Top 100 defining cultural moments of the noughties
From pop to opera, television to art, our award-winning team of critics have sifted through the past 10 years to find the moments that signalled a change in the cultural life of Britain and the rest of the world.
Two stories seeem to sit at the heart of it all. The first is technology: the explosion in self-expression that we have witnessed has only been made possible by the boom in ways of transmitting thoughts, images, feelings, ideas - the cornerstones of culture. Computer software and the internet have democratised creatively: everyone's an artist now.
But, more than that, everyone's a critic. This was the decade of the whirlwind recommendation, when a song or an image, a film clip or a piece of writing could be shared instantly and praised or attacked by anyone - right here, right now.
Brian Eno - interview with the producer of U2's No Line On The Horizon
At the opposite end of the scale from this intangible digital world sit the other dominant figures of the decade: buildings. The rise of the big culture shrine has been as remarkable as the numbers who have turned up to look inside.
Let us not forget Kylie Minogue's bottom, however. Or the first tweet sent by Stephen Fry. For at the same time as the serious play has flourished in the West End, this has also been a decade of froth and celebrity, one in which, at times, the whole world seemed to go pop.
2000
January
Opening ceremony of the Dome: New Labour’s grand folly sounds the death knell for Cool Britannia.
Zadie Smith’s 'White Teeth’ published: Young, black and very gifted Cambridge student publishes first novel.
Naomi Klein’s 'No Logo’ published: Critique of branding culture becomes the antiglobalisation movement’s key text.
April
Metallica sue music file-sharing service Napster: Napster settle but the free online music genie is already out of the bottle.
May
Tate Modern open: When the Queen opened Tate Modern on May 11, London acquired its most important new museum since Edward VII opened the Tate Gallery at Millbank more than 100 years before. In transforming Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station into a pristine space for contemporary art, Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron lit a match that kindled a British love affair with modern art. The love affair turned obsessional and 10 years later, every single major museum in London had devoted at least one show to contemporary art.
June
Kylie Minogue steps out in her hot pants: Flaunted in the video for Spinning Around, the Aussie’s perfect buttocks become the pop symbol of the new millennium, in what already seems like a more innocent era.
July
'Big Brother’ airs for the first time on Channel: When it arrived, with a former nun among its contestants and a winner who gave away his prize money, Big Brother was an interesting study in group living. But by the time Jade Goody became its most famous participant in 2004, it had become a symbol of our obsession with instant fame.
October
V.S Naipaul wins the Nobel Prize for Literature: Curmudgeonly genius rewarded for unsparing analysis of postcolonial world.
2001
March
Destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan: Historic Afghan cliff carvings are blown up after the Taliban deems them idolatrous.
July
'The Office’ debuts on BBC Two: Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s meticulously observed mockumentary instantly broke the mould for British sitcoms with its barbed understatement and made a household archetype of Gervais’s lovably loathsome boss-man David Brent. The aftershock of its novelty continues to be felt around the world; it has now aired in more than 80 countries. Gervais soon came to embody a new breed of comedy superstar whose live appearances harnessed the emerging power of the internet to become fast-selling phenomena in their own right.
July
'Brass Eye’ paedophilia special stokes controversy
Chris Morris’s satire on modern day witch-hunts ensnares politicians.
September
Attack on the World Trade Center: The cultural response to the outrage began badly, with Stockhausen’s remark that the destruction of the Twin Towers was “the greatest work of art ever”. More sane responses came later in John Updike’s Terrorist, work by Asian novelists such as Mohsin Hamid, and John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls.
Anthony d’Offay Gallery closes: After decades of mounting blue-chip shows of contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Gilbert and George, the art dealer calls it a day.
Sky Plus launches: RIP VHS – viewers now choose what they watch when at the touch of a button.
October
Release of the iPod: Apple’s elegant gadget changed the way we listen to music. Beautifully constructed, superbly functional and weirdly addictive, its little white ear buds became the most ubiquitous musical status symbol of the decade. In nine years, more than 220 million iPods have been sold worldwide. It’s like carrying your record collection in your pocket. And, with the random “shuffle” function, the iPod itself chooses what song we are going to hear at any given moment, throwing up all kinds of personally fascinating juxtapositions from the soundtrack to our own lives.
2002
January
Guantánamo inspires a wave of cultural responses: From gallery installations to television dramas, art finds a potent symbol of oppression in the American detention camp.
February
Will Young wins 'Pop Idol’: Politics graduate Will Young snatches the crown from Gareth Gates and begins the era of the TV talent contest.
June
'The Wire’ premieres on HBO
The Baltimore crime epic would come to symbolise a golden age for “high-end” American television dramas.
July
David Bowie performs 'Low’ at the Royal Festival Hall: Bowie begins a nostalgic trend in artist album live sets, of which Brian Wilson’s Smile – performed in 2004 – becomes the best known.
September
Simon Rattle’s debut with Berlin Philharmonic: The British conductor brings a controversial modernist hue to this venerable orchestra.
October
Robbie Williams signs £80m deal with EMI: Former Take That star lands the biggest recording contract ever offered to a Briton.
New English edition of Proust: Sensitive Frenchman reflects on his wasted life. In modern English.
2003
February
Sacha Baron Cohen hits America: Ali G runs amok in “da USA” and Hollywood pounces on his creator’s PC-subverting antics. Ali G begat Borat begat Brüno making the north London prankster a global superstar.
Sacha Baron Cohen's funniest lines
March
Michael Moore hijacks the Oscars: Picking up his Bowling for Columbine gong, Moore puts the knife into Bush’s “fictitious” presidency, splitting his audience between boos and applause.
April
Nicholas Hytner brings theatre to the masses: After taking over at the National, Hytner introduces £10 tickets and Sunday opening. The theatre plays to over 90 per cent of capacity year after year.
Spencer Tunick installation opens the Saatchi Gallery: 160 volunteers pose naked together on the gallery’s terrace for the American artist’s latest eye-catching work.
July
'The Da Vinci Code’ published: Dan Brown begins worldwide domination with monks-and-conspiracy thriller.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z release 'Crazy in Love’: The single of the year signals the arrival of a new king and queen of the pop firmament, and the union of hip hop and r&b that will become the dominant sound of the decade.
September
'Little Britain’ airs on BBC3: The comedy that makes stars of Matt Lucas and David Walliams also gives a welter of catchphrases, like Vicky Pollard’s “yeah-but-no-but”.
October
Banksy smuggles one of his own works into Tate Britain: The nation’s favourite graffiti artist nabs himself a place in the art establishment.
Olafur Eliasson’s 'Weather Project’ at Tate Modern: Who would have guessed that an art work entitled The Weather Project and installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall by a then-obscure Icelandic artist would turn out to be the most memorable contemporary art show of the decade? But Eliasson’s dazzling disc of orange light, seen through a veil of vapour and reflected in scores of ceiling mirrors, mesmerised tens of thousands of visitors.
'Belle de Jour’ takes blogging into the mainstream: Offering everything from the musings of a literate lady of the night to the minutiae of the latest outlandishly named musical movement, blogs become the publishing medium that matters.
December
'Broken Fall’ opens at the Royal Opera House: Sylvie Guillem dances Russell Maliphant’s Broken Fall with the Ballet Boyz, bringing a blast of modernity to the Royal Ballet. Wayne McGregor, who had a work on the same bill, would become in 2006 the first contemporary choreographer to be appointed resident choreographer for the company.
Building work on the Gherkin is completed: Foster and Shuttleworth’s distinctively shaped office building instantly becomes a London landmark.
2004
January
The Richard & Judy Book Club starts on Channel 4: New gods of the publishing world anoint some and disappoint others.
Renovation of London Coliseum completed: English National Opera moves back into its magnificently restored home, amid a financial and administrative meltdown that threatens the company’s existence. Under Loretta Tomasi’s tough management, it now looks secure again.
Virtual studio - Garageband released
The software that makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to write and record music.
May
Russell Brand captivates television audiences: His Wildean, waggish improvisations on Big Brother’s Big Mouth seal the deal for the lascivious Essex motormouth, who hereafter becomes inescapable.
'Strictly Come Dancing’ launches on BBC1: The BBC’s revival of ballroom dancing provides it with sequins, scandals and audience ratings – and reflects the boom in all forms of dance.
Momart warehouse fire, East London: Celebrated art work by the Young British Artists is destroyed in an inferno: a tragic loss or a bonfire of the vanities?
September
'Stuff Happens’ opens: North London’s Tricycle Theatre blazed the way with its pioneering inquiry dramas. But when David Hare put the causes of the Iraq war on stage at the National, it was clear that documentary theatre had become the most important theatrical trend of the decade.
'Cloaca’ launches Kevin Spacey’s first season at the Old Vic Theatre in London: The double Oscar-winner kicks off his tenure as artistic director with a stinker, but goes on to attract big stars and full houses with a string of cast-iron hits.
Publication of 'Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’: After 12 years of work, the most comprehensive history of a nation’s people, comprising 60 volumes and 57,000 biographies, hits the shelves.
October
Alistair Spalding appointed chief executive and artistic director of Sadler’s Wells: Under Alistair Spalding’s leadership, the renowned London dance venue shifts into a new creative gear, generating an astonishing run of world-class work devised by many of the greatest choreographers alive today.
'Saw’ released: Characterised by scenes of ingenious sadism, James Wan’s film spawns an ever-more gruesome franchise. Along with films such as Hostel, the Saw films are dubbed “torture porn”.
December
Google announces its plan to convert 15 million books into digital format: A fully searchable, universally accessible library available on your computer. Brilliant but scary.
Sage Gateshead opens
The £70 million “shining slug” concert hall designed by Norman Foster brings the wow factor to the North East of England.
2005
January
The BBC screens 'Jerry Springer: the Opera’: Television broadcast of the hit stage show, featuring a nappy-wearing Jesus, elicits 63,000 complaints.
February
YouTube created: When it began, this video-sharing website, founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, was loathed by multinational entertainment corporations as a copyright-infringing parasite. Since then it has been bought by Google, attracts more than a billion hits a day and its user-generated content makes it a major player in the Web 2.0 economy. Many of the companies who tried to sue it now distribute and promote their products through it.
March
'Doctor Who’ returns to BBC: The revival of a classic made essential teatime viewing for a new generation.
'Billy Elliot: The Musical’ opens: The first huge hit British musical since Phantom of the Opera goes on to conquer Broadway and sweep the board at the Tony awards.
June
Beethoven Experience dominates the airwaves: Radio 3 broadcasts every note of Beethoven, and the symphony downloads break all classical records.
July
Live 8: Twenty years after Live Aid, the global musical charity event returned bigger, though not necessarily better. The feelgood factor was dissipated by a sense of confusion about what was achieved. Two years later, Live Earth was so botched it felt like the whole format had become outdated and ineffective.
August
Hurricane Katrina destroys New Orleans: Kanye West and Spike Lee lead the black community’s protest at government indifference.
October
Arctic Monkeys release 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’: With their second single, the Sheffield band sneak up from the web margins to take over the nation’s youth.
November
'Guitar Hero’ debuts on PlayStation 2: The release of the interactive game begins a process that will end with the Beatles as computer avatars.
December
Harold Pinter wins Nobel Prize for literature: Already weakened by the cancer that would kill him three years later, the dramatist is unable to attend the awards ceremony in Stockholm, but sends a videotaped acceptance speech that attacks American foreign policy, suggesting the US had supported “and in many cases engendered” every right-wing military dictatorship in the past 50 years.
2006
March
'Planet Earth’ starts on BBC One: The most expensive wildlife documentary ever commissioned by the BBC makes its debut, packed with extraordinary high-definition scenes from nature never before seen on television. Elephant-hunting lions, cannibal chimps and a bloody encounter between a monkey and a tiger – all vie for attention with the inimitable tones of David Attenborough.
April
RSC Complete Works festival: The RSC’s reputation soars with a year-long Shakespeare fest – followed, in 2007, by The Histories.
May
'An Inconvenient Truth’ premieres in the US: Al Gore’s filmed lecture about global warming becomes an international hit and wins two Oscars.
June
Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sells for £73m: Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder’s record-breaking purchase propels art prices to a stratospheric peak.
July
'Top of the Pops’ shown for the very last time: The show that occupied the central point in British pop music for four decades goes out with a whimper, killed off by the BBC because of lack of interest.
August
'Black Watch’ opens: The new National Theatre of Scotland gets off to a flying start with this gutsy, “total theatre” portrayal of the combat experiences of the legendary Scottish regiment.
September
Richard Dawkins’s 'The God Delusion’ published: Atheist polemic sets off heated debate about God, the universe and everything.
Sony Reader launched: A new way to read books – on an eye-friendly hand-held screen. Goodbye paper?
October
Premiere of Punchdrunk Theatre Company’s 'Faust’: Greatest of the site-specific productions that were such an adventurous feature of the decade.
December
Met Opera in New York begins HD broadcasts to cinemas worldwide: Crystal-clear sound, perfect picture and informality take the stuffing out of the opera house experience.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
Pamuk’s work illuminates a country torn between a resurgent Islam and the West.
2007
January
Canongate publishes Barack Obama’s 'Dreams from My Father’: Small Edinburgh publisher picks up little-known American senator’s memoir. Two years later…
February
'Citizens and Kings’ opens at the Royal Academy of Arts: For two decades we saw countless blockbusters at the Royal Academy. This survey of portraiture in the age of enlightenment was one of the most ambitious – but would be one of the last. Throughout the decade the cost of such shows mounted, the danger to the objects increased and sponsorship became harder to find. A year later the markets crashed, taking with them the culture of the blockbuster.
March
Paul McCartney signs record deal with Starbucks: Anyone can be a record company now – even a coffee shop chain.
May
Rupert Goold’s 'Macbeth’ at Chichester Theatre Festival: This dazzling Stalinist take on Shakespeare makes Goold a director to watch.
June
Darcey Bussell retires from ballet: At the height of her powers, a great British ballerina gracefully bows out.
'Monkey: Journey to the West’ premieres at first Manchester Festival: Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s enchanting Chinese opera inaugurates the Manchester International Festival.
July
'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ published: JK Rowling sends children (and adults) into a frenzy of speed-reading.
August
Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra makes its British debut: The public face of a nationwide campaign to rescue Venezuelan street kids through music education, this orchestra electrifies audiences across the world. Gustavo Dudamel, its conductor, becomes a superstar.
Prince takes up residence at the O2 Arena in London: The Minneapolis Wonder’s 21 nights at the O2 Arena reconfirmed his superstar status as the most abundantly gifted musician of the modern pop age. Singing, playing and gyrating through a constantly shifting set of 130 songs, the jazz-soul-funk-rock-machine treated 420,000 ticket holders to some of the greatest shows on earth. He also cannily demonstrated the new music-business priorities by giving away his album Earth Songs with the Mail on Sunday.
September
Pavarotti dies: The world mourns the Italian tenor who had become the popular face of opera.
October
Radiohead release 'free’ album: Britain’s most influential band ask fans to name their price for In Rainbows.
'War Horse’ premieres at the National Theatre: Captivating equine puppets are the stars of the hugely acclaimed production.
Digital TV switchover: By 2012, all television will be digital. The revolution starts in the Lake District.
December
Karlheinz Stockhausen dies: The great guru of new music combined a mystical megalomania, a showman’s theatrical canniness, an inventor’s practical brilliance and true musical genius.
Led Zeppelin re-form for one night only: At a charity concert in the O2 Arena, the gods of Seventies rock unite. With veterans (from Neil Diamond to Leonard Cohen) at the top of the charts and the inevitable reformation of almost every ex-group with at least one member still breathing, nostalgia proves a potent commercial force.
2008
February
Polaroid announces that it is ceasing production of instant film: Henceforth, memories will be bright, digital and amnesiac rather than faded and ghostly.
'Yes We Can’ released: Rapper Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas turns a Barack Obama speech into an uplifting hip-hop anthem, with a little help from celebrity friends including Scarlett Johansson.
June
The Public, West Bromwich, opens after a catalogue of delays: The much-derided £54m digital arts centre marks a low point for architecture.
July
'Mamma Mia!’ is released: Not so much a musical as a cinematic karaoke session, Mamma Mia! goes on to become the most successful British movie of all time.
August
Olympics Opening Ceremony, Beijing
Perhaps the spectacular audio-visual cavalcade dreamed up and choreographed by film director Zhang Yimou was little more than propaganda for a repressive regime. But it was hard not to marvel at how brilliantly he marshalled a 15,000-strong cast to tumble and move through Herzog and de Meuron’s extraordinary Bird’s Nest Stadium, and how dexterously he juggled drum platoons, LED paper scrolls, lip-synching singers and CGI fireworks in a militantly euphoric and made-for-television spectacle that felt like a national “coming out” to the world and an attempt to fashion a new sense of Chinese selfhood.
September
David Foster Wallace commits suicide: Most original writer of his generation dies. An extraordinary loss.
Damien Hirst’s 'Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ auction at Sotheby’s, London: On September 15 and 16 2008, Damien Hirst sold by auction at Sotheby’s in London 223 lots of new work for an estimated total gross of £111.5 million. The supreme irony was that the sale happened on the very day that Lehman Brothers fell and Merrill Lynch went under. It was the end of the frenzied era when art became about worth – and worth alone. Hirst had already made the point a year earlier when he showed a human skull encrusted with £50 million worth of flawless diamonds – and he made it again at Sotheby’s with pieces entitled False Idol and The Golden Calf. And anyone who went to sneer, came away seduced, dazzled, entertained and impressed by much of the work’s breathtaking, heartbreaking beauty.
October
Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand controversy: Victims of bash-the-Beeb media hype, or overpaid, morally coarse perpetrators of a shockingly tasteless prank on the revered Andrew Sachs?
November
Dizzee Rascal interviewed by Paxman on 'Newsnight’: The crown prince of urban music bests the king of television interviewers.
December
Alfred Brendel’s farewell concert, Vienna: The musical world says farewell to a living symbol of the golden age of classical pianism, leading all the way back to Czerny and Beethoven.
2009
January
Titian’s 'Diana and Actaeon’ saved for nation: The National Galleries of Scotland and England raise £50 million to keep a masterpiece.
February
'Slumdog Millionaire’ wins eight Oscars: Danny Boyle’s Mumbai-based fairy tale, from a script that nearly didn’t get made, becomes the most feted British film since The English Patient.
Stephen Fry tweets while stuck in a lift: Fry’s 140-character SOS messages, read by thousands, make the news headlines – and turn Twitter into a household name.
May
Carol Ann Duffy appointed Poet Laureate: Tradition tumbles when, for the first time in the position’s history, a woman becomes “royal bard”.
June
Michael Jackson dies: Just weeks ahead of his 50‑date residency at London’s O2 Arena, the one‑time King of Pop collapses and dies. In a process of Elvis-like deification, Michael Jackson’s reputation is transformed by tragedy.
July
Antony Gormley’s 'One & Other’ begins on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: One by one, for an hour each, 2,400 Britons become living artworks.
December
James Cameron’s 'Avatar’ released: The megahyped sci-fi epic will pave (or block) the way forward for digital 3D.
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31.10.09
Happy 'alloween!
Some fun here from the Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/big-fat-story/2009-10-30/happy-halloween/
1989
The end of the story was gruesome--a spray of bullets and a splattering of blood on a wall in central Romania. On Christmas Day 1989, after a hastily arranged trial before a kangaroo court, the deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad. The assembled soldiers, eager to eliminate the despised dictator, were ordered not to aim higher than his chest. The faces of the condemned had to be recognizable after the fact. The country had to see that the communist era was over.
The fall of communism was as decisive a turning point in modern history as the French or Russian revolutions. In 1989 the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed; the division of Europe symbolized by the Berlin Wall crumbled; the cold war began to recede into historical memory; and more pluralistic, sometimes democratic, states emerged where one-party dictatorships had dominated for four decades. (It was also the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille.) Statist, ostensibly planned economies yielded to freewheeling capitalist markets; and hopes were raised, momentarily as it turned out, for a "new world order" without debilitating ideological conflicts.
Interpretations of the causes of the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire are becoming as numerous as books on the subject, especially in this, its twentieth-anniversary year. At one extreme are fatalistic accounts that trace the demise of a utopian system structurally flawed at its conception. At the other are highly voluntarist and contingent explanations that focus on the key players--the Polish pope, John Paul II; the determined but inconsistent reformer Mikhail Gorbachev; and an array of actors on both sides of the barricades, from Lech Walesa to Nicolae Ceausescu--who shaped a welter of dynamic and volatile events without ever being able to control them. But the events themselves were so consequential for our own times that few are content to stop with narration, analysis and explanation. Moral and political lessons are to be learned. Judgments about socialism, capitalism, democracy and the social engineering intrinsic to modernity are to be handed down.
The events of 1989 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It's a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. Capitalism responds to the nature of "man"--acquisitiveness, competition, egoism and the insatiable need for more. Socialism stands in the way of initiative, creativity and competition. Going by its nom de guerre, communism, it proposes radical equality in a world of unequals. Therefore, it can be maintained only by the coercive power of an entrenched elite and a repressive state. In the Eastern bloc, once that force was removed and party leaders lost confidence in their right to rule, communism naturally fell, and people's instinctual drives for material accumulation were liberated. Markets won out everywhere, even when democracy did not.
History, however, is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. The history of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century can be told as the story of two series of revolutions: the communist-led revolutions of the post-World War II years that ousted the former ruling elites and transformed largely rural societies into urban industrial ones; and the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, mostly peaceful and in one case even "velvet," that overturned entrenched party regimes already weakened by political sclerosis. In Eastern Europe, one form of "actually existing socialism" was established at a particular historical moment--the beginning of the cold war struggle between an enormously wealthy, nuclear-armed United States and a significantly weaker Soviet Union. Forty years later, communism fell when political crises, economic stagnation (but not economic collapse) and a will to change the way the system worked coalesced at another historical moment. To the lasting dismay of democratic socialists in Europe and elsewhere, it was a moment of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism, vigorous anticommunism and muscular military and covert operations against the left and radical movements in all parts of the globe. As for socialism, what originated in the early nineteenth century as a noble political philosophy devoted to promoting the common good was reduced to an epithet hurled at anyone skeptical of the workings of laissez-faire or the idea that capitalism is intrinsic to the natural order. Socialism has a long history, but it has not been able to escape the crushing burden of its recent Leninist incarnation.
The end of the story was also confusing. How did two empires fall--one in Eastern Europe, the other the Soviet Union itself--with little effort by the imperial power to prevent their disintegration? The upheaval and downfall occurred so quickly, so unexpectedly, that journalists could barely keep up with it and scholars were left disoriented. Twenty years on, in Revolution 1989, journalist Victor Sebestyen offers an analysis that foregrounds human actors and avoids larger conclusions about the structural factors that contributed to communism's disintegration. Constantine Pleshakov, a historian at Mount Holyoke College, does not shy away from evoking the positive achievements of communist power in order to explain its durability, but most of the story he tells in There Is No Freedom Without Bread! is ultimately about the cascade of events, from Poland to Afghanistan, that overwhelmed the creaky "socialist" system and its creaky operators. In Uncivil Society, Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross, historians at Princeton University, offer a deeply structuralist analysis of communism's collapse. Their narrative combines a certainty about the unreformability of state socialism, at least in Eastern Europe, with a preachy confidence in the inevitable triumph of capitalism. For all their differences in tone, perspective and scope, these three books are masterful and reliable accounts of a time when the world turned right side up (no pun intended).
Like the two world wars that preceded it, the cold war began in Eastern Europe, a fragmented frontier between developed industrial capitalism and its agrarian poor relation, still largely peasant, traditionally religious and fiercely nationalist. This was not a particularly hospitable place to launch a socialist revolution à la Marx--especially when that revolution was associated with Russia, the Great Power most resented by Poles, Germans, Hungarians and Romanians. Stalin's USSR was slowly recovering from its costly victory over fascism. It was suspicious of the intentions of its former allies and determined to retain the territorial spoils of the recently concluded war, stretching from its western borders to central Germany. The "East European Revolutions" of the 1940s and '50s were largely, though not entirely, imposed by the Kremlin, and the system eventually built was modeled after the most draconian variant of what has been called socialism, namely the Stalinist command economy and police state.
Realists in the East and West understood that given military conditions and Soviet notions of security, the question of whether capitalism or communism would dominate Eastern Europe was moot. The true question was not if but how Stalin would control the "liberated" countries. Would they become allied but autonomous states, like Finland, or fully Stalinized and Soviet-manipulated police regimes? At first the Soviets promoted coalition governments and gradual social transitions. The pre-war elites had been discredited by their collaboration with the Nazis, and the politics of most of Eastern Europe gravitated leftward. In Hungary, Poland and Romania, hundreds of thousands of acres of private property were turned over to peasants. In Poland, industry owned by Germans was nationalized. Russians were popular in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the same social reforms easily gained support there. But four of the countries taken by the Soviet army--Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria--had been part of the Axis, and they were drained of resources as reparations for the Soviet Union's staggering war losses.
As in the Soviet Union, communists in Eastern Europe were brutal modernizers. Kremlin leaders believed that the security of the USSR went hand in hand with the transformation of the countries on its western border from agrarian to industrial, peasant to proletarian. By the late 1940s any deviance from the strict Soviet form of "revolution from above" led to expulsion from the communist bloc (as in the case of Tito's Yugoslavia); the purging of dissenters; or even the execution of veteran party leaders, including László Rajk in Hungary, Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia.
In There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, Pleshakov introduces the metaphor of civil war to revise conventional accounts of 1989 in Eastern Europe. He argues that if socialism was as fundamentally flawed, and its fall as preordained, as the fatalists say, it would not have lasted as long as it did. The regimes not only survived for forty years but were relatively stable and even enjoyed a degree of popular support, in large part because of what Pleshakov calls "social contracts between the rulers and the ruled": "No Communist state could have done without secret police--but people accepted the state not just because of terror and intimidation, but also because of free health care, free housing, and free education." Dissident Poles may have shouted in 1980, "There is no bread without freedom!" but Pleshakov claims that the reverse was also true. The communists not only expropriated land from the aristocracy and the church but secularized education, provided jobs in new industries and made life and livelihood more secure and predictable. Furthermore, they extended Poland territorially by annexing German lands to compensate for the loss of the eastern part of pre-war Poland that Stalin incorporated into the Soviet Union. They abetted the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteed the new borders of the state, as well as the independent existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles were not happy with the loss of territory ceded to the USSR and Romania; but the presence of the Soviet Army, along with the internationalist rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, at least prevented the recurrence of the worst excesses of ethnic nationalism that had long plagued the region. Economies grew in the years after Stalin's death in 1953; energy was cheap, subsidized by Soviet exports; and in general Eastern Europeans lived better in the periphery of empire than most Russians did in its metropole.
For those existing, as we say, "under communism," Pleshakov argues, making a living came first and was for many years almost enough to make the socialist experiment seem gratifying. Even after the "Soviet Union and its version of communism had lost luster," he says, egalitarian Marxism, a more human form of communism without terror or Russians, continued to have broad appeal. But the Kremlin's decision to crush the anti-Stalinist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia left those hopeful for another kind of socialism feeling bewildered, if not betrayed. What they got was "vegetarian" communism or (for the omnivores) "goulash communism"--more goods, some travel abroad, less repression, but only the most muted voice in politics. By the early '70s the regimes looked stable, relatively prosperous and likely to endure. But the command economy by itself couldn't uphold the social contract: East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania borrowed heavily from the West to maintain an aging industrial base and a standard of living comfortable enough to keep populations relatively quiescent. The debt owed to foreign banks swelled, and a cycle of falling productivity and growing discontent accelerated.
In retrospect, the second round of Eastern European revolutions appears to be the culmination of four crucial events. The first two were the mass strikes of 1970 and 1976 in Poland, which forced the government to make concessions to popular protest and culminated in the formation of Solidarity, the officially recognized independent trade union, in 1980. Eventually Poland's communists could no longer placate the burgeoning workers' movement, and party chief Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted by declaring a "state of war" in December 1981, arresting thousands, Walesa included, and driving Solidarity underground. The third event was the election, in 1978, of Karol Józef Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. The Kremlin was appalled that a cleric from the Soviet bloc had been elevated to a position of global influence. The pope did not have any armored divisions at his command, but his moral authority at home and abroad translated into what Marxists understood to be a "material force." Soon hundreds of thousands of civilians would be on the street or on strike, inspired by John Paul II's refusal to compromise with Marxism. Money from US intelligence agencies, funneled secretly through Western labor organizations and the church, helped to fuel the movement. The fourth event was the most unpredictable: the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's radical reforms turned, step by step, into a revolution that crippled the party and dissolved state authority. His greatest gift to the USSR's satellite states was to restore their sovereignty and pledge not to interfere in their affairs. To the dismay of hardliners like Erich Honecker in East Germany, the Soviets refused to back up former client states facing popular protests.
With sharply drawn anecdotes, Victor Sebestyen relates in Revolution 1989 what happened when a reluctant Gorbachev traveled to East Berlin in early October 1989 to observe the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. In his public remarks the Soviet leader pointedly turned to Honecker and warned, "Life punishes those who fall behind." That evening, as the two party leaders watched what was billed as a celebratory torchlight parade, blue-shirted, red-scarved Communist Youth marched by the dignitaries' podium pleading, "Gorby, help us; Gorby, help us." The rot had penetrated so deeply that even the sons and daughters of the elite were calling for radical reform. For two weeks the party and state apparatus floundered in the face of demonstrators, but Gorbachev ordered the 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany to remain in their barracks. Meanwhile, in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, communists and opposition figures held roundtable discussions to negotiate free elections in those countries and eventually the transfer of power.
Less dramatic than crowds in the street but equally devastating was the accelerating payments crisis faced by the communist states that had been borrowing heavily from foreign banks for decades. After they conspired to remove Honecker as party boss in mid-October, German Politburo members were shocked to learn that the country was essentially bankrupt. But when Egon Krenz, the new party boss and Honecker clone, went hat in hand to Moscow, Gorbachev brushed him off: "We are in no position to offer assistance, not in the USSR's present condition." On November 9, 1989, an East German party spokesman answering a question from NBC's Tom Brokaw about the new travel policy for East Germans mistakenly stated that it was now possible for people to cross the border freely. (The spokesman had meant to say that the old visa restrictions were being lifted and that people could apply for passes allowing them to cross.) Within hours, thousands gathered at the wall. They climbed over it, danced on top of it and began tearing it apart. For many in Russia, the sense of national security they had gained from the Soviet army's westward advances in 1945 was buried in the rubble.
