Conservative relatives of the victims and their political and media allies mobilized to banish a proposed ‘Freedom Center’ for the site on the grounds that it might dishonor the dead” (2).Īlthough battles over September 11 representations work well as an introduction to a book on art and politics, the culture wars of the previous two decades seem to weigh more heavily on The Arts of Democracy. “By the time of the fourth anniversary of the attacks,” Blake writes, “the familiar dynamic of the cultural wars had extinguished any hope for the rebuilt World Trade Center as an open, public space. And third, the eventual battle over the meaning of September 11 demonstrates that in postmodern America, there can be no common conversation, even about a collective trauma. Second, efforts on the part of authorities to channel this artistic outpouring exemplify how cultural politics are transposed onto politics writ large, or, how the state seeks to control the cultivation of its citizen-subjects. First, the avalanche of artistic expression in New York City following the hateful demolition of the World Trade Center reminds us that humans long for symbolic representation, especially in their darkest hour. In Blake’s introduction, three types of response to the Septemattacks nicely illustrate how art interacts with public culture and the state. Also see Lacy’s interview of Smith.) Blake and the other contributors to this anthology largely succeed in their mission to connect art to a broader intellectual context, especially insofar as they relate art to political culture. (See Tim Lacy’s review of another book in this series, Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Along with the rest of the Penn Press series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life In Modern America,” which Blake also edits, The Arts of Democracy seeks to place expressive culture in dialog with ideas. Blake, a professor of history at Columbia University, is the editor of The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, a compelling and useful anthology of essays that addresses “the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the relationship between the arts and public life in modern America” (2). The anxious commentary by conservatives like Reagan, Buchanan, and Wildmon was less proof of leftist cultural hegemony than of the culture wars, or the “fragmentation of public experience,” which, in the words of Casey Nelson Blake, “represents Americans’ multiple visions of a good life in ways that rule out the very possibility of a common conversation between citizens” (5). “While the right has been busy winning primaries and elections,” Buchanan wrote in 1989, “the left has been quietly seizing the commanding heights of American art and culture.” Instead, the 1980s gave us Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed, in Reverend Donald Wildmon’s contemptuous words, a “weak, insecure, mentally deranged Jesus.” It also gave us Andres Serrano’s seemingly blasphemous Piss Christ-literally a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine-and Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly stylized, homoerotic black-and-white photography. “For those who create the popular culture,” Reagan lamented, “patriotism is no longer in style.” Buchanan was more explicit: “America’s art and culture are, more and more, openly anti-Christian, anti-American, nihilistic.” The culture had not lived up to the conservative promise of what Sidney Blumenthal termed “Reaganism and the neokitsch aesthetic,” a nostalgic rendering of 1950s America, when John Wayne and Ward Cleaver were models for all things decent. In what Patrick Buchanan described as a “dramatic understatement,” Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address included a simple critique of artists and other cultural producers. “At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness.” Pierre Bourdieu Review of Casey Nelson Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |