The Hangmen of the
Arts
The Ways of Fraud
The arts, I say, constitute a brazen
fraud—the arts at least as peddled in boutiques, sanctified in
galleries, and rattled-on about by professors who ought to find
productive jobs.
To begin with, the poseurs who have
awarded themselves charge of the arts wouldn’t recognize an art if they
found it swimming in their soup. It is true. Start with literature. I
have read several times over the years of wags who copied out three
chapters of some classic—The Reavers, or Moby Dick
(“Call me Fishmeal.”)—and sent them, perhaps with the names changed, to
publishing houses in New York. Invariably they were rejected. The
professional judges of manuscripts recognized neither the books nor
good writing. You would get better results having literature judged by
a committee of taxi-drivers.
I ask you this: Suppose I went
pub-crawling in London and stumbled on an unknown play by Shakespeare,
the equal of Lear and unquestionably genuine. Maybe Shakespeare had
left his driver’s license with it. Suppose further that I sent it to
New York, and to the English department at Harvard (which these days
might or might not have heard of Shakespeare) and told them that it was
my senior essay in creative writing at Texas A&M.
Are you sufficiently hallucinatory to
expect an explosion of appreciation? “My god, we’ve found genius in the
outback!” or maybe, “Geez, this kid writes like he’d actually been
there!”
No. There would be condescension and
polite silence. The perfessors don’t think old Bill is good because he
is good, which they are not capable of ascertaining, but because he is
Bill. You could show them a pizza order signed “Willybill S.,”on
decayed parchment, tell them that it was found at Stratford, and they
would wet themselves with emotion. Double cheese, anchovies.
Fact is, most art isn’t. Let some
cultural executioner hang anybody in a museum, and he becomes Art, sort
of by appointment. The critics will then make a career of sitting
around appreciating themselves for appreciating him. Criticism is about
critics; the art is barely necessary.
Or again, take The Bard, as we say
more pompously than absolutely necessary—good phrase-maker, tired
plots, low plausibility, but suitable for a quick buck with a mob
audience. Twelve thousand PhD theses later and he’s had all manner of
dreadful significance read into him that would never have occurred to
the man.
On television I saw the story of a
rich woman in New York who had, she thought, and so did others, a
genuine Somebody. You know, Renoir or Gauguin or what have you. She was
no end proud, kept it in a thermally controlled room, and fed it
nothing but exotic cheeses and designer water. Critics came to visit
it. They said, “Ah! The light…” and “Oh! The masterly play of…” and
“Only He could have….” Then it turned out that the paint had been made
in 1947. The value dropped by several million dollars, the critics
vanished, and the woman probably didn’t commit suicide but it would
have been a good end to the story.
Which shows that painting has nothing
to do with beauty but only with sniffishness and social predation among
the cerebrally understated with too much money. A Degas on the Upper
West Side (I think that's a good address) is the equivalent of, in a
sports bar, a baseball signed by Willy Mays. (If the ball were signed
“Claude Monet,” it would be in a temperature-controlled case on the
Upper West Side.) Should a painting be adjudged of value for what it
looked like, then you wouldn’t care who did it. But when the point of
the game is name-dropping, then the only reliable art critic is a mass
spectrometer.
But if we rashly assume that art has
something to do with beauty (it doesn’t), think about copies. In Italy
a girlfriend and I once went to see Michelangelo’s David (“Old Marble
Dick,” she called him. Women have no respect.) Now, David’s a pretty
good statue. I won’t deny it. He could hold a lantern on my
lawn any day, though he might need pants. What if you took a laser
scanner and made a copy of Dave accurate to within the radius of a
marble atom (we’ll assume here that marble is atomic) and colored it
perfectly? Let’s say that no critic yet born could tell it from the
original. So why wouldn’t it be worth as much?
Because art isn’t about Beauth or
Trudy. It’s about staying ahead of the Hirschorns. It’s a scam. It’s a
racket.
You may now want to say, “Fred, you
obviously think that there is no art. How can you be such a cultural
Philippine? Can centuries of art critics all be wrong?” Sure. And, yes,
I could think that there was no art. I am professionally perverse
enough. Anyway, you can see the evidence in any museum.
But in fact I don’t think it. Actually
there is lots of art. Thing is, unless you build a museum around it, it
doesn’t count.
