Very much enjoyed this discussion of the spiritual power of art. It's nice to see someone argue for something like this rather than some sort of practical or utilitarian benefit of art, but it's also a challenge, because how do you talk about the spiritual convincingly in the contemporary world? As I was reading I kept thinking of the idea of faith, which I think is what you were getting at when you talked about people believing in the value of their own work. I don't mean religious faith here, just a belief that what you're doing matters, that it's the right thing, even if you have no real proof, or no proof that could be recognized as such by others (one can see how this can go wrong, too). The person who I think captures these ideas of faith and spirituality, at least imo, is Andrei Tarkovsky, and I find myself returning to his films and writing again and again. I'm just gonna include a quote from his book "Sculpting in Time" because it's full of this sort of stuff:
"Art addresses everybody, in the hope of making an impression, above all of being felt, of being the cause of an emotional trauma and being accepted, of winning people not by incontrovertible rational argument but through the spiritual energy with which the artist has charged the work. And the preparatory discipline it demands is not a scientific education but a particular spiritual lesson..."
Thank you! I don't know much about Tarkovsky, but I'd like to know more! At one point when I was in a lot of distress I read the transcript of this Bill Moyer's interview with Barry Lopez, and it crystalized a lot of my ideas about art.
I think most artists believe there is something spiritual about it, no? That there's a certain rightness or integrity to the best art. Obviously everything has flaws, but it's a joy to see something that really feels like it needed to exist and that it ought to exist.
The two that are most relevant to the discussion here (that I know of, haven’t seen everything) are Andrei Roublev and Nostalghia, as they’re both in a way about artists going through a period of creative death, losing faith in what they’re doing, and then rediscovering it through another person who has the spiritual energy they lack. Unfortunately neither of these are on YouTube. The ones on YouTube are Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker. I haven’t seen these ones yet but they’re all considered classics and I would guess they treat similar themes. I don’t think you can go wrong just picking any of them.
My issue with The Americans was that the strengths of the show (the acting, the physical and social mise en scene, the portrayal of FBI and Sovet bureaucracy, the slow burn of the underlying dramatic situation, especially as regards the children, etc.) went along with some wildly overdramatic made for TV storytelling. Philip and Elizabeth were assassinating people every other episode it seems like, were personally handling wildly toxic biological weapons, etc. etc. They were a one-family crime spree in a way that is optimized for television but not for a deep cover agent. In the end I had a hard time suspending disbelief even though the way the setting was handled was masterful.
Very interesting Article! About Gandhi: Of course, Mahabharata's spiritual power had became his philosophy, but Lev Tolstoy's political philosophy became the main Idea of Gandhi 's peaceful revolution against English colonialism. Young Gandhi visited old Tolstoy in his Yasnaya Poliana and Tolstoy convinced him in his theory: "not to resist the evil by violence." Gandhi was first and last, as I know, who followed this theory. Russians didn't and we know how it finished. There is no prophet in own homeland. What confirms, why great Andrei Tarkovsky had to leave Russia.
Tolstoy was considered in Russia and in the world not only as a famous writer, but a spiritual leader and philosopher in his late life. Russian intelligentsia followed him in his theory to be closer to peasantry, to open schools, libraries, kitchens and what they did, calling themselves Populists - Narodniki, in Russian. It was not a political organization, and it was long before the Revolution of 1917. So, nobody suffered. But I don't know history of India in the details and don't understand why the Gandhians had to suffer.
Great post and one whose gist I totally agree with!
I guess one minor (hopefully interesting) thing that I would point out is that Beowulf is very pagan in many ways, yes, but it’s also extremely Christian too, with references to the Old Testament and the biblical flood and so on. Grendel is described as being descended from Cain, for example, even while the characters themselves and the setting are pre-Christian.
I like the idea that the Great Books have spiritual power, for purely selfish reasons. If I watch TV, I only watch trash. I think the medium does not lend itself to high quality entertainment, so you may as well watch what is appropriate to the delivery system. Currently, I'm following Sin City Tow. The Las Vegas paper of record hated it enough to devote an entire article to how bad it was, which was enough of an endorsement for me.
The Postrel book looks pretty interesting, and (more importantly) looks pretty! Reminds me conceptually of something like Berger's "Ways of Seeing" - have you ever read that? Perhaps "read" should be in scare quotes, what with all the visuals there.
