The Web is replaced dead trees. Kindles are replacing printed books. Traditional publishing is dying (and good riddance). People browse the Web increasingly for political and social news. It’s also a riff on an old Simon & Garfunkel tune: “and the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.”
Hmmm, OK. Looks like I missed your point entirely.
The only book I read by him was Rabbit Run in high school and I didn’t like it. I didn’t find it shocking in any real way. I just thought it was a literary version of a TV Soap Opera and not even an especially interesting one at that. I haven’t thought about the book much since so I reread the plot summary to see if I was misrepresenting anything. Nope, it is exactly like I remember. An unlikable guy gets himself into a series of deeper and deeper messes through bad life choices.
I agree with the summary that it is just slightly better than average written trash and not especially noteworthy otherwise.
I don’t know anything about Van Eyck, but Beethoven, absolutely. The big classical composers of the 18th 19th centuries were immensely popular. Perhaps you’ve heard, for example, of Lisztomania?
In the world of literature, Dickens was considered a great writer of his age, and of course people were going wild for his stories. There are tales of people waiting on the docks for the magazines to arrive from England so they could find out what happened to Little Dorritt.
As an interesting point of connection:
Tchaikovsky, a voracious reader and theatre-goer when he was not composing, was entranced by the book, which he presumably read in Russian, French or German translation, and recommended it enthusiastically to his younger twin brothers Modest and Anatoly in his voluminous correspondence with them.
I hadn’t planned for that to be in here, but there you go! Tchaikovsky’s works were considered “important,” and he was ultra-popular too. You know, people went and saw the Nutcracker and shit!
Now, I think you are right that academic taste didn’t necessarily influence the common man. I would say, rather, that they were in harmony. Dickens was considered a great writer by “men of letters” and the masses.
Of course, many things were popular among the masses that academics disdained. But I don’t think that readers of penny dreadfuls were holding them up as any kind of art. Of course, there were also crap artists a la Thomas Kinkade who people thought were great, and sometimes the academics agreed, and sometimes they didn’t. Nothing in history is every perfectly neat and clean.
The divergence between academic/learned opinion and popular tastes began before WWII with cubism, free verse, and atonal music–art forms that are simply not as entertaining as their predecessors. But it seems that the line was held until the early 1960s. At that point, the famous artist, composer, poet, [fill in the blank] became a dying breed. Sometimes things got popular but academics trashed them anyway. Rod McKuen is the best-selling poet in the history of planet earth. In the 1960s and 70s, he sold 10s of millions of books that can now be found moldering away in resale shops (Listen to the Warm, bitch), but academe has only vituperation for him from the beginning.
Today, there are simply no famous classical composers (popular music has rightfully replace it, in my view). Some artists can get fabulously rich (Damien Hirst, ick; reason: rich people want to buy status art, etc.), but no one has the status of a Picasso (which is a shame, since there are many brilliant artists like Tara Donovan out there). There are no famous poets, and poetry is basically dead as an art form enjoyed by the masses. Prestige in art these days lies in popular music, television, films, and popular novels a la Rowling. Academic opinion on any of that means precisely jack shit.
The thing is, we get that. It’s popular film critics like Ebert (RIP), music critics blogging online, smart people reviewing books on Amazon. The critiquing and reviewing process has been democratized to a large extent, and I think that’s very healthy. Academics get to pretend that their opinion still means something because they get to extort tuition from students who are forced to go to college to “get a good job.” But I think that system itself is not long for the world.
I would rescue Roth from the group facing condemnation here. Roth’s themes are larger. Consider “American Pastoral.” Roth can make you feel the character’s emotions straight in your gut. I think his work transcends authors like Updike, Michener. Roth’s books also manage to capture significantly a slice of a time in history.
I agree with the criticism of weak female characterization but that’s pretty typical of books of that time.
You’re right about Liszt and Tchaïkovsky but I think you’re wrong about Beethoven. His late works, the ones that are now considered the most significant, left a lot of his contemporaries (even friends and professional musicians) puzzled or even hostile. "Beethoven …has caused great damage, and his powerful spirit has manifested a very detrimental influence upon the art. " (Wendt on Fidelio). These reactions are now used ironically by present day programmers to show how opinion has changed.
We also know that Bach’s reputation was not as high in his lifetime as it is now (he was considered a second choice after Telemann) and it even declined after his death. Popular opinion of his work only started improving in the early 19th century. Those in the know however (Mozart and Beethoven for instance) respected him.
In harmony in some respects (Dickens). At odds in many others.
