threading together riffs from Freddie deBoer, Ted Gioia, Alan Jacobs on the crisis of AI slop being the crisis of educational formulas about the arts in Cold War American arts education programs

Freddie deBoer's recent post (Great Writers "Tell" All the Time) rolls out a few usual suspects (Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky) to demonstrate that the "show don't tell" bromide has been one of the more harmful pedagogical cliches of what Mark McGurl describe in his book The Program Era (not that deBoer name-checks that book anywhere in the post).  The other axioms are "write what you know" and "find your voice".  

I mention deBoer simply in passing despite his inspiring this post because I have also been reading Alan Jacobs and Ted Gioia on artificial intelligence and how it has been used in the arts.  Jacobs was the one who proposed that AI slop has become what it was because the Iowa Writers Workshop formulas made it so easy for Ai to replicate those formulas.  I discussed that over here.

Ted Gioia has been warning that AI slop is utterly inhuman and even if I can agree on paper I think the grand failure of Ted Gioia has been the failure to explain how and why AI slop is what it is.  How is it that the AI project, which has been utterly human from start to finish, become abruptly inhuman only at the content generated from the AI prompt?  As Ethan Hein so eloquently put it, AI slop predates AI.

deBoer's proposal is that rules that make sense for screenwriting and playwriting migrated into prose where "show don't tell" is not automatically (or even usually) the wisest way to write.  It is here that I can't resist shifting to an essay Leonard Meyer wrote in the last century wherein he contended that one of the foundational mistakes of the integral serialists was presuming that all levels of cognitive engagement worked in the same way with music.  Meyer's counterproposal was that just as a molecule doesn't behave the way a cell does; a cell doesn't behave the way an organ does; an organ doesn't behave the same way a system does; and a biological system is not the same thing as organism in a similar way the behavior or patterns of musical organization at the level of the phrase are not the same as those for a larger musical chunk.  As Ben Johnston put it in the writings that made it into Maximum Clarity, twelve-tone exhausted its own set of viable options faster than all tonal systems that came before it.  

AI has been creating creepy slop because we taught it a bunch of lies about what good art does, if not necessarily about what we consider good art.  I respectfully differ from Bryan Townsend that AI slop generates cliches.  Love is the biggest cliche there is but we need love.  We also can't all be super-Benthamites who abjure all the arts.  

Engaging all the arts on the basis of a few simple top-down formulas has been what we've had going on in the arts in the United States for generations.  It's one thing to lament the identikit nature of post Joseph Campbell Star Wars everywhere monomythic monotony.  That's to complain about the output.  The problem with the input filter is that Joseph Campbell's whole approach was garbage.  It doesn't necessarily improve if the variation comes via Northrop Frye.  These moves have probably had the same effect on narrative as Anton Reicha's description of grand binary form had on early 19th century piano sonatas, leading to a bunch of interchangeable and forgettable piano sonatas from that period nobody knows about because those sonatas were written by people who didn't end up getting canonized. Ethan Hein is utterly write that AI slop predates AI but I am willing to grant that Reicha did not intend for his description of what has come to be called sonata form as a mere formula or recipe. 

Ted Gioia claimed in his history of music that through the power of music we can all be wizards.  That's a lie.  I've made this point in the past but the big theme running across Peter Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn is the contrast between the magic of seeming and the magic of doing. The magic of seeming can seem powerful and amazing but it creates appearances and impressions for those who are able to be won over by it.  The magic of doing is a lot more powerful but also more difficult to control and fewer people have the ability to master that kind of magic.  It can be read very easily as a parable about two kinds of art.  As big and scary as The Red Bull is he's blind and, as the magician points out in the story's end, the monster conquers but never fights.  When the unicorn turns, stands her ground and prepares to fight The Red Bull he relents and the unicorns trapped in the sea are released.  The old king Haggard meets his death with a strange sense of relief as the bull he'd captured is leaving him.

King Haggard's domain can be read in the early twenty-first century as a kingdom of AI slop with a king who wants to see, if just once in his life, someone who has the magic of doing and not the magic of seeming.  Beagle, tellingly, once described himself as not seeing the king as a villain because he saw himself in the character.  A particularly acid literary scholarly sort could quip that The Last Unicorn is literature in the magic of seeming and not doing a la whoever-else-that's-been-canonized gets assigned to you in a college literature course. But the academic world of liberal arts education has to have been administered by a bunch of King Haggards for AI slop to be what it is here in 2026.  

Apropos of nothing I'm reading James Crenshaw's book on Ecclesiastes.  Crenshaw takes the book to have been a fabrication passed off as the work of Solomon so there are ideas Crenshaw entertains I find less and more persuasive but an idea of interest to me is this--Crenshaw pointed out that in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible there is no redeemer.  Job hopes, briefly, that he can have a redeemer who delivers him from his misery but Qoholet does not conceive of God as a redeemer and the Book of Proverbs gives you rules to live by because people who don't screw up their own lives have done at least that much.  The Wisdom Books are books with no memory of the Exodus and even no recollections of the Law, let alone the Prophets.  

The proverbial is wise but also formulaic and yet we have generations of liberal arts educators who swear up and down in theory and practice that the liberal arts are supposed to be prophetic and powerful and shake things up and call down and call up chthonic spirits blah blah blah.  But what gets taught is literally proverbial and formulaic.  The problem isn't that proverbs are cliches.  Cliches are often true and even often wise but Proverbs warns that a fool wielding a proverb is still a fool.  Proverbs also warns that if you see a man who is wise in his own estimation there is more hope for a fool than for him.  Qoholet warned that even if a wise man claims to have figured everything out that happens under the sun don't believe him. 

In his commentary on Job 1-21 C L Seow noted that many biblical scholars have groused that Elihu seems to add nothing to the debate.  That's obviously not true.  Seow pointed out that Elihu's new contribution is that God reveals some things to some and not others and that this is so is mysterious.  Job's friends rely on what may be good theology as far as it goes but the shoe-horn Job's suffering into their established ideas and double down on the necessity of being right.  

The crisis of AI slop in the arts seems to me as though it's art generated by Job's friends rather than Job.  It's the art that relies on the wise formulas of tenured sages that has no prophetic element because ... when's the last time you heard of a North American tenured academic who thinks prophets are actually prophets and not scribes with political interests whose hegemonic agendas can be deconstructed from the strictures of language and analyzed with respect to systems of control?  

We live in such a time that people can publish books in which they not only assume Q was a real document but that the political agendas of the scribal community that produced Q (upon which the Synoptic Gospels are assumed to have relied) can be nailed down.  Look, I get that Q is useful as a scholarly shorthand in New Testament studies for all the material in common across the Synoptic Gospels.  That doesn't oblige me to think some Q document ever actually existed--that's a scholarly super-fad of the last century or so.  Let's think of AI slop in the arts as what you can get if you think the Gospel of Q was ever actually written and not the fabrication of American scholars who think they're smarter than the people who wrote the Gospels. Their scholarly magic can be described as a magic of seeming and not doing. It's the committee made reductionist take on what some self-selected scholars decide the "real" teachings of Jesus were once all the mythic stuff got removed.  

And Ted Gioia can wonder how AI slop got to us?  No, I think it's pretty patently clear what kind of technocratic self-assured American educational norms helped get us to the age of AI slop.

