The search for a sustainable financial model for serious journalism is time-consuming. Currently concentrating on support for Arts Spectrum, I am reprinting some past columns. This week's post is a lightly edited version of a column that appeared in the Hendersonville Times-News on October 14, 2001, a month after “9/11” changed both the political world and the artistic environment.
These are tough times for cultural journalists, or so says Kate Taylor in the Toronto Globe & Mail (September 27, 2001). In the aftermath of the September 11 carnage, just how important are the arts?
For most news media, the answer is “not very.” Even before these events, newspaper editors in a poll rated the arts last in importance of fifteen categories for news coverage. Many regional newspapers have eliminated dramatic and musical criticism altogether, and their cultural news consists of gossip, scandal, and box-office grosses.
Perhaps the artists and critics themselves are partly to blame for this. Deconstructionism and post-modernism may be an unintentional joke that posterity will smile on benevolently. Recent artistic theory may in fact constitute intellectual baggage that restricts spontaneity by creative artists. By the time reaction occurs, the stimulus may no longer be news. Since art appears to have lost its ability for rapid reaction, it may be an error to even consider arts reporting as “news.”
This slow reaction is not true of the human need to express suffering and mourning through iconic and poetic expression. Public art appeared soon after the September tragedy. The Baltimore Sun (September 30, 2001) reports that “the multifaceted artistic community of America’s largest city” responded swiftly with impromptu memorials. The New York Times (October 1, 2001) reports that these improvised shrines were often conceived around poems. The Chicago Tribune (September 25, 2001) discusses these shrines: “They are personal. They are peaceful. They are human. And they seem to be part of an increasingly common way of publicly mourning the dead in this country, in New York, in Oklahoma City, in Colorado, and in Chicago.”
But these outpourings were naive art by amateurs or transient spontaneous works by professional artists. In our time, high culture seems to have become retrospective in nature, and unable to react rapidly to events in the news.
Early in the twentieth century, slow reaction was not the case. The poet Wilfred Owen wrote powerful poetry regarding World War I from the trenches of Flanders before being slain. Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica was a contemporary comment on the brutality of the Fascist rise to power in Spain in the 1930’s, while Berthold Brecht’s play Mother Courage told and ominously foretold the sufferings of common people in European wars. North Carolinian Randall Jarrel’s poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” was a graphic response to the sacrifice of young life in World War II. And the abstract expressionist school of painting was based on a life-affirming post-World War II American optimism after the defeat of the authors of the Holocaust and despite the continuing threat of nuclear war.
From a report in New York Magazine (September 24, 2001) we learn that “If the consensus is correct, the arts may change dramatically… In Western society, the response of art to a change in social conditions is never uniform and rarely obvious… If there is to be a profound change in art, however, its early harbinger will be impatience - even disgust - with the broad worldview that has sustained art during the past 40 years.”
That sounds like the start of something interesting. Perhaps rapid reaction to critical contemporary events will arise again in the arts. The re-examination of American values and actions now underway may incline the artistic world to value-based gut reactions and away from clumsy deconstructionist evaluations.
© 2001, 2009 Edward C. McIrvine
Arts Spectrum column #461
December 4, 2009
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