To paraphrase that master of revolution Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary situation exists when society is no longer willing to be ruled in the old way and the ruling elites are no longer able to rule in the old way. While not all such situations end in successful revolution, the outcomes in Eastern Europe were for the most part positive. What would soon be called "transitions to democracy" (and would later spawn a new subdiscipline of political science--transitology!) were not uniformly democratic in process; but most of the transitions did result in the formation of states that were democratic in character (in contrast to most of the successor states created from the former Soviet Union). Three distinct patterns emerged: the roundtable negotiations between the communist ancien régime and the opposition (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia); coups d'état within the innermost communist circles (East Germany, Bulgaria); and a revolution from below that forced regime insiders to unseat the leader (Romania). Efforts to preserve communist power with truncheons or bullets failed in Leipzig, Prague and Timisoara, and ultimately the "dumpling-faced" party bosses lost the will and ability to rule in the old way. In Poland there was a progressive erosion of popular support and the simultaneous loss of confidence by the elite, a dynamic that spilled into Hungary, then Germany and Czechoslovakia, and finally Bulgaria and Romania. In Uncivil Society, Kotkin and Gross liken the revolutions in the GDR and Romania to "bank runs." When the government wavered, masses of people took to the streets and withdrew their acquiescence to the system. In Hungary and Poland, by contrast, there were negotiated shifts of power. Even the timetables differed from state to state. As scholar-journalist Timothy Garton Ash put it, "In Poland it took ten years; in East Germany ten weeks; in Czechoslovakia ten days."
For the self-proclaimed "socialists" of the communist regimes, everything from the reforms of Gorbachev to the tearing down of the wall was evidence not of revolution but a counterrevolution bent on the abolition of socialism. In November 1989, the Czech politician Alexander Dubcek, the hero of 1968 who had championed "socialism with a human face," spoke at a press conference in Prague and proposed a reformed socialism. The man of the hour, playwright and dissident Václav Havel, interjected, "'Socialism' is a word that has lost its meaning in our country." For Havel, socialism was identified with the regime that he and his supporters were seeking to overthrow. Dubcek had failed--as Gorbachev would two years later--to comprehend how far the popular mood had shifted away from his shopworn ideals. At the very moment that Havel and Dubcek shared the microphones, it was announced that the entire communist leadership of Czechoslovakia had resigned, and all forms of socialism, from communist statism to Dubcek's Social Democracy, seemed to melt into the air.
As the drama of 1989 moved toward a denouement in Eastern Europe, in the USSR reform was rapidly mutating into revolution. Gorbachev's promotion of elected bodies--the Congress of People's Deputies and, later, elected soviets--shifted power from the Communist Party to broad parliamentary institutions. Politics moved from the cloistered offices of high party officials into the spotlight of unscripted televised debates. The Soviet Union lasted two more years before disintegrating into fifteen separate states, but by 1989 the communist system of a single governing party and a command economy all operating under strict censorship had vanished. What had once been an ironclad freighter labeled "totalitarianism" was being replaced daily by a jerry-built ship at sea, hardly seaworthy and already foundering in the turbulent waters of economic crisis.
Gorbachev called his project of perestroika (rebuilding) a "revolution," even though he did not anticipate the loss of power by the party he headed. He probably intended to eliminate the communist system but wanted neither the end of socialism, which he defined as a politics dependent on and requiring democracy, nor of the USSR. And he certainly did not anticipate the precipitous rejection of party rule in Eastern Europe. (As Stephen F. Cohen has pointed out in an essay on the reformability of the Soviet system, the pessimists doubted the system could be reformed, because it would cease to be the Soviet system--a tautological statement. That, of course, was always the revolutionary potential of a radical reform from above.) But after Gorbachev had successfully reformed the system out of existence and set adrift the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the example of decolonization became a powerful incentive, first to dissident nationalists in Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and later to communists in the non-Russian republics. Even the old communist Boris Yeltsin discovered the political advantages of nationalism: after repeatedly defending the integrity of the Soviet Union, in 1991 he conspired with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to bring down the Soviet state, and Gorbachev with it.
In the last few years of Soviet power, Gorbachev was not only unwilling to use force to retain control of the Eastern European states but extremely reluctant to use coercion against recalcitrant and rebellious Soviet citizens to compel them to obey existing laws and to prevent separatism. Violent suppression of demonstrations and protests and even pogroms occurred in Georgia, the Baltic republics and Azerbaijan, but the use of the police or army was intermittent, hesitant and usually followed by concessions or apologies. Gorbachev, it turned out, did not have the "iron teeth" that Andrei Gromyko, in nominating him to the highest post in the land, had promised he possessed. Revolutions are almost always accompanied by violence and often followed by civil wars. Lenin unhesitatingly called for civil war when he was struggling for power and used terror as a tool for state-building. Unlike another state preserver, Abraham Lincoln, Gorbachev was reluctant to use the military and political instruments at hand to keep his union intact.
Kotkin and Gross argue against the cherished notion that an organized revolution from below occurred in Eastern Europe. They view Poland as an exception, but this caveat does not lead them to grant Poland the central role cast for it by Pleshakov and Sebestyen, who see the Polish workers' rebellion in 1980 as creating an existential dilemma for the Soviets. With the Soviet army engaged in Afghanistan, sending troops into Poland was unthinkable for Moscow. Since the Polish party could no longer rule in the old way, party chief General Jaruzelski was forced to declare a "state of war." Poland was certainly unique, and according to Kotkin and Gross, more common was the process of "nonorganized mobilization," most evident on those December days in Bucharest when a lone voice was sufficient to turn a crowd against Ceausescu.
Mobilization against the state in Eastern Europe, they go on to argue, did not happen in or because of civil society, that imagined community of anticommunist dissidents of the 1970s and '80s: "Needless to say, in 1989 'civil society' could not have shattered Soviet-style socialism for the simple reason that civil society in Eastern Europe did not then actually exist." Dissidents a civil society do not make. Instead, "it was the establishment--the 'uncivil society'--that brought down its own system." Totalitarianism, in Kotkin and Gross's view, made civil society impossible. That extra-state arena of "people taking responsibility for themselves" with "recourse to state institutions to defend associationism, civil liberties, and private property" was a mirage. Poland's Solidarity mesmerized Eastern Europe, but in no other Soviet bloc country were citizens able to repeat its successes. "Uncivil society" constituted a world of structural incompetence. The Soviet system itself, its practices of secrecy and coercion, its culture of suspicion, promoted the loyal rather than the capable, the submissive rather than the innovative, the risk-averse rather than the creative. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell because the elites were unable to change their ways; Gorbachev refused to support them and demanded that they reform. When the "uncivil society" of an illiberal state was no longer able to manipulate or even gauge the mood of its own people, it found itself bereft of the most basic instruments of government.
Kotkin and Gross provide an intriguing revision of the usual narrative of mobilized popular resistance to "actually existing socialism." Highlighting the failures at the top is key to understanding the collapse of communism, but that emphasis must be supplemented by attention to what went on below. Both organized popular resistance in Poland and more spontaneous mass mobilization in most of the other socialist states, as Pleshakov and Sebestyen extensively and persuasively demonstrate, contributed to the crises that made the communist regimes unsustainable.
Eastern European communists promised something besides social justice and equality; to their own detriment they also promised greater prosperity and productivity than was possible under capitalism. Khrushchev repeatedly spoke of "reaching and surpassing America!" This was yet another failure in the face of capitalism. The economies of Soviet bloc countries, themselves eager to incessantly increase output, were ultimately outperformed by the West. Nowhere was this contrast more evident than in Berlin, where the radiance of the western sector outshone the more subdued lights to the east. Not only were the Soviet-style economies unable to compete successfully but, by engaging with the bankers of the West, they became dependent on loans and saddled with onerous debt. The "social contract" trapped the socialist states; they could neither modify the subsidies that underwrote low consumer prices nor use the capitalist weapon of unemployment to restructure their economies. China's "market Leninism" showed one way out--a turn toward capitalism without democratization--but Eastern European communists hesitated to take that path. Even Hungary, the most market-oriented, would not permit labor or capital markets.
Communism, Kotkin and Gross conclude, was unredeemable. The execution, on Christmas Day, of the one remaining dictator in Eastern Europe was for them the salute that marked not only the collapse of the communist establishment but the triumph of capitalism and the failure of socialism. Stripped of the hopes and illusions of earlier years, by 1989 many on the streets agreed with the Polish opposition figure Adam Michnik: "There is no socialism with a human face, only totalitarianism with its teeth knocked out."
The fall of communism was as decisive a turning point in modern history as the French or Russian revolutions. In 1989 the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed; the division of Europe symbolized by the Berlin Wall crumbled; the cold war began to recede into historical memory; and more pluralistic, sometimes democratic, states emerged where one-party dictatorships had dominated for four decades. (It was also the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille.) Statist, ostensibly planned economies yielded to freewheeling capitalist markets; and hopes were raised, momentarily as it turned out, for a "new world order" without debilitating ideological conflicts.
Interpretations of the causes of the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire are becoming as numerous as books on the subject, especially in this, its twentieth-anniversary year. At one extreme are fatalistic accounts that trace the demise of a utopian system structurally flawed at its conception. At the other are highly voluntarist and contingent explanations that focus on the key players--the Polish pope, John Paul II; the determined but inconsistent reformer Mikhail Gorbachev; and an array of actors on both sides of the barricades, from Lech Walesa to Nicolae Ceausescu--who shaped a welter of dynamic and volatile events without ever being able to control them. But the events themselves were so consequential for our own times that few are content to stop with narration, analysis and explanation. Moral and political lessons are to be learned. Judgments about socialism, capitalism, democracy and the social engineering intrinsic to modernity are to be handed down.
The events of 1989 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It's a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. Capitalism responds to the nature of "man"--acquisitiveness, competition, egoism and the insatiable need for more. Socialism stands in the way of initiative, creativity and competition. Going by its nom de guerre, communism, it proposes radical equality in a world of unequals. Therefore, it can be maintained only by the coercive power of an entrenched elite and a repressive state. In the Eastern bloc, once that force was removed and party leaders lost confidence in their right to rule, communism naturally fell, and people's instinctual drives for material accumulation were liberated. Markets won out everywhere, even when democracy did not.
History, however, is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. The history of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century can be told as the story of two series of revolutions: the communist-led revolutions of the post-World War II years that ousted the former ruling elites and transformed largely rural societies into urban industrial ones; and the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, mostly peaceful and in one case even "velvet," that overturned entrenched party regimes already weakened by political sclerosis. In Eastern Europe, one form of "actually existing socialism" was established at a particular historical moment--the beginning of the cold war struggle between an enormously wealthy, nuclear-armed United States and a significantly weaker Soviet Union. Forty years later, communism fell when political crises, economic stagnation (but not economic collapse) and a will to change the way the system worked coalesced at another historical moment. To the lasting dismay of democratic socialists in Europe and elsewhere, it was a moment of Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberalism, vigorous anticommunism and muscular military and covert operations against the left and radical movements in all parts of the globe. As for socialism, what originated in the early nineteenth century as a noble political philosophy devoted to promoting the common good was reduced to an epithet hurled at anyone skeptical of the workings of laissez-faire or the idea that capitalism is intrinsic to the natural order. Socialism has a long history, but it has not been able to escape the crushing burden of its recent Leninist incarnation.
The end of the story was also confusing. How did two empires fall--one in Eastern Europe, the other the Soviet Union itself--with little effort by the imperial power to prevent their disintegration? The upheaval and downfall occurred so quickly, so unexpectedly, that journalists could barely keep up with it and scholars were left disoriented. Twenty years on, in Revolution 1989, journalist Victor Sebestyen offers an analysis that foregrounds human actors and avoids larger conclusions about the structural factors that contributed to communism's disintegration. Constantine Pleshakov, a historian at Mount Holyoke College, does not shy away from evoking the positive achievements of communist power in order to explain its durability, but most of the story he tells in There Is No Freedom Without Bread! is ultimately about the cascade of events, from Poland to Afghanistan, that overwhelmed the creaky "socialist" system and its creaky operators. In Uncivil Society, Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross, historians at Princeton University, offer a deeply structuralist analysis of communism's collapse. Their narrative combines a certainty about the unreformability of state socialism, at least in Eastern Europe, with a preachy confidence in the inevitable triumph of capitalism. For all their differences in tone, perspective and scope, these three books are masterful and reliable accounts of a time when the world turned right side up (no pun intended).
Like the two world wars that preceded it, the cold war began in Eastern Europe, a fragmented frontier between developed industrial capitalism and its agrarian poor relation, still largely peasant, traditionally religious and fiercely nationalist. This was not a particularly hospitable place to launch a socialist revolution à la Marx--especially when that revolution was associated with Russia, the Great Power most resented by Poles, Germans, Hungarians and Romanians. Stalin's USSR was slowly recovering from its costly victory over fascism. It was suspicious of the intentions of its former allies and determined to retain the territorial spoils of the recently concluded war, stretching from its western borders to central Germany. The "East European Revolutions" of the 1940s and '50s were largely, though not entirely, imposed by the Kremlin, and the system eventually built was modeled after the most draconian variant of what has been called socialism, namely the Stalinist command economy and police state.
Realists in the East and West understood that given military conditions and Soviet notions of security, the question of whether capitalism or communism would dominate Eastern Europe was moot. The true question was not if but how Stalin would control the "liberated" countries. Would they become allied but autonomous states, like Finland, or fully Stalinized and Soviet-manipulated police regimes? At first the Soviets promoted coalition governments and gradual social transitions. The pre-war elites had been discredited by their collaboration with the Nazis, and the politics of most of Eastern Europe gravitated leftward. In Hungary, Poland and Romania, hundreds of thousands of acres of private property were turned over to peasants. In Poland, industry owned by Germans was nationalized. Russians were popular in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the same social reforms easily gained support there. But four of the countries taken by the Soviet army--Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria--had been part of the Axis, and they were drained of resources as reparations for the Soviet Union's staggering war losses.
As in the Soviet Union, communists in Eastern Europe were brutal modernizers. Kremlin leaders believed that the security of the USSR went hand in hand with the transformation of the countries on its western border from agrarian to industrial, peasant to proletarian. By the late 1940s any deviance from the strict Soviet form of "revolution from above" led to expulsion from the communist bloc (as in the case of Tito's Yugoslavia); the purging of dissenters; or even the execution of veteran party leaders, including László Rajk in Hungary, Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria and Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia.
In There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, Pleshakov introduces the metaphor of civil war to revise conventional accounts of 1989 in Eastern Europe. He argues that if socialism was as fundamentally flawed, and its fall as preordained, as the fatalists say, it would not have lasted as long as it did. The regimes not only survived for forty years but were relatively stable and even enjoyed a degree of popular support, in large part because of what Pleshakov calls "social contracts between the rulers and the ruled": "No Communist state could have done without secret police--but people accepted the state not just because of terror and intimidation, but also because of free health care, free housing, and free education." Dissident Poles may have shouted in 1980, "There is no bread without freedom!" but Pleshakov claims that the reverse was also true. The communists not only expropriated land from the aristocracy and the church but secularized education, provided jobs in new industries and made life and livelihood more secure and predictable. Furthermore, they extended Poland territorially by annexing German lands to compensate for the loss of the eastern part of pre-war Poland that Stalin incorporated into the Soviet Union. They abetted the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteed the new borders of the state, as well as the independent existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles were not happy with the loss of territory ceded to the USSR and Romania; but the presence of the Soviet Army, along with the internationalist rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, at least prevented the recurrence of the worst excesses of ethnic nationalism that had long plagued the region. Economies grew in the years after Stalin's death in 1953; energy was cheap, subsidized by Soviet exports; and in general Eastern Europeans lived better in the periphery of empire than most Russians did in its metropole.
