Sunken Cathedrals

A 'mission statement.'

I posit this: the biggest problems in art today are, on the one hand, the lack of sophistication in the extant styles of the pop, and on the other, the esotericism in the extant styles of the high. Depth without sophistication vs. sophistication without depth.

Many of our current artists do still make serious art. Some make serious high art - serious gallery art, serious novels, serious classical compositions - which for at least the last 40 years have been, generally, in my judgment, minimally impressive. Some make serious popular art - serious popular songs, serious film and television, serious comic books - which have been, generally, a bit more impressive. But the best of our art is no longer very serious. And while even bad art can be groundwork, our art will not be groundwork for serious art in the future until more of us start taking it seriously as art.

Lightly parodying all affect as a lifestyle has turned my own cohort into an intellectual lost generation. And so it seems increasingly clear that whatever the next chapter after post-modernism is - and post-modernism might not even end up cutting it as a paradigm next to modernism or romanticism; there are simply too many things going on that don’t have anything to do with it - will have to involve putting a stake through the heart of all the pop culture baby-talk. Maybe this will happen by pop artists making their work more sophisticated. Maybe it’ll happen by high artists making their work more relevant.

Or maybe people will just stop taking art seriously altogether.

That last option seems most likely to me. I sure hope I’m wrong - I’ve been doing a lot of that lately - but over the course of my lifetime (31 years), I simply cannot shake the feeling that we really have lost the belief that artists are serious people who have something important to tell us — even in popular arts like music and movies, two mediums I’ll be singling out because those are the ones that most (but not all) of these pages will explore. And while as recently as 20 years ago we could still hem and haw about how it’s come to this, by now nobody even tries to deny that a major reason - hell, the major reason - is the tremendous amount of art that we now have at our fingertips, thanks to the internet.

Before you hit the buzzer that says ‘Romanticizing The Past!’, consider that the words ‘romanticized past’ might just be a roundabout way to make excuses for the present. It is possible not to romanticize the past, while also recognizing that certain pasts are more instructive than others.

And yes, some times are better for an art form than others. The 15th century was a great time for visual art, but a horrible time for poetry. The 18th century was a great time for music, but an awful time for tragic theater. Today is a great time for many things, but not for music and film — and it wasn’t so long ago that those two seemed most vital of all; vital on a mass-motivating scale. Nobody in music, and almost nobody in film, is making art on as high a level of quality as the best of the 20th century, and the only popular artistic mediums that do seem to be in rude health are gaming and television — two forms that I’ve personally never cared much about, which admittedly puts me at an observational disadvantage. (Frankly, though, I’m still unconvinced that the best ‘prestige TV’ is as good as the best of the half-hour sitcom format of the late 20th century, or the best educational programming of the late 20th century. But that’s another topic for another day.)

The only one of the old high arts that we actually can’t help but notice is architecture. So, I dunno — anyone got any hot leads on what the embroidery racket’s been up to? How ‘bout the cartographers?

It’s not accurate to say that artists have no reason to do anything serious, because they do have at least one: their own ambition. What they lack is encouragement.

A lucky seven reasons why our artists lack encouragement:

1. The fragmentation of popular art into mainstream and niche(/‘underground’/‘indie’/whatever) genres has resulted in a situation where the artist is crippled by either an excessive striving for respectability (the niche) or an insufficient degree of self-respect (the mainstream).

2. Parents and schools tell kids today that there’s no such thing as artistic greatness, and some of the kids who might’ve been great artists believe it. (This comes courtesy of a dreary blend of counter-culturalism and post-structuralism. I’ll touch more on this in a few minutes.)

3. Contemporary arts criticism is failing, pitifully, at the task of clarifying between an artist’s primary talents and secondary talents. Certainly, most artists have to use varying talents of varying strengths from their creative palette, in order to survive. But the current tendency in criticism is to insist that there are no primary or secondary qualities at all — only the totality. (Film criticism, because it gave us the auteur theory, is most vulnerable here.)

4. Technology has progressed to the point where it is possible to compress the textural and dynamic range of many different moving elements at near-maximum saturation simultaneously, while still keeping every element clearly discernible. This goes for the ear-bleedingly crisp sound of popular music - often physically numbing to listen to for extended periods of time, in the niche as well as the mainstream - and it goes similarly for the exactingly passive sheen of digital streaming ‘content’: nothing ever messy or out of place; all things locked and loaded in icy sync, set for Auto-Play while the head bobs back to the phone. All very ‘old man yells at cloud,’ I know. But there’s no way around it: the mere consciousness of being able to tap anything so clear away is gonna dampen the effect. Christ, how could it not?

