Art with a capital F

The cross-eyed old painter, McNeff,
Was colour-blind, palsied, and deaf.
When he asked to be touted
The critics all shouted
”This is art with a capital F!”

Well, who do they think they are, these critics, eh, slandering poor old McNeff like that? Considering their failure over the centuries to come up with anything approaching a persuasive definition of art, you’d think they’d be a little more reluctant to go around making pronouncements about it.

I admit, you do have your serious thinkers about art who define it as whatever artists or art critics say it is, but there’s one teeny-tiny little flaw with that definition – artists and critics never agree among themselves about what art is.

Then there are your people who say art is what artists do. A bit circular, that definition – "How do you know that's art?" "It's art because an artist did it." "Well, what makes him an artist?" "He does art! Duh."

And there are your people who say art is whatever is intended to be art, which makes James McIntyre’s “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds” a work of art. Then you've got your people who consider art to be the appreciation of beauty. The problem with that idea is you then have to define beauty, and appreciation of beauty.

A lot of grand-sounding assertions are made about beauty, of course. “Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth.” Oh, sure.

Dentist: “Fact is, John, repairing that tooth’s going to set you back about a grand. I’m not kidding.”

Me: “Wow, that's beautiful, eh, doc? Thank god they made me read Keats in school so I could appreciate that.”

And what about “The Metamorphosis,” for example, or Guernica? They sure as hell ain’t beautiful, but they probably fall into your art category.

Beauty, my shorts. I’ll tell you what art is. Art is craft that rich people buy.

Render a few painstaking portraits of Elvis on beautiful navy blue or black velvet and, you know, no major art critics are going to come to your show. Slap some paint on a canvas to render an approximate facsimile of a nude woman, though, and all of a sudden you’re distinguished portraitist Lucian Freud (Freud is a good example because he started out painstakingly emulating Ingres and then switched to a far more slapdash style without the critics claiming he was no longer an artist; he also started raking in a lot more moolah). So what’s the difference between your exquisite portraits of Elvis and Freud’s less meticulous portraits of the unclothed? Simple – rich people buy the latter and don’t buy the former.

And why do rich people buy Lucian Freud but not portraits of Elvis on velvet? Rich people buy Lucian Freud rather than portraits of Elvis because Lucian Freud’s stuff costs a ton while even poor people can afford a portrait of Elvis on velvet.

What’s the point of being rich, eh, if people don’t know you’re rich? Filthy rich. Filthy, stinking rich. Filthy, stinking rich enough to plunk down a sum of money that would buy a medium-sized apartment house in exchange for a rendering of a nude which, if presented anonymously, would be considered an example of commercial art (in 2005, Freud’s Naked Girl Perched on a Chair, which looks as if it came from the cover of a 50s detective novel, pulled down $5.75 million US), a purchase you then put on your wall and proudly display as Great Art.

One artist who exploited this habit of rich people was Andy Warhol. He marketed portraits to the rich which were giant assemblages of photographs, made with a cheap camera, of the rich society women who had commissioned the portraits. Mum got to feel like a movie star for a day while a Major Artist took pictures of her in what resembled a modelling shoot, and Dad got to put a whacking great artwork on the wall which screamed to all and sundry “Buddy paid a whole hell of a lot of money for me! I’m a freaking Warhol!”

This definition of art as what rich people buy is not mine, of course. The great social commentator Lenny Bruce pointed out half a century ago that a depiction of factory workers screwing was smut, while a depiction of a titled lady screwing was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No doubt the theory predates Bruce. The practice certainly does. Would the Marquis de Sade’s obsessive sadistic fantasies have been hailed as great works of literature if his title had been merely Monsieur?

Literature, of course, is what rich people read. Back in the day only the rich read novels, since the plebes, if they could read, had more important things on their minds, like going poaching so they could eat. When the plebes finally got some time to read, they still didn’t have as much time, obviously, as the leisured classes, so they wanted something with a strong plot, interesting characters, clear ideas, and lots of incident. Whence the current “literary” novel – if the plebes prefer strong plots, interesting characters, clear ideas, and lots of incident, then the “literary” novel has little plot or incident, boring characters, and as few ideas as possible.