And rightly so I think.
Who knows? There are people who claim that Michael Jackson was a genius.
Wow, I disagree completely with the bolded bit. It’s entirely subjective. You don’t have to be a genius to appreciate some abstract art. And atonal music can be written in a way that is extremely appealing and I’d even say beautiful. Granted it can be horrible, too but then a silly tonal melody will also get on my nerves and so will painfully predictable rhymes.
You’re right and it’s a shame.
Part of it is due to the artists themselves. After WWII some of the dominant trends were deliberately abstruse (total serialism and new complexity in music for instance). But it’s changing. There are now composers who write complex but accessible music. Atonal melodies (yes, atonal melodies!). Whether one of them will ever be famous is another question because…
Another big reason is that art has come to be seen as a commodity, something to be consumed quickly and easily. Such art has always existed but it never had staying power. Now it does because there’s so much money involved. We’re bombarded with it.
Well I think you’re right. You have to look for the good stuff. Paradoxically, it’s more accessible than ever but you have to make more efforts to get to it because there’s a bazillion summer blockbusters to watch and hit singles to listen to.
Our divergence may be due to the different status of academics in Europe and the US. I get the feeling that they’re more isolated in America. In Europe, it’s by no means unusual to have literary critics, historians or even philosophers on tv during the day.
The point is that these composers, for the most part, were not laboring in obscurity in their day. They were putting on concerts, making money, etc. I would say the same is true of Beethoven, as I have read about well-received concerts. No doubt you are right about some/most of his later works.
Well, Grosse Fugue, which I love, really is still challenging to the modern listener. It sounds like 20th century music. Massively ahead of its time!
Bach was very popular in his time but fashion changed with the advent of the galante style, and the understanding had not yet formed of “classical music for the ages.” Haydn and Mozart were both extremely popular in their times. Haydn even traveled to London twice to put on hugely successful concerts of his work.
If anything, I think academia erred on the side of leniency. Longfellow is generally considered an awful poet now, but in the 19th century he was considered a master, and crap like Evangeline sold in massive quantities. Really, the only American poets that survive from the 19th century are Whitman and Dickens. I think some baby has gone out with the bathwater (I rather like Thomas Bailey Aldritch and Celia Thaxter), but the modern opinion is largely correct. It would be interesting to look at the true and false positives and negatives of critics and the public of the time. Another interesting fact is that not a single American play of the 19th century is considered to be of any value, and I have never seen a shred of evidence to the contrary.
He had a lot of talent as a songwriter and a performer, I’ll say that.
I was not referring to my personal taste. I was referring to what the public has chosen to enjoy over the long term.
Well, that’s not totally true. I am a huge Schoenberg fan. Berg and Webern too. They did a great job with their atonal pieces, but it was new and interesting at the time, and they were geniuses who poured their souls and minds into it. I would say that serialism turned out to be a dead end for “classical” music. Academe fully embraced it, however, and thus what was going on in university composition programs came to be fully ignored by the public, the press, and so on.
I am a poet, and I don’t prefer rhyme and meter over free verse, but I do prefer the poets who worked in rhyme and meter, as free verse is hard to do, and most poets since the end of the 19th century didn’t do that great a job. Plus, poetry became negative, even nihilistic (“The Wasteland,” etc.), and the public got turned off. With McKuen, poetry had a last gasp. I’ve read that the last poem with artistic value to make any kind of waves in society was “Howl” in 1956, and I find no reason to disagree. Now poetry is culturally irrelevant, and I can’t imagine it coming back. Meanwhile, people still read Keats and Shelly and Whitman, since they want, you know, poetry.
Art is in a different situation, as unique pieces can be sold to individuals and museums, and there is a demand for that and always will be so long as rich people exist. But with respect to art, music, and literature, Camille Paglia said that deconstructing the classical ideal in these arts could only happen once. It did in the 19th and 20th centuries, but now there really is no way to be avant-garde. But there’s also no way to go back to realism and have that considered “great.” So we don’t have big artists now, however great their work may be. That’s sad for society, but I don’t see any way around it.
Well, that’s what I meant by “less entertaining.” And no, none of these composers will ever be famous.
Personally, I regret it while not being overly cynical about it. Paradoxically, I think two reasons for the current state of affairs are the rise in literacy and education and our unprecedented interconnectedness. More literate and educated people means that a lot more people are trying to writers and artists and musicians of various types, creating massive noise in the system. There is far more put out than even a planet of 7 billion people can consume. In the past, there was a real hunger (it seems to me) for any kind of art; demand exceeded supply. Now we have all of the art of the past to enjoy while an infinite number of new works beg for our attention. People simply cannot digest it all.
