Thursday, September 20, 2007

Art and Life

I just heard a debate on Woman's Hour about whether art should be condemned on the basis of the artist's life. Here is the background story. Eric Gill seems to be the big problem. Gill, a catholic, sculpted the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral. But he indulged in paedophilia, bestiality and who nows what else? The first point to make here is that it's the paedophilia that matters. If Gill had merely had sex with animals or indulged in any other gross perversion, I suspect the issue would not have come up. Indeed, in the case of Caravaggio, a murderer, it very seldom comes up. But paedophilia is our age's one great blasphemy and, even beyond the grave, paedophiles must be persecuted.  But the idea of censoring art in response to the crimes - any crimes - of the artist is noxious and absurd. Orwell once asked if we would think any differently about Shakespeare if it was revealed he assaulted little girls on trains. The answer is that our feelings about Shakespeare the playwright should be unaffected. Unfortunately the thought process behind this seems to be too subtle for those people who just love banning things. Of course the art and the life interact, but this does not compromise the autonomy of the art. I have just been reading Emily Dickinson. It is essential to know something about the life if the poems are to be fully understood. But the poems still stand alone to be judged as poetry; it is, after all the poems and only the poems that make us wonder about the life. The whole point about art is that it transcends the artist; that's why and how it works, that's why we can understand great art that is centuries or millennia old. But the contemporary imagination is affronted by anything that transcends the contemporary. It is affronted, in particular, by beauty.

19 comments:

  1. It does make a difference, at least here. If I know unpleasant facts from the life, a part of me will hold back, become diffident and stubborn, when contemplating the work. I suppose, in some sense, I don't want to be held hostage by a very sick mind. I'd hope I can still appreciate the heights to which that mind aspired, but as for uncritical admiration - nope. It's not being judgemental of a person; call it a survival instinct, and partly unconscious at that. I'd be surprised if plenty of other people don't react in a similar fashion.

    As for banning stuff and the mania for seeking the contemporary in everything to the point of rank intolerance, you are spot on imho. Ben Jonson killed someone in a duel but got off pleading benefit of clergy. By our lights, he was at best guilty of manslaughter and at worst of murder. But of course that wasn't how the world of the time looked at such things, any more than the great writers of antiquity should be castigated for keeping slaves.

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  2. I agreed with most of what you had to say until the last two lines. On what are you basing the notion that the contemporary imagination is affronted by beauty? That's just wrong, though it is true that contemporary *artists* are giving us little enough that is beautiful. The average person, however, still craves beauty.

    Ahh, Emily, queen of dash and dammerung. I guess if you know nothing about her life, reading her poems are the equivalent of reading Ashbery's -- his also sound like overheard conversations that don't make much sense out of context. And I know you love him, too. But I like Dickinson far better: Everybody understands why you can't stop for death, but it will stop for you, even if that loaded gun in the corner remains a puzzler.

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  3. Agree on the whole. However, knowing an artist was thoroughly unpleasant does muddy the waters a little. We associate great art with noble types. A myth of course, but there you go. To find out that an artist was involved in all kinds of pretty ignoble activities detracts a little from the overall experience of contemplation - it intrudes somewhat.

    As for whether the contemporary imagnination is affronted by beauty, I wouldn't know. All I can say is that there is a lot of ugliness around. Also, you don't hear the word beauty very much these days. Things are nice, or have a "wow factor", or are fashionable or whatever, but rarely straightforwardly beautiful.

    It would appear that prosperity is bad for art - it's production and appreciation. I'm not sure what I mean by that, it's just my impression.

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  4. I should think that a substantial part of the demographic that considers itself a lover of art, literature and music would be quite mortified if any of the artists, composers or writers who they profess to adore actually came back from history and moved in next door Bryan. They wouldn't want to see how these people lived the lives that left us what they left us anymore than they would want to think about what goes on in the abbatoir whilst they eat their sunday roast. If a precedent was set for banning anything created by anyone who did anything we disapproved of then we'd all be living in some kind of giant Milton Keynes in no time

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  5. Good post Bryan. A small army of little folk puff themselves up by exposing the shortcomings of the great. For example, recent hatchet jobs on Koestler, Orwell and others.

