"I would quote a passage from Salinger’s 'Franny and Zooey' comparing a performer’s audience to 'Christ Himself,' a righteous entity worthy of serving. I found similar comfort in a scene from 'Manhattan' in which Woody Allen’s character asks what makes life worth living, then rattles off a mix of cultural touchstones (before landing, of course, on 'Tracy’s face'). At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that 'the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art' was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power. I still value the sanctity of the artist-audience exchange, but it worries me when conversations about artists’ misdeeds end up centering on it. When an artist is revealed to have abused someone, we ask, 'Can we still like their art? Is it still O.K. to?' These questions treat every individual’s response to art as a morality test. They confuse optics with ethics, muddying a useful distinction between reacting to a work of art—an act that, after all, is something visceral and involuntary, like laughter—and materially supporting it.... "
Writes Tavi Gevinson in "What 'Tár' Knows About the Artist as Abuser/Todd Field’s film about the downfall of a world-famous composer shows the toll that untouchability takes even on the person it supposedly benefits" (The New Yorker).
ADDED: Here's the passage from "Franny and Zooey":
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?… Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
Posts
21 comments:
One can seperate art from the artist by ignoring the artist, and enjoying the art. But one can also misinterpret art entirely.
I bought a reproduction of a Mayan Era statue while on vacation long ago. It looked like a crudely dressed toddler, arms spread wide, with a smiling face.
A few years later I learned it was a reproduction of a Mayan god, who was worshipped by having his child-sized statues covered with the flayed skins of young human sacrifices. If you don't know this the statue is, well, cute looking.
My wife, who married me a few years after I acquired the statue, is a pediatrician. Oops. She knows, and still likes the statue. I will never ask her for her opinion of her patient population.
Tavi is going for the trifecta: Salinger, Woody Allen, her own precocious teenager diary. The girl knows how to get published in the New Yorker.
I think of the artist as a pottery vessel where a seed is planted and hopefully sprout into something others will be delighted or frightened by. At some point in time the art/plant outgrows the pot. The plant needs to be moved… or something. Let’s not confuse the plant for the pot nor an artist for ‘his’ art.
Artists, actors, musicians, celebrities -- the less you know of their personal lives, the better.
Damn, Salinger could write. The intention of his quote is rather diminished in the article. Yes, the artist is ultimately creating for Christ as the audience, but He wears the face of someone the artist disdains and ridicules, someone the artist believes to be swine receiving their cast pearls.
Um. "Tar"'s protagonist is a conductor, not a composer. Strange that the New Yorker's legendary fact-checkers missed that.
It took some research to find that Lydia Tar is ficticious. Being the "first conductor of the Berlin Phil" should have been a givaway but my willing suspension of disbelief prevailed.
Still, a great review and plug for the movie.
“ Damn, Salinger could write. The intention of his quote is rather diminished in the article. Yes, the artist is ultimately creating for Christ as the audience, but He wears the face of someone the artist disdains and ridicules, someone the artist believes to be swine receiving their cast pearls.”
Yes, and it must relate to the Biblical passage Matthew 25:
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”“
There should be no moral ambiguity to admiring the art of an evil artist once the artist is dead. But while there is a chance the artist will gain from my admiration of their work, I will withhold that admiration (or at least keep it to myself) and I expect others to do the same. Roman Polanski comes to mind. I will appreciate his movies after he's dead, but I will always despise Hollywood for embracing him in life.
the fan’s capacity for enthusiasm was as holy as the works of art we lived by."
I know this isn't what he means, but I consider the audience more important than the artist. The world is lousy with artists, some good, most bad, and there will always be more no matter what. What is vital for art, what it cannot exist without, is the audience who makes it all possible by paying for it.
Field is a writer/director who hasn't worked in a long while. I remember his first major work, In the Bedroom, back in 2001. It won several nominations for Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress. Didn't win anything.
You know the concept of clickbait? Field's stuff is Oscar bait. It's very heavy on the drama, slow and ponderous, and no humor.
Here's a clip of my review from his first movie...
The movie really milks the painful emotions, which makes the film hard to watch in places. Wilkinson and Spacek (who play husband and wife) have one knock down, drag out argument that was so bad, I really wanted to be somewhere else. It was kind of like the neighbors invite you over for tea, and they start ripping into each other. You want to excuse yourself while they're having their emotional meltdown.
The film kind of works like this: boring boring boring PAIN PAIN PAIN OH MY GOD I CAN'T WATCH boring boring borPAIN PAIN boring boring boring boring PAIN PAIN PAIN oh that's illegal.
It's not a bad movie by any means. On the other hand, it's not The Virgin Spring, either. Now that's a movie that's dark and sad and beautiful and interesting all the way through. This movie has very strong acting, and whipsaws us emotionally. It's effective. I have no desire to ever watch it again.
