I spent last week at my brother’s. While my son frolicked with his cousins, I raided my sibling’s library. So here’s a series of brief reviews:
Barefoot Gen, Volume 1 by Keiji Nakazawa A story of world-historical import and great human tragedy is always improved by warmed-over melodrama, poignant irony, and random fisticuffs. Stirring speeches about the horrors of war are feelingly juxtaposed with scenes of anti-militarist dad beating the tar out of his air-force-volunteer son. On the plus side, though, drill-sergeant brutality set pieces are apparently the same the world over. Also, to give him his due, Keiji Nakazawa stops having his characters beat each other up for no reason every third panel once the bomb drops. Tens of thousands of civilians running about shrieking as their flesh melts is enough violence for even the most impassioned pacifist adventure-serialist. It’s okay to have Gen rescue the evil pro-war neighbors from their collapsed house and to have the evil pro-war neighbors refuse to help dig out Gen’s family and to have the sainted Korean neighbor help carry Gen’s mom to safety as long as you don’t have Gen and the Korean pummel the evil pro-war neighbors with a series of flying kicks as the city burns. It’s all about restraint.
High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez
Hernandez tells us several times over the course of this searingly human graphic novel that his protagonist, Fritz, has a genius level IQ. And how would we know if he didn’t tell us? Also, she was probably sexually-abused as a child, and therefore the fact that she fucks anything that isn’t nailed down is a sign of her profound psychological thingy, and not a sign that Hernandez likes to draw balloon-titted doodles fucking everything that isn’t nailed down. In this, of course, the comic is profoundly different from past works like Human Diastrophism, in which there were big tits and gratuitous fucking, but interspersed with paeans to the human interconnection of all of us who are bound together by empathy and profound meaningfulness and also by a love of big tits and gratuitous fucking.
Whoa Nellie! by Jaime Hernandez If you adore female Mexican wrestling and girls’ fiction about the ups and downs of friendship — then I still can’t really see why you’d want to read this.
But, you know, it’s “fun” and “enthusiastic”. “Buy it now.”
Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez Alternachicks drift through their alterna-lives with quirky poignance and poignant quirkiness. Plus, bisexuality.
To be fair, to really understand the subtle characterizations here, you need to take the entire Hopey/Maggie saga and inject it into your eyelids weekdays 8:30 to 5:30 and weekends 12-6. Only when you’re blind and destitute and wretching blood in the sewer with the ineradicable taste of staples glutting your tonsils will you truly understand the blinding genius of layered nostalgia.
Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg Better than the movie Lomborg argues convincingly that it would be better to cure malaria and HIV than to wreck our economies by failing to reduce greenhouse emissions. Which largely confirms my suspicion that global warming is less a real policy priority than it is an apocalyptic fad — a rapture for Prius-owners.
Marvel Masterworks: Jack Kirby There’s been a lot of debate in comments here as to whose prose is more tolerable, Stan Lee’s or Jack Kirby’s. After trying and failing to read the Marvel Masterworks volume, I think I have to say, who gives a shit? Lee’s hyperbolic melodrama is slicker and Kirby’s more thudding, but the truth is that if you put the two of them together in a room with an infinite number of monkeys and a typewriter and gave them all of eternity you’d end up with a pile of monkey droppings and a lot of subliterate drivel. The ideal Jack Kirby would be a collection of his illustrations of giant machines and ridiculous monsters and weird patterned backgrounds with all the dialogue balloons excised. Short of that, you look at the pretty pictures and you try your best to skip the text.
Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis It’s hard to believe anyone was willing to publish such an obvious Grant Morrison rip off, but I guess comics are shameless like that. It’s all here with numbing inevitability — the multiple iterations of our hero (Captain U.K. of earth 360b, Captain Albion of earth 132, etc. etc.), the goofily foppish reality altering villain, the cyberpunky organic/computer monster. Throw in a standard kill-all-the-superheroes plot and a bunch of high-concept powers (abstract bodies! summoning selves from further up the timeline!), add some borderline-satire of the square-jawed protagonist and you’ve got everything Morrison’s written for the last two decades. To be fair, though, Moore and Davis seem to be on top of their derivative hackitude, and as a result there’s none of the pomposity that can infect their prototype. Captain Britain doesn’t die for our sins and he isn’t an invincible icon; he’s just some dude in spandex swooping through the borrowed plot with equal parts bewilderment and bluster. Sometimes imitation works better than the real thing; maybe Morrison should try ripping off these guys next time.
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s characters sometimes seem more like chess pieces than like people; Nabokov pushes them here and pushes them there about the page, forming patterns for his own amusement. There’s no doubt that it is amusing, though, and while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of the game, I enjoyed watching the patterns expand and dilate, moving in black and white through their silent hermetic dance. There’s one passage, which I wanted to copy out but now can’t find again, in which our protagonist, the corpulent, hazy chess master Luzhin, types a string of random phrases at the typewriter and then mails them to a random address from the phonebook. If any book makes me laugh that hard even once, I consider myself well-recompensed for my time.
The Real the True and the Told by Eric Berlatsky Eric printed an excerpt of his book on HU here, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read the whole thing till now. Despite his daughters’ review (“Why are you reading Daddy’s boring book?”) I really enjoyed it. The basic thesis is that post-modern texts like Graham Swift’s “Waterland” or Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” don’t actually deny the reality of history. That is, history in such works is not just text. Rather, postmodern lit tries to approach the real through non-narrative means. The emphasis on the textuality and artificiality of historical narratives is a way of reaching through those narratives to reality, not a way of denying the existence of reality altogether. Basically, for Eric, post-modern fiction rejects, not reality, but simplistic narrative, suggesting that the first can only be accessed by rejecting or resisting the second.
I think it’s a convincing argument about the goals of post-modern fiction, though I question whether the tactic is as successful as Eric seems (?) to want it to be. There are two problems I see.
First, as Eric’s book kind of demonstrates, the anti-narratives and non-narratives Eric discusses are themselves, at this point, narrative tropes. When Artie in Maus laments the insufficiency of narrative, for example, he’s voicing long-standing clichés intrinsic to accounts of the Holocaust; when Kundera talks about Communists rewriting history, he’s voicing long-standing clichés about totalitarian regimes which go back to Orwell, at least, and probably before him. Self-reflexive, alternative narrative structures are their own genre at this point…they’re well-established narrative traditions in their own right. It’s hard for me to see, therefore, how those narrative traditions really effectively escape their tropeness and encounter the real in a way that’s diametrically opposed to the way that more traditional narratives encounter the real. Which is to say, Eric’s argument seems to be that the Book of Laughter and Forgetting is through its form closer to the real than Pride and Prejudice — and I don’t buy that.
The second problem I have is that the real in many of these books (and in Eric’s discussion) ends up being linked to trauma. The Holocaust and pain and suffering is more “real” than love or marriage. Eric also notes that the quotidian, or unnarrataeable is often figured as the real too…which would mean that the real is either trauma or boredom. I’m as pessimistic as the next Berlatsky I think, but I’m not really sure why bad or neutral is more real than good.
Which brings me to my second second (and last) problem…which is that I think it’s quite difficult to theorize the real without theorizing the real. Or to put it another way, can you talk about the real while bracketing theology? If you’re at a place where the real is either the Holocaust or tedium, it’s hard to see how exactly that’s different in kind from nihilism — and if you’re a nihilist, what are you doing talking about the real in the first place?
Anyway, the book was great fun to argue with, and probably the thing I read on vacation that I most enjoyed. It’s amazon page is here in case you want to raise the fortunes of the extended Berlatsky family.
Makes you wonder who was watching Noah’s kid while he did all of that reading?
Uh, Noah? You realize that Moore and Davis’ Captain Britain came out before Morrison even started his comics career? (Ok, his very early comics may have overlapped with the end of their run.) I guess you didn’t. That kind of know-nothing knee-jerk reaction pretty much sets the tone for the rest of this post. It’s the kind of column that makes me want to delete HU from my bookmarks and never have anything to do with it again. It really undoes a lot of the credit that your more thoughtful posts accrued. It’s really a pity.
Yes, I know Moore came first. It’s a joke.
And I think it’s pretty important to torpedo my reputation on occasion. Don’t want to get too stuffy, after all.
Noah doesn’t read, he sits in the back and makes farting noises.
Okay, now you’re just trying to flatter me.
Noah–if you want people to get that it’s a joke, you have to first establish a reputation that you know what you’re talking about.
Nah; I don’t need anyone to get that it’s a joke. I mean, if you got that it was a joke, I’d miss out on your irate response…which I think was also pretty funny.
My dear friend Bert pointed out that disciplinary anxiety seems to be a constant theme on this blog. I guess I just bring it out in folks.
But really, I’m a lover not a fighter. If you don’t like the first half, Andrei, you could talk about my brother’s book and the philosophical status of the real in post-modernism. Surely that’s sufficiently serious?
Oh, and the last sentence of the Capt. Britain discussion is the tell.
I fail to see the disciplinary anxiety in my reply; pointing out that your knee-jerk reactions are superficial and uninformed may simply have to do with your knee-jerk reactions being superficial and uninformed. But if it makes you feel better to think there must be some other cause for my claiming that your knee-jerk reactions are superficial and uninformed, go ahead and tell yourself that.
Andrei, Consider that Noah likes to skip over the boring parts of Proust looking for the good parts. This gives him time to dip pig- tails in inkwells.
But they’re not uninformed; I knew the thing that you thought I didn’t know. So…what’s you’re problem, exactly?
Your response when I say, “this isn’t very good for this reason and that reason,” is to say, “hey! You don’t know enough to say that!” But my knowledge or lack thereof has nothing to do with whether or not what I say is correct. Freaking out about whether or not so and so has the credentials to say such and such is definition status anxiety.
And it’s pretty funny to call my knee-jerk reaction superficial and ill-informed when your own knee-jerk reaction was based entirely on a clumsy superficial reading which left you looking kind of ridiculous. You could have just shrugged and said, “whoops, made a mistake” — but instead you double down. It’s almost as if your shirt is so stuffed you can’t even breathe in there, Andre.
And, you know…we could still talk about the real and postmodernism. Or we could continue to exchange juvenile insults. Whatever works for you.
Holly, you’ve got me confused with Robert. You need to read more closely!
Noah, your responses to Jaime, Gilbert, and Kirby were just as superficial and uninformed, and as far as I can tell you don’t have the out of claiming they were jokes too. I did say it “sets the tone for the rest of the post.” It’s not about credentials, it’s about your inability to read them to a depth of more than one millimeter. But if you think it’s about credentials, again, whatever makes you sleep better at night.
It’s funny that you think I’d approve instead of a more “serious” conversation about the real and postmodernism. Yawn.
Uh…okay. I’m interested in the real and postmodernism, and my brother’s book had a lot of thoughtful things to say on those topics…but whatever. I guess you’re just in reflexive sneering mode now; I know that that can be hard to break out of.
So why exactly is my reaction to Gilbert uninformed, as an example? Do you feel High Soft Lisp is a work of great humanity and moral genius? You’re arguing it’s not intended to be a stroke book? Or you’re claiming Kirby’s prose is deathless and his plotting immaculate? If you want to argue those points, go ahead, but if you’re just going to throw insults, I’m going to conclude that you’re a fanboy who uses his academic credentials to shield his shoddy taste and crippling nostalgia.
At what point in this discussion did I ever mention any academic credentials? It’s funny how you feel you need to bring them up just to dismiss my comments. I have nothing to say in defense of High Soft Lisp (haven’t read it, your position on it seems defensible), but your takes on Gilbert’s earlier work, on Jaime and on Kirby are just, again, really superficial, much more reminiscent of back-of-the-comic-store fanboy talk than anything I wrote. And now you’re resorting to cliched, one-size-fits-all retorts (“Stuffed shirt”? “Crippling nostalgia”?). I wouldn’t have thought your rhetorical arsenal, or for that matter the sense of humor you usually try to put on when answering negative criticism, would have run out so early.
Noah, I agree with you on most of those comics (the ones I’ve read at least) except Ghost of Hoppers. Maybe you do have to have read earlier parts of the series to appreciate it, but… that’s the way most of Jaime’s work is. It’s like reading the second book of a trilogy and skipping the first and third.
“Whoa Nellie”, though, is pretty much a trifle. Though it has some nice formal elements to it: http://madinkbeard.com/archives/whoa-nellie
Sorry, You Watchmen guys are hard to tell apart.
Hey, Noah — Regarding the Marvel stuff, if you can dismiss it out of hand so easily, I think you might just be a tad too close to the source material.
Whenever possible, I try and look at things from a wider, historical point of view. In the realm of comics, it would be easy for a classical snob to dismiss every comic strip or comic book ever made as mass-produced literary detritus — even material that has garnered widespread critical acclaim amongst comics historians.
If you think about it, however, contemporary or near contemporary critics are often much harder on a creator than those of later generations.
For example, Samuel Pepys called one of Shakespeare’s plays “insipid” in his famous diary. Goethe said of Durer’s work, “Ugly shapes and extravagant fancies have interfered with his incomparable talent.” The latter almost sounds a bit of “Hooded Utilitarian” criticisms of Frazetta, doesn’t it?
The Marvel Silver Age material, while not Shakespeare or Durer, has undeniably had a HUGE impact on 20th and 21st Century culture. For you to dismiss it out of hand, without thoroughly exploring the depth and range of that impact, is a pretty piss-poor bit of criticism, don’t you think?
;)
Andrei, all right, all right; you win. Five or so TCJ message board back and forths is all I can really work up the bile for these days. I’m sorry you didn’t like the post…but, you know, there’s always something new tomorrow.
Derik, that seems reasonable about Jaime. I was trying to read Whoa, Nellie because it seemed self-contained…but that didn’t work, obviously. A friend suggested Death of Speedy is a better place to start…maybe I’ll give that a go (the same friend also assured me that there was no way I’d ever like Jaime though…so perhaps it’s a lost cause….)
Holly, that’s because we’re all simultaneous big blue naked avatars of Dr. Manhattan.
By the way, anyone else think that Durer was the first-ever “popular culture” artist?
Hey Russ. I’d say it’s had a moderate-sized impact, rather than a huge one. Marvel’s always been a specialty interest; pretty small beer compared to, say, hip-hop (though still certainly a cultural force.)
And…I didn’t entirely dismiss it. That Galactus drawing kicks ass. I really do like paging through and looking at the pretty pictures with Kirby and (sometimes) Ditko. I just find the writing almost unreadable at this point, whether that writing is by Stan Lee or Kirby himself.
Noah: Death of Speedy is a good starting place. Though… yeah, you probably won’t like it regardless. But, who knows?
Russ:
“By the way, anyone else think that Durer was the first-ever “popular culture” artist?”
Yes, if you consider emperors Maximilian and Charles and other aristocrats to whom he worked popular enough. Or if you consider 15th and 16th centuries humanism as part of the popular culture of the Renaissance.
What about those marvels of early performance art “The Flagellents?”
Domingos — Hmmm, do I detect sarcasm here?
So Durer worked for artistocrats? Big deal! That doesn’t negate his innovative, popular culture-esque approach to printmaking for the masses.
Next you’ll be claiming that Everett Raymond Kinstler, because he later became a portrait painter of presidents, wasn’t really a popular culture artist. Kinstler, by the way, embraces his pop culture roots. Kudos to him!
How many votes did Ars moriendi get in the poll?
The “masses” couldn’t afford a square inch of one of Dürer’s etchings, I’m afraid…
A page from a “Dark Age” Comic Book.
http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bimage%5D=7&set%5Bzoom%5D=default&set%5Bdebug%5D=0&set%5Bdouble%5D=0&set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fmdz10.bib-bvb.de%2F~db%2Fmets%2Fbsb00039962_mets.xml
There were a good number of these “block books” printed in the 1400’s.
Noah — Moderate-sized? Maybe. But you really can’t say for sure, can you? No one has really explored the impact in a scholarly fashion.
From a personal, anecdotal point of view, I’ve been amazed at how many “non-comics” people I’ve met over the years who, when they find out I’m a comic book artist, say something like, “Oh, yeah! I collected Spider-man until I went off to college and my mom threw my comics out.”
Not too long ago, I and a good sports buddy of mine from the 1970s re-connected, via e-mail, after about 30 years. Last month, during one of our e-mail exchanges, he started talking about the Cap film, and then went into a side conversation about Sharon Carter!
Last year I was at a barbecue at my brother’s house, and one of his friends walks up to me and pops open a briefcase full of bagged, mint condition comics he’d saved since the 1970s and said, “Hey, Russ! Check these out!”
A while back, while discussing some current films over the phone with producer, I mentioned I was a comic book fan. The next thing I knew, we went down a 10-minute comic book collecting rathole.
A Marine I know found out I was a comics buff and started recommending graphic novels for me to read, such as “Scalped.”
This happens ALL THE TIME!
It’s like tens of millions of comics fans are members of some massive Mason-like organization, and the secret code word for a fellow brother or sister is, “I read comic books.”
holly cita:
“A page from a “Dark Age” Comic Book.
There were a good number of these “block books” printed in the 1400?s.”
None of these are top ten material though. It seems that _Calvin & Hobbes_ is a lot better…
Sure, there’s a fairly large number of men and a much smaller number of women who care about Marvel comic books. It’s just nothing like the number of people who care about hip hop, though…or the number of people who care about the Wire.
It’s easy to tell that this is true from looking at my site stats. It wasn’t an article about spider-man that got 100,000 plus hits, I can assure you.
Stuff like Harry Potter and Twilight are just enormous pop culture phenomena. Comics used to have that kind of reach back in the 40s, I think, but it was long vanished by the 60s when Marvel was up and running. Again, that doesn’t mean it had no impact; it obviously had some, and continues to have some. But I think it’s of the nature of things that folks who are really into comics tend to overestimate their influence.
And I like Jack Kirby a good bit more than I like Harry Potter…and probably somewhat more than I like Twilight.
Hey, don’t put it on me, Domingos. I voted for Hokusai.
Holly, there’s something screwy when I try to follow that link. Is there a problem on your end or is it maybe my browser?
Domingos wrote: “The “masses” couldn’t afford a square inch of one of Dürer’s etchings, I’m afraid…”
Maybe not now, but during his Nuremberg years, Durer made a considerable number of prints of each one of his works, and those were sold by him and through an agent. As a matter of fact, it was the circulation of all of these prints that made him famous throughout Europe, and is what probably led to his gigs with Maximilian and other aristocrats.
By the way, though this has nothing to do with Durer, I had a relative who was once the mayor of Nuremberg.
Works for me.
Is this any better?
http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fmdz10.bib-bvb.de%2F%7Edb%2Fmets%2Fbsb00039963_mets.xml
If not try cutting and pasting the link into your browser.