For those existing, as we say, "under communism," Pleshakov argues, making a living came first and was for many years almost enough to make the socialist experiment seem gratifying. Even after the "Soviet Union and its version of communism had lost luster," he says, egalitarian Marxism, a more human form of communism without terror or Russians, continued to have broad appeal. But the Kremlin's decision to crush the anti-Stalinist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia left those hopeful for another kind of socialism feeling bewildered, if not betrayed. What they got was "vegetarian" communism or (for the omnivores) "goulash communism"--more goods, some travel abroad, less repression, but only the most muted voice in politics. By the early '70s the regimes looked stable, relatively prosperous and likely to endure. But the command economy by itself couldn't uphold the social contract: East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania borrowed heavily from the West to maintain an aging industrial base and a standard of living comfortable enough to keep populations relatively quiescent. The debt owed to foreign banks swelled, and a cycle of falling productivity and growing discontent accelerated.
In retrospect, the second round of Eastern European revolutions appears to be the culmination of four crucial events. The first two were the mass strikes of 1970 and 1976 in Poland, which forced the government to make concessions to popular protest and culminated in the formation of Solidarity, the officially recognized independent trade union, in 1980. Eventually Poland's communists could no longer placate the burgeoning workers' movement, and party chief Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted by declaring a "state of war" in December 1981, arresting thousands, Walesa included, and driving Solidarity underground. The third event was the election, in 1978, of Karol Józef Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. The Kremlin was appalled that a cleric from the Soviet bloc had been elevated to a position of global influence. The pope did not have any armored divisions at his command, but his moral authority at home and abroad translated into what Marxists understood to be a "material force." Soon hundreds of thousands of civilians would be on the street or on strike, inspired by John Paul II's refusal to compromise with Marxism. Money from US intelligence agencies, funneled secretly through Western labor organizations and the church, helped to fuel the movement. The fourth event was the most unpredictable: the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's radical reforms turned, step by step, into a revolution that crippled the party and dissolved state authority. His greatest gift to the USSR's satellite states was to restore their sovereignty and pledge not to interfere in their affairs. To the dismay of hardliners like Erich Honecker in East Germany, the Soviets refused to back up former client states facing popular protests.
With sharply drawn anecdotes, Victor Sebestyen relates in Revolution 1989 what happened when a reluctant Gorbachev traveled to East Berlin in early October 1989 to observe the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. In his public remarks the Soviet leader pointedly turned to Honecker and warned, "Life punishes those who fall behind." That evening, as the two party leaders watched what was billed as a celebratory torchlight parade, blue-shirted, red-scarved Communist Youth marched by the dignitaries' podium pleading, "Gorby, help us; Gorby, help us." The rot had penetrated so deeply that even the sons and daughters of the elite were calling for radical reform. For two weeks the party and state apparatus floundered in the face of demonstrators, but Gorbachev ordered the 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany to remain in their barracks. Meanwhile, in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, communists and opposition figures held roundtable discussions to negotiate free elections in those countries and eventually the transfer of power.
Less dramatic than crowds in the street but equally devastating was the accelerating payments crisis faced by the communist states that had been borrowing heavily from foreign banks for decades. After they conspired to remove Honecker as party boss in mid-October, German Politburo members were shocked to learn that the country was essentially bankrupt. But when Egon Krenz, the new party boss and Honecker clone, went hat in hand to Moscow, Gorbachev brushed him off: "We are in no position to offer assistance, not in the USSR's present condition." On November 9, 1989, an East German party spokesman answering a question from NBC's Tom Brokaw about the new travel policy for East Germans mistakenly stated that it was now possible for people to cross the border freely. (The spokesman had meant to say that the old visa restrictions were being lifted and that people could apply for passes allowing them to cross.) Within hours, thousands gathered at the wall. They climbed over it, danced on top of it and began tearing it apart. For many in Russia, the sense of national security they had gained from the Soviet army's westward advances in 1945 was buried in the rubble.
To paraphrase that master of revolution Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary situation exists when society is no longer willing to be ruled in the old way and the ruling elites are no longer able to rule in the old way. While not all such situations end in successful revolution, the outcomes in Eastern Europe were for the most part positive. What would soon be called "transitions to democracy" (and would later spawn a new subdiscipline of political science--transitology!) were not uniformly democratic in process; but most of the transitions did result in the formation of states that were democratic in character (in contrast to most of the successor states created from the former Soviet Union). Three distinct patterns emerged: the roundtable negotiations between the communist ancien régime and the opposition (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia); coups d'état within the innermost communist circles (East Germany, Bulgaria); and a revolution from below that forced regime insiders to unseat the leader (Romania). Efforts to preserve communist power with truncheons or bullets failed in Leipzig, Prague and Timisoara, and ultimately the "dumpling-faced" party bosses lost the will and ability to rule in the old way. In Poland there was a progressive erosion of popular support and the simultaneous loss of confidence by the elite, a dynamic that spilled into Hungary, then Germany and Czechoslovakia, and finally Bulgaria and Romania. In Uncivil Society, Kotkin and Gross liken the revolutions in the GDR and Romania to "bank runs." When the government wavered, masses of people took to the streets and withdrew their acquiescence to the system. In Hungary and Poland, by contrast, there were negotiated shifts of power. Even the timetables differed from state to state. As scholar-journalist Timothy Garton Ash put it, "In Poland it took ten years; in East Germany ten weeks; in Czechoslovakia ten days."
For the self-proclaimed "socialists" of the communist regimes, everything from the reforms of Gorbachev to the tearing down of the wall was evidence not of revolution but a counterrevolution bent on the abolition of socialism. In November 1989, the Czech politician Alexander Dubcek, the hero of 1968 who had championed "socialism with a human face," spoke at a press conference in Prague and proposed a reformed socialism. The man of the hour, playwright and dissident Václav Havel, interjected, "'Socialism' is a word that has lost its meaning in our country." For Havel, socialism was identified with the regime that he and his supporters were seeking to overthrow. Dubcek had failed--as Gorbachev would two years later--to comprehend how far the popular mood had shifted away from his shopworn ideals. At the very moment that Havel and Dubcek shared the microphones, it was announced that the entire communist leadership of Czechoslovakia had resigned, and all forms of socialism, from communist statism to Dubcek's Social Democracy, seemed to melt into the air.
As the drama of 1989 moved toward a denouement in Eastern Europe, in the USSR reform was rapidly mutating into revolution. Gorbachev's promotion of elected bodies--the Congress of People's Deputies and, later, elected soviets--shifted power from the Communist Party to broad parliamentary institutions. Politics moved from the cloistered offices of high party officials into the spotlight of unscripted televised debates. The Soviet Union lasted two more years before disintegrating into fifteen separate states, but by 1989 the communist system of a single governing party and a command economy all operating under strict censorship had vanished. What had once been an ironclad freighter labeled "totalitarianism" was being replaced daily by a jerry-built ship at sea, hardly seaworthy and already foundering in the turbulent waters of economic crisis.
Gorbachev called his project of perestroika (rebuilding) a "revolution," even though he did not anticipate the loss of power by the party he headed. He probably intended to eliminate the communist system but wanted neither the end of socialism, which he defined as a politics dependent on and requiring democracy, nor of the USSR. And he certainly did not anticipate the precipitous rejection of party rule in Eastern Europe. (As Stephen F. Cohen has pointed out in an essay on the reformability of the Soviet system, the pessimists doubted the system could be reformed, because it would cease to be the Soviet system--a tautological statement. That, of course, was always the revolutionary potential of a radical reform from above.) But after Gorbachev had successfully reformed the system out of existence and set adrift the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the example of decolonization became a powerful incentive, first to dissident nationalists in Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and later to communists in the non-Russian republics. Even the old communist Boris Yeltsin discovered the political advantages of nationalism: after repeatedly defending the integrity of the Soviet Union, in 1991 he conspired with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to bring down the Soviet state, and Gorbachev with it.
In the last few years of Soviet power, Gorbachev was not only unwilling to use force to retain control of the Eastern European states but extremely reluctant to use coercion against recalcitrant and rebellious Soviet citizens to compel them to obey existing laws and to prevent separatism. Violent suppression of demonstrations and protests and even pogroms occurred in Georgia, the Baltic republics and Azerbaijan, but the use of the police or army was intermittent, hesitant and usually followed by concessions or apologies. Gorbachev, it turned out, did not have the "iron teeth" that Andrei Gromyko, in nominating him to the highest post in the land, had promised he possessed. Revolutions are almost always accompanied by violence and often followed by civil wars. Lenin unhesitatingly called for civil war when he was struggling for power and used terror as a tool for state-building. Unlike another state preserver, Abraham Lincoln, Gorbachev was reluctant to use the military and political instruments at hand to keep his union intact.
Kotkin and Gross argue against the cherished notion that an organized revolution from below occurred in Eastern Europe. They view Poland as an exception, but this caveat does not lead them to grant Poland the central role cast for it by Pleshakov and Sebestyen, who see the Polish workers' rebellion in 1980 as creating an existential dilemma for the Soviets. With the Soviet army engaged in Afghanistan, sending troops into Poland was unthinkable for Moscow. Since the Polish party could no longer rule in the old way, party chief General Jaruzelski was forced to declare a "state of war." Poland was certainly unique, and according to Kotkin and Gross, more common was the process of "nonorganized mobilization," most evident on those December days in Bucharest when a lone voice was sufficient to turn a crowd against Ceausescu.
Mobilization against the state in Eastern Europe, they go on to argue, did not happen in or because of civil society, that imagined community of anticommunist dissidents of the 1970s and '80s: "Needless to say, in 1989 'civil society' could not have shattered Soviet-style socialism for the simple reason that civil society in Eastern Europe did not then actually exist." Dissidents a civil society do not make. Instead, "it was the establishment--the 'uncivil society'--that brought down its own system." Totalitarianism, in Kotkin and Gross's view, made civil society impossible. That extra-state arena of "people taking responsibility for themselves" with "recourse to state institutions to defend associationism, civil liberties, and private property" was a mirage. Poland's Solidarity mesmerized Eastern Europe, but in no other Soviet bloc country were citizens able to repeat its successes. "Uncivil society" constituted a world of structural incompetence. The Soviet system itself, its practices of secrecy and coercion, its culture of suspicion, promoted the loyal rather than the capable, the submissive rather than the innovative, the risk-averse rather than the creative. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell because the elites were unable to change their ways; Gorbachev refused to support them and demanded that they reform. When the "uncivil society" of an illiberal state was no longer able to manipulate or even gauge the mood of its own people, it found itself bereft of the most basic instruments of government.
Kotkin and Gross provide an intriguing revision of the usual narrative of mobilized popular resistance to "actually existing socialism." Highlighting the failures at the top is key to understanding the collapse of communism, but that emphasis must be supplemented by attention to what went on below. Both organized popular resistance in Poland and more spontaneous mass mobilization in most of the other socialist states, as Pleshakov and Sebestyen extensively and persuasively demonstrate, contributed to the crises that made the communist regimes unsustainable.
Eastern European communists promised something besides social justice and equality; to their own detriment they also promised greater prosperity and productivity than was possible under capitalism. Khrushchev repeatedly spoke of "reaching and surpassing America!" This was yet another failure in the face of capitalism. The economies of Soviet bloc countries, themselves eager to incessantly increase output, were ultimately outperformed by the West. Nowhere was this contrast more evident than in Berlin, where the radiance of the western sector outshone the more subdued lights to the east. Not only were the Soviet-style economies unable to compete successfully but, by engaging with the bankers of the West, they became dependent on loans and saddled with onerous debt. The "social contract" trapped the socialist states; they could neither modify the subsidies that underwrote low consumer prices nor use the capitalist weapon of unemployment to restructure their economies. China's "market Leninism" showed one way out--a turn toward capitalism without democratization--but Eastern European communists hesitated to take that path. Even Hungary, the most market-oriented, would not permit labor or capital markets.
Communism, Kotkin and Gross conclude, was unredeemable. The execution, on Christmas Day, of the one remaining dictator in Eastern Europe was for them the salute that marked not only the collapse of the communist establishment but the triumph of capitalism and the failure of socialism. Stripped of the hopes and illusions of earlier years, by 1989 many on the streets agreed with the Polish opposition figure Adam Michnik: "There is no socialism with a human face, only totalitarianism with its teeth knocked out."
29.10.09
Art Women: A Guide
A Guide to Museum Women
Essay by Polly Frost
THE CURATOR
The Curator oversees the acquisitions of new works, takes responsibility for the maintenance of the museum’s holdings, and carefully sculpts the museum’s future with her vision of where Art Is Going. If, as a practical matter, The Curator spends most of her energy enhancing her reputation among the cosmopolitan museum set -- well, so much the better! After all, you don’t expect her to stick around this hick town for long, do you?
Role Models
Athena The Curator works hard to stand for the art community the way Athena symbolized Athens. Like the Greek goddess, The Curator always strives to be magnificent, noble, and austerely stylish.
Simone de Beauvoir Feminist, philosopher, bohemian, and scarf-wearing lover of Sartre, de Beauvoir showed The Curator that a woman could have brains, panache, and significance. The Curator finds it curiously arousing that such a proud woman could also have abased herself so thoroughly in the service of her mentor.
Andy Warhol He achieved artistic fame by mixing up the low and the high. He was a master manipulator. And, let’s face it, The Curator would rather be a creative person than a bureaucrat anyway. Who wouldn’t?
Habitats
Living out of open suitcases in a one bedroom apartment. Happiest when standing in the middle of an empty gallery telling assistants where she wants art to be placed.
Varieties
19th century Secretly fed up with Impressionism.
Special Exhibitions Considering a move into the marketing department at Viacom.
Antiquities Smug. Who would dare to suggest deaccessioning her collection?
Attitude
“I inhabit many time zones simultaneously.”
Sustenance
Less about what it is and more about how it’s done. Eats either in the European style, fork in the left hand, or with expertly-wielded chopsticks.
Often Heard Saying ...
“I’m always challenging the role of the curator itself.”
“I have a preoccupation in my work with loss and absence.”
“I was planning to bring over Pipilotti Rist and now you tell me we don’t have the funds to stay open Saturdays?!”
Family
Dad did something shadowy and parapetetic for Aramco. Mom gave up a career as a fashion model in order to tend the household. You don’t think it’s easy making arrangements for boarding schools, do you?
Education
American Schools in Tangier, Kowloon, and Abu Dhabi. Apprenticed at the Biennale and the Tate. Speaks four languages fluently, gets by in six more -- but still trying to master the local accent so as not to appear too hoity toity.
Mating Patterns
Skype sex with fiance, Financial Times bureau chief in Berlin. That third-rate Brancusi in the Museum’s entryway is looking mighty erotic!
Biggest Challenge
Balancing her sense of international chic with her need to win over the locals. Needs to impress, but mustn’t alienate! Good will and attendance figures count, too.
High Point
Used the word “nexus” three times in one interview.
What Art Means to Her
Last year it was “context.” This year it’s “dematerialization.” Next year? God only knows.
The Art of …
MAKING YOURSELF THE STAR
Do This!
Stake out a niche. Art has been thoroughly raked over, but clever curatorial concepts are forever. Ineffective show: Beauty, Nature and The Hudson River School. Effective show: Video and Diversity in a Hyperlinked Age.
Don’t Do This!
Don’t let yourself bog down in local concerns. Give interviews about your plans to serve the community, emphasizing your enthusiasm for regional fiber and glass traditions, then assign your dullest staffer the job of organizing locally-themed exhibits. After all, you’re a smart girl. If you play your cards right you’ll be running the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern long before you have to follow through on any of your more substantial vows.
THE BENEFACTOR
Where would the art world be without The Benefactor? It’s only thanks to her that the Museum can keep acquiring black-market antiquities and adding superfluous wings designed by fashionable architects. So let’s all praise and honor The Benefactor -- the single most powerful cultural force in the entire city. The fact that she knows nothing about the arts and has terrible personal taste? Minor details!