In postmodern biblical studies we can see that people have realized that you can speculate on the subdivisions of J, E, D and P all you want but that will not get you closer to interpreting the actual Torah as a narrative.  If you spend your time separating P and E materials and don't actually read the narrative of Genesis 9 and wonder whether Noah's curse was simply unjust then you're splitting hairs within the realms of academic fads rather than directly wrestling with how unjust Noah's curse is within the Genesis narrative if you stop and think it over.   I am not kidding about scholars being so busy separating strands of the Genesis narrative into source critical ruminations they don't deal with the narrative but I'll let Justin Michael Reed's book do the work he already did in it.

You can take that tale of source critical hair-splitting that doesn't engage the narrative itself as a parable and a tale of how we arrived at AI slop. The mystery is not that we got here to the point where AI slop art is with us in a new form, it's that people who taught the way they taught the arts for the better part of a century, devoted to what Jacques Ellul described as the dogma of technique, didn't step back to think that this outcome was on the way. 

Freddie deBoer's rant about how badly Stranger Things ended reminded me that I've been thinking about Hollywood's sad history of trying to copy anime and Hong Kong action cinema without learning any lessons about the problem of "raising the stakes" at the expense of human interest

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/all-kidding-aside-i-find-the-creative

Freddie deBoer

Jan 13, 2026

… I love the basic concept: in an effort to develop super soldiers the government subjected a bunch of children to radical experiments to develop psionic abilities, then pushed the most powerful of them to explore another dimension… but she brought something back with her. Awesome, smart premise.

 

But if you’ve watched the last couple of seasons, you already know the punchline: that cool, uncluttered premise has been thoroughly retconned. Actually, the government had already accessed that alternate dimension years earlier, and actually, their experiments weren’t what created the psionic abilities. No, in fact, the children with psionic powers got them because they received transfusions of magic blood from the first test subject, and he himself got powers because he… took a rock haunted by a demon from a dying scientist he found in a cave while he was a Boy Scout? What? What the fuck is this? In its later seasons, Stranger Things did the worst thing a long-running television show can do: it retroactively made its earlier seasons worse.

 

That drift from a tight, self-contained, and (in a certain sense) modest story to a sprawling, overcomplicated one that inevitably retconned earlier episodes and invited all manner of plot holes - that’s exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about troubles with modern storytelling. There’s a general drift from clear themes and efficient storytelling towards sprawling, shaggy, seemingly directionless plots that scream “Well, we might as well do this now.” That devolution has happened with all manner of television series and movie franchises. The television version of Westworld is a perfect example. While I wasn’t as big on the first season as its most ardent fans, that season was certainly a remarkable achievement in sharp, inventive, and confident storytelling - in self-contained storytelling. It took place almost entirely within a Western-themed theme park, focusing on the philosophical awakening of “hosts,” that is, androids. There were plenty of mysteries, but they felt smart, intentional. The modesty of the show’s narrative horizons helped keep the focus on what really mattered, which was the enduring question of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be alive.

 

And then… oof.

 

I wonder if deBoer has missed an opportunity to make a larger and broader point about the trajectory of franchise storytelling.  He can say that The X-Files bugged him because each set of questions led to more questions and no answers and he wanted answers. I liked the show from seasons 1 through 5 and I liked the movie but it began to go steadily downhill after that and part of the problem was that the questions started getting answered and the answers were kinda dumb.  You see when you set up a high concept Gothic romance in which “romance” is the quest for truth and not just a low Gothic jumpscare freak of the week thing (though The X-Files, seriously, excelled at that back in the day), you don’t have to answer all the questions because the show was at its best dealing with how people deal with the unanswerable.  The X-Files could be very serious and also mock its own conceit more viciously than anyone else could (“Mulder … are you sure it wasn’t a girly scream?”).

 

deBoer gets at a problem that I think has been endemic in American mainstream entertainment for generations.  He writes that the nerds have one but still act as if they are bullied.  I … don’t think that’s quite the problem.  I think the problem isn’t even about worldbuilding as such, deBoer’s complaint that worldbuilding gets retconned for the sake of stakes raising is on point.

 

In fact I would venture to say that Star Wars was Exhibit A for this back in the days of the prequels.  Previously we’d been told that The Force was out there to be wielded and believed in or not and then with Episodes I through III midichlorians had something to do with how well and effectively you could sense and wield The Force.  This was a giant retcon that altered the nature of the franchise.  The sequels were stuck with a Force that you were born with access to and there was no longer a question of whether she was born with it or whether it was Maybelline.  Yup, she was born with it!  The Force awakens and, no, it wasn’t asleep at the wheel.  Or was it?  Is this the way or not?

 

But Avatar: The Last Airbender pulled off the feat of having a great story given an idiotic retcon that made the entire “universe” worse.  I am going to assume you just know ATLA and the spin-offs.  No, I won’t humor you.  The cartoon series from 2005 that emerged just as Justice League Unlimited was winding down stands as a high point in serialized childrens’ animation comparable to Batman: the animated series.  The tale is about the last member of the Air nomads finding out he is the Avatar, the one person who can master the elements of earth, wind, fire and water (a rote cosmological idea from Hellenistic speculative philosophy but one that has come up as relevant to interpreting what the Apostle Paul meant by the elements of this world in Robert Ewusie Moses’ survey of powers and principalities in Pauline literature, I assure you this is true). Aang, the Avatar, has to find a way to stop the Fire Lord from subjugating the rest of the planet and the short version is that he does but not without some difficult battles and getting murdered by the Fire Lord’s terrifying spoiled fire-wielding prodigy daughter Princess Azula along the way. 

 

Then the sequel series Legend of Korra was done and my brother and I have vindictively referred to it as Legend of Entitlement.  Swiftly we noticed that the world-building of the original series had been jettisoned.  Back in the original series a fire-bender could generate lightning but the technique was so dangerous if you did it the wrong way you could very easily kill yourself.  Then in the sequel series Korra meets Mako, who is a wishy-washy fire bender who can just point and shoot lightning like it’s nothing and why? Well, because athletes are able to do so much more now than they could a hundred years ago and that’s all.  That’s why.  So, sure, cyclists could win seven Tours de France in the last thirty years and blood-doping and systemic cheating and performance enhancing drugs and all that were involved. Did that explain how Makko could point and shoot lightning a generation later from Princess Azula?  Or was it just lazy hand-waving away questions about the writers and show runners being too lazy and incompetent to take their own mythological system seriously?

 

Then in Season 2 of Legend of Entitlement we get the origin of the Avatar cycle and, damn, it was the worst mistake they made before making Seasons 3 and 4 happened.  The Last Airbender just told us there was an Avatar and that the avatar continuously reincarnated across the four elements in each generation.  The sequel series gave us some Wan guy who cheated and tricked his way into mastery of the four elements and then one day he sees two spirits locked in conflict and he thinks he broke up the fight only to discover that he separated a spirit of light and darkness from each other and unleashed a new level of chaos and death on the world.  Wan bonds with the spirit of light and tries to undo the damage but it’s all impossible so he keeps reincarnating so that he can one day bring balance to the world.

 

What?

 

So the founding origin of the Avatar is that the Avatar was the one who created all the chaos in the world?  This was the dumbest origin anyone could have had for the Avatar.  And now there’s a Dark Avatar?  Does Avatar Korra think to reconnect the spirits of darkness and light and thereby finally succeed where every prior Avatar iteration was retroactively doomed to fail?  Nope!  She beats the crap out of this new Dark Avatar and locks it away in a tree for … who knows how long? 

 

Maybe the show runners thought this was going to be epic but I saw it as the shittiest and most incompetent knock-off of a Paprika ending anyone could have done.  Yes, dear reader, if you somehow thought of Satoshi Kon’s surrealistic masterpiece that’s because I name-checked it. In Kon’s film the narrative’s “lord of darkness” is not defeated by getting a sheer beat-down from the power of light, he’s defeated by balance, the balance of light and dark, and man and woman, and dream and reality. 