Hmmm. I'm sensing something – aha! the work of Barbara Pym just popped into your mind, didn’t it?

Art music, of course, is concert music. Rich people go to the symphony, so the symphony repertoire is Art. Rich people go to the opera, so opera is Art. Rich people go to the ballet, so ballet is…what is it, everyone? That’s right, Art.

Jazz? Whoa – hold on there, cowboy. Jazz was produced by people who resemble not rich people but rather rich people’s servants. No, except to a small coterie of jazz-besotted fanatics, jazz is not Art but rather the colourful, undisciplined music produced by a crew of fascinating, untutored characters. That so many of them could remain untutored even after graduating from Juilliard is evidence of their happy-go-lucky approach to music.

Incidentally, ballet is really your art with a capital F, isn’t it? Telling a story by standing on tippy-toes in an outfit that not only looks silly but has a silly name does not seem to me to be the best way to achieve artistic effects. Ballet’s claim to being an art would be no better than figure skating’s (another endeavour in which people attempt to create art by performing curious physical feats while wearing unusual costumes) were it not for the presence in the ballet audience of…of whom, everyone? Yup – rich people.

Now, I have nothing against rich people, apart from their being rich and my not being. I wholeheartedly support their right to have their own subcultural craft activities. I also freely admit that I find many of those subcultural craft activities of theirs highly entertaining and even moving. What I object to is the art racket.

The art racket is simple – get what you like officially defined as Great Art and then use that classification to get the government to pay for it. The world is filled with temples to the art of the rich – that is, by art galleries, concert halls, opera houses, and so on. Many of those temples were endowed by and are completely paid for by the rich, who also do the non-rich a favour by letting them in for a look. However, “the arts,” as they are so grandly named, survive to a great extent on the largesse of government, more aptly described as the largesse of the non-rich. Does the name Canada Council strike a familiar note?

Okay, it’s a free country. Maybe you don’t find anything inappropriate about the modestly-incomed subsidizing the rich. Maybe you think “the arts” are just what’s needed to strike some civilization into the hearts of the great unwashed.

Well, guess what? The great unwashed don’t go to exhibitions of “the arts”! Maybe it seemed like a good idea at one time to promote the civilizing effects of rich people’s art on hoi polloi, but after decades of applying this strategy the only conclusion we can reasonably draw is that it doesn’t work! All those galleries, orchestras, opera houses, etc., are still losing money.

But…but…if the arts don’t get money from government, who will support them? Hmmm. Hmmm – wait a minute! I don’t know much, but I do know that one thing that rich people have a lot of is…like, money. I’m sure you will agree with me to some extent here. Rich people have stacks of money. They have piles of money. They have oodles of it, great whacks of it, enormous freaking collections of it. They have money up their elegant Rosedale wazoos. Listen to me, rich people – if you just substituted Ossetra caviar for Beluga a few days a year and donated the savings to the arts, the arts would flourish like flies in an outhouse!

Meanwhile, the rest of us could use the extra money in our pockets to buy paintings on velvet.

Art with a Capital F © John FitzGerald, 2007

Mein selbst

Guest column by Adolf Hitler:

At the age of 39 I was a total loser. Born illegitimate, I dropped out of high school and at 39 was still using my mother’s comical last name, Schicklgruber. By the time I was 44, though, I had turned my life around! I was Chancellor of Germany, and soon went on to become its all-powerful Führer! People turned out in the hundreds of thousands to hear me speak, and wherever I went everyone proudly greeted me with the special salute I had devised for them! Why, people even stopped saying “hello” and “goodbye,” and started saying “Heil Hitler!” instead!

How did I do it? How did I overcome four decades of failure on the margins of society and within five years make myself a total success at its centre? The answer: I started believing in myself.

Yes, the self-improvement gurus are right! If we just believe in ourselves, we have the power within us to accomplish whatever we want. Why do so many of us not believe in ourselves? As Dr. Phil puts it, in his book Self Matters, you actually have a choice of two selves to believe in:

• your authentic self, or “the self you once were before life took its toll,” and
  
• your fictional self, which he describes as “the identity...you believe you are supposed to be, the person people tell you you are.”