Since these are wood block printed there are many “blank pages.”
http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fmdz10.bib-bvb.de%2F%7Edb%2Fmets%2Fbsb00039963_mets.xml
http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bimage%5D=8&set%5Bzoom%5D=default&set%5Bdebug%5D=0&set%5Bdouble%5D=0&set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fmdz10.bib-bvb.de%2F~db%2Fmets%2Fbsb00039963_mets.xmlhttp://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set%5Bimage%5D=9&set%5Bzoom%5D=default&set%5Bdebug%5D=0&set%5Bdouble%5D=0&set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fmdz10.bib-bvb.de%2F~db%2Fmets%2Fbsb00039963_mets.xml
Yes, that worked. Thanks!
Noah wrote: “But I think it’s of the nature of things that folks who are really into comics tend to overestimate their influence.”
Perhaps.
But Marvel Silver Age characters have shown remarkable staying power — nearly 50 years and counting, in many cases. In addition, their reach went far beyond comic books, touching almost every popular culture medium imaginable.
Think about some of the pop culture icons of the past that, say, most Americans under the age of 30 have probably never heard of. Ed Sullivan, for example. Or the Hula Hoop. Or Walter Cronkite. Closer to home, even stuff like Pogo, Li’l Abner, or Steve Canyon would bring quizzical looks from the average under-30 person. Hell, ask anyone under the age of 50 what a Shmoo is and all you’ll get is a blank look. Yet, in 1949, Shmoos were all the rage.
So, I suspect Marvel characters might be more ingrained in our culture than you may think.
Russ:
We must be meaning different things when we use the word “masses.” I use the quotation marks because talking about 15th and 16th century masses is kind of an anachronism. Besides, Durer’s Humanism couldn’t be perceived by the “masses.” The people had their own rich culture back then. Unfortunately all that is lost by now (or changed to become meaningless folklore).
While Marvel Comics might be small potatoes as a cultural force, I’d suggest that the North American Superhero Aesthetic (which Kirby played a major role in inventing) has had a profound impact on our visual landscape. Car ads, movies, whatever. Kinda’ stating the obvious, I know.
BTW, I am stoked to check out Eric’s book. I’m reading a lot of documentary theory right now, which has been concerned with the status of the real for some time now. A literary perspective will be a breath of fresh air.
Hey, if I sell a copy of Eric’s book, I feel my nepotistic work is done.
It is really good, actually…and yeah, I think it would definitely have something to say to documentary theory. That makes sense.
I’d agree that the well known superheroes (superman, batman, spider-man, wonder woman sort of) as a unified group are definitely a cultural touchstone of sorts. But…it’s still not as big a deal as something like hip hop, I’d argue, and it’s also fairly diffuse. It’s definitely not tied strongly to the original incarnations or creators. It’s just hard for me to go from “Lots of people have a general idea of who superman is” to “Jack Kirby is a cultural figure of immense importance.”
In some way the whole conversation is beside the point anyway, since I don’t think that cultural cache really has anything to do with quality. Even if Jack Kirby was the most popular artist in the history of humankind, I’d still find his writing unreadable. (And I’d still enjoy looking at his drawings.)
Does anyone want to stand up for Barefoot Gen? I take it Andrei hasn’t read that one, and/or doesn’t care….
Domingos — I suspect you’re right. My opinion about “popular culture” is probably more inclusive than yours. I would lump Shakespeare and Durer together as popular culture creators of their day, but I’m sure Shakespeare’s audiences were much more economically diverse. After all, a performance at the Globe Theatre cost a penny a person (about $1.50 today), while Durer’s prints no doubt targeted the upper middle class and the wealthy.
Still, we ARE talking about mass audiences in both cases.
Noah — Per my earlier point, the musical genre of hip hop may be a musical footnote in 50 years. Marvel characters have had proven staying power, and will not disappear from the cultural ether any time soon.
The Captain Britain capsule review made me spit water all over my keyboard. Fine work, sir.
Hip hop has been around for probably 30 years, depending on how you count it. It started out as a subcultural phenomena, like Marvel…but then it took over the world.
So basically, hip hop has been around for the majority of the time that Marvel superheroes have been around. The main difference is that it’s much, much, much, much more popular and influential. It’s a lot (a lot) more credible to suggest that marvel superheroes will have vanished in 50 years than it is to suggest that hip hop will have.
Sean, I’m glad somebody got it. I hope your computer’s okay!
I laughed at the Captain Britain thing, too.
The one thing it was missing, tho’, was contrasting and massively under-motivated praise for an obviously shithouse artist. Something like “of course, neither Moore nor Morrison can hold a candle to Gerry Conway”… Try harder next time, Noah!
Noah wrote: “Hip hop has been around for probably 30 years, depending on how you count it. It started out as a subcultural phenomena, like Marvel…but then it took over the world.”
Yeah, 30-odd years sounds about right. As a matter of fact, I have Rapper’s Delight (1979) on my iPod playlist — one of the songs that helped start it all. Personally and objectively, I don’t like a lot of the new stuff, though, despite the fact that my tastes are (and have always been) eclectic.
Hip hop sales have nose-dived during the past five years. This could be because of the economy; or because of illegal file sharing; or because a lot of the newer stuff is stale, crude and uninspired; or all three. We’ll just have to see.
One other thing… despite your insistance that hip hop is so popular, the Marvel stuff crosses three or four generations. Hip hip might cross one, or on a good day, maybe two generations. Quite a few people in their 60s, 70s and 80s know who Spider-Man is, but probably couldn’t name even one hip hop artist if their life depended on it.
I think Noah’s downplaying Marvel’s impact on the popular-culture, particularly with regard to Spider-Man. I don’t think there’s a person alive in North America, or frankly the developed world, who isn’t aware of the character to some degree. The property’s presence, particularly over the last decade, has been enormous. The three Raimi films are among the top 100 N.A. moneymakers after being adjusted for inflation, and the first two are among the top-ten box-office champs of the last decade. Spider-Man is a much bigger deal than Twilight in pop-culture terms. It’s a bigger deal than Harry Potter as far as movies go, and the only reason I wouldn’t say it’s bigger in terms of the culture is that it hasn’t enjoyed comparable success in publishing.
To say it hasn’t enjoyed the same success in publishing is something of an understatement. I looked at figures at one point, and as far as I can tell, the Harry Potter books have sold better not just than spider man, but than all graphic novels combined.
———————
Noah Berlatsky says:
Yes, I know Moore came first. It’s a joke.
———————
I had no trouble “getting” the joke, for what it’s worth. Taking it for granted that the Moore/Davis Captain Britain stuff surely dated from their “2000 AD” days helped…
———————-
The second problem I have is that the real in many of these books (and in Eric’s discussion) ends up being linked to trauma. The Holocaust and pain and suffering is more “real” than love or marriage…
———————–
Maybe it’s easier to consider those more “real” because they’re, in a sense, simpler events/experiences? The Holocaust was an elaborate endeavor, yet just a method aimed at exterminating undesirables. Can love or marriage be described as aiming at such uncomplicated physical ends?
As for “pain and suffering,” a kick in the ‘nads certainly feels more intensely real than the muddled and ever-mutating phenomenon of “love,” and creates obvious (sometimes permanent!) physical side-effects…
———————-
…Does anyone want to stand up for Barefoot Gen?….
—————————-
Keiji Nakazawa has told his story in many forms; the only one I’ve read was the one-shot “I Saw It” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Saw_It ). While I can understand those who’d consider its manga-style cartoonishness as inappropriate, it nonetheless is informative and affecting, vividly conveying experiences of the inhabitants of wartime Japan.
Been decades since my last reading, but can vividly recall scenes such as Keiji and his brother gnawing on hunks of wood to try and assuage their hunger pangs; Keiji and a neighbor spotting the glint, high in the sky, of the fateful B-29 that would bomb their city; the chilling fact that only the happenstance of standing behind a piece of wall at the moment of detonation saved him; his horror at regaining consciousness and seeing that “everyone has been turned into monsters!”, their skin melted from their flesh; these same survivors then trudging along painfully, their sloughed-off skin dragging on the ground; a husband trying futilely to rescue his wife, trapped in the burning rubble of a collapsed house; how bodies, being disposed of in mass cremations, would curl up like shrimp on a grill…
Perhaps the necessary brevity of “I Saw It” made for a more documentary-like approach, avoided editorializing and pitfalls such as Noah complained of: “…It’s okay to have Gen rescue the evil pro-war neighbors from their collapsed house and to have the evil pro-war neighbors refuse to help dig out Gen’s family and to have the sainted Korean neighbor help carry Gen’s mom to safety…”
It’s better than you’re portraying it. Spider-Man’s publishing history also has to include periodical sales that date all the way back to 1962. From 1963 on, the annual international unit sales have to have been consistently in the millions. And I’m not counting the sales of the newspapers that have published the daily strip, which would really explode the numbers. The Harry Potter publications have probably made more money, but that’s at least in part because the price point is considerably higher. I’m pretty sure that cumulatively more individual customers have bought a copy of a Spider-Man publication over time than have bought a Harry Potter one.
Well, here’s google trends data of harry potter vs. spider-man. It isn’t pretty for spider-man:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22harry+potter%22%2C+%22spider-man%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Even if you add in spider man without the hyphen:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22harry+potter%22%2C+%22spider-man%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
The web at least thinks harry potter is a lot more important.
I think pain feels more real, though, because we’ve decided it feels more real. The feeling of what is “real” — with or without quotes — is surely a cultural one. Love isn’t less real than pain in any objective sense, right? Both are part of the world; we experience both.
I can see a shorter more documentary approach working better for Barefoot Gen. He’s got a good story to tell; the closer he sticks to it the better off he could be.
Sorry; these are fun to play with. Here’s harry potter vs. spider man no quotes:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=harry+potter%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Looks even uglier.
Here’s twilight vs. spider man.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=twilight%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
You can see the blips for the spider-man movies more clearly there…still nothing like the twilight numbers when that really gets going.
And, ouch, check out Naruto vs. spider man. At least spider man beats dora the explorer…barely.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=naruto%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I think pain feels more real, though, because we’ve decided it feels more real. The feeling of what is “real” — with or without quotes — is surely a cultural one. Love isn’t less real than pain in any objective sense, right?…
———————
Certainly an attenuated emotion like mild embarrassment is as real as cancer; yet physical pain has a more intense effect; we feel it all the way down to our “lizard brain”!
As an example, there’s Joe Sacco’s autobio “How I Loved the War” story of how his injured tooth became much more important to him than the lead-up to the Gulf War, for all his dismay about that oncoming conflict, being surrounded by fellow antiwar folk…
It’s one of those “in-jokes” which only other super hero fans can understand.
Well…Andrei’s a superhero fan and he didn’t get it. So maybe superhero fandom is necessary but not sufficient.
Well, movies are still the best individual measure of pop-culture success. In this case all three have had phenomenally popular film series, so you can’t say any of them have been handicapped on that front. Actually, while Harry Potter movies on average have been bested by the Spider-Man films in North America, the opposite is true internationally. Spider-Man still beats Twilight in both arenas, though.
Is movie success really better than google search terms for measuring pop culture reach? I think those google trend graphs are pretty telling….
Noah:
” think pain feels more real, though, because we’ve decided it feels more real. The feeling of what is “real” — with or without quotes — is surely a cultural one. Love isn’t less real than pain in any objective sense, right? Both are part of the world; we experience both.”
That’s surely true, but there’s a lot more pain in the world than love (we all die, no less). Even love can lead to a lot of pain (if it’s unrequited; if we’re separated from those we love; if those we love die). An artist must be incredibly good to just show the good face of love. Two things may happen if the artist is that bold: (1) the work is very good formally speaking or something (I have no idea, I’m not that good!); (2) it’s saccharine (which happens 99,9 % of the times).
Besides, everybody knows that hapopiness has no story to tell…
Besides, everybody knows that happiness has no story to tell…
You have to separate the films, and their gigantic marketing blitz, from the old source.
Comic books have not been a significant part of popular culture since the 1950’s. They aren’t popular, and large numbers of people don’t read them.
Even these hugely popular movies are something like soap bubbles aren’t they?
They show up all inflated, pop and vanish without a trace. I’m not around comics people, do folks really discuss these movies in the workplace or at PTA meetings? When the big money action flicks run their course very few people will remember them.
He he: “hapopiness” is a great word for pop pap, cuteness and saccharine :D
Pain vs. love. Love is more popular.
I think you have to defend using pain in fiction. Horror is never held in the same esteem as drama. People don’t tend to ask, “why do you want to explore love?” Torture creates more controversy than romance.
link doesn’t work. here it is:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=pain%2C+love&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Domingos…sure, but there’s more tin in the world than gold. That doesn’t make gold less real. Just more expensive.
torture vs. romance:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=torture%2C+romance&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
I don’t disagree with you Noah (that’s where I started, saying “That’s surely true”). A work of art is a microcosm. The best microcosms are kaleidoscopic in nature.
Charles:
From Harlequin novels to Bollywood and Hollywood, cuteness, pap, saccharine, kitsch, made fortunes, that’s for sure.
I agree with RSM about Spider-Man’s ubiquity. Maybe people don’t google him so much cause they already know all they need to.
I don’t think that really washes. People don’t know who harry potter is at this point? Come on.
People just aren’t as interested in reading about spider-man or buying spider-man products as they are in reading about harry potter or buying harry potter products. They are less interested in spider man by several orders of magnitude, as a matter of fact.
Here’s some older pop culture comparisons.
Beatles/spider-man: http://www.google.com/trends?q=beatles%2C+spider+man%2C+narnia&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Narnia/Spider-man: http://www.google.com/trends?q=narnia%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Beatles are way more of a current cultural force, except for right around the spider-man movies. Narnia and spider-man are comparable, though Narnia still wins (somewhat to my surprise.)
And superman/spider-man: http://www.google.com/trends?q=superman%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Supes wins…and I think he’d beat Narnia too (though not the Beatles.)
Shakespeare vs. spider man: http://www.google.com/trends?q=shakespeare%2C+spider+man&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
In the Spidey vs Harry sweepstakes, Spidey wins. This is so obvious it shouldn’t even be a subject of discussion;
What does Harry Potter mean to a 60-year-old? Nothing. But that same 60-year-old was only 12 when the first Spidey comic story appeared.
That’s a simple factor of time. Spider-Man has had nearly 5 decades to implant itself into the public consciousness. Look, you can go to Timbuktoo or Vladivostok or Manaus, and I guarantee you’ll come across a Spidey T-shirt, bag, toy or other tchotchke before a Harry Potter one.
Kirby or Lee dialogue: you have to go with the flow on this. Lee’s great contribution was comedy, as full of hilarious schtick as a Borscht Belt tummeler.
Kirby’s “bad” prose, for me, is marvelous almost BECAUSE it’s bad. It’s as though there were these inexpressible concepts bubbling through the strange leaky filter of his conscious mind that had to wrench themselves tortuously onto the page…for me, he’s a bad-good prose and dialogue writer as were Eugene O’Neill (who acknowledged his ‘tin ear’), Theodore Dreiser, or Philip K. Dick…
Actually, in another postthread someone compared Kirby to Blake, in that you really needed to surrender to his exalted daemon to appreciate him — that makes sense to me;
Gen of Hiroshima: admire without liking. To treat the atom-bomb massacre of so many thousands of civilians with the cartoony conventions of manga?
It’s as unthinkable as treating the Holocaust through the lens of a “cat and mouse” cartoon.
I kind of hate to say this…but Maus is a lot better than Barefoot Gen (or at least better than the first volume of Barefoot Gen.) Spiegelman is really a stuffy, serious aesthete; when he uses cartoon tropes, it feels like he’s slumming. But — when you’re dealing with such explosive material, that’s better than not being able to tell that using pulp tropes to deal with massive tragedy is incongruous and problematic. Maus is boring, but it’s not stupid. And stupid is really a problem if you take as your subject one of the 20th centuries emblematic tragedies.
I wouldn’t be so sure that you’d find Spidey before Harry Potter in countries throughout the globe. I believe those google stats are worldwide.
>>>Philip K. Dick>>
Come now. The man sometimes wrote some clunky prose–sometimes writing books from no outlines on amphetamines might have contributed to this–but clunky dialogue?? He’s hardly a virtuoso stylist, but he always seemed very attuned to the rhythms of human speech to me. Check out his faux-salesman patter in Ubik, to reach for a ready example.
Also, teh Googlz doesn’t lie. Who knows how Harry Potter will be remembered fifty years from now, but from where I’m sitting, there’s no question which is currently the bigger cultural phenomenon.
I think PKD”s prose is often really beautiful. Some of the internal monologues in Man in the High Castle or Palmer Eldritch; the weird last scene in Scanner Darkly…his writing sometimes crumbles at the edges, the way his worlds do, but I find even that effect lovely.
It seems worth pointing out to those that think it too “cartoony” that Barefoot Gen was originally aimed at a pre-teen audience.
Yeah, it’s hard to read it without figuring that out.
Barefoot Gen wasn’t bad, but I kept expecting him to put on a helmet and climb into a nearby waiting Mach 5.
I guess what I’m saying is that considering the grimness of the subject matter, the cartooning style was all wrong. The odd juxtaposition was distracting and jarring to me — as would it be if, say, John Stanley drew a comic book story about the plight of the Donner Party.
Noah:
Re. that other discussion at the comixschl-list: it seems that Supes beats Peanuts: http://tinyurl.com/3zw99cg
Ack! Hoisted by my own algorithm!
Or maybe not quite. Superman and spiderman are very well known as pop culture phenomena, but nobody reads their comics. I suspect the number of people who actually read Peanuts is quite a bit bigger than the number who read capes and tights comics.
Snoopy beats Wonder Woman, at least for the most part: http://www.google.com/trends?q=snoopy%2C+wonder+woman&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Popularity these days is like a flash flood surging through an arroyo. A month later you have a dry gulch.
It’s official:
http://www.google.com.au/trends?q=harry+potter+sucks%2C+twilight+sucks%2C+spiderman+sucks&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
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R. Maheras says:
August 23, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Barefoot Gen wasn’t bad, but I kept expecting him to put on a helmet and climb into a nearby waiting Mach 5.
————————–
Heh!
————————–
I guess what I’m saying is that considering the grimness of the subject matter, the cartooning style was all wrong. The odd juxtaposition was distracting and jarring to me — as would it be if, say, John Stanley drew a comic book story about the plight of the Donner Party.
—————————-
John Stanley…Donner Party? “This is a job for…R. Sikoryak!” ( http://www.rsikoryak.com/ )
Not to be a troll, but I really believe Kirby’s and Marvel’s cultural contribution is the superhero aesthetic, and not any particular character. Whether people remember Spidey or Harry 50 years from now seems secondary to whether they’ll need to recognize the influence of superhero comics on late 20th century visual & narrative conventions. If there’s a comparison to be made, I’d say it’s with video games, and how their aesthetic is creeping into other media.
