A bumpersticker in a parking lot at one of my work places reads: “Fear No Art.”
I did not expect to be drawn into a discussion of art. As I acknowledged in my first posting, other than an amateur enjoyment of classical music and opera, my artistic knowledge is woefully undeveloped. But I am reminded of Gilbert Meilaender’s phrase, “bringing one’s life to a point.” (That was all the way back in 1994—Prof. Meilaender’s reflection on the reaction to his participation in First Thing’s statement earlier in the year on homosexuality. Time flies.)
Certainly this moment can hardly be compared to Meilaender’s confrontation with the politically correct powers of Oberlin College. Still, one lives, one tries to be faithful, one waits for the point to manifest itself. Here this point seems to need to be held up to view.
Upon reading my first posting, a friend forwarded two essays in City Journal on the current state of art and opera. In one, Roger Scruton describes “Beauty and Desecration”. The transcendental value of art, beauty, has been replaced by “artistic self-expression.” According to Scruton, the self as defined by the contemporary artist is the one who is “outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it,” and who expresses his opposition by “disturb[ing], subvert[ing], or transgress[ing against] moral certainties.”
The first problem with such an program should be obvious: if the artist subverts received moral certainties, and produces his art out of his perceived “self,” then what vision, what value is being produced? “By their fruit you shall know them,” the Gospels tell us Jesus said. Moral wholeness is in the doing. One is just, if one acts the way an ideal just man would act, according to Aristotle. And what fruit is being produced? “Artists can now make their reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the human face and throw dung at it,” Scruton says.
He goes back to an earlier essay in City Journal by Heather McDonald, “The Abduction of Opera.” McDonald describes the travesties of Regietheater, where the director (Regie), brings his own inner vision to the music and drama. In the case of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, that vision “call[s] for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano…masturbation, urination as foreplay, [and] forced oral sex.” The director, Calixto Bieito, needed to hire prostitutes to carry out his stage requirements.
Scruton wants to restore “the presence of a transcendental claim,” and McDonald hopes that New York’s Metropolitan Opera will continue leave “Eurotrash” in the European landfill where it belongs. I am sympathetic. I certainly hope that “the Met” will still be presenting classic productions of La Traviata, La Fille du Régiment, or La nozze di Figaro,when I finally get the opportunity to enter its doors.
I am, alas, not hopeful. “Cultural conservatism”—if I can thus label a movement that wants to regenerate the classic values of “Western culture” —does not recognize what it needs to conserve. To understand why, begin with Scruton’s reference to Plato’s belief in a “vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order.” There is only one problem: Plato was unjustified in his belief. He wanted there to be a “changeless order.” But he had no way of knowing that such an order existed.
Plato had the ancient inheritance of Hellenic “art”: Homer, Hesiod, and the sculpted and painted representations of the gods in their stories. In Book II of The Republic, he rejected their stories, because they viewed the gods—Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Ares, Hera, Aphrodite—as handing out good and evil without reason or justification, lying, violent and in all other ways morally corrupt. What he could not do is explain why one should reject the gods. A fundamental task in any philosophical argument is being able to show how one reaches one’s conclusion. (As in modern empirical science, the argument must be “reproducible.”) In Book III, Socrates repeats a long list of the stories of the gods, and encouraged by his interlocutor, responds that “they ought not to hear that sort of thing,” and “let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated” this or that account. Plato did not (and could not) prove that the “true” gods were not morally corrupt, he assumed it.
The moral corruption of the Olympian pantheon is the moral corruption of art. (Don’t forget: “Western” art at least, has only two sources, the Bible and myths, mostly Greco-Roman.) According to Hesiod, out of Chaos came Gaia, Tartaros, and Eros—”who/Makes their [the gods'] bodies (and men’s bodies) go limp, / Mastering their minds and subduing their wills.” Gaia gave birth to Ouranos (“heaven”), and then mated with him to bring forth the Cyclopes, who had “hearts of stone,” and 3 monsters, Cortos, Briareos, and Gyges, “Strong, hulking creatures that beggar description.” From the beginning Ouranos hated all of them, and stuffed them back into the earth. These are the brute, stupid, amoral forces of nature, the powers that make us and consume us with equal disregard. (Much in this tale is parallel to Norse legend, especially the role of the giants. In Wagner’s version, they are powerful, darkly desirous, but dumb beings who initiate the chain of events that will lead to the fall of the gods, law, and life.)
