"We will not be able to recover the vision and understanding of God's grandeur until we recover an understanding of ourselves as creatures who have been made to know such grandeur. This must begin with the recovery of the idea that as beings made in God's image, we are fundamentally moral beings, not consumers, that the satisfaction of our psychological needs pales in significance when compared with the enduring value of doing what is right. Religious consumers want to have a spirituality for the same reason that they want to drive a stylish and expensive auto. Costly obedience is as foreign to them in matters spiritual as self-denial is in matters material. In a culture filled with such people, restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than simply getting some doctrine straight; it's going to entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality."
- David Wells
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
In his post The Case for Restricting Artists, Andrew Klavan's main purpose is to complain about Peter Jackson's handling of The Hobbit *, but before he launches into that, there's this gem.
Restrictions on art — whether it’s the rigors of the sonnet form or some idiot studio executive screaming, “Make it shorter or you’re fired!” — force artists to use all their skill to say what they can in the space and manner provided. There is a reason no one reads new poetry; a reason paintings, which once served to express the deepest levels of the human experience, can now do little more than decorate bank lobbies. No restrictions. Poems are free form; paintings are abstract. And they suck. Restrictions make artists better, more resourceful, more clever, more artistic. Without them, art becomes free — and dull and meaningless.Thought provoking . . .
* There will be a Hobbit review in this space soon. I'm planning on seeing the film again before writing it.
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Comments on "The Blessing of Boundaries":
2. Andrew
- 01/09/2013 6:52 am CST
Poems are free form; paintings are abstract. And they suck.
In fairness, the decline of formal poetry seems to have only a little to do with its supposed decline in relevance. Besides maybe Robert Frost, Walt Whitman was the most popular poet America has ever produced, and he didn't care about forms at all. The best and most enduring poetry of Yeats is informal, and the same could be said of Eliot, Cummings, Ginsberg and Ted Hughes, all very popular poets (at least, popular by poetry's standards). I think poetry's lack of relevance has less to do with an abandonment of form (after all, poets have been abandoning forms for 150 years), and more with the public's taste. Most people don't know how to read poetry - even very formal poetry. Poetry has a lot of problems, but I don't think they would be solved if poets went back to writing sonnets and odes.
3. Karl
- 01/09/2013 7:36 am CST
I definitely enjoy art, music and poetry more when some degree of structure is involved. At least enough that I can tell with some effort what is going on, being said, represented, etc. So I think there's some element of truth to this critique. But the critique can be taken too far also. Sometimes it takes either education or an acquired taste to appreciate an art form that initially seemed alien, confusing or repellent. In some cases the expansion or elimination of old boundaries allows an art form to flourish in new ways.
Looking forward to the review of The Hobbit. This isn't a full blown review, but here are some things I said about it in an email exchange with a couple of friends:
"I don't know when I've seen a movie before in which I enjoyed the viewing process that much, but which also contained that many things that I objected to or thought were unnecessary and less than desirable. From the beginning I started trying to keep mental note of the things that "I need to remember to tell Rod [my friend] that I disagreed with PJ's choice here re. X" but by the time the movie was 2/3 of the way through I stopped trying to keep track. I would have needed a pen and notepad to keep up with them all. PJ definitely doesn't do subtlety. But in spite of the many points at which I quibbled, I did thoroughly enjoy watching the movie. I guess I have a similar response to his entire LOTR trilogy. Broken down scene by scene, I can find so many things I wish he'd done slightly different or left out or changed somehow. But they're still fun to watch.
"The stuff that was pulled from the appendices of LOTR or alludes to from the Silmarillion was largely a plus, in my mind. I like that kind of stuff if (as was mostly the case here) it's basically JRRT-canonical and included to fill in or round out the story, connect dots, etc. Kind of like the opening of LOTR where Galadriel explains the 9, the 7 and the 3, the forging of the one ring, the war of elves and men against Sauron, etc. I liked that they included Radagast but abhored the silly rabbit sled and over the top portrayal of him. The idea of him as a bit of an addled-seeming eccentric who has more going on upstairs than people like Saruman credits him with was solid (I thought) but the execution typically excessive PJ. Also (assuming I understand where PJ is headed) the idea that Mirkwood could go in such a compressed time frame from beautiful, nice forest to what it becomes by the time the dwarves and Bilbo travel through it, is illogical. I mean, isn't that what he's suggesting - that the place where Radagast was living and the spiders showed up, will become Mirkwood within a few weeks/months time? Dumb and unnecessary, if so.