Superheroes are obviously a big deal…but I don’t think you can say bring them down to just Lee and Kirby. Obviously, Superman and Batman are still really recognizable and important…as are the Claremont/Byrne X-Men…as is Watchmen, and, for that matter, something like Ben Ten or Transformers or Buffy which pick up parts of the superhero tropes. It’s just hard at that point to really feel like it’s really about Lee or Kirby in any straightforward way, at least as originators. (Which, again, says nothing in particular about their aesthetic achievement
I think Nate’s right — perhaps in a way he may not even realize.
In the 1960s, Marvel, primarily through its superhero books, almost single-handedly caused a widespread seismic shift in readership age demographics that had been in place since the mid-1930s.
Comics always had a percentage of readership that consisted of older teens and adults, but it was generally a small percentage until the Marvel Universe came along and changed all of the rules. I think the success of Marvel had everything to do with the widespread emergence of a much larger and older teen fan base that later begat and supported undergrounds, led to more adult-oriented fanzines, and forced competitors to address more adult-oriented themes like drug abuse, racial inequality, and other social issues.
Nothing happens in a vacuum, so I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to say that Marvel Silver Age superheroes were the primary catalyst for everything that followed, be it Maus, Fantagraphics or whatever.
Fantagraphics makes sense. Spiegelman is way more oriented towards old newspaper strips than towards superheroes though. I think it’s really a stretch to make Lee/Kirby responsible for him.
Noah wrote: “Fantagraphics makes sense. Spiegelman is way more oriented towards old newspaper strips than towards superheroes though. I think it’s really a stretch to make Lee/Kirby responsible for him.”
Like I said, nothing happens in a vacuum. Spiegelman was heavily involved with reading the comics and fanzines of that era — almost all of which were being heavily influenced by the transformative Silver Age Marvel Universe.
Below is a Spiegelman quote that nicely frames his early “Maus” motivators. The quote is from Arie Kaplan’s 2008 book, “Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books.”
“What I wanted to make was something I’d thought about as a result of reading ’60s fanzines, like Graphic Story Magazine. And in there there was a discussion of (early 20th century Belgian woodcut master Frans) Masereel, and people like that. And the idea that there could be such a thing as the Great American Novel, but in comics form, was a notion that I vaguely remember seeing there, and it corresponded with something I wanted!”
And if you read the Gary Groth interview of Spiegelman from TCK #180 and 181, it’s very clear that he read and absorbed superhero comics like “Amazing Spider-Man” and the “Fantastic Four” just like he did the works of Kurtzman, Crane and others.
“TCK” above was obviously supposed to be “TCJ”
google trends is fun.
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=batman%2C+harry+potter%2C+pokemon%2C+naruto%2C+disney&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Disney > Naruto > Pokemon > Harry Potter > Batman (which is about even with Twilight). All of the above > Spider Man and Fantastic Four.
Another random point about the inflence of superhero comics indirectly and directly on comics fans. A while back, I indexed, and later scanned the covers of, the first 400 issues of “The Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom.” TBG #1-400 were published over about 10 years of comics fandom, beginning in 1971. This was a critical period of comics fandom’s growth which started quite modestly in 1961.
While compiling the index, there was a wide snapshot of artists and writers who were in there early years of creativity. But what I found striking in a number of cases was seeing early superhero-related efforts of creators who later went on to successfully do material that had nothing to do with superheroes. For example, the Hernandez Brothers drew a Doom Patrol cover for TBG several years before they introduced “Love and Rockets.” Likewise, Guy Gilchrist, who currently draws the newspaper strip “Nancy” drew an early cover for TBG featuring a bunch of comics heroes playing poker. And one of one of Dan Clowes’ firts published drawings was a cover for TBG (although it was a space-themed drawing rather than a superhero cover). If I had a copy of my index handy, I could no doubt cite some more examples.
At some point though, there’s a question of whether that stuff was a help or a hindrance, don’t you think? All there was was superhero stuff, so yeah, lots of comic artists saw it. But did it help them? I feel like Spiegelman really doesn’t name check marvel, and doesn’t even like Kirby’s work all that much, right? Does it have to be an influence just because it was around? Did it really help them do the art they wanted to do? Or was it a distraction or an irritation?
And Ave: hip hop vs. comics:
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=hip+hop%2C+comics&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Noah — In his TCJ interview, Spiegelman expressed his ambivalence, and even outright distaste, for Kirby’s work. Yet, at the same time — in a Jerry Springer Show sort of way — he couldn’t stop talking about it.
I think what Marvel’s superhero movement did was draw, through conventions, fanzines, etc., a wide variety of comics-minded people together into a loose, but often unrelated confederation — sort of like a glowing neon sign at night attracting a wide variety of insect species. In the case of comics folks, a convention like San Diego, or a blog like Hooded Utilitarian, is the neon sign.
And I think that, regardless of whatever comics genre floats your boat, if not for Silver Age Marvel (and to a lesser extent, Silver Age DC) superheroes fandom, the huge and diverse comics comics community we enjoy today would probably not exist.
To be fair, it was certain key DC fans like Dr. Jerry Bails who got the ball rolling circa 1961, but it was the rise of Silver Age Marvel superheroes that caused an older, more comics savvy, and more hardcore fandom to explode.
Russ–
I’ve read that interview. The person who wouldn’t stop talking about Kirby was Gary Groth. Spiegelman was trying to humor Gary, but it was obvious he was becoming increasingly impatient with the entire line of questioning. He doesn’t give a damn about Kirby’s work.
Someone should ask Art what he thinks of The Watchmen.
Alan Moore had at least one piece in RAW, so Spiegelman has had some appreciation for Moore in the past, at least….
RSM — I think Gary was trying to get Spiegelman to explain exactly what it was about Kirby’s work he didn’t like, and Spiegelman just couldn’t do it.
But my point was not whether or not Spiegelman liked Kirby’s work, it was that Spiegelman read superhero comics and was a part of the whole diverse fandom movement that developed during that era.
Most fans I knew at the time read a wide variety of stuff, and while everyone had their own preferences, most also had read, or were still reading, traditional Marvel or DC superhero stuff — just like they were reading EC reprints, Mad reprints, Elric, Gods of Mount Olympus, The Spirit, underground comix, Conan, Barks, The Shadow, newspaper strip reprints, or whatever comic book or fanzine happened to be creating a buzz at the time.
“And Ave: hip hop vs. comics”
Ooh, those two are actually closer than I thought they’d be, but the comics one could be skewed by the ambiguity between comics (Jack Kirby) and comics (Chris Rock). Here’s hip hop vs. manga:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=hip+hop%2C+manga
and hip hop vs. movies:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=hip+hop%2C+movies&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
one observation (sorry if someone already pointed this out): with Spider Man (and arguably Peanuts, sorry Noah but Newspaper Comics aren’t a very vital art form anymore either) the brand name has probably vastly outpaced and over-saturated the actual story at this point. I think that Noah’s right that people actually read Harry Potter but while (relatively) a few dedicated souls still read Spider Man and everyone knows what he looks like, the story and character are kind of nebulous and not that interesting. Which of course says nothing about how aesthetically influential Ditko might be, just how popular. Potter’s probably more popular than Dickens or Austen too but I don’t think Rowlings is more influential. And who knows, maybe Marvel/Disney’s current approach of copying the comics and rebooting every five years with endless sequels will pan out in the long run, in which case Potter Inc. might have to do the same to compete. For what it’s worth I love Kirby’s art, think Ditko’s Spider Man is okay, and really enjoyed a couple of the Potter movies.
One last google trend – Spider Man vs. Ditko:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=spider+man%2C+ditko&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
One of the things about vintage issues of publications like “The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom,” “The Comics Journal,” “The Comic Reader,” etc., is because you can see what trends and topics were hot over a period of time.
TBG was especially good at providing this snapshot because of its frequency of publication and sheer size (it went from a monthly to a bi-weekly to a weekly in a relatively short period in time; and by the mid 1970s it sported multiple sections and averaged 100 or more pages every issue.
Batman and Twilight kick Shakespeare’s butt:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=shakespeare%2C+twilight%2C+batman&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Here’s a link showing the Guy Gilchrist cover of TBG #92, published Aug. 22, 1975 (mis-dated on the cover as Aug. 15, 1975):
http://cbgxtra.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/cbg92.jpg
The Clowes cover (TBG #254) and the Gilbert and Mario Hernandez cover (TBG #274) don’t have cover image links yet on the CBG web site even though I sent the guys at CBG the 400+ scans last year. They’ve only posted links to TBG covers up through TBG #110.
Don Rosa is another former TBG artist and columnist that fans under the age of 30-35 do not equate with superheroes, yet if you read his “Information Please” columns in early issues of TBG, it becomes pretty obvious he was a veritable superhero encyclopedia.
There were a other early TBG cover artists like Phillip Yeh, John Adkins Richardson, Marc Hempel, and a few others, who worked superheroes into their early fan art, but are not known today as artists of that genre.
Back then, there was lots of genre crossover among fans, and no one ridiculed you if you happened to read superheroes, or Barks stuff, or whatever. It was no big deal. I kind of miss that.
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R. Maheras says:
…I would lump Shakespeare and Durer together as popular culture creators of their day, but I’m sure Shakespeare’s audiences were much more economically diverse. After all, a performance at the Globe Theatre cost a penny a person (about $1.50 today), while Durer’s prints no doubt targeted the upper middle class and the wealthy.
Still, we ARE talking about mass audiences in both cases…
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There needs to be a differentiation between works which are fine art and can be both appreciated by the intelligentsia and the “common man”…
…and work which is kitschy crap, aimed solely at the “lowest common denominator.”
In the former case, with Shakespeare’s plays, the better-educated audience members could be moved by the poetry, enjoy the classical allusions; the “booboisie” would more appreciate the swordfights, twists in the plot (when Macduff tells Macbeth — who’s been told that no man born of woman can harm him — that he was not born of woman; he was delivered via Caesarean section!), gawdawful puns (like the shoemaker in “Julius Caesar” saying “all I know is awl”)…
And cheap prints of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Durer’s “Praying Hands” can be found for sale at flea markets.
In the latter case, there’s utterly brainless crapola like the “Transformers” movies, Kinkade prints, and too much more to mention. Stuff that those with sophisticated tastes can, at best, only appreciate in a condescending “so bad it’s good” fashion.
On some other HU thread I’d posted links to what happens when a worthy work gets “tackyfied” to more appeal to the insensitive tastes of the masses, with hideous versions (night-lights, fountains with colored water; a Bible worked in) of “Praying Hands.” And recently read of how some old-time productions of Shakespeare would be made more “audience-pleasing” by moves like adding a happy ending to “Romeo and Juliet”…
Mike — It always makes me nervous when some “higher authority” in the art world steps in and arbitrarily makes decisions about what is, or is not, art.
In science, rigid standardized, quantifiable characteristics are striven for to categorize things. A result must be measurable and reproducible to be valid. Vagaries are frowned upon.
In the art world, however, it does not appear to me to work that way. It almost seems like anarchy, with clusters of clans fiercely defending their museum turf. Standards of what is and is not art seems to change by generation, probably because there are many in the art world who seem to take pride in tearing down established standards or changing them to suit the characteristics of some new art movement.
I really don’t mind anarchy and the arbitrary rules in the art world per se, because from a creativity point of view, I think that’s probably healthy.
But the art world cannot have its cake and eat it too.
What do I mean? Simple: If there are no set rules and no measurable standards in the art world, then there cannot be any experts. That’s right… everyone’s opinion of what is or is not art is equally valid.
As far as a work of art getting corrupted goes, it’s going to happen. I guess that’s why, in most cases, nothing beats the original. I say “in most cases” because there are instances wher a re-do or remake is better than the original.
For example, film-wise, the the 1941 version of “The Maltese Falcon” was actually better than the 1931 version — even though many of the scenes and the dialogue were identical.
Art-wise, Michelangelo’s “David” statue is a much better, though thinly veiled “re-do” of the Greek statue Doryphoros of Polyclitus.
Russ: “Art-wise, Michelangelo’s “David” statue is a much better, though thinly veiled “re-do” of the Greek statue Doryphoros of Polyclitus.”
How do you know that? You never saw the latter.
———————-
R. Maheras says:
Mike — It always makes me nervous when some “higher authority” in the art world steps in and arbitrarily makes decisions about what is, or is not, art…
———————–
I’d be glad to wear the ermine mantle of ““higher authority” (even more so if a throne came with it, too!); though I never — much less “arbitrarily” — made any “decisions about what is, or is not, art.”
The crucial factor is whether something is “works which are fine art…and work which is kitschy crap…” (Emphasis added.)
If Marcel Duchamp can convert a urinal into a work of art by “recontextualizing” it, when fine industrial design is exhibited in art museums, even the more conservative concede the border between art/non-art is permeable.
Personally, I have no trouble accepting “Transformers II,” the works of “the painter of light,” a tampon in a teacup, a clock incorporating a photo of Elvis polyurethaned onto a piece of driftwood, a “performance art” work that consists of a light switch being flipped on and off, as at least a kind of art. Minimally filling the basic requirement: that a work be intended to create an aesthetic effect.
It’s the quality of the work, as shown by the presence or absence of factors such as…
– Originality
– Creative mastery
– Psychological/intellectual depth and complexity
– Imagination
– The effectiveness with which its creator’s intentions are communicated
…And so forth
…that makes the significant difference. And, even knowledgeable and perceptive critics can disagree on the importance accorded each of those factors. Say, one might favor originality, even when it’s lacking in polish; another give greater weight to Academic-style mastery of execution.
However, that the rules of what constitutes “originality” or “psychological perceptiveness” are not cast in stone, or clearly demarcated as the boiling-point of water at sea level, does not mean we need go to the “anything goes” opposite extreme; maintain that the judgment of the mouth-breathing doofus who proclaims “The Fast and the Furious II” “the most awesome movie of all time” is every bit as valid as John Simon’s arguing that Ingmar Bergman is the world’s greatest filmmaker.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Russ: “Art-wise, Michelangelo’s “David” statue is a much better, though thinly veiled “re-do” of the Greek statue Doryphoros of Polyclitus.”
How do you know that? You never saw the latter.
——————–
Um, did you mean because it should’ve been called “Doryphoros of Polykleitos?
Actually, Polyclitus is an accepted version of the name:
http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/farberas/arth/ARTH209/Doyphoros.html
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/museums/doryphoros.html
Mike — Domingos is just being a wise guy. He hates it when low-brows like me make a reasonable point that undercuts his fine art canon.
Um…no reason to get testy. It’s not clear to me exactly what Domingos meant…but he was probably referring to the fact that the original of the Doryphorus appears to be lost (at least according to Wikipedia.) So nobody living has seen it.
Mike wrote: “However, that the rules of what constitutes “originality” or “psychological perceptiveness” are not cast in stone, or clearly demarcated as the boiling-point of water at sea level, does not mean we need go to the “anything goes” opposite extreme; maintain that the judgment of the mouth-breathing doofus who proclaims “The Fast and the Furious II” “the most awesome movie of all time” is every bit as valid as John Simon’s arguing that Ingmar Bergman is the world’s greatest filmmaker.”
But therein lies the rub — when standards are so subjective, who’s to say where the line of demarcation is?
Some of those who pooh-pooh the idea that, say, a Frazetta painting could and should rightfully hang in the Louvre use rationale, that, when closely examined objectively, is arbitrary, illogical, and thus, unfair.
Criticisms like, “Well, Frazetta was not an artist, he was just a commercial illustrator.”
Really? And how were his commissions any different than Rembrandt’s, or Durer’s, or any past artist’s? The fact is, they weren’t any different. If Rembrandt needed money, he’d paint the neighbor’s wife, or a local church official, or some wealthy businessman — just like Frazetta did.
And when arbitrary discriminators like these are peeled away one-by-one, there is little left except personal preference, and that scares the shit out of art experts. And frankly, I don’t care. If the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, I’m going be that guy who says, “Hey, wait just a frickin’ minute here…”
So any art should hang in the Louvre?
Russ, are you saying Frazetta is objectively just as good as Rembrandt (that it’s not all subjective opinion), or that he’s no better than Matt Feazell (who should have just as good a chance at hanging in the Louvre)?
I think there’s some ground between scientific objectivity and complete subjectivism. There are more or less agreed upon standards which you can talk about and argue for in terms of whether a work of art is good or bad. They’re not absolute, but they make sense (parties to the discussion understand them).
I don’t really care over much what hangs in a museum. I like Frazetta to some extent because he has technical skill and energy. I don’t find his approach especially original, he isn’t very thoughtful, and he happily accedes in some of the less pleasant ideology of his pulp sources. As a result, it’s hard for me to rank embrace him wholeheartedly…though, you know, there are people I like less hanging in museums.
Noah:
That’s right. What we have are Roman copies. A week ago or so I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and let me tell you: the few Greek bronze statues in there (especially with the eyes intact, which is even rarer) are absolutely stunning.
King Lear was often given a happy ending in the 19th century too, believe it or not.
Charles wrote: “So any art should hang in the Louvre?”
Of course not. And no, I do not think Frazetta’s work is the equivalent of Rembrandt’s. But, like Noah said, there are artists with works hanging in museums who, from both a technical and emotional inspiration point of view, Frazetta could paint rings around. So, at the very least, I think he, and other exceptional artists whose work has been effectively banned from art museum consideration because they are “mere commercial illustrators” should get a fair, more objective evaluation by the art world.
Domingos, Speaking of Greek art. Have you seen the Skythian gold? Fucking amazing. I’d never seen the like and wandered around in an art-daze for days afterward. Just beautiful.
Vom: unfortunately no, I’ve never seen it. I must go to S. Petersburg, then…
Time to dig out my crude but succinct artistic nose-tweak of post-modern art:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ.maheras/post-modern-lores3.jpg
The best place to see authentic Greek Sculpture is probably London since Englishmen looted much of the best of it.
If you page through “Greek Sculpture” Lullies and Hirmer, you will see page after page, London, London, with frequent stops in Berlin, and Munich.
Here is a piece of the type Domingos mentioned which is in Athens.
http://www.maicar.com/GML/000Iconography/Anonymous/slides/5213.jpg
Another which was raised from the Sea of Athens.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/-_FRuJZU-BbI/Sns-uQ4cOEI/AAAAAAAAIek/CmrU-SrO48g/25.jpg
Yes, that Paris is great in person (I bet that it is Paris without the apple). The other one looks too Roman though…
The new Acropolis Museum is a political manifesto: it has all the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon (those that survived the puritan fury of the Byzantines and the Venetians bombing) in repro (the lord Elgin ones) and the originals that didn’t leave Greece.
The museum is worth a visit for the Archaic sculpture alone. I suppose that the British and other 19th century colonialists just wanted classical and Helenistic sculpture.
Domiongos: “I suppose that the British and other 19th century colonialists just wanted classical and Helenistic sculpture.”
Very true, I’m more interested in the Crete and Aegean sculpture than later more representational work, but perhaps the British thought the archaic work was cartoonish looking.
