Tag: Art

Art, Morality, and (Dis)Comfort

A great OpEd from the NYTimes. Jen Silverman (the author of the OpEd and a playwright/novelist) identifies “a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.” Silverman goes on to say:

When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

In my own teaching, I’ve run into this confusion of character voice with authorial voice.  But the bigger point, that great writing/art is not just a morality tale. I’m reminded of Les liaisons dangereuses which suddenly had a heyday with three movie adaptations, Dangerous Liaisons(1988), Valmont (1989), and later the teen adaptation Cruel Intentions(1999). My impression is that Dangerous Liaisons made the bigger splash, but I preferred Valmont precisely because it wasn’t a neat, little morality play were the bad people got their comeuppance. It had a more complex, perhaps less comfortable ending.

I’ve never been a fan of the comfortable. The comfort zone is not a zone of growth. That’s not to say the comfort zone doesn’t have its very important place (give me a good book, good cup of tea, cat in the lap, and fire in the fireplace). But it’s not the place to spend one’s entire life.

Silverman sums it up beautifully:

But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.

We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them.

…the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity.

A Moment of Joy

Christo and Jeanne-Claude did amazing art installations (or as Wikipedia puts it, large-scale site-specific environmental installations). I took the photo below at their Gates installation in Central Park.  I thought a dreary month (and February always seems dreary) deserved a bit of bright color.

The Gates installation

The cover up is always worse

Whether it’s folks who find themselves in a bit of a misunderstanding or someone engaged in something more intentionally nefarious, why don’t people learn that the cover up is usually worse than the original mistake or crime? Think of Martha Stewart and the SEC. Or Trump and the National Archives. And now the Cleveland Museum of Art. They’ve had a beautiful (albeit headless) Roman bronze statue since the 1980’s which has now been seized as part of a criminal investigation into looted and smuggled antiquities. Perhaps the Cleveland Museum were unwitting participants in this. Perhaps it is understandable that they dismissed Turkey’s claims about the statue as Turkey couldn’t provide evidence. However, this part of the NYTimes article (link will get you past the paywall for the next 30 days) caught my eye.

Turkey’s claim on the statue hinged in part on persuading investigators that the statue in fact depicted Marcus Aurelius, because the stone plinth where they say it had stood is inscribed with that emperor’s name.

The Cleveland museum’s website had until recently described the statue as “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161-180),” adding that the item had originated from “Turkey, Bubon(?) (in Lycia), Roman, late 2nd Century.” They also wrote in an accompanying description that the statue “likely represents Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor known for his philhellenism and Stoic writings.” (Aurelius wrote “Meditations,” a classic work on Stoic philosophy.)

But several weeks ago, the museum removed the earlier references to Turkey and Aurelius and changed the website to read: “Draped Male Figure, c. 150 BCE-200 CE,” adding, “Roman or possibly Greek Hellenistic.” It also altered the language of its accompanying description to read “without a head, inscription, or other attributes, the identity of the figure represented remains unknown.”

Will folks never learn?

Still on an Odyssey kick

One of my favorite receptions of The Odyssey is Romare Bearden’s collage series. If you are unfamiliar with Bearden, he was a mid-20th century African-American artist. He had played around with The Iliad earlier in print form (late 1940’s-early 1950’s). In his Odyssey series, he not only draws in Homer, but also the influences of Matisse and other artists such as Robert S. Duncan (a 19th cent. African-American landscape painter) and his Land of the Lotus Eaters. Below are two great videos on this series from a Smithsonian touring exhibition of them.

Romare Bearden Black Odyssey (15 min.)
Wallach Art Gallery Visit with Robert O’Meally and Diedra Harris-Kelley