Having read the second edition of John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution, I would venture to say I'm halfway sympathetic to some of his complaints. I substantially differ on the assertion Borstlap makes that jazz, pop, film and other types of music can't be assimilated into contemporary concert music. I think there is certainly a place for theory, even theory of the most abstract and esoteric sort, in finding ways to solve musical problems. I've drawn on theoretical writings by Hepokoski and Darcy; by George Rochberg; by William Caplin; and the music of ragtime composers and the early 19th century masters of classical guitar to play with fusions of sonata forms with the style of ragtime in the last five years. It takes more than just technical facility on an instrument and familiarity with ragtime and sonatas from the 18th through 20th centuries; you can't compose sonatas drawing on country, blues, bluegrass, shape-note hymnody and other American vernacular styles to compose multi-movement works if you haven't steeped yourself in, say, the chamber music of Haydn and the keyboard works of Clementi and Dussek and Beethoven and Chopin ... even if you happen to be a guitarist.
But ... there's another point at which I differ with Borstlap and that's about how effective his polemic against technocratic post World War I modernism has gotten. He seems to locate the rupture in modernism that rejected the past with "zero hour" and the aftermath of World War II. I don't really want to contest that particular reading since it's his Netherlands and associated arts patronage he's had to deal with. I do, however, suggest that Jacques Ellul provides a more compelling alternate take on the emergence of technocratic art tailored to technocratic societies.
In particular, Ellul zeroed in on the role that critics play as the establishment that defines what is "in" or "out". Ellul had a few zingers about the Boulez who had the luxury of denouncing everything since he got all the awards, the funding, the social prestige and could write whatever he wanted. But Ellul's broadsides were against technique being pursued as an end unto itself, as the new defining process and principle of art in technological societies. In such societies the artist is more a cultivated personality or persona than someone who even makes actual paintings of musical works or poetry and it is the critic who, thanks to a variety of 20th century theories, is the new and greatest iteration of technocratic art culture. Tom Wolfe once sniped in one of his books that he was being led to believe that arts critics would say to him that if he did not have a theory of seeing he could not even see a painting. What Wolfe riffed on as a journalist, Ellul trawled through as a scholar. Bold emphases are added.
THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE:
ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by
Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael
Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7
page 152
In this vast universe,
the art critic finally achieves his principal role. The artist is only a
secondary element in relation to the critic who makes and unmakes styles and
reputations. ... Let us note that the
art critic is a recent development. This man who is a scholar of the material
in question, music or novel, painting or poetry, who knows all that can be
known, who is the true expert in all his knowledge of the imaginary museum;
that man, a specialist, a meticulous connoisseur of all the techniques, is
incapable of producing anything by himself, but, as the occupant of the public
podium, he makes his opinions known. He promulgates evaluations, and he reveals
the philosophy and meaning of these works. He decrees what is good for the
general welfare, and what will be the legacy of our present world for the
future. He can add nothing to this
legacy but his explanations. The art critic did not exist in the
seventeenth century, although there were a few hints. In reality, he is a
product of the bourgeois, industrial, mass society; he is a shareholder in the
culture, whose conscious and willful reality originates in the same era (along
with the idea of culture), ... The critic owes his existence to the mutation of
the bourgeoisie: the bourgeois, perhaps uncultured, harried and involved with
other needs, and dedicated to utility, does not possess the same understanding
of art as the aristocrat. For the latter, there was no need for explanation. By
contrast, the bourgeois, the philistine of the Gilded Age, needed explanations,
needed to be led to understanding. And, just as businessmen needed their
brokers, so, in matters of art, the bourgeois needed their critics in order to
discern what kind of art to buy. And for the Bourgeois buying art is an act of
status. He must not make a mistake. First and foremost, the critic guarantees
the durability and lasting value of the work in question. The critic is just another business agent
whose job is to guarantee status.