They did loot a tremendous amount of archaic vase painting, perhaps because it was easy to transport, or maybe pottery was viewed as a decorative art, and not viewed with the same prejudice as sculpture?
Sculpture would not generally be seen as having as great a narrative quality as painting, but the Greek temple frieze and pediment sculpture at the Temple of Artemis, Temple of Athena, the Siphnian Treasury, Pergamon, etc. were narratives.
Noah, as far as Love & Rockets goes, just start at the beginning. For Jaime, Maggie the Mechanic and The Girl from HOPPERS. For Gilbert, Heartbreak Soup and Amor y Cohetes.
They peaked no later than five-six years into their run, which is pretty much the years these books cover. I don’t think you’ll get much out of reading any more early Gilbert, but surely if you can appreciate Kirby’s artwork then you might appreciate some of Jaime’s.
But yeah, “High Soft Lisp” is terrible. Just wince-inducing. In an interview from some months back, Gilbert said he was burn out with those Palomar-related characters at the end of the first volume of L&R. Well, that series ended fifteen years ago. If he was burn out then, then what is he now? And believe it or not, his story using those characters in last year’s L&R v3 was even worse. As was “Love from the Shadows.” But I did like that surreal short story in the v2 annual from a few years back. Self-contained with no back story or human characters to bring to flesh & blood life.
NB- “You’re arguing it’s not intended to be a stroke book?”
If only it were! I think you’ve got it wrong there. His drawings tend to have a certain grotesqueness to them, partly by design. He’s aged them as times goes on. The “Petra” character who had this perfect athlete’s body is now practically an obese blimp. Who knows what treatment he’ll give “Fritz” in the years to come. Personally, everything he’s doing with those returning characters is so off, so tone deaf, I think he’s just hacking things out.
Getting past Kirby’s groan-inducing dialogue is probably too much to ask for a lot of people. Though I do like parts of his “New Gods,” especially the “Glory Boat” story which I think reaches a certain level of majesty. As bad as his writing can get though, I’d sooner read it than any latter-day Gilbert Hernandez.
Hey Steven. I’ve read Heartbreak Soup, actually (I thought it was eh.)
I think Gilbert gets off on a lot of body types, and on the profusion of body types, and on the alteration of body types. I think High Soft Lisp is definitely about its fetish elements in large part. It doesn’t feel hackish to me; more spiraling into his own not especially interesting obsessions (a la Crumb.)
I like Jaime’s artwork okay.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
….Domingos meant…was probably referring to the fact that the original of the Doryphorus appears to be lost (at least according to Wikipedia.) So nobody living has seen it.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
…That’s right. What we have are Roman copies…
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If they were copied with the original right there, I have no trouble — considering the exceptionally high standards of skill and artistry the Romans had available — accepting it as a perfectly valid work by which the quality of the original may be judged.
For instance, a copy of the Laocoön: http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/3854387
The original: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/LaocoonPioClementino1.jpg
But really, how many of us have actually seen the original of a great work of art? What we usually mean when we say we’ve seen, say, the paintings of Van Gogh, is that we’ve looked at 4-color printed or low-res online copies of photos of those works. Where color balance may be “off,” details and brushwork subtleties lost.
http://www.canyons.edu/departments/ART/images/MAGRITTE%20THIS%20IS%20NOT%20A%20PIPE%201928-29.jpg comes to mind…
(Doing a Google Images search for “magritte this is not a pipe” shows an array of versions of photos of the painting: color tonalities all over the place, cropping varying or borders added, some brightly contrasty, others murky. One may as well call the resulting screenful of images “Ceci n’est pas ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ “…)
…where sculpture is concerned, we may at best see a few views of a 3-dimensional object intended to be observed in the round.
And, there is the “de-contextualization” when works are removed from their intended setting — a temple, cathedral — and set in the neutral, utterly secular confines of an art museum.
Can even visitors to the Parthenon say they’ve truly seen the Parthenon? Aside from its ruined state, no longer being at the heart of the ancient, thriving city it was meant to be in, the bright colors it was painted with (as standard with classical Greek statuary as well) are long gone..
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R. Maheras says:
Mike wrote: “However, that the rules of what constitutes “originality” or “psychological perceptiveness” are not cast in stone, or clearly demarcated as the boiling-point of water at sea level, does not mean we need go to the “anything goes” opposite extreme; maintain that the judgment of the mouth-breathing doofus who proclaims “The Fast and the Furious II” “the most awesome movie of all time” is every bit as valid as John Simon’s arguing that Ingmar Bergman is the world’s greatest filmmaker.”
But therein lies the rub — when standards are so subjective, who’s to say where the line of demarcation is?
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Nothing as clear as a “line” exists; but the weight of critical consensus should be significant in assigning merit, and compensates for the isolated wackos who’d consider Mickey Spillane a great literary creator…
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Criticisms like, “Well, Frazetta was not an artist, he was just a commercial illustrator.”
Really? And how were his commissions any different than Rembrandt’s, or Durer’s, or any past artist’s? The fact is, they weren’t any different. If Rembrandt needed money, he’d paint the neighbor’s wife, or a local church official, or some wealthy businessman — just like Frazetta did…
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But, the results of those Old Masters were of a vastly higher aesthetic caliber.
Moreover, Frazetta’s work was aimed at a far larger audience to begin with, and designed to accompany genre writing that, whatever its merits, was not exactly intended for sophisticated tastes.
The nameless chaps cranking out sterile clip-art illos of grinning “suits” shaking hands across a conference table could as well say, “I’m creating art for money…just like Michelangelo, when he was painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling!”
Yet the painter’s Papal sponsor was infinitely more sophisticated, his expectations far higher, than those of the equally nameless art director for the clip art service…
That Neoclassical copy of the _Laocoön_ is terrible.
Even that early Laocoön is something of a mystery. It was unearthed in the 1500’s outside Rome, and is thought to have been a later (something like 50 AD) copy commissioned by a wealthy Roman of an earlier Greek bronze.
On the relative merits of Rembrandt and Frazetta, I think Fredric Jameson gives a good account of why such comparisons are ahistorical and unhelpf in his well-known essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979). The essay can be found in his book Signatures of the Visible. A relevant section below:
“Indeed, this view of the
emergence of mass culture obliges us historically to respecify the nature of the “high
culture” to which it has conventionally been opposed: the older culture critics indeed
tended loosely to raise comparative issues about the “popular culture” of the past. Thus, if
you see Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Don Quijote, still widely read romantic lyric of the
type of Hugo, or best-selling realistic novels like those of Balzac or Dickens, as uniting a wide
“popular” audience with high aesthetic quality, then you are fatally locked into such false
problems as the relative value-weighed against Shakespeare or even Dickens-of such
popular contemporary auteurs of high quality as Chaplin, John Ford, Hitchcock, or even
Robert Frost, Andrew Wyeth, Simenon, or John O’Hara. The utter senselessness of this
interesting subject of conversation becomes clear when it is understood that from a
historical point of view the only form of “high culture” which can be said to constitute the
dialectical opposite of mass culture is that high cultural production contemporaneous with
the latter, which is to say that artistic production generally designated as modernism. The
other term would then be Wallace Stevens, orJoyce, or Schoenberg, orJackson Pollock, but
surely not cultural artifacts such as the novels of Balzac or the plays of Moliere which
essentially precede the historical separation between high and mass culture.
But such specification clearly obliges us to rethink our definitions of mass culture as
well: the commercial products of the latter can surely not without intellectual dishonesty
be assimilated to so-called popular, let alone, folk art of the past, which reflected and were
dependent for their production on quite different social realities, and were in fact the
“organic” expression of so many distinct social communities or castes, such as the peasant
village, the court, the medieval town, the polis, and even the classical bourgeoisie when it
was still a unified social group with its own cultural specificity. The historically unique
tendencial effect of late capitalism on all such groups has been to dissolve and to fragment or
atomize them into agglomerations (Gesellschaften) of isolated and equivalent private
individuals, by way of the corrosive action of universal commodification and the market
system. Thus, the “popular” as such no longer exists, except under very specific and
marginalized conditions (internal and external pockets of so-called underdevelopment
within the capitalist world system). The commodity production of contemporary or
industrial mass culture thus has nothing whatsoever to do, and nothing in common, with
older forms of popular or folk art.”
Sorry, that should be “ahistorical and unhelpful”
Mike wrote: “Nothing as clear as a “line” exists; but the weight of critical consensus should be significant in assigning merit, and compensates for the isolated wackos who’d consider Mickey Spillane a great literary creator…”
That’s an extreme example, although, to Spillane’s credit, he did exploit (create?) a energetic and blunt literary style that was fairly unique.
Art critics, like experts in other fields, can be spectacularly wrong with surprising frequency, and that’s the main point I’m trying to make.
Van Gogh is a good example. He was almost totally ignored by art critics and only managed to sell one of his paintings during his lifetime. Now he’s regarded as a genius. Does that mean all the art experts who saw Van Gogh’s work and kept on walking were stupid? Or does it mean they were, perhaps, too close to the subject matter to truly appreciate it? Regardless of what the reason was, the blindness of experts back then is obvious now, just as it may one day be obvious in the case of artists like Frazetta.
The blindness of experts is repeated throughout history in every field imagineable: Economics, politics, medicine, the military, physics, astronomy, etc.
As a matter of fact, at times, a monkey throwing darts at a dart board is more likely to guess a particular outcome in a given situation than a room full of experts.
In defense of experts, they most certainly establish a good starting point, but especially in fields with “soft” standards such as art, that starting point can be pretty damn arbitrary.
Jeet, that Jameson passage doesn’t seem to be quite saying what you say it’s saying? He’s saying you shouldn’t pretend that high and low culture distinctions now can be interpolated into the past, which seems reasonable. But that doesn’t mean you can’t compare Rembrandt to Frazetta along formal or conceptual lines. The past is another country, not another reality.
But Russ Maheras wasn’t just comparing Frazetta and Rembrandt on “formal or conceptual lines” he was saying that Frazetta and Rembrandt were both commercial artists and hence comparable figures in terms of intent and social role. Here’s what Russ wrote:
“Really? And how were his commissions any different than Rembrandt’s, or Durer’s, or any past artist’s? The fact is, they weren’t any different. If Rembrandt needed money, he’d paint the neighbor’s wife, or a local church official, or some wealthy businessman — just like Frazetta did.”
I think Jameson speaks to exactly this point.
Also, I’d add that for Jameson (and for me) the formal/conceptual can’t be divorced from the social/historical. Form evolves over historical periods: that’s one of the great themes of Jameson’s work ranging from Marxism and Form to The Political Unconscious to the essays on postmodernism.
That Lacoon copy is off. The pose on the right is bugging me. I think it’s the abs that are all wrong and the direction of the face….
But in any case, copying is always hard. I say this as someone who spends a lot of my free time copying in order to learn. 3D is a ton harder than 2d and 2d is hard enough.
Jeet…oh I see. I didn’t understand that you were specifically responding to that. And yes, you’re right; I agree with you and Jameson, not with Russ there.
I’d agree too that it’s hard to separate formal and historical. I don’t think that means that you can’t compare art or ideas across historical periods, though (or across formal differences, for that matter.)
Jeet, without agreeing with Russ, whose formulation really oversimplies, I don’t think the passage you selected to quote really gets at Jameson’s point about mass and high culture (or the nature of historical specificity). In the same essay, he also says:
His notion of “respecifying the nature” of high culture relies on a deeply dialectical notion of historical specificity that brings those two categories, high and low art, Rembrandt and Frazetta, closer together, rather than keeping them strictly apart. So the historical and social context of Rembrandt’s activity is what would be “respecified” in light of this dialectical notion of history, one in which “the generic forms and signals of mass culture are very specifically to be understood as the historical reappropriations and displacement of older structures in the service of the qualitatively very different situation of repetition.”
From the way you’ve presented this, it sounds like you’re emphasizing the difference in the situations historically (meaning diachronically in time) at the expense of their interdependence dialectically (meaning synchronically in structure). I think it is the two in combination, history with dialectic, diachron with synchron, that is so characteristically — invigoratingly, elegantly, originally — Jamesonian.
—————————–
R. Maheras says:
Art critics, like experts in other fields, can be spectacularly wrong with surprising frequency, and that’s the main point I’m trying to make.
Van Gogh is a good example. He was almost totally ignored by art critics and only managed to sell one of his paintings during his lifetime. Now he’s regarded as a genius. Does that mean all the art experts who saw Van Gogh’s work and kept on walking were stupid? Or does it mean they were, perhaps, too close to the subject matter to truly appreciate it? Regardless of what the reason was, the blindness of experts back then is obvious now, just as it may one day be obvious in the case of artists like Frazetta.
The blindness of experts is repeated throughout history in every field imagineable: Economics, politics, medicine, the military, physics, astronomy, etc…
——————————
Re those critics who weren’t able to appreciate Van Gogh’s genius, they’re actually in the exact same situation as Medieval medics who thought bleeding was a cure-all, and ailments caused by imbalances in the “humours”… ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine , http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030317/medicine.shtml )
Why is it that once-derided artists and scientific theories are now accepted and admired? Because in most of the fields listed above, progress happens; practitioners realize they were idiots to have dismissed new approaches, learn to appreciate new methods of creating art (from using perspective to Cubism) or conducting warfare (marching troops head-on against entrenched machine-gun nests: not a good idea!).
And so, while Victorian art connoisseurs would’ve been baffled or outraged by cubism, their modern equivalent can comprehend and appreciate (in varying degrees) prehistoric art, African tribal sculpture, Outsider Art, the Pop vitality of Carnival sideshow poster renderings…
“Because in most of the fields listed above, progress happens”
There’s progress in art? So what dramatist now is an improvement on Shakespeare, exactly? What poet is better than Wallace Stevens?
Progress in science is more controversial than you’re portraying it too, but arguing for progress in aesthetics seems pretty unconvincing on its face. Aesthetic standards do change over time, but calling that change “progress” seems dubious.
@Caro: I think what you’re ignoring here is the fact that while Frazetta is an excellent example of mass culture, Rembrandt isn’t a comparable figure in high culture because the distinction between high culture and mass culture didn’t exist in Rembrandt’s time. That’s what Jameson meant when he wrote “The
other term would then be Wallace Stevens, or Joyce, or Schoenberg, or Jackson Pollock, but
surely not cultural artifacts such as the novels of Balzac or the plays of Moliere which
essentially precede the historical separation between high and mass culture.” In Jameson’s terms, the counterpart to Frazetta is Jackson Pollock or Warhol, not Rembrandt.
It’s true that the high culture of modernism and the mass culture of the market are two sides of the same coin, dialectically connected, but that’s true of the period of modernism (say from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s). Prior to that period, both elite art and popular culture were more organically an outgrowth of their social worlds. And after the 1960s we have the postmodern breakdown of lines separating high culture and mass culture.
Of course, it might be useful on occasion to compare works of art across wide historical periods but only if the historical differences are kept in mind — to make comparisons without a sense of historical change, without factoring in all the ways the past is different from the present, is to engage in an essentially one-dimensional and simplistic criticism (which happens all too often in these precincts).
You can’t “factor…in all the ways the past is different from the present.” That’s impossible; the world is too big to encapsulate all of its differences or similarities in an encyclopedia, let alone a blog post. I’m morally certain that you yourself have never come close to factoring in all the ways the past is different from the present in anything you’ve written, because how could you? Even as something to aspire to it seems kind of ridiculous — more a way to avoid saying anything than an actual effort to ground a critical perspective.
Rembrandt will get you through times with no Frazetta, better than Frazetta will get you through times with no Rembrandt.
http://www.shafe.co.uk/crystal/images/lshafe/Rembrandt_The_Blinding_of_Samson_1636.jpg
Okay, how about “factoring in the the major ways the past is different from the present”? Is that also impossible?
Well, that’s somewhat more feasible…but how can you decide which is major and which isn’t? Which are applicable and which aren’t? The effort to evaluate the way standards have changed requires the application of standards; backing that step up recursively may make a better or more interesting argument, or it may just muddle you in minutiae. It depends.
Holly wrote: “Rembrandt will get you through times with no Frazetta, better than Frazetta will get you through times with no Rembrandt.”
True, but it’s ironic you chose that painting, since Rembrandt made some key mistakes on it. From a design point of view, the knife stabbing Sampson in the eye is not well-positioned (it blends in with the knife-wielding hand’s arm). In addition, based on the positioning of the knife-wielder’s head, his arm is far too short — about half as long as it should be. It’s pretty obvious Rembrandt was having trouble with foreshortening limbs here, which I find surprising, especially since he was 30 year old when he painted it.
Historical consciousness isn’t an easy thing achieve since it requires the grubby work of immersing yourself in the past, which includes lots of minutiae. There are no hard and fast rules for what counts as important historical differences: you have to spend time getting to know an earlier period well so that you have a sense of the values of the time and how they differ from the present. The question isn’t really about “standards” so much as some awareness of the changes of mentality over many generations. Still, while historical consciousness isn’t easy, it is much better than the alternative, the sort of airy, lightweight, and groundless ahistorical comparisons that we often get here.
@R. Maheras. I think both those “mistakes” are in fact deliberate. Rembrandt is trying to dehumanize the Philistines in a number of ways: the knifewielder is wearing armor which blends in with the knife, making his whole body a kind of weapon. The standing figure on the left is also shorter than normal, as arguably are some of the other Philistines (hard to make out because we don’t get their full bodies). The point is these are lesser creatures attacking the great hero. The only full size figures are Samson and Delilah (who is given heroic stature because of her central role in the story and because she brought down the hero). So as far as I can see, no mistakes; only artistic choices. Of course, its no Frazetta….
Russ, If Rembrandt had your keen analytical skills perhaps he would have been a better artist.
I don’t think that restriction to modernism applies throughout Jameson’s work, though, and certainly not to the same degree that the demand for dialecticism does. His notion of history seems fundamentally different to me from the one it sounds like you’re advocating. Compare the passage you quoted to the opening salvos of The Political Unconscious:
Do you differentate your approach from his description there of history as the study of “objective” structures? I mean, maybe you do, but that’s the type of history you seem to me to be calling for.
Not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with that kind of history, even, but Jameson’s devoted a lot of time and characters to documenting a notion of “historicization” that isn’t about “objective structures” but rather this complex synthesis of synchronic psychoanalysis and the historical dialectic. Just as an example, he says in Political Unconscious that “the historical originality of the Balzacian object needs to be specified not merely against the mechanisms of classical storytelling but against the psychological and interpretive habits of our own period as well.”
In that context, which does represent a slightly later and much more developed version of the thinking in the essay you cite, there is a very real sense in which Rembrandt can be seen as a “modernist” text, specifically the sense in which he is viewed through the lens of mechanical reproduction and the dictates of the modernist aesthetic of high art. Jameson’s thesis in the Political Unconscious is that this is no less historicized than the previous, more objective stance.