Role Models
Fanny Hill The Benefactor devoured John Cleland’s erotic classic in her grandmother’s library when she was ten. The tale of Fanny -- a hapless girl who took command of her sexuality and wound up well taken-care-of -- gave The Benefactor all the life-guidance she’d ever need.
The Dalai Lama Though the world thinks of her as crass and materialistic, deep inside The Benefactor knows she’s a spiritual person. Besides, she finds that reincarnation thing very appealing.
Napoleon In one of her previous lives, The Benefactor was emperor of France -- and, indeed, of nearly all Europe. The Benefactor pictures her current incarnation as an opportunity to avoid repeating Bonaparte’s mistakes. Unlike him, she’ll achieve all her life goals!
Habitats
Flirting with the pilot of her private jet or trying to bargain down the price of a blender at Target. There’s nothing The Benefactor loves more than saving a few pennies.
Varieties
The Climber Has buried three self-made men -- so far!
The Heiress Having grown up rich, she has no need for a personal style. Hence the braids and navy cloth coats.
The Duchess Went to Europe and married a title.
Attitude
“I could always bequeath my millions to the local hospital, you know.”
Sustenance
Since attaining her majority, The Benefactor has never been spotted ingesting anything other than bourbon and cigarettes. To the dismay of many, she actually seems to thrive on this unlikely diet. And doesn’t she love pissing people off with her longevity!
Often Heard Saying ...
“Give me one goddamn reason why I shouldn’t buy another Bentley!”
"Would you look at how that water skiing instructor fills out his surf baggies!”
"Raphael, Michelangelo -- what’s the difference?”
Family
Coming out of the woodwork. It’s quite amazing how many third-removed relatives show up when you have money.
Education
On her back whenever possible. Oh, for the days of being tutored!
Mating Patterns
Ties the legal knot on average once a decade, but doesn’t let it get in the way of frequent adventures. You wouldn’t want to make it through life without having explored the lovemaking styles of all kinds of different men, would you?
Biggest Challenge
Fending off her kids’ attempt to have her declared incompetent.
High Point
When the local art critic proclaimed the portrait of her that was hung over the Museum’s Entry Desk a masterpiece. See: Buying the city newspaper was a totally worthwhile investment, even it’s a money-loser.
What Art Means to Her
Class.
The Art of …
ENDOWING A MUSEUM WING
Do This!
String the Museum Director along purely for your own amusement. You should be able to extort hundreds of four-star meals and tons of brown-nosing out of him before you’ll feel obliged to either write that check or die.
Don’t Do This!
Don’t allow the Board to build your wing in a style that complements the Museum’s beloved Neoclassical edifice. Insist instead that the Museum use an edgy architect whose design will cause loads of controversy -- more publicity for you! Your name will dominate the entryway no matter how jagged the typeface.
THE FUNDRAISER
Gifted with a gregarious spirit and enormous personal charm, The Fundraiser is a true six degrees of connection gal. Married to a successful -- but not successful enough -- man, she knows how the city’s social game works, she’s familiar with the state of everyone’s finances, and she’s a wiz at using the prestige of Art to get people to play along with her schemes. By the time she’s 60, she’ll have made it to the top of the local social heap!
Role Models
Georgette Mosbacher While taking a break from nursing the twins, she read a profile of Georgette in Vanity Fair. Here was a woman who achieved fame via networking, money wheedling and overshadowing her husband. “I can do that!” thought The Fundraiser.
Arianna Huffington Reading Arianna’s Picasso biography gave The Fundraiser the idea that she could make her own mark in the culture world. And how inspiring that Arianna went on to conquer the worlds of politics and money!
Brooke Astor The Fundraiser knows that she will spend her golden years as a gracious, celebrated, and loved institution. The Fundraiser will end her days far better, though -- her own kids adore her.
Habitats
On the hands-free cellphone in her Audi SUV. Showing an unpaid intern how she wants her home office organized.
Varieties
Staffer Anxious about the way so many jobs are being outsourced these days.
Freelancer Dividing her professional efforts between six local nonprofits.
Volunteer Sulking, because her idea to run a benefit for the homeless was shot down by the Museum’s director.
Attitude
“I truly believe in what I’m doing. This is going to be the best event ever. And don’t you dare hang up on me again!”
Sustenance
Diet Coke and sandwiches when dining on her own dime, the Deluxe Sushi Platter when on the Museum’s.
Often Heard Saying ...
“You’d be the perfect sponsor for our Sunday Brunch With An Artist program!”
"The annual Fall Auction is going to be star-studded!”
"There are many ways to leave a bequest. I’m sure you’ll find one that’s very suitable.”
Family
Grew up in the least prosperous cul de sac of a respectable suburb. No such cruel fate for her own kids! They’re attending the best private academy in town, thanks to a discount she obtained doing volunteer work for the school.
Education
Public schools and a state college. But her real education didn’t begin until she was taken up by a gray-haired tycoon, who showed her how the local power scene really works.
Mating Patterns
Hubby’s a lovely man, if far less ambitious than she foresaw. The mentor-mentee relationship with her tycoon? It never became sexual -- unless you count that one time when he asked to see her breasts ...
Biggest Challenge
Keeping the hometown musician who went on to become a national pop star returning every year to perform for the annual Dinner and Wine Gala in the Sculpture Garden.
High Point
Incorporating as an LLC.
What Art Means to Her
Never cared for it until one day, when she burst into tears while looking at minor Monet Water Lily painting. Too bad that the art that she’s begun to love is so far out of her price range.
The Art of …
REELING IN THAT MAJOR DONOR
Do This!
Seize the right moment. If you can force your obscenely rich prey to admit that he’s considering giving a large sum to the museum in front of his friends, you’re halfway home. Tearfully praise his generosity while shaking his hand in front of a large table at the country club, then apologize for being so emotional. Make social shaming your ally!
Don’t Do This!
If you learn that your prey is considering using his money to buy a new radiation machine for the local hospital, don’t back down. Remember, the arts are of vital importance. Explain that cancer treatment is available everywhere, but a fine Tracey Emin installation is a rare thing indeed.
THE DOCENT
An inescapable presence in the Museum’s galleries, inevitably equipped with formidable vocal equipment, The Docent takes groups of guests on tours of the Museum’s collections. Less familiar is her other responsibility: visiting local schools, where she strives to instill a love for fine art in pop-culture-obsessed young minds. The Docent never gives in to feelings that this may be a hopeless endeavor and remains staunch in her conviction that Art is Always and Everywhere A Good Thing.
Role Models
Frida Kahlo Frida loved deeply, lived in a folksy Third-World country, painted self-portraits, and a beautiful biopic was made about her long after her death. What’s not to feel inspired by?
Sister Wendy This English nun showed The Docent that art could be presented to the public in an intelligent yet fun way. While giving her own tours, The Docent sometimes treats herself to the fantasy that she’s a beloved PBS institution herself.
Ms. Marjory Knutsen The Docent didn’t find her vocation as an A-student until Ms. Knutsen’s 4th-grade class. What a challenge it was to read Edith Wharton! And what a shock it came as, years later, to learn that Ms. Knutsen had been a lesbian. But that’s OK, she was a nice person!
Habitats
Showing her cleaner where to dust in her modernist house, or memorizing facts from a guidebook while on a Smithsonian tour.
Varieties
The Dymano She’ll be giving the Renaissance collection tour soon!
The Newbie Still struggling with how to pronounce “chiaroscuro.”
The Senior Wondering if the time has come to devote her charitable energies to the Rescue Dog Society instead.
Attitude
“God, I hope nobody in this group knows more than I do!”
Sustenance
Available at a 10% discount at The Museum Cafe. Knows she should never indulge in a third glass of Chardonnay -- but after having had two, how to say No? Wishes she didn’t have quite such a weakness for that heavenly Mondrian Cheesecake.
Often Heard Saying ...
“Please note the use of ...”
"I’d like to propose that The Museum set aside Reserved Parking for the Docents.”
"When I was at Chatauqua last summer ...”
Family
Aside from a Viagra addiction and a recurring midlife crisis, Hubby couldn’t be more solid! And aside from a few DUIs and stints in rehab, the kids are doing great!
Education
Would have loved to go to Smith -- and knows she’d have been admitted if only that darned Marcy Wilde hadn’t stolen the high school’s Student Council Presidency election from her.
Mating Patterns
Mates for life -- and, no doubt because of this, obsesses over the sexy bad boy who flirted with her back in sophomore Psych.
Biggest Challenge
Pretending enthusiasm for that “Art of the Post-War Italian Sports Car” touring exhibit. Only show her husband visited a second time, wouldn’t you know it.
High Point
Finding a vase that turned her patio into the Bonnard painting that she always envisioned it as.
What Art Means to Her
Self-improvement.
The Art of …
PRESENTING THE NUDE
Do This!
March right up to the Museum’s one Mapplethorpe. Fearlessness is your byword here! Adamantly maintain that Mapplethorpe was the great classical artist of the late 20th century while at all costs avoiding mention of the anus on display. If any of your tour group members seem uneasy, instantly transform the conversation into a First Amendment debate.
Don’t Do This!
Husbands to a man adore technical virtuosity and pretty nudes, and will try to stall the group in front of academic 19th century allegorical nymph-and-faun paintings. Don’t let them -- remember, you’re in charge. Dismiss these works as kitsch and move the group promptly into the Judy Chicago retrospective in the next gallery.
Polly Frost is a humor writer and a new media producer. Her humor has been published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the New York Times and Scene4. One of her humor pieces is an upcoming Story of the Week in Narrative magazine. Her book of satirical horror stories, "Deep Inside" was published by Tor in 2007. Praise for the book included The Austin Chronicle and adult film legend Ron Jeremy. She is married to and frequently collaborates with Ray Sawhill. Their comedy "The Last Artist in New York City" was performed at PS 122 in May, and their theater project "Sex Scenes" was performed across the country in 2007 in 9 cities and is now avalable as an audio entertainment on CD and as a download. Together with director Matt Lambert, Polly and Ray co-wrote and co-produced "The Fold" a sci fi burlesque webseries starring Julie Atlas Muz. Released in 2008, it was compared by film critic David Chute to early Almodovar. Website: pollyfrost.com
A Guide to Museum Women
Essay by Polly Frost
THE CURATOR
The Curator oversees the acquisitions of new works, takes responsibility for the maintenance of the museum’s holdings, and carefully sculpts the museum’s future with her vision of where Art Is Going. If, as a practical matter, The Curator spends most of her energy enhancing her reputation among the cosmopolitan museum set -- well, so much the better! After all, you don’t expect her to stick around this hick town for long, do you?
Role Models
Athena The Curator works hard to stand for the art community the way Athena symbolized Athens. Like the Greek goddess, The Curator always strives to be magnificent, noble, and austerely stylish.
Simone de Beauvoir Feminist, philosopher, bohemian, and scarf-wearing lover of Sartre, de Beauvoir showed The Curator that a woman could have brains, panache, and significance. The Curator finds it curiously arousing that such a proud woman could also have abased herself so thoroughly in the service of her mentor.
Andy Warhol He achieved artistic fame by mixing up the low and the high. He was a master manipulator. And, let’s face it, The Curator would rather be a creative person than a bureaucrat anyway. Who wouldn’t?
Habitats
Living out of open suitcases in a one bedroom apartment. Happiest when standing in the middle of an empty gallery telling assistants where she wants art to be placed.
Varieties
19th century Secretly fed up with Impressionism.
Special Exhibitions Considering a move into the marketing department at Viacom.
Antiquities Smug. Who would dare to suggest deaccessioning her collection?
Attitude
“I inhabit many time zones simultaneously.”
Sustenance
Less about what it is and more about how it’s done. Eats either in the European style, fork in the left hand, or with expertly-wielded chopsticks.
Often Heard Saying ...
“I’m always challenging the role of the curator itself.”
“I have a preoccupation in my work with loss and absence.”
“I was planning to bring over Pipilotti Rist and now you tell me we don’t have the funds to stay open Saturdays?!”
Family
Dad did something shadowy and parapetetic for Aramco. Mom gave up a career as a fashion model in order to tend the household. You don’t think it’s easy making arrangements for boarding schools, do you?
Education
American Schools in Tangier, Kowloon, and Abu Dhabi. Apprenticed at the Biennale and the Tate. Speaks four languages fluently, gets by in six more -- but still trying to master the local accent so as not to appear too hoity toity.
Mating Patterns
Skype sex with fiance, Financial Times bureau chief in Berlin. That third-rate Brancusi in the Museum’s entryway is looking mighty erotic!
Biggest Challenge
Balancing her sense of international chic with her need to win over the locals. Needs to impress, but mustn’t alienate! Good will and attendance figures count, too.
High Point
Used the word “nexus” three times in one interview.
What Art Means to Her
Last year it was “context.” This year it’s “dematerialization.” Next year? God only knows.
The Art of …
MAKING YOURSELF THE STAR
Do This!
Stake out a niche. Art has been thoroughly raked over, but clever curatorial concepts are forever. Ineffective show: Beauty, Nature and The Hudson River School. Effective show: Video and Diversity in a Hyperlinked Age.
Don’t Do This!
Don’t let yourself bog down in local concerns. Give interviews about your plans to serve the community, emphasizing your enthusiasm for regional fiber and glass traditions, then assign your dullest staffer the job of organizing locally-themed exhibits. After all, you’re a smart girl. If you play your cards right you’ll be running the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern long before you have to follow through on any of your more substantial vows.
THE BENEFACTOR
Where would the art world be without The Benefactor? It’s only thanks to her that the Museum can keep acquiring black-market antiquities and adding superfluous wings designed by fashionable architects. So let’s all praise and honor The Benefactor -- the single most powerful cultural force in the entire city. The fact that she knows nothing about the arts and has terrible personal taste? Minor details!
Role Models
Fanny Hill The Benefactor devoured John Cleland’s erotic classic in her grandmother’s library when she was ten. The tale of Fanny -- a hapless girl who took command of her sexuality and wound up well taken-care-of -- gave The Benefactor all the life-guidance she’d ever need.
The Dalai Lama Though the world thinks of her as crass and materialistic, deep inside The Benefactor knows she’s a spiritual person. Besides, she finds that reincarnation thing very appealing.
Napoleon In one of her previous lives, The Benefactor was emperor of France -- and, indeed, of nearly all Europe. The Benefactor pictures her current incarnation as an opportunity to avoid repeating Bonaparte’s mistakes. Unlike him, she’ll achieve all her life goals!
Habitats
Flirting with the pilot of her private jet or trying to bargain down the price of a blender at Target. There’s nothing The Benefactor loves more than saving a few pennies.
Varieties
The Climber Has buried three self-made men -- so far!
The Heiress Having grown up rich, she has no need for a personal style. Hence the braids and navy cloth coats.
The Duchess Went to Europe and married a title.
Attitude
“I could always bequeath my millions to the local hospital, you know.”
Sustenance
Since attaining her majority, The Benefactor has never been spotted ingesting anything other than bourbon and cigarettes. To the dismay of many, she actually seems to thrive on this unlikely diet. And doesn’t she love pissing people off with her longevity!
Often Heard Saying ...
“Give me one goddamn reason why I shouldn’t buy another Bentley!”
"Would you look at how that water skiing instructor fills out his surf baggies!”
"Raphael, Michelangelo -- what’s the difference?”
Family
Coming out of the woodwork. It’s quite amazing how many third-removed relatives show up when you have money.
Education
On her back whenever possible. Oh, for the days of being tutored!
Mating Patterns
Ties the legal knot on average once a decade, but doesn’t let it get in the way of frequent adventures. You wouldn’t want to make it through life without having explored the lovemaking styles of all kinds of different men, would you?
Biggest Challenge
Fending off her kids’ attempt to have her declared incompetent.
