July 9th, 2011 / 10:09 am
Snippets
Snippets
Impossible Mike—
“[…] The outcry was shrillest from those who confuse art, which exists to make people uncomfortable and to spur them to new thinking, with entertainment, which is meant to gratify, relax and confirm preconceptions of decorum, prettiness, or good citizenship. No art is great if it makes its consumers feel comfortable.”
–Richard Davenport-Hines, “Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin”
I like this quote. I like thinking about it when you replace “art” with “comedy.”
That’s a common dichotomy: discomfiture (“art”) vs. palliation (“entertainment”).
And, as with useful dichotomies, thematizing the boundary makes one question it:
how is it that distressing art is also pleasurable?
how is it that effectively, even ingeniously, calculated entertainment can grate horribly?
how is it that (some) people learn or are hard-wired to prefer or at least to choose grief over nothing??
Is that not too strong?
There’s vision of life, of human life and reality, that takes to heart persistence and fertility and regeneration, that embraces a human place in the ordinary processes and cycles of the world. That vision can be as compelling as the (or an) alternate vision of mortality and tiny significance and personal oblivion on either ‘side’ of the miseries of life.
Frank mentions “comedy”; what about the Comedy? (Dante never called it “divine”; it was named that by others both for its theme and for the excellence of its poetry (unless I have that explanation wrong).) “Paradise” is much less celebrated than the action-packed first two thirds, but the poetry is not less “great”.
Bach and Mozart make “great” music that, if not meant ‘to comfort’ in a primly therapeutic way, sure is comfy on the whole Ear. Is happy pop music – happy dance music – since, say, WW II all not “great”?
However repellent the underlying ideology (or lack of reasonable criticism) in his movies, Capra is a “great” filmmaker.
Etc.
I’ll bite, Mr. God.
Of course the quote is too strong, and I think ol’ RDH makes the quote so strong to exemplify what he’s talking about: a clearly over-the-top statement upsets (no matter how subtly), provokes, and conjures up conversation.
“how is it that distressing art is also pleasurable”
People are always striving to be better in different ways. One of the ways to be better, I think, is by understanding everything you possibly can. Art that at initial glance causes a knee-jerk reaction of anger/disgust/surprise is pleasurable because one can anticipate that such a piece of work will teach them something. Learning something about the world and yourself, when you are surrounded by a world which is predominantly drab and dull, is tittilating (apologies for spelling), and therefore pleasurable.
“how is it that effectively, even ingeniously, calculated entertainment can grate horribly”
Not sure what you mean by that. This quote is saying entertainment mollifies, and it seems your question implies it is saying the opposite. To me, at least.
“how is it that (some) people learn or are hard-wired to prefer or at least to choose grief over nothing?”
Boredom.
Also, I mean, there are grades of grief. I have cigarette burns on my body because the pain was invigorating and the scars are fun to look at. I like being deeply scratched during sex because it makes me appreciate sex more. I like hangovers because they keep me in check.
But there’s plenty of pain/grief I’d like to avoid. Family members and friends dying. Being impaled. Having a rod stuck up my pee/butthole.
Idunno. I feel like this discussion (as most of the times I jump in here) are adhering to a really tenuous/unsure set of ideas and definitions. This stuff is so much easier in person!
Also I think your use of the word “grief” is unfair. That’s a very particular type of pain/discomfiture/whatever, you know?
Not implying that the quotation says the opposite!; saying that “entertainment” often doesn’t entertain (mollify) in the way it’s calculated to do. I mean (for just one example): the Transformers (movie) franchise. The major sensation I get from all the noise and world-saving grimacing is wrath that so much $ and talent goes into . . . that.
–
“Boredom” is a good diagnosis (for why (some) people choose grief), but “boredom” defers explanation rather than offering it. Why would someone be bored with sugar and anaesthesia? – what’s boring about ‘nothing’? (It seems pretty titillating to me – Buddhism, nihilism, emo to the emoth, proudly bored with everything, etc.)
for the love of god, can ya’ll stop talking about art and start taking about writing? posture, posture, pose.