Your "Beowulf is TV" analogy is straight-up wrong, though. Sorry! TV criticism and analysis within my lifetime has been disproportionately focused on "important" "quality" programming rather than low-brow popular entertainment. Is there a media studies academic alive today who has ever *watched* NCIS, let alone written about it at length? There's an entire genre of thinkpiece that goes "golly, this Yellowstone show is way more popular than Succession, and yet everyone I know is obsessed with Succession and has barely even heard of Yellowstone!" But that genre of piece never goes beyond that Kael-on-Nixon observation, or concludes that Yellowstone might be worth paying attention to on aesthetic, cultural, etc grounds.
It would be very hard to say whether Beowulf is the NCIS or the Succession tho, since we have no idea what other anglo Saxon poetry existed! Succession is TV tho. It might not be NCIS but it's certainly TV. It is popular entertainment.
Maybe the answer is that neither Succession nor Yellowstone are worthy of paying a lot of attention to!
Also I have seen SO MANY episodes of NCIS. My parents would watch it every night after it replaced law and order on TBS's syndication. We also watched a lot of Bones. Both shows are pretty mind numbing! Definitely watchable but not really worth writing about?
Does a text need to be "good" to be worth writing about, though? A show like 24 comes to mind here. 24 is a technical marvel in terms of how it handles the mechanics of storytelling, which I think is worth writing about for the same reasons I love when you analyze how Henry James or Garth Greenwell write on the sentence level. 24 is the narrative America told itself during the War on Terror, and plenty of people write about novelists' oeuvres as artifacts of American empire. I think "is 24 art?" and "is 24 worth writing about?" are completely separate questions.
This is excellent—looking forward to you book v much!
On Succession—I care about the diminution of Shakespeare way more than the elevation of TV. Agree with you in broad terms. Just strikes me that the modern praise some TV receives is due to the lack of reading in modern culture. TV can be good (and is good) without taking over the place of art. But in a culture without reading status must accrue to what the educated are otherwise engaged with.
I think you’re probably right in the end, but I’ve found your jabs at Succession and Taylor Swift not all that convincing. I think it’s just very hard to prove a negative about an artwork’s worth; it would take a much closer reading than is plausibly worth the trouble. The problem is that a shallower takedown almost inevitably comes across as supercilious gatekeeping; you’d have to come across as understanding what people do love about these works and only then be in a good position to convincingly demonstrate they’re of a lower level than Lear or Woolf.
You think that we start from the position of assuming it's the equal of King Lear? People love all sorts of things and we don't assume that is what makes them equivalent of art. People love McDonald's. Do you think we need to go into detail to prove that it's not as good as Asian or French cuisine because we start by assuming that what is loved is good? I ask people all the time what they think it is that makes modern TV as good as golden age Hollywood, for example, and I get very few if any actual examples. Can anyone quote anything from any golden age TV programme that compares to the great writing of the past? Can we put any of its scenes next to the great movies and see an equal value? I just haven't seen this sort of serious case get made. Note that I am not saying necessarily that all of this stuff is bad, just that the criticism which claims it to be the equivalent of the various accomplishments of high art forms hasn't really made a case beyond "we all like watching it". Sure, but that was true of masses of long-forgotten stuff. I don't think I have said Taylor Swift is no good, for example, merely that to compare her to Mary Shelley and Wordsworth is silly. Almost nothing is that good and we are too glib with our highest praise of the popular.
What's great about contemporary art is it's totally unnecessary to demonstrate that it's as good as Lear or Woolf or Shelley. Contemporary art is entertaining and engaging, because it's made by and for us.
I agree that when we additionally try and heap this praise on contemporary art, positing a kind of timelessness, it's simply too much. It's unnecessary. It serves as an excuse for people to not engage with the past, because if Succession is as good as King Lear then why bother with the latter?
Yes! this is exactly my position---I'm not actually taking many "jabs" at Swift or TV, I am trying to resist the lazy criticism that equates them to other works of art. If people didn't write that stuff, I wouldn't bother writing about them.
No, that’s not what I mean; I certainly agree that it’s silly, but once you start writing *about* how it’s silly it seems to me you’re taking on the critical onus to actually prove that it’s silly, which is what I was describing as a high bar to meet. You had a post where you compared some Swift quotes to some Woolf quotes, so that you were at least gesturing at trying to demonstrate Woolf’s superiority, and once you’re into that game is when you’re caught up with trying to prove a challenging negative.
