Farts and Fetters--Daily

Somehow, the three new items posted at Arts & Letters Daily on Friday, December 3 seem wholly typical of the kind of commentary this otherwise useful website has favored almost since it made its appearance in the cultural cybersphere. In general, A&L Daily likes to present links to articles the editors seem to think are "contrarian," but they're really not. Most of the time they're entirely consistent with prevailing ideas among conservative writers, journalists, and academics who have themselves more or less become the established sources of opinion in a mainstream media and political culture that has been given over to conservative conventional wisdom. And it will become only more firmly embedded now that G.W. Bush has been reelected.

The first, an essay from Art News Online that would otherwise, shorn of the reactionary context a link from A&L Daily provides, seem innocuous enough, describes a return to representation among painters previously known to use abstraction. What seems to be at issue is not a rejection of abstraction per se, but the shift from one mode to the other by artists who find working in only one needlessly restrictive. The essay concludes by asserting that "Today, deciding to paint figuratively or abstractly, artists and curators agree, is no longer considered a problem. 'My own sense is that it is now a false distinction,' says Robert Rosenblum, a professor at New York University and a curator at the Guggenheim. . .'The issue is why paint at all versus whether what you paint is representational or not,' adds [Russell] Ferguson. 'If you are going to paint, paint what you want.'"

This seems to me a perfectly sensible view. Indeed, if painting has reached the stage where both representation and abstraction are seen as possible strategies to be used to accomplish particular goals, then the modernist/postmodernist "revolution" has triumphed. Painting "what you want" is now an uncontroversial approach.

But anyone who visits Arts & Letters Daily knows perfectly well that this is not the idea it wants to promote by linking to Art News. As it did vis-a-vis writers and narrative in the recent link to Julian Evans's silly essay on the "return of story," A&L Daily is instead suggesting that in returning to representation artists are perhaps now coming to their senses, have rejected all that fancy-pants avant-garde stuff and are again defining "art" as it ought to be defined: the painting of pretty pictures. This is analagous to Evans's notion that linear narrative is needed in fiction to overcome the "modernist attitudes" and "the meanness and the fear of involvement" brought on by "introspection and irony." Can't all those writers and artists just get with the program and play nice?

The second item, a Wall Street Journal article by Roger Kimball on Umberto Eco's History of Beauty, might again seem to the uninitiated a hamless enough discussion of Eco's book, except that Kimball is of course a well known conservative arts critic, writing in perhaps the foremost conservative newspaper in the country. (And both Kimball and the WSJ are frequently featured on A&L Daily.) Kimball, at least, disavows the association of art and beauty with fluff. He has much bigger ideas in mind:

Mr. Eco is ever alive to such paradoxes of beauty, its strange filiations with its opposite--the ugly--and with its explosive counterpart, the sublime, which might be described as the beautiful startled by an electric current. His book touches on the melancholy fact that much contemporary art is less about beauty than other more brittle realms of experience: "the interesting," "the challenging," "the transgressive," not to mention the perverse and the inane.

And what about beauty? We live at a time when many important words and ideas survive in maimed or diminished form. Think of what has happened to the word "virtue," for instance, or "respectable," and the realities they name. It is the same with "beauty." Sometimes it seems synonymous with the merely pretty or insipidly anodyne. The real pulse of art, of life, seems elsewhere.

Mr. Eco seeks to disabuse us of such diminishment. He does not, I believe, quote Dostoyevsky, but "History of Beauty" might be taken as an illustration of Dostoyevsky's observation that "beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil war for the soul of man."

It's telling that in attempting to revitalize the concept of beauty, Kimball wants to connect it with "virtue" and "respectability," but what's most interesting in this passage is that after noting that many people seem to find beauty frivolous, he doesn't try to rescue aesthetic beauty from such misconceptions at all but instead quotes Dostovesky on beauty as theology. Dostoevsky? I'm admittedly less taken with Dostoevsky as a writer than most other people seem to be, but where in any of Dostoevsky's fiction is there any evidence that he cared about the creation of aesthetic beauty in the least? (If we heed Nabokov's critique of Dostoevsky as a stylist, we know he certainly had no interest in language as an aesthetic medium.) Kimball seems more concerned with religion and with abstract metaphysical doctrines than with anything that could tangibly be called beauty--in an aesthetic or any other material sense.

The third article is a straighforward political screed in which Anne Applebaum dismisses anyone who questions American policy toward Ukraine, or any other aspect of American foreign policy, as being "freedom haters" and "anti-American." Its the sort of blinkered and paranoid neocon argument to which we have by now surely become accustomed, but its appearance on A&L Daily is also entirely typical of the kind of political view this site implicitly endorses. (How often does it link to articles in Counterpunch, or even The Nation, that challenge the accepted wisdom of what has become the conservative establishment, that question such wisdom at least as vehemently as Applebaum seems to question the views of the "Western left"?) I think it would be very hard for anyone who monitors Arts & Letters Daily on any kind of consistent basis to deny that the neocon-ish sneering at the antics of "the left" represented by Applebaum's article is essentially A&L Daily's own preferred political take on current affairs.