High Point
When the local art critic proclaimed the portrait of her that was hung over the Museum’s Entry Desk a masterpiece. See: Buying the city newspaper was a totally worthwhile investment, even it’s a money-loser.
What Art Means to Her
Class.
The Art of …
ENDOWING A MUSEUM WING
Do This!
String the Museum Director along purely for your own amusement. You should be able to extort hundreds of four-star meals and tons of brown-nosing out of him before you’ll feel obliged to either write that check or die.
Don’t Do This!
Don’t allow the Board to build your wing in a style that complements the Museum’s beloved Neoclassical edifice. Insist instead that the Museum use an edgy architect whose design will cause loads of controversy -- more publicity for you! Your name will dominate the entryway no matter how jagged the typeface.
THE FUNDRAISER
Gifted with a gregarious spirit and enormous personal charm, The Fundraiser is a true six degrees of connection gal. Married to a successful -- but not successful enough -- man, she knows how the city’s social game works, she’s familiar with the state of everyone’s finances, and she’s a wiz at using the prestige of Art to get people to play along with her schemes. By the time she’s 60, she’ll have made it to the top of the local social heap!
Role Models
Georgette Mosbacher While taking a break from nursing the twins, she read a profile of Georgette in Vanity Fair. Here was a woman who achieved fame via networking, money wheedling and overshadowing her husband. “I can do that!” thought The Fundraiser.
Arianna Huffington Reading Arianna’s Picasso biography gave The Fundraiser the idea that she could make her own mark in the culture world. And how inspiring that Arianna went on to conquer the worlds of politics and money!
Brooke Astor The Fundraiser knows that she will spend her golden years as a gracious, celebrated, and loved institution. The Fundraiser will end her days far better, though -- her own kids adore her.
Habitats
On the hands-free cellphone in her Audi SUV. Showing an unpaid intern how she wants her home office organized.
Varieties
Staffer Anxious about the way so many jobs are being outsourced these days.
Freelancer Dividing her professional efforts between six local nonprofits.
Volunteer Sulking, because her idea to run a benefit for the homeless was shot down by the Museum’s director.
Attitude
“I truly believe in what I’m doing. This is going to be the best event ever. And don’t you dare hang up on me again!”
Sustenance
Diet Coke and sandwiches when dining on her own dime, the Deluxe Sushi Platter when on the Museum’s.
Often Heard Saying ...
“You’d be the perfect sponsor for our Sunday Brunch With An Artist program!”
"The annual Fall Auction is going to be star-studded!”
"There are many ways to leave a bequest. I’m sure you’ll find one that’s very suitable.”
Family
Grew up in the least prosperous cul de sac of a respectable suburb. No such cruel fate for her own kids! They’re attending the best private academy in town, thanks to a discount she obtained doing volunteer work for the school.
Education
Public schools and a state college. But her real education didn’t begin until she was taken up by a gray-haired tycoon, who showed her how the local power scene really works.
Mating Patterns
Hubby’s a lovely man, if far less ambitious than she foresaw. The mentor-mentee relationship with her tycoon? It never became sexual -- unless you count that one time when he asked to see her breasts ...
Biggest Challenge
Keeping the hometown musician who went on to become a national pop star returning every year to perform for the annual Dinner and Wine Gala in the Sculpture Garden.
High Point
Incorporating as an LLC.
What Art Means to Her
Never cared for it until one day, when she burst into tears while looking at minor Monet Water Lily painting. Too bad that the art that she’s begun to love is so far out of her price range.
The Art of …
REELING IN THAT MAJOR DONOR
Do This!
Seize the right moment. If you can force your obscenely rich prey to admit that he’s considering giving a large sum to the museum in front of his friends, you’re halfway home. Tearfully praise his generosity while shaking his hand in front of a large table at the country club, then apologize for being so emotional. Make social shaming your ally!
Don’t Do This!
If you learn that your prey is considering using his money to buy a new radiation machine for the local hospital, don’t back down. Remember, the arts are of vital importance. Explain that cancer treatment is available everywhere, but a fine Tracey Emin installation is a rare thing indeed.
THE DOCENT
An inescapable presence in the Museum’s galleries, inevitably equipped with formidable vocal equipment, The Docent takes groups of guests on tours of the Museum’s collections. Less familiar is her other responsibility: visiting local schools, where she strives to instill a love for fine art in pop-culture-obsessed young minds. The Docent never gives in to feelings that this may be a hopeless endeavor and remains staunch in her conviction that Art is Always and Everywhere A Good Thing.
Role Models
Frida Kahlo Frida loved deeply, lived in a folksy Third-World country, painted self-portraits, and a beautiful biopic was made about her long after her death. What’s not to feel inspired by?
Sister Wendy This English nun showed The Docent that art could be presented to the public in an intelligent yet fun way. While giving her own tours, The Docent sometimes treats herself to the fantasy that she’s a beloved PBS institution herself.
Ms. Marjory Knutsen The Docent didn’t find her vocation as an A-student until Ms. Knutsen’s 4th-grade class. What a challenge it was to read Edith Wharton! And what a shock it came as, years later, to learn that Ms. Knutsen had been a lesbian. But that’s OK, she was a nice person!
Habitats
Showing her cleaner where to dust in her modernist house, or memorizing facts from a guidebook while on a Smithsonian tour.
Varieties
The Dymano She’ll be giving the Renaissance collection tour soon!
The Newbie Still struggling with how to pronounce “chiaroscuro.”
The Senior Wondering if the time has come to devote her charitable energies to the Rescue Dog Society instead.
Attitude
“God, I hope nobody in this group knows more than I do!”
Sustenance
Available at a 10% discount at The Museum Cafe. Knows she should never indulge in a third glass of Chardonnay -- but after having had two, how to say No? Wishes she didn’t have quite such a weakness for that heavenly Mondrian Cheesecake.
Often Heard Saying ...
“Please note the use of ...”
"I’d like to propose that The Museum set aside Reserved Parking for the Docents.”
"When I was at Chatauqua last summer ...”
Family
Aside from a Viagra addiction and a recurring midlife crisis, Hubby couldn’t be more solid! And aside from a few DUIs and stints in rehab, the kids are doing great!
Education
Would have loved to go to Smith -- and knows she’d have been admitted if only that darned Marcy Wilde hadn’t stolen the high school’s Student Council Presidency election from her.
Mating Patterns
Mates for life -- and, no doubt because of this, obsesses over the sexy bad boy who flirted with her back in sophomore Psych.
Biggest Challenge
Pretending enthusiasm for that “Art of the Post-War Italian Sports Car” touring exhibit. Only show her husband visited a second time, wouldn’t you know it.
High Point
Finding a vase that turned her patio into the Bonnard painting that she always envisioned it as.
What Art Means to Her
Self-improvement.
The Art of …
PRESENTING THE NUDE
Do This!
March right up to the Museum’s one Mapplethorpe. Fearlessness is your byword here! Adamantly maintain that Mapplethorpe was the great classical artist of the late 20th century while at all costs avoiding mention of the anus on display. If any of your tour group members seem uneasy, instantly transform the conversation into a First Amendment debate.
Don’t Do This!
Husbands to a man adore technical virtuosity and pretty nudes, and will try to stall the group in front of academic 19th century allegorical nymph-and-faun paintings. Don’t let them -- remember, you’re in charge. Dismiss these works as kitsch and move the group promptly into the Judy Chicago retrospective in the next gallery.
Polly Frost is a humor writer and a new media producer. Her humor has been published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the New York Times and Scene4. One of her humor pieces is an upcoming Story of the Week in Narrative magazine. Her book of satirical horror stories, "Deep Inside" was published by Tor in 2007. Praise for the book included The Austin Chronicle and adult film legend Ron Jeremy. She is married to and frequently collaborates with Ray Sawhill. Their comedy "The Last Artist in New York City" was performed at PS 122 in May, and their theater project "Sex Scenes" was performed across the country in 2007 in 9 cities and is now avalable as an audio entertainment on CD and as a download. Together with director Matt Lambert, Polly and Ray co-wrote and co-produced "The Fold" a sci fi burlesque webseries starring Julie Atlas Muz. Released in 2008, it was compared by film critic David Chute to early Almodovar. Website: pollyfrost.com
David Remnick
It's the birthday of the current editor of The New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, (books by this author) born in Hackensack, New Jersey (1958). He's only the fifth editor in the 84-year history of the magazine.
He had no professional editorial experience before taking the job a decade ago. He was a journalist, and one of the best around. After graduating from Princeton with a comparative literature degree, he went to work for The Washington Post as a cub reporter, covering football games, police activity, and celebrity gossip. Then, a post as Moscow foreign correspondent opened up, and he — in his late 20s and newly married — jumped at the chance.
He was the junior reporter at the foreign bureau, and the minion status led to some interesting investigative assignments. Once, he was charged with the task of finding a hairdresser for an upcoming interview between Mikhail Gorbachev and his boss, the owner of The Washington Post, Katherine Graham. Without a plethora of beauty salons then in communist Russia, he "did not so much find a hairdresser as create one," he recalled. He went to an embassy and found "a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush." He said, "I rang her up and explained the situation. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs. Graham, and a hundred dollars." She accepted, and the interview went well and the text was featured — along with an excellent photograph in the publication Pravda the next day. Remnick reflected, "Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. I felt close to history."
He stayed in Moscow several years, researching and writing stories for The Washington Post. He was a dedicated, brilliant, and prolific reporter, fluent in Russian, a rising star, a young man who'd become a legendary foreign correspondent. One day, three of his stories from Moscow appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. Then he wrote his first book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last days of the Soviet Empire (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
After a decade with The Washington Post, he went to work for The New Yorker, starting as a staff writer in 1992.
When Remnick took over in 1998, the magazine was in financial straits. But it's remarkably profitable now, with greater advertising revenue and the highest renewal rate of any subscription magazine in the country. But Remnick said, "My principle in the magazine — and I am not being arrogant — is that I don't lose sleep trying to figure what the reader wants. I don't do surveys. I don't check the mood of the consumers. I do what I want, what interests me and a small group of editors that influences the way of the magazine.
He had no professional editorial experience before taking the job a decade ago. He was a journalist, and one of the best around. After graduating from Princeton with a comparative literature degree, he went to work for The Washington Post as a cub reporter, covering football games, police activity, and celebrity gossip. Then, a post as Moscow foreign correspondent opened up, and he — in his late 20s and newly married — jumped at the chance.
He was the junior reporter at the foreign bureau, and the minion status led to some interesting investigative assignments. Once, he was charged with the task of finding a hairdresser for an upcoming interview between Mikhail Gorbachev and his boss, the owner of The Washington Post, Katherine Graham. Without a plethora of beauty salons then in communist Russia, he "did not so much find a hairdresser as create one," he recalled. He went to an embassy and found "a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush." He said, "I rang her up and explained the situation. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs. Graham, and a hundred dollars." She accepted, and the interview went well and the text was featured — along with an excellent photograph in the publication Pravda the next day. Remnick reflected, "Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. I felt close to history."
He stayed in Moscow several years, researching and writing stories for The Washington Post. He was a dedicated, brilliant, and prolific reporter, fluent in Russian, a rising star, a young man who'd become a legendary foreign correspondent. One day, three of his stories from Moscow appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. Then he wrote his first book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last days of the Soviet Empire (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
After a decade with The Washington Post, he went to work for The New Yorker, starting as a staff writer in 1992.
When Remnick took over in 1998, the magazine was in financial straits. But it's remarkably profitable now, with greater advertising revenue and the highest renewal rate of any subscription magazine in the country. But Remnick said, "My principle in the magazine — and I am not being arrogant — is that I don't lose sleep trying to figure what the reader wants. I don't do surveys. I don't check the mood of the consumers. I do what I want, what interests me and a small group of editors that influences the way of the magazine.
Oxford Companion to English
The Oxford Companion to English Literature has, since it first appeared in 1932, proved hugely popular, becoming not just a staple of library reference sections, but also a valuable tool for academics and amateurs, as well as an example of the unexpected readability of works of reference – those books that threaten to be ossuaries, yet abound with glistening treasure. It was the first in the Oxford Companions series; now that series is vast, encompassing titles such as the Oxford Companion to Global Change and the Oxford Companion to Black British History.
For its seventh edition, the editorship has passed from Margaret Drabble to Dinah Birch, who in her preface characterizes the volume as “a lively and authoritative source of reference for general readers, scholars, students, and journalists looking for a guide to English literature in its broadest context”. “Much . . . is fresh”, she writes, and so it is. There are more than 1,000 new entries, the cross-referencing has been strengthened, and there is more coverage of literature produced outside the British Isles.
There are also substantial new introductory essays. In the first of these Hermione Lee addresses “Literary culture and the novel in the new millennium”, reflecting on the ramifications of online bookselling, the “DIY reviewing culture” of blogs, the role of literary prizes and the recent proliferation of populist defences of fiction by critics such as James Wood, Jane Smiley and John Mullan. The theme is certainly not “O tempora o mores”, but at the heart of the essay is a sensitive awareness of the changing contours of literariness and the new mechanisms of literature’s dissemination and reception. While Lee’s essay and the others by Kelvin Everest, Bénédicte Ledent and Michael Rosen are instructive, they are essentially amuse-bouches. The meat of the book is the 1,100 pages of alphabetically sequenced articles that follow. These are supplemented by appendices providing among other things a literary chronology and lists of major awards.
The articles, lucid and resolutely factual, are flecked with personal touches. Here are Milton (who died “probably of renal failure associated with gout”), Tennyson (whose work “continues to suggest excellent new readings in its emotional, political, formal, and linguistic aspects”) and Auden (in whose writings “the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the introspective mingle with great fluency”). Here, too, are thematic items on parody, where we drop in on both Henry Fielding and Wendy Cope, and diaries, from Pepys to Bridget Jones via Francis Kilvert and James Lees-Milne. There are brief explanations of matters such as tail-rhyme and chiasmus, and intelligently succinct ones dealing with, for instance, the Bush Theatre, madrigals, Harriet Tubman, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and The Times Literary Supplement. This last “tries to cover most of the important works of literature and scholarship, and remains influential”.
Who and what is fresh in Dinah Birch’s edition? Perusing the Hs, one finds for the first time Mark Haddon, whose novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is “a remarkable tour de force”; hagiography, a term “often now used to condemn uncritical biography”; the Harlem Renaissance; Ben Hecht; His Dark Materials, which, we are ambiguously told, “has attracted many enthusiastic readers”; Alfred Hitchcock, whose entry mentions only four of his films by name (The Lodger, Blackmail, Rebecca and Vertigo); Khaled Hosseini; Michel Houellebecq; and the “virtually unreadable” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Elsewhere there are many good new entries, as for instance on J. H. Prynne – “a poet whose desire for personal obscurity is often confounded with a perceived desire for poetic obscurity” – and the eighteenth-century devotional writer William Law, who in his fifties retired to Northamptonshire “to live a life of charity, celibacy, prayer, reading, and writing”. Even the short entries contain nicely condensed insights. Neil Gaiman manifests “an erudite sensitivity to the dark undercurrents of folklore”; Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis is “much more than the suicide note its title suggests”; and Sam Selvon’s fiction relates “the experiences of black immigrants trying to find fame and fortune, or at least a bed, in the unknown terrain of Earls Court, Notting Hill, and Bayswater”. Elegance, concision and a crisp informativeness are the norm.
Moreover, there has been significant revision. Among the senior authors to have been given more than just a polish are Chaucer, Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. In some cases the coverage is admirably up to date – Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall is noted – but, conversely, one finds that the entry on Geoff Dyer mentions no book of his more recent than Paris Trance (1998).
