Kitsch Me If You Can

There are a lot of good ideas in this review of Roger Scruton's new book. Unfortunately because it's Scruton, those ideas can seem sort of musty and scolding. Moreover, the relationship between kitsch and beauty feels like a false dichotomy, and it's very easy to see how something that at face value seems kitschy can be transformed into something beautiful in the hands of right artist.

But I thought this was well expressed:

We miss the point if we think that beauty in art or literature or music has finished its job when it provides pleasure. Scruton argues, reasonably, that beauty also makes ethical demands on us. Its existence challenges us to "renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world."

Kitsch encourages us to dwell on our own satisfactions and anxieties; it tells us to be pleased with what we have always felt and known. It reaches us at the level where we are easiest to please, a level requiring a minimum of mental effort.

Beauty, on the other hand, demands we consider its meaning. It implies a larger world than the one we deal with every day. Even for those with no religious belief, it suggests the possibility of transcendence. Faith has declined in much of the West, but "art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species." As one reviewer has already pointed out, Scruton's "perspective is religious without belief."

At the other end of the scale, kitsch ("that peculiar disease that we can instantly recognise but never precisely define, and whose Austro-German name links it to the mass movements and crowd sentiments of the 20th century") degrades beauty through the Disneyfication of art. Kitsch trivializes human conflict and demotes feeling into bathos. It's a mould that forms, as Scruton says, over a living culture.

This all works well if you substitute kitsch with solipsism, beauty with imagination, and morality as an overcoming of the ego. Art, as this essay rightly recognizes, requires an imaginative leap of faith. Not in the religious sense, but in the sense that you open yourself up to the world without expecting any particular outcome or result. Art surprises and transforms.

What Scruton seems to miss is that it's always about context and the way that objects stand in relationship to one another and play on our imagination. In this way, an army of garden gnomes can be beautiful, while a magnetic reproduction of the Mona Lisa on your fridge can come off as the worst sort of bad taste.

Led Zeppelin Animation

Ectomo directs our attention to artist and animator Steve Scott, who in addition to be an excellent illustrator also did the background projection for Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" during their recent reunion.

Amoral Atheists

Pharyngula wastes a lot of energy trying to defend the moral behavior of atheists, and trying to make himself out to be a bland, upstanding guy. No offense, but who cares?

I do have a real and consistent reason for behaving morally, it's just one that doesn't require a supernatural foundation. I was raised in a happy family, one that reinforced that conventionally 'good' behavior, and that rewarded appropriate social behavior. I lived with good role models who offered love without conditions, who taught by example rather than with fear or threats. I live now in a family and with a community of friends who do not demand obeisance to superstition in order to give respect. I am rewarded materially and emotionally for moral behavior.

What's important in atheism is it takes away religion's ability to make truth claims about the natural world and the workings of science. The argument from social reinforcement would be a lot more convincing if there was any research to back it up, but that' s beside the point. Once you've taken the truth claims out of religion, what you have left is not amoral atheism, but art and culture. The how and the why of justifying the ways of humanity to itself. From Antiquity to the Present day, this is something that we all share and participate in. Art for art's sake, art for reason's sake, art for passion's sake, art for and against the grain, for thousands of years. And I would argue that it is this third way that we should lead the discussion.
----------------
Listening to: Sufjan Stevens - Variation On "Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion At Magruder Park"
via FoxyTunes

Ryan Heshka's Neo Pulp

Via Cool Hunting, an interesting artist with a fun pulp style. More here.

Edward Hopper and the Mad Men

I enjoyed the first episode of AMC's "Mad Men" last night. It tells the story of an ad agency in the high modern Manhattan of the 60s: jet set style, skyscrapers, steel and glass, and skinny ties.

Unfortunately the shows greatest weaknesses are also its supposed strengths: the period smoking plays like Brazil style satire, the ad agency brainstorming runs the danger of turning into Shakespeare in Love style serendipity (Lucky Strikes are toasted to be tasty, hey that's good!). Additionally, the conceit that "behind closed doors, things are not what they seem", tells us a lot less about the 60s (or life in general) than the show thinks it does. It also borrows pretty heavily from the 50s era domestic dramas that Far from Heaven payed tribute to, including the closing scene where our hero returns home to wife and children in suburban Connecticut.

What the show does well though is give us interesting characters and places them in visually interesting situations. Maybe it's the fact that Christina Hendricks's green dress stole every scene it was in, but I couldn't help but think that the look of the show was much more inspired by the 40s and 50s than the 60s. For example in this painting by Edward Hopper:



Also notice in this shot the way they use the furniture and windows of the office to highlight the increased isolation and internal conflict of Jon Hamm's character:



As in this painting:




In both instances, the placement of the person within the scene is both visually pleasing and psychologically interesting. Lost in thought, the character is isolated from the world around him as well as from other people, and perhaps life.

It is this attention to the characters and the way that the scenes are shot that makes Mad Men successful. I'm looking forward to future episodes.

Edward Hopper

Hopper is one of my favorite painters. He has a real David Lynchian narrative style that is both very cinematic and realistic as well as surreal and frightening. There's a tension in each picture that you don't notice so much as feel after you've looked at it for a while.

There's a good slideshow discussion over at Slate.