[And to another friend]
Saw the Hobbit on Sunday with the family. We all enjoyed it, even with all the departures from the book and the over-the-top action sequences. See my exchange with Rod copied below. I agree w/ most of his comments, although I kind of liked the intro stuff with Frodo, whereas Rod definitely didn't. I agree about the action stuff though. I actually found myself getting bored while Gandalf and the dwarves were escaping from the goblins, with none of them getting hurt while they bashed countless goblins and had one narrow, improbable escape after another ad infinitum. Sometimes less is more. But Peter Jackson doesn't do subtlety. Still, even though there were SO many things I would have tweaked, left unchanged (hated how he changed the scene with the trolls from the version in the book where Gandalf tricks them, turning it into yet another fight scent) or wished PJ had done differently . . . I did thoroughly enjoy the experience of watching the movie and PJ does do a good job of capturing the look and feel of middle earth, which I always love.
Yes, I did think the way Gandalf answered that "why Bilbo?" question from Elrond was out of character and not really in line with Tolkien's take on it - more of a 21st century take, the way PJ and his writers would express it.
The troll scene was the worst example, but the way he had Bilbo charge out of the burning tree to rescue Thorin (from a fight that never happened in the book in the first place) was nearly as bad for me. It was like PJ decided every movie needs a climactic final action scene and since they were ending this movie at this point in the book then if there wasn't a battle scene at that point of the actual book, they'd have to insert one because the scene as written in the book wasn't exciting enough to end on. Same with the invented chase by orcs and wargs that led them to escape to Rivendell. Like in LOTR when the Wargs attack them as they travel, it's like PJ doesn't trust the viewer to stay interested unless there is a big action scene every so many minutes, so he invents new ones when he feels like Tolkien's story is slowing down a little. But enough of the spirit of the book and the feel of middle earth was captured, and there were enough magical spot-on moments, that I still really enjoyed it as a whole even though I'd be hard pressed to find any given five minute segment where something didn't irk me. Like Rod, I could watch Andy Serkis do Gollum for hours. And I thought Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo. You really need to watch him as Watson in the BBC's "Sherlock" on Netflix. That is a fantastic show, absolutely brilliant. Each 90 minute episode is like a movie, it doesn't feel like TV.
4. Bill
- 01/09/2013 8:07 am CST
I don't think they would be solved if poets went back to writing sonnets and odes.
You're probably right. But I wonder, even though they weren't writing following strict forms, if there are perhaps other "forms' that the older masters followed that have been forgotten today - I realize that doesn't make a lot of sense (consider the person speaking and my woeful knowledge of poetry :-) but I like the way P.J. O'Rourke said it
Here is Robert Frost, last of the antiques, celebrating the inauguration of old-fashioned high-binder John F. Kennedy:
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom's story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Not Keats, perhaps, but not bad, and with interesting use of the dactyl and amphibrach in the final tercet.
Now here is Maya Angelou, foremost of the contemporaries, at the inauguration of that most modern of all presidents, Bill Clinton:
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Host to species long since departed
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor
No rhyme, no meter, and it's about dinosaur turds. Maya Angelou, celebrating the most solemn and momentous ritual of the republic, can think of nothing to write about except dinosaur turds - and that mastodon who'd be playing the devil with our dethatching and reseeding if it weren't, like modern poetry, mercifully extinct.
5. Hannah
- 01/09/2013 4:06 pm CST
I wonder if the problem we're discussing (along the poetry lines, not particularly the Hobbit) is one of narrative rather than form. With a loss of focus towards effective story-telling, which by its nature hinges on the receiver changing to accept the version, and beliefs, of the teller, poetry can lose a great deal of its power. I believe that's been the largest blow towards modern poetry, along with the loss of vocabulary and nuanced awareness in modern langugage (but that's another battle). Free form gives poets the ability to adapt and express and is just as shocking and liberal as the ballad was once considered, or even the sonnet. The issue, I would argue, is that poets no longer know how to tell a story with conviction. No narrative = no art. Without a narrative (by which I mean an intentional organization of events to express a distinct point or progression), art is a production of the self to the self and egoism is rarely attractive.
