On Jun 9, 2012, at 7:40 PM, joseph berg wrote: > To paraphrase Ezra Pound: > > - [Bad art doesn't weather] the ages because once in so often a man of > intelligence commands the mass to [ignore] it.
Now, now. You cannot validly negate a general affirmative in this way and produce equivalent statements, or use the modified version to rebut William's Cat-copter ennui. >From Ezra Pound, "Imaginary Letters: 1. Walter Villerant to Mrs Bland Burn" (1930): There is no truce between art and the public. The public celebrates its eucharists with dead bodies. Its writers aspire to equal the oyster: to get themselves swallowed alive. They encompass it. Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be "in on it". Even the botches of a good artist have some quality, some distinction, which prevents their pleasing mass-palates. Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of intelligence commands the mass to adore it. His contemporaries call him a nuisance, their children follow his instructions, and include him in the curricula. I am not lifting m voice in protest, I am merely defining a process. I do not protest against the leaves falling in automn. ------- Pound's message here exudes the condescension of the person of superior taste deploring the baseness of the "public." In the last century, we in Western cultures have been pummeled with evidence, obvious and evanescent, of various kinds of biases: racism, sexism, ageism, even specieism and others newly minted. But I don't remember anyone remarking about rampant "public-ism," the disdain for the taste and ethos of the generalized public. This public-ism started with Babbit, perhaps even before, and has proceeded unabated since then. Writers, artists, philosophers, and others have created a pseudo-aristocratic ambience of elevated and ennobled interests in contrast to the mundane and gauche interests of the hoi polloi. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
