Bad Art

There is Good Art, so it logically follows that there is is Bad Art. There is even art that is bad for you, although both "art" and "bad" are contingent upon who "you" are. If art moves us, then it can move us badly. There is, however, no "evil" art. Only Nazis and fundamentalists think otherwise. And there is no such thing as "high" or "low" art, a distinction generated by the mass media to begin with. Joyce was as comfortable with advertising as he was with Aquinas, but he wouldn't have said they were the same thing or that they had the same value.

No Distinction, No Difference

An argument for the relative harmlessness of
popular culture.

I am all for more rational discussions of popular culture and its effects on consumers. It simply is not true that "low" culture lowers us, and claims to that effect are elitist in some precise sense, not to mention ahistorical. Shakespeare was certainly a popular artist; indeed, the notion of the playwright as author had yet to be created until after he died.

Yet this article is typical in simply wanting to assign to works of art the same value as any other consumable good, which is simply the pleasure it gives the consumer. It may be a torturous argument, but I would call this idea "elitist," since it obscures the fact that people can and do make distinctions between works of art, and those distinctions matter. Another painting is not simply another brand of toothpaste. Just because Shakespeare could be appreciated by the groundlings does not mean he was aiming at the lowest common denominator, which is precisely what most consumer goods do. Rather, for art, there is indeed a canon and there are such things distinctions matter, which is why we continue to study aesthetics.

Unfortunately, many proponents of aesthetics and the canon reify both, such that any change is a change for a bad. These are the proponents that Lumby has in mind, the sort that tend to say "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Yet art is that which defies reification--this is the quality that Derrida has tried, with little success, to import into the study of philosophy--so that any time someone reifies "Art," you know that they have a hidden agenda. There is however tradition, but not again in the way that traditionalists think of it. Techniques, truisms, and indeed mentoring all pass down skills. This is why it is elitist for Media Studies professors to say anything can pass for art. They conceal the amount of work and attention it continues to take to make an impression. By giving young people the idea that anything counts, such elitists are setting them up for a fall. Unfortunately, that was what many people heard when the Beats and the Hippies ruined the sacred truths of New Criticism. To my mind, it is in the interest of cultural workers everywhere to say that work requires work and that tradition matters, even it is only in service of change.

The Foundation Is Unlikely To Fund Art Supplies

That about sums up the place of art in the world of social research funding.

The Unknown Friedrich

Here is an intriguing review of a recent biography of Friedrich Hayek, indisputably the intellectual exponent of the small government good is good thesis. Postrel points out that Hayek was not, as he is sometimes caricatured as, simply a advocate of Darwinism in economics and society in general, but rather strongly concerned with a problem that besets any system in which people are organized. That problem is how best to distribute information. Rightly upset by how information was manipulated by the Nazis and Stalinist Soviet Union, Hayek, an Austrian, argued that the free market was much more effective and much more democratic way of disseminating information. Thus, in the Soviet, you had one major state supported vehicle of information, Pravda, while in the US, effectively the free market had a let "a hundred flowers bloom." No doubt in the US, common people as well as the average politician knew much more about what was happening in various parts of their country, then what the average citizen of the Soviet Union. Hayek generalized that thesis to claim that in all cases the free market resulted in more democratic solutions to social problems than government planning.

It's an intriguing claim, one that Postrel submits as prescient of information theory as well as postmodernism, but I would argue that Postrel's extensions of Hayek's prescience, let alone influence are a form special pleading.[1] On information theory, Gregory Bateson's work on systems, documented in Naven from research in the 30s are far more prescient, particularly in paying attention to dysfunction as well as function--finding dysfunction it in part functional. I am less familiar with Norbert Wiener, who codified information theory, but I believe his work is at least contemporary with Hayek. As for postmodernism, I fear that Postrel is ignorant of the meaning of "postmodernism" as opposed to "post-structuralism". Post-Structuralism represents a plausibly coherent philosophical movement, one that either asked what happens when you realize that society is a system (Foucault), or which mocks the ambition to be a systematic philosopher (Derrida). Postmodernism is simply a period term. It is philosophy and thought that comes after the modern period, which ended roughly (in both senses) in the 30s with the rise of the Nazis and Stalin, (both of whom stigmatized the avant-garde in material ways) and the world-wide depression. Hayek, by the virtue of when he was writing, is Postmodern.

If anything, Hayek's economics resemble what the Vienna school was doing in various disciplines: Logical Positivism in epistemology (Carnap) and an absolute objectivity in the history of science (Popper). In particular, the common feature that Hayek shares with these figures is that he proffers one solution for a multipiicity of problems. In every case, where he documents problems, whether in markets, the dissemination of information, public services, etc., he suggests that free market distributes good more equably. And he believes with the same fervor that the logical positivists believed that verification was sole means of philosophizing, so that speculative domains such as ontology and metaphysics and humanist domains such as aesthetics and ethics were at least dubious and probably bad. Likewise, in Hayek's zeal to prove a claim that might be true in some domains to be true in all, he campaigned vigorously (and fairly unscientifically) against competing claims.