Another son, Cronos, “hated his lecherous father.” He and his mother, Gaia, hatched a scheme: a Ouranos came down on her to mate, he cut off Ouranos’ genitalia and hurled them in the ocean. The foam in the water produced Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual passion, while the blood created the Furies, “chthonic deities of vengeance,…of the anger of the dead (Wikipedia).”
This is the beginning. Look long and hard; think carefully before you choose to praise it. Art comes from the ground, the dark soil of human passion, greed, and rage, the incestuous intertwinings of lust and loathing.
Fear all art.
June 27th, 2009 |
Plato was justified in his belief, and he did have a way of knowing an unchanging order existed- he knew it intuitively, per Romans 1. He did not and could not prove the true God was not morally corrupt, he assumed it, but he was well justified in his assumption. The Greeks knew there was another God, they just didn’t know who it was until Paul came to Athens some centuries later, Acts 17.
The point of art is not that it provides moral instruction, but that it provides insight about the world.
June 27th, 2009 |
Jim:
Your answer is justified from the standpoint of Christian apologetics: showing that Christian truth fulfills the inchoate yearnings of the pagans.
However, that does not justify Plato. For Plato’s belief to be justified, he had to justify it on philosophical grounds, using such arguments as were available to a Greek circa 350 BCE. My objection to Plato is not that he was wrong (he was not), but his “opinion” did not rise to the level of “understanding” as he himself defined it.
For that reason, his philosophy does not provide the answers to the nature and shape of reality. Such answers are needed if we are to make trustworthy moral decisions about the conflicting “insights” that different myths, cultures, and artistic expressions generate.
June 27th, 2009 |
Spengler,
A comment off post! A few days ago the wife and I watched Defiance.
From time to time I must be reminded what the European Jews went through under National Socialism. The movie portrays the Beilski (sp) brothers resistance in Bellorussia (sp), the fighting, death , horrors. In seeing what the Jews went through I am reminded what ideologies can bring down on all men, it is what Voegelin spoke of.
I need to be reminded the why and how of the nation of Israel, and that I stand with her, simply because there must be a place on this planet for the Jew. Hollywood in its disorder gave this year’s Oscar to the movie, Milk!
June 27th, 2009 |
I think “Fear all art” is too sweeping. I would prefer, “Fear any art that is not ordered to the truth of the creation: fallen, and redeemed in Christ. Fallen, but not utterly corrupt. Damaged, but shot through with glory. Beauty that is ordered to the truth is one of the ways people are converted. Truth, beauty, goodness—these are what draw people to God.
“Fear all art” is a bit like “Fear all sex”. No. Fear only that art and that sex which is not ordered to the truth of God’s revelation.
But then, I’m a Catholic. I love anything visual or aural or tactile that reminds me, beckons me, to the Lord. And Hopkins is my favorite poet.
June 28th, 2009 |
I once had the opportunity to be alone in a small synagogue in Natchez, Mississippi. Do you believe in an “art” of the spirit? One felt the antiquity of the centuries there; also of the fundamental wisdom that shaped Western Civilization. … and now we have the kinds of things you describe. How very much we owe one another. We are our brothers’ keepers.
June 28th, 2009 |
The artist develops powers which can be used for evil as well as good, the case of Richard Wagner being the most obvious in music. These powers come from the effort to address the sacred, I believe, but they can be perverted. That is the problem of Feanor that Tolkien narrates in the Silmarillion.
June 28th, 2009 |
The viewer of art also brings something to the encounter. This something (for example, the viewer’s own orientation toward the sacred) can make even an encounter with explicitly anti-sacred art a useful encounter. Not one that is sought, but useful if it happens to occur. Does this mean we should aid and abet anti-sacred artists? No. But it does mean that we should act like adults, not only with our liberty, but with the liberty of others. Mr. Scruton shows that there is no shortage of opportunity for criticism. These days, it rather becomes a duty. Perhaps it was ever thus.
I’m still puzzled by Mr. Layman’s reflections. David L, you’re saying that somewhere there occurred a split between theistic and humanistic art, and that Plato failed to mount an effective defense of theistic art for some reason. Your mentioning Cronos and Gaia and the fearful origin of Aphrodite is all very stirring.
