[New-Poetry] beauty

[jforjames at aol.com]

As  I posted to the Wallace Stevens list, the thing that I most object to is idea that 'beauty' is so weakened in art that it needs a socio-cultural defending.
Beauty is far from be washed away by ersatz merz or simple-minded conceptualism or provocateurism. Beauty can take it...beauty is more resourceful
than its defenders understand.

That said, when I hear the words 'edgy art' I'm often ready to be bored to tears. Then there is that feeling that artists are tripping over themselves,
trying to be more transgressive than the last. It's tiresome. 

I think the big problem is that issue of beauty is framed, no pun intended, in zero-sum terms, as battle for the soul of humankind. When it could be expressed as one person's 
concerns about an increasing ingrown fashion for 'in your face' art. 

It occurred to me that the Pre-Raphaelites were also reacting to 'ugliness' of an order that most now would Scrutonize and classify as 'beauty.'

Finnegan

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Weiss <junction at earthlink.net>
Sent: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 3:14 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] beauty


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 >w
ith...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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