Very much enjoyed this discussion of the spiritual power of art. It's nice to see someone argue for something like this rather than some sort of practical or utilitarian benefit of art, but it's also a challenge, because how do you talk about the spiritual convincingly in the contemporary world? As I was reading I kept thinking of the idea of faith, which I think is what you were getting at when you talked about people believing in the value of their own work. I don't mean religious faith here, just a belief that what you're doing matters, that it's the right thing, even if you have no real proof, or no proof that could be recognized as such by others (one can see how this can go wrong, too). The person who I think captures these ideas of faith and spirituality, at least imo, is Andrei Tarkovsky, and I find myself returning to his films and writing again and again. I'm just gonna include a quote from his book "Sculpting in Time" because it's full of this sort of stuff:
"Art addresses everybody, in the hope of making an impression, above all of being felt, of being the cause of an emotional trauma and being accepted, of winning people not by incontrovertible rational argument but through the spiritual energy with which the artist has charged the work. And the preparatory discipline it demands is not a scientific education but a particular spiritual lesson..."
Thank you! I don't know much about Tarkovsky, but I'd like to know more! At one point when I was in a lot of distress I read the transcript of this Bill Moyer's interview with Barry Lopez, and it crystalized a lot of my ideas about art.
https://billmoyers.com/content/author-barry-lopez/
I think most artists believe there is something spiritual about it, no? That there's a certain rightness or integrity to the best art. Obviously everything has flaws, but it's a joy to see something that really feels like it needed to exist and that it ought to exist.
Thanks, I’ll watch the interview. A few of Tarkovsky’s films are officially uploaded in high quality on YouTube.
I'm kind of intrigued now! Which should I watch first?
The two that are most relevant to the discussion here (that I know of, haven’t seen everything) are Andrei Roublev and Nostalghia, as they’re both in a way about artists going through a period of creative death, losing faith in what they’re doing, and then rediscovering it through another person who has the spiritual energy they lack. Unfortunately neither of these are on YouTube. The ones on YouTube are Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker. I haven’t seen these ones yet but they’re all considered classics and I would guess they treat similar themes. I don’t think you can go wrong just picking any of them.
My issue with The Americans was that the strengths of the show (the acting, the physical and social mise en scene, the portrayal of FBI and Sovet bureaucracy, the slow burn of the underlying dramatic situation, especially as regards the children, etc.) went along with some wildly overdramatic made for TV storytelling. Philip and Elizabeth were assassinating people every other episode it seems like, were personally handling wildly toxic biological weapons, etc. etc. They were a one-family crime spree in a way that is optimized for television but not for a deep cover agent. In the end I had a hard time suspending disbelief even though the way the setting was handled was masterful.
Agreed! I'm halfway through season one and already this body count is straining credulity!
The other funny thing when you binge watch is the increasingly eye rolling nature of Philips “disguises”
Oh yeah! I'm like...he is having sex with these women and they don't notice he is wearing a wig????
Very interesting Article! About Gandhi: Of course, Mahabharata's spiritual power had became his philosophy, but Lev Tolstoy's political philosophy became the main Idea of Gandhi 's peaceful revolution against English colonialism. Young Gandhi visited old Tolstoy in his Yasnaya Poliana and Tolstoy convinced him in his theory: "not to resist the evil by violence." Gandhi was first and last, as I know, who followed this theory. Russians didn't and we know how it finished. There is no prophet in own homeland. What confirms, why great Andrei Tarkovsky had to leave Russia.
There were a fair number of Russian Tolstoyans--that's my understanding at least. They just got killed by the Soviets at some point.
In modern India, the Gandhians face the same dilemma--not killed off, but they have a hard time. Not a lot of Gandhians left.
Tolstoy was considered in Russia and in the world not only as a famous writer, but a spiritual leader and philosopher in his late life. Russian intelligentsia followed him in his theory to be closer to peasantry, to open schools, libraries, kitchens and what they did, calling themselves Populists - Narodniki, in Russian. It was not a political organization, and it was long before the Revolution of 1917. So, nobody suffered. But I don't know history of India in the details and don't understand why the Gandhians had to suffer.
Great post and one whose gist I totally agree with!
I guess one minor (hopefully interesting) thing that I would point out is that Beowulf is very pagan in many ways, yes, but it’s also extremely Christian too, with references to the Old Testament and the biblical flood and so on. Grendel is described as being descended from Cain, for example, even while the characters themselves and the setting are pre-Christian.
I like the idea that the Great Books have spiritual power, for purely selfish reasons. If I watch TV, I only watch trash. I think the medium does not lend itself to high quality entertainment, so you may as well watch what is appropriate to the delivery system. Currently, I'm following Sin City Tow. The Las Vegas paper of record hated it enough to devote an entire article to how bad it was, which was enough of an endorsement for me.
The Postrel book looks pretty interesting, and (more importantly) looks pretty! Reminds me conceptually of something like Berger's "Ways of Seeing" - have you ever read that? Perhaps "read" should be in scare quotes, what with all the visuals there.