A small number of entries are unsatisfactory. “Gonzo journalism” reads: “A phrase coined in 1970 about the work of Hunter S. Thompson and subsequently applied to writing which combines fact and fiction, often in a flamboyant way”. The definition is vague; it would be a help to know that the gonzo form is subjective and openly suspicious of the idea that journalism can be objective, and perhaps also to know that the term was coined by Bill Cardoso. The entry on the “hardboiled” style of crime fiction provides the name of only one of its practitioners, Dashiell Hammett, and does not mention that it was pioneered by Carroll John Daly. Brevity can contract into perfunctoriness.
There are issues of emphasis, too. For instance, the entry on The Prisoner of Zenda is longer than those on Truman Capote and Melodrama. Why, we may wonder, does Mike Leigh get as much coverage as Philip Roth, whom Hermione Lee in her introductory essay identifies as “the greatest living American writer”? Why is there as much on Les Murray as on Philip Larkin, and less on F. Scott Fitzgerald than on J. K. Rowling (or Thomas Lodge, or The Pickwick Papers)?
Furthermore, there are omissions – or at least what feel like omissions. In dealing with “writers with newly established reputations”, the Companion “can make no claim to comprehensive coverage”. But what about writers whose reputations are not newly established? There are no entries for Robert Lowth, Richard Carew, August Wilson, John Muir, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elspeth Huxley and David Foster Wallace. Among living authors, none of Tim Parks, Clive James, Alexander McCall Smith and John McPhee makes the cut. They might with some justification be miffed at apparently being less important than Ben Elton (though he is described – a touch improbably – as a big influence on “many young novelists”) and Stephen Gallagher, author of two series of Doctor Who in the 1980s. There is palpable overcompensation for the previous neglect of science fiction. The overview of this genre states that Greg Bear’s novel of 1985, Blood Music, “is all that science fiction should be: its narrative makes us see the world anew”. The tribute feels incongruously partisan.
Readers unfamiliar with previous editions will be surprised by how much there is about authors writing in languages other than English. They are here chiefly because of the influence they have exerted. However, among more recent names the rationale for inclusion is not clear. There are entries on Michel Butor and Patrick Chamoiseau, yet not on Ismail Kadare, Orhan Pamuk or Haruki Murakami – and on Luigi Meneghello, yet not on Witold Gombrowicz, Roberto Bolaño or José Maria de Eça de Queiroz. On the other hand, those familiar with Drabble’s Companion may note the trimming of some of its jauntier moments, such as the statement in the section on “horror” that “for every King there are a dozen or more knaves hacking away”.
In reviewing a work of this kind there is a temptation to overemphasize mistakes. Copy-editing glitches are inevitable and there are misprints, but I found too few to justify comment. In reality, this is a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information. It also contains some unexpected gems. I did not know that W. H. Smith and Son opened their first railway station bookstall at Euston in 1848, that the Left Book Club in its twelve-year history printed only one play, or that P. G. Wodehouse and Jack London were among the authors published by Mills and Boon in that company’s early days. Nor did I know that it was at the Savile Club that Robert Louis Stevenson was supposed to have said that “to play billiards well was the sign of an ill-spent youth”; nor indeed that he said it to Herbert Spencer. Excellence is in the details.
Dinah Birch, editor
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE
Henry Hitchings’s recent books include The Secret Life of Words: How English became English, which appeared earlier this year.
For its seventh edition, the editorship has passed from Margaret Drabble to Dinah Birch, who in her preface characterizes the volume as “a lively and authoritative source of reference for general readers, scholars, students, and journalists looking for a guide to English literature in its broadest context”. “Much . . . is fresh”, she writes, and so it is. There are more than 1,000 new entries, the cross-referencing has been strengthened, and there is more coverage of literature produced outside the British Isles.
There are also substantial new introductory essays. In the first of these Hermione Lee addresses “Literary culture and the novel in the new millennium”, reflecting on the ramifications of online bookselling, the “DIY reviewing culture” of blogs, the role of literary prizes and the recent proliferation of populist defences of fiction by critics such as James Wood, Jane Smiley and John Mullan. The theme is certainly not “O tempora o mores”, but at the heart of the essay is a sensitive awareness of the changing contours of literariness and the new mechanisms of literature’s dissemination and reception. While Lee’s essay and the others by Kelvin Everest, Bénédicte Ledent and Michael Rosen are instructive, they are essentially amuse-bouches. The meat of the book is the 1,100 pages of alphabetically sequenced articles that follow. These are supplemented by appendices providing among other things a literary chronology and lists of major awards.
The articles, lucid and resolutely factual, are flecked with personal touches. Here are Milton (who died “probably of renal failure associated with gout”), Tennyson (whose work “continues to suggest excellent new readings in its emotional, political, formal, and linguistic aspects”) and Auden (in whose writings “the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the introspective mingle with great fluency”). Here, too, are thematic items on parody, where we drop in on both Henry Fielding and Wendy Cope, and diaries, from Pepys to Bridget Jones via Francis Kilvert and James Lees-Milne. There are brief explanations of matters such as tail-rhyme and chiasmus, and intelligently succinct ones dealing with, for instance, the Bush Theatre, madrigals, Harriet Tubman, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and The Times Literary Supplement. This last “tries to cover most of the important works of literature and scholarship, and remains influential”.
Who and what is fresh in Dinah Birch’s edition? Perusing the Hs, one finds for the first time Mark Haddon, whose novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is “a remarkable tour de force”; hagiography, a term “often now used to condemn uncritical biography”; the Harlem Renaissance; Ben Hecht; His Dark Materials, which, we are ambiguously told, “has attracted many enthusiastic readers”; Alfred Hitchcock, whose entry mentions only four of his films by name (The Lodger, Blackmail, Rebecca and Vertigo); Khaled Hosseini; Michel Houellebecq; and the “virtually unreadable” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Elsewhere there are many good new entries, as for instance on J. H. Prynne – “a poet whose desire for personal obscurity is often confounded with a perceived desire for poetic obscurity” – and the eighteenth-century devotional writer William Law, who in his fifties retired to Northamptonshire “to live a life of charity, celibacy, prayer, reading, and writing”. Even the short entries contain nicely condensed insights. Neil Gaiman manifests “an erudite sensitivity to the dark undercurrents of folklore”; Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis is “much more than the suicide note its title suggests”; and Sam Selvon’s fiction relates “the experiences of black immigrants trying to find fame and fortune, or at least a bed, in the unknown terrain of Earls Court, Notting Hill, and Bayswater”. Elegance, concision and a crisp informativeness are the norm.
Moreover, there has been significant revision. Among the senior authors to have been given more than just a polish are Chaucer, Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. In some cases the coverage is admirably up to date – Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall is noted – but, conversely, one finds that the entry on Geoff Dyer mentions no book of his more recent than Paris Trance (1998).
A small number of entries are unsatisfactory. “Gonzo journalism” reads: “A phrase coined in 1970 about the work of Hunter S. Thompson and subsequently applied to writing which combines fact and fiction, often in a flamboyant way”. The definition is vague; it would be a help to know that the gonzo form is subjective and openly suspicious of the idea that journalism can be objective, and perhaps also to know that the term was coined by Bill Cardoso. The entry on the “hardboiled” style of crime fiction provides the name of only one of its practitioners, Dashiell Hammett, and does not mention that it was pioneered by Carroll John Daly. Brevity can contract into perfunctoriness.
There are issues of emphasis, too. For instance, the entry on The Prisoner of Zenda is longer than those on Truman Capote and Melodrama. Why, we may wonder, does Mike Leigh get as much coverage as Philip Roth, whom Hermione Lee in her introductory essay identifies as “the greatest living American writer”? Why is there as much on Les Murray as on Philip Larkin, and less on F. Scott Fitzgerald than on J. K. Rowling (or Thomas Lodge, or The Pickwick Papers)?
Furthermore, there are omissions – or at least what feel like omissions. In dealing with “writers with newly established reputations”, the Companion “can make no claim to comprehensive coverage”. But what about writers whose reputations are not newly established? There are no entries for Robert Lowth, Richard Carew, August Wilson, John Muir, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elspeth Huxley and David Foster Wallace. Among living authors, none of Tim Parks, Clive James, Alexander McCall Smith and John McPhee makes the cut. They might with some justification be miffed at apparently being less important than Ben Elton (though he is described – a touch improbably – as a big influence on “many young novelists”) and Stephen Gallagher, author of two series of Doctor Who in the 1980s. There is palpable overcompensation for the previous neglect of science fiction. The overview of this genre states that Greg Bear’s novel of 1985, Blood Music, “is all that science fiction should be: its narrative makes us see the world anew”. The tribute feels incongruously partisan.
Readers unfamiliar with previous editions will be surprised by how much there is about authors writing in languages other than English. They are here chiefly because of the influence they have exerted. However, among more recent names the rationale for inclusion is not clear. There are entries on Michel Butor and Patrick Chamoiseau, yet not on Ismail Kadare, Orhan Pamuk or Haruki Murakami – and on Luigi Meneghello, yet not on Witold Gombrowicz, Roberto Bolaño or José Maria de Eça de Queiroz. On the other hand, those familiar with Drabble’s Companion may note the trimming of some of its jauntier moments, such as the statement in the section on “horror” that “for every King there are a dozen or more knaves hacking away”.
In reviewing a work of this kind there is a temptation to overemphasize mistakes. Copy-editing glitches are inevitable and there are misprints, but I found too few to justify comment. In reality, this is a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information. It also contains some unexpected gems. I did not know that W. H. Smith and Son opened their first railway station bookstall at Euston in 1848, that the Left Book Club in its twelve-year history printed only one play, or that P. G. Wodehouse and Jack London were among the authors published by Mills and Boon in that company’s early days. Nor did I know that it was at the Savile Club that Robert Louis Stevenson was supposed to have said that “to play billiards well was the sign of an ill-spent youth”; nor indeed that he said it to Herbert Spencer. Excellence is in the details.
Dinah Birch, editor
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE
Henry Hitchings’s recent books include The Secret Life of Words: How English became English, which appeared earlier this year.
Beauty
It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from?
Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a nice view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750, and a scene like that on his homepage. In contrast, judging from Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, a congenial vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley circa 1,000,000 BC. Yet in spite of these differences I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities both their tastes and their distastes would chime.
They each believe in the best that has been written, painted, or composed. They each know what it is. Both of them grieve to see it dishonored and trashed. “A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path,” Dutton writes in his introduction. “A Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” Scruton would also like to see high artistic values restored, and it is both encouraging and surprising to see two such thoughtful books appear within weeks of each other.
Though perhaps such a conjunction is not so surprising after all, because the place of the arts in society, and the general condition of the arts, have long been seen as a gauge of civilized morale. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pioneered this critical tradition in the 19th century—but we’ve come a long way since then. Once confined to the Bohemian margins, artists and their adversarial values have in the last century moved steadily closer to the center, at the same time strengthening their institutional grip and political clout, and this drew the worried attention of such distinguished commentators as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Jacques Barzun.
In The Use and Abuse of Art, Barzun observed that the “invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting.” Characterizing “the sensibility of the sixties” and its typical creative works, Bell wrote of its “violence and cruelty” and of “an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood” that has hardly diminished since, and that also concerns Scruton and Dutton today. When Kristol wrote that abandoning the constraints of the Protestant ethic caused “virtue to lose her loveliness,” who would have thought that “loveliness” (by which we mean the entire ethically ambiguous realm of the aesthetic) would soon claim the virtue that virtue itself had lost? Skeptics wondered whether the triumph of the aesthetic represented the final moral defeat of the bourgeoisie.
If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: isn’t this getting close to the evolutionary view?That is doubtless an exaggeration—and anyway we are getting ahead of ourselves here. The books in question have more positive and enthusiastic purposes. About our ideas on beauty and why we like what we like, they are primarily philosophical, and seek to explain and defend the place of cultural refinement in a life well lived—and in any life worth living, Dutton might say. His Darwinian argument is that music and literature and much else are deeply rooted in human nature itself. This in turn raises questions about sources and origins. Where do we find the earliest signs of aesthetic sensibility? Is it in a primordial appreciation of nature? Can Africa’s Omo Valley really be where it all began?
Landscape and Universals
You don’t travel far with either author before the question is raised whether trees and rivers and hills are universally appealing. For most ordinary men and women (though varying with levels of articulacy) this could range from a hushed “look at that!” to my own excited reaction not long ago. Driving one morning around a curve in a country road I saw a sunlit view—rolling hills, low light, willows by a stream—and “God, that’s beautiful!” burst unbidden from my lips. There may have been sheep and cows too. Not a very original expostulation, you will say, but the question is this: was it as spontaneously unmeditated as it seemed to me at the time? While the words “instant” and “instinct” sound similar, do they here mean much the same thing?
Dutton would unequivocally answer “yes” and give his reasons. Evolutionary psychology (or EP) suggests that landscape preferences are deeply ancient and originated in Palaeolithic times, and critical judgements about suitable real estate started way back then. However “disinterested” the appreciation of beauty either is or should be, according to Immanuel Kant, a beautiful Pleistocene landscape was always a matter of lively ancestral concern, and it was valued for straightforward down-to-earth reasons. According to The Art Instinct the deep source of my excitement as those sunlit hills came into view was a primordially laid-down pattern of instinctive response. What is surprising, however, is that with rather more equivocation Roger Scruton seems to agree.
According to the author of Beauty, Kant also thought that our response to nature was spontaneous and unstudied. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon you are at once struck dumb with wonder. Views of nature please us immediately and without concepts, said Kant—and speaking for myself I’d have to say that’s how I felt that day. Unaware what was coming, and attending to nothing but a winding road, I was immediately riveted by the view, and my reaction was as unconceptualized as only passive visual sensation on the threshold of attention can be. Kant also maintained that “the primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature,” a statement glossed by Scruton when he adds that “a faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.”
It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators.Now, unless I’m mistaken, this tells us that a sense of “natural beauty” is “universal” and shared by “all human beings”—pretty much a matter of human nature you’d think, or what Kant himself called a sensus communis. In the course of his discussion, Scruton twice refers to “our species,” and when mankind as a species is invoked can the universalities of origins, sources, evolution, genes, homo sapiens, Darwin, the lot, be far behind? Our mastery over nature converted the primeval world “into a safe and common home for our species” Scruton writes on page 61. Then on page 65, elaborating on the contrast between the “free” beauties of nature and the “dependent” beauties of art, he tells us that “there is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members.”
If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: isn’t this getting close to the evolutionary view? Dutton and Scruton start from very different premises, to be sure, yet aren’t they talking about much the same thing?
The Failings of EP
But no—Scruton won’t have any of that. Agreeing with an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, he dismisses evolutionary psychology as “Darwinian fairytales.” As for The Art Instinct, although it receives bibliographical mention at the back of Scruton’s book, neither the work nor its argument is engaged directly (both books appeared in 2009, The Art Instinct a little before Beauty). Instead, two other proponents of evolutionary psychology, Ellen Dissanayake and Geoffrey Miller (whose contributions are described in Dutton’s book), are made to represent evolutionary aesthetics overall.