We could take a film critic such as Roger Ebert as a potential counter-example. Ebert partly gained his reputation by deciding that he was not going to tell people, so to speak, to "not eat hot dogs". He decided that rather than always insist that people not eat what he thought of as cinematic junk food he'd review even the junk food movies and then offer his opinion as to whether or not "is this a good hot dog?" So Ebert would, say, mention that he enjoyed Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and felt the trilogy ended respectably while commenting about how he couldn't get into Superman because every single filmmaker always came back to the boring weakness of kryptonite rather than explore the character's capacity for weakness in some other, more interesting way. Naturally other writers on film would prefer there were no superhero films. I'm inclined to think, as I read critical responses to popular cinema, that one of the reasons film critics dislike middle and lowbrow cinema is because the messaging is so overt the films can be dismissed as some kind of propaganda, certainly, but it might be more crucial to suggest that a filmmaker who is pulling no punches about a message has made a film that doesn't require the mediation of a critic in order to connect with audiences.
The critic is a rubber stamp that something is worth buying for those who otherwise lack the intellectual and social resources to know, as aristocrats offering patronage to artists in days of yore, what they like already. The critic as the broker for a businessmen whose business is art consumption might be a disturbingly accurate assessment of this relatively recent development in arts cultures in the West. Later on in the book Ellul has an even more trenchant description of what critics do for contemporary art.
page 153
... The art critic is a
publicity agent for modern art. ... The link between the discourse of the critic
and art itself is so essential that it appears, for example, in the view of
Abraham Moles, as a proof of art's vitality. Everywhere they have proclaimed
the death of Art, he asserts; now we are witnessing an "unprecedented
flourishing of doctrines and movements," which prove that art
is alive. However, these doctrines are the work of critics. They produce an
infinite amount of discourse on art, but one must remember that this is not
art. ...
page 154
Clearly minimalist and
post-minimalist paintings and sculptures are nothing, absolutely nothing,
without explanatory discourse. We are told that it is a "mental" art,
which now requires conceptualization and no longer the sentimentality that has
ruled art for too long. I can buy
that. But I do not see in what way a red
X traced on a white sheet is in any way "conceptual." Now, I must
explain. A work like this has no character or any intellectually discernible
quality unless the artist or the master know-it-all steps up and reveals the
intellectual process, the means of understanding, and the logic of the work.
This is what we could call an "instruction manual of poetics." I'll
buy that, too. But why should this act
of drawing two bars on paper be a greater act of creation than that of a lathe
operator in a workshop?
page 155
That's certainly a harsh indictment on the role critics play in technocratic societies in which a critic simply saying that a red X traced on white paper is "conceptual" art that could be done by any teenager in shop class but for the vetting of an established critic writing for this or that institution. Ellul asserted, as we saw above, that when a critic invoked the proliferation of doctrines and movements these were not, really, signs of a vibrant social life of artists making art, it was a sign of the liveliness with which arts critics promulgated theories and established schools of discourse. Now theoretical writing is valuable and has its place but Ellul's complaint was that art in technocratic societies had devolved to the point where, absent this kind of theoretical post hoc explanation the art in question was often so opaque, so hermetic, and so fixated on refining technique as the starting point and ultimate goal of art, the objects produced meant nothing without that post hoc critical explication.
It might even be said that "the death of the author" was not so much the death of the author as the self-anointed accession of literary criticism as the ultimate realization of what art was supposed to be. This is a point Ellul brings up near the end of his book.
page 155
I am not at all sure
that modern art would have evolved as it has if it were not for the critic. In
other words, it is an enormous resource to know that an explicator is behind
the artist and whatever he produces; the explicator will take charge of providing
a meaning and of decrypting symbols even when none exists. This will happen
provided the artist in question falls in line with society and with the current
development of sensibilities in artistic milieus. If this happens, the artist
no longer has to worry about expressing a "form" attached to a
"meaning," and he has the rare privilege of declaring that there is
no meaning, that art is pure form; he knows that the critic is the specialist
in discovering sense and nonsense, a meaning in pure form that pretends to say
nothing. The critic is nothing more than a safety net for a high wire act. The
artist, according to the model granted him by modern society, has the added
privilege (and one that he always claims) of insulting without consequence the philistine
public off which he lives. The critic is there to exalt these insults and to
demonstrate that they are really a form of respect for the spectator who is
involved in a newly minted reality. But, in order to play this role, the critic
becomes a technician of art. He knows its history, its techniques, and its
resources better than any artist. And the more the work becomes abstract, the
more a technician is required who not only displays his knowledge of
technique but, in addition, can elaborate his own techniques for
interpretation. He possesses instruments the others do not. The critic, after
having become an indispensable character of capitalist bourgeois society,
becomes a representative epigone of the technical system. He makes art and the
comprehension of art a technique; he leads us to think that there is no
such thing as untutored reading or vision (except in those cases where it is
false); he establishes himself as the sole judge of success and value, which is
precisely the role of the technician.