 

This is the part where I admit I was considering seminary decades ago and where I remind my longtime readers I’ve got an eighty-five book reading list on different takes on Christian and some Jewish demonology and spirit cosmology.  So when I was watching Legend of Korra I kept getting more and more infuriated at the stupid storytelling decisions that were getting made that retroactively wrecked the world that had been slowly and steadily and consistently built in The Last Airbender.

 

The icing on the cake was Korra, having pined for Makko for two seasons, in season four is retconned into having a lesbian crush on Asami, the woman who was dating Makko and who had her boyfriend stolen from her TWICE by the Avatar.  But what does Asami do?  She decides she’s in love with Korra and so she went from being the Q who gave James Bond his gadgets to the trophy Korra gets to bang for saving the world.  And it got billed as somehow empowering?  No, I basically liked Asami Sato as a character and the fact that she was demoted across four seasons from being the Batman of Team Avatar to Korra’s trophy girlfriend gave me the sickening sensation that the writers of Legend of Korra just seemed to be a bunch of entitled frat boy bros.  Virtue signaling of the laziest Hail Mary kind (the show had been bleeding off viewers across its four seasons) did not salvage what turned out to be a disaster of a show.

 

By the end of Legend of Korra I saw that The Last Airbender was like the original Star Wars trilogy, a lightning in a bottle moment of collaborative genius that gave way to the fetid self-aggrandizing of auteur ordinary and post-Joseph Campbell pedestrian chosen one tripe.

 

It’s not that I have some issue with strong female characters as such.  I own all The Powerpuff Girls (they still rock).  Yor Forger is a favorite of mine and it doesn’t get stronger than a woman who can mule kick a sedan into changing course while it’s driving toward her (Spy x Family is a blast and a show I can enjoy with my nieces and nephews, who share their uncle’s affection for animation in general and anime more particularly).  Momo Ayase from Dan da Dan is what Korra could have been, maybe, if she’d been written by writers and editors who were actually any good at storytelling. But American bids at tapping into the epic fantasy and sci-fi elements of anime have tended to founder.  I think that is probably because there’s a tendency to keep raising the stakes and retconning for the sake of “the moment”. 

 

Now what I hope people don’t do is say something like “What about Chainsaw Man?”  You’d have to be as stupid as Denji to have not seen from episode one Makima was going to be the big bad of the Control Arc.  Korra is, if you look at what she does and says, probably even a bigger idiot than Denji!  Whether it’s Denji from Chainsaw Man or Tanjiro Kamado in Demon Slayer the animated heroes in anime seem to have gone over in the US better than stuff like Elio in 2025.  I think Chainsaw Man is a wee bit overhyped but I did watch the twelve episodes of it and, sure, Power as an Eric Cartman homage is definitely funny!  It’s very much R-rated toonage, though. 

 

deBoer’s point that you shouldn’t go retroactively breaking everything about your narrative world-building just to up the stakes is a point I can basically agree with and I’d say the main perpetrators of this kind of narrative nonsense would be The Big Two, and comics fans will know I mean DC Comics and Marvel.  The Big Two have being stuff like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis or Civil War or whatever Marvel’s gonna do for generations.  Put the universe at stake!  Is the universe too small?  Well, the multiverse is at stake!  You do it once in a while and, okay, Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse were still fun but The Boy and the Heron was still going to win that Oscar and it earned it.

 

The thing is that by 2026 the idea that cartoons are just for kids is pretty obviously not true if Chainsaw Man’s Reze arc could get a theatrical release in the United States at all.  Haven’t seen it or Demon Slayer but I am just enough of an anime fan to think I’ll try to catch both.  Sure, I know Shinobu’s gonna die but that won’t mean I won’t root for her in Infinity Castle anyway.  Denji might as well be nicknamed betrayal bro because he’s such an idiot he can’t tell when he’s being marked for another assassination attempt.  He dreams small … .

 

deBoer seems like he doesn’t watch anime at all but I will go back to his complaint that The Matrix was pretty bad.  My long-haul proposal is that what deBoer is picking up on is that people like the Wachowskis do knock-off tributes to anime landmarks and Hong Kong action films and Americans are suckers for it because after decades of Sly and Arnold moviegoers feel like this stuff is new and different.  Well, okay, yeah, it was new and different if you didn’t live on the “Left Coast” and hadn’t been soaking up anime and Hong Kong action films since about the time John Woo’s Hard Boiled came out.   Back in my college days I ended up meeting some folks from Hong Kong and so, well, it’s not a huge guess to imagine that in the early through mid-1990s college boys might bond over John Woo and Jackie Chan movies, right?

 

Well, if deBoer wanted an example of a franchise where every attempt to raise the stakes and up the game of the newest story does something stupid like retroactively vitiating the premise of the story that came before nobody can do better than talking about the Michael Bay Transformers franchise.  Say what?  Am I really going to go there?  Of course I am!

 

You see the problem with the Bayformers movies isn’t actually that the plots make no sense.  Each Bayformers plot, taken entirely on its own terms, is fastidiously consistent with the possibilities and consequences of the use of whatever MacGuffin of the week is in play.  The real problem with the Bayformers stories is that every new Plot Device that gets introduced is based on something -in-universe that retroactively reveals that the Plot Device of the immediately preceding film was pointless.

 

Brace yourselves.

 

Transformers gave us a quest to find The Cube, which was the Allspark.  Autobots and Decepticons were trying to find the Magic Cube because it had the power to generate new Cybertronian life, new Autobots or Decepticons depending on who was using The Cube.  This would have corresponded to The Creation Matrix from the old Marvel comics run of Transformers from the 1980s.  The Cube ends up being destroyed because it gets shoved into the chest of the evil Decepticon leader Megatron.

 

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen shows us that the planet Cybertron itself was dead and had to be revived by way of a star harvesting apparatus that was hidden away in ancient Egypt under a pyramid.  The new Plot Device was being sought out by a super old evil robot called The Fallen (Tony Todd, RIP, he sounded cool and menacing a la Candyman as usual and it wasn’t his fault the movie was so dumb).  But, wait a minute, what were the Autobots doing fighting over the AllSpark for in the first movie?  Why fight over the device that can be used to create new Cybertronian life if the planet itself is dead and has to be rebooted?  But …,

 

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon reveals that millions of years ago Megatron made a deal with Optimus Prime’s predecessor in Autobot leaders, Sentinal Prime, to send a space bridge apparatus to the Earth.  This would be used to set up a cosmic link between Earth and Cybertron so the Earth could be drained of resources so that Cybertron could be revived. So now we’re told that this deal had been brokered maybe a million or so years prior?  Did Megatron just forget this deal in the previous two films?  Not exactly because Soundwave and Shockwave knew of the deal as far back as the American moon landing.  Oh?  So, uh, why didn’t Soundwave and Shockwave mention this a couple of movies earlier?  That sun harvester device from the second movie wasn’t even necessary.  Or maybe The Fallen was looking for it but Megatron didn’t say “No, bossman, we’ve got a device that can let us revive Cybertron by enslaving humanity and all we have to do is just go to the dark side of the moon for it.”  Nah, Sun Harvester set-up meant Devastator could tear apart a pyramid in Egypt.  That set pieces are already in place so don’t mess with that. Still, if the planet could be subjugated without harvesting the Sun through the Sun Harvester on Earth that would destroy the planet … why blow up the planet if you planned to enslave the humans on it anyway?

