Art for Art's Sake

There is a wonderful essay on contemporary art by Lewis Lapham. It is from the forward to Lapham's Quarterly, but is reproduced in TomDispatch.com. Here is just one of many snippets I enjoyed:

Usually I found myself on the wrong side of the critique, in some quarters regarded as an obsolete romantic, in others as a trivial bourgeois. Introduced to the modernist doctrines of alienation and despair, I took the notes but didn’t learn the lesson. The Bauhaus architecture I thought better suited for a barracks or a penitentiary; in the paintings of Mondrian and Kandinsky I could recognize little else except the surface of a decorative design. Nor in the works of Berg and Shostakovich could I identify the sound that from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century composers I’d learned to recognize as music.

The apparatchiks in the English department employed the techniques remarked upon by Billy Collins -- “tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it,” beat it with a hose “to find out what it really means.” I was less interested in what it really meant than in A. E. Housman’s definition of poetry as that which raises the hair on the chin while shaving. Despite four years of being told that art was somehow sacred, divorced from all sakes other than its own, I never learned to prefer the comprehension of the theory of the thing to a naive delight in the thing itself.

The whole of Lapham's essay is worth reading. And I expect that Lapham's Quarterly is well worth a subscription. I've always enjoyed Lewis Lapham's essays in Harper's Magazine and his many books. He is an acute observer of the human scene, or culture, and of its pretensions.

You really should read the whole of Lapham's essay. This bit where he talks about US government control of "the message of American art" is both serious and seriously sad:

To the generation coming of age in the forties and fifties, the distinction was important, maybe even bearing on what was to become of the American future. It was a generation infected with the idea that the arts were serious business, sharing with the late Walker Percy his novelist’s belief that all fiction can be used as an instrument of exploration and discovery, that “the novelist or poet in the future might be able to go further, to discover or rediscover… how it is with man himself, who he is, and how it is between him and other men.”

During the years of the Eisenhower administration, the portraits of novelists decorated the covers of Time magazine, the views of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer accorded the deference now placed at the feet of Warren Buffett. New plays on Broadway from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were as eagerly received as the musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Under the aegis of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the CIA was deploying American art as a Cold War weapon of mass instruction. Although the Allies had won the war against Hitler (won it in the name of democratic freedom and Western civilization), they appeared to be losing the peace to Stalin and the systems of totalitarian repression, and what was afoot in the 1950s was a contest for the good opinion of mankind. The communist agitprop on offer in Europe in 1947 pictured the United States as a materialist wasteland inhabited by gum-chewing shoe salesmen, lynchers of negroes ignorant of the works of Gramsci and Lukács.

The CIA undertook to suppress the rumors, directing the tactical movement of art exhibits to Venice, music festivals to Rome. Not satisfied with the wholesale distribution of wholesome texts, the agency pressed forward into the no man’s land of the avant-garde, seeking to show its prospective friends in Bremerhaven and Marseilles that American art was something more than a provincial reflection of European decadence.

No, by God, America was a great country, as rich in artists as it was in steel or corn, and here to prove it on the wall in Paris is the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock -- a real American from Cody, Wyoming, not a Hungarian refugee or a Princeton homosexual; virility incarnate, reckless and heavy-drinking, a fountain of acrylic orgasm; just the sort of fellow to represent the virtues of free enterprise, and whose paintings, nonfigurative and incoherent, embodied the antithesis of Soviet socialist realism. The aesthetic stamped with the seals of government approval matched the one embraced by the Beat poets howling in the California wilderness, marking out the road into an ecstatic future unregulated by death and taxes.

This bit ends with a bit of a tongue-in-cheek put down of the "wildness" of the beatnik rebels of the 1950s as "tools" of a CIA plot to sell America to the world. Funny because this cultural rebellion was squelched in the late 1960s (and continues to be the target of attack in the "culture wars" that have gone on ever since).

And here is the knife to the jugular vein:

America’s victories in World War II had established its military and economic predominance. In the 1950s, it was thought that a determined courting of the arts would bring forth works of genius of a match with the arriviste hegemon’s spiritual and moral grace. Other empires had done so, most notably Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England, France during the reign of Louis XIV. Surely the United States could produce something equally impressive. Was not America richer than any other country known to history? Were not its weapons more terrible, its virtues more abundant? How then could its painting not be more luminous, its literature more profound, its music more sublime?

These fond hopes and great expectations didn’t survive the epistemological shift during the 1960s to political and commercial sets of reference. The locus of advanced artistic opinion moved from the Greenwich Village bars to the pages of Women’s Wear Daily; Andy Warhol discovered a market for portraits of Campbell’s Soup cans, and the several forms of expression previously known as the “lively arts” were melted down into the alloy of the “media.” By the time President Ronald Reagan danced onto the White House stage in 1981, politics was fashion, news was entertainment, celebrity was art, literature a regional dialect spoken only in the universities.

Excellent!