{ Wednesday, February 19, 2003 }
Artistic Sign Language: Signs of the Coming Bush Fall by Bernard Weiner
Sign is symbol, symbol is sign. Consider:
• Powell goes to the United Nations so that the missile attacks on Baghdad and Basra can begin -- and, in the lobby of that grand building, Picasso's "Guernica" painting, which depicts the horrific results of the Nazi bombing of that Spanish town, is covered over prior to Powell's arrival. No use embarrassing the U.S. by reminding folks of what's in store for Iraqi civilians.
• Ashcroft, in his police-state zeal, begins shredding the Constitution's Bill of Rights with its guarantees of due-process of law, and, early on, has the huge lobby statue of the Goddess of Justice draped and covered over because of its exposed breast. How appropriate to shroud Justice so that she can't see what's being done in her name.
• First Lady Laura Bush cancels a poetry workshop at the White House because she suspects that a number of America's high-profile poets, in the sacred grounds of that seat of power, will raise the issue of the coming war with Iraq.
Did you notice the thread that unites these events? In all three cases, symbolic shrouds are placed over art, so that nobody will notice the bad things that are being done in American citizens' names.
But art knows. Art sees beyond, often before the general public is aware of what's going on. (Often before the artists themselves are conscious of what they're revealing.) Art points us in new directions that make us think and question.
To those inclined more to rigid-order mentality, art is a virus that needs to be stamped out, or, at the least, tightly controlled. ("When I hear the word culture," said Nazi leader Goebbels, "I reach for my revolver.")
LINK | 1:26 AM | TB
Or was it Goerring?
And re the Ashcroft statue lunacy, see:
http://www.bhikku.net/archives/02/nov02.html#05
"The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar,
He hath neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs;
I, sir, am a person of most respectable connections,
My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon."
Well spoken, Caterina.
I think what we witnessing in Washington, D.C. and London is a chilling metamorphosis: The elected officials whose duty and responsibility should be to speak for the will of the people have replaced those obligations with personal agendas and misguided convictions. We are watching Presidents and Prime Ministers become kings.
Darin-san: Say rather "well posted"; the words are by Bernard Weiner.
As for the "culture" quote, it's usually attributed to Goering rather than Goebbels, but nobody really knows if either man ever said it; what's certain is that the words were written by Hanns Johst, a Nazi playwright. Citation available at Languagehat:
http://www.languagehat.blogspot.com/2002_12_29_languagehat_archive.html#86810396
Another example of such shrouded art: The background image on the crisispapers page!
Jim | February 19, 2003 8:30 AMIsn't it always surreal to hear from a hardcore republican poet?
Here's an interesting question: Why are artists so unanimously liberal?
Marcus | February 19, 2003 11:10 AM"Why are artists so unanimously liberal?"
Oh, for heaven's sake. Just to stick with poetry, do the names T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound ring a bell? Or, on a less exalted level, Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Belloc, Roy Campbell, Les Murray, Philip Larkin... Whatever you want to call Robinson Jeffers, he was no liberal. And what was Wallace Stevens? Do you care? I don't. And I don't think we honor poets or poetry by dragging them into these political categories. I'm as much against the war as anyone, and I love poetry, but I'm damned if I want to read poems written to oppose the war; the odds they'll be any good are just too low.
steve | February 19, 2003 12:38 PMAbsolutely right. I noticed just as I clicked "Post."
Well posted.
Or read The New Criterion (descendent, isn't it, of Eliot's Criterion?), my republican dad's lit crit zine of choice.
Weiner's piece isn't the best writing around -- it's a bit disorganized, and the writing really falls apart towards the end, and his facts are wrong -- it was a tapestry of the Guernica that was covered up, not the Guernica itself.
More right-wing poetry written for this occasion can also be found at Poets For the War, naturally.
With Steve, I'm not hopeful that any "timely" poetry rushed out to serve a political cause is very good. It tends to be written in haste, without much deep thinking. There is validity to the captured fleeting idea, but I think that such quarry makes better rough material than final opus. I have to confess to not having read very many of the Poets Against the War poems. I nonetheless admire the project -- people speaking out against the war, especially the most eloquent citizens of the world.
And I don't actually think the groundswell of art is enough to unseat tyrants -- you need citizens, politicians and, yes, sometimes soldiers -- fighting for what the art has shown them is worth fighting for. Artists are, obviously, citizens too, and can act politically -- Vaclav Havel is a prime example of an artist turned statesman. In a lot of arguments for/against the Poets Against War efforts I've seen people forgetting this fact. You can't divvy a person up into their poet half and their citizen half. Can't be done.
But I'm completely and wholeheartedly with Weiner on the idea that art is way of seeing into the heart of things, and that during times of darkness and oppression, it can be a -- I was going to write "shining path" :-) -- light by which the way out of darkness is lit.