So, putting Updike in that context. I do think he’s the kind of guy who’s not going to “make it” into the canon. I’m not even sure how much more the canon can hold, really. Even the great masters like Beethoven compete with themselves: the 8th symphony is my favorite of his, but how often does that get played compared to the 5th or 9th?
Yep, America is big and dumb. I watch almost zero TV here.
True but it’d be interesting to know who attended these concerts. I doubt it was thousands of working-class guys.
Same here. I’m still struggling with his late string quartets.
Sort of popular. He wasn’t considered the towering figure of his era. That honour went to composers we know consider as second-tier or even less.
Perhaps. It’s very difficult to assess correctly the worth of a contemporary or recently deceased artist’s work. It takes decades or more to sort everything out and you end up with half a dozen geniuses per genre per century. This means that lot of supremely gifted artists come to be seen as also-rans.
I’d say that the public is exposed to abstract art and atonal music (in film music for instance). And likes it… to a certain extent.
Just in this past month, I’ve seen references to poems by Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas on message boards that one wouldn’t describe as particularly intellectual.
And “nihilistic” may be an accurate description of The Waste Land as well as of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock but both are masterpieces, more than occasionally quoted.
Hmmm, interesting (and kind of depressing). A way around might be the meeting/merging of different cultural traditions as is already happening. There’s been a growing cross influence between the West and the Far East in the past decades.
I’m more cynical in that respect. I’d say that more literate and educated people means a loss of humility. People have sort of heard of so-and-so, read a couple of books, seen a couple of things and presto! they have a this notion that they know everything there is to know about art. Have you read some alternative music reviews? Lots of pedantic jargon, little insight.
I’m 40 and I know very little (as these boards among others remind me daily).
My remark wasn’t meant to be understood as dissing America. It was just an observation that American academics are in an ivory tower, sort of out of touch with the real world. Much more so than in Europe, it seems to me.
That story is told about Little Nell (from The Old Curiosity Shop), not Little Dorritt.
Whoops! Ty. 
And I was unaware (post 27) that Charles Dickens was an american poet…������
Perhaps you meant Dickinson …
Seriously, enjoyed your post very much.
My two cents…never thought of Updike as someone likely to go down into history as a Classic Author, mainly because I think he’s overrated. But what do I know?
Surely I did! Ty too.
Thanks! I have not really researched it and it would be hard to research, but the impression I get is that writers/artists/composers circa 1960 thought it was business as usual: the canon was still being built, and they had a chance to be in it. They didn’t know that, in essence, the Book of Famous People in These Areas was closed and that their art would shine for but a very brief moment.
He had a wife, ten kids, and a teenaged mistress to support; he had to work two jobs.
The weird thing is that creators of video games nowadays labor in obscurity. Surely, they are the creators of the most popular artform of this era.
I dunno, as a casual gamer I can name at least three video game creators - Sid Meier, John Romero and Peter Molyneaux.
I can’t name any post 1990ish poets though.
Nice insight. Yeah, they are producing something equivalent to a blockbuster motion picture, and there is very little fanfare for the actual creators and everyone involved.
Old(er) black man here, who’s a huge fan. I’m going to make a TV miniseries of the Rabbit books one day. (And when I do, you all will be the first to know.:D)
That raises the question of whether videogames are art.
They certainly require an awful lot of skill and taste to create.
But then, football also require a very unique talent and I’ve heard people describe some actions as “elegant”. Is football art?
One can draw a distinction between art that first and foremost tries to establish a connection (intellectual, emotional) between the artist and the public on the one hand and art that has a concrete “aim” which takes precedence over said connection. Traditionally, the former has been seen as superior
In the case of videogames and sports, it seems pretty obvious to me that the main goal is not the connection with the creators (players) but the result of the game. Does that mean that they are inferior? Is a well crafted cup inferior to a Picasso sculpture?
I’d tend to say: “Yes, they are”. High Art focuses exclusively on the connection between the artist and the rest of humanity and this “union of minds and feelings” is more valuable than any “practical” purpose. That excludes sports, videogames, gastronomy and handicrafts because these activities have other, priorities (winning, playing, eating, getting things done…).
But I can see how one would argue the contrary.
By this standard, movies are not art.
Movies that aim first and foremost to sell as many tickets as possible certainly are not High Art.
Not all movies are like that, though.