[New-Poetry] beauty

[Mark Weiss]

I know. It's not you who pisses me off, but the 
interface often takes one on the nose for the 
guilty party. It might help if you didn't with 
some consistency quote the most inflamatory passage.

Beauty is of course never defined in the article, 
but the two scenes he paints as examples are a 
Disneyesque moment in what passes for nature and 
a table set for Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving.

The proximate cause of Scruton's outrage (which 
I'd guess really dates back to the merciless 
ribbing he must have taken in the schoolyard over 
that name) seems to be a setting of Mozart's 
Abduction from the Seraglio in a whore house, 
replete with all manner of violence. I generally 
agree about the removal of works entirely from 
their original settings--it's worth an audience 
making an effort at understanding a bit about the 
culture surrounding the original composition--but 
I know that theater economics often require 
radical restaging of often-performed works to 
draw in a bored audience. So we get Branagh's 
unutterably stupid fin de siecle Viennese Hamlet 
(not mentioned in the article), and this 
Abduction. Mozart has been unusually afflicted 
with this kind of thing. On the other hand, 
Abduction, beautiful as the music is, is so 
insubstantial dramatically (as opposed to the 
other major Mozart operas) that the director's 
temptation must be especially strong.

Scruton seems to think that the dark turn of the 
art of this past century has been a whim on the 
part of artists and critics. I would guess that 
it has more to do with living in a time when wars 
that cause fewer than half a million civilian 
deaths aren't worth mentioning. A defining moment 
might be the end of All Quiet on the Western 
Front, when the hero gets killed reaching towards a butterfly.

Mark



At 02:39 PM 6/11/2009, you wrote:
>Remember I don't post only those things I agree 
>with...it's my job as CC to this list, to drag 
>the web for things that might be of use to our intermittent discussions.
>Finnegan
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Weiss <junction at earthlink.net>
>Sent: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:25 am
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] beauty
>
>Did I miss something here? Hopper's paintings 
>are about bleak absence and the anxiety caused 
>by absence, Barber's piece is from a child's 
>point of view, its loveliness interrupted by a 
>starkly terrified outburst, and Stevens is most 
>often engaged with the slipperiness of what we 
>call reality. But that's just a start. I read 
>the article. This is some sort of neocon nonsense.
>
>Mark
>
>At 09:27 PM 6/10/2009, you wrote:
> ><<http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty. 
> html%3Ehttp://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html>http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html>http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html 
>
> >For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, 
> and >Wallace Stevens, ostentatious 
> transgression was >mere sentimentality, a cheap 
> way to stimulate an >audience, and a betrayal 
> of the sacred task of >art, which is to magnify 
> life as it is and to >reveal its beauty—as 
> Stevenss reveals the beautyy >of “An 
> Ordinary Evening in NeNew H avenâ€Â 
> and >Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 19155. 
> But >somehow those great life-affirmers lost 
> their >position at the forefront of modern culture.
> >
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