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  6. What makes it all worse is that we live in a time when the Life is seen as of so much intrinsic interest that it often entirely eclipses the Work - look at the scale of the biography industry (often lives of writers who are barely read). Today's General (non)Reader more often than not knows nothing of the work and one thing of the life - and that one thing is usually wrong. Ruskin and the pubic hair is a classic case in point.
    Odd though, isn't it, that Lewis Carroll survives in such good odour and is even read...

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  7. Good point about Carroll, Nige. It's sad the Ruskin pubic hair thing isn't true.

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  8. What makes you say that, Bryan? I thought he did expect Effie to resemble a hairless white marble statue?

    At any rate, what I remember most about Ruskin (most of whose works I've read as I studied with one of his biographers) is his unhappy death -- he was screaming about snakes. Oh, yeah -- and his love for that poor kid, Rose. Ruskin was really screwed up by his cold parents. In one of his autobiographical fragments he writes about his main amusement in childhood: Studying the patterns in the persian carpet. Why? Cause he wasn't allowed to have any toys.

    Sick. Rather have the McCanns for parents than the Ruskins!

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  9. Only responding to nige's remark, Susan. He is a big Ruskinian - or was.

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  10. I like Ruskin's art criticism a lot. Love "Stones of Venice." And I love the Pre-Raphaelites, too. If Nige is not you (or even if he is) and if he gets to these shores, I shall personally escort him to the Pre-Raphaelite collection at the museum in Wilmington, DE. The DuPonts (I think it must have been them) have amassed a bigger collection of Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Rossetti and the boys than you will find anywhere -- at least, bigger than I have found anywhere.

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  11. erm, yes. but I don't get what you mean by those last two lines either. what's beauty got to do with it?

    presumably it is also okay to commission art from *known* paedophiles? I mean, if it doesn't affect the quality of the work. Or is that going a bit too far?

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  12. At the time, it was his move to Rome, which was seen as 'odd'.
    But, how perfect is the glass blower, who with his breath has made your wine glass. And how perfect does he need to be.

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  13. Bryan, what were you doing listening to Woman's Hour? Does it hold a particular fascination for you?

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  14. As I always say, these damn revisionists will have to pry my Gary Glitter 'Greatest Hits' LP out of my cold dead hands before I give it up.

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  15. My original Eric Gill print is staying firmly on the wall. It is perfectly possible, and necessary I believe, to separate the creator from the creation.

    And Susan, if it's quantities of Pre-Raphaelites you are after, next time you visit the UK you should go to the City Art Galleries in Birmingham and Manchester, the Leverhulme Collection in Port Sunlight near Liverpool and, of course, Tate Britain. Bit of a whistlestop tour, but worth it.

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  16. thank you, sophie. if i can ever afford to come to GB again (the dollar needs to be quite a bit stronger against the pound), I will do that. I think I've seen the ones in the Tate, but never been to Manchester, Birmingham, or Liverpool. But I do like the idea of a Pre-Raph Brotherhood, Beatles tour!

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  17. "...Shakespeare if it was revealed he assaulted little girls on trains."

    I don't know about anyone else but finding out the Shakespeare was actually from the 19th century would definitely change my opinion on many things including my own sanity.

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  18. A weighty issue.

    i didn't start to read writers' biographies till i'd read a lot of their works, so i'd usually had time to sense peculiarities & what not. i wasn't surprised to learn that Kierkegaard had a strange coldness to him, that Proust was a sadist, that DH Lawrence was an ego-maniac, Shelley recklessly destructive, TS Eliot both aloof & passionate etc. i was surprised & disappointed that Thomas Mann was so repugnant, and that Camus didn't seem to care that his wife was going off the rails.

    i suppose - having met in the flesh only one gifted writer who is also a good man - that good writing (which i like to think is 'moral' in some very subtle but enduring way) comes from what is good in a man or woman.

    The act of writing is perhaps a concentration of the self, in which that 'good' facet becomes the whole lens for the life's experience & response; because actually, though it may only be a small facet of the daily self, it is of the deepest level of one's being.

    i don't really bother 'concentrating' my blog persona but i feel my fiction comes from a more primal stratum, which is moral in a way my daily self isn't. My daily self is humourous, foolish, a little careless, and very occasionally 'moral'.

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