Of course you absolutely can say, along with Jameson, that Rembrandt isn’t a good text to use in order to explore the dialectics that are at work in reading Frazetta against the high/art dialectic and that using Rembrandt is likely to occlude some important historical points.
But what I heard you say is not that Rembrandt is the wrong text for the specific dialectic in question but rather that, in general, any comparison between texts from two different historical periods isn’t useful, regardless of the dialectic that’s being considered. I think that’s assigning history to a much more restricted, objective field than Jameson in particular does.
My point isn’t that that is wrong, my point is that it isn’t terribly Jamesonian.
You absolutely can assign history to that objective field — plenty of people do it and with interesting results. But I’m uncomfortable with it being thought of as Jameson’s approach, when he is so much more a synthesis of that kind of history with psychoanalytic poststructuralism. Eliding the poststructuralism in his method seems to me to be a failure to historicize Jameson himself…
The knife wielder himself has made the worst mistake of all; he’s holding the knife by it’s blade.
I must say though I always thought his arm appeared short because it was being seen almost straight on by the viewer. I never considered Rembrandt had made a error in judgment.
“the sort of airy, lightweight, and groundless ahistorical comparisons that we often get here.”
See, it seems to me that when you say “airy, lightweight, and groundless”, what you often mean is, “you are saying mean things about artists I like and I resent it.”
But we’ve had this discussion before, and probably will again. No harm in that, I suppose.
@Caro: Briefly, I have a very different reading of Jameson than you do. It is true that he has incorporated into his criticism synchronic concepts developed by post-structuralists but he’s done so in the service of an agenda that remains forthrightly committed to priority to the diachronic sensitivity of historical materialism. There are very few critics who are as attuned to historical change as Jameson is. This awareness of historical change (or “historical consciousness” to use a short-hand phrase) is central to Jameson’s agenda as a critic (naturally enough since he’s a Marxist, i.e. a historical materialist). In fact, dialectically enough, Jameson uses the synchronic approach to deepen our awareness of the importance of the diachronic.
To quote from The Prison-House of Language: ‘”To say, in short, that synchronic systems cannot deal in any adequate conceptual way with temporal phenomena is not to say that we do not emerge from them with a heightened sense of the mystery of diachrony itself. We have tended to take temporality for granted; where everything is historical, the idea of history itself seemed empty of content. Perhaps that is, indeed, the ultimate propadeutic value of the linguistic model: to renew our fascination with the seeds of time.”
Also, I’m not sure why you think that I believe history is an “objective field” since I didn’t (and in general don’t) use words like objective and objectivity when talking about history. As I clearly said, history is form of consciousness or awareness. And its something we can’t do without out (or to quote Jameson again: “we cannot not periodize”: a double negative but it gets at the inescapable nature of historical consciousness). As I said above, it might make sense in certain circumstances to compare Rembrandt with Frazetta but if you’re going to do so, you’d have to bring some historical consciousness to the proceeding, some sense of periodization and change over time.
“Eliding the poststructuralism in his method seems to me to be a failure to historicize Jameson himself…” Well, Eliding the historical materialism from Jameson seems like an even greater disservice, especially since The Political Unconscious begins with the injunction “Always historicize!”
As long as we’re talking ahistorical comparisons…it’s interesting that what leapt out at me about the Rembrandt image in the context of the discussion of Frazetta is that Rembrandt is choosing to illustrate the moment of *failure*, rather than of heroism. Sampson is really quite unprepossessing there; none of the figures are heroically proportioned, and he’s flat on his back with his eye being poked out. It’s a castration scene; I don’t think I’ve ever really seen Frazetta do that…? Russ would probably know better than I, but the Frazetta I’ve seen are generally heroic or at the most a scene of struggle where the outcome isn’t clear. He doesn’t depict failure or humiliation very often (unless you count sexualized submission, which I don’t think we should.)
And that’s the thing that limits my appreciation of Frazetta; the emotional range is narrow and…well, not very nuanced, shall we say. Which doesn’t mean it’s awful, but doesn’t make it Rembrandt, either.
That’s a fair enough comparison — it might be heightened by an awareness that while Rembrandt was (in this instance) illustrating the Bible, Frazetta tended to illustrate less … um … elevated fare like Conan paperbacks. The credence given to Biblical stories and the cultural weight that these stories had in Rembrandt’s time informs his paintings.
Yes, I think that’s right. You could point out too that one of the results of modernity (already underway in Rembrandt’s time, of course) has been the fracturing of a shared culture, particularly religious. You could argue that the pulp fantasy fare Frazetta illustrated had a mythological component…but that mythology had (in most if not all cases)to be a lot thinnner than the Bible. Weakness as heroism is a complicated and (it seems to me, anyway) profound concept that fits poorly into late modernity.
Still…it’s not just a cultural failure. People did more interesting things with pulp material than Frazetta did (Marston/Peter were all over the weakness is strength thing; Philip K. Dick managed a real sense of tragedy in pulp sources.) So there were ways to express more complicated ideas at around that time in that milieu….
Jeet wrote: “So as far as I can see, no mistakes; only artistic choices. Of course, its no Frazetta….”
Ha!
Frazetta had similar problems with perspective and foreshortening, or were those “artistic choices” as well?
Holly wrote: “Russ, If Rembrandt had your keen analytical skills perhaps he would have been a better artist.”
I’m sure Rembrandt finished some of his paintings, stepped back, and was self-critical of them. Every good artist does that to some degree — that’s how they improve. Rembrandt was human, and despite what Jeet thinks, I think thsoe were errors, not “choices.”
I think foreshortening is fairly common among artists doing “action’ scenes. Kirby is an extreme example. I don’t think these are mistakes unless you believe that the goal of a painting is to produce the equivalent of a photographic reproduction of what a scene would look like in the “real world.” But art is only rarely about copying reality; more commonly art tries to create a new reality with its own rules.
Holly wrote: “The knife wielder himself has made the worst mistake of all; he’s holding the knife by it’s blade.
I must say though I always thought his arm appeared short because it was being seen almost straight on by the viewer. I never considered Rembrandt had made a error in judgment.”
Very true about the blade.
I think the foreshortening of the arm was definitely an error, and it may have occurred in the early stages of the painting. Originally, the knife-wielder’s head may have been farther back. If that was the case, the foreshortening would have been slightly awkward, but not wrong. But by positioning the knife-wielder’s head where he did, the arm would have to be impossibly short.
Don’t shoot the messenger here.
Jeet wrote: “I think foreshortening is fairly common among artists doing “action’ scenes. Kirby is an extreme example. I don’t think these are mistakes unless you believe that the goal of a painting is to produce the equivalent of a photographic reproduction of what a scene would look like in the “real world.” But art is only rarely about copying reality; more commonly art tries to create a new reality with its own rules.”
C’mon Jeet, you’re really rationalizing here.
I know all about foreshortening. While I’m obviously no Rembrandt, I am an artist, remember? Foreshortening has nothing to do with realism or fantasy. A figure is a figure, and unless Sampson was fighting a bunch of grossly misshapen gargoyles in the painting, the arm is impossibly short based on where the head and shoulder of the knife-wielder are located.
Foreshortening is extremely hard to do in some cases — even for seasoned artists. This is especially true when one is drawing the fantasic, or creating some historical scene, where there may not photos or models available for reference.
The knife wielder is able to hold the blade because he’s wearing armor — again to emphasize the contrast between the hero (Samson: big, unarmed and unprotected, his hair shorn, and a man alone) with his enemies (the Philistines: short and ill-shaped, armed and armoured, hairy, many in number).
Russ’s working theory seems to be that Rembrandt was trying to do a photorealist painting (the equivalent of Alex Raymond’s drawing style on Rip Kirby) but failed to make the grade. This theory seems unlikely given the simply fact that Rembrandt lived long before the photograph as we know it was invented (I know there was the camera obscura but that hardly seems the same).
Much more likely is that Rembrandt was primarily interested in creating a striking composition and also heightening the drama of the Biblical story, and concerns about anatomical accuracy were of secondary importance.
“Unless Sampson was fighting a bunch of grossly misshapen gargoyles in the painting”: I think it was exactly the intention of the painting to make the Philistines into misshapen gargoyles. They’re the bad guys, remember?
Jeet — Rembrand had no foreshortening issues here:
http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/night_watch_large.htm
Jeet wrote: “Much more likely is that Rembrandt was primarily interested in creating a striking composition and also heightening the drama of the Biblical story, and concerns about anatomical accuracy were of secondary importance.”
Would you be saying the same thing if Frazetta had a similar awkward perspective in one of his compositions? Like this, perhaps:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/wp-content/2009/02/29_camethedawn_09_02.jpg
The extreme foreshortening in the painting is iconoclastic for it’s time. It’s possible many artists stayed away from such portrayals with due consideration prior to the advent of the photographic image. Go take a look at action photography of a sporting event and you will see all kinds of odd looking things the minds eye didn’t pick up, before the dawn of the frozen moment.
It’s interesting that “modern art,” (now old hat), took a great deal from primitive and archaic art where you would never see a foreshortened form, and on the other hand engaged with the advent of the frozen moment by incorporating the previously “invisible” observations captured by the camera.
It could be assumed that a Rembrandt, and other artists, being in part close observers, knew the foreshortened form violated how the minds eye was informed by reposed proportion. The average mind educated by the frozen moment understands things previously seen by people who made their living by seeing things not easily observed.
“Foreshortening is extremely hard to do in some cases — even for seasoned artists. This is especially true when one is drawing the fantastic, or creating some historical scene, where there may not photos or models available for reference.” In Rembrandt’s case, there wouldn’t have been photos available because he lived in the age before photos existed. But he could and did have models, and would have been able to dress them up in historical costumes, so I don’t think that explains his decision to paint the Philistines the way he did. It makes more sense to see these “mistakes” as part of the larger compositional and allegorical design of the painting.
@Russ. The Nightwatch is not a heroic and allegorical painting, set in a near mythical past, the way the Samson painting is. So it makes sense that Rembrandt used a different set of rules for the two paintings.
I think the Frazetta’s drawing you linked to isn’t awkward. It’s also exaggerated for effect, and defensibly so. Not every painter or illustrator is trying to replicate the effect of photography. I suppose soon you’ll be complaining about Little Orphan Annie’s pupil-less eyeballs or the fact that Mickey Mouse walks on two legs and doesn’t look like a rodent.
Holly — True enough. Some positioning of figures leads to odd compositions, which, in my case at least, forced me to sometimes rearrange an existing composition so the oddness was reduced or eliminated. Still, and I can’t emphasize this enough, foreshortening is damn hard to get right sometimes.
I think one of the most talented comic book artists when it came to doing fantasy action drawings with “natural-looking” and believable foreshortening was John Buscema.
Jeet wrote: “I think the Frazetta’s drawing you linked to isn’t awkward. It’s also exaggerated for effect, and defensibly so.”
But Jeet, the perspective of that Frazetta panel is exaggerated all wrong. In fact, it’s one of the worst Frazetta compositions I’ve ever seen, and it’s probably why it remained unpublished.
I’m not so sure that foreshortening is hard to do, as much as it is hard to present in a drawing or painting in a way which is convincing to the viewer. A photograph doesn’t have this problem, because the viewer knows it is “real.”
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/10/sports/20080810-GYMNASTICS_3.html
Are you an artist, Holly?
I don’t think this particular Frazetta drawing is that much worse than most of his drawings or paintings — the perspective is “wrong” but its a striking drawing. As with Kirby, the overall effect is more important than the obedience to rules of realism.
I’m getting a kick out of the debate: either Rembrandt made a mistake, or he intentionally painted a struggle involving a superhero against a bunch of evil mutant dwarves. But that’s supposed to put him above Frazetta thematically because it was based on the Bible instead of Howard. Hunh? Russ is probably being more generous.
The picture’s about suffering and failure rather than heroic triumph. The monotony of heroic triumph in Frazetta is something I find…well, monotonous, I guess. Rembrandt seems to me to have a greater range, and to be generally more thoughtful. If he misdrew an arm, that doesn’t really effect my appreciation of him especially.
I do like that Frazetta illustration Russ linked to. Like Jeet says, it’s a striking image. Made me laugh, as Frazetta often does.
“The picture’s about suffering and failure rather than heroic triumph.”
Only if you’re not a Philistine dwarf. He might say it’s propaganda.
Jeet – I don’t think that Jameson isn’t committed to historicity. I just don’t agree with you that his notion of history is as reductively or classically diachronic as you seem to think it is.
An understanding of Jameson that isn’t attentive to his use of Althusser’s post-structural, psychoanalytic Marxism is just not a thorough reading of Jameson…look at what he says in the chapter On Interpretation:
How do you get from that to this notion of the priority of the diachronic in his work? I mean that question seriously — how do you read passages like that and end up putting him unproblematically on the side of old-fashioned diachronic priority? You can’t just pull out the places where his dialectic references the pole you’re fond of and ignore the places where his dialectic references the poles you object to!
So, yes, I agree, he is deeply invested in historicization. But not simple periodization. Not the priority of diachrony. Something more subtle and complex than that – a historicization that emerges out of his extremely insightful and nuanced and informed dialectical critique of Althusserian structural causality and its Lacanian precedents.
And yes, I agree, his synthesis constitutes an historicist stance. But it is not a historicism unchanged by the dialectical encounter with poststructuralism, any more than the synchronic elements of it are unchanged from the previous formalisms. It is not a corrective to synchronism that privileges diacronism as an all-conquering alternative to idealist naïvete. That is a misreading, born of too little sensitivity to the aspects of his work that you do not appreciate on their own terms.
When you talk about him, you tend to deemphasize the importance of certain perspectives and strains of thought to his work in a way that it itself de-historicized — Jameson’s thought represents a limited dialectical synthesis of certain key formulations regarding the synchronic and the diachronic that were current and convincing trends in Marxist thinking at the time he was writing. The Political Unconscious (to use the construction from Reification and Utopia) puts Frankfurt School Marxism into a dialectic with French Poststructuralist Marxism. Althusser owed great debts to Lacan. Jameson says outright that the “Freudian model of the unconscious is exemplary” to his “political unconscious”. He opposes it to the neo-Freudianism of contemporary psychology (the “cure”), specifically following the post-Freudians (post-Freudians like Lacan differ from neo-Freudians in this precise respect). He is rigorously and passionately Marxist. He very consistently and imaginatively draws from and converses with other Marxists – especially Althusser but also Durkheim and Derrida. His debt to Greimas is incontrovertible, and Greimas is assuredly poststructuralist. Jameson’s Greimas is much richer than Greimas before Jameson, but it is still Greimasian semiotics. His Althusser is useful for reading culture in a way Althusser could not have imagined, but it is still discernably Althusserian.
These things are why it is such an extraordinary achievement and so valuable to thinkers interested in both philosophical vantage points and their conceptual histories. Jameson does not oppose historicism against the synchronic insights of poststructuralism in a non-dialectical binary the way you suggest. He allows the dialectic to enrich and act as a corrective to both. You talk of priority, but there is no priority in the dialectic.
When you reference the priority of the diachronic, you seem to be asserting that Jameson is more diachronic than he is dialectical, and I don’t accept that. I think you’d be hard pressed to make a compelling textual case for that position that the dialectic mode is not more fundamental to his thought. He is trying to assert a properly Marxist historicism that encompasses the rapidly maturing synchronic thought as well as the conventional strains of diachronic thought, and to do that, he reasserts the importance of Marxist dialectical materialism as “beyond the opposition between synchrony and diachrony.” These – historicized! — aspects are ignored in your reading, as far as I can tell from the limited amounts you’ve said here.
To ignore the importance of this dialectic here is to mischaracterize his achievement and to ignore the historical context in which it was produced, the conversations and debates that were happening around poststructuralism and the counterproductive opposition between Frankfurt School and classical Marxism and the Althusser/Lacan focused French schools. To see it as otherwise is to reify the conditions of philosophical opposition that he saw as so “theoretically urgent”.
So I’m not objecting to your advocacy for historicization; I am objecting to what feels like an oversimplification of Jameson’s notion of historicization and a dehistoricization of Jameson himself!
Noah wrote: “Rembrandt seems to me to have a greater range, and to be generally more thoughtful. If he misdrew an arm, that doesn’t really effect my appreciation of him especially.”
I agree on both counts. Frazetta is no Rembrandt. But, while I frankly don’t know exactly where Frazetta belongs in art history, I absolutely think he belongs there in some significant way.
I’ve observed the work of thousands of artists over the years, and not very many have impressed me and captured my interest as long as Frazetta has. There’s something very special about his best work that goes far beyond childhood nostalgia.
Comparing Rembrandt and Frazetta is too funny. When I think of Fritz I think of that painting where if the dude with the horned helmet brings his axe down, he’ll break his own neck when his arms hit the horns.
And, earlier in the comments, Art Spiegelman started his “comix” career in Wally Wood’s Witzend—and, Art did try to get work in mainstream comics. He did the coloring for two of Frank Springer’s issues of Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD, right after Steranko’s run. According to Art, he got fired for using too much pink.
Charles, I don’t think there were any Philistenes about to be oppressed by Rembrandt. People looking at that image were (are) supposed to empathize with the guy getting poked in the eye.
Russ, like I said, I don’t really have any problem with that. I like Frazetta. I feel like he gets overrated in fan circles…but if Norman Rockwell is sort of easing into some fine art cred, I don’t see any reason why Frazetta shouldn’t do the same.
James, that’s a great story about Spiegelman.
Caro and Jeet — if a novice were to try to read Jameson, where should said novice start?
My teachers definitely thought Political Unconscious, but I’m not so sure. It would have been a hard slog then without people to talk to about it who had read it multiple times and had read many of the source texts. It made a lot more sense to me after multiple courses in Marxism and Lacan.
The title essay maybe, from “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”? That’s the one that has the counter quote to Jeet’s “inescapability of historical consciousness” (Jameson defines the postmodern as the “inability to think historically” — I suppose what’s inescapable is historical (political!) unconsciousness…)
Although I am personally very fond of his book on Wyndham Lewis, and you know, thinking a minute, I’d probably actually recommend Marxism and Form. http://books.google.com/books?id=knx3dYEBTVQC&lpg=PA158&ots=SPHwBjUiAB&dq=Marxism%20and%20Form&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
It’s relatively straightforward and he references it a good bit in the arguments in Political Unconscious.
All right; I’ll give that a try.
@Caro. I don’t mean to deny Jameson’s complexity but I don’t see how the synthesis he achieves between post-structuralism and Western Marxism is useful for defending the statement that Rembrandt and Frazetta were both commercial artists, which was the original impetus for this discussion. To quote again from Russ Maheras’s words “The fact is, they weren’t any different. If Rembrandt needed money, he’d paint the neighbor’s wife, or a local church official, or some wealthy businessman — just like Frazetta did.” In response to Russ’s words, I quoted a relatively straightforward statement from Jameson about the dangers of conflating the mass culture of the 20th century with the cultural artifacts that precede the modern division between high and mass culture. I don’t think any of the extra complexity in Jameson’s work that you allude to, or indeed any amount of extra critical theory, makes Maheras’ original statement any more defensible since that statement tramples over fundamental historical differences that need to borne in mind when comparing these two artists. The point of theory is surely to give us a more complex view of things.
