Naturally, imperfect human beings produce art, along with everything else. They inevitably sin against others and against themselves. But why make a virtue out of those inevitable errors and misdeeds, much less a program? History teaches us that class society occasionally mutilates very gifted people beyond recognition, so that artistic genius and personal vileness coexist within a single human being. Why not simply recognize this as an unfortunate fact of that society, another sign of its incompatibility with the demands of human happiness, and not as a proof that genius feeds on vileness? Art counts for a good deal, but not everything. We listen to Richard Wagners music (or some of it) with enjoyment, but that does not dissipate the stench of his anti-Semitism and generally filthy ideas. He is remembered, frankly, for both his music and his ideas. Doesnt it mean something that humanity is more likely to cherish in its collective memory a Mozart and not a Wagner, a Van Gogh and not a Degas, a Döblin and not a Céline, a Breton and not an Eliot? As for Kazan, somewhere around page 600 in his autobiography he sums things up fairly well: For years I declared myself an ardent liberal in politics, made all the popular declarations of faith, but the truth was--and is--that I am, like most of you, a bourgeois. I go along disarming people, but when it gets to a crunch, I am revealed to be a person interested only in what most artists are interested in, himself. A remarkable comment. Kazan thinks he is being very clever here, that he is revealing an essential, if unpalatable, universal truth. In reality, he only displays his extraordinary philistinism. What is the logic of his comment? Life is, first and foremost, about taking care of oneself; art presumably serves a function insofar as it enables one to do that. The individual who considers art as a means, as something extraneous to the purpose of his or her existence, is not a serious figure. The great artist, one might say the truly ambitious artist, is one who understands that the fate of his art is of far greater consequence than his personal destiny. Marx, writing in 1844, understood this: In no sense does the writer regard his works as a means. They are ends in themselves; so little are they means for him and others that, when necessary, he sacrifices his existence to theirs, and like the preacher of religion, though in another way, he takes as his principle: God is to be obeyed before men. [from Hollywood honors Elia Kazan: Filmmaker and informer, https://wsws.org/en/articles/1999/02/kaz1-f20.html]
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 03:40:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015