...
pages 155-156
The critic, in his
current role, and especially in relation to abstract art, fills a social
function of monopolistic mediation based on technical competence. He is the
technician for arts and letters, comparable to MBAs and other technocrats. And,
like them all, he reduces every art form to an ensemble of techniques. It’s not
by accident that the denial of meaning and a refusal of anything to say is the
result of the ping-pong match between critics and artists. The critic assures his pre-eminence, his
social role, his indisputable status by asserting that there is nothing in art
which is not hermetic, nothing which is not symbolic in the second or third
degree, but that everything is beyond the understanding of the lay person. And
the artist plays the same game, assured that his technique will hoodwink the
public. ...
page 156
... IN all cases what
the author says is never to be confused with what he wants or would want to
say. And it is New Criticism that seizes on an author's real meaning behind
what he says. But despite this difference we can conclude with two quite
remarkable positions. The first position is the pre-eminent role of the critic,
who is situated above the creative artist.
Roland Barthes states this position cogently; there is a kind of
hierarchy where one goes from the word to the language, from the language to
the work, and from there to the criticism, which is the "ultimate act of
literary creation, a symbol superimposed on the symbol created by the work."
Without the critic the work is sterile, because the critic is essentially the
model for the reader; and so, the work must be studied not as an extension of
the one who creates it but of the one who reads it. Reading constitutes the
work. Hence, criticism is the fine flower, the ultimate point, the supreme
creation of the artistic process. ...
page 157
... the critic has
become the most important person in the world of art, and this relates at all
levels to the technicization of society.
another reminder of the kind of trends I've seen in arts criticism that inspired me to write the following haiku
every arts critic
must consecrate consumption
to live with their craft
Now I love criticism, actually. A good deal of what I write here and a few things I write elsewhere would have to be described as criticism, a literary genre I think it's pretty obvious I love reading and writing in. Yet ... just as obviously, I've become a bit skeptical about the extent to which criticism is regarded as "necessary" for a functioning society. Criticism at its best is still a kind of journalism and while I have no doubt that journalism is "the first draft of history" there may be some danger in thinking too much of it. Ellul mentioned that there was a case to be made that critics were always wrong when it came to making decisions and judgments about what was worthy and what wasn't in the history of 19th century literature as we now know it.
If the art critic is the stoke broker for the new bourgeois; the publicity agent for the new establishment art in technocratic societies, do we do without them? Well ... it could still seem that some kind of gatekeeping function for the critic is valuable. But if we live in an era in which those who attain these roles as arts critics have in mind to cast some doubt about the hegemony of a canon that their predecessors created, well, Ellul has some remarks about that kind of regime change mentality, too.
page 157
... the critic has
become the most important person in the world of art, and this relates at all
levels to the technicization of society.
Thus, it is amusing to
note that New Criticism violently attacks old criticism proclaiming that the
old critic was an agent of social control, the ultimate police force created by
society to monitor expression of thought and conversation about values ... but
those who exercise this function in a terroristic manner are none other than
the new critics, much more so than the traditional university critics! But, if
traditional critics were the police of traditional society, then the new
critics are the enforcers for technological society with a deep-rooted and
exclusive attention to everything that might threaten this society. ...
As the Pete Townsend song put it, "Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!"
Now what I try to do at this blog is, among other things, provide some compensating activity for the sort of coverage I don't see happening (enough) in whatever I see going on. So for a while I wrote about, ahem, megachurch activity in the Puget Sound area that I felt was not getting enough journalistic attention from the mainstream and independent press. And since that period came to a close I have shifted more toward what I had hoped to do when I started blogging back in 2006, writing about chamber music and music for classical guitar.
Not that Future Symphony Institute necessarily has any reason to care what Wenatchee The Hatchet thinks but I really would recommend Ellul's book for their bookstore page. I think it does a compelling job of articulating the problems in post-war technocratic trends in arts and arts criticism in a way that would supplement arguments that have been made by Roger Scruton and John Borstlap at the Future Symphony Institute website.
No comments:
Post a Comment