Ohhhh! I gotcha now. Thanks for the example, that is perfect.
That’s a good example of how constrained this quote is, I think. Not everyone likes the same things. A person who takes entertainment and art very seriously is more likely to be upset by things like that than people who don’t take entertainment and art very seriously. Then also comes age. Most likely, Mr. God, I am assuming you are not a teenager, and that movie was not marketed to you. Just the same way a 12 year old might look at (probably not read) Finnegan’s Wake and think “What is this retarded gay shit.”
*
You’re right, that answer does defer explanation, but I really liked the way the word looked there by itself, so fucking smug and glib. There’s nothing boring about nothing. There’s something frightening about nothing, though! I know, personally, the idea of achieving some sort of perfection scares the shit out of me.
Ohhhh! I gotcha now. Thanks for the example, that is perfect.
That’s a good example of how constrained this quote is, I think. Not everyone likes the same things. A person who takes entertainment and art very seriously is more likely to be upset by things like that than people who don’t take entertainment and art very seriously. Then also comes age. Most likely, Mr. God, I am assuming you are not a teenager, and that movie was not marketed to you. Just the same way a 12 year old might look at (probably not read) Finnegan’s Wake and think “What is this retarded gay shit.”
*
You’re right, that answer does defer explanation, but I really liked the way the word looked there by itself, so fucking smug and glib. There’s nothing boring about nothing. There’s something frightening about nothing, though! I know, personally, the idea of achieving some sort of perfection scares the shit out of me.
Megan Fox and car accidents are definitely (and sometimes successfully) marketed to me. Not only is “everyone” composite and inwardly at odds as a group; each “one” is likewise composed. Jaws was, for me, effective mass entertainment; the American re-make of The Ring was, too. I was ‘happy’ paying for those two ~two-hour units.
i don’t differentiate between the two pizza bb
From Faulkner’s novella (and novella shuffle) Wild Palms/The Wild Palms:
Have you never seen A Bout de Souffle?
Good grief.
Touche!
But the fact is other people found ways to like that movie. Y’know, no objectivity and all that bullshit.
I’m assuming that the whittling down in size of these comments means my other responses were satisfactory? I like getting pats on the back, help a brother out.
helping out bros is pizza’s bailiwick
I would probably choose the grief of seeing my grandmother die over nothing.
I would probably choose death (nothing) over the grief of losing my kid.
These are big words, dude. I understand that playing with these big words can be fun, but you put one on the operating table and start operating you better be aware of all its intricacies.
I have never seen that movie. I am not very well read.
Of all the Charlie Browns in the world…
Seriously. What a bizarre comment.
What about the comfort level of writers themselves that seems to have largely come about due to the university system workshop-engineering out individuality (or fostering it if you believe otherwise)?
i merely take sontag’s separation of art from culture a step further. ‘art’ as a supercategory, epistemologically speaking, has been toppled over, so i’m sensitive to and skeptical of its use in most contexts. call me a pedant, but terms are important to me.
I hear stuff like this all the time, and I think it’s ridiculous because most of the people who say it are made comfortable by nothing so much as the suspicion that they’re being made uncomfortable by some ostensibly transgressive, deeply scene-affirming indie art.
Yes, fun or ‘fun’ or no fun at all, it is a stark, comfortless choice, if there is any ‘freedom’ to choose.
There is, for most, another alternative: faith, ‘cognition of the immortality of the “soul”‘. The grief-people call this path “nothing”, and the nothing-people call it “grief”, ha ha.
I don’t think the “intricacies” of confronting/being confronted by mortality are or should be prohibitive.
Too much reality is a fine goal for art and for thought – too much reality + effective craft.
As Dan might be suggesting below, the problem some have with ‘the Gothick’ is not that it’s disturbing, but rather, that its comforts rest in sloppy provocations.
Yes, fun or ‘fun’ or no fun at all, it is a stark, comfortless choice, if there is any ‘freedom’ to choose.
There is, for most, another alternative: faith, ‘cognition of the immortality of the “soul”‘. The grief-people call this path “nothing”, and the nothing-people call it “grief”, ha ha.