The Arts & Letters Daily worldview seems to perceive all truly contrarian opinions and practices, whether in politics or art and literature, as the collective expressions of radical leftists and dippy postmodernists. They are approached not usually with outright scorn but with mock surprise (Can you believe these people?) and unconcealed sarcasm. Usually they are conflated, as if political dissidents and artists were all members of the same infernal club, always conspiring to undermine Western values and American hegemony. This is done both through the specific articles to which the site links and the often unfair characterizations of other articles provided by the site's own teasers. The result is a website whose motto, "truth hates delay," would appear to mean that all those enemies of truth--those who don't accept the political wisdom of the Bushworld idea men, who don't accept the reduction of art and culture to social ritual and traditional metaphysics--need to be dealt with posthaste. Because of its permanent links, and because it does still occasionally link to worthwhile items from non-mainstream sources, A&L Daily remains a site worth visiting. But in my opinion, if you think what you're getting there is an objective survey of "arts and letters," you're not paying very close attention.

Comments

[Amardeep]

AMEN.

I have been feeling that way for awhile. I still go there constantly; a lot of the links are the real deal.

Maybe we should clone the A&L Daily format and put up truly eclectic linkage. Including some choice 'low culture' and truly eccentric stuff.

"Arts & Ideas Daily" ? (Maybe just to make a point to Mr. Dutton)

[Philip Munger]

I agree about Arts & Letters skewing neocon right overall, though I have sorted through their columns in search of evidence of links between serious composers and social or environmentalist activism.

My personal experience with the site is that in May, 2004 I wrote to them, giving links to a number of articles which had been written about a disagreeable experience I had had the preceding April, while trying to produce a musical work about Rachel Corrie. They didn't write back, but other web sites which either linked to the articles or chose not to at least had the courtesy to answer my letter.

The site contains vast amounts of drivel, as you point out, but also a fair number of useful reviews and articles.

[George Wallace]

Your point being what, exactly? That ALD is hornswoggling innocent culture consumers? That Denis Dutton owes an obligation to leave his personal philosophies at the door?

Mr. Dutton has never made any secret of his particular slant on culture, which readers are free to take or leave. He is an editor, and he edits to suit his own tastes; surely there's nothing scandalous in that.

As you rightly say, "if you think what you're getting there is an objective survey of 'arts and letters,' you're not paying very close attention." And if what you see there offends you, it is easy to avoid. Those who want (or don't object to receiving) their cultural links with a solid left-ward slant have ample alternatives, such as "WOOD S LOT". There is plenty of room, and plenty of value to be had from, both.

[Dan Green]

I like Amardeep's idea of an alternative A&L Daily that, ideally, would attempt a fair survey of "arts and letters." I visit wood s lot almost every day, and there's lots of good stuff there, but finally it is in its way as politicized a view of culture as Arts & Letters Daily's.

[Matt]

What on earth would an unpoliticized view of culture be? There is nothing "solid left" about Denis Dutton. Philistine, yes.

[Dan Green]

"Culture" as in "arts and letters." "Unpoliticized" as in without reference to its ultimate political utility or implications. Such a thing is perfectly possible. All of the dogmatic assertions that everything is political are just malarkey.

[Matthew C Harrison]

But if, as you've asserted, prevailing ideas have been given over to a mainstream media dominated by conservative conventional wisdom, what exactly can "unpoliticized" mean? Surely if this statement is true, then the arts and letters discussed cannot help but lean toward the mainstream, if only in numerical prevalence. Is this not what Arts & Letters Daily has been accused of? If not a numerical average, then what? Who will judge the absolute scale from which representational works are drawn?

I too find the idea of a "cultural spider" to be an interesting one, but ultimately would it not be seen equally as political as its reader?

Rather, if you are going to represent culture, why not represent what you want?

[Dan Green]

"But if, as you've asserted, prevailing ideas have been given over to a mainstream media dominated by conservative conventional wisdom, what exactly can "unpoliticized" mean?"

I don't understand this statement. Unpoliticized means unpoliticized. Unlike the current mainstream media, which at present happens to be conservative.

[Kevin Holtsberry]

I think it would be helpful if you were more clear about your terms. You seem to thow out the terms conservative and neo-con a lot but leave the definitions a bit vauge. There are big differences between and within conservatives. Are you talking philosophical, cultural, political, theological? Someone can be consdered conservative in an orthodox way - not wanting radical change - but not be politically conservative at all. There are also those that are conservative/traditional about culture but not neccesarily fans of President Bush, etc.

Just looking at recent links there are stories from the New Yorker, Slate, the Nation, CS Monitor and more. To call these sources conservative in a political way is to make the term useless. I get our point about art for art's sake instead of art as a cultura war weapon, but I think you are off base when you try to tie this in to current electoral politics.

[Dan Green]

Kevin,

The A&L Daily brand of conservatism seems to me to be of the neocon variety. You are assuredly correct that in many ways neocon philosophy is in serious conflict with traditional conservatism. And I really don't have that much trouble with a traditionally "conservative" view of art and culture (well, some trouble). I just don't see it being expressed much these days.

[David Sucher]

Perhaps what you (and I) object to these days at A&LD is what I see as a cheap, "gotcha" conservatism which seizes on silly posturing at the extreme -- and what school of thought/belief doesn't have people who get carried away? -- and characterizies that silly thought as mainstream.

[Lynn S]

It always surprises me whenever anyone characterizes the mainstream media as "Conservative."

[Dan Green]

If I were to label the "mainstream" media as a whole, I would probably characterize it not so much as "conservative" but as "compliant." Deferential to established authority.

[Alex Leibowitz]

"In ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul."

This isn't just an example of the conservative slant of AL Daily, but of poor scholarship and shoddy intellectualism. If it's possible to be a pseudo-intellectual on the left, it's just as possible on the right.