 

As you can probably see by now, each new Plot Device pretty obviously and simply renders the point of the immediately preceding Plot Device moot.  That gets us to …

 

Transformers 4: Age of Extinction.  So now it turns out that anonymous entities planted a bunch of Transformium all over Earth ages ago. Sixty-five million years ago, okay?  Even though Megatron keeps getting killed off he’s back as Galvatron and he plans to use the magical Transformium to reformat Earth to be suitable for Cybertonian life.  Blah blah blah, bad guy gets defeated and we get to.  So Optimus Prime tells us at the start of the film all this Transformium was around millions of years ago.  I guess if it was around did they even need The Cube to make new robots?  If they did why didn’t they just start looking for all that Transformium that was already on the planet so they’d have enough raw material to make new Cybertronians instead of going for the Cube that turns Nokia phones into nasty gunslinger bots? But wait …

 

Transformers 5: The Last Knight reveals the entirety of Earth is really Unicron the evil twin brother of Primus (i.e. Cybertron). So what’s the point of those creators dumping Transformium to format Earth for Cybertronian life if Earth is really just Unicron the twin brother of Primus?  Who needs to reformat the planet Earth to be Cybertronian life-form compatible if all along Earth was also Unicron!?  How stupid are these robots that they can’t remember their own histories?  You would think that the Earth itself being Unicron would be the first thing anyone would want to know. 

 

But we’re not done yet, there’s Rise of the Beasts where “Unicron is coming”, the sixth entry if we don’t even count Bumblebee (which, honestly, I actually like Bumblebee because E. T. meets The Iron Giant directed by Travis Knight (of Kubo and the Two Strings) with Hailee Steinfeld is a solid popcorn movie, Bumblebee is what a few of us Transformers fans thought ought to have been done from the first movie). So, anyway, by the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Unicron is coming to destroy earth even though in the immediately preceding Bayformers film we had not been given any reason to think the Earth itself wasn’t still Unicron.  Why would Unicron need to come to Earth when Unicron is the Earth? At this point we’ve seen that every new Plot Device hinges on a new element in the narrative universe that makes the previous Plot Device impossible or pointless. 

 

Even within Transformers lore there is a claim that though there are countless dimensions and universe there can only be literally one Unicron.  In the Marvel comics continuity that Unicron devoured every universe across the multiverse but some kind of magical Big Bang happened when multiversal fragments hit each other and so “our” universe was born.  It’s bonkers and hokey but was an actually consistent in-universe mythology.  So, that’s another way to say that for Bayformers to have Earth be Unicron and then follow up with a film where Unicron is coming (in the 1990s) to devour an Earth that is still also technically Unicron … why don’t we just have the next film be two dueling Unicrons?  Cyberton (also known as Primus) can just sit that one out or maybe three planet-sized robots are going to have a WWE smack-down and one of the Unicrons will be voiced by John Cena.  Sure, why not? He had a supporting role in Bumblebee.

 

So, when deBoer complains that Stranger Things piled on retroactive continuity changes that made everything worse it’s not as though I can’t think of how this has been endemic in fantasy and sci-fi action franchises going back over the last two decades. 

 

Maybe, just maybe, the reason anime like Chainsaw Man or Demon Slayer or Apothecary Diaries or Spy x Family or Frieren have been doing well in the U.S. market is because thirty years of Hollywood cribbing from Asian cinema has reached a point where the second-hand and third-hand nature of the work has begun to show and it’s just easier to go watch Asian cinema these days.  These days you don’t have to look that hard to pull up Belladonna of the Sadness, for instance.

 

I’ll put this another way, in American post-Joseph Campbell storytelling the Chosen One has to save the world then save the universe then save the multiverse and then save time-space as concepts or something.  In Frieren the elf mage defeated the Demon King about a century ago but she still has thousands of years of living to do and laundry still needs to be done and food needs to be cooked and she kinda realized that as so many of her human friends keep dying on her maybe she should have tried harder to be a better friend to them.  Raising the stakes is not the same as keeping the stakes personal and I think what deBoer has intuited is that Hollywood in its present form has utterly botched that in its bid to keep “raising the stakes” in franchises that studios want to be cash cows that are ever producing the milk of entertainment.

When arts critics have no real gatekeeping power they are nothing more than super-consumers--thoughts on reading Freddie deBoer's hatred of Stranger Things and the decline of the negative review

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything written by Freddie deBoer, whose Substack I do read semi-regularly. Since some of his writing intersects with thoughts I've been having about the state of criticism and laments about the state of the arts and the state of criticism I'm goingto go a bit long-form this weekend.

Freddie deBoer's riffs on separating arts and artists in the days when Gaiman is accused and Sainte-Marie has been posthumously stripped of honors, do you want your artists to be priests or prophets?

I know perfectly well that prophets came from priestly clans and tribes (Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel came from priestly lines to name just three prophets in Judaism and Christianity). I know that some prophets were vocational prophets and others were not (Amos!).  Many a priest was not a prophet and the Torah forbade modes of divination to priests that might not necessarily (per Frank Crüsemann) have been prohibited to prophets. But the binary of priest and prophet as non-overlapping roles is a useful rubric for looking at how non-religious (and religious) people look at the arts and decide whether or not we can, should, must, or must not separate the Art from the Artist.

Take Freddie deBoer as one of the easiest self-identified partisans of separation, granting that you can and should feel otherwise if that's your thing:

the double binds of "art history"--Ted Gioia and Roger Kimball on the Western avant garde, a grand narrative that they want to keep for and against the sake of "rebels"

I present to you nine unadorned observations from Ted Gioia about the avant garde.  I say “unadorned” because I am citing the observations themselves minus all the other words appended to each of them:

 

(1) Avant-garde experiences allow rule-breaking—which should feel fun and liberating. But that doesn’t happen often enough.

(2) But the avant-garde still makes a vital contribution even when it is flawed.  

(3) The avant-garde has lost its ability to disrupt the system, because it’s now entrenched inside the system.

(4) The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy. 

(5) Cutting edge art can’t cut anything unless it resists the allure of insider money and power.

(6) Why did we stop worrying about artists selling out? That’s a legit concern.

(7) Disruptive movements in the arts still occur all the time—but they’re now coming from tech companies

(8) A vital avant-garde community would fight against becoming content creators. In fact, this might be the true destiny of the avant-garde in our time.

(9) There so many ways art can transform the world—but we’re not even looking at the problem in the right way.

a sprawling links for the weekend post, variations on a ground bass--counterpoint under fire in the 1470s. laments about a loss of Catholic liturgical music that was lambasted in the years it was being written, and how fifteen C. musicians defended their jobs at the expense of ordinary musicking people

https://mereorthodoxy.com/musical-localism-and-the-rebirth-of-culture

...

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has written on this distinction, which he takes to be more fundamental than any genre distinction, between “participatory” and “presentational” kinds of music. “If we briefly consider the products of the music industry over time,” says Turino, “we can glimpse cosmopolitans’ gradual shift in thinking of music making as a social activity to music as an object.” He talks about what it was like interacting with Peruvian festival music of the 1980s, before (or athwart) the arrival of the various technologies that have enabled our presentational era. “For them,” says Turino, “a recording is to ‘music’ what, for us, a photograph is to the person in the snapshot: a representation of something else, not the real thing.”