There is a very simple way of denying the total truth of such arguments, which, while not scientific, is satisfying. Blake, the greatest English artist (and greatest Christian artist, aside from Dante perhaps), in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell notes that "One Law for the Lion and Fox is Tyranny." Or more recently, "It takes different strokes to move the world...What might be right for you may not be right for some."

1] I take some pleasure in noting that Postrel is using this form of argument for Hayek's influence, since critiques of attempts to expand the canon are always argued as forms of "special pleading." The logic of special pleading is simply begging: your author isn't popular or isn't taught in enough of the right places, so you show how he is deserving. Calling Hayek "postmodern" is another one of these tricks, though it might be properly called branding. [i]

i]And this is just a querulous note as to why Libertarians endorse the Western Tradition unthinkingly. The western tradition is only notionally something put forward by the "free market." The church and the academies, while anti-thetical to the market, have never been pay-as-you-go institutions. They remain institutions that are kept up as an Inherent Good Thing, as The Believer has argued for books. Judging by the "free market," the Bible is the most important text, followed closely by Steven King. Of course, if you were to make judgements about what is thought based on what information people were seeking, you would also have to take into account what is being checked out from a library, as well as what is selling at used bookstores. And then you would have to find out what people were actually reading. Oh, but then you would have to find out what exactly they were getting out of that reading ... You see where I am going ...

My Demographic

I am embarking on a small project to create a series of social research surveys about the differences between Generation X and Generation Why; roughly the culture of late teens-20s and the culture of 30 - 40 year olds. I am doing this because of the discipline it will require. I'll have to come up with questions that generate interesting responses. Finally, I 'll "product test" this survey with colleagues in the SRI, so the survey will have to survive their no doubt withering responses. In all, it is a good project for some who has been primarily literary, but now has turned to policy and thereby started committing social science.

But I am also want to do this project because in my time in the English department whenever I made substantial claims about differences between generations, people demurred, in that way that I recognized as saying, "There goes Robert again." The substantial and principled reason that they disagreed is of course the whole discourse about "generations" has more to do with demographics and marketing than anything else. It's commodified, as they say. Thus, the difference between Madonna's place in the culture in contrast to Britney Spears says nothing substantially interesting about the differences in generations, although it may say something about the evolution of the pop culture industry.

I humbly disagree on this point: demographic research, i.e. stereotyping, only works insofar as it actually tells you useful things. But rather than the English thing and simply assert this with amusing and telling anecdotes, I want to create an actual survey so I have (pseudo)real social research to back up my claims. I also believ that the objections of English major not really based on principles or marsixm. Rather, people in English departments, even those doing theory, are really cultivating their individuality. They may sometimes being writing dissertations or short fiction in which people fail at being individuals, but this in service of their (English majors) own individuality. It is pretty much human to deny that stereotype based on demographic information actually applies to you, sometimes followed by a denial that the stereotype even exist. But in the case of an English major, the reaction to that response has been honed even more sharply through the study of literature, but also through the study of theory. Thus, English majors have a number of creative responses to being classified as part of a group, though this may constitute the pattern that they themselves following.

In any case, it is ridiculous to say that broadly speaking your actions do not conform to a larger social pattern. The entire discipline of economics, not to mention its applied form in marketing, is built upon the assumption that people do behave in relatively discernible patterns. And claims built on these disciplines indisputably do work in the world. (Tho' the English major me will have to add that just because you are given choice, it doesn't mean that it isn't already determined.) More importantly, Generation X coincides with the moment when the avant-garde became populist. I mean the punk rock movement, which really was an entire arts movement--its just that punk music has been the most successful version of it. Think of the clothing, the design aesthetic, as well as filmmakers who started as video artists. Some of the gestures had been done, but punk made them available to kids in the suburbs and the non-center cities, where before you would only get It in London, Paris, New York, etc.

The question, then, my survey will try to answer is whether you can discern a more fragmented form of cultural allegiance in younger people, since the array of identities now available in the subculture are legion, rather than the three or so (Punk, Goth, Hippie) that were available in 1983. So, stay tuned for more discussion of the "Madonna-Britney" problem.

I've gone and done one of those silly quizzes on the web. I did the quiz mostly because "Robert" is one of the characters in this cartoon. However, I am pleased that I have been told that I am part of an "America Hating Minority." It's about time that intellectuals were recognized as the minority we are. And we do require affirmative action, or at least decent stipends. Doesn't anyone in the current administration realize that buying an intellectual--who usually don't cost a lot --is the best way to get them on your side?

I am an Intellectual



Which America Hating Minority Are You?

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The new year begins with a new blog. My old blog is now inaccessible even to me, as I killed the account under which it was started. And, to be honest, I wanted to start on a new footing. There were far too many mispellings for me to be happy with "Post Theory," but the tone was also worrying. Some people may think I am pulling a Kathleen Wilson: writing about the same things in a new space with a new name. Regardless, the Blog is On.