In Defense Of Modern Art

I was recently checking out a post at TYWKIWDBI, one of my daily must read blogs (mentioned here when Brain Rage was added to the blogroll there) written by an elderly yet prolifically posting fellow who goes by the name of Minnesotastan, wherein he repeated a common lament that he just did not "get" modern art. One of his commenters echoed his dirge and linked to the following commentary by the similarly elderly and also perpetually whining 60 Minutes icon Andy Rooney:


Now I can somewhat understand Stan's and Rooney's worldviews as they pertain to this subject. Both of these men most likely came of age in a culture that celebrated the traditional "masters" of the art world, growing up in a time when most credible "art" meant a skillfully constructed painting or sculpture that actually looked like what it was supposed to be portraying. True, the modern art genre has existed for over a century now but outside of the artistic community the views of those like Stan and Rooney have largely persisted as the mainstream of American society.

I've often heard the similar opinion from many other people that modern art is just not as meaningful or well done as that of the traditional masters but I must respectfully disagree. Now this is not to say that I don't appreciate great traditional works. In fact, as I type these words in my humble abode I'm looking at framed prints of "Ancient Rome" by Giovanni Paolo Panini (which I viewed at the Louvre in Paris) and "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusai (which I viewed at the Met in New York City) but at the same time they hang across the room from "Lucifer" by Jackson Pollock (which I viewed at the MOMA in San Francisco), one of my absolute favorite works of all time.

So, which of these is the best painting of the bunch? Which is obviously the most artistic? They are each as radically different from each other in form and style as art can be yet I have an easy answer to this largely academic question: They all are. I say this despite the fact that one of the originals is obviously the most expensive while another has almost certainly been deemed the most important and meaningful by the artistic community but I say it mainly because I love each of them for very different reasons.

Now of course I would never assign myself the title of "Arbiter of All that is Worthy and Artistic in the World" (although that would certainly be a kick-ass addition to any resume) but I do know what I do and do not like as far as the art world is concerned, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some curmudgeonly old commentator like Andy Rooney dictate to me what is and is not "art" as if I were some wholly uneducated bumpkin uncomprehendingly staring at an amorphous splash of paint on a largely unmarked canvas. Rooney's certainly entitled to his opinion on this score (as is Minnesotastan) but I'll be the final arbiter of what I find worthy of artistic praise and merit.

It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this is often said because it's true. I myself refer to various pieces and installations as either "good" art or "bad" art on a routine basis but I realize that my personal opinions and designations hardly make these judgements true for others and the same applies to those critics within the art world with educations and personal collections far in excess of my own, and it especially applies to serial scolders like Rooney. If you personally like a piece of art, it's good; if you do not, it's bad. Don't ever let someone else tell you what to think about any particular piece of art just because they claim to have some mysterious insight into said piece, but at the same time don't presume to judge anything as "non-artistic" for everyone else just because you don't appreciate it personally. I enjoy living in a world teeming with art even if I'm not always particularly fond of every piece I come across and unlike Rooney, I'd rather have "bad" art than none at all.

Gordon Brown Fail

President Obama is still winning the hearts and minds of the world. Prime Minister Brown, not so much:


Pundit Kitchen has another take:

Something Someone Else Said

"The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool." -Charles Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

You can read my own take on the benefits of elitism at this post.

Picture Of The Day

President Barack Obama enjoys a beer at the Bulls-Wizards game in Washington, D. C. I'll bet that's an imported European beer though. Elitist.

Something Someone Else Said

"Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far as the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, who to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it’s where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: “Don’t trust him. Don’t know. Undecided. Just because, that’s why.” We know because we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love. I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing — a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that’s so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”" -Mark Slouka, Harper's Magazine

This is why Joe the Plumber is famous right now, and it's embarrassing.

Something Smart Someone Else Said

"Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared." -David Brooks, The New York Times

Something Someone Else Said

"The one moment that stays with me tonight, oddly enough, was not Palin's speech. It was a line from Giuliani, a New York mayor with a young second third wife and gay friends, mocking a "cosmopolitan" who was brought up by a single mother. It was that Barack Obama's rise could "only happen in America." And it was designed to mock him, the first African-American candidate for the presidency of the United States.

I won't forget that." -Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, on the third night of the Republican National Convention

Michael Phelps' Diet

Unless you've been living under a rock this past week you've probably been following or have at least heard about Michael Phelps' history making run at the Beijing Olympic games. He won eight gold medals and set seven world records, establishing himself as the greatest medal-winner at a single Games in the 112-year history of the modern Olympics. Combined with his six golds and two bronzes from previous Games and the fact that he plans to compete again both four and eight years from now, it's a pretty good bet that he will some day be known as an Olympic legend.

Even more prolific than his penchant for winning gold however is his appetite: the 23-year-old consumes a staggering 12,000 calories a day, over five times what an average adult male should be getting. Check out this menu from a typical training day:

Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase "Breakfast of Champions" by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.

He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.

At lunch, Phelps gobbles up a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayo on white bread - capping off the meal by chugging about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

For dinner, Phelps really loads up on the carbs - what he needs to give him plenty of energy for his five-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week regimen - with a pound of pasta and an entire pizza.

I'm a fairly slow eater myself but even if I wasn't I don't think I could find the time to put all of that away every day. And I imagine that he must have many days just like the one below (you can see that the Emmy's are well deserved):

Who's The Elitist Again?

Read this account of Hillary Clinton stopping for a photo op at a South Bend, Indiana gas station to promote her and John McCain's plan to eliminate the federal gas tax for the summer. In addition to admitting that she hadn't pumped her own gas in years, she apparently had a little trouble getting her own coffee as well:
I'm also collecting bets on the last time she actually held a tire iron in her hands. Any takers?

