Courtesy of American Digest, this observation from Oz Conservative on the failures of modern culture:

Where were the Bachs and Beethovens of my own time? The Europe of the past was poorer and less populated. It was supposed to be more backward. And yet it produced a wealth of great composers - a whole tradition of high art - which fell away during the 1900s.

 

Why hasn’t liberal modernity produced high culture? One reason, perhaps, is that if we only recognise man and his desires, with no higher order toward which man aspires, then there is nothing for a high culture to successfully orient itself to.

Not necessarily. One of the greatest 20^th century art forms was the skyscraper, which is pure Mammon from the caissons to the tip of the spotlit spire. Renaissance art may be religious in subject matter, but it was often commissioned as a status symbol, complete with the patron in the corner pointing to the Scourging of St. Screamus with a grave expression. This didn’t make the painting irreligious – belief saturated everything – but I’m not sure how many of these painters were devout guys who cut off the legs of their easels so they could paint on their knees. But I know what he means. It’s not the humanism that ruined art, it was humanism that divorced itself from the possibility of transcendence. Which would be bad enough if it hadn’t decided to splash around in the gutters as well.

Ah, but why was it influential? It recontextualized the commonplace and made us see it as Art, a process that continues to this day every time you see a book with a title like “The Art of Bread” or “The Art of Toad Sexing” or whatever else has to be elevated to the status of marble sculpture to make the user feel they’re living a rarified life. It played a joke on the Stuffy Academics, which is something the adolescent temperament never tires of doing. This is not encouraged any more, since the Academics are on the side of Truth and Modernity, however defined today. Although I once knew an architecture student who took perverse and boundless glee in shocking his teacher by putting a pointy roof on the house each student had to design. A pointed roof. In other words, a useful roof, a functional roof that didn’t collect rain water. Everyone else had a flat roof, of course. Machine for Living and all that. This was just around the time Post-Modernism made it okay to quote history, as long as everyone saw you wink, or could understand that your overscaled grotesque excretions were meant ironically.

An instructor might not know what to make of a house with a point roof, but if you called it “House In The Time of Reagan” he’d understand.

Finally, Duchamp redefined the act of creation. You were no longer required to take materials and form them into pleasing shapes. (He lacked the skills to make something as graceful as an industrial urinal, probably.) Art now consisted of the act of calling something Art, of finding art where others had just seen pissoir equipment. Again, a reaction to Stuffy, Tradition-Bound Authority. It wasn’t enough that the visual arts had undergone the Great Unravelling; what was necessary was removing Art from the hands of the Artists entirely. Or rather taking it from the old guard and putting it in the hands of you and all your friends, who are just a marvelously clever bunch of lads and having a grand old time.

Painting didn’t lose its relevance because of secularism – the 19^th century was a tremendously vital era, and the great art was almost entirely secular. But they revitalized painting by tugging on the loose, frayed strand of representationalism, and that unraveled everything. You can only invent a new school if you’re more unrepresentational than the previous guy, which is why you start with gauzy Turner landscapes and end up with Motherwell, or any other guy who puts an enormous black mark on a canvas the size a garage door, calls it ELEGY or AMERICA #6 and watches the commissions roll in.

Music: same thing, more or less. German Romanticism unraveled around the end of Mahler’s tenure; French music, well, Raveled; the Italians soldiered on in the old tradition, but it sounded thin and showy. The Brits did their best as well, but eventually their orchestra music got odd and grumpy around the edges before expiring in a burst of showy golden glory in Walton’s Coronation March.   In short: I think serious composers lost faith in the ability of the symphonic and tonal traditions to ever equal Beethoven or Mozart or the rest, so what’s the bloody point? Or they lost faith in their own ability to rise to the challenge. Jazz was the new thing anyway; the Americans were showing that. Maybe the world had enough oboe concertos composed to accompany the morning bowel-movements of Count Schnaggellpussen of Upper-lower Saxony; it didn’t have enough Louis Armstrong. In any case, orchestra composition isn’t dead – it’s doing very well in movie scores, thank you. (The rise of the movie as an art form is another Good Thing about the 20^th century, but that’s another post.)

but that’s beside the point, really. Liberal culture, if you want to use the author’s broad term, or modern culture, if you want a term less charged, hasn’t produced any high art because it doesn’t want to, doesn’t know how to, and doesn’t believe in it. What started out as an individual revolt against exhausted traditions – something whose origins you could probably trace to 19^th century political trends, if you wanted to spend the time – became enshrined as a Permanent Revolution against the crusty old bothersome past, the same big hunk of history that summed up the innumerable failures of the West, at least as the grave penseurs defined them. If we are the enlightened ones, then it stands to reason that the culture of the Dark Ages must reflect the sexism, imperialism, fascism, classism, and other myriad isms that stained the globe. But they’ll still go see a traveling exhibit of old Masters, and they’ll still pile in the halls to hear Beethoven, because those are still the gold standards for Taste, and Taste has long been their favorite, and most self-flattering, virtue.

High art has been replaced by mass art, which can be low or high or middle; whatever it is, it’s characterized by wide availability, momentary ubiquity, instant access, and its perishable nature. (The worst side effect of the rise of mass art was the death of the pop song, as it was defined before rock.)  But the old traditions are still around – painting still has its realists, emerging now from the catacombs where they hid with Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers for decades; sculpture might yet be liberated from the hands of people who drag rusty steel walls into empty plazas and regard themselves as the heirs to Bernini; music, well composed and properly orchestrated, still has its old power intact, if dormant. Nearly everyone on the planet can hum the “Star Wars” theme, after all.

(Some note that William’s theme bears a strong resemblance to theme from a Ronald Reagan movie, “King’s Row.” Perhaps. That piece was written by Erich Korngold – a European expat who was called a genius as a young man by none other than Mahler himself.) 

Then again, maybe we’re just dining on the last of the seed corn. It doesn’t take a belief in the divine to appreciate Bach. Does it take such a belief to be Bach? Or does a rational, secular society have no answer to Bach but the empty crystal kaleidoscopes of Phillip Glass? 

Or if their answer is P Diddy, what comes after that?