 

It is worth asking for a moment where and how the change occurred in music. Here I depart a great deal from other traditionalists and conservatives who talk extensively about music, particularly the late Roger Scruton, as well as the various others who have written on the topic such as E. Michael Jones and Julian Johnson. For many of these thinkers, the moment of decline occurred somewhere in the twentieth century or perhaps the nineteenth, and the culprit was, variously, dissonance, a rejection of long-standing norms of form, professionalism, and, most of all, the rise of commercial recording technologies that allowed music to become abstracted from live, public performance.

 

Here I am much more radical: Classical music is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. I consider the shift from Palestrina to Monteverdi, from Bach to Haydn, as far more fundamental than the shift from Wagner to Schoenberg or from tonality to atonality or from Rachmaninoff on shellac to the Beatles on vinyl.

...

Well, to go by Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europea 1470 to 1430, classical music, in the sense of being elite music produced by elite for elites that was bankrolled by a system of indulgences has always been the problem.  I know John Ahern knows about this book because I discovered it reading a couple of his blog posts at Ad Fontes Journal online.

John Borstlap on the need to define words properly, such as modern and modernism

While throughout his blog and his comments at Slipped Disc and in his book The Classical Revolution he has hinted that he found it a bit unfortunate Roger Scruton put as much stock as he did by traditional religion, there are moments when I read John Borstlap write about music, aesthetics and ideas ... and, if you’ll pardon the joke, I wonder how many neo-Calvinist presuppositionalist Christian polemics he has read in his life. Bear with me, I’ll explain things soon enough. I read Borstlap’s blog post from last month in the last few weeks and will quote all of Borstlap’s text and skip the Krier quotes:

 

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2023/07/progressive-conservative.html

In the culture wars concerning modernity and tradition, concepts like 'modern', 'tradition', 'conservative', 'progressive', 'value' and so forth, appear to have different meanings in different contexts, with the result that meaning is often blurred by political motivations in the background. In fact, their meaning is shifting all the time, and thus become tools for other meanings which are different from their origins.

Tradition: simply the sum of successful solutions to problems of aesthetics, practices, value. 'Our heritage has come down to us without a testament' (René Char), which means: we should never stop being critical of what we have inherited of our civilisation. This critical stance is the motor of development and keeps traditions alive and accessible.

Progress: anything which means an improvement. This is entirely dependent upon context.
Modern: that which is contemporary, which is 'now'. It is a historical category and has no meaning as to value.

Modernism: the ideology which has, in the last century, created a world view which is very different from most of the past, and in which technology, science and progressiveness for its own sake have taken priority over humanist values as were developed since the Renaissance. It is a prescriptive ideology (hence its nature as 'ideology') and often not open to critique, which is discarded as 'conservative'. But attempts to recapture successful solutions to problems, which have been discarded because of not fitting within a modernist world view, can be progressive in terms of improvement, when a civilisation has developed towards extremes which undermine its capacities for development. With conservatism in the sense of wanting to freeze historic moments, it has nothing to do. Nothing has done classical music more damage than the misunderstanding that this art form is a 'conservative' one.

…

Only if notions like modernity, modernism, progress and tradition are understood in their original and true meaning, can a vision be developed which offers a perspective on improvement: the only serious meaning of progress.

Ted Gioia has on the bane of never-ending stories in contemporary Hollywood, revisiting the thesis that franchise nostalgia has cultural self-veneration in it

The worst or best element about genre fiction, depending on whether you like it and providing a few tacit caveats per genre, is that the story never ends.  Serialized pulp fiction can go on as long as the writer keeps living.  In the most famous cases of genre fiction Sherlock Holmes has long outlived his inventor.  Characters that can inspire seemingly endless stories are a boon for the entertainment and publishing industries but characters have shelf lives.  There are no truly "timeless" works of literature or art or music, Romantic art-religion withstanding.  

 

Ted Gioia has highlighted a more foundational problem with contemporary pop and pulp as handled by the largest entertainment industry corporations of our day--the Marvel/Disney formula has always been formulaic (I can hear Kate Beckinsale's Charlotte from The Last Days of Disco sniping, "Of course it's formulaic, that's why they call it a formula." when a character complains about the formulaic nature of best-selling books). The problem is that the schema has become too obviously schematic even for audiences and, worse yet, we're supposed to be in Phase 5 when Endgame would've and could've been the, well, endgame.

 

Not that Gioia has the details but he's feeling his way through general concepts when he has this at his Substack.

 

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/audiences-grow-weary-of-stories-that

the death or change theme in classical music

 Richard Taruskin began his Oxford History of Western Music seriously proposing the era of literate music in the West was coming to an end, a kind of death-of-classical-music that was more typical of a Norman Lebrecht.  By the end of the fifth volume he concluded that classical music wasn't dying, it was changing.  

I have more than a handful of times floated the idea that the symphony and the orchestral traditions of the long 19th century constituted an equivalent to the ars perfecta of the late Renaissance mass. When the mass of the earlier era gave way to new styles and forms partisans of the older style complained that the new recitative genre was garbage, that any unmusical hack could do that and simulating the rhythms of human speech in such a dubiously literal way was not really musical or expressive.  

Here we are in 2023 and I would venture the proposal that rap has become a kind of recitative in our era, declamatory speech that is organically fused with melodic activity and it's the kind of thing that is denounced as the death of melody by partisans of the older ars perfecta equivalents of our era.  The historical irony would be that recitative in Italian opera was viewed by partisans of Palestrina and company as being as much anti-musical junk in the time of Monteverdi as rap is viewed by fans of Italian opera now.  

Art was supposed to find liberation from court and church, from throne and altar and for a time in the long 19th century instrumental music took flight and became the top dog in the musical arts.  Earlier theories of aesthetics and treatises on the arts regarded music as suspect and instrumental music as nearly contemptible for its lack of verbal and propositional content.  Mark Evan Bonds has written a few books outlining how that status quote from the 18th century mutated into the Beethoven syndrome we have had since E. T. A. Hoffmann and company. 

It's commonplace to see thinkpieces asking how and why classical music has declined or whether classical music can withstand the shift from the private to public realm.

Two links will suffice.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/why-has-classical-music-declined.html

https://www.overgrownpath.com/2023/02/can-classical-music-survive-private-to.html

The Romantic era had a lot of salon and club music, though, which was not necessarily "public".  There was indeed a lot of public music-making but in histories of classical music hausmusik doesn't figure as prominently in music histories and I, being a guitarist, think there should be a counter-vailing interest in precisely the house music traditions to offset the symphonic stuff.  There was plenty of music-making going on in Biedermeier era Vienna but it was not the stuff of Beethovenian legend, exactly.  Paul Hindemith contended that the state of musical life should not be assessed on the basis of professional activity but on the basis of amateurs.  Sure, he could be a snob about lowbrow pop music like many other emigre composers to the United States but the point remains a point worth considering.  It may be more salient now that we've got books like The Death of the Artist lamenting that it is easier than ever to publish in all the arts and harder than ever to monetize that activity.  

It may be there's more going on in "classical music" now than can possibly be covered by mainstream music journalism or even indie music journalism.  I know that for classical guitar there are half a dozen cycles of preludes and fugues that have been composed mainly in this very century that have not even been discussed in most music journalism, or even in classical guitar journalism.  That would be because stuff is on Youtube. German Dzhaparidze's cycle has been recorded but the cycle in score form is unpublished.  Gerard Drozd's cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar seems to be unavailable in the West.  Rekhin's cycle was composed in the last century but has never been recorded in full for a commercial release.  