I don’t think the “intricacies” of confronting/being confronted by mortality are or should be prohibitive.
Too much reality is a fine goal for art and for thought – too much reality + effective craft.
As Dan might be suggesting below, the problem some have with ‘the Gothick’ is not that it’s disturbing, but rather, that its comforts rest in sloppy provocations.
Funny you should mention too real. That’s the reason a literary agent turned down my work once. She said it was “too real.” Maybe I keep forgetting to think about it in context, but that phrase has always stuck out. I sort of take some sanctuary in it, because I think it’s like being told your dick is too big.
Dan’s argument statement is flawed I think. I’m about to go down there and point it out.
Essentially your argument is:
I don’t like this thing because lots of the people who like it are dumb.
If that argument were valid, I think you’d have to dislike McDonald’s, Nirvana, South Park, the Bible, Madonna, The Godfather, everything, et al.
Probably better to dislike something based on your personal preference and not have it be influenced by external influences.
?
I don’t think Dan is saying transgressiness supporters are “dumb”; he’s saying that their support of ‘discomfort’ is phony, in that ‘discomfort’ in the cases he means is a matter of crowd-sourcing, of herding together, and is therefore not only not uncomfortable, but rather, is a low, “ridiculous” succor.
Dumb may be the wrong word, certainly, but you are still saying the same thing as Dan.
That people might not adhere to a statement in a genuine manner does not discredit the statement. It discredits the people.
The Golden Rule is not a bad rule despite all the people who have treated other people like shit all the time forever.
Opera and jazz makes me comfortable and happy and joyous, so I guess according to Richard Davenport-Hines Mahler, Stravinsky, Wagner, Ellington, Mingus, Andrew Hill, etc are not “art”? Something is missing from this comfortable/uncomfortable criteria.
Sure: calling someone ‘phony’ means discrediting some particular claim they’ve made or attitude they’ve struck.
Is it never possible to infer reasonably that someone – or a crowd – is catering to the strictures of membership rather than empirical compulsion in the matter of judgement or taste??
I don’t think it’s necessarily treating someone like “shit” to disbelieve in their word.
My last sentence was an example. The Golden Rule is “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” or something like that. This is a good statement. People have been killing each other and cursing each other for a really long time now, but that does not mean that the Golden Rule is a bad rule to abide by. Unless you’re into sadomasochism or something.
No, I don’t think it’s never possible.
Like, I’d see more validity in the argument:
The ultimate goal of art is positive stimulation (edification through understanding).
Being uncomfortable is negative stimulation.
Even if the initial reaction to art might be discomfort, it must
eventually resolve itself into positive stimulation (or edification
through understanding) to be successful.
Art which creates discomfort without this resolution is incomplete.
Therefore, RDH’s statement is incomplete.
But who gives a fuck.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write a book.
That’s not it at all. I don’t like this thing because the people who purport to believe it are not made uncomfortable at all by what they perceive to be art. I’m just not sure it’s a workable theory of art, because people who are actually made uncomfortable by something do not generally react by declaring it art.
Speaking as a huge fan of McDonald’s and the the Bible, if not those other things, what people like this are really saying in my experience is that art isn’t art unless it makes somebody else uncomfortable. People who saw the piss Christ or whatever as art were not the people who were made uncomfortable by it—they derived comfort from it.
Yes, ‘do unto others’. – and I’d not silence someone before they could call me a ‘phony’. Either I’d argue the point, if I thought there was someone ‘there’ to talk to, or not, but I’d not take away the privilege of that perspective of me. So it’s not necessarily inconsistent with the Golden Rule to say one thinks a crowd is a crowd of phonies.
Dan isn’t saying something about other people that he would prevent them from saying about him, is he?
Was there every a time when obvious hyperbole was displayed somewhere on the the internet and the display wasn’t marred by an army of literal minded bros arguing with it?
I think that disturbing experiences – including those generated by art – afford a vision of the world’s inameliorable resistance to one’s will. Communicating that vision (of failure, loss, and so on) is as much a kind of success as communicating a vision of ‘completion’ or harmony or wholeness, in my view.