What They've Got

It's kind of hard to make supposed insults like "elitism" stick when you have the facts in front of you, huh? True, they're each millionaires but I'd say the disparity in net worth is quite telling. Yet you hardly hear anything about it in the mainstream media because they're too busy talking about flag lapel pins and whether a candidate's angry black pastor is patriotic enough; you know, the really important issues.

Obama, Elitism And Bitter Politics

Unless you're politically tone deaf or you just don't read the news (which would certainly describe a significant portion of Americans, although not the well informed readers of this blog of course), you've heard all of the noise being made lately by Hillary Clinton, John McCain and every one of their surrogates in the national media about some comments made by Barack Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser last week. Specifically this:

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Now you would think that any responsible news organization would take a little time to listen to the entire speech in order to put his remarks into context but I think most of us are well aware by now of how most news organizations have devolved to the point where the quest for ratings and lazily playing sound-bites are standard operating procedures. If you did listen to the entire thing you would see that he was speaking about folks who have fallen upon hard times over the last several years and even decades, people who feel betrayed by their government and who, when they hear someone talking about government in a non-cynical way, immediately feel resentment and mistrust. His point was that when we do get the chance to institute real change in this country, these people who are going to need our help the most are the same ones who will need the most convincing of our sincerity to deliver that change and who will need to hear specific, concrete ideas for the future that will positively affect their lives and the lives of their families for the better.

A major talking point being pounded upon by the anti-Obama forces is his declarative use of the word "bitter" to describe these specific people. As Joe or Jill Public, if you or I said something like this no one would bat an eyelash because (mercifully) we don't live under the constant microscope of someone who is running for the presidency. Unfortunately, if you're Barack Obama and you say something to the effect of "people who have lost their jobs to economic stress are bitter" there is an immediate and disproportionate backlash: you're against poor, working-class people, you're a smug elitist out of touch with blue-collar America, here's one person we found who lost his job and he's not bitter so now you're a dirty liar as well, etc. These cries are in turn amplified and taken advantage of by his opponents and every other opportunist who has something to gain from attacking him and harming his reputation. Case in point: Hillary Clinton was shamelessly handing out "I'm Not Bitter" buttons to voters at an Indiana campaign event in a desperate attempt to capitalize on this supposed controversy.

Another meme from this story is his use of the word "cling" in reference to people's feelings about guns, religion, distrust of the other, etc. This line was immediately spun and distorted thusly by the rival political camps: Barack Obama wants to abolish the 2nd amendment and take away your guns, Obama doesn't respect your religious beliefs, Obama wants to open our borders to illegal immigrants who will take away even more of your jobs. Of course, anyone who has read the man's books or listened to his speeches can tell you that he has never intimated anything like this and that what he was speaking of is exactly what those on the right (and now the left as well, unfortunately) have been doing for years and are callously doing yet again: using incendiary, hot-button social issues to drive a wedge between the American people and to use this distraction to convince the electorate to consistently vote against their own well being and economic self interests. The public "clings" to issues such as gun rights and religion because these things are familiar and comforting and, unlike the national or world economies, people feel like they can exert some measure of control in these matters.

And have you ever noticed that when Republicans introduce federal legislation to outlaw abortion/gay marriage or to ban flag burning or to build a wall to keep the brown people from crossing our border that it only occurs in years ending with an even number/election years? They even propose outrageously unpopular constitutional amendments that they know will have no chance of being ratified so that they can look like they're fighting the good and moral fight for their conservatively religious base, then when they win another election cycle it's back to business as usual with corporate America for another year not evenly divisible by 2. What, you want us to raise the minimum wage and institute affordable health care? We tried to smack down the Mexicans and the gays for you but those evil, liberal Democrats wouldn't let us; isn't that doing enough? Tell you what: reelect us again next year and we promise to try it all again. In the meantime, your baby's cough sounds really bad; maybe you should take him to a doctor or something.

But if you listen very carefully to the steady drum beat behind the cacophony of the daily news cycle you will notice the new bogey-word that Obama's enemies are now falling all over themselves to apply to him: elitist. It's purposeful misuse in our political discourse has had a carefully crafted effect upon the voting public; the mere utterance of the word immediately brings to mind images of fat, pampered royalty ruling an underclass of downtrodden peasants, of efete, Ivy league eggheads in ivory towers spouting ambitious ideas and grand theories too complex to be comprehended by the undereducated masses, of corrupt politicians and slimey corporate executives lining their own pockets with lucre culled from business empires built on the back of the little guy. In short, people who think they're better than us.

And that's the message every Obama hater is crowing right now at the top of their lungs all across the Midwest: this guy thinks he's better than you! This wealthy, Harvard educated politician who uses big words when he speaks wants to become your president so he can make the rules, raise your taxes and tell you how to live your life, because he thinks you're too poor, stupid and incompetent to do that on your own. They then subtly weave this snobbish image together with the classic "uppity negro" persona still recognizable to many older, working-class white voters and it becomes a fairly effective method to prey on the insecurities and weaknesses of the Pennsylvania rust belt; a classic Karl Rove political strategy and one that typifies precisely the type of dirty tricks and political maneuvering that Barack Obama has striven so hard to transcend with his campaign.

At the outset of this post, I had planned on writing a lengthy treatise on the virtues of elitism and the tragedy of it's conspicuous absence amongst those who would endeavor to lead us but when I went back and reviewed this vintage clip of Bill Maher which had originally inspired me to do so, I realized that there wasn't much more I could add that he hadn't already stated in his sometimes eloquent, and oftentimes caustic, style. So I'll just let my fellow Libertarian-Socialist (and intellectual elitist) take it from here: