In arts coverage and criticism there's been a lot of concern that the arts are in a bad way, especially arts funding. Yet concern about the inequality and inequity of arts fudning is also a big concern, particularl in an era of intersectionality; being "woke"; and striving to have more diversity in the fine arts. Well ... in popular arts hip hop has become the dominant musical market presence.
It’s Official – Hip-Hop Dominates Music
The bottom of music sales has been jazz and classical music. But jazz and classical music have city symphonies and established bands and grant money and so on.
But that's not where I'm thinking for this weekend. No, I've been thinking about the regularity of bromides about the death of this or that art. The death of film, for instance, or the death of classical music. Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is a relatively easy read overall but it starts as an obituary for the literate musical tradition as a whole. Taruskin, at least, managed to rethink this obituary certainty by the time he got to volume five!
But a friend of mine likes to say that any time a film critic laments that Hollywood has run out of ideas they show they don't know that Hollywood never had its own ideas. The art of film has been parasitically dependent on every other narrative and visual form since its birth. Taruskin has proposed that opera isn't dead but its social and cultural role has been taken from it by film, which seems fairly accurate.
Believe it or not this is getting to my idea, which is that film critics as a profession lament the decline of their discipline but it's not a shock. Journalism in traditional print media has been in a tailspin in terms of jobs for decades. So it's hard to feel bad for professional critics at a lot of levels because I got a journalism degree and have never managed to land the kinds of jobs that someone like Scott Timberg has feared are no longer available for Gen X and beyond. The discipline of art criticism will endure.
But to say that an art form is dying now? It seems like that's the confession of someone who consumes too much. If you think the art of cinema is dying in the 21st century it may just mean yo're watching too many movies. I love music but I dn't actually like listening to music all day. That's not how I love music. I love thinking about music and thinking in musical ways but I don't like to use music as a mood-altering catalyst or even as a way to reflect my mood at a particular time half the time. I listen to learn and I love learning music that helps me think about music.
This week's been the centennial of Thelonious Monk's birth but I can't think of any sufficienty worthy words about that.
What I have been thinking is that the sorts of people who believe an art is dying aren't even necessarily facing down their own mortality, which is a joke I've seen critics make about other critics, I think perhaps that the kinds of people who complain about the death of an art like film or the travesty of more-of-the-same is this is the sort of urbane put-down uttered by cinematic gluttons who have consumed too much and need to go produce something. The great big name critics in the 19th century art music scene weren't always just critics. Schumann and Belrioz wrote music criticism but they also wrote music. When the disciplines of production and interpretation are so stratified within a market or a social scene as they are now then I think the problem is that critics either sanctify their consumption habits by canon formation or damn the art form of cinema as being boring because these critics have glutted themselves when they should turn to other things.
So that's an admittedly polemical proposal for a weekend.
2 comments:
Without being reductive, because the so called 'death of art', might be somewhat owing to the fact that much of what passes for high art in elite circles isn't worth caring about for the general population. I'm not ant-modernist or anti-postmodernist by any means, but much of what passes for contemporary art is almost incomprehensible, whereas earlier forms, even early modern forms have a decipherable meaning.
Besides, much of what is now considered high art has its origins as low art. As a general rule, I don't think that the artistic impulse of society starts at the elite level, it starts in the lower strata of society and works its way up.
Something I was thinking of writing about is how when I look at some of my favorite composers, particularly Haydn, Villa-Lobos and Shostakovich, these were composers who wrote some rarified music (fugues and large-scale sonata forms) but who got their respective starts playing in street bands or in theater settings (Shostakovich played music for movie theaters)--a lot of high art may have roots in low art over the last century or so but it seems that high art is determined to repudiate its pulpy roots. Someone wrote that the refusal of HBO's Game of Thrones to concede how completely pulpy its source material really is is why the show can be lame to watch when Peter Dinklage isn't performing heroic feats of comic relief. I gave up on Game of Thrones after season 1 because I have better things to do than watch a cable TV show expand a story like the Levite and his concubine out to 20,000 times its original length.
But, wehre was I? I was trying to say that my favorite composers found ways to mediate between high and low elements and that high and low art have had more of a mutually synergistic relationship of the sort that I think was once summarized by Dwight Macdonald in his Masscult and Midcult essay. But I may be misremembering that particular thing.
Sometimes a film doesn't do so well because it makes some attentional demands audiences aren't up for or that refuses to answer questions that are considered "important". Blade Runner 2049 doesn't answer the question whether Deckard is a replicant or not (he's not, and Ridley Scott's a hack, which is why the new film is much better-directed than the original in its seven different versions). The questions 2049 opens up are more interesting than the answers it refuses to provide.
But as the film mother! has been showing by its even weaker box office is that being a critical think-piece catalyst that alienates audiences is not necessarily the same as making a movie that "works". This latter film seems to have been stuck in the reflexive tabula rasa critic-bait approach that seems deeper than it might actually be.
And truth to tell I don't see a ton of movies anymore and my play money tends to go toward music. So in the last month in which I could have seen mother! I preferred to get season 5 of Samurai Jack. :)
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