{"id":1275,"date":"2014-02-10T10:26:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-10T18:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2014-02-10T18:54:03","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T02:54:03","slug":"what-are-the-arts-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/02\/what-are-the-arts-for.html","title":{"rendered":"What Are the Arts For?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”n5XpwhQfRtKBHPK1BXtQynuCSQpBNl9j”]<\/p>\n

WHY do we fight? Whether you are a World War II soldier trying to save an Italian Renaissance painting from the Nazis, or a 21st century American, trying to produce, assess or defend culture in a marketplace that’s less and less interested in it, the question is the same. The answers — some of them proposed by a new film — may be different.<\/p>\n

For a while now, we\u2019ve been, as a society, at a loss to explain what the arts \u201care for.\u201d Over the centuries, we\u2019ve had a firmer sense, even if the explanation has changed radically from age to age. The question has gone through various kinds of utilitarian arguments (these paintings will help us attract the bison we\u2019re hunting, this music will make animal sacrifices to the gods less brutal), to art-for-art\u2019s-sake (two reasonably brief periods in western history), to art and music as a way of advertising the prestige of a duke or prince, to a Victorian (and later an American middlebrow) notion that culture was uplifting.<\/p>\n

These days, our thinking is dominated by neoliberalism\u2019s cult of efficiency (everything must pay for itself, education is training for the job market) and technocrat assurance (everything can be measured) and post-Reagan, post- Soviet disillusionment (public projects and grand dreams are simply covers for vested, even nefarious interests.) Warholism makes old ideas of cultural transcendence sound naive and square.<\/p>\n

If this is all true, how do the arts fit in? As with the value of liberal arts education, civil society, matters of the spirit, and many other things that can\u2019t be measured and don\u2019t make a clear contribution to the GDP, we hardly possess a language to talk about these things.<\/p>\n

That disorientation, I think, is shaping some of the discussion of the ne\"300px-MFAA_Officer_James_Rorimer_supervises_U.S._soldiers_recovering_looted_paintings_from_Neuschwanstein_Castle\"<\/a>w movie Monuments Men<\/i>, about a group of Americans who try to save visual art the Nazis have plundered. To them, this art is the foundation of our society \u2013 what we\u2019re fighting for.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post\u2019s Philip Kennicott has written a very tough and smart piece<\/a> on how the movie\u2019s sense of art is so hackneyed as to make the film unwatchable.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a bit from his story:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s dangerous to talk of art \u2014 the purpose, ideals and spiritual value of art \u2014 in general terms. But art can safely be defined in the negative, as the opposite clich\u00e9. Thus: Clich\u00e9 deadens our sensibilities, art refines them; clich\u00e9 shuts down thinking, art opens it up; clich\u00e9 is lazy, art is ambitious; clich\u00e9 affirms our unconsidered, reflexive understanding, while for the past two centuries, art has generally challenged it.<\/em><\/p>\n

… <\/em>Throughout the film we are given multiple reassurances that art is very important and a high ideal of humanity, and represents our most noble aspirations and teaches us to be human and lots of similar utterly meaningless blather \u2014 every word that comes out of Clooney\u2019s mouth, especially in his tedious and risible voiceovers, is a clich\u00e9.<\/em><\/p>\n

So Kenniccott (and others \u2013 the movie has been roundly dissed by people I trust) have convinced me not to see the film. (And there is much wisdom in his piece — please read all of it.) But what I\u2019m wondering is how, in the 21st<\/sup> century, at a time when arts education and public funding for culture and coverage of the arts in the mainstream press has been severely depressed, we articulate the meaning and value of aesthetic things. (More broadly, perhaps, how do we have a conversation about non-corporate culture in the public sphere.)<\/p>\n

Monuments Men<\/i>, apparently, does not do a terribly good job at this. But I\u2019m reminded of a similar impasse that may tell us something: George Packers\u2019s The Unwinding<\/i> lives up to its subtitle as An Inner History of the New America<\/i>, and it is rigorously reported and often lyrically written; the book deservedly won the National Book Award. But even a book as substantial as this one, observers on both left and right have noted, suffers by not being grounded in a theory of politics and society, of what has gone wrong since the \u201880s. If a writer as formidable as Packer cannot provide a larger frame for our confusing time, I\u2019m not sure how a Hollywood movie, aimed at a more or less general audience, can make sense of its characters\u2019 1940\u2019s sense of culture in a way that resonates with our own.<\/p>\n

The issue, I think, is context: Without a broader sense of how things fit together, of what things are worth and what has value, much of what we say becomes speech in a dead language. Politically, culturally, aesthetically, that\u2019s where we are now. In some ways I, and perhaps other cultural types, envy these World War II soldiers, with their firm and unshakable sense of mission.<\/p>\n

Folks, it sounds like a bad movie. But perhaps some of the hostility the film comes from a frustrated sense that our certainty is gone.<\/p>\n

ALSO: Here, finally, is some good news on classical music. The Minneapolis Orchestra has begun to play again, after a 16-month lockout. This New York Times story<\/a> describes the concert and the recent history, calling the show “a concert made even more prominent for being the first in Orchestra Hall since its $52 million renovation, completed last fall. In the event, the orchestra did itself proud, against long odds.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”n5XpwhQfRtKBHPK1BXtQynuCSQpBNl9j”] WHY do we fight? Whether you are a World War II soldier trying to save an Italian Renaissance painting from the Nazis, or a 21st century American, trying to produce, assess or defend culture in a marketplace that’s less and less interested in it, the question is the same. The answers — some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70,16,17,76,110],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-art","7":"category-arts-funding","8":"category-arts-journalism","9":"category-film","10":"category-world-war-ii","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}