The fictional self is a self imposed on you by others , while the authentic self is you as you really are. Others impose a fictional self on you so that they can control you, but when you stop believing in that fictional self and start believing in your authentic self you become uncontrollable! You can accomplish your heart’s desire!

My own heart’s desire, of course, was to exterminate the Jews. Until I started believing in my authentic self, though, I had been reticent to try to achieve this goal, inhibited as I was by the oppressive strictures of the people about me and of the fictional self which they had invented to contaminate the purity of my authentic self and bend me to their will. Of course the Jews played more than a small role in this. Their absurd system of ethics, founded on the primitive teachings of Middle Eastern religious fanatics, was imposed on Germans so they would forget their authentic Aryan knowledge of good and evil and become servile minions of the international Zionist infanticidal financial conspiracy of hate and despair!

Well, I fixed that, or I would have if it hadn’t been for that Jew Franklin Delano Rosenfeld and his lackeys Winston Cohen and Joseph Stalinberg. Jealous of the heaven on earth my authentic self had created for the German people, and fearful that the populations they oppressed would start to demand the same thing for themselves, they didn’t just try to get me to be my fictional self again, they stabbed my authentic self in the back. I was stopped from achieving my authentic goal only by the violence and devastation inherent in their natures.

However, although they thought they could kill me, they could not kill my dream. My dream of accomplishing everything I had my heart set on. My dream of a better world full of better people.

My dream. My dream. Traum heil!

Hang on to your dream. Believe in yourself. You will accomplish miracles.

Mein Selbst © John FitzGerald, 2007

Iggy's excellent empire

The Conservative Party of Canada has decided to enliven our lives in recent days by running announcements on TV about how un-Canadian Michael Ignatieff is. Once we got over our shock at the Conservatives attacking someone for being pro-American, we decided this was the perfect time to dust off this review, first published in 2006.

Reviewed in this article:

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff(Vintage, 2003; 127 pages plus index; the Penguin edition, also published in 2003, is reviewed here)

He’s got that thing. Michael Ignatieff has been charming the Canadian journalistic classes for months now. The Globe and Mail published a fawning seven-page interview with him. Over and over we’re told how intellectual he is, how powerful his mind is, how he’s internationally respected as a scholar.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I decided to read some of this great thinking. The first thing I discovered while I was looking him up at the Toronto Public Library is that the Canadian people, or at least the Toronto branch, have not been inspired by reports of Mr. Ignatieff’s intellectual power (since Mr. Ignatieff is not teaching at the moment, I will use Mr. as his title rather than Dr.). No one’s been reserving any of his books, many of which are still on the shelves. In Toronto, at least, Iggymania seems to be confined to the employees of giant media corporations.

Anyway, I took out Empire Lite, which had the advantage of being fairly recent (2003) and topical (it deals in part with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; Mr. Ignatieff, in a departure from the policy of the party he aspires to lead, supports the latter invasion). It’s also short (127 pages of text in the Penguin edition), which I hoped would mean it hadn’t been artificially fattened the way so many books have been these days.

Mr. Ignatieff plunges into his topic immediately. His argument is that the old form of imperialism, which justified itself as necessary to spread civilization, has been replaced by a new stripped-down version which justifies itself as necessary to promote national self-determination – “hegemony without colonies,” as he puts it, “a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing” (p. 2). He calls this empire lite, and says “the key question is whether empire lite is heavy enough to get the job done” (p. 3).

What job is that? Well, Mr. Ignatieff is confusing about that question. He asserts in his summary that the “essential purpose" of empire lite is “to restore order to border zones essential to the security of great powers” (p. 109), which at least is plausible. However, from the end of the introduction on he assumes that the most important goal of empire lite is actually to promote self-determination.

