maybe good fodder for weekend deep-dive thread?
from jed perl's new republic piece:
from alyssa rosenberg:
from jed perl's new republic piece:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118958/liberals-are-killing-art-insisting-its-always-politicalDo more and more liberals find the emotions unleashed by the arts—I mean all of the arts, from poetry to painting to dance—something of an embarrassment? Are the liberal-spirited people who support a rational public policy—a social safety net, consistency and efficiency in foreign affairs, steps to reverse global warming—reluctant to embrace art’s celebration of unfettered metaphor and mystery and magic? If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said the answer was no. Now I am inclined to say the opposite. What is certain is that in our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun. Art itself, with its ardor, its emotionalism, and its unabashed assertion of the imagination, has become an outlier, its tendency to celebrate a purposeful purposelessness found to be intimidating, if not downright frightening.
<snip>
The problem is by no means a new one. Back in 1950, in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling worried that liberalism’s “vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life . . . drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination.” Liberalism, he argued, “in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind . . . inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the nature of the mind.” In the sixty-four years since Trilling published those words the process of constriction and mechanization has only become more pronounced. This process is reflected in the ever-growing obsession with polls, surveys, and sundry forms of bureaucratic analysis, which threaten to reduce all art’s unruly richness to a set of data points. Instead of viewing life’s unquantifiable artistic experiences as a check on quantification, the well-intended impulse among many liberal commentators is to try and quantify the unquantifiable. But the power of art, which is so personal and so particular, is finally unquantifiable—and therefore a source of embarrassment to the rationalizing mind. What is at stake is art’s freestanding power.
from alyssa rosenberg:
from rod dreher:Perl is worried that by focusing on the political value of art, we make it harder to defend investment in it. I agree that there are risks in both strategies. If you argue that a sculpture should be preserved because it is beautiful, people who are left cold by it can say the work has no aesthetic value. If you argue that a work is good because it has certain politics, people who find those politics objectionable may be inclined to disagree.
In both art and politics, what is good and what is bad depend on deeply personal preferences and on framing. There is no technique we can use in either sphere of life to reach a collective agreement on what is good and what is bad. There is no objective standard for what constitutes a beautiful painting or a beautiful worldview.
Perl is addressing liberals in a liberal magazine, but his point is universal. True art cannot be reduced to the sum of its creator’s parts. It comes from somewhere particular, but it will have achieved the quality of universality that allows it to stand alone from its creator. Your understanding of Dante’s verse is far richer if you understand the historical, theological, and philosophical sources of his vision. But his lines are no less beautiful and true absent that understanding.