If we leave these modernities aside and look at, say, the paleolithic images of Lascaux, what do we find? I’d say we find that the origin of art comes from something like Adamic naming and aboriginal story-telling. The impulse was the describe the world (animals!), particularly as a strongly gestural and moving thing. Then we have a concomitant impulse to put these images into a temporal sequence, or narrative (an exciting hunt!). We also have abstract signs. The origin of art thus lies in the impulse to render, to narrate, and to abstract. Why? To memorialize? Maybe. To praise a Creator? Unclear. In my untutored view, it just shows our rational, emotional, and reflective spirit doing what comes naturally: trying to figure out this animated world, and our place in it.
Eventually, selfishness and pride asserted itself, and we all know that story.
June 29th, 2009 |
Perhaps you were just trying to hammer your point home rhetorically in this blog entry´s conclusion, but the assertion that all art should be feared is ghastly. For you to aver that all art springs from the same dark fecundity of the bestial is nothing short of astonishing, given your obvious intellectual power.
Clearly you don´t believe–you couldn´t believe–that Bach´s Mass in B Minor emanates from the same sort of base, nightmarish id as Penderecki´s Threnody, or that the Russian ballet is born of the same rutting depravity one finds at the locus of a Faulkner novel.
Not all passions are created equal.
June 29th, 2009 |
Matthew Bishop,
Penderecki is considered a religious composer (e.g., his “St. Luke’s Passion”). 99% of the musicians you will meet will ask why Bach’s Mass in B Minor should be considered preferable. And you will be hard put to provide a rigorous answer.
June 29th, 2009 |
Ms. Smith,
To be alone in a synagogue may have its charms, but Jews do not go to synagogue alone; to pray together with ten or more Jews is to be part of the Congregation of Israel. The Temple was a sacred place; the synagogue is not a substitute. It is merely an assembly hall of convenience. There is however a direct link between the altar of the Temple and the Sabbath table of the Jewish family (the requisite loaves of chalah are the Showbread, the head of household blesses wine and bread in recollection (but not reproduction) of the Temple sacrifice, and gives the three-fold Priestly blessing.
June 29th, 2009 |
Mr. Goldman,
Don´t get me wrong–I think Penderecki is magnificent, and his Threnody is sublimely terrifying. I didn´t know he was religious; however, I have never heard a piece of music in which God was more absent than the Threnody, which was why I placed it opposite Bach´s Mass in B Minor, in which I hear God very clearly.
June 29th, 2009 |
Also, having considered it, it doesn´t surprise me at all to learn that Penderecki is a religious composer. It´s hard to imagine the pure horror of godlessness being evoked by the nonchalant atheists who have dominated the arts for the better part of the past century; perhaps it takes something approaching a religious sensibility to fathom man as he truly is (or would be) without a redeeming mythos.
June 29th, 2009 |
[...] David P. Goldman fears art, and Sally Thomas offers some frightful and funny examples. Comments [...]
June 29th, 2009 |
[...] David Layman at First Things: Upon reading my first posting, a friend forwarded two essays in City Journal on the current state of art and opera. In one, Roger Scruton describes “Beauty and Desecration”. The transcendental value of art, beauty, has been replaced by “artistic self-expression.” According to Scruton, the self as defined by the contemporary artist is the one who is “outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it,” and who expresses his opposition by “disturb[ing], subvert[ing], or transgress[ing against] moral certainties.” [...]
June 29th, 2009 |
A little footnote for all this. I studied with Penderecki during the time when he taught briefly here in the United States. He decision to write a passion to fulfill a commission was very much made on the spur of the moment. The decision even surprised him. Soon after the completion of the St Luke Passion he wrote the Devils of Loudun, which is a rather different work. The only time I discussed anything of a religious nature with him was when we talked briefly about Bach. Penderecki was quite certain that Bach had no personal interest in the religious texts he set. They were merely what he was required to write music for because his job demanded it. And Penderecki made clear that it wasn’t an issue that interested him or one he wanted mentioned again.
Those conversations were in the late 1970’s. I may have misunderstood him then and I have no idea what his personal religious beliefs are now. He writes a great variety of music, some of it with religious subjects, but I don’t know if he would consider himself to be a “religious” composer. But he certainly was a most insightful teacher.