Early in his career Field did some acting too. He was one of the stars of Walking and Talking. That's a hilarious movie. It's Nicole Holofcener's first movie. Here's a scene with Field. He and his girlfriend have been fighting because she thinks he's a slacker. She's spotted a mole and she wants him to go to the doctor and have it checked out, and he's like, "whatever."
Field has no comic chops, he's just too serious. But the humor jumps out at you nonetheless. In a fair universe Holofcener would be making a movie once a year, and some of her stuff would be the greatest films you've ever seen.
In our universe, Oscar clickbait gets made every year, and many of us suffer though it because we think great art is painful and unhappy.
I feel for rootless young people lost in life, people who find in descriptions of trench warfare as of WW I or of a star's fall from grace some image or reflection of their own experience. They seem to me like the Athenian youth sent to the Minotaur's labyrinth before Theseus slew the monster and found the way out. This movie and the review, both, illustrate this generation of cultural Okies, subsisting in NYC's dustbowl of art.
The film seems to be about power in an ethical vacuum so that it says that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Only power in America isn't absolute, it turns over through elections or, in this case, through the arrival of a younger generation with different rules.) But the reviewer speaks in a cloud of affirmations succeeded by almost at once by cancelling negations. For example, the reviewer states that she loved art as a teen0ager - as shown by how she wrote about fashion for teens in a digital magazine. Or, in another example, in the end the disgraced Lydia Tar is leading an orchestra for a cosplaying game playoff. This is Hell. Or, this is an affirmation that at bottom Lydia Tar, a conductor to the end, loved art for itself.
Because I was allowed, and I used to enjoy The New Yorker, I read the whole thing.
As a subjective take on real and fictional artistic subjectivity, it was a good read, but nothing in it motivates me to compare my own experience of the work with the reviewer's. I might eventually watch the movie, if only for the musical context, but Blanchette blanches on me in large doses.
Speaking of the trenches of the Great War, has anyone tried the German "All Quiet" remake yet? I'll have to check my wife's Netflix status, given that I've missed any big screen showing there might have been.
On the particular question of artistic or artist's responsibilities, and our reactions, pffft. Nobody has anything new to say--just be thankful the artists (I include interpreters like conductors) keep doing what they do. If they spent their time chewing over this crap instead of Arting, we'd all be the poorer.
I have no idea what Salinger's point is in that passage. No wonder I didn't like Catcher in the Rye. Wait, it seems he's somehow riffing off The book of Matthew (KJV), well..OK.
If it floats your boat, go for it.
I like Harvey Weinstein's movies, even though I am glad he is in prison. I was listening to the song "Lullaby" about a girl in LA, in the car yesterday, and after #MeToo, it sounds a lot different than the first time I heard it.
She still lives with her mom outside the city
Down that street about a half a mile
And all her friends tell her she's so pretty
But she'd be a whole lot prettier
If she smiled once in a while
'Cause even her smile looks like a frown
She's seen her share of devils in this angel town
Some JD Salinger trivia for my fellow lawyers. While living in isolation in New Hampshire Salinger's neighbor and friend was Justice Learned Hand. J. Hand was my favor judge while in law school. Best justice never to serve on the Supreme Court (I was never a fan of Justice Cardozo's opinions).
Some JD Salinger trivia for my fellow lawyers. While living in isolation in New Hampshire Salinger's neighbor and friend was Justice Learned Hand. J. Hand was my favorite judge while in law school. Best justice never to serve on the Supreme Court (I was never a fan of Justice Cardozo's opinions).
(second post to correct a typo).
Some JD Salinger trivia for my fellow lawyers. While living in isolation in New Hampshire Salinger's neighbor and friend was Justice Learned Hand. J. Hand was my favorite judge while in law school. Best justice never to serve on the Supreme Court (I was never a fan of Justice Cardozo's opinions).
(second post to correct a typo).
In reaction to this post, I reread Franny and Zooey, start to finish. It has been decades since I first read it. It was even better than I remembered. The Fat Lady as Christ Himself indeed. Phenomenal. Thanks, Althouse.
mikee writes, "I bought a reproduction of a Mayan Era statue while on vacation long ago. It looked like a crudely dressed toddler, arms spread wide, with a smiling face."
Maya or Olmec?
Maybe the Pre-Columbian statuette identifies as Mayan.
You have to read through the whole book to appreciate the closing speech. Excerpted it looks a little silly.
The critics didn't like F+Z. Their notion was that Salinger was too much in love with and in worshipful awe of the family he had created (was there a "dogwhistle" in there about Salinger's religious development?). I think maybe they identified too much with Lane Coutell, Franny's pompous, litmajor date or boyfriend, and saw the description of him and his way of looking at the world as a challenge to their own cult.
Post a Comment