But my soap box issue here (among others) has been that we live in an era in which a synergistic relationship between "pop" and "classical" is both feasible and desirable in North America.  I know there are people in Europe who dissent from such a view but I submit those kinds of writers and composers are not being coherent with their own stated views about authenticity and flexibility in the understanding and application of tradition.  I'm going to resist the temptation to drag in Jaroslav Pelikan's The Vindication of Tradition beyond a short mention but I see many a claim that "the muse" must be rescued or saved.  Writing as a Christian and not a partisan of Greek gods and goddesses I can't help but think that if the muse needs you to rescue her she's not a worthy muse, is she?  

The thing about muses is that muses have favorites and muses can move on. Maybe the muses, if muses there be, have left the symphony behind. Maybe expecting the muses to stick around with one art form forever is to misunderstand their nature. Partisans of ars perfecta may well have thought their favorite music was literally heavenly, timeless, eternal and beyond improvement.  I do love listening to Renaissance choral music now and then but is that style the norm?  Has it even been the norm since roughly 1650?

HT The Music Salon: Don Baton on overselling Florence Price--a set of arguments paradoxically and predictably weakened by lack of engagement with non-classical cultures

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2023/02/friday-miscellanea.html

Bryan Townsend noted that Don Baton claimed over at City Journal taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade and that Alex Ross is upstream of everyone else, but that New York can be like Toronto, a city that is prized as the heart of cultural influence in the country.  Whether or not it's actually the case, however, is debatable.  After all, the death of New York has been a theme here and there.  To pick just one example ... 

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

New York's slow death as an arts scene due to gentrification is a journalistic trope, and yet at the same time art-washing is also a journalistic trope and also not without cause.   Since Hyperallergic was so vigilant about defining and deploying the concept of artwashing in coverage of Boyle Heights I'll include a few links for your perusal.

https://hyperallergic.com/616931/artwashing-during-a-pandemic-should-artists-say-no-to-real-estate-crumbs/

https://hyperallergic.com/tag/boyle-heights-alliance-against-artwashing-and-displacement/

Now why would I lead with all that before getting to Don Baton's case that we all need to move on from Alex Ross?  Well, because if we're going to try to talk about Alex Ross and the influence of arts writers at The New Yorker it doesn't hurt to introduce caveats to the whole project by asking how firm the foundation is for the rest of the world (and even the rest of the United States) caring about what taste-makers in New York are saying. I hated Nirvana when they first became popular and I still hate the band.  Most of the Seattle grunge era sound aggravates me.  I grant an exemption to Soundgarden but that's about it.  Even a Seattleite can note like the Seattle sounds, and by extension, just because Alex Ross says X doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit.  That is, of course, what Don Baton has argued ... 

https://www.city-journal.org/moving-on-from-alex-ross

John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion

If Richard Taruskin’s career has been characterized, as I have written previously, in taking aim at Romanticist art-religion and views that music, serious music, has a fundamentally if nebulously sacramental role then a case could be made that the Joker to his Batman might be someone like John Borstlap.  There are many writers who subscribe to a notion that music, serious music; art music has a special function that catalyzes, in a deep and mysterious way, the emotional order of the listener who attentively listens.  John Borstlap and the late Roger Scruton might be the easiest contemporary examples, via their work at the Future Symphony Institute of a throwback to sacramental listening and a sacramental view of the musical fine arts of the sort that Richard Taruskin so often took aim at. 

Martha Nussbaum on the Romantic legacies of the myth of authenticity and the myth of the artist as transgressive of societal norms; Justin E. H. Smith has a fairly predictable defense of "real literature" by way of invoking Zhdanovian socialist realism

https://lithub.com/beyond-good-and-evil-reconsidering-the-toxic-myth-of-the-transgressive-artist/

...

Abusers are often shielded not only by this “myth of authenticity,” but by another myth, which pervades all the performing arts, and indeed all the other arts as well. This is an age-old myth, at least as old as Romanticism. The myth is that the constraint of usual social norms and rules is bad for artists. They have to be permitted to be transgressive, to break the rules, or else their creativity will be stifled. Genius is beyond good and evil. This myth is basically false: there are many artists who are perfectly capable of maintaining a boundary between their inner freedom in the realm of creation and the way they live outside it.

However, the myth is so pervasive that for many it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. An artist who sincerely believes that breaking society’s rules is necessary for success, by long habit actually becomes unable to create without transgressing. It’s revealing that the myth is overwhelmingly about male creativity, used by males for males. And it’s revealing, too, that the myth mainly concerns sexual rules. I can’t think of an artist I’ve known who believed that being creative licensed him to commit theft or burglary. It’s just a handy way, for a small number of talented men, to arrive at a conclusion so often coveted by male pride: I am above sexual laws, and other people aren’t fully real.

...

There’s another factor: if the arts we love are to thrive, they need star power. Star power generates both ticket sales and donations. Even if we dislike star power and star influence, but just want the art we love to persist and do well, we can ill afford to get rid of the star, however badly behaved. And some people may not care so much about the health of the art, but more about making money on their investments. Hence the fact that some stars whose gifts make money for others are held to account only when they are too old and ill to make money for others any longer.

One of the things that I have noticed in the last decade or so is the extent to which bad behavior in artists is defended on something along the following lines--if we expected our artists to be perfectly morally people there wouldn't be any art left.  But to formulate this axiom in terms of Christian theological terms (as I have seen done) needs to be avoided or, if done at all, put in very careful terms.  The humans are sinners and that very often we sin in ways we don't realize or anticipate is one kind of thing to say.  It's possible to hurt people without realizing you're hurting them. It's another thing to pardon in advance or to pardon retroactively the sins of people because their work has in some way been canonized.  That kind of theology of "grace" can be nothing more than a post hoc pardon granted for the sake of continued consumption, a case that "grace" is provided so that I can keep watching, say, Woody Allen movies because his films are "art" and "art" has a sacramental role in sanctification (i.e. I am a better person in some nebulous way for watching "art" movies).  

Well, okay, I admit that I do actually read Puritans and there are cases to be made that if a person abuses people that "can" be considered a reason to either revoke their "artist" card or, to put it another way, the arts are not sanctifying sacraments to begin with.  What doesn't tend to happen is to define what qualifies as "art" so as to define why the "artist" is able to get away with doing Y or Z but everyone else who isn't an "artist" can't be pardoned in a similar way.  Take Richard Brody, who dubbed Woody Allen an "artist" and Louis C. K. as "not an artist". Apparently the artist  can do or say creepy things so long as the artist has some moment of self-doubt and questioning that finds its way into the finished products that are christened art.  The critic has the power to declare whether or not this has happened and as Richard Brody has declared in the past, the critic has the power to declare that a film is about B no matter how much the filmmaker says the film is about A.  Critics are capable of conferring on whatever they regard as "art" meanings that have nothing much to do with the artworks upon which they confer the status of art.  

The bread is just bread until it is consecrated by the priest, you might be able to say. If the priest does not consecrate the bread it will have no sacramental function, which seems to be the difference between Richard Brody consecrating the bread of Woody Allen's films and not consecrating the bread of Louis CK.  But reasons, of course, are given for the consecration, whether what is consecrated as "art" is a Woody Allen film or songs recorded by Michael Jackson. 

The conundrum doesn't go away if something is designated as "not art" by critics B or E because history is full of self-designated artists whose work aggravated critics.  But let's not pretend that merely self-designating the status of "artist" is more than that.  Any bro can self-identify as an artist and then proceed to act as though the license of being an artist is part of the life of being an artist.