6. Andrew
- 01/09/2013 4:10 pm CST
Heh, well I much prefer Frost to Maya Angelou, but it has little to do with form.
The larger argument, about whether artists need to pay attention to structures and standards trips up on a key question: who decides? It is not as if God invented iambic pentameter (one could argue that he created math, but that's something different). In the case of poetry (I don't know anything about painting), nearly great poet has broken rules at some point. Shakespeare and Donne were notoriously loose with meter (at the time, Ben Jonson said that Donne should be hanged for his flexibility with iambic pentameter). William Blake seems arcane now, but at the time, his verse was shockingly inventive. Now though, we think of them all as "old masters."
I don't believe that every noise an artist makes qualifies as art, and certainly not meaningful art, but it's crude to say that just because a work ignores certain rules that a previous generation observed, that that work is "dull and meaningless."
I hope I'm not coming across too forcefully, because I think this is an important discussion, and I'd like to continue it. The function and responsibility of art is something I care about, and I hope that we can work our way towards one another.
So let me ask you, Bill, what do you think? It's a bit cruel to expect you to defend someone else's point, so I'd like to know your own position. Then, we can actually begin to understand one another.
Thanks!
7. Daniel Ross
- 01/09/2013 9:29 pm CST
I've always said Prince needs an editor. He's a musical mastermind but he's needs a filter to tell him no every now and then. I felt the same way about Metallica's 'therapy' album "St. Anger." All it really needed was an editor and someone to say "make the snare drum sound right, dummy!"
8. Bill
- 01/09/2013 11:18 pm CST
So let me ask you, Bill, what do you think? It's a bit cruel to expect you to defend someone else's point, so I'd like to know your own position. Then, we can actually begin to understand one another.
I'm not exactly sure :-) - I think, though, that Hannah has nailed my position pretty well in her comment above. I've wondered lately why almost all my reading is of works that are 50 to 150 years old. For me it's a bit of what Tolkien was getting at when he said [and I paraphrase] that he felt like he was on the caboose of a train looking backwards.
I don't believe that every noise an artist makes qualifies as art, and certainly not meaningful art, but it's crude to say that just because a work ignores certain rules that a previous generation observed, that that work is "dull and meaningless."
I agree completely. Klavan was, obviously, painting with a big, large generalized brush.
Regarding painting, I am unqualified to weigh in on modern art. But I remember when we were in Ukraine, at the university - almost every piece of art we saw was realistic (i.e., a depiction of something real). I found that incredibly refreshing.
I say that knowing that the fact that I've never acquired a taste for modern art has nothing to do with that art's intrinsic value. The fault is on my side, not on the art's side
9. Shrode
- 01/10/2013 9:55 pm CST
Daniel,
whenever someone mentions "Metallica" I pay attention.
I think you are right. They needed a producer for St. Anger. They also needed someone to say, "People actually like guitar solos. Having Kirk Hammett play on the album but not play solos would be like inviting Julia Child on a trip and not letting her cook."
I know people complain about Bob Rock, but he clearly trimmed them up and made their songs leaner and meaner, when you compare "...And Justice For All" and the Black album. j
Of course, I like Metallica so much that they can almost do no wrong. I like everything they do...well I did....until LuLu.
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Interesting, indeed.
I thought a little about this when my wife and I toured Florence on our Honeymoon. Seeing David, some Boticellis and other artwork throughout the city all seemed to have been commissioned by someone who had an agenda - most often the Catholic church.
I gravitate heavily towards artwork from the Renaissance. And it seems clear that the artists then were more directed, perhaps, than in any other era. But, alas, I am no art historian, and I might be completely wrong.
I love the idea of churches commissioning artists again. I think art has a larger place in worship than we grant it, and I think it is high time we return. The exception, of course, is music. Everyone values music (as long as it is their style).