He writes in his introduction, for example, that “critics of imperial power need to understand that self-government in these places [Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo] is unattainable without some exercise of imperial power….Imperialism has become a precondition for democracy” (pp. 23-24). However, 85 pages later we find him writing that one of the imperial characteristics of empire lite is that “real power [in the countries which have supposedly become self-determining] will continue to be exercised from London, Washington, and Paris” (p. 109).

Besides that, Mr. Ignatieff repeatedly writes, persuasively, that the failure of empire lite to provide true self-determination is one of its serious flaws. One could as well argue that although con men never deliver the Brooklyn Bridge to any of the suckers who’ve given them money, nevertheless if you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge you’re going to have to give money to a con man.

Mr. Ignatieff has been characterized by some as a groupie of the powerful, and his attribution of democracy-creating magical powers to imperialism – against his better judgment – seems to be an example of this. Nowhere does he make an argument to support his claim that imperialism is a precondition for democracy. He does not attempt to show how this assertion could be deduced from the defining characteristics of empire lite. In the three chapters between his introduction and his summary he marshals no objective empirical evidence which would support his claim or disprove a counterclaim that democracy can be established in a country without its becoming an object of imperialism. As we have seen, he characterizes imperialism (including empire lite) as inherently restricting national self-determination. His conclusion is that if empire lite doesn’t start living up to its supposed principles soon we’re going to be in serious trouble. But since imperialists say that their goal is to promote democracy, then ipso facto, Mr. Ignatieff seems to be arguing, that’s what their goal is.

I realize that what I’m claiming may not seem credible. However, if you’re a Canadian your public library probably has at least one copy of this book. All you have to do is read it. You will probably be as shocked by what you find as I was.

You’re probably wondering what goes on in those middle three chapters if Mr. Ignatieff is not marshalling evidence. What’s going on is some pedestrian journalism. In particular, the second of these three chapters is devoted to obvious character assassination of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières and of Médecins du Monde. Well, Mr. Kouchner may be as evil as Mr. Ignatieff depicts him, but his argument is unsupported by evidence. “What Bernard Kouchner represents is the whole tortuous history of modern humanitarianism and its marriage of convenience with state power and military force,” Mr. Ignatieff writes (p. 59). Represents to whom? Who exactly considers him to be a symbol of these things, other than Mr. Ignatieff? And saaay – isn’t hitching the self-determination wagon to the locomotive of state power and military force what Mr. Ignatieff is arguing for?

Clearly the imperialism of today does not promote national self-determination. Bosnia is effectively run by the European Union. In Iraq the coalition of the all too willing is ostensibly promoting the self-determination of a democratic nation called Iraq, when many of this ostensible nation’s citizens think their true nation is something else – Kurdistan, or an Islamic Caliphate based in the Sunni regions, or an islamic Republic of Iraq. But Mr. Ignatieff is still pitching the supposed virtues of the invasion of Iraq.

Much has been made of Mr. Ignatieff’s supposedly suspect Canadianness. Well, this book will allay your fears on that score. He actually mentions Canada as if it were important, so he must be Canadian. However, his book is obviously intended not for Canadians but for citizens of a country (the United States, say) which is having grave doubts about the justifiability of its imperial adventures and looking for someone who can give it soothing reassurances that blowing up thousands of Iraqis and Afghans is just what the remaining unexploded Iraqis and Afghans needed. As an analysis of what's happening in the world, though, it is unsubstantiated, self-contradictory, and quite possibly disingenuous.

Iggie's Excellent Empire © John FitzGerald, 2006

Pornography: boon or blessing?

Pornography has become considerably more acceptable lately. A few years ago it was widely condemned as a threat to women, to children, to the family, and to non-exploitative relationships between the sexes. Then the internet arrived and suddenly every household had a free pornography dispenser. People love to get things free.

Attitudes toward pornography still vary widely. Men, for example, love it. They can’t get enough of it. I imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury has seen a few things on his computer that don’t show up in reports to the General Synod of the Church of England, if you catch my drift. I mean – he’s a guy.

