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Editorial Reviews. From Library Journal. Turner (arts and humanities, Univ. of Texas, Dallas) argues for a "radical center" that dissolves the dualistic theories of.
Table of contents
- Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit
- Characteristics of the Renaissance
- The Birth of Natural Classicism
- HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
Daniel became a playmate of Yehudi Menuhin's grandchildren, and Menuhin inspired Daniel to take up the violin. Hope's long artistic partnership with Yehudi Menuhin consisted of over 60 concerts together, including Lord Yehudi Menuhin's final appearance in , in which he conducted Hope's performance of Alfred Schnittke's Violin Concerto. Daniel Hope has toured the world as a virtuoso soloist for 25 years and is celebrated for his musical versatility as well as his dedication to humanitarian causes. Hope is Music Director of both the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and the New Century Chamber Orchestra, and is one of the world's most prolific classical recording artists, with more than 25 albums to his name.
To learn more about Daniel Hope, visit his fascinating website. The symptoms of the crisis are well known. A few years ago art collectors were paying large sums to a certain artist for sealed and labeled cans of his excrement; recently the artist decided to eliminate the middleman and sell the collectors their own excrement instead.
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In the Whitney biennial show, which is supposed to represent the best contemporary art being produced, crude racist slogans directed against people of European descent vied with a pile of simulated vomit and photographs of private body parts for the delectation of the connoisseur. Completely blank canvases are solemnly exhibited and sold; the Tate exhibits an empty gallery as a work of art. In avant-garde music, melody is studiously avoided; a Slinky toy is portentously dropped off a piano at a concert otherwise devoid of sonic content; various contrivances are devised to produce entirely random combinations of sounds.
In performance art, performers execute sexual acts on stage, maim themselves by a variety of means including high-powered rifles, and engage in lavatory activities with strong political messages. The strangely misnamed language poets, whose hallmark is that their poems do not make any kind of sense, are the present rage.
Architecture has graduated from modernist brutality to deconstructivist nausea. This catalog of abuses is a familiar litany. To complain in this way is to adopt the traditional position of the straight man, the bluenosed bourgeois who is the butt of all avant-garde sarcasm, the poor benighted philistine harrumphing at what he does not understand.
But I am not the first to warn the public that our culture is sick and needs cure. He argues that the great artistic ideals of modernism are still valid, but have been lost in a welter of claims for artistic attention by neglected minorities or oppressed groups, to the extent that the prestige of art has become a consolation prize to mollify the politically or economically unsuccessful.
Earlier, in The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch blamed what he saw as the moral flabbiness and cultural decadence of our times on the cult and psychological condition of narcissism. Allan Bloom, in a more complex argument, has rooted the malaise in the philosophical, political, and cultural failure of the central ideas of romanticism—a tragic failure, given the grandeur of its hopes, but one whose deepest symptom is the contemporary incapacity for tragedy itself, for that tragic love of life which accepts that it must be painful and unfair.
Dana Gioia, in Can Poetry Matter, has focused on the decline of poetic standards and the withering away of the audience, due the neglect of craftsmanship and traditional form. Christopher Clausen, putting poetry in a larger cultural and philosophical context, has argued that poetry damaged itself by resigning its cognitive function, its claim to a kind of knowledge.
Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit
Hirsch has addressed the problem in terms of the decline in cultural literacy. David Griffin, in several books, has argued that the deconstructive postmodernism of recent decades is but another manifestation of the deadening and unspiritual legacy of modernity. The neo-Marxist social critics, like Frank Lentricchia and Frederic Jameson, have made similar points about our predicament, blaming what they call the commodification and fetishization of late capitalism.
There is surprising unanimity that something is rotten in the state of our culture. However, the diagnosis differs each time, and usually no cure is offered, except for the vague injunction to desist from what we are doing and return to the path of virtue. In this book I shall try to combine the diagnoses into a larger picture of our sickness, and prescribe a real cure, one which treats our mind and imagination as well as our behavior.
Avant-garde leftist artists and intellectuals see the culture war as an assault by evil fascistic conservatives upon the freedom of artistic expression, an attack based on patriarchal white Western values.
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In order to defend these values the conservatives are attempting to regulate the National Endowments and censor art. The conservative insistence on standards, quality, and excellence is, according to the avant-garde position, just code for racist and sexist bigotry, covering up the continuation of economic and social privileges for rich and powerful elites.
Characteristics of the Renaissance
In contrast, the avant-garde sees itself as being the vanguard of social change, encouraging economic and cultural justice and a new world of equality, caring, universal self-esteem, and self-fulfillment; thus their art serves as a way of exploring new forms of sensual experience, new conceptions of the self as dissolved or disseminated, and nontraditional forms of social and personal relationships.
Conservative right-wing critics of the arts see things differently. They look at the horrors of the inner cities, the devastation of the family, the collapse of personal self-discipline and psychological health, widespread sexual promiscuity, declining rates of educational achievement, rising drug use, crime, and violence, and blame the nationwide decay of moral fiber and cultural morale.