Both thinkers, however, are too idiosyncratic to fill this role, and might be seen as easy game. In Homo Aestheticus and elsewhere, Dissanayake had proposed that art arises from the human need to decoratively “make special” our ceremonies and religious rites. Making special by means of ornamental art supposedly encourages group cohesion, and thereby confers a collective advantage. Scruton allows that the theory has something to be said for it, but says it “falls critically short of explaining what is distinctive of the aesthetic.” Again, in The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller pushes Darwinian fitness theory further perhaps than is entirely safe: like the peacock’s tail, both beauty and art itself are lumped in with all the other phenomena of sexual selection and reproduction. Not unreasonably, Scruton comments that “even if the peacock’s tail and the “Art of Fugue” have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.”(37)
Whatever evolutionary psychology may say, or evolutionists might think (Scruton argues), it is man’s nature to have been divinely touched with rationality, for “it is the very capacity for reasoning that distinguishes us from the rest of nature.” Reasoning about things we know and have experienced enables us to make the fine discriminations required in aesthetic judgement; reasoning allows us to enter into the mind of the artist and understand his intentions—what the poet was driving at, what the painter meant. After which on page 38 Scruton sweeps the whole Darwinian argument aside:
As things stand, the evolutionary psychology of beauty offers a picture of the human being and human society with the aesthetic element deprived of its specific intentionality, and dissolved in vague generalities that overlook the peculiar place of aesthetic judgement in the life of the rational agent.
The Evolutionist’s Response
So that’s that. But is it also how things stand with Denis Dutton? Within his evolutionary scheme of explanation, does a painter or poet know what he’s doing, mean what he says, and can we understand his intentions ourselves? The Art Instinct has in fact a lot to say about intention and intentionality, and it is never vaporous or vague. Fitness theory—the signs of vigor and male prowess that brilliant tail feathers and menacing antlers and fighting ability show—is important in Dutton’s argument, and it places conscious intention and visibly displayed individual achievement at the center of evolutionary aesthetics. Moreover, his thinking about Palaeolithic origins in the past is informed by research among tribespeople in the present. Evidence of self-conscious artistic intention is something he encountered doing fieldwork in New Guinea villages, where “the work of individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention.”
From Scruton’s comment above you might think that evolutionary psychology had as one of its aims (or anyway one of its effects) an anthropological “abandonment of the author function,” a denial of individual agency, a view of abstract historical process without individual influence or meaning, of predetermining forces that supervene and displace the writer’s mind. Not so, says Dutton—quite the reverse. It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators:
We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, descriptive uses of language and regard these qualities as showing that a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations—stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such as poetry—are similarly judged.
Behind every act of speaking, descriptive or artistic, looms the idea of the fitness test. Human beings are continuously judging their fellows in terms of the cleverness or banality of their language use.
Skilled employment of a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic uses of language are particularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.
Listing 12 “signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category,” Dutton emphasizes the universal admiration for individual skill and virtuosity; the way relatively static traditional styles are the measure against which individual innovations are tested, registered, and adopted for mainstream performance; the role of novelty and creativity as “the locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that aspect of art that is not governed by rules or routines”; and the potential for “expressive individuality” wherever exhausted conventions produce boring work for weary audiences.
‘Even if the peacock’s tail and the “Art of Fugue” have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.’As for the common argument that artistic individuality is a “Western construct” (a postmodern claim, and certainly not Scruton’s), drawing again on his field experience Dutton declares this to be false: “individual talent and expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere.” So standing back a little we can see that the supposedly contradictory propositions about universality and individuality are not so incompatible after all. Yes, on the one hand, a universal “art instinct” is the biological foundation of music, painting, and literature. Yes, on the other hand, the particularity of individual genius is indispensable for climbing art’s highest peaks. What’s not to like?
Feminine Beauty, Male Display
No account of beauty would be complete without the effect of sexual attraction upon our judgement of personal appearance, and since Scruton has already written much on this matter it was to be expected that he would also have something to say in his latest book. Kantian ethics demand that individuals be treated as ends, not means: in his discussion of feminine beauty, it becomes important for Scruton to explain how a disinterested aesthetic admiration for the nude can be distinguished from mere lubricity. Invoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between “fantasy” and “imagination,” he claims that “true art appeals to the imagination, whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment.”
This is all very well—and not unpersuasive—until one looks at what he himself humorlessly writes about Titian, and about the reclining Venus of Urbino in particular. Suffice to say that it is less than convincing. No doubt some useful philosophical distinction between the erotic and the pornographic can be made, as he tries to do, and the contemporary curse of pornography is real enough. No doubt, also, Kant’s distinction between means and ends helps us understand what has happened. I do feel, however, that if feminine beauty is of such serious moral concern to Scruton, then one would like to see him turn his attention away from the inevitably voyeuristic temptations of reclining nudes. The serene dignity of the partially draped standing figures of the Venus de Milo and the Myrina Aphrodite, each of them Hellenistic, remind us that antiquity did some things so much better.
In contrast to all this, evolutionary aesthetics is more concerned with male fitness than female beauty. Darwin’s thinking about sexual selection by mate choice is the starting point, and here the peacock’s tail returns in all its glory: any specimen strong enough to provide the walking, squawking base for such extravagant excess proclaims its biological excellence to peahens for miles around. Yet Darwinian aesthetics sees physical ostentation as only the start. One could almost argue that it takes off from the point where Roger Scruton falters, confusedly pondering moral issues. Dutton’s approach certainly notes that a healthy body is basic, and that the fitness indication it provides has been the biological foundation of mate choice for millions of years.
But that’s just the beginning. Human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art. Minds were expanding, and artistic virtuosity not only gave access to your mind, it enhanced your attractiveness too. Gorgeous paintings gradually came to supplement gorgeous anatomy; sharp wit and sharp dialog supplemented physical prowess. Muscly warrior castes may have thought such developments effete, distracting, and incomprehensible, but in evolutionary terms they were no less effective in determining mate choice.
Human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art.Dutton writes: “Grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities of mind constitute eloquence, and the admiration of eloquence is solidly on the list of human universals.” So it is that from a foundation of words, and intelligence, and with sexual selection operating, the glories of story telling and literary enchantment eventually grew—from tales about hunting bears told thousands of years ago to The Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.
Minimal Beauty and the Sense of Order
A photograph in Beauty shows a place setting at a dinner table. A folded napkin, tied neatly with a bow, sits on a plate alongside a knife and fork, with wine glasses ready nearby and lighted candles in the background. A suspicion that this heralds a chapter on etiquette soon proves mistaken (though I look forward to neat little bows on our domestic napkins in the future). In fact the accompanying discussion is among the more interesting in Scruton’s book, and it underlines two things. First, that an elementary sense of visual order lies at the foundation of the pictorial arts; second, that when the author writes of civilization providing “a safe and common home for our species,” this is the sort of home he has in mind. His species is cultural, not zoological, and most of it can be found within a leisurely day’s ride of what Englishmen call the Home Counties, not far from London.
“There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a website” Scruton writes, and however remote in scale and significance these are from the maximalism of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Beethoven’s Ninth, in each case we want things to “look right.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to be reminded of this amidst the welter of magazines dealing with house and home and the plethora of newspaper supplements about “design,” especially when more and more people call themselves “designers.” But because he feels that the more mundane features of modern life also belong in a general theory of beauty, Scruton usefully reminds us that “a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper” are more important to many people’s daily lives than the great works of art that may, if we are lucky, fill our leisure hours. They both confirm and express “our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility.” (12)
His ability to say helpful things about shoes and wrapping paper shows the practical turn of mind that is one of Scruton’s assets. His chapter on “Everyday Beauty” also treats gardens, distinguishing their aesthetic enjoyment from the open spaces of landscape. Kant had argued that, unlike works of art, landscapes “owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity, and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.” In contrast, writes Scruton, gardens are extensions of the human world that mediate “between the built environment and the world of nature.” Gardens have been made and enjoyed for human purposes in every civilization. Does this make them also aesthetic universals? Perhaps there’s a case for such a view:
This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (82)
But what is true of politics and economics is also true of aesthetics. A tension exists between the claims of the collective and the claims of the individual, between the communal requirements of cultural tradition and the personal ambitions of artists. A small town with an established architectural style that has grown and matured over centuries may not appreciate the egoistic audacities of Frank Gehry or Sir Norman Foster. The residential community may want something that fits in, that does not stand out; something where age-old patterns are honored, not violated; a design in which the humble harmonies that make a house a home should be preserved. In brief, it may not want a big glass-walled egg in the town square.
The aesthetics of everyday life lead ineluctably to the place of consensus and tradition. Scruton places a high value on collective agreement whenever settled understandings of hearth and home are threatened by a spirit of “tear down and start again”—regardless of whose hearths and homes are pulverized. He argues the conservative case for a civilized life that consists, fundamentally, in providing congenial homes for people of taste in a social order “that does nothing to disturb our perceptions but which radiates a simple message of calm sociability”(92). His eloquence on behalf of this ideal is moving, but seems perhaps a mite too bland. It needs a dash of bitters—the sort of thing provided by Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Whatever it does for the modern economy, and it plainly does a great deal, conspicuous consumption also “disturbs our perceptions” and does nothing at all for “calm sociability.” Some awareness of this is perhaps implied by the following contrast:
Our discussion implies that aesthetic judgement can be exercised in two contrasting ways: to fit in and to stand out.
Fitting in or standing out (and in the arts is there now a more popular way of standing out than being outrageous?), passively conforming or seeking attention, unconsciously accepting conventions or actively “making special,” these psychological alternatives have all sorts of implication—or they do for a Darwinian approach to art. Although he might be loath to admit it, Scruton’s thoughts on such matters as novelty versus tradition relate to cognitive evolution, and to our organized understanding of the world around us. This begins with the perception of patterns, and their interpretation, and the way living organisms respond to regularity and order.
Cognitive Evolution
It is over 30 years since E. H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, a book in which he advocated “an evolutionist view of the mind.” Such a view, he wrote, “has become inescapable since the days of Darwin,” adding that it is “thanks to the researches of ethologists during the last few decades that more is known about inborn reactions for which animals are undoubtedly ‘programmed’ than even Darwin could have surmised.” His particular interest was how perceived regularities in the natural world (of light, sound, heat and cold, pressure, physical resistance) enable ‘cognitive maps’ to be built up—systems of “coordinates on which meaningful objects can be plotted.” Such maps were essential to survival; they enabled living things to orient themselves in space; and he set out to connect the resulting “sense of order” with a theory of decorative design.
What did this order consist of? Amid the blooming buzzing confusion of the sensory flux, organisms detect patterns—patterns in time and intensity, in duration and force. The simple association of mere pleasure and pain might lead to valuing one pattern over another—but how did primitive organisms think? You might say the amoeba “developed a hypothesis” about the danger of approaching too close to something hot. Or you might say it “told itself a story” about the danger of hot things. Anyway the neurological rudiments of thought have been there, along with elementary representations, for millions of years. As James Hurford writes in his 2007 The Origins of Meaning, a natural evolutionary approach means “that mental representations of things and events in the world came before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences.”
We have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts.When referential language eventually came along, words and concepts multiplied to manage the patterns (Gombrich drew on information theory to explicate avian behavior: the signal to noise ratio of the peacock’s tail enabled it to cut through the surrounding redundancy). With pattern recognition came an embryonic aesthetic sense: “In both space and time, in sight and sound,” writes Brian Boyd, “we sense beauty in ‘the rule of order over randomness, of pattern over chaos.’” Before long, homo sapiens got the idea that playfully imaginative storytelling was even more fun than description, and you could have horses with wings (Greece), serpents with feathery plumes (Mexico), or priapic heroes that travelled underground (Australia). After that the arts really took off. On page 15 of Boyd’s 2009 On the Origin of Stories he writes that “we can define art as cognitive play with pattern.” This is universal among the higher mammals, he says, adding that play itself
Evolved through the advantages of flexibility; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action. Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense, and social give-and-take can make life-or-death differences.
But it is “attention” and the incessant demand for attention by art and artists that Boyd emphasizes perhaps most of all. “Art dies without attention,” he writes, adding 20 pages later that “attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.” All of us seek attention, we are told, as a mark of acceptance, respect, and status; primatological studies show that “the more dominant a primate, the more attention others direct toward him or her”; and he then pursues this topic through an analysis of one of the most famous epic narratives of all time, The Odyssey. Asking rhetorically what Homer’s work can offer us after two thousand five hundred years, he answers that “it can stress the importance of attention itself … a sine qua non of all art. Art can affect minds over time because it so compulsively engages our attention.”
Art’s importunity appears to Boyd unproblematic, perhaps because he sees it in such heartily positive terms. Something else he approves are communal benefits both at human and pre-human levels. We learn that chimpanzees celebrate community through excited cries or matching movements and “derive a rich emotional response from harmonizing attention among themselves through pattern and rhythm, chant and dance,” while historian William McNeill “recalls the ‘sense of pervasive well-being’ that he experienced in the Army drill yard in 1941—‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’” The implication being that a thoroughgoing incorporation into collective life is essential for everyone, that attention-getting is a social necessity in life as in art, and that ever-expanding creativity of every kind is desirable. As he writes on page 123, “For us, artistic creativity offers a good in itself.”
From Making Special to Making Vile
While walking recently I saw a sticker saying “Art makes me feel unsafe.” I wonder who wrote it, and why? Can it be that some art today is indeed unsafe and has a genuinely threatening purpose and character? In which case does evolutionary aesthetics throw light on the matter? As we saw at the beginning, although they differ in various ways both Roger Scruton and Denis Dutton are equally dismayed by the contemporary trashing of high culture. In his introduction, Dutton complains that “a determination to shock or puzzle has sent much art down a wrong path,” and he plainly feels uncomfortable with some modern trends. Scruton’s misgivings go deeper, and as an example of what he fears he describes a Berlin production by Calixto Bieito of Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail)” set in a Berlin brothel:
With Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.
As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”
While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics such as Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”
For his part Denis Dutton looks critically at modernism and says its assumption that “culture can give us a taste for just anything at all” is false. In other words, we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. I am very glad to hear this, and I hope it is true, because if it’s not, then Calixto Bieito and the film director Lars von Trier represent the future—the showbiz incarnation of that sick outrageousness that infects the entertainment industry today. And if that happens I suspect art will make us feel less safe still. It needn’t, and it shouldn’t, but it may.
Roger Sandall is a Sydney-based writer and the author of The Culture Cult. You can find more of his essays and commentary at http://www.rogersandall.com. He last wrote for THE AMERICAN about the elite attack on ancient Greek achievement.
Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a nice view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750, and a scene like that on his homepage. In contrast, judging from Denis Dutton’s Darwinian The Art Instinct, a congenial vista for that author might be Ethiopia’s Omo Valley circa 1,000,000 BC. Yet in spite of these differences I expect that across a wide range of cultural artefacts and activities both their tastes and their distastes would chime.
They each believe in the best that has been written, painted, or composed. They each know what it is. Both of them grieve to see it dishonored and trashed. “A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path,” Dutton writes in his introduction. “A Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” Scruton would also like to see high artistic values restored, and it is both encouraging and surprising to see two such thoughtful books appear within weeks of each other.
Though perhaps such a conjunction is not so surprising after all, because the place of the arts in society, and the general condition of the arts, have long been seen as a gauge of civilized morale. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy pioneered this critical tradition in the 19th century—but we’ve come a long way since then. Once confined to the Bohemian margins, artists and their adversarial values have in the last century moved steadily closer to the center, at the same time strengthening their institutional grip and political clout, and this drew the worried attention of such distinguished commentators as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Jacques Barzun.
In The Use and Abuse of Art, Barzun observed that the “invidious, resentful relation of art to life has become general and unremitting.” Characterizing “the sensibility of the sixties” and its typical creative works, Bell wrote of its “violence and cruelty” and of “an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood” that has hardly diminished since, and that also concerns Scruton and Dutton today. When Kristol wrote that abandoning the constraints of the Protestant ethic caused “virtue to lose her loveliness,” who would have thought that “loveliness” (by which we mean the entire ethically ambiguous realm of the aesthetic) would soon claim the virtