Worrisome Stuff

A while back Robert Tracinski, an author I enjoy reading, wrote that the problem with our  culture is not that we have a Beyoncé but that we do not have a Beethoven  - that what he called  lowbrow popular culture is all we have. He did not mean that literally. He knows that there are people out there claiming to produce and widely  touted by the “official” artistic establishment  as  producing serious, high quality works in  paintings, music, and sculpture.  (He mentions  the agony of sitting through a performance of a modern opera.) His point  is that they are not any good, and that that says something worrisome about our times.  

  

It is a good point.  It would be unfair to disparage an  age for not having  a Beethoven or a Mozart. That standard is too high,  but  it is completely fair  to wonder why we do not (as far as we know based on publicly available information)  have at least a  Rossini  or a Dvorak. Similarly we can worry  not that we lack a Rembrandt but  that we  don’t have  a Turner or a Delacroix,   not that  we are without a Michelangelo but that there is not even a  Saint-Gaudens.  (Some people point to movies as a genre where our time has seen great works created, and certainly there have been some fine movies.  However most of the great or very good filmmakers belong to the past. Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock, Hawks, Welles, Kurosawa,   Wilder, Lang, Bergman, Kubrick, Lubitsch, Keaton, Donen,  Wellman, Wyler, Disney, Cukor,  Curtiz, and  Huston were  dead, no longer working working,  or past their prime by the late 1960’s, and that was fifty years ago. What we have seen lately is mainly not encouraging.) 

Actually  things are worse than that. It is not only that we are not seeing  many new  high quality works in painting, sculpture, and serious music. It is that  many people have lost sight of what  such things are.  People in the artistic establishment  have so long and so successfully  passed off minor, novelty, or  worthless stuff as great art that a lot of people either cannot tell the difference or have given up and decided that if this is art, you can have it.  We can hope we are in only  a lull, and better times are coming. But people such as  Tracinski are right to be concerned. For as Goethe told Eckermann in a similar context “in what  does barbarism consist, other than  not recognizing what is excellent?”