Musically, the technological innovation that set this ‘consciousness of constant gratification’ in motion actually predates the internet: Alex Rosner’s 1971 invention of the DJ mixer. This allowed for sound to be shifted from one turntable to another, keeping the party going in a continuous flow of music (and dance, and booze). Disco arrived in short order, with punk the other side of the same coin: both styles produced plenty of powerful music in their heyday, but both in their different ways also heralded the transfer of music from the hands of instrumental players to the hands of computer programmers. (You might say that disco and punk were both a preview for the simplicity of Reaganism. Well, maybe you mightn’t. I might.) This soon reached a possible-point-of-no-return, as well as an artistic milestone, with Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson’s mega-blockbuster Thriller in 1982, a nine-song album that essentially established synthesizer-based funk as the most popular form of popular music — which it’s remained ever since, for better and for worse (mostly for worse).

At this point I’d like to emphasize: despite this development, which I suppose I do think is a negative one, the best music from the ‘machine’ side of things - the best hip-hop; the best electronic music - has for the last 30 years been significantly more impressive than the best music played manually by human beings within the same timeframe. If that sounds like faint praise, that’s because it is. (Electronic music is the music of the future — and it always will be!)

In cinema, the analogous technological innovations had been cooking for decades, but were finally and definitively pushed through by one northern Ontarian gearhead named James Cameron, whose 2009 Avatar - not an artistic milestone - unofficially marked the point at which digital projection became standard. The spreadsheets bore it out: scotch the tactile, and there’s more fake-money in the bank.

5. Music is not as prestigious today as it was, say, in the wake of Beethoven in the 1830s, or when the coincidence of advances in amplification technology and the general social upheaval of the 1960s made musicians look like prophets of the dusk of an old era and the dawn of a new one. Similarly, movies aren’t even as prestigious as they were when I was growing up in the ‘90s - already at a period of degradation - and while I still believe that film is the medium with potentially the greatest power of evocative experience, entirely comparable to the best of literature and painting, I have to admit that cinema at its highest has never been as prestigious as music at its highest. (The tough question of whether or not movies are actually devolved theatre will be saved for another piece.) Admittedly, cinema has had far less time to work with than music. But people just haven’t cared about any movie in its own time quite the way people cared about the Beatles in the ‘60s, and the movie that comes closest in that respect - that of being almost a religion - is probably Star Wars. Which may just go to show music’s eminence, because the Beatles are great and Star Wars kind of sucks. And yet, even with music, it’s now an ‘atomized connoisseur’ culture.

6. We’re incredibly fickle, now more than ever, and artists as a result are exceptionally vulnerable to that particular anxiety of influence: that of assuming that artists simply stop doing good work as they get older. A very casually cruel assumption. In point of fact, the notion that artists start sucking as they age is only generally true of popular musicians, and I’d say there are two big reasons why.

The first: musicians are demoralized by the realization that so many of their fans are distractible turncoats who don’t actually care about music as much as they care about having the right brand of background sound. (On a brighter note, this realization also tends to weed out a lot of mediocrities and starfuckers, who quickly realize that they don’t actually like music nearly as much as they like the idea of being a musician.)

The second: starting in the 1960s, performer-songwriters have been prioritized over non-performing songwriters. It used to be possible to write, but not perform, and still feel like you were working at the highest level of your profession — but that’s no longer the case. Thus it becomes not just a matter of creativity and craft, but of physical strength and stamina, and so it’s not surprising that pop performers tend to do their best work when they’re young and their bodies are at their peak. 

Filmmakers aren’t subject to quite the intensity of betrayal that musicians are, if only because (as touched on in point 4) the number of people who are invested in a filmmaker’s authorial presence and progression is a far smaller number than those invested in a musician’s. However, since filmmaking is perhaps an even more physically taxing profession than music, it tends to at least wear down its artists pretty quickly as well.

If only we had any cognizance of history, we’d know that many pre-1960s composers and songwriters, and many post-1960s filmmakers, did do their best work after more than, say, 20 years in the game.

