variations on a theme at Current Affairs, populism is terrible if it isn't left populism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/why-conservatism-can-never-be-populist

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/isnt-right-wing-populism-just-fascism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/11/huey-long-and-the-power-of-populism

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/the-falls-mark-e-smith-was-a-cipher-for-modern-populism

You might get the idea that if any kind of populism is even good, it's one kind.  It is, after all, Current Affairs. 

The Anxieties of Empires and decolonizing musicology, how Anglo-American musicology is having a debate about the primacy of German music, sort of

If the British Empire and it's spin-off the United States of America had not more or less continuously exerted world-defining influence and power across the entire planet we might not be seeing the back and forth debates we've been seeing about whether or not Anglo-American musicology needs to be "decolonized" by way of giving less emphasis to the would-be German empire we helped defeat in two wars inside the last century.

For reasons I admit I have not discerned, Norman Lebrecht has posted as an “exclusive” that J. P. E. Harper-Scott has decided to withdraw from academia in response to “woke” musicology.   A dutiful addition of a composer who “can’t be decolonized” was added that mentioned that Franz Liszt could not be decolonized.  

But how can the announcement have been an “exclusive” when it was sitting at Harper-Scott’s website for the whole world to read?

https://jpehs.co.uk/why-i-left-academia/

…

I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.

 

Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.

 

The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.  …

So Harper-Scott has announced he has left academia.  This move seems indicative, writing as someone outside academia, like a small part of a set of conflicts between British leftists and American progressives in Anglo-American musicology.  Harper-Scott is hardly a political reactionary but Americans might get the idea that he is. The tricky thing about attempting to parse debates and battles through a left/right binary is that there’s no shortage of radical musicians in terms of politics who were traditionalist in their musical styles (Hans Eisler, for instance, or a raft of Soviet composers).  Ian Pace has been arguing for both leftist politics and against what he regards as the “deskilling” of musicology, as well as having a discussion about the hegemonic influence of Anglo-American popular musics.  Harper-Scott has, so far, not struck me as being nearly as specific as Pace.  That sort of thing was on my mind when I wrote “hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer “ years ago. British musicologists being concerned about the hegemonic influence of American popular music can sincerely think that in terms of market presence Anglo-American pop has ruled the world and that Anglo-American pop could and has included blues and jazz.

At Hyperallergic, Noah Fischer makes an argument that the art world needs a non-pejorative definition of populism but that since Trump's election populism has been cast in strictly negative terms

https://hyperallergic.com/615843/why-the-art-world-needs-populism/

...

In short, these have been victorious years for anti-populists, who maintained their economic status quo while successfully rebranding exclusive cities, companies, and cultural institutions as the frontlines of progressive struggle.  But what is populism, anyway?

Just about four years ago, President Obama said: “I’m not prepared to concede the notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been popping up is populist.” He was referring to Trump’s racial-bullhorn campaign rallies, and still believed the term to be contested — that it could mean standing with the people in their struggle against financial elites — the rhetoric he’d employed in his 2008 campaign.  But after the 2016 election, US populism has been pulled into line with Europe’s decades-long use of the term to mean basically, nativism — and the hazardous and cynical manipulation of an ignorant populace by authoritarian leaders.

This negative framing of populism isn’t new to contemporary art. While major museums have long tipped their hats to popular tastes with exhibitions on Star Wars or motorcycles, skepticism of the general populace is embedded not just in the art world’s proximity to the one percent of one percent, but arguably in the socially vulnerable nature of the avant-garde. In the late ‘90s, for example, NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani deemed the YBA “Sensation” show which had travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, “sick stuff,” focusing on Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) painting as an offence worthy of defunding the museum.

...

One of the points I've made here at Wenatchee The Hatchet since Trump got elected is that it's been troubling to see arts journalism define populism in strictly pejorative terms.  Since Trump's election it has been easy for well-established critics at venerable journalistic institutions to come up with patently idiotic appraisal of the most boilerplate liberal messages in mainstream popular level films.  Take Richard Brody's claim that Brad Bird promoted authoritarian populism in The Incredibles 2, for instance. This was the same Brody who claimed that Lady Susan Vernon didn't break any of the "important" rules of ethical behavior in Whit Stillman's Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship, which anyone who has even passing familiarity with Austen's writings knows is not the case. The possibility that something can be popular and have a populist aim without being "authoritarian" has seemed difficult for arts journalists, whether fine arts or performing arts, to even consider.

Fischer added:

...

In his short book What is Populism, German political philosopher and Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller calls populism “the permanent shadow of representative politics.” His book argues that populism wherever it is found, is based on narrowly defining “the people,” so that populists always oppose pluralism. And yet, anti-populism conveniently justifies the rule of a benevolent elite, tasked to defend the nation against the uncouth, messy, and dangerous impulses of its masses. The book was assigned for the incoming Princeton class of 2021—an appropriate first instruction for a stratum preparing to helm the nation’s top institutions.

