My review of Glittering Images is live at Rain Taxi. I see I got the name of a Star Wars film wrong at least once; shows what I think of Paglia’s thesis that George Lucas is the greatest artist of our time. Nevertheless it is—and I hope this won’t annoy anyone too much—a laudatory review.
Pistelli/Paglia
As promised, my brief commentary on Ryan Spahr’s art show, Post-Paranoia, debuting tonight at Little Amps Coffee Roasters in Harrisburg, PA. The painting series is based on the opening credit sequence of The X-Files. For a look at the paintings, go here. For a text version of my essay, go here.
Is this [Cézanne’s ‘canonicity’] “enough”? Not for Danchev, who claims both at the start of his biography and at its conclusion that Cézanne’s “impact on our world, and our conception of our world, is comparable to that of Marx or Freud”. This seems more an enthusiastic, loving flourish than a sustainable argument. Alex Danchev quotes Bresson saying that Cézanne “went to the brink of what could not be done”. This may be true, but painting has continued, and art has changed, sometimes building on Cézanne’s discoveries, sometimes not. Has our daily vision really become Cézannified? Is it as full of his visual tropes as our mental lives are of Marxian or Freudian tropes? At this point the reader might, like one of the painter’s card players allowed to unfreeze for a moment, rap the table quietly and murmur, “Pass”.
—
(Fair enough. But if our daily vision and mental lives were more Cézannified, then surely at least a few of the problems Marx and Freud rightly set out and sadly failed to correct would take care of themselves.)
Anti-art movements are vital when there is actually an art establishment that has cultural weight and power. But when society is ruled by popular culture, as it is now, anti-art gestures serve no purpose whatever and are positively destructive.
Warhol has become his own ism. Warholism is the dominant ism of our day, grounded as it is in the assumption that popular culture trumps all other culture, and that all culture must become popular culture in order to succeed, and that this new high-plus-pop synergy relieves everybody of the responsibility to experience works of art one on one.
[…]
The argument is that we are all soulless in the Warhol way, all victims of cultural anesthesia. And if you question these assumptions or attempt to change the conversation, you will be told that you have done nothing of the kind. If we are all Warholians, then even our distaste for Warhol is a Warholian act.
— Jed Perl, “The Curse of Warholism”
Modern Marsyas
by Laura Cumming
6. The Flaying of Marsyas: Titian, c1570-75
Photograph: National Gallery, London
This frightening picture shows the satyr Marsyas receiving his punishment for losing a musical contest with Apollo: strung upside down, his skin flayed inch by inch, while a spaniel laps the blood and another musician – excruciatingly – accompanies on the violin. The surface of the canvas itself appears flayed, an incoherent mass, almost monochrome except for bloody streaks of crimson. Close up, every stroke blurs softly into the next, as if Titian couldn’t paint such a vision of horror without lending it a sorrowful grace. He puts himself into the painting, too (seated on the right) pondering the torture with sadness.
……….
Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence, are always under the impression that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo but Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does fromany enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.
—Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
When Marsyas was ‘torn from the scabbard of his limbs’ - DELLA VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante’s most terrible Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin’s music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne- Jones’s women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of ‘the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,’ and the ‘famous final victory,’ in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.
—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
The arts have often flourished in regimes we’d call despotic. This isn’t because artists and writers do their best work when they’re being persecuted - a Romantic cliche that doesn’t stand up to any careful inquiry.
It’s because traditional tyrants left a good deal of freedom in society. Ancient China wasn’t anything like a modern democracy, but it produced some of the greatest art there’s ever been, while Mao’s China produced nothing. Tsarist Russia contained many kinds of discrimination and injustice, but in the late 19th and early 20th Century it was in the vanguard of literature, painting, music and dance. The Soviet Union produced little that was even remotely comparable. The arts flourished in the empire of the Habsburgs, while Nazism produced Leni Riefenstahl’s repugnant and much over-rated Triumph of the Will. Whereas authoritarian regimes leave much of society alone, totalitarianism aims to control everything. Invariably, the result is a cultural desert.
Culture may not need democracy or peace, but it can’t develop without some measure of freedom - and that requires a diversity of centres of influence, working openly and at times in opposition to one another.
