- but they also
throw away tax dollars on convention centers that frequently are just as
empty as the culture palaces. 
The situation in literature is similar. A few decades ago, writers like Gore
Vidal and Norman Mailer were able to hold forth on the state of the nation
on the basis of their reputations as novelists. To have political influence
today, Mark Helprin has had to write speeches for Bob Dole. As late as the
1960's, ''Poets Oppose War'' was news in elite circles. Today, that headline
would receive about as much attention as ''Landscape Architects Denounce
U.S. Trade Policy.'' 
For the better part of two centuries, the artist stepped into the roles made
available after revolutions stripped the aristocracy and the clergy of
legitimacy. Our aristocracy today is made up of movie stars and pop
musicians, not classical music composers and conductors. Our clerisy
contains journalists and pundits and think-tank experts and political
historians, but not novelists or poets as such. The literary figures who
claim authority in political discourse do so as representatives of
constituencies defined by race or sex, not on the basis of their
professional accomplishments. 
What explains the Artist's loss of public authority? One cause may be the
spread of democracy and liberalism. In 19th-century France, Hapsburg Italy
and the Soviet bloc, writers and composers like Hugo and Verdi and
Solzhenitsyn could become symbols of liberal or nationalist dissent -- a
function performed in liberal democracies by politicians and journalists.
Meanwhile, in countries that have long been democratic, like the United
States and Britain, the relaxation of censorship has eliminated another role
of the Romantic-modernist artist -- that of champion of sexual liberation.
Those who once would have gone for inspiration or titillation to Lawrence,
Miller, Durrell, Wilde or Gide now have The Advocate -- and Larry Flynt. 
But the most important factor in the decline of the religion of art may be a
resurgence of common sense. The Romantic-modernist myth that the great
artist is not only an accomplished, even inspired, craftsman but a mutant of
superhuman facility who should be worshiped by the rest of the species was
too silly an idea to be taken seriously for more than a few generations.
Cicero wondered how two Roman soothsayers could pass each other in the
street without bursting into laughter. One might similarly wonder about the
ability of Frank Lloyd Wright to keep a straight face while looking Mies van
der Rohe in the eye. Only a generation ago, the stale myth of the doomed
genius in a world of philistines was still powerful enough to turn Sylvia
Plath and Robert Lowell, not to mention Jim Morrison, into tabloid-style
celebrities. Today, potes maudits are more likely than not to be
grant-mongering professors in graduate creative writing programs, whose
traumas are known only to their families, their employers and their
H.M.O.'s. 
The surviving acolytes of the Old Time Religion of art, whether to be found
among the followers of Hilton Kramer or of Harold Bloom, are inclined to
treat the breakup of the post-1800 Euro-American cultural constellation as
the end of Western civilization. But Western civilization, broadly defined,
has survived and flourished since classical antiquity without the creed of
art or its appurtenances: municipal orchestras and public museums, academies
and Salons des Refuses, self-destructive easel painters, flamboyant
composers, hermitic novelists. For most of Western history, visual artists
and musicians were considered tradesmen. Poets tended to have a higher
status, but in their lifetimes at least they usually were assigned a station
below that of rulers, generals, ministers, theologians and philosophers. The
idea is heretical to esthetes -- but maybe the older, more modest conception
of the place of art in society was the correct one. 
Indeed, a case can be made that the fading of the religion of art is already
bringing about a return to a sounder state of affairs in our culture. The
pre-Romantic artist aimed to please a paying audience or followed the
general instructions of his institutional or individual patron (''Too many
notes, Mozart!''). In contrast, the Romantic artist and his modernist
successor addressed patron or audience de haut en bas. Surely it is
significant that the most important movements in the fine arts of the past
generation -- the new urbanism, expansive poetry, neo-tonal music -- have
involved the renegotiation of the contract in favor of the audience of art,
by promoting the creation of buildings and neighborhoods in which people
enjoy living and working, poems written to be read and even, for those so
inclined, committed to memory rather than merely deciphered, and, yes, music
that you can hum. 
It can even be argued that the loss of celebrity and social authority
liberates the artist. No longer drafted to serve as spokesman of the
oppressed, New Age guru or high-class pornographer, the artist can
concentrate on his craft. Once again an artist can be recognized for his
genius even if he does not commit suicide, go to prison or into exile or
wear funny clothes. In the 21st century, the fact that a writer, dramatist,
composer or visual artist is as law-abiding, successful and well paid as,
say, Shakespeare, Haydn or Raphael will not be grounds for suspicion. 
In the century to come, great novels and poems will be written, but the
capital-letter Novelist and Poet, like the Composer and the Painter, may
already be as much figures of the past as the Cavalryman and the Belle and
the Vaudevillian. The very idea of a full-time professional who spends an
entire career writing only novels or only poems may seem as bizarre in the
third millennium as it did before the 19th century. 
Future generations may find our received ideas about artistic originality
just as outlandish as our ideas about literary specialization. Most
premodern fiction and drama was not ''original'' in the sense that the
author invented the characters and the plot as well as the treatment.
Usually the playwright, librettist, prose romancer or narrative poet
provided his own interpretation of a familiar myth, legend or historical
episode. In this respect, traditional writers were less like today's
autobiographical novelists and confessional poets than like Hollywood
screenwriters doing the latest remakes of the tale of Zorro or the Titanic
story. ''Hamlet,'' based on one or more earlier sources, really is
''Shakespeare's Hamlet.'' Chaucer plundered Boccaccio, and Dryden updated
Chaucer (Dryden also, with Milton's amused permission, turned ''Paradise
Lost'' into what nowadays would be called a musical). In short, for most of
recorded history the Writer has been a Rewriter. 
Perhaps, then, the decline of the anomalous artistic tradition from which
Mann emerged will be followed by a return to something like the pre-Romantic
conceptions of art and literature that Dryden took for granted. Such a
development would neither have surprised nor disappointed Mann, who attacked
the ''dreary, rotten distinction'' between the poet (Dichter) and the
journalist or man of letters (Schriftsteller). Having begun his career as
the chronicler of the decadent European bourgeoisie, Mann matured into a
cosmopolitan romancer who retold timeless stories from India (''The
Transposed Heads''), medieval Europe (''The Holy Sinner'') and the Bible
(''Joseph and His Brothers''). Late Mann seems to belong to an earlier
period than early Mann; like T. H. White's Merlin, Mann (whom his children
called the Magician) aged backward. Much of this late work, which seemed
old-fashioned to mid-20th-century modernists, seems fresh on the eve of the
21st. Sometimes the best way to be ahead of one's time is to be far behind
it. 
<NYT_AUTHOR_ID type = books version = 1.0 

Michael Lind is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine and a senior
fellow at the New America Foundation. 



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