What should artists do—if anything—about Trump? That’s a question Spencer Kornhaber tries to answer in an occasionally rambling, occasionally insightful piece at the Atlantic about the ineffectiveness of political art. The problem facing artists today, Kornhaber argues, is that the president is impervious to criticism. Nothing touches him. Artists shilling for Clinton before the election didn’t get her elected (and maybe even hurt her), and attacks on the president since haven’t had any effect on either his popularity or his positions. Why?
Kornhaber gets close to an answer when he compares Trump to Nixon: “Richard Nixon’s election, like Trump’s, was interpreted in part as a reaction to the left’s cultural noisemakers: Spiro Agnew railed against the ‘closed fraternity of privileged men’ running the TV networks, and the phrase the Silent Majority captured, among other things, the notion that its members felt they didn’t hold the microphones.”
But he doesn’t go far enough. The difference is that Trump is not a reaction against mere “noisemakers” and a small “fraternity of privileged men” but against the left’s cultural hegemony. Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix were—at least initially—cultural outsiders. That is not the case of artists today, whose beliefs on sex, war, capitalism, and various “rights” are not counter-cultural at all. They are the culture. Who’s getting kicked off university campuses today? Losing their jobs for their beliefs? Ostracized for their vote? It’s not the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of ‘68. That’s why protest art doesn’t work against the president. He is the protest art against the artists.
What should artists do, then, according to Kornhaber? He says they should perhaps ignore Trump as a form of political protest. How about just ignore Trump and politics altogether—not as a form of protest but as a form of, I don’t know, making art. I’m not saying art can’t be political. It can, but often it is in unanticipated ways.
Are kids the enemy of writing? Probably not, says Michael Chabon, and if so, who cares? “If I had followed the great man’s advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the long run the result would have been the same as the result will be for me here, having made the choice I made: I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indifference of space, and it will take only 100 of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust, and consign to oblivion all but a scant few of the thousands upon thousands of novels and short stories written and published during our lifetimes. If none of my books turns out to be among that bright remnant because I allowed my children to steal my time, narrow my compass, and curtail my freedom, I’m all right with that. Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.”
The modern obsession with skin color is odd. Consider the view of the ancient Greeks: “‘Black’ (melas) and ‘white’ (leukos) are also – importantly – gendered terms: females are praised for being ‘white-armed’, but men never are. This differentiation finds its way into the conventions of Greek (and indeed Egyptian) art too, where we find women often depicted as much lighter of skin than men. To call a Greek man ‘white’ was to call him ‘effeminate’. Conversely, to call Odysseus ‘black-skinned’ might well associate him with the rugged, outdoors life he lived on ‘rocky Ithaca’. So to ask whether Achilles and Odysseus are white or black is at one level to misread Homer. His colour terms aren’t designed to put people into racial categories, but to contribute to the characterisation of the individuals, using subtle poetic associations that evaporate if we just plump for ‘blond’ rather than ‘brown’, ‘tanned’ rather than ‘black’ (and vice versa). Greeks simply didn’t think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that’s a strange aberration of the modern, Western world.”
Pablo Neruda was a rapist and a Stalinist. Is he still worth reading? Ben Bollig considers.
Might LSD be good for you? “When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. He may, according to the American journalist Michael Pollan’s fiercely interesting new book, have been on to something.”
Remembering the gonzo philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: “In his best journalism, it’s often hard to distinguish between lucid reports of actual events and his wildest hallucinations. For Thompson, there was a special benefit to choosing the drug you used when reporting a particular experience – whether it was a presidential campaign, or a sequin-fraught Debbie Reynolds stage-show, or a convention of boozy district attorneys watching propaganda flicks about the dangers of marijuana. Drugs could either help you comprehend the madness or maintain your sanity. Gonzo journalism wasn’t simply about getting the insane facts right. It was about enduring them.”
Essay of the Day:
I prefer Bach’s soul to Beethoven’s technical mastery, but I enjoyed Jonathan Gaisman’s deep dive into the composer’s Hammerklavier piano sonata in Standpoint:
“All the major works of Beethoven’s final years (he died in 1827) make tremendous demands upon listener as well as performer; but perhaps the Hammerklavier makes the most tremendous of all upon both. In order to listen to, as opposed merely to hear, a performance of this behemoth, it is almost as if a new set of auditory equipment is required. Like the snake which has to detach its lower jaw in order to ingest a particularly large item of prey, one finds that the existing mechanisms of musical attentiveness are simply insufficient. Alan Walker has suggested that the piece ‘lies somewhere in the future of the piano’. Beethoven himself had an intuition of this futurity when he said that the sonata would be keeping pianists busy in 50 years’ time. He was right: its anatomy bears no more relationship to the ordinary piano sonata than the inflated and muscle-bound body-builder’s resembles the average physique.”
Photo: Snowy comet (Be sure to click on the photo.)
Poem: Christian Wiman, “Eating Grapes Downward”
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