If all that is necessary is to claim to be an artist and then transgressiveness is permitted would people go back to 2012 and conclude that, say, Terry Richardson could be called an artist and therefore what he reportedly did was not so bad as to preclude his being considered an artist?  But was he an artist?  The allegations about his conduct came during a time in my life when I knew someone who worked from time to time as a model and she shared that photographers like Richardson were known in the industry and that women who wanted to avoid certain types of situations had best categorically refuse to work with certain photographers.  To put the matter delicately, if you were a woman working in modeling and you didn't want X to happen you made a point of never working with photographers Y or Z.  To put the matter discreetly, Terry Richardson didn't get a reputation in the fashion industry for taking the kinds of photographs that would be considered "art".  If you've never heard of him you are probably better off.  

I can make my point in a still different way.  The kind of "grace" that some people want for the artist who takes advantage of people, even particularly women, is not necessarily extended to athletics. There are things people are still willing to overlook or pardon in an "artist" like Woody Allen or Philip Roth or Richard Wagner or the proverbial Lord Byron that they aren't willing to pardon in a Larry Nassar or a Sandunsky or maybe a Lance Armstrong.  Nussbaum's book, of course, zeroes in on precisely how athletics is precisely another arena of activity where men are allowed to get away with a great deal but within the realm of defenses of "art" it is not that common to see those who would defend the license exercised by athletes or the coaches or trainers of athletes as being as defensible as the license exercised by artists.  If that's the case, why is that the case?

With Richard Brody's defense of his watching Woody Allen's films and refusing to grant that there is any "art" to Louis CK, he is arguably taking the stance of favoring survivorship bias.  It's easy to defend the already canonized on the grounds that the canonized art and the canonized artist was artful enough to retain canonicity.  In pop music John Lennon may have been a domestic abuser but his being a domestic abuser won't disqualify him from "Give Peace a Chance" at a larger cultural level.  To put the matter bluntly, Lennon may have been a hypocrite about giving peace a chance in the domestic sphere but he wasn't a hypocrite about giving peace a chance within the realm in which he made his plea.  Bill Cosby's hectoring moralizing ran aground so brutally on what turned out to be his personally exploitive relations to women he revealed a double standard that many feel vitiates his claims to being an artist.  

Mere hypocrisy, failing to live up to your ethical ideals, seems to be something we can pardon in artists because we can pardon that in people.  Double standards are different. When Jesus condemned the Pharisees and legal experts for judging people by standards they would not help people live up to it was arguably the double-standardized method of moral judgment Jesus was condemning.  If they were merely blind they would not be guilty but because they claimed to see their guilt remained.  In the epistle of James there's a warning "not many of you should aspire to be teachers" because teachers will be judged by a sterner standard.  If art religion remains with us it may not be a bad thing to decide that the priests of art religion really ought to be judged by higher standards than those who are not so consecrated. Arguing that celebrity or the conferred status of "artist" does not bring with it the kinds of things that are repeatedly reported as being done by artists doesn't have to be construed as an argument against "grace", if "grace" is a theological shibboleth that is defined in such a way that "I" get to keep consuming the "art" I want to consume.  

But it's just as easy to reframe all of this in non-religious terms or, taking a page from Wagner, to recognize that there is a concept of "sacred" that doesn't require religious belief.  What is sacred enough to people that they will still venerate the music of Michael Jackson even if all the things alleged about him were proven true?  Racial conciliation is one significant possibility.  I'm alive because of an interracial marriage so I don't have a problem proposing that Michael Jackson's music is still worth studying and that his vision of racial conciliation is worth considering despite what he may have done in other realms of life.  I still vastly prefer Stevie Wonder but at the moment I trust it's clear that my point is that there "are" cases to be made that values found in or imputed to artists and entertainers and their works make them worth visiting and revisiting even if they had more than mere feet of clay and had some well-known vices.  

The problem seems to be that a good deal of the "theology" of art religion expounds a doctrine of "grace" that is more focused on the liberty of the consumer to keep consuming than the responsibilities of art-religion clergy (however they attain that status) to, if you will, live in a manner worthy of their "calling".  

Another problem is that, well, it's one thing to say that writers are engineers of the human soul as a stand-in for what artists are expected to do and another thing to consider that the idea that artists (writers, but artists of all sorts) have such a role can just as easily be something besides Romantic Western liberalism.  It can also come about through Zhdanov style socialist realism, as Justin E. H. Smith lately expounded upon at moderate length:

https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/hr-managers-of-the-human-soul

In a speech to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow in 1934, Central Committee secretary Andreï Zhdanov reminded those assembled of Comrade Stalin’s recent declaration that, in the Soviet Union, writers are now “the engineers of the human soul”.

 

What obligations does this appellation entail? Most importantly, Zhdanov says, reality must be depicted “neither ‘scholastically’ nor lifelessly, nor simply as ‘objective reality’, but rather as reality in its revolutionary development. The truthfulness and historical exactitude of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation, of the education of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This method in fiction and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.”

It's absolutely no surprise he tipped his hat to the proverbial devil and made a case for why artists can be bad people who make compelling art.  An American expat to Paris might almost be expected to default to such a position. Someone who approvingly cites Adorno against pop culture might also default, as Adorno did, to the assumption that anything from the Soviet bloc by way of the arts was precluded from even being art but that's not actually where Smith lands.

Smith may have a stronger case that philosophy is not art and significant philosophers could be literal Nazis and still remain important to study:

...  

I understand that Roth’s posthumous legacy has met with some bumps recently, and it is hard not to suppose that the biographer who was responsible for seeing to it is now being punished in a sort of twofer deal: for his own real crimes, and for his deceased subject’s crimes of imagination. I don’t have much to add to the Roth/Bailey “discourse”. I don’t really know why people read literary biographies, let alone treat their authors as persons of public interest. For years I have struggled to come up with something interesting to say about the question of “moral luck” — interesting, that is, beyond the sort of hack position-taking that one is required to engage in for, say, a “Guest Essay” in the Times. I will say that I do not support anything so simplistic as “distinguishing between the artist and the work”, since it is fairly plain to me that often the moral rottenness of the artist is constitutive of the work. This extends even to philosophy, where any honest person will concede that Martin Heidegger was not “a great philosopher” who was “also a Nazi”, and that the whole challenge of dealing with Heidegger and his legacy is to figure out how Western philosophy developed in such a way that when Nazism emerged it made sense for at least one of its greatest expositors to offer his services as a handmaiden to this ideology. It is precisely for this reason that reading and understanding Heidegger is so urgent. There is nothing “honorific” about doing this; philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is.

...

I have already confessed in this space to a certain sympathy for the devil in my musical taste, and it should not be surprising to learn that this sympathy extends into literature as well. I have been through hell, aesthetically speaking. I was “brought up” on tales of lowlife criminality from Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs (another red flag, apparently), and all sorts of “hardcore shit” I won’t even bother to describe. I think I turned out alright, as did the great majority of those in my cohort of bourgeois decadent romantics.

These days I am more sensitive, and a convert to the Good. But I can’t help but think that this conversion is also a continuation, just as J.-K. Huysmans’ arch-Catholic En route completes the trilogy that begins with the satanic Là-bas, and that the journey through that valley has been a key element of my own moral education. Nor does it seem to me that the two are so easy to separate out from one another, no matter what Zhdanovism —which is also a Manicheanism— would have us believe. There is nothing more transgressive than St. Julien’s massacre of the animals, not to mention his subsequent massacre of his parents. In the end what elevates him to the status of a saint is not his anchorite retreat from the world in repentance for his sins, but rather his hallucinatory erotic tryst with a dying scabrous leper. This is something Flaubert is in part spinning out of his imagination, but if Lolita is spun out from the stories of “detectives, pimps, and prostitutes” that Zhdanov sees as populating bourgeois imperialist arts and culture, Flaubert is rather drawing on the source material of the medieval “legends of the saints” genre, notably the Genoese archbishop Jacques de Voragine’s thirteenth-century Légende dorée. Christian tradition, and the literatures it has produced, has generally been sensitive, in a way that Zhdanovism cannot be, to the fact that we human beings, qua human beings, have always been doing hardcore shit, and it is a purpose of art to lay this bare, and compel us to meditate on it 

... 