Caterina | February 19, 2003 1:14 PManybody opposed to decapitating Iraq this year is blind to the fact that the people of iraq will be better off when they can elect an american puppet leader, at first, and truly indigenous representation later. iraq is a reasonably secular society so this should work out well. at the same time, they will get to up petro production because under american leadership they wouldn't be subject to the un sanctions on oil exports. naturally people see this as americans stealing oil resources, but that's nonsense because like all jusidictions the iraqi state will impose taxes (as the americans will no doubt want) to spread money around, alleviating the need for US financial assistance. this is an opportunity to do good.
Brian | February 19, 2003 11:36 PMMetafilter sez:
Do us all a favor and shut up. You're for the war? Wrote an essay about it? Good, good. Good for you. Guess what? Shut up about it. Thanks. Oh, you're against the war? Fantastic. Wrote a poem about it? Find the nearest closet and tell it to the coats. Yea, that's right. Shut it.Stewart | February 20, 2003 1:31 AM
Or, as someone else said in a different context:
Talk, it's only talk Babble, burble, banter, bicker bicker bicker Brouhaha, boulderdash, ballyhoo It's only talk Back talkTalk talk talk, it's only talk
Comments, cliches, commentary, controversy
Chatter, chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat,
Conversation, contradiction, criticism
It's only talk
Cheap talk
Talk, talk, it's only talk
Debates, discussions
These are words with a D this time
Dialogue, dualogue, diatribe,
Dissention, declamation
Double talk, double talk
and so on.
God, what a great album! It's been years. I better go find the CD right now...
Caterina | February 20, 2003 1:36 AMEzra Pound, paraphrasing Napoleon (!) in Canto 43:
Artists high rank, in fact sole social summits which the tempest of politics can not reach. Caterina | February 20, 2003 2:29 AMArtists are not "unanimously liberal" or unanimously anything. They might be open-minded by definition, but in a non-political way. So hostility toward and fear of art is an indictment of one's level of consciousness, first of all, not one's politics. The war in Iraq might be great, easy, horrific or not, but it is not the basic issue on the table.
The issue is what the hell kind of country our American junta wants us to live in, if it needs to divert our eyes from the humanizing symbols of civilized culture that rightly underpin our national and international institutions in order to make policy statements. These guys are textbook totalitarian counter-revolutionaries, regardless of their party affiliations. I do not trust them for a split second.
tim | February 20, 2003 2:56 AMI'm not suggesting that artists are "liberal by definition," as if it were some metaphysically fundamental characteristic of that term.
Nor am I suggesting that they are literally "unanimously" anything at all. But how can you doubt that they are, as a class, significantly more likely to lean to the left? If it were just a barely visible phenomenon it might not even warrant mentioning in the midst of this discussion. But it seems like a strikingly consistent truth.
The same can be said, I think, of academics. When's the last time that you attended a gathering of artists and intellectuals where a discussion of politics didn't lead to some sort of consensual outrage at the Bush administration?
I'm not saying that this is a criticism of liberal viewpoints - if anything, it's the opposite, as artists and intellectuals represent some of humanity's best.
I'm just curious as to why this is the case. I don't think there are correlations between, say, an artist or an intellectual's tendency to prefer one color over another. Why liberal politics? (I need to get around to venturing a response to myself, I suppose, but I haven't entirely clarified my thoughts on the matter.)
Marcus | February 20, 2003 7:06 AMMarcus, I hate to say this, and I say it with all due respect, but I'm afraid that what you take to be a phenomenon of the outside world is actually a result of your choice of which artists to pay attention to.
steve | February 20, 2003 7:22 AMLet me quote from an academic study in this issue, titled, "Issues of Scholarly and Media Bias in the Public Consumption of Elite Knowledge
Dr. Jim A. Kuypers"
"Voting Records Of Faculty/Administrators
The above given examples are indicative of the left-wing hegemony in our discipline and higher education in general. One can also see this when reviewing voter registration of faculty. For example, the Cornell Review analyzed public voter registration records of professors at Cornell and several other universities, and the results clearly prove the left-wing supremacy of the faculty.
In total, registered Democrats outpolled registered Republicans 171 to 7 in seven of the larger and more popular liberal arts departments at Cornell: History, Government, English, African Studies, Women's Studies, Economics, Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology.5
Its no better at Dartmouth. In 1996, student reporters investigated only the departments of English, Government, History, Philosophy and Religion, on the grounds that the politics of physicists and chemists don't really affect their teaching. Transforming the figures into percentages, we learn that:
--62 percent of those who teach economics are registered as Democrats and 6 percent as Republicans (others listed themselves as independents).
--In English, 78 percent are Democrats, 6 percent Republicans.
--In Government, 90 percent Democrats, zero percent Republicans.
--History? Eighty-three percent Democrats, zero percent Republicans.
--Religion: 83 percent Democrats, zero Republicans.
