The 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death prompted an essay in The Economist pondering how his lousy treatment of women should affect our response to his art.
Which no longer has us aflutter; the world has moved on. Yet “art” today is nevertheless still, in no insignificant part, a house that Picasso built, and that must be a lens through which we view his works. The flesh-and-blood man is really not the point.
The issue arises with other arts, notably music, as with Michael Jackson or R. Kelly, the latter almost making Picasso look like a feminist. The essay mentioned Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries — one of my own favorite musical passages, a compositional tour-de-force evoking strong emotion. Wagner was notoriously anti-Semitic, and (posthumously) a Nazi icon. Should that make us eschew Wagner’s music?
This is all much a sign of the times. I’m reminded of a major scholarly biography of writer Philip Roth, all set for publication — until its author was accused of sexual misconduct. The publisher pulled the plug. Did the accusations somehow make the book any less authoritative, informative, useful? Or did the publisher’s action conflate two very separate matters?
Perhaps the book’s treatment of Roth’s sexual history would be colored by the biographer’s own. Fair enough; a reader should be thusly mindful. But would it color his treatment of Roth’s literary career? And can the latter have value despite the former? Yet the zeitgeist has little patience on that score; we seem to be throwing out babies with bath water. (The book wound up published elsewhere, to mixed reviews.)
Then there are Woody Allen’s movies. I think the facts about Allen are messy; but little room is made today for moral ambiguity. Villains must be villains. Meantime, The Economist essayist opined, Annie Hall is still a funny film. Must we deny ourselves its pleasures, if Allen was a creep?
Manichaeism is rampant — believing people are good or bad, and the bad must be uncompromisingly rejected. I’m as prone as anyone — a sucker for a good old morality tale, highly judgmental as between right and wrong, good and evil. But while the world is full of evils, people who are evil are actually quite rare. The problem isn’t human evil, it’s cognitive fallibility; people being not wicked but misguided. Two very different things. (I’m pretty confident of my own judgments. But so is everyone. How do we know who’s really right?)
It’s of the essence in all the arts that we respond to them as emotive individuals. A painting is an expression of something in the artist, yes, but far more importantly, for the viewer, something that generates a response within them. Knowing a nasty fact about the painter’s life may be part of such response, but if that dominates, the viewer may be missing out on a lot.
So Wagner was a proto-Nazi. I’m no great music connoisseur; I respond to music with frankly simplistic emotions. Especially relishing triumphalist music — like The Ride of the Valkyries. And when I hear its stirring bars, what images do you think often enter my head, a narrative for that music to accompany? Of course it’s good against evil. I see the allied ships steaming toward Normandy, the men hitting the beach, the sky filling with paratroopers. Propelled by Wagner’s own music pounding against him.
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