Yeah, I think it ties into that point I was making about how he’s putting the dialectic to work on several key strands of Marxist thinking in the 70s (Marxism and Form is ’71; Political Unconscious is ’81.) Poststructuralism was Marxist, but still disruptive to Marxism, so you’ve got the start of his engagement with some thinkers he believes are critical to the tensions of the time (the last chapter of M&F is “towards dialectical criticism”) and then in TPU you get its conclusion (the last chapter of TPU is “the dialectic of utopia and ideology”). So starting with TPU like they made me do is a shortcut nobody would inflict on anybody other than a graduate student…
Yeah, the essay on postmodernism (available in the book of the same name but also widely reprinted) is a good place to start as is Marxism and Form. I wouldn’t start with The Political Unconscious, which pre-supposes a lot of the other work. His essays on film (in Signatures of the Visible and The Geopolitical Aesthetic) are good too.
I’m very fond of the Lewis work but it is best seen as a trial run for The Political Unconscious.
Jameson does think that postmodernism amounts to “inability to think historically” but that’s not something he approves of, and he dialectically deploys the concept against itself. As he says in the Postmodern book: “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”
Huh; I don’t think my brother would agree with that characterization of the postmodern…he (Eric) makes a pretty good case that thinking historically is central to postmodern lit, at least….
Jeet — I don’t think it does. That’s why my first comment opens with “without agreeing with Russ, whose formulation really oversimplies.” But I continued “I don’t think the passage you selected to quote really gets at Jameson’s point about mass and high culture (or the nature of historical specificity).” You were attributing to Jameson this notion that “such comparisons are ahistorical and unhelpful” and I was saying I don’t think the quote you picked really makes that point, because that point implies that any “ahistorical” comparison is always unhelpful, and I think Jameson’s concept of history is big enough to allow for comparisons of Rembrandt and Frazetta — especially in light of the quote about Balzac. I think the effect of such a comparison though a Jamesonian lens would be to suck Rembrandt out of his historical context and emphasize the commodification of Rembrandt in postmodernity (mechanical reproduction, etc.) rather than to elevate Frazetta through comparison. It’s not that the comparison between them can’t be made or is unhelpful; it’s that making it requires viewing Rembrandt “against the psychological and interpretive habits of our own period.” Which seemed to be something you were resisting as “ahistorical.”
Jeet — on Lewis — I heard him give a fantastic fantastic amazing talk on Lewis last year at Duke. I need to go see if it’s come out in print yet — he has reconsidered so much of what’s in the original book. It was breathtaking.
On postmodernity — I’m not trying to say he thinks that it’s a good thing — just that the dialectic is the fundamental organizing committment, not diachrony itself…he’s “beyond the opposition.” Neither has priority. He pulls in the negative hermeneutic in a way that’s very indebted to post-Hegelianism and I think that’s very key to what makes him interesting. I don’t mean to say that synchrony is more important to him than diachrony, the way it is for, say Derrida, or Lacan, or even Althusser, less so. And if I HAD to pick one, sure, I’d pick diachrony, — but I think having to pick one is against the dialectical spirit of what he’s doing. I think when you talk about Jameson you need both, all the time, because he works in both modes. It’s so exciting and impressive how he does it, almost magically erasing the opposition between them. I think he’s one of the most intuitively dialectical thinkers American academia has ever produced, and I think there are few places in critical theory where the nuances of the dialectic emerge as clearly and palpably as they do in Jameson’s work. Overstating his commitment to diachrony really occludes that. I think it also has the effect of “disciplining” him, making him seem more like a conventional historian and less like the tremendously interdisciplinary polymath that he is…
Noah, At the moment I’m a runner with a broken foot. Currently reading the seven volume Nausicaa.
@Caro. Yeah, I was disappointed that Verso recently re-issued Fables of Aggression and just did a straight reprint (not even fixing mistakes). They should have gotten Jameson to do a new intro or afterwords talking about how his thinking on Lewis has evolved.
I had asked one of the other speakers at the Symposium for a copy of his paper and he said that the organizers were going to publish a proceedings with all the papers, so I am hoping that will have the Jameson talk as well. Maybe I should email them and see if anybody can tell me the status of that coming out. I guess it’s on academic publishing time.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Because in most of the fields listed above, progress happens”
There’s progress in art? So what dramatist now is an improvement on Shakespeare, exactly? What poet is better than Wallace Stevens?
Progress in science is more controversial than you’re portraying it too, but arguing for progress in aesthetics seems pretty unconvincing on its face. Aesthetic standards do change over time, but calling that change “progress” seems dubious.
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Looking at that sentence as I was about to post it, I could see it was going to raise objections, but didn’t have the time to add a batch of explanations and clarifications; and had serendipitously run across comments in the “Medieval medicine” sites I’d posted links to that related interestingly on why we can have “progress,” yet still a decline.
“Progress” is far from an “it’s all good” phenomenon; many of the definitions at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/progress being neutral (“developmental activity in science, technology, etc.”; “growth or development” could as easily apply to the metasticizing of a cancer) or aware of its ambiguity “the development of an individual or society in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level.” (Emphasis added)
Though geniuses may not come along like clockwork, the fact remains that modern art critics and artists have an infinitely greater pool of knowledge, can draw from a vastly greater amount of influences, than those in the past.
In art criticism, knowledge of far more schools of art than the Victorians were privy to enables deeper insight, wider and deeper appreciation of work that the old-timers would’ve scornfully dismissed as unfinished, or the product of children or lunatics.
As far as artists are concerned, awareness of countless other approaches than one currently failing to inspire can lead one into fruitful new directions, or a new synthesis.
Alas, all this does not necessarily mean we get a barrage of great art; and for the sterility of so much of the product, we can lay the blame at the concrete-shod feet of modernity.
Wikipedia on “Medieval Medicine” notes:
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Ideas about the origin and cure of disease were not, however, purely secular, but were also based on a world view in which factors such as destiny, sin, and astral influences played as great a part as any physical cause. The efficacy of cures was similarly bound in the beliefs of patient and doctor rather than empirical evidence, so that remedia physicalia (physical remedies) were often subordinate to spiritual intervention.
———————–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine
Not as effective as modern medicine, but indicative of a more richly complex worldview, rather than a coldly mechanistic one.
Wouldn’t art created in a world where the former view rather than the latter held sway (which to a significant degree included the time of Rembrandt) be enriched by that attitude?
Consider how religious art of the past was routinely great art; and modern-day religious art, even by True Believers, is uniformly drek. Fatally infected by modernity!
Another site on Medieval Medicine ties into the talk here of trying to understand the past:
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There are two primary fallacies that must be avoided when attempting to study a culture that is unfamiliar, and they are especially dangerous when we are examining a culture from the past. The first is to see the other culture as unsophisticated when set alongside our own…
The second fallacy to be aware of is positivistic thinking. As Bryon Grigsby describes it, this sort of thinking leads us “to see medieval medicine as a precursor or primitive form of twentieth-century medicine. In order to do this effectively, critics construct a narrative by which the discoveries of the future are foreseen in the documentation of the past.” While it is true that discoveries, in a genealogical sense, build upon one another (one thinks of Bernard of Chartres’ metaphor — made famous by Isaac Newton — about standing on the shoulders of giants), it does not follow that we should mine the past for those moments when medieval practitioners “got lucky,” so to speak, and did something “right.” What we need to understand, what we must understand, is that medieval medicine was a vibrant, complex, learned system that makes complete sense when viewed on its own terms. Given the facts that doctors had to go on, they did remarkably well in creating hypotheses to fit those facts and in constructing systems of theory to fit those hypotheses….
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http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030317/medicine.shtml
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R. Maheras says:
…it’s ironic you chose that painting, since Rembrandt made some key mistakes on it…
———————–
‘Nother Old Master screws up: http://tinyurl.com/4xrdmfz . Why, the Virgin Mary is huge!
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_j00PDhcWMlE/S-hnZ-EgC7I/AAAAAAAACcE/teVDJyTjYfM/s1600/frank_frazetta_thesilverwarrior.jpg
(Frazetta in an interview pointing out how people didn’t notice the deliberate “mistake”; his not including a tangle of harnesses in the painting)
…And another likely “deliberate mistake” of Frazetta’s:
http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/3/25094.jpg
Sent up thusly:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_aEwpTxipisk/S_DDYA3udJI/AAAAAAAABdw/CeSv7evL_ig/s1600/frazetta_brain_1a.jpg
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…And that’s the thing that limits my appreciation of Frazetta; the emotional range is narrow and…well, not very nuanced, shall we say. Which doesn’t mean it’s awful, but doesn’t make it Rembrandt, either.
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Indeed the emotional range is narrow and lacking in nuance. And that’s why to describe Frazetta or Norman Rockwell (or Howard Pyle, Dulac, Arthur Rackham, and other greats) as “illustrators” is not a mere relegating of them to second-class status, but pointing out that these artists were laboring in a field, creating art for mass consumption by a broad, not-necessarily-sophisticated audience, where it was necessary for their artwork to communicate clearly and with little ambiguity.
The great commercial artist/designer Milton Glaser praised “the power of the cliché.” Everywhere in art and universally in art criticism, a cliché is something to avoid. But, if you want to create art for mass consumption by a broad, not-necessarily-sophisticated audience, the cliché — by telling the viewer at a glance “this is the bad guy, this is the good guy, this is the imperiled heroine, this is the situation they’re in” — is your friend..
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Charles Reece says:
I’m getting a kick out of the debate: either Rembrandt made a mistake, or he intentionally painted a struggle involving a superhero against a bunch of evil mutant dwarves. But that’s supposed to put him above Frazetta thematically because it was based on the Bible instead of Howard. Hunh?
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Never mind “thematically”; details such as Samson’s big toe clenched in pain — an odd, humanizingly subtle detail that Frazetta would never think to add — or the psychological complexity of Delilah’s expression: horror, fascination, triumph commingled. Worlds above anything in Frazetta’s work.
“the fact remains that modern art critics and artists have an infinitely greater pool of knowledge, can draw from a vastly greater amount of influences, than those in the past.”
That’s just nonsense. You have a different range of knowledge and a different pool of influences. Books and entire categories of knowledge are lost and found. There’s hardly going to be any creative artist today with the knowledge of Renaissance Italian politics that Dante had, or the knowledge of early modern scientific and religious discourses that Donne had.
Art doesn’t progress. It’s not science. I can’t even believe I’m having this argument.
It might be worth visiting William Hazlitt’s essay “Why the Arts are Not Progressive?” from the early 19th centur: http://books.google.ca/books?id=Pqw_AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=hazlitt+round+table&hl=en&ei=9CxZTovNLufJ0AH6_53zDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“the fact remains that modern art critics and artists have an infinitely greater pool of knowledge, can draw from a vastly greater amount of influences, than those in the past.”
That’s just nonsense. You have a different range of knowledge and a different pool of influences. Books and entire categories of knowledge are lost and found. There’s hardly going to be any creative artist today with the knowledge of Renaissance Italian politics that Dante had, or the knowledge of early modern scientific and religious discourses that Donne had…
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Note how, to my argument that “modern art critics and artists [in general, as the wording makes clear] have an infinitely greater pool of knowledge, can draw from a vastly greater amount of influences,” we get a supposedly deflating response about how two specific great creators knew a lot about a very few, highly specific areas.
Yeah, and there’s hardly a modern around these days who has the knowledge of rocks that a caveman does.
Therefore, the idea that modern humans know far more stuff than cavemen is “just nonsense.”
(Even if these two notables had been as widely learned as possible, in their days the entire field of significant human knowledge could’ve been encompassed in one bookshelf…)
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Art doesn’t progress. It’s not science. I can’t even believe I’m having this argument.
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Puh-leaze. Cave paintings may be wondrous in their limited fashion, but to deny that the infinitude of multifaceted creativity that followed indicates “progress” is the same as to deny that the extraordinary complexity of, say, a peregrine falcon, constitutes an advance over an amoeba.
And no, I’m not saying that the “tampon in a teacup” is therefore automatically superior to the cave paintings of Altamira; that there is progress in the arts is a general rule, and — like progress in other fields — contains the possibilities that there may be periods of stagnation and even regression, or that it may entropically slow to a crawl and even eventually stop altogether.
(Thanks for that Hazlitt link, Jeer; will masticate and comment upon its assertions — some significant flaws in its premises instantly jab the eye — later…)
“Therefore, the idea that modern humans know far more stuff than cavemen is “just nonsense.””
It is nonsense. They don’t know more stuff. People today for the most part don’t know how to hunt and cook animals. They don’t know the details of prehistoric religion, or daily life.
And the idea that modern art is better than Egyptian art, as just one example, is nuts. Much Egyptian art is beautiful. Much Greek art is beautiful. On what grounds is modern art better than beautiful? Because we have indoor plumbing? Or what?
What I’m trying to say is — a human life is a human life. Everybody gets only one, including the knowledge associated with it. Everybody gets only the culture they’re born into. Art comes out of that, and in terms of art, a prehistoric life isn’t any richer than an ancient Egyptian’s life isn’t any richer than a 19th century Chines life isn’t any richer than yours. The fact that you can look up stuff on the internet is really irrelevant as far as determining whether you’ve got more artistic vision than Hokusai or Mozart goes.
I don’t really think Hazlitt is right that the best art is always the earliest either. But he’s certainly correct that art doesn’t progress.
Noah, It’s just a guess because I haven’t read the essay in question, but I think you are misreading the quote. “Pool of knowledge” is not the same thing as personal knowledge. Just as a matter of years passing like water filling a pool, the pool holds more water. That isn’t to say people know more today, and today’s typical person often has a bunch of trivial knowledge of dubious worth, compared to the knowledge of a primitive.
My personal taste in art is inclusive, but runs towards archaic, and primitive forms. Today’s artist does have a greater pool of knowledge to dip into than ancient rock painters, that in no way means modern man will make better art. It simply means today we are aware of Lascaux, ancient Sumer, early Flemish painting, Cubism, and the David Rockefeller collection of primitive art.
And this isn’t to say people make anything good out of all those other styles of art, it’s just the opposite.
I think I was quoting Mike re: “pool of knowledge.”
I’m not convinced that people do have a greater pool of knowledge. Lots of information gets lost — especially the information arguably most important to artists, which is the vast amount of unrecordable knowledge about what life is like at a particular time. We really know very little about life and beliefs in ancient egypt, for example, or in prehistoric times. The idea that there’s an ever-expanding pool of knowledge ignores how much we forget, and how much simply isn’t particularly recordable, even if you’ve got a video camera. To talk of a expanded pool of knowledge requires a vision of knowledge as instrumental and easily quantifiable — which is itself a historically limited discourse which excludes other kinds of understanding which have in the past contributed to great art.
A few things to consider:
1) The average person today (in the West at least) lives many decades longer than the average person in the distant past.
2) The average person today (in the West at least) devotes far less of their time to, well, just surviving. We have far more free time in which we can follow interests outside the immediate concerns of feeding, housing and clothing ourselves.
Both of those things presumably give us a greater opportunity to accumulate knowledge than was ever afforded to some hairy bloke painting mammoths with a stick.
3) Our sources of knowledge are no longer limited to personal experience and the spoken word (or, later, exorbitantly expensive, laboriously handmade, written texts that most people couldn’t read).
Our hypothetical caveman certainly knew things we don’t (including, I dare say, some things it would do us good to know) but he had no way of accessing knowledge from outside his personal environment and local community.
In other words, more time to learn plus an easily accessible record of the knowledge accumulated by others before us gives us both a larger pool of knowledge than our forebears and more ability to move from one area of that pool to another.
The fact that most of us don’t avail ourselves of all the knowledge that we could doesn’t mean the pool is the same size – it just means that we’re happy paddling in the shallow end.
Think of it like two people building objects out of Lego, one with just a few sizes of brick and one with thousands of different shapes and sizes. The former might produce something beautiful and the latter might produce a mess (or else might not use most of the shapes available) but the latter certainly has more potential, surely?
The problem is that knowing what it’s like to live in a world where people live shorter lives is an important kind of knowledge to have. Knowing what it’s like to not have tons of leisure time is also an important kind of knowledge.
Also, I really don’t think art is like legos (except when you use legos for art, of course.) And…there’s just a ton of fairly strong empirical evidence that art has not in fact progressed (Beethoven, Da Vinci, Jane Austen…the list goes on….) so explanations of why art has progressed seem fairly unconvincing on their face.
Stravinsky and Debussy were both controversial in their time. Surely it’s a form of progress that they’re now accepted. Progression doesn’t have to mean everything that comes after X is qualitatively better than X.
So Stravinsky and Debussy are accepted…and what artists have disappeared or been erased because they’re no longer fashionable? Are those artists worse? Or better? On what grounds? And is the fact that Debussy and Stravinsky have been domesticated actually a sign that we respect their work more? Or were they more relevant and appreciated when they were controversial — that is, when people cared enough about their art to fight about it?
Progress usually means that things are generally better at least. Even if you want to change the terms, though, art just isn’t teleological. The fact that we’ve changed our attitudes towards past artists certainly shows that the past is different from the present. It doesn’t show that the present is better.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Therefore, the idea that modern humans know far more stuff than cavemen is “just nonsense.””
It is nonsense. They don’t know more stuff. People today for the most part don’t know how to hunt and cook animals. They don’t know the details of prehistoric religion, or daily life…
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So, human heads can only contain a certain amount of knowledge, and whether they’re in the Stone Age or practicing neurosurgeons, their brains get filled up to capacity with the same quantity of info — like a jug that can only hold a gallon’s worth of fluid — whatever culture they’re in?
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I think I was quoting Mike re: “pool of knowledge.”
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Yup! Which doesn’t mean every fratboy dimwit actually dives into it, just that it’s available…
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I’m not convinced that people do have a greater pool of knowledge.
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Couldn’t easily find some chart depicting the increase of knowledge throughout human history (Scott McCloud, where are you now that we need you?); there’s much confusion of “information,” which can be utterly trivial or so focused as to be little applicable elsewhere (Joe Schmo’s phone # or Internet shopping habits, for instance), with the far richer “knowledge”…
Though this cool video — https://plus.google.com/103889979518005423477/posts/HJi6yg3Khk8#103889979518005423477/posts/HJi6yg3Khk8 — about “the staggering growth of information technology” mentions how “It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century,” and so forth…
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Lots of information gets lost — especially the information arguably most important to artists, which is the vast amount of unrecordable knowledge about what life is like at a particular time. We really know very little about life and beliefs in ancient egypt, for example, or in prehistoric times. The idea that there’s an ever-expanding pool of knowledge ignores how much we forget, and how much simply isn’t particularly recordable, even if you’ve got a video camera.
