Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 21:57:00 -0600
From: Bill Spornitz <lumpylabs-AT-mbnet.mb.ca>
Subject: Re: here's the deal for those interested


b-

...flog gnihctaw naht retteB

>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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