The culprits, they believe, are the avant-garde artists and intellectuals who encourage sexual license, ethnic separatism and fragmentation, and life-style experiments, at the same time ridiculing self-discipline, virtue, Judeo-Christian values, the traditional family, and the moral and rational tradition of the West. They suspect there is an artistic establishment that has deliberately censored wholesome and uplifting forms of art.
If you identify with either one of these camps, the conflict is insoluble except by total victory—that is, by the disappearance or forced reeducation of the enemy. However, a third side is emerging, one which recognizes the valid ideals on both sides of the conflict but approaches art and culture in a very different way. This third side, which I call the radical center, sees that the avant-garde and the conservatives share certain metaphysical and philosophical assumptions, inherited from the nineteenth century, concretized in the polarization between Left and Right, and frozen in place by an esthetic and evaluative vocabulary that no longer corresponds to our best knowledge about the world.
Those assumptions are the reason, not only for the ideological impasse, but also for many of the real problems of the contemporary arts, such as its desperate crisis of originality, its failure to find an audience, and its isolation from vital intellectual currents in the human and natural sciences, religion, technology, and the environmental movement. Perhaps the best way to point out the differences—and the potential for reconciliation—among the three positions is to give a brief description of each.
What is value, where does it come from, how ought it to be distributed? What is the nature of the physical universe in which value exists? Is art fundamentally orderly or disorderly?
The Birth of Natural Classicism
What is the nature, if any, of the human beings who make and experience art? What is the role of art with regard to social improvement and social progress?
What constitutes social improvement or progress? Who is the chief enemy of art? What is the chief evil? What should be censored, if anything? What is the chief value of art? The artistic Left, that is, the established avant-garde as it has persisted in various forms since the early nineteenth century, still accepts the view of value implicit in traditional scientific economics: that there is a limited stockpile of natural value.
This stockpile roughly corresponds to the thermodynamic order remaining in the accessible universe, and it is running down through the increase of entropy—the shrinking pie. The conservative Right shares this view of value, but with different emphases. Natural value is a diminishing stockpile that is distributed by the Invisible Hand of the market, a just process that cannot be disrupted without economic damage.
Social value is the recognition of natural value in the context of consumer demand and scarcity. The radical center holds a very different view of value. In agreement with many fields of twentieth-century natural science, ranging from evolutionary theory to chaos theory, it believes that value is continually created by the natural universe, that it is not a shrinking pie, and that human beings can share in and accelerate the growth of value through work which may be delightful, if disciplined.
Value of this kind should circulate freely where it is needed. The present market system of capitalist economies is a linear and clumsy attempt to imitate the more subtle processes of true value-creation, but though it is our closest approximation to date much closer than any socialist system it is transforming itself as our technology enables more perfect and multidimensional forms of communication. As machines take over the drudgery, the labor basis of value is being replaced by an information basis of value; and this in turn will be replaced, perhaps, by an emergent kind of value which is hard to define but as a kind of embodied grace.
If the universe is, as both the avant-garde and the conservatives believe, an ordered system that is gradually running down and becoming more disordered, what is the role of art? The Right believes that art should help maintain and preserve the order of the past against the ravages of dissolution and cultural decline.
Order may be tyrannical, but it is all we have; quality and standards cannot be detached from bondage. The avant-garde, on the other hand, observes that natural physical order, which is the only kind it recognizes as not an illusion of political hegemony, is deterministic and opposed to human freedom. Thus the only course for art to take must be that of disorder, of constant dissent, disruption, and rebellion against order; we are free only if we can perform a gratuitous act with no sense or reason.
Modernist and postmodernist artists have sought in the name of freedom, which they value above all else, to incorporate a larger and larger element of the random, irrational, and unintelligible in their work, so as to break the shackles of deterministic order.
HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
The fact that in so doing they are in their own terms furthering the decay and collapse of the physical universe is either ignored or silently celebrated with a dark glee. There is a curious correspondence between this view and that of nineteenth-century industrialism, that was willing to ravage the natural environment to increase human power. The radical center, however, has seen that evolution—a concept now extended by scientists to cover not just biology but the whole of the physical universe—is productive of novel forms of order.
Chaos theory tells us that beautiful attractors can underlie apparent chaos, and that highly ordered systems can, through iteration, feedback, and the mutual communication of all their elements, generate entirely unpredictable emergent properties. Thus the order of the universe is neither running down nor deterministic, and the strict distinction between order and chaos, vital to the Left and the Right, is invalid.
For the radical center art can, from the strictest traditions and severest order, derive unexpected and profoundly original visions and perspectives. At the same time the most heterogeneous and unlikely elements can be mixed together to produce, out of an apparently wild disorder, a classical synthesis that can rival and even surpass the achievements of the past, if those elements are permitted a consistent and thoroughgoing process of mutual feedback. As for the human artist and human audience, both the avant-garde and the conservatives find themselves shackled by eighteenth-and nine-teenth-century notions of nature as a deterministic machine.
Conservatives tend to accept the idea that the body is a machine like the rest of the universe, and that we have a human nature that determines our station in life, but that we also have an immaterial soul that is preserved in its free state by religious observance and the willing acceptance of duty and service.