7. The main obstacle for the working and middle classes participating in artistic culture, as ever, is not material access but time: the leisure time needed to not merely experience art, but to think critically about it. And since the world’s consumers don’t have enough wealth to absorb the productive capacity of the world’s economy - as a result of the wealth of the middle and working class in the developed world not only failing to keep up with rising productivity, but actually declining since the 1970s (while the wealth of the developing world hasn’t risen enough to make up the difference) - this has only gotten worse. The world’s economy depends on consumers running up debts they can’t pay, and until the rich are forced - and it looks like they will indeed have to be forced - it’s not exactly surprising that most working people can’t earmark the time to catch up on the Goethe corpus.

Certainly, we’re predisposed by nature and nurture - both, as ever - to enjoy certain things, to be moved by certain things, and so on. But you might say the greatness (or lack thereof) of art lies exactly in how artists consciously or unconsciously manipulate those predispositions.

This is the subtext of all these problems, the boogeytopic in the arts these days: the notion of (*braces*) objective aesthetic value.

Over the course of my lifetime, there’s been a rapid and defensive uptick in the resistance to making any distinction at all between value and preference — and an increased pushback from audiences and critics (!!!) at the act of enduring the unavoidably unpleasant elements of an artwork in order to experience the great elements. There used to be a word for these people: philistines. (Still a good word!) But these days, it’s practically a badge of honor.

See, here’s the thing: refusing to distinguish between good and bad art means refusing to appreciate how hard it is to make the good. And it reflects an inability to self-examine; an inability to grapple with our own distinctions and prejudice, and by extension toward any ideals larger than ourselves.

If my criterion were personal preference, I’d say that Debussy is a greater composer than Wagner, and that Marc is a greater painter than Picasso, and that Ellison is a greater novelist than Faulkner, and that Kobayashi is a greater filmmaker than Ozu. They aren’t.

By definition, someone who creates something is more creative than someone who doesn’t. All other things being equal, someone who creates a new chemical compound is more creative than someone who doesn’t. All other things being equal, someone who creates a new progression of musical key changes is more creative than someone who doesn’t.

Granted, all other things are never equal, and we have no way to measure all of the theoretically infinite ways in which any single person can be creative at the same time — or even of all of the ways in which a single person can be creative in any particular artistic medium. (Though we can show that an artist has changed a specific way of doing things to a great extent, and challenge the proponents of another artist to show them changing some other specific way of doing things to an equal or greater extent.) But that only indicates the limits of our ability to measure the world. Contra pop quantum theory, a thing that is theoretically measurable exists whether one has the means to measure it or not. And while empirical claims are not ‘provable,’ they can be demonstrably replicable.

Everything that exists is necessarily original. Consequently, all virtues are necessarily original. The question that art criticism tries to answer is who the original creator of a particular aspect of a piece of art is.

If one is willing to assume that the world exists outside their head, then there are objective standards. Dependent on that assumption, sure. But people depend endlessly on that assumption every day, so why go through the whole tiresome rigamarole of fighting it when it comes to art — and almost literally nothing else?

Most people already know this. Even in discussions about art, people make objective assertions all the time, and usually only start backing off from the notion of objectivity once they realize that they’re losing an argument.

Making a list of criteria of the ways in which art can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is, of course, absurd. But under normal circumstances, a person wouldn’t have to expand on what they mean by a word like ‘creativity’ by saying things like, ‘the presence of original ideas,’ or, ‘the extent to which an artist fulfills the requirements of whatever structure they’re using in unpredictable ways,’ or whatever. That’s the problem: when you force someone to take a nice, concise, vague term like ‘creative’ and prove that it is in fact an objective standard, you end up with interminable strings of very clear, very boring language.

Because here’s the thing most of us don’t even realize: discussions about objective aesthetic value really are a phenomenon that’s unique to our time. Some 19th century artists and critics might’ve trashed their contemporaries for non-aesthetic reasons, but even they didn’t deny the existence of objective aesthetic value; they simply thought artists were obliged to create work that had moral value as well as aesthetic value. Some early 20th century artists and critics might’ve asserted that there were no objective aesthetic standards — but at the same time, they were asserting that there were no objective standards for anything else either.

I started having discussions about art on the internet in the early ‘00s - first on painting, then film, then music - so I’ve actually witnessed the birth of this phenomenon. I can remember seeing a few ‘You can’t objectively judge art!’ discussions early on, and they spread so quickly that by the mid-‘00s they’d even become noticeable in real life.