Look, there are three hundred million
people in the United States, let alone everywhere else. Artistically
this is probably equivalent to ten billion Frenchmen in 1890 because
almost all Americans have the time and minor disposable income to paint
or play the saxophone in a chamber group. Most don’t. But they could.
Yes, the truth is that lots of those Impressionistic frogs were really
damned good. But can you possibly imagine that America, or France for
that matter, couldn’t find twenty times as many people as good today if
we looked?
It wouldn’t take much looking. In
Washington D of C, there is the Corcoran Gallery, which annually has a
contest in which (I think I have this right) every state sends
paintings by a couple of its best high-school artists. This is an
extraordinarily good idea, but they do it anyway. I know about this
because my daughter Macon was in it for Virginia and ended up getting
her stuff sent to New York somewhere to be hung for a while, like John
Brown. (Talent skips generations. That’s why.)
Anyway, I propose the following for
any who are interested in art: Go to Washington when the Corcoran has
the show. Start by spending several days at the National Gallery on the
Mall. The collection is pretty good. In addition to the usual there are
paintings by Thomas Cole, Cropsey, Durand, Church and suchlike that you
don’t hear about because they aren’t European. (More fraud. See?) Of
course there is the tiresome Early Christian stuff, all gold foil and
grotesque misshapen babies, and overdone post-card painters like Redon.
Never mind. A fair bit of it is tolerable.
Don’t go in the usual state of
intimidation expected of hayseeds in galleries: “Gee, I’m just a lowly
pedestrian slug, and in the presence of genius, and don’t understand
Art, and if it looks like this turkey can’t draw, there must be
something wrong with me….” More likely, the turkey can’t draw.
Then go to the Corcoran to see what the kids have done. You will find
freshness, imagination, and unabashed talent. You can't call it that,
though, without showing yourself to be a rube. If you told the critics
it had been found in Cezanne's basement, or a tomb in Egypt, they would
run for their swooning couches like a herd of enraptured bison, so
great would be their appreciation. But if it's signed by Sally
Tugwinkle of Broken Needle, Arkansas...naah, doesn't count.
Ages ago when my younger daughter
Emily, now a blues singer in San Francisco, was eight or nine, we went
to the Hirschorn in DC. There we encountered a white canvas, about the
size of a ping-pong table, blank except for a red circle, as large as a
healthy orange, in one corner. It was Art. The museum said so. We
dutifully appreciated at it. Later I asked her what she thought.
The scorn would have curdled motor
oil.
“Big deal. A red dot. Gag me.”
Sound judgement, clarity of
expression, no frou-frous. Now that’s criticism.
©Fred Reed
www.FredOnEverything.net
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"A celebrity is a person who works
hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to
avoid being recognized."
--Fred Allen
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"Scientists now say that house cats
can get Alzheimer's disease. Here's
my question, how can you tell? My cat sleeps twenty-three and a half hours a day, has no idea who I am
when I walk in, and he stares at a
ball of yarn. Isn’t that Alzheimer’s? I don’t’ know."
--Jay Leno
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"Only two things are infinite, the
universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
--Albert Einstein
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Signs You're Watching Too Much College
Football
10. During breakfast, you ask your son
to pass the Nokia Sugar Bowl
9. Canceled family trip to Mexico,
going to Boise State instead
8. Mailed nude photos of yourself to
Brent Musburger
7. Insist on being called "Coach" even
though you're a dentist
6. Told your daughter, "I'd love to go
to your wedding, but the Northern Illinois-TCU game is on"
5. Every time you walk ten yards,
three of your friends have to move the chains
4. Instead of a shower, you dump a
bucket of Gatorade on yourself
3. Always asking, "What would Joe
Paterno do?"
2. Your solution to Iraq - "I dunno, a
playoff system?"
1. In bed, your wife says, "Get a
Trojan" - you come back with USC Kicker Mario Danelo
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One day Jake, a
nine-year-old, asked to pack his own lunch for school. His mom agreed.
But they couldn't agree on what he should pack, so they both made lists.
This was the mom's list:
One sandwich
One apple
Pretzels
A carton of milk
This was Jake's list:
Candy
Candy
Candy
Jake agreed to
compromise. Sure enough, the next morning, Jake was ready for school
and he packed his lunch. His mom came to check his lunch, and this is
what he had:
An ice cream sandwich
A caramel apple
White chocolate-covered
pretzels with sprinkles on top
A carton of Nesquik
chocolate milk
And a bag of candy, of
course, for dessert.
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OK, move along, that's all there is, move along
please ....