I pointed the hyperbole out in my very first response to deadgod…?
i know, i’m just generalizing, as i’m the one who posted the quote i’m clearly “on your side” here so to speak
Was there ever a time when the occasion for thought and conversation afforded by hyperbolic statement wasn’t enlivened by shrill calls for chilling the fuck out?
I think your first sentence is still judging a statement based on people’s ability to follow it, but your second sentence makes a little more sense, and has to do with that little hypothetical that I put up there about the statement potentially being incomplete.
But I think really when you do reach that point of interpretation, “who gives a fuck” becomes a valid response, because, really. We can modify every over-generalized statement every writer has ever made, or we can practice intuition and work the dissonance out ourselves, in our heads.
Yeah, I have no qualms with saying that the quote lacks harmony, but that just bolsters its own point, I think.
Now I really have to go write a book!
The Serrano hysteria is a good call.
– but I call “art” – and love – lots of things that make me uncomfortable, though it’s not every second, or even many seconds, of an average day that I want to be made uncomfortable.
I don’t think either “comfort” or “discomfort” are definienda of “art”.
Yeah, but the Golden Rule argument was supposed to stand apart as a separate example. It wasn’t supposed to be involved with the meat of our argument. I guess I didn’t make that clear, and I apologize.
Do you or don’t you want people discussing your post? Or do you just want people to write “sweet”?
bored
For my part, this quote appears to simply dogmatize, to make absolute without cause, a longstanding avant cliche–doing the only thing possible to make a cliche more insipid.
The wisdom kerneled within it is belied by the narrowness of its scope.
However, if given the options of quoting this at somebody, or watching Transformers 3 with them, just gimme the soapbox.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Actually, you did make it clear on your previous post on this subthread; I didn’t get it ’til just now ha ha ha.
True, that a rule’s usefulness and power to illuminate and test ‘virtue’ aren’t to be measured by people’s failure to follow it.
But Dan is saying that people support offensive material when they’re not offended or threatened or whatever by it, and that it’s an irony – if not hypocrisy – that they claim to value “discomfort” when that claim itself is a sign that their position is somehow affirmed and not challenged by the material they bravely defend.
I don’t understand how ‘good albeit difficult-to-follow’ in maxims relates. ??
I see what Dan’s saying. But a piece of art doesn’t result in a single uniform reaction. This is the issue I brought up with that argument about edification through understanding: initial reaction results in discomfort, followed by dialogue — either with others or with yourself — followed by comfort/positive stimulation/edification through understanding.
Therefore I’d say one can argue the quote is flawed because it fails to acknowledge the final end result (but who gives a fuck), but I’d also suggest the quote is flawed in an effort to “spur new thinking”.
I think it’s rare to experience art in the sense that RDH is explaining, but I do not think it is a faulty statement. Therefore it’s “good albeit difficult-to-follow.”
I see what Dan’s saying. But a piece of art doesn’t result in a single uniform reaction. This is the issue I brought up with that argument about edification through understanding: initial reaction results in discomfort, followed by dialogue — either with others or with yourself — followed by comfort/positive stimulation/edification through understanding.
Therefore I’d say one can argue the quote is flawed because it fails to acknowledge the final end result (but who gives a fuck), but I’d also suggest the quote is flawed in an effort to “spur new thinking”.
I think it’s rare to experience art in the sense that RDH is explaining, but I do not think it is a faulty statement. Therefore it’s “good albeit difficult-to-follow.”
[…] “[…] The outcry was shrillest from those who confuse art, which exists to make people uncomfortable and to spur them to new thinking, with entertainment, which is meant to gratify, relax and confirm preconceptions of decorum, prettiness, or good citizenship. … Continue reading → […]
[…] followers, Htmlgiant.com, a literary blog, took this phrase out of context from Richard Davenport-Hines’s Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, […]
[…] Wallace intended it to be boring.” Concerning followers, Htmlgiant.com, a literary blog, took this phrase out of context from Richard Davenport-Hines’s Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, […]