I have some half-formed theories about why this particular creed has emerged at this moment in history. For now, I’ll just say that maybe that old dead French guy might actually have been correct when he said that an increasingly democratic society - a good thing - comes at the price of increasing hostility to artistic greatness.

(Ironically, practically the only group that currently believes in artistic standards is the general public. Whatever the vicissitudes of their (our) short-term tastes, we really do enforce a hierarchy of quality over the long term.)

So, getting back to my opening volley about depth v. sophistication: certain artists have had some limited success in bridging that gap. But if nobody has had more than limited success, maybe the problem is not the talent pool, but simply that the task is impossible at the moment, and will stay that way until the styles have evolved into something other than what they are now.

I’m pessimistic, but not negative. My consolation these days is that it only took about 1,100 years to create the Renaissance after the decadence of Rome. So hey, maybe we’ll succeed at creating a new high culture in another 1,100! (Optimistically assuming that environmental degradation doesn’t finish us off first!)

'I used to feel so devastated/At times I thought we'd never make it/But now we on our way to greatness/And all that ever took was patience....'

It probably sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m actually not. Things can take a while. The long, vast arc of artistic accomplishment is thrown into humbling relief when one remembers that Hamlet and Don Quixote - the texts most widely held up as the pre-eminent play and novel, respectively - were released into the world within 10 years of each other — a mere 400 years ago. And in my judgment, the art of (at least) the American, English, and continental European middle classes follows roughly the same trajectory: in the 19th century, often profound, but with a tendency toward gloominess; by the late 20th century, generally less gloomy, but now with a tendency toward shallowness. Maybe the French Revolution marks the point beyond which the invention of a new culture was necessary to replace the high culture that emerged in the late Medieval period — in which case, maybe our artists are, as Paul Cézanne said, primitives of a new art.

So that’s more or less what I’ve been grappling with for the last 15 years of my life. And while generational discourse is basically a silly crutch, I do feel genuinely blessed to have been born at almost literally the last possible point - in my case, the last week of the 1980s - in which one could still have a conscious memory of a time before the internet — or at least a time before its ubiquity, and the ubiquity of pocket computers.

And look, I get that all these highfalutin allusions to lofty old culture standards might not get the juices flowing. It’s understandable. In music, for example, people can take rock (and now, hip-hop) seriously while being ignorant of classical music for the same reason: most people who take music seriously at all want to hear music that says something about their own time, and no classical composer has had anything to say for a long time. (Ironically, the last who did were probably those paragons of unpopularity, the total serialists - Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and associates - as well as La Monte Young, who pioneered of the ‘drone’ style that bled in to rock and eventually cross-bred with funk to produce electronic dance music. But since then, classical music has mostly been a matter of either (a) pretending that what was revolutionary yesterday still is, or (b) slumming by referencing pop culture - usually yesterday’s pop culture - without actually trying to compete in the pop music trade. Jazz is the same way, having been spinning its wheels with very limited success ever since it ran out of places to go after the late ‘60s, whereupon it had to start borrowing from rock.)

At this point, I feel like the best we can do is just try, in whatever small ways we can, to lay intellectual groundwork for the future. Maybe we’ll end up making some great art along the way — sneaky art. That’d be nice. (Maybe sneaky art is the best art.)

‘Is this all not just a matter of education?’ Well, yes and no. Bear in mind that - using music again as my springboard - the people of the late 17th century were (somewhat) better educated than the people of the early 17th century, had a longer history to build on, and had access to better musical theory…but they still failed to produce music as great as that of the early 17th century. The people of the mid-to-late 19th century were (much) better educated than the people of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven’s time, had the longer history and access to better musical theory…but they still failed to produce music as great as some of their predecessors.

The premise that better-educated artists and audiences, a longer history, and better tools necessarily produce better art is naïve, because education can result in jadedness as well as sophistication. A long, great historical legacy can paralyze - making artists feel that they’ll always be inferior to the old masters, or that everything’s already been done - as well as inspire. Making the process of creation simpler can vitiate an artist’s talent as well as liberate it, because the creative process involves encountering problems and finding solutions to them. And of course there are factors in art besides sophistication, legacy, and the available tools. A theoretically infinite number of factors!

Ultimately, I’d put it this way: if you’ve got a good reason for liking it, you’re a good aesthete. And if the artist gave you a good reason for liking it, it’s good art. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’