Sat, 19 Apr 2008
Against the dehumanization of art
An old must-read from Mark Helprin in The New Criterion. Here's the central blessed point of his essay:
I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard. Though the entire cultural apparatus may deny the existence of an absolute standard, though the universities, the philosophers, the newspapers, and eventually, perhaps, every single human being on earth may deny that it exists ... it does, nonetheless, exist.
And here's a paragraph that stuck with me as I read the latest equipment-laden Field & Stream magazine:
Modernism is by necessity obsessed with form, much like a craftsman obsessed with his tools and materials. In my climbing days we used to call people like that “equipment weenies.” These days you can see it in fly-fishing, where not a few people go out once a year with $5,000-worth of equipment to catch (maybe) $5-worth of fish. What should have been the story of the man, the stream, and the fish becomes instead a romance between the man and his tools. In this century the same thing happened in art. Just as they who would deny the existence of the soul will perforce worship the body, those who do not immediately know the difference between art and design are those who would confuse and equate a sailfish levitated above windblown waves with a reconstruction of its stiff and motionless skeleton in a natural history museum.
This 1865 painting by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field", figures in an anecdote in his essay:
posted by Bill White at 20:33 | permalink | email me | | |