Your "Beowulf is TV" analogy is straight-up wrong, though. Sorry! TV criticism and analysis within my lifetime has been disproportionately focused on "important" "quality" programming rather than low-brow popular entertainment. Is there a media studies academic alive today who has ever *watched* NCIS, let alone written about it at length? There's an entire genre of thinkpiece that goes "golly, this Yellowstone show is way more popular than Succession, and yet everyone I know is obsessed with Succession and has barely even heard of Yellowstone!" But that genre of piece never goes beyond that Kael-on-Nixon observation, or concludes that Yellowstone might be worth paying attention to on aesthetic, cultural, etc grounds.
It would be very hard to say whether Beowulf is the NCIS or the Succession tho, since we have no idea what other anglo Saxon poetry existed! Succession is TV tho. It might not be NCIS but it's certainly TV. It is popular entertainment.
Maybe the answer is that neither Succession nor Yellowstone are worthy of paying a lot of attention to!
Also I have seen SO MANY episodes of NCIS. My parents would watch it every night after it replaced law and order on TBS's syndication. We also watched a lot of Bones. Both shows are pretty mind numbing! Definitely watchable but not really worth writing about?
Does a text need to be "good" to be worth writing about, though? A show like 24 comes to mind here. 24 is a technical marvel in terms of how it handles the mechanics of storytelling, which I think is worth writing about for the same reasons I love when you analyze how Henry James or Garth Greenwell write on the sentence level. 24 is the narrative America told itself during the War on Terror, and plenty of people write about novelists' oeuvres as artifacts of American empire. I think "is 24 art?" and "is 24 worth writing about?" are completely separate questions.
That's true! I am convinced by your argument :)
It is called being educated.
This is excellent—looking forward to you book v much!
On Succession—I care about the diminution of Shakespeare way more than the elevation of TV. Agree with you in broad terms. Just strikes me that the modern praise some TV receives is due to the lack of reading in modern culture. TV can be good (and is good) without taking over the place of art. But in a culture without reading status must accrue to what the educated are otherwise engaged with.
I think you’re probably right in the end, but I’ve found your jabs at Succession and Taylor Swift not all that convincing. I think it’s just very hard to prove a negative about an artwork’s worth; it would take a much closer reading than is plausibly worth the trouble. The problem is that a shallower takedown almost inevitably comes across as supercilious gatekeeping; you’d have to come across as understanding what people do love about these works and only then be in a good position to convincingly demonstrate they’re of a lower level than Lear or Woolf.
You think that we start from the position of assuming it's the equal of King Lear? People love all sorts of things and we don't assume that is what makes them equivalent of art. People love McDonald's. Do you think we need to go into detail to prove that it's not as good as Asian or French cuisine because we start by assuming that what is loved is good? I ask people all the time what they think it is that makes modern TV as good as golden age Hollywood, for example, and I get very few if any actual examples. Can anyone quote anything from any golden age TV programme that compares to the great writing of the past? Can we put any of its scenes next to the great movies and see an equal value? I just haven't seen this sort of serious case get made. Note that I am not saying necessarily that all of this stuff is bad, just that the criticism which claims it to be the equivalent of the various accomplishments of high art forms hasn't really made a case beyond "we all like watching it". Sure, but that was true of masses of long-forgotten stuff. I don't think I have said Taylor Swift is no good, for example, merely that to compare her to Mary Shelley and Wordsworth is silly. Almost nothing is that good and we are too glib with our highest praise of the popular.
What's great about contemporary art is it's totally unnecessary to demonstrate that it's as good as Lear or Woolf or Shelley. Contemporary art is entertaining and engaging, because it's made by and for us.
I agree that when we additionally try and heap this praise on contemporary art, positing a kind of timelessness, it's simply too much. It's unnecessary. It serves as an excuse for people to not engage with the past, because if Succession is as good as King Lear then why bother with the latter?
Yes! this is exactly my position---I'm not actually taking many "jabs" at Swift or TV, I am trying to resist the lazy criticism that equates them to other works of art. If people didn't write that stuff, I wouldn't bother writing about them.
No, that’s not what I mean; I certainly agree that it’s silly, but once you start writing *about* how it’s silly it seems to me you’re taking on the critical onus to actually prove that it’s silly, which is what I was describing as a high bar to meet. You had a post where you compared some Swift quotes to some Woolf quotes, so that you were at least gesturing at trying to demonstrate Woolf’s superiority, and once you’re into that game is when you’re caught up with trying to prove a challenging negative.