Of course, when he’s up in the pulpit, so to speak, Arch has to go on about pornography demeaning the human spirit etc. It’s his job. But then, when you’re doing your job you have to do what the boss tells you to, and Jesus was quite clear on this issue. According to Him, if you looked on a woman with adulterous lust in your heart, not only had you actually committed adultery, but you should go ahead and pluck your eyes out so you couldn’t do it again. The median number of eyes among contemporary Christians still seems to be two, but when they’re promoting the religion they have to follow company policy.

As for other religious leaders, Benedict XVI is the head, so to speak, of one of the biggest fetishistic organizations on the face of the earth. For one thing, there’s all those guys wearing dresses. And who invented the nun’s habit? It wasn’t the atheists.

As for the evangelicals, their opposition to pornography may be a little more heartfelt, since they seem to prefer hookers.

Women seem to have less positive attitudes about pornography. For one thing the whole question of the threat pornography constitutes to them and to society has never really been dealt with. In Canada, of course, there have been other concerns, such as raising the age of consent from 12 (twelve). It is difficult to inveigh against pornography, and especially against child pornography, when the law allows Canadian children to have sex with adults at the age of fourteen (at twelve you can consent to sex only with other immature children – what a protection).

Perhaps the answer is to look at pornography from a different perspective. Instead of looking at the threat it poses, let’s look at its benefits (metaphorically, I hasten to add):

• pornography has allowed Hugh Hefner to live most of his life in his pyjamas
  
• free advertising for the breast implantation industry
  
• promotion of high-speed internet connections (that ain’t just Disney movies they’re downloading)
  
• uh, that’s it

Wait – just thought of another benefit. Pornography is one of those questionable things we allow because, if we didn’t, then other things of demonstrable value might be outlawed. For example, much of what has been written over the last forty years about women’s reproductive rights might well have been suppressed in earlier days for the same reason that people want to suppress pornography – to stop people from encouraging immoral acts. Pornography is a form of speech, and if it can’t be suppressed then manifestly beneficial forms of speech can’t be, either. If pornography didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it.

Of course, that sort of argument is easier to make because research has never provided persuasive evidence for the argument that pornography encourages rape or other violent offences against women. In fact, it seems to be the countries with the least pornography which have the most abuse of women. Not much pornography in Saudi Arabia, and not too many women there singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” either.

But if it did turn out that pornography caused harm to society – then what? We still haven’t managed to ban tobacco, and that shit has killed more women than pornography has.

We talk a good game, though.

Pornography: Boon or Blessing? © 2007, John FitzGerald

It's all about us

First published in 2008:

The Canadian political leaders spent the recent election campaign telling us what wonderful people they were. What they should have been doing is telling us what wonderful people we are.

There is a strong narcissistic streak in the public. The appeal of politicians like Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan was that they told the voters that they (the voters) were wonderful people and that consequently they (Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Reagan) were going to do wonderful things for them.

At the moment one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States talks about how the American people together can accomplish great things, while the other talks about how only some of them – the “real” Americans – can accomplish great things. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but you can get pretty close to flattering all of them, and at the moment the one who is flattering all of them is leading in the opinion polls.

It is flattery, too. Most of us are just great lumps. Most Americans couldn’t find the United States on a map, and they’re supposed to accomplish great things? But it makes sense to them, so you can’t hurt yourself playing up to it.

In Canada, this is the secret of the Quebec nationalists. They continually tell Quebeckers how vibrant and dynamic their culture is. Not vibrant enough, apparently, to withstand a reduction in arts grants, but let’s not confuse the voters, eh?

So, if Stephen Harper wants a majority, he’d better start sucking up. We don’t want to hear about what a swell fellow he is, we want to hear about what a great bunch of guys and gals we are. Unfortunately, most Conservative politicians seem to believe that we’re really a substandard lot, the standard being Americans. It may take them a while to convert to the new approach.

And Jack Layton can stop talking about “everyday families,” eh? We don’t want to be told we’re good enough for everyday, we want to be told we can accomplish great things. You’d think a socialist could come up with something about the collective greatness of the Canadian people.

As for the Liberals, they blew their chance royally. Instead of calling their platform the Green Shift, all they had to do was call it the Just Society.

Democracy: it's all about us.

It's All About Us © John FitzGerald, 2008