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Actually, we know a great deal about life in ancient Egypt; my modest Egyptological library (made up of these things called books, which came along before video cameras) tells me so…
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And the idea that modern art is better than Egyptian art, as just one example, is nuts. Much Egyptian art is beautiful. Much Greek art is beautiful. On what grounds is modern art better than beautiful? Because we have indoor plumbing? Or what?
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I said there was progress in art, which does not necessarily make all of modern art more “beautiful” (I love ancient Egyptian art) or “better” than that of ancient times. Again, “progress” is not necessarily better; but an increase in the pool of available knowledge permits one to “stand of the shoulders of giants,” learn from them; create unique new effects and permutations; such as…
http://home.manhattan.edu/arts/gallery/galleries/Oil_Paintings/PAINTING-20c/PAINTING-20c-BALTHUS-TheStreet-1933.JPG
More Balthus: http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/article_images_new/WHLE_5.jpg
Max Ernst: http://www.ligotti.net/picture.php?albumid=55&pictureid=944 , http://img.artknowledgenews.com/files2009b/Max_Ernst_La_horde_Die_Horde.jpg
Grosz: http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinlei/2028695799/
(Re Hazlitt’s assertion that “the arts hold immediate communication with nature, and are only derived from that source,” the works above — not to mention those even more detached from “nature,” such as Mondrian, Kline, Pollock — show that great originality and power can be obtained by deviating from nature…)
There’s no progress between http://arthistoryresources.net/willendorf/images/willendorfa.jpg and http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/farberas/arth/Images/110images/sl13_images/bernini_apollo_and_daphne2.jpg ?
Sure, the earlier work has a blunt, primal power; but the Bernini is far more multileveled, sophisticated, capturing the human form, movement, emotion, transformation…
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…in terms of art, a prehistoric life isn’t any richer than an ancient Egyptian’s life isn’t any richer than a 19th century Chines life isn’t any richer than yours…
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Mind-boggling. So, the kind of culture one lives in has no effect one way or the other on inspiring art? A cosmopolite New Yorker’s kid is no better off “in terms of art” than some sheepherder’s sprout slaving away dawn-to-dusk in some arid, isolated village under the Taliban?
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The fact that you can look up stuff on the internet is really irrelevant as far as determining whether you’ve got more artistic vision than Hokusai or Mozart goes…
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Even for those living in the same basic “culture” — say, America’s — whether you grow up in a household that appreciates books and art and one that thinks anything outside of the Bible and sports is “fag stuff” is crucial in stimulating or retarding — oops, “challenging” — creativity.
Some thoughts by Robert Anton Wilson on “Human Intelligence Increase: The Last 4,000 Years and The Next 40 Years”; amid dubious speculation, there are interesting addenda such as…
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…In 1918, a military engineer, Major C.H. Douglas, who evidently had not read Brooks and Henry Adams but sounds as if he had, carried their kind of thinking a step further. The major factor in social change, Douglas said, was the increment of association which creates a cultural heritage.
The increment of association simply means that when you’ve got more people organized together, you can accomplish more work; something Adam Smith had already noticed in 1776. But Douglas saw this more dynamically than Smith had. The increment of association increases from generation to generation, he noted, because of cultural heritage – the passing on of knowledge, gimmicks, devices, tools, ideas, etc.
Obviously, a tribal society could not build the Parthenon, even if an architect of genius were born among them. The increment of association and the cultural heritage were not there. Similarly, a Renaissance city-state, even with Leonardo da Vinci in charge, could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon…
…in 1921, Count Alfred Korzybski, another engineer, defined…time-binding. Time-binding is the mechanism of the cultural heritage, Korzybski says, and it is based on our capacity to generate more and more inclusive kinds of symbolism. As we advanced, he says, we moved from grunts and howls, like other primates, to articulate human speech, to written language, to math and graphs and calendars, to scientific laws, and now to computer simulation sand electronic world-wide information systems. At each step, we learn more about how to model the universe, and how to predict what will work and what will fail.
…[Buckminster] Fuller points out that knowledge can only increase (except for tragedies like brain damage in an individual or totalitarianism in a society.) As our communication skills and information processing improve, human knowledge as a whole accelerates synergistically. Therefore, both hard and soft technologies accelerate – ideas and tools both change faster, faster, faster…
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http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/HII.htm
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…is the fact that Debussy and Stravinsky have been domesticated…
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They’ve not been “domesticated” in any fashion; unless their compositions were to be altered, to make a pleasantly Muzak-type effect.
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…actually a sign that we respect their work more? Or were they more relevant and appreciated when they were controversial — that is, when people cared enough about their art to fight about it?
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So their work was more “appreciated” when most music critics and the masses despised and rejected it? With only a few speaking up for its worth?
No more than feminism is more “appreciated” in an Islamist fundamentalist country.
(The “relevant” bit is another thing entirely, which hardly goes along with appreciation.)
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Progress usually means that things are generally better at least…
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Unless you pay attention to the other parts of the definition of “progress” — as I noted, earlier — that show it’s more complicated than that.
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The fact that we’ve changed our attitudes towards past artists certainly shows that the past is different from the present. It doesn’t show that the present is better.
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(???) Do I come across like a “the present is better than the past, in every possible way” Pangloss?
To jab away some more:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The fact that you can look up stuff on the internet is really irrelevant as far as determining whether you’ve got more artistic vision than Hokusai or Mozart goes…
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So you’re saying that for artistic vision, being able to see and learn from the work of other artists is “irrelevant”?
Why is it, then, that before you could “look up stuff on the internet” that artists — including many of the Old Masters — considered it a vital part of their artistic education, which often led to significant creative development and breakthroughs, to travel to other countries (say, Italy or France) or go to museums to study what greats had done, copy their work?
Culture isn’t irrelevant; seeing and learning from other artists isn’t irrelevant. But it doesn’t improve by accretion over time either. In ancient Egypt there were lots of artists whose work has been lost. Egyptians at the time had accesWe s to those artists; we don’t. So how can you be sure that we’re superior?
Also…there are lots and lots of books on ancient Egypt. Many are devoted to scholars speculating and arguing with each other about facets of Egyptian culture that would have been common knowledge at the time. In many cases we don’t have any way of sifting true statements about ancient Egypt from false ones.
Of course, false statements can be just as inspirational for art as true ones…which is one of many reasons that art doesn’t really progress.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Culture isn’t irrelevant; seeing and learning from other artists isn’t irrelevant. But it doesn’t improve by accretion over time either.
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Cultures don’t improve by taking in and learning from other cultures? Over a period of time? ‘Way to toss all of human history in the dumpster!
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In ancient Egypt there were lots of artists whose work has been lost. Egyptians at the time had access to those artists; we don’t. So how can you be sure that we’re superior?
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Because the more advanced a culture is, the greater the range of creativity that exists. When you look at so-called “primitive” art, or that of ancient cultures, what exists is variations on a theme, the same approach religiously followed. A greater talent may be better than the competition within those existing conventions, but only by remaining within the parameters established by the less-advanced culture.
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Also…there are lots and lots of books on ancient Egypt. Many are devoted to scholars speculating and arguing with each other about facets of Egyptian culture that would have been common knowledge at the time. In many cases we don’t have any way of sifting true statements about ancient Egypt from false ones.
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Because there are some aspects of ancient Egyptian life that we’re not certain of, therefore that means, as you said earlier, “We really know very little about life and beliefs in ancient egypt”? (Emphasis added)
Although can’t help but be reminded of David Macaulay’s satirical “Motel of the Mysteries, written in 1979 following the 1976–1979 exhibition of the Tutankhamun relics in the USA, [and] concerns the discovery by future archaeologists of an American motel and the archaeologists’ ingenious interpretation of the motel and its contents as a funerary and temple complex…” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Macaulay )
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http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries/Image9.html
Although it seemed hardly possible, the contents of the Inner Chamber were even more dazzling than those already discovered….a second body was present, and this one appeared to have been buried with more care and ritual than the first. Wearing the Ceremonial Head Dress (No. 8), it had been placed in a highly polished white sarcophagus (No. 9), which had in turn been sealed behind an exquisite and elaborately hung translucent curtain (No. 10).
The proportions of the sarcophagus had been precisely determined to prevent the deceased from ever sliding down into a fully reclined position. The similar postures of the two bodies led Carson to the conclusion that the proper burial position had the chin resting as much as possible on the chest. Although the outer surface of the sarcophagus was plain, there were two sets of ceremonial markings on the inside. The first consisted of ten parallel rows of slightly raised discs along the floor of the sarcophagus over which the body had been placed. The second was an almost entirely faded line that ran all the way around the walls parallel to and about ten inches above the floor. Two water trumpets, one about five feet above the other, projected from the end wall facing the deceased. Some of the music required during the final ceremony was produced by forcing water from the sacred spring through the trumpets and out through a small hole in the floor of the sarcophagus. Other music came from the music box (No. 6) situated above the Sacred Urn (No. 2). Articles No. 1 and No. 4 were used in preparing the body for its final journey and No. 5 was the Sacred Parchment, pieces of which were periodically placed in the urn during the ceremony…
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http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries.html
“Cultures don’t improve by taking in and learning from other cultures? Over a period of time? ‘Way to toss all of human history in the dumpster!”
No, they really don’t. Sometimes things get better, sometimes they get worse. Nazi Germany was not an improvement on anything, even though it certainly took in and learned from a lot of different cultures. American imperial hegemony is not an improvement on anything in particular.
Progress in culture or art is a myth. It’s our modern superstition, no more true than animistic prehistoric religions, though (arguably) more damaging in the long run.
Noah, Reich was really influenced by Bach (and Debussy). We still have Bach and now we have Reich. Orchestras can be heard playing both. That sounds like something of a progress to me. I don’t think one needs to speculate on what was lost in ancient Atlantis to see more potential opportunities in music listening available now.
But I think we’re all probably using different notions of progress here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#Does_history_have_a_teleological_sense.3F
And it might be (has been) argued that Nazi Germany was a reaction against modernity more than a realization of it. Would you rather live at any time in Germany than today? I can see the argument about art, but to insist that nothing’s really progressed from the middle ages seems a bit silly.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Cultures don’t improve by taking in and learning from other cultures? Over a period of time? ‘Way to toss all of human history in the dumpster!”
No, they really don’t. Sometimes things get better, sometimes they get worse. Nazi Germany was not an improvement on anything, even though it certainly took in and learned from a lot of different cultures. American imperial hegemony is not an improvement on anything in particular.
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Ooh, Nazi Germany did it and got worse! In what way — aside from picking from Henry Ford’s Jew-hating propaganda to boost anti-Semitism, and Hitler’s admiration and emulation of Mussolini — can the evils of Nazi Germany be blamed on “learning from other cultures”?
To pick a few examples:
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Islamic contributions to Medieval Europe were numerous, affecting such varied areas as art, architecture, medicine, agriculture, music, language, education, law, and technology. From the 11th to 13th centuries, Europe absorbed knowledge from the Islamic civilization. Of particular importance was the rediscovery of the ancient classic texts, most notably the work of the Greek natural philosopher Aristotle, through retranslations from Arabic…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_contributions_to_Medieval_Europe
In a “turnabout is fair play” spirit, we have modern-day pro-democracy movements in Islamic countries pushing for Western-style reform and values such as democracy, women’s rights, a free press, the separation of religion and state…
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Education in ancient Rome influenced the development of educational systems throughout Western civilization. In the span of a few centuries, Rome went from an informal system of education in which knowledge was passed from parents to children, to a specialized, tiered system of schools inspired by Greek educational practices. Rome’s rise to the status of world power ensured the perpetuation of its methodology and curriculum throughout the provinces it ruled…
Following various military conquests in the Greek East, Romans adapted a number of Greek educational precepts to their own fledgling system.[1] Roman students were taught (especially at the elementary level) in similar fashion to Greek students, sometimes by Greek slaves who had a penchant for education.[3] But differences between the Greek and Roman systems emerge at the highest tiers of education. Roman students that wished to pursue the highest levels of education went to Greece to study philosophy, as the Roman system developed to teach speech, law and gravitas…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ancient_Rome
I think living in some time when we’re not in the middle of a massive global recession might be nice, sure.
Nazi Germany was absolutely a reaction to modernity, as well as being part of modernity itself. Same with Soviet Russia. And the Khmer Rouge. All of those were relatively recent phenomena. Would I rather live in ancient Greece than in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge? Yes. Yes I would.
At least there’s an argument to be made that technological advancements in general improve things for everyone in general. With art the progress discussion just seems kind of ridiculous to me. Sure, we have Steve Reich and Bach. We don’t have a lot of Bach’s contemporaries, though, or predecessors. We don’t really even know what Perotin sounded like in his own day, I don’t think. We have only a vague idea of how Egyptian music sounded, or even of how instruments back then worked for the most part. Less for prehistoric times. We don’t even have tools to compare, much less decide which is better.
And, you know, if Bach is better than Steve Reich (which is surely arguable) and we don’t have anyone who is making music like Bach is making music, on what grounds is modernity superior. Because you can collect CDs of all these people who make better music than anyone now? Why isn’t that decadent and sad rather than a sign of progress?
I’m not saying it is decadent and sad; I like Steve Reich. The point is, you’re arguing for quantitative accretion as a measure of artistic progress. That’s certainly a very late capitalist way of thinking, but I don’t see how it really makes the case that late capitalism is superior in aesthetics.
Nazi germany certainly learned from earlier cultures. It learned from Nietzsche; it learned from paganism; it learned from industrialized countries. All cultures are syncretic; Nazi Germany was no exception.
I don’t see the argument of progress as being all or nothing (you and Mike can work that one out). Just because there are great tyrannies in the 20th century doesn’t preclude any progress from having occurred. To pick a moment when you’re most likely to be tortured, killed or oppressed and say you’d rather live some time when you weren’t is kind of fatuous. It also works both ways: living in present day Cambodia is certainly preferable to the killing fields. I don’t know what ancient Cambodia was like, but I know that Americans are better off in present day America than the 1800s unless one has the views that blacks should be slaves, that women shouldn’t vote, etc.. So, granted, this is all relative to what one wants out of life, but I’d argue that some wants are better than others and would judge our progress from the past accordingly. And, perhaps, it might be that oppressed people of the past didn’t realize what they were missing and were happier than many people with more choices are today. I don’t buy that, but I guess one could make an argument of incommensurability here (maybe you’d really like the Nazis had you lived under them; maybe you’d like the Khmer Rouge, too). I think any time a culture reaches a point that it’s, say, anti-slavery, that’s progress over pro-slavery. That doesn’t mean we can’t regress though.
My point about Reich and Bach (why is everything late capitalism?) was that more people have an opportunity to listen them now. Having gone to actual concerts, I know that it’s ideal for listening to classical music, but I’m not with Adorno when he argues that recorded technology is only a source of commodification. It has served some good, too.
Late capitalism is where we’re at. It’s kind of tedious, but that’s the way it goes.
I’m skeptical of the claim that things are getting better in general. However, there’s a much better argument to be made that standards of living in general are improving than that art is. Your argument for art improving appears to be quantitative; there’s more stuff. But art isn’t a quantitative endeavor. It’s not making widgets. It’s art. It’s qualitative. Which is, again, why talking about it in terms of progress seems fairly nonsensical.
But in a 100 years, when it’s still around, what we call it? Post-late. Anyway, you could’ve been really mean and accused me of an early capitalist view.
Well, if there’s an apocalypse it’ll just be dead capitalism.
“The problem is that knowing what it’s like to live in a world where people live shorter lives is an important kind of knowledge to have. Knowing what it’s like to not have tons of leisure time is also an important kind of knowledge.”
Maybe. But “important” does not mean “equal in scope to”. If we have a greater number of important knowledges than they did, our overall knowledge has progressed from theirs regardless of what might have been lost, no?
“I really don’t think art is like legos”
I wasn’t saying it was – I was attempting to suggest that the number of options (tools, techniques, markets etc.) is greater now than in the past, in the same way that having more types of bricks gives you more options than fewer.
[Incidentally, why are Americans the only people in the world who pluralise Lego with an “s” on the end? “Legos” sounds as wrong as “sheeps”, dammit.]
“And…there’s just a ton of fairly strong empirical evidence that art has not in fact progressed”
I was primarily suggesting that knowledge had progressed rather than art specifically. That said, regardless of its quality, we certainly do have more types and styles of art to choose from than in previous ages, as well as far, far more sources and inspirations to borrow from and a more (which is certainly not to say entirely) holistic knowledge of art through history and from around the world than at any other time in the past.
“Would I rather live in ancient Greece than in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge? Yes. Yes I would.”
Me too. But it’s worth remembering that, statistically, you’d have been more likely to be a slave labourer than a philosopher in ancient Greece. The distant past is not as rosy as you sometimes seem anxious to paint it.
Also, you seem to be saying that if progress is not a smooth progression upwards, worldwide, it isn’t happening at all but two steps forward, one step back is still progress.
I get the impression that you think that the awful crimes against humanity of the Twentieth Century were unprecedented; the inevitable result of Twentieth Century thinking. But proportionate to the populations involved, were the Thirty Years War, the Taiping Rebellion or the War of the Triple Alliance any less destructive? The Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Latin America any more humane? Hell, wasn’t Genghis Khan responsible for the deaths of as many innocents as Hitler and Stalin combined (all without the aid of modern technology or modern population density)?
Progress doesn’t mean perfect. It doesn’t mean better in every way, all the time, in every place. It means most things are somewhat better most of the time.
I’ve been watching the world of art for about 45 years now, and it seems to me that art continuity is episodic and fragmented — not a smooth upward curve across the board.
For example, looking at it from a popular culture angle, here are a few of my observations:
— Newspaper strip cartooning has regressed, skill-wise, during the past 10-15 years. In general, art is poorer, writing is weaker, and lettering is worse — despite the fact that there is electronic lettering available now.
— In the area of comic books, quality is all over the place, mainly because there is no longer any “minimum standard” of artistic skill required to be professionally published. In the 1980s, many complained that a lot of the art in independent black and white comics published during that era were equivalent, or worse, than fanzine art of the 1960s and 1970s. Experts like Overstreet even went so far as declaring that those B&W comic books could not even be classified as comic books. Well guess what? Quality-wise, a lot of art in today’s mainstream — even in award-winning comics — is at that 1980s level, or worse.
— By the 1970s, artistic clarity in most forms of comics had been refined to the point that it was a fundamental hiring point for any artist. Not any more. You can go to a comics rack on any given Wednesday and pull out comics where the story flow is awkward or impossible to follow. One’s eye is drawn all over the page, so instead of the reading process being smooth and transparent, it’s jerky and unintuitive. An alarming number of artists today have simply forgotten (or never learned) how to guide the reader’s eye through a story. This is one of the big reasons I find so many comics today so unsatisfying to read.
