"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
17 December 2005Where the brows areThe yawning chasm between "literary" and "genre" or "popular" fiction — certainly it makes me yawn — has prompted this spirited commentary from Lynn:
[I]t seems to me that the problem with today's artsy-fartsy academics in general, whether the subject is literature, music or visual art, is that they are trying to control history in a way that past masters never would have dreamed of. They want absolute control of what ends up in The Canon instead of just letting history follow its natural course.
Of course, they won't get it: the audience and the pundits are ever at odds.
In a way, the scorn for popular literature and other popular entertainment is understandable. There is a lot of popular trash being created and thanks to modern technology we have the means to broadly distribute all of it and to preserve it for future generations regardless of whether or not it is worthy of preservation. A vast majority of people have no concept of quality and no patience for works that do not make an immediate impression. But the academics have gone too far. They do not only scorn trash; they broadly dismiss everything popular or even known at all by ordinary people. Meanwhile they are creating trash of their own and demanding that we all simply accept it as superior merely because they say so.
I don't think it's necessarily that the vast majority has no concept of quality; more likely, it's simply that they haven't gotten around to expanding their horizons beyond the lowest-common-denominator stuff that the most massive of mass media prefer to shovel in their direction. And even providers of pop culture have been known to aspire to something better, or at least less ephemeral:
The Sony Classical issue (CK 85397) of piano solos by American composer William Joel (1949- ), performed by the British/Korean pianist Richard Hyung-Ki Joo, is, unlike almost every other Sony title sold at or near full price, utterly bereft of liner notes, and the cover art is a bland reproduction of one of those old G. Schirmer music books, right down to the quotation from Horace ("Laborum dulce lenimen"). Music should speak for itself, but this is ridiculous. Fortunately for those of us who are new to Mr Joel's oeuvre, he is fairly easily categorized: he's an unabashed romantic. And he has thoughtfully added explanations to titles otherwise undescriptive; for example, the three-part Suite, Op. 8, is billed as "Star-Crossed". What appeals most, I think, is the sheer ebullience of the music, which makes perfect sense for a composer born into a New York state of mind. And Mr Joo gives these pieces the shimmer they deserve, though it would be interesting to hear the composer (also under contract to Sony, I understand) play them himself.
It's not the first time the uptown girl wound up as Muse to a downtown man. For this and other reasons, I am wary of assuming too much of an anti-elitist posture, as Donald Pittenger explains:
I don't like the reflexive negative reaction of the Art Establishment to popular, financially-successful artists such as [Thomas] Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell.
So far as I'm concerned, nearly all Establishment-anointed Post-Modern art is pretentious or silly, if it can be called art at all (more on this in future posts). This means I don't take Establishment criticism seriously. But I also have to guard against being reflexive myself, trying to like what they hate. He's not a Kinkade fan, though there's this:
On the personal level, Kinkade married his childhood sweetheart and fathered four daughters. He is deeply religious and has used his art for charitable fund-raising. For artsy-intellectoids, what's not to hate?
It should be remembered, moreover, that this particular elite isn't especially monolithic: there are schools and sub-schools and squabbling groups who ultimately agree on only two things: artists don't get enough respect, and geez, how can anyone pay actual money for a freaking Kinkade print? I hesitate to say that culture is becoming democratized, because it's always been democratized: the audience votes with its checkbook. And though popularity is no guarantor of quality, neither is obscurity. Posted at 10:03 AM to Almost YogurtTrackBack: 10:46 AM, 18 December 2005 » Casting the Canon from The View from the Foothills Pursuant of this, Lynn has her own comments on "literary" fiction, and Dustbury has chimed in as well. ...[read more]What's different today is that so little of pop culture has any lasting value. It's aways been true that the bulk of pop culture was crap; today the crap to quality ratio grows higher by the minute. Can you imagine a musical (just to name one musical genre) as good as "West Side Story" or for that matter (closer to Dustbury) "Oklahoma" getting made today? Yet people, for good reason, still love those musicals. Will anyone be listening to Fifty Cent fourty years from now? Taste aside, it used to take real talent to be a musical star; talent today it's almost a hindrance. And visual art is no better-Rockwell, who in fact was a damn good illustrator, was another Picasso compared with the likes of a Thomas Kinkade. Probably the only field where talent still equals stardom is in movie acting; in fact arguably there are fewer stars today who are as poor at their craft as, for example, Joan Crawford or Clark Gable. I disagree with Lynn's comments about the literary canon-somebody has to decide what belongs and what doesn't. I hope it's somebody with taste and, yes, a little elitism in his heart. Otherwise Harold Robbins and Danielle Steele will be "taught" because that's what people like. Or Oprah (God bless her) will decide. |