In a representative democracy, elites do, to some extent, have to contend with the voice of the street. Anti-populism therefore depends on incorporating popular imagery and language —even including the language of uprising— into the walls of their impenetrable institutions. The instruments of art, academia, and public relations/advertising are called on to perform this incorporation. Georgetown philosophy professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò explains how the concept of “elite capture” can be used to describe, “how political projects can be hijacked — in principle or in effect — by the well positioned and resourced.”  ...

This being an article at Hyperallergic the end goal is a left populism for the author but the points are worth considering across the spectrum of political and economic theories--why did it become so easy for arts institutions to cast all forms of populism as revanchist nativism?  Does a focus on representation within arts production make things better for Americans who are not working in the arts?  

Personally I don't have any problem writing about Wenzel Matiegka's guitar sonatas and Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar on the one hand and then turning around and writing about Batman: the animated series on the other. I wrote years ago that it's one thing for film critics to complain that Hollywood keeps recycling the same old franchises and another thing to provide some feasible explanation for why this happens, and I proposed that if we actually look at which franchises keep coming back or staying around there's a pattern--that the franchises that stick around in Hollywood tend to be utopian or dystopian touchstones of pop culture in the JFK/LBJ "Camelot" era of the American civil religions or the Reagan era.  Thus "Nostalgia and the Anxieties of Empire: Toward a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia" 

Pointing out that the sci-franchises America keeps recycling cluster around the Camelot and Reagan era political mythologies is at least a theory as to why Hollywood is not merely "running out of ideas" but why they keep drawing from Star Trek, Star Wars, Planet of the Apes or trying to riff on Robocop.  The theory could even potentially explain why some reboot attempts keep failing to gain momentum a la Charlie's Angels.  None of which is to say that The Exorcist can't come back in some form, I was playing more with the basic idea that we should move beyond the critical bromide that "Hollywood has run out of ideas" to see if we can find any patterns in what franchises keep coming back.  If you factor in the 1980s and how G. I. Joe and Transformers were toy lines then you have to consider that the playtime kids had with those toys is  inextricably bound up with the films. 

Even Richard Brody could claim he enjoyed moments in the Bay-formers movies for replicating the experience of being a kid dumping all the toys out of the box to play some chaotic scene with them.  Right, Brody's still wrong to claim George Miller doesn't give or have as much fun as Michael Bay but if Brody can "get" the idea that he brings his memory of his own playing with toys as a kid to cut Michael Bay any slack as a film-maker he's at least tried to think about why anyone would greenlight the Bayformers films.  But then Brody could turn around and describe Brad Bird's Incredibles 2 as "authoritarian populism".

If the only kinds of populism that can exist are the kinds that American arts journalists and musicians the Western world over think will just vote for Trump then that cedes the whole concept of any kind of populism in the arts (and politics) to people like Trump and I would think that liberals, progressives and leftists would want to question why that has to be the case.  The article I've quoted from Hyperallergic clearly shows a writing who identifies with the left asking why this conflation of "populism" with "reactionary" has been so easily embraced in the arts.

is there any other kind of populism in the arts today than "authoritarian populism"? Some thoughts on Ian Pace's comments on Stuart Hall and authoritarian populism

Charles Rosen, in theThe Classical Style (ISBN 0-393-31712-9 PBK), stated that by the 1790s Haydn had developed and refined a style that was both deliberately popular and steeped in the intellectual and practical riches of learned technique.  

Only for one brief historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn, and some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the street song. (page 329)

I'm aware that there are cases made that the "canon" of dead white guys is racist, however, I am not quoting Rosen's work as a boilerplate defense of dead white guys in music.  I happen to love Haydn's music and think Mozart is over-rated and over-played.  My primary point in quoting Rosen is to point out something he said about Haydn's work, even if (and perhaps especially if) we're confining discussion of music written by the "canon" of dead white guys, that there was a brief historical period in the operas of Mozart and the late symphonies of Haydn as well as in Schubert songs where there was no opposition between the popular and the learned.  

Contemporary academic discussions of populism since 2016 have a strong current of defining "populist" and "populism" in authoritarian terms.  I've discussed Jacques Ellul's "populist agitator" propagandist in the past yet in the arts one of my concerns in the last four years has been that populist ideas have been defined in such strictly pejorative terms the very idea that there can be any positive populist impulse has been moved off the proverbial table.  Thus ... I'm half skeptical of Ian Pace's skepticism about authoritarian populism not because there's nothing to the concern as stated but because I'm wondering if there's any other kind of populism these days in the minds of academics than authoritarian populism.  I'll proceed to quotes from Pace on that topic.

https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/my-contribution-to-the-debate-on-authoritarian-populism-and-impure-futures-the-legacy-of-stuart-hall/