Charles Milliken: The descent of high culture
I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground when I observe that “high” culture has descended into decadence. It is everywhere you look. Art, if it can even be called “art” anymore, bears only the remotest resemblance to art prior to the dawn of the 20th century. As a friend of mine once remarked when touring a museum featuring “modern” art, “heck, I could do that out in my garage and become famous.” If what actually showed up in canvas and sculpture were the only criteria, even I, who cannot draw a stick figure with the aid of a ruler, could also become famous. Come to think of it, my inability to draw would be an advantage.
What more can be said of clothes and fashion than that the bizarre attracts attention, semi-nudity is often de rigueur, and expensively torn jeans remain a staple of everyday wear. Compare those to fashions of the forties and fifties.
Architecture, perhaps the most consequential of the arts, since we live and work in the results, has descended from art nouveau and art deco gracing beautiful buildings to boxes of concrete and glass. Cheap. Efficient. House the masses in soulless apartment blocks, much beloved by 20th-century socialists of all stripes. At least single-family houses have largely bucked the trend, because individuals who can afford a single-family house continue to resist living in ugliness.
Music? Can you think of any “classical” composer since Gershwin who many people would want to hear? Atonality, dissonance. Often synonyms for noise. As with art, I suspect adhering to classical canons has become boring, and besides that requires discipline and talent.
Poetry ditto. A hundred years ago an average person could name a few poets. Today? Many jurisdictions and organizations name a “poet laureate,” although England, which started the practice, hasn't had one since Tennyson, figuring there were no longer poets worthy of the distinction. You’ll be happy to know here in the U.S. poets laureate are still named, the current one being Ada Limon. Among her many awards and distinctions is the 2015 “Pushcart Prize” for a little poem (it neither rhymes nor scans, which is now considered totally unnecessary) titled “How to Triumph Like a Girl.” It contains this deathless phrase, “... inside the delicate skin of my body there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.”
We’re not talking Tennyson here, nor Robert Frost, the most recent name on the list I recognized.
This brings me to literature, which started me on today's lament. Specifically, it was the works of a much-praised, awarded and successful author, the recently deceased Cormac McCarthy. He wrote, inter alia, about a dozen books, including three made into movies. He did not write happy, uplifting books. While I am hardly an expert on McCarthy’s works, having read only four of his novels, I do not think I shall read more.
What particularly caught my eye, and perhaps his most praised book by literary critics, the taste makers of elevated discourse, is “Blood Meridian.” Such phrases as “poetic” (see poetry above to see what that might mean. In this case, it refers to highly pretentious wordy writing. McCarthy scoured every dictionary and thesaurus to find dozens of obscure, obsolete, or foreign words — sometimes simply making them up.) Writing aside, the book is a celebration of evil and cruelty from start to finish. “Redemption through violence,” as one commentator put it. “A description of the human condition.” God help us if the characters in this book describe all but a tiny minority of humans, or if we seek redemption through violence.
Directors through the years have tried to make a movie out of it, so far without success. As is often the case with his books, there is little coherent plot. Then there is the unceasing, graphic, and mindless violence (a whole lot of redemption taking place).
The only good thing that can be said is that in the end virtually all the vile people in the book have been killed — along with women, children, handicapped and two puppies for good measure. I shudder to think that “high culture” can sink any further!
— Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Charles Milliken: The descent of high culture
