Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Ain't This America What is distinctive about American art and letters

Mirror, mirror on the wall....

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Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered
that they are fools. This is the first step toward becoming either estimable
or agreeable; and until it is taken there is no hope.
--- Lord Melbourne

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Anyone who breaks into "nanny nanny boo boo" gets a time out.

Julia, the Ranter

Andrew Wyeth was not bad, either.

Yours,
Issodhos

I missed you remarks about Lovecraft, but are you familiar with the works of another American writer very strongly influenced by him - Robert E. Howard?

Is it necessarily a reasonable comparison to make between the artistic accomplishments of a culture that is barely four centuries old and its European parentage that has 2.5 millennia of development? Or to the East Asian cultures that you so obviously admire and their four millennia of artistic treasure?

The point you make is worthy of consideration, but it merely shrinks the arena of comparisons to a span of four centuries. During that four centuries, Europe has vastly outshone America in art and letters.

Moreover, America has not sprung from the forehead of Zeus; in the main, it is a side-branch of European culture. That makes the degeneration into barbarism of its culture all the more appalling,

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The essential failure of America is that it has no High Culture.

Let me emphasize that I am not referring to the culture of a snobbish clique. I allude to what I mentioned in a previous posting here. The goal of High Culture is the elevation of the spirit; it is centered around the pursuit of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. It drives consciousness into realms which could never have been conceived without the transcendent fire of artistic creation.

To paraphrase Aristotle:

True Art is the energy of the soul at its highest peak, as it pursues the goal of existence.

It is a measure of the utter degradation of American consciousness that these statements sound ridiculous or incomprehensible to most Americans.

American life is dominated by pop culture and mass entertainment. Profit is its driving force, not the expansion of consciousness. Its "art" is ephemeral, shallow, the "suppliance of a moment" --- which is inevitable, since most Americans no longer have the ability to concentrate their minds for any length of time.

It is this almost total lack of a High Culture, and the triumph of garbage in the marketplace, that renders plausible the false view that art is a matter of taste, rather than the traditional view that there is an inner core to art which is real and unchanging.

Numan -

I have, I am sorry to say, serious questions about your taste.

Over time you have suggested that Americans have no real culture, that our population is ignorant, uneducated, and devoid of curiosity. You feel that our government is deeply disordered, corrupt, self-serving, and fatally flawed.

Given that most of the members of this board are Americans, your views and your values must make spending time at RR a bit like a visit with the tattooed denizens of a trailer park.

You are, of course, welcome here; you always have been. But there must be boards like this where the membership is primarily Canadian, European, anything but American; I find myself shaking my head that you continue to spend your time with us.

I can only assume that other sites have not been as welcoming - or perhaps you prefer feeling like the fast fish in a slow pond.

Still, I feel it wise to remind you that there are many boards in the webisphere where you could express your opinion without running the risk of insulting the other posters, where your erudition could be appreciated by members who were raised and educated to value it properly, and where those members can engage with you on a more equitable level.

Until you find a board like that you will, of course, continue to be welcome here.

Julia
Poster

Thank you, Julia. You say things so nicely.