“Threni” doesn’t have anything to do with Hiroshima. Its original title was 8’26” and was a study in non-pitched counterpoint. It’s too strong to call Penderecki an opportunist, but he is politically savy and his decision to re-name the piece significantly helped both its European reception during the period of strong anti-Americianism in Europe in the 1960’s and Penderecki’s treatment by his Polish communist masters (interestingly, when Penderecki toured the United States in the fall of 1976 he refused to make any comment whatsoever about the workers’ strikes back in Poland and their violent suppression. This was at a time when Andrei Sakharov was daily risking his life opposing the policies of the Leonid Brezhnev). Penderecki’s anti-American title is a very cleaver bit of political theater. But perhaps a better dedication might have been to the Katyn Forest massacre.
A lot is written about the Wagner and the Nazi’s. It’s interesting to note that Hitler’s favorite classical composer wasn’t Wagner. It was Bruckner. Of course Hitler loved Wagner but it was apparently Bruckner who was nearest his heart. And he loved his Fourth Symphony.
Here is Frederic Spotts’ “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics:”
“It was near the end [of the Third Reich] that the Berlin Philharmonic was involved in what must rank as the most grotesque episode in music history. There was apparently a general understanding that when the Philharmonic’s programme included Bruckner’s Fourth Syjphony that would be a signal that the final day of the Thrid Reich had come. The concert of 13 April included the work. As everyone left the hall they encountered uniformed members of the Hitler Youth at the exits passing out free cyanide capsules.”
Apparently, all those Nazi’s (including Hitler himself) thought that it was Bruckner’s music that most powerfully embodied the ideals of Aryan Master State, not Wagner’s. And it was given to Bruckner to sing the Master State to its destruction. A bit surprising, isn’t it?
June 29th, 2009 |
“Fear all art” is a strong statement. However, I understand the point. Fear does not equate to hate. Therefore to “fear” art is to recognize its power and be cautious, not necessarily disregard it without some engagement.
I think Wagner is amazing, but I sense the darkness beneath. One must be “aware” of the fire that you are playing with and be grounded in an understanding of that which trannscends in order not to be swept under the waves of passion that so easily become untethered from prudence and wisdom.
I don’t think we shoud dismiss all art that may be dangerous, but, again, we must be cautious and grounded.
As to the point on Plato, no one “knows” Truth with a capital “T.” We can only believe it based on faith. Reason only takes us to the edge of belief, it never, alone, pushes us over.
However, I do think that to “conserve” means to conserve what we have faith in, otherwise why bother fighting the tides of the time?
God would be that which deserves and demands our conservation in a secular age.
June 29th, 2009 |
[...] 29, 2009 Spengler is feeling the horror: I am, alas, not hopeful. “Cultural conservatism”—if I can thus label a movement that wants [...]
June 30th, 2009 |
Mr. Linton,
Many thanks for sharing your anecdotes. For me it matters little whether Bach was divinely inspired or just a practical genius; art for profit or career is art nonetheless.
It’s interesting to learn of Penderecki’s little political ruse in naming the Threnody. I mentioned before that it has always evoked, for me, the madness of man as beast, bereft of his own sense of divine similitude–the id, if I’m using that term accurately.
As for fear of art–I must confess that I live in constant terror that my girlfriend will drag me to hear Offenbach…
June 30th, 2009 |
Chinese Confucius culture has always held art as a part of the basic and also the highest form of refinement of civilization. Music, Go (a Chinese game, culturally much more sophisticated and refined than Chess), Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting are 5 items required to master in order to become a gentleman in traditional Chinese culture.
As Sima Qian, the most prominent Chinese historian at about 2000 yrs ago noted in his Record of History, the most celebrated great works (arts such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, literature, etc.) in Chinese history have almost always been produced under extreme conditions where the bright minds suffered extreme negative pressures.
Fear is the common factor amongst many forms of psychological pressure such as worry, angry, pain, hatred, etc. Fear no art? Fear all art? Or just No great fear, No great art? Indeed No fear, No art?