There are other “lost” artistic skills I could mention, but these are just a few.
Lots of people do argue that the twentieth century atrocities were unprecedented…largely I think because technology allowed people to be killed quicker and faster, not because people were innately worse or anything like that.
And yes, ancient Greece had serious problems.
Be that as it may…you’re still arguing quantity. We have access to more and more different kinds of art. And again I say…so what? Art isn’t a numbers game where you add up the number of kinds of art and then the person with the most art at the end wins. Even if it were…the argument, I thought, was about whether art has progressed; i.e., has art gotten better in general? And I look at Bach, and I look at Jane Austen, and I look at Hokusai, and I look at ancient Egypt or ancient China and I say, what planet are you people living on? Do you really believe most art is better most of the time now than before? What does that even mean?
Sorry…I’m still finding it hard to believe we’re even having this conversation. Arguments about whether there’s progress in civilization are totally reasonable, and I expect people to say I’m nuts when I even mildly question progress in technology. But progress in art? I guess it just goes to show how tenacious this particular modern myth is but still, I find it kind of flabbergasting.
“Be that as it may…you’re still arguing quantity. We have access to more and more different kinds of art. And again I say…so what?”
All I’m saying is that access to more resources and influences is progress in and of itself. I’ve not made any argument beyond that.
“Do you really believe most art is better most of the time now than before?”
No. I think Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) is pretty much a constant. What I would say, though, is that there’s a greater variety of good art (as well, of course, as a greater variety of bad art) than there was when your choices boiled down to scratch-on-rock-with-other-rock or paint-on-rock-with-stick.
And I think it’s an improvement that you and I can look at art from across thousands of years and the entire globe rather than just what one tribe has achieved in one valley.
That’s the entirety of my case and I don’t think it’s all that contentious. Anything else you have to take up with Mike.
Yeah; I think you’re making an argument about improvements in consumer access, not an argument about improvements in art. Is that fair?
“What I would say, though, is that there’s a greater variety of good art (as well, of course, as a greater variety of bad art) than there was when your choices boiled down to scratch-on-rock-with-other-rock or paint-on-rock-with-stick.”
But there was a huge variety of art in the ancient world. Arguably a *greater* variety of art, because localized art traditions weren’t swamped by international consumer culture. I think you could argue that in many ways the past had a greater variety of art traditions for that reason.
Postmodernism/deconstruction — Bah, humbug!
It’s as if Bizarro Superman came to Earth and started a fad.
“Yeah; I think you’re making an argument about improvements in consumer access, not an argument about improvements in art. Is that fair?”
Consumer AND artist access. But, yeah, basically.
“But there was a huge variety of art in the ancient world. Arguably a *greater* variety of art, because localized art traditions weren’t swamped by international consumer culture. I think you could argue that in many ways the past had a greater variety of art traditions for that reason.”
I can buy that. But nobody got see more than a tiny fraction of it. The Aztecs had no way of accessing classical Greek sculpture. The Babylonians knew nothing of early Japanese art. Nobody in Carthage was ever going to get to see Native American carvings from the Great Lakes.
So there might have been more unique traditions but each person living in those diverse traditions had access to so much less.
Did they have access to less? How rich were their traditions? How do you measure that? How do you know that their layered traditions were less rich than the postmodern smourgasbord, in which differences are all turned into a single infinitely accessible soup? And what evidence do we have that that’s better for art either as a whole or within individual traditions?
If plurality destroys the nature of the things it commodifies, is that really plurality? Or is it just a different kind of hegemony?
I think Jameson is interesting…but I do think he’s got a weird and incorrect sense of aesthetic postmodernism. Mostly, though, he’s talking about the condition of postmodernity (in late capitalism)— and equates all/many cultural products of that era as a product of history…but not really about history. To equate Star Wars and Doctorow’s novels (as an example) seems wrongheaded to me.
when the characters in Barefoot Gen “beat each other up,” I think it’s supposed to be seen as affectionate horseplay, not violence.
Sturgeon’s Law is 90% crap.
“Did they have access to less?”
Well, yes.
“How rich were their traditions? How do you measure that?”
I can’t answer those questions but I have some of my own:
What proportion of their populations was the art intended for and accessible to? How much of it served their priesthoods or rulers? How free were their artists to experiment or challenge with their art? Was all of their art commercial and / or religious or did they have the time, resources and freedom to create art for enjoyment’s sake alone? How many media were available to work in? What resources and references and influences and techniques?
How many of the residents of Venice or Florence ever got to peak at the privately commissioned masterpieces of the renaissance? How many of Rome’s beggars ever got to admire the artworks piled high by successive popes in the Vatican?
The art pieces and grave goods inside Egyptian pyramids were certainly rich but who got to enjoy their richness? What value do you place on the richness of art that is available only to those who are (a) royalty and (b) dead?
“How do you know that their layered traditions were less rich than the postmodern smourgasbord, in which differences are all turned into a single infinitely accessible soup?”
I didn’t actually say their traditions were less rich – I said they were fewer. I also don’t think it’s the case that the “infinitely accessible soup” means viewing everything from any time and any place completely out of context. If I go and look at the Sutton Hoo exhibit at the British Museum, I’m clearly not viewing it the same way I view a Batman comic on the bus.
[Not, I want to make it clear, that I actually read Batman comics on the bus…]
“And what evidence do we have that that’s better for art either as a whole or within individual traditions?”
Surely interactions with other traditions spur creativity and ward off stagnation? It’s a generalisation, I know, but it seems like a common sense kind of a generalisation.
“If plurality destroys the nature of the things it commodifies, is that really plurality? Or is it just a different kind of hegemony?”
Your question presumes that the individual has no control over what art they consume. That’s certainly true to an extent – it’s hard to avoid all art, particularly commercial art – but to some degree you choose what to embrace and what to ignore. Is it really hegemony if you can easily opt to step out from under it? I’m reminded of the superhero fans who complain (still) about manga, as though its very availability somehow obliged them to read it.
You also presume that having a lot of stuff available means making everything the same. But, you know, I live in a city with restaurants selling food from Britain and India and Mexico and Italy and Sri Lanka and Thailand and Spain and China and France and the Lebanon and Brazil and Jamaica and Morocco and Japan and Greece (and probably some others I’m forgetting right now). None of those restaurants sells food from all of those countries simultaneously in a giant melting pot. Indeed, many of them trade on their “authenticity”. Personally, I’d get really bored if I could only eat food from any one of those traditions every night from this day forward. I don’t think that would enrich my life at all.
On that note, would you, personally, be willing to trade your current access to art for a situation in which, for the rest of your life, you could only ever see art produced within 50 miles of your house (by artists working under the same restriction)? Do you think you would be culturally poorer if you had only ever seen art produced within 50 miles of your house since birth? How would you measure the richness of your community’s art if you had nothing to compare and contrast it to?
Would you like all the museums and galleries and libraries where you live – and your internet service provider, radio and TV stations and publishers too – to either close down or allow only local art? I suspect not.
If you wouldn’t want that for yourself, why would you wish it on anybody else?
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“Sturgeon’s Law is 90% crap”
Thanks for the measured and detailed analysis, Holly, I’ll be ever so sure to take that on board.
Those are fun questions…but they don’t really address the issue of whether the art is better or worse.
In terms of food…most ethnic restaurants change their food; less spicy, less range of “unusual” foods, etc. So you have a greater range…but it’s also a blander range, at least arguably.
In terms of wealth and access…obviously there have been massive wealth discrepancies in the past. I think it’s arguable that gothic cathedrals, for example, were kind of public art — lots of people saw them, certainly. But anyway, who sees what is only rally tangentially related to whether the product is good or beautiful or not. Lots and lots of people have access to Seinfeld and Friends, but those shows are still utter crap.
You seem to be arguing mostly against a point I’m not making. Whether or not modernity is an improvement is one discussion, which I have mixed feelings about. But whether or not art has improved is really a very different question. I’m not even sure you disagree with me about it? I kind of can’t tell for sure.
“Surely interactions with other traditions spur creativity and ward off stagnation? It’s a generalisation, I know, but it seems like a common sense kind of a generalisation.”
I think it depends on the tradition. Modern art (like, since the Renaissance) is really focused on innovation and marketing (the next big thing) in a way that makes interaction with other traditions quite important. But you can have traditions which are more about incremental change, or about keeping faith with the past.
Also…there’s a question in modernity as to whether you *can* have other traditions; everything’s already so interconnected that there’s kind of no outside.
“Do you think you would be culturally poorer if you had only ever seen art produced within 50 miles of your house since birth?”
That’s a really good question. Surely in part it would depend on the culture and the place within it. You’d have a very different understanding of the art you’d seen, certainly. I think it’s just really hard for someone living now to put yourself in that place. It’s such a different worldview — I mean, I can’t wish to be someone other than me in that way, I think, but it’s also really difficult for me to say what the person I would be then would prefer or like.
This is the point I’m trying to make about access to less. Since art is qualitative, “access to less” is fairly meaningless. Someone could have access to less stuff…but be born into a tradition that’s more meaningful to them in various ways and for various reasons. And having access to less is it’s own experience which someone who has access to more can’t reproduce. I mean, there’s a fair bit of philosophy from various traditions that suggests that a simpler life is a better life for all sorts of reasons. Lots of monks, eastern and western, have made fairly spectacular art that is arguably related to their spirituality, which has some link to their lifestyle. You can argue till you’re blue in the face that I have access to a richer culture than those people, but until I start making zen ink drawings or illustrated manuscripts on a regular basis, I’m skeptical that the fact that I just saw Columbiana and they never could means that I’m in a richer art tradition.
“Those are fun questions…but they don’t really address the issue of whether the art is better or worse.”
That’s true. But the original question I was responding to wasn’t whether art had improved but whether it had progressed and I don’t think those are quite the same thing. I think the opening up of outside traditions is an evolution, a progression. I think it gives more options to both artist and consumer. I agree it doesn’t necessarily make for qualitatively better art on a piece-by-piece basis; it adds breadth, not depth.
“So you have a greater range…but it’s also a blander range, at least arguably.”
Sure – but if I had access to the very best pizza in the world, I think I would rather stick with bland variety than have to eat pizza every single night from here on.
“You seem to be arguing mostly against a point I’m not making.”
That’s just what I was going to say! I think we kind of went off on mutually exclusive tangents…
I don’t honestly feel qualified to say whether art is / can be “better”. But as I said above, I think whether art has “progressed” is a slightly different question and that’s what I was responding to.
“That’s a really good question. Surely in part it would depend on the culture and the place within it. You’d have a very different understanding of the art you’d seen, certainly. I think it’s just really hard for someone living now to put yourself in that place. It’s such a different worldview — I mean, I can’t wish to be someone other than me in that way, I think, but it’s also really difficult for me to say what the person I would be then would prefer or like.”
That seems reasonable. Historically though, doesn’t the very spread and intermingling of traditions suggest that most people (particularly artists) were actually really happy to encounter new aesthetics? Obviously there were places that rejected outside influences for a long time (Japan for example) but weren’t those rejections usually motivated by religion or politics, by protecting the establishment?
“Lots of monks, eastern and western, have made fairly spectacular art that is arguably related to their spirituality, which has some link to their lifestyle.”
Well, yeah – it’s much easier to make and enjoy art in, say, 12th Century Europe if everybody else is paying for you to do so through Church tithes.
One of the ways I do definitely think art is better now than then is that these days, in most places, art is not the preserve of the church, the state and the nobility. Obviously individual artefacts created for those groups could be beautiful in their own right but do you not think the, for want of a better word, democratisation of art is a good thing, is progress in and of itself?
We may never see the like of Fabergé’s eggs again but, you know, 99.999999% of the population of Imperial Russia never had the opportunity to see them when they were still being made so…I’m not sure how big a loss that really is?
I think the idea that non-rich people didn’t have art before now is kind of fallacious. There have been folk arts for a really long time. Pop culture kind of gutted them. It’s not exactly clear that that’s an improvement.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…on what grounds is modernity superior. Because you can collect CDs of all these people who make better music than anyone now? Why isn’t that decadent and sad rather than a sign of progress?
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What, progress can’t also lead to decadent and sad results? I recall one cartoon that in its first panel, showed a caveman elder telling stories to a rapt audience around a campfire.
In the next, a batch of zoned-out folks sprawled on a sofa were staring, glazed-eyed, at some commercial in the idiot box…
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…you’re arguing for quantitative accretion as a measure of artistic progress.
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Sure, it’s a measure (not the only one)…
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That’s certainly a very late capitalist way of thinking, but I don’t see how it really makes the case that late capitalism is superior in aesthetics.
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Oooh, it’s “late capitalist,” therefore it’s utterly vile and corrupt! So the idea that the arts can develop through learning and taking in ideas from other cultures is an exclusively “late capitalist” concept?
And, if someone were to quote some ancient Greek’s beliefs on aesthetics, would that then be dismissed as “That’s certainly a very late slave-owning society way of thinking, but I don’t see how it really makes the case that slave-owning is superior in aesthetics”?
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I’m skeptical of the claim that things are getting better in general. However, there’s a much better argument to be made that standards of living in general are improving than that art is.
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Although, progress being a two-edged sword, the short-term improvement in “standards of living” (which most of the world sees as a resource-devouring American standard of living) will end up creating a massive collapse in the ecosystem; thus making things MUCH worse in the long run.
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Your argument for art improving appears to be quantitative; there’s more stuff…
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No; rather, there’s a greater variety of stuff…
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It’s art. It’s qualitative. Which is, again, why talking about it in terms of progress seems fairly nonsensical.
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Is it “nonsensical” to call the change from painters focusing entirely on scenes from the Bible to the incredible variety of approaches and subjects — including paint itself — that burgeoned forth afterward “progress”?
Even if it ends up sputtering away and virtually fizzling out, as Robert Hughes concluded in his history of modern art, “The Shock of the New.” With the “afraid to be seen as out-of-it” art world ending up in the situation depicted in Russ’ cartoon: http://home.comcast.net/~russ.maheras/post-modern-lores3.jpg .
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…But there was a huge variety of art in the ancient world. Arguably a *greater* variety of art, because localized art traditions weren’t swamped by international consumer culture. I think you could argue that in many ways the past had a greater variety of art traditions for that reason.
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So, a creator being able to, as Ian put it, “look at art from across thousands of years and the entire globe rather than just what one tribe has achieved,” constitutes being “swamped by international consumer culture”? And by “late capitalist, sexist, colonialist White Males” too, no doubt…
If you look at most gatherings of artists these day, you see about as much variety of approaches in these relatively tiny groups as existed throughout the entire world.
Am reminded of the Kuna indians in the islands of San Blas off Panama. Their molas are decorative panels which are affixed to their clothing with stylized designs. Though as a group the styles have a “family resemblance,” each island favors a different subject; some birds, others insects, fish, flowers, or abstract shapes… ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mola_%28art_form%29 )
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How rich were their traditions? How do you measure that? How do you know that their layered traditions were less rich than the postmodern smourgasbord, in which differences are all turned into a single infinitely accessible soup? And what evidence do we have that that’s better for art either as a whole or within individual traditions?
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Now that’s a much better argument; interestingly echoing that made in Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” that, in traditional, more clearly hierarchal societies (like Feudalism, or India’s caste system) you were more confined in a group, not able to move out of it, but had great freedom within that group; a place existing for you within it.
And some artists would likely find that being free of the pressure to “make it new!” (as Ezra Pound urged), with ready-made traditions and subjects to serve as ready-made frameworks and focus for their creativity, would be more helpful than total freedom.
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Those are fun questions [of Ian’s]…but they don’t really address the issue of whether the art is better or worse.
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Better in some ways (greater, more stimulating variety of creativity available), less so in others (tossing out of standards leading to creative dead-ends or crap [sometimes literally, like the artist who sold tins of his own feces]; emphasis on fashion and trends rather than substance)…
Is it better to have access to only art by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo?
Or to have available instead the work done in Cubism, and Surrealism, and German Expressionism, and abstraction?
The level of quality would be more concentrated and uniformly finer in the former, more limited case; but the latter group would give a wider range of creativity, methods of expression.
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Since art is qualitative, “access to less” is fairly meaningless. Someone could have access to less stuff…but be born into a tradition that’s more meaningful to them in various ways and for various reasons…
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And if they’re born into one which is less meaningful to them, say a young free-thinker growing up amid Bible-thumpers who consider ornamentation the Devil’s work? Would you dismiss as “fairly meaningless” that this could-be-an-artist has “access to less”?
In my own case, living amid mainstream culture, art didn’t have much importance in my life, its world an uninspiring blur, until I discovered Surrealism (in a tossed-aside magazine in High School with an article titled “Is Dali Disgusting?”), and through that “gateway drug” went on to appreciate a vast array of creative approaches in the visual arts…
“What, progress can’t also lead to decadent and sad results?”
No, it’s not supposed to. Progress means that things are getting better. If they’re getting worse, it’s not progress. By definition.
And I didn’t say late capitalism was always horrible. I don’t think it is. But demonstrating that we’re in late capitalism doesn’t show that art is improving. Was my only point.
“Is it better to have access to only art by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo?”
Better for what purpose? If you’re arguing that it’s more enjoyable for consumers to have a greater range available to them, that’s one thing. If you’re arguing that it’s better because we’ll make better art…well, I see no evidence of that. Insisting that theoretically it should allow for better art seems like a silly tack since we have many, many examples of art we could argue about empirically.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
August 30, 2011 at 6:02 am
“What, progress can’t also lead to decadent and sad results?”
No, it’s not supposed to. Progress means that things are getting better. If they’re getting worse, it’s not progress. By definition.
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This is like trying to teach Mr. A that gray exists. Didja miss where I posted the link to the definitions of “progress”? Pointing out how…
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“Progress” is far from an “it’s all good” phenomenon; many of the definitions at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/progress being neutral (“developmental activity in science, technology, etc.”; “growth or development” could as easily apply to the metasticizing of a cancer) or aware of its ambiguity “the development of an individual or society in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level.” (Emphasis added)
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A culture’s switching from agricultural to industrial is routinely referred to as “progress,” the usage being liable to all manner of politicized ends. Will indeed have plenty of benefits (access to improved medicine, more comfortable living conditions, less physically-demanding jobs) but will also get a batch of negatives along with the positives.
Regarding the negatives, see…
Gustave Dore’s London: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/skilton/images/dore/Dore121.jpg
Child labor in Victorian England: http://www.victorianweb.org/history/hist8.html
http://english10patterson.phoenix.wikispaces.net/file/view/child_workers_2.jpg
The consequences of modern China’s rush to “improve its standard of living”: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/10/28/chinas-dark-satanic-mills/
Well, if you’re arguing that progress means that sometimes art gets better and sometimes it gets worse and there’s not actually a trend, then we’re not actually arguing about anything, because I don’t disagree with that. Calling that “progress” seems a little silly, but I don’t need to get hung up on semantics.
I’m a geek by heart and programmer by hobby!