Hand waving concerns about the scruples of "artists" or lack thereof as some neo-Zhdanov activity can be easy for academics in Paris to do.

 …

I am currently translating one of the legends of the Sakha oral epic tradition known as Olonkho (I’ve written extensively about my work on this project here). A common narrative sequence in this tradition features an ogre, far more beastly than Humbert Humbert, spying on girls in the forest. The girls pee in turn, and the ogre observes to see which of them produces the urine with the most bubbles in it. This is taken to be a sign of fertility. When he determines which of the girls it is, he kidnaps her, and takes her off as his “wife”.

In the prenuptial ritual traditions of several Eurasian cultures, extending broadly from the western coast of the Black Sea all the way to the north of Lake Baikal and the Lena River basin, there is a moment where the groom’s family and friends simulate a kidnapping of the bride. The simulated quality of the ritual is generally obvious in more bourgeois and urban settings; as one moves out into the countryside, it becomes more difficult to say whether one is witnessing a sublimation, or indeed the real thing. The Olonkho motif with the ogre and the maiden is itself a more distant sublimation — correctly discerning the true monstrous nature of the men who perpetuate this tradition. It’s an evil tradition. Engineers of the human soul would wish to deal with this evil by suppression; literature, real literature, deals with it through the power of imaginative sublimation. It is dark and wrong, to speak with Moshfegh, and we understand ourselves through it. ...

We have, today, a Zhdanovshchina suited to the particularities of our times, one that promotes not so much an “engineering of souls” as a “human-resources management of souls”. The abrupt ascendancy of HR as the central organizing power of society extends far beyond literature, of course. It has certainly overtaken philosophy, the academic discipline I know best. In the middle ages philosophy was said to be the “handmaiden” [ancillaris] of theology; in the modern period it became the handmaiden of science. Today philosophy is in many respects an ancillary of human resources (as here, for example).

In literature as in philosophy, we may at least comfort ourselves with the enduring existence of the treasures of the past, to which at least for the moment our information technologies continue to provide us access. 

Then again, another variation on the Zhanovschina could be guys in Paris pontificating about how nobody over the age of forty should even know who Spider-man is.  Yes, well, since I had fun watching Alfred Molina play Otto Octavius I won't mind that he's reportedly coming back for the next Spider-man movie and I really hope Kathryn Hahn reprises her funny take on Doc Ock in the next Into the Spider-verse film.  The paradox of Zhdanov style socialist realism as a mentality is that it can manifest as readily as a fixation in those who oppose it as those who advocate it.  If we treat it as another variation in a post-Tolstoy conception that artists, if we are too admire them, should in some sense have earned that admiration, this is not that unusual or shocking.  If Nabakov can draw upon pulp what's the case that pulp is off-limits?  Smith doesn't take that view about Paula Abdul in contrast to opera, so why take that kind of stance in cinema and literature?  What's the case for studying Nabakov rather than Hammett? 

For those who don't invoke Zhdanov and socialist realism the trendier invocation is the Puritans.  Or Tolstoy comes up, or maybe even Charles Ives with his sentiment that if you are not first a good spouse and/or parent then the idea of being a good artist will be hard to sustain. So, sure, I prefer, where practical, that artists, writers and musicians aspire to be humane and generous.  I remember hearing a tale from my brother about a comic book discussion forum, no less, where when news about Bill Cosby's crimes began to spring up one person declared that he really, really wanted for Mr. Rogers to have actually been the guy he seemed to be on his show.  Mr. Rogers is the kind of person "we" make fun of at a cultural level for being pretty square and squeaky clean.  Fred Rogers would never be anyone's idea of a Byronic hero because he simply wasn't, and thank God for that (I suppose it doesn't contradict our understanding of him as a public figure to recall he was an ordained minister).

But a point raised by the woke and the social justice scene that still doesn't go away is who has defined and who gets to define what "real literature" is and what literature you have to read to get through undergraduate and graduate studies.  It may be that progressive American academics are in a figurative pissing context about what should be canonical and what shouldn't be for what reasons. That the debates can happen. Smith waxed philosophical, fairly literally, but the core question went by with a hand-wave about "real literature" and sublimation and an incessant thread of comparing anyone who might wonder why this or that literary figure has been canonized is on the side of Zhdanov, the formal advocate of socialist realism.

Which  brings me around to the late Nikolai Kapustin and the question of why it was that someone who was born and raised in a Soviet bloc nation that was stuck having to deal with Zhdanov style socialist realism ended up being more successful at synthesizing jazz and classical traditions in his 24 Preludes and Fugues than a bunch of Western European composers.

In almost any field anyone can make a case that bad people can have great accomplishments and we should have "grace" for them.  I'm a Presbyterian so I'm not going to argue against "grace", but I'm going to ask whether the "grace" people want to talk about is common grace or prevenient grace or sanctifying grace because a lot of art-religion seems to propose that the worsts people can make the most beautiful things and that beauty is what redeems us when we consume it.  There is, so to speak, no arguing against the intensity of the experience and palpable results. If the writer is an asshole but attains "art" by changing people's lives do we argue against that?  

Well ... I will admit to a concern. I heard similar arguments on behalf of, oh, Mark Driscoll here in Seattle, over the span of twenty years.  Maybe people will even concede Mark Driscoll is "an asshole" (I know someone who said this, literally) but he's changing lives.  At one point I still thought Mars Hill was capable of making positive contributions to the Seattle scene.  I changed my mind but it was not because I suddenly became progressive or particularly liberal.  I have remained what is probably best described as a kind of Mark Hatfield type Republican (f that exists any longer).  I concluded that the convictions I had not only didn't require me to give Mark Driscoll a pass for doing what he did but that it was also better to go find somewhere else to call church home. 

I admit to being skeptical about the idea, whether on the topic of art-religion or religion-religion, that if someone just gets results that people feel/think are "sublime" that all the other stuff can be forgiven.  There's room to propose that the Harvey Weinstein allegations have re-introduced the possibility of a Donatist controversy in the realm of Western art-religion.  Of course for the non-religious I want to find a way to reformulate this idea in more secularly comprehensible terms, and terms that don't presuppose being immersed in Christian doctrinal debate--well, one incredibly blunt way to reformulate the observation is to ask why Hollywood waited until Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump to have its moment of reckoning with the legacies of Weinstein and Bill Clinton.  If Justin E. H. Smith wanted to make an argument that had more sting he could have asked why that was but he didn't.  The argument that the earnestness of the censorious from the left and the right can often turn out to be in bad faith might be something of an argument ... if Smith had made it.

If the best Smith can do is to argue that social justice types and the woke are like Zhdanov in what they want and how they want to go about it that's a long and only occasionally artful ad hominem.  I'm not even exactly particularly progressive myself and I admit to not being trained in philosophy but I don't see that Smith has successfully pivoted from why philosophers can be jerks but we should study them to why writers can be jerks but we should study them.  It's possible to take that as axiomatic and still regard Smith's variation as having an element of bad faith.