June 30th, 2009 |
Michael Linton,
Thanks very much for the color on Penderecki. The question of what makes a composer “religious” apart from his intent to be religious remains unanswered. Bruckner was a devout Catholic, one of the very last composers of Catholic choral works that remain in standard repertoire, and no doubt would have been horrified to find his music appropriate by the Nazis, whereas Wagner’s family, including emphatically his widow Cosima Liszt, were close to Hitler from the early 1920s onward. Benedict XVI has praised Bruckner as a religious composer, and the pope is something of a musician himself (his elder brother Georg conducted the Regensburger Domspaetzen, an excellent boys’ choir). I don’t like Bruckner, but that’s a different matter, and has nothing to do with the Nazis’ appropriation of his music. Hitler was personally involved with the details of the Bayreuth Festival until the war broke out, as Brigitte Hamann’s excellent book on Winifred Wagner reports. Some historians claim that after 1943, Hitler ceased to like the idea of Goetterdaemmerung and distanced himself from Wagner, but that hardly obviates the Nazis’ earlier identification with Wagner. Is Wagner’s “Parsifal” a Christian work, as Nietzsche complained? It is a hash of Christian and pagan elements; “Erloesung dem Erloeser” sounds almost kabbalistic to me, and I confess that I don’t understand what Wagner was getting at.
The point remains that we do not have a rigorous way of distinguishing religious music from non-religious music, or religious composers from non-religious composers. Mozart wrote the Requiem, surely the single most moving setting of a Catholic sacred text, simultaneously with the Freemasonic opera “Magic Flute” with its hymns to Isis and Osiris. Mozart was a Catholic but hardly an orthodox one. Does that make his Requiem any less “religious”? Beethoven was a very heterodox Catholic whose views were Romantic and pantheistic; does that invalidate the Missa Solemnis? And does Wagner’s nominally Christian theme make “Parsifal” Christian?
July 1st, 2009 |
“The frightening thing is that beauty is not only terrible, but it is also a mystery. It is here that Satan fights against God, and the battlefield is the heart of men.” (Dostoyevsky)
Along with Mr. Goldman, I love art, and I fear it as well–because it constantly tempts me to idolatry and paganism, because I am always tempted to love it above the God of Heaven and Earth, all the more so when I behold a work of sacred art like the B-minor Mass that seems thoroughly imprinted with the purest piety…
An appropriate fear keeps one from giving oneself without reserve to the love of a mere work of human hands. Love it–but always be wary.
January 23rd, 2010 |
In my earlier post I failed to mention this important book by Penderecki: “Labyrinth of Time, Five Addresses for the end of the Millennium,” published in 1998 by Hinshaw Music of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The final chapter of the book is an interview of the composer by the American conductor Ray Robinson. Here is a bit of that interview:
Ray Robinson: What will be your final musical work for this millennium? Is there one form, one text, one idea that will serve as a summary statement of your musical thinking for the 20th Century?
Penderecki: I am planning to write a Christmas Oratorio for the year 2000, to commemorate two thousand years of Christianity. Since I am Christian and compose as a Christian, I must write a major religious work. I am considered a composer of religious music. While this is not entirely true, since I have written other types of music, I have composed many religious works. Looking at other composers of our time, there is only one—Olivier Messiaen—who has written as much music on sacred texts. This is my task. After that I will probably not write any other oratorios. I have composed so many large choral works. I am not sure that I will be able to find an idea for another work of this type.
Me again: I’m not certain that the Christmas oratorio has been written, but there is a major new oratorio that is in the process of composition—keep the maestro in your prayers so that it may be finished. But I think that answers the question of how Penderecki himself thinks about his own work.
Returning to the Threni; whatever its genesis it remains one of the seminal works of the second half of the last century and, if for no other reason than its influence on film music, is with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring the century’s most influential piece of concert music—at least in my opinion. On April 30, 2010, Penderecki will be conducting the piece at Carnegie Hall. The program also includes the 1967 Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra, the violin concerto and the horn concerto (in its US premiere), and the Fourth Symphony. And yes, of course, I’m going.
If readers are interested in what I think it means to be a Christian composer (not a religious composer or a composer of religious music–both things in which I have real interest–but a Christian composer), they can spend some time at the site refinersfire.us.
The site is still being but together but even now there’s material there that fleshes out many of my comments posted elsewhere.
February 6th, 2010 |
[...] at the Spengler blog, David Layman writes (emphasis original): The moral corruption of the Olympian pantheon is the moral corruption of art. [...]
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