--And, in the mother of learning, philosophy, we have 100 percent Democrats.6"
Marcus | February 20, 2003 7:46 AMI should also post a link to the entire study:
http://www.roguecom.com/roguescholar/kuypers.html
Marcus | February 20, 2003 7:48 AMCornell, yes. Probably the whole Ivy League. But I bet if you looked at the faculty of, say, Brigham Young, or any of the hundreds of bible colleges there'd be plenty of registered Republicans.
My experience mirrors yours, Marcus. But it is because of where we choose to go to school, and how we choose to spend our time and whatwe choose to think of as "art" -- the United States Government gives 20 times the money to marching bands as to what you and I consider "art." You and I probably don't have as high regard for John Philip Sousa as the rest of the nation.
(I'll have to track down the source of that marching band statistic; I've been quoting it for years to show how art-hostile the United States is.)
Caterina | February 20, 2003 10:27 AMCaterina,
If you find that figure for marching band funding, please post it. I'd love to know what the funding disparity is between that and the NEA.
Marcus | February 20, 2003 11:16 AMAhhhh - King Crimson: They RULE!
KenAmmo | February 20, 2003 11:57 AMRe: bible colleges being full of Republicans, well said. I don't think I totally follow Marcus' curiosity. For comparison, I'd also ask how many registered Republicans inhabit the boardroom of Apple vs Microsoft? Or Google vs AOL? Or hi-tech companies vs, I dunno, railroads and banks?
Seems to me that politically likeminded people gather together to accomplish all sorts of things, from widgets to education to missionary or military work. School X or Y will be very politically uniform to one direction or the other, like any human organization. If you are asking why the Ivy League is now so liberal... hm, I'd bet they haven't always been, just like they haven't always been co-ed or let in Jews.
Those guys who invented the SAT in the 1930s are probably partly to blame for Cornell's political makeup (or partly to be thanked.)
tim | February 20, 2003 12:45 PMBesides what Caterina and Tim said, what do the percentages of Democrats on the faculties of Dartmouth and Cornell (which I'm perfectly willing to stipulate is high) have to do with the percentage of liberals among artists, which is what we were talking about?
steve | February 20, 2003 1:20 PM"Cornell, yes. Probably the whole Ivy League."
"For comparison, I'd also ask how many registered Republicans inhabit the boardroom of Apple vs Microsoft? Or Google vs AOL? Or hi-tech companies vs, I dunno, railroads and banks?"
I'd be curious to know that as well. I think that any profession, persuasion, or class of people defined by something other than their political leaning, but nonetheless possessing homgenous political views could lead to an interesting contribution to the entire debate about the wrong-doings of our present administration. If artists and intellectuals are much more often liberal, than that tells me something about the nature of the liberal ideas.
I've always been interested in what personality traits contribute to one's political leanings. Does it depend on the way that someone's rational mind assembles worldly facts over the years, or is it something more philosophically fundamental about our character than that?
I'm convinced that it's more of the latter, and the fact that people who prefer similar lines of work (and/or similar inward pursuits or what have you) also tend to vaguely share political opinions seems to confirm that idea.
Sometimes I'm amazed that political debates are as easily polarized as they are, that we so neatly seem to want to fit into a two-party system. What do the words "liberal" and "conservative" really, fundamentally mean?
And, to put us back towards our original topic, why don't conservatives (who by most definitions are so named because of their social and fiscal policies)tend to appreciate real art?
Marcus | February 20, 2003 1:32 PMApparently the marching-band issue arose during a House session in which Rick Lazio mentioned that the NEA's budget that year (sometime mid 90s, I think) was $65 million less than what the military spent on its own marching bands (here's one source). So, unfortunately, I don't think the Ohio State Marching Band, aka The Best Damn Band in the Land (or so I hear), saw one nickel. I have no idea what the discrepancy is today.
Cheshire | February 20, 2003 6:00 PM"Why don't conservatives (who by most definitions are so named because of their social and fiscal policies) tend to appreciate real art?"
Marcus, I wish I knew where to start with that one. I can't get past the thought of "real art". I basically have two bodies of work, one for people who go to the country club, which is completely classical, and one that is for myself , experimental and more investigative in form and expression. My fellow-artists tend to call the second body "my real work", but I disagree. Poussin and Ingres is real art, so is Ad Reinhardt or Jeff Koons. Many believe that art establishes polarities and rival constituencies, like any candidate seeking your support. I think it is a false dichotomy. But I live in two countries, so...I am not the typical example.
shrouds=burqas
Chris | February 22, 2003 12:19 PM{ Post a comment }
God bless you, C. Let us not forget the other chilling parallel: The Bamiyan Buddhas that the Taliban demolished. The thugs in the White House are hostile to art and free expression for equally fervent and violent reasons. Those who are against art are invested in lies, and are liars. There is simply no other reason to hide from art.
tim | February 19, 2003 1:52 AM