Finally: the last topic chapter, about The Arts, and then the final chapter.
Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, post 5, post 6, post 7, post 8, post 9.
–Ch20, The Arts
The arts community thinks the arts are in trouble; examples about bookstores closing, etc (and this was 22 years ago!) But TS Eliot said something similar in 1948. Now we have competition from science and engineering; too many PhDs; careerism.
Actually, the arts and humanities have never been in better shape; consider attendance at concerts, number of books in print; recordings of music, videos of movies, dozens of TV stations, the web. So why all the lamentations? Some say new works are mediocre. This has always been true. The best is as good as anything. There are many new varieties of music. Computer graphics. The decline is a cognitive illusion, 403m. [[ I’d say this is a variation of the “good-old-days” syndrome, which is related to the motivations of MAGA: we’re comfortable with things we’ve lived with all our lives, and skeptical of anything new and different. Thus the pace of innovation in the arts is related to the human life span. ]]
Still, there are three areas of concern. Most ‘classical music’ was composed before 1900. The influence of cultural critics has dwindled. And academia. Pinker’s diagnosis? The 20th century’s philosophy of modernism, and then postmodernism, which denies human nature.
Art is in our nature, in all cultures. The are seven universal signatures for what constitutes are, p404: expertise; non-utilitarian pleasure; style; criticism; imitation; special focus; imagination. Art might be an evolutionary adaptation, or a byproduct of achieving various ends. Wilson’s biophilia seems to be a human universal. Thus, certain landscapes are attractive to everyone. Good works of art are layered. A drive for status, and conspicuous consumption, are key points. A way to impress prospective partners. Like bowerbirds. Artistic instincts transcend culture. (Including the plots of stories, 408.6, with the example of Star Wars.) There are common idealized landscapes. Possibly, these are just the effects of Western culture, spread throughout the world on calendars and in popular music.
Virginia Woolf claimed in 1910 that human nature changed. So what happened in 1910? Modernism, as in paintings of the post-impressionists. Realistic depictions gave way to abstraction. [[ In this case, at least, there’s a deeper cause: once photography was widespread, painters were no longer need to do portraits, or to paint realistic landscapes. So painters found something else to do. ]] In literature, new techniques included stream of consciousness, confusion of causal sequences, etc. In poetry, rhyme and meter were abandoned. Music introduced 12-tone modes, and others. Architecture became machines for living: glass towers, apartment blocks. In ways they paralleled discoveries in the sciences that challenged common sense notions of how the world worked. There was also a political agenda: to challenge the mass commercial society, to construct a better kind of society. Then in the 1970s, postmodernism. No perspective was privileged. No meaning, progress, or shared values. Claims of truth and progress were political. Art was to break us out of a prison; example of Andy Warhol’s soup cans. Literature and films become self-referential. [[ In a small way this was reflected in SF’s ‘new wave’ in the 1960s. ]]
These movements depend on the Blank Slate, a false theory. Perceptions are not learned social constructions. And they fail to account for the human drive for esteem. There is a perpetual turnover of styles in the arts, 412b. [[ Again, due to the drive for novelty. This has happened in sf too. ]] Now in the 21st c, we’re awash in cheap art. Now it’s about being distinctive, not beautiful. Modernist art disdained beauty. In 1913 Clive Bell wrote that art was about beautiful women, 413m. By now another motive for art is ‘conspicuous outrage’, to attract the attention of a jaded public. Critics came to supply art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe commented on this. Performance art. Bad writing. There’s pretentiousness going on too, as if elite art is inaccessible to cultural philistines. The is no correlation between morality and artistry. So the result of all this was: “ugly, baffling, and insulting art” and “pretentious and unintelligible scholarship”. So people stayed away.
A revolt has begun. [[ One might perceive an analogy between all this spinning of artworks and scholarship and science fiction or even fantasy — i.e., looking for new ways reality might make sense. ]] A new philosophy of the arts is emerging, with various movements 417t. [[ From 2000 or so, when Pinker was writing. I can’t say I’ve heard of any of these. ]] These were opposed equally to the postmodernism left, and the cultural right (with its canons of great works and sermons on the decline of civilization, 417.4) Mavericks in academia, 417m, including Dutton, Gottschall, and Turner. … ending with quotes by Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, and John Updike.
[[ Another factor I don’t Pinker mentions is that physics was revealing, in the early 20th century, that reality was not what we intuitively thought it was, what with relativity and quantum mechanics. Suddenly there were no certainties. And so artists explored new ways of pursuing their crafts, free from the constraints I’ve trying to be realistic. ]]
Part VI: The Voice of the Species, p421
The Blank Slate was attractive, and became part of secular faith, but it had a dark side too, (given the consequences discussed above). The modern science of mind, and evolution, show that it is not true. And many assumptions based on it are also wrong. This doesn’t excuse our behaviors, but it helps understand those behaviors. And most people, deep down, probably didn’t believe a lot of blank slate implications—that boys and girls are interchangeable, etc, 422.6. It’s the poets and novelists who’ve likely had the better take on human nature than the scientists. [[ Excellent point, which I made in my essay. That’s why sometime scientific ‘discoveries’ are dismissed as obvious by the public, as things people knew all along, though they’d never been nailed down in scientific ways. ]] Author concludes the book with some of their words.
- Emily Dickinson, “The Brain is Wider than the Sky.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron” (this is the story in which talented people are handicapped so they can’t perform better than ordinary people)
- George Orwell, 1984. (Its philosophy is well-articulated, 426m. Postmodernism! And the super-organism, a collective, around Big Brother. The Blank Slate assumption that men are infinitely malleable.)
- Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn. (Violence in a culture of honor. Feuds.)
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, A Love Story (a play)
