Beauty and the Best: A Call to Arms

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You probably already seen this link, you just don’t recognize it yet. I’ve seen it twice in blogs today, and I read it myself yesterday. Entitled Beauty and the Best by Theodore Dalrymple in the New English Review, it hashes up much pertinent and heady classic art debate in order to “understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west” that contemporary art is incapable of serious, informed and moving art.

One is almost tempted to call him atavistic, or say his ideas are charming in an grandfatherly sort of way. Unless, of course, you’ve ever wanted more from your art than Damien Hirst could give you or you were ever struck by the craftsmanship of a statue by Bernini or some other forgotten barbarian. If that is the case, you will enjoy the spirit of Dalrymple’s argument immensely.

Book Club: Extreme Decisions

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The Good: I’m starting a book club! It’s called, creatively enough, Contemporary Fiction Club (CFC to those in the know). At least for now anyhow…

The Bad: I’m floundering in impossible choices. A good book club is a lot of pressure!

What books should my fledgling book club read? My co-founder and I think focusing on contemporary fiction would be fun. But then, I’ve picked up some poor fiction choices lately. The book should obviously be well-written and discussion-worthy. Hopefully it will lure people of all kinds into thinking CFC is the best book club ever. I feel like this is an impossible decision, and important because I want everyone to come back. Any thoughts?

And then there’s the additional worry of how to handle the meetings. Should I have questions? Let people just talk?

All suggestions welcome. Also please note, despite the above pathetic ramblings, I’m actually hosting a lovely brilliant book club full of intelligent and fascinating discussion, so it would be the highlight of your literary life to come to our first meeting–Feb 2!

Connections: VanGogh and Nietzche; Too Much in the Sun

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Both died mad at the end of the 20th Century, and their incipient fame and death in their prime only suggested how much more of which they were capable. But the similarities between philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) and painter Van Gogh (1853-1890) are more than the biographic (e.g. syphilis) or zeitgeist-related. I imagines the same anguished ethos formed the works of both, but I could be imagining things. Their style, however, is palpably similar in different mediums. According to Nietzsche, all philosophers had to be artists in order to completely express their thoughts.

Reaper. 1889.

Deceptively joyous, their works make one feel as if the creator has stared at the sun too long without seeing the fingerprint of god on it. They take radical ways to express a view of the world that is intense and yet accessible on the surface. Influential as they have been, they remain isolated iconoclasts in their paeans.

Their works are accessible only in their apparent joyousness. Van Gogh is repeated on shirts and posters because people find his work pleasant. Nietzsche becomes the easy catch phrase for the undergrad searching for a strident, carefree tone. This view confuses the bright veneer of a conclusion with the strenuous wrestling that went into its making. Within Nietzsche words lies the horror that is in the root of the oldest fairy tales, and Van Gogh paints as one who must paint the flatness of life in the purest pigments and thickest layers because the world enters his consciousness with the cunning of the light that finds the hungover man and makes him wince. Such heightened feeling is not always pleasant, even when it has been transformed into the aesthetic object.

“There are endless corn fields under dull skies, and I’ve not shied away from portraying this sadness and utter loneliness…”- Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Cypresses
Painted around Saint-Remy in early June 1889

Merely the madness of artists on view? Perhaps, in that these men used their art to express a worldview that Conrado de Quiros, a writer for the Phillipean Enquirer, puts it well by saying, “That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it.”

It is a mistake to view these two artists as unrelated raving lunatics. I would venture rather that they are raving artists depict the intensity of life head on and struggle in their valuation thereof. If their similarities do not depict the same temperament exactly, they do the same view of a world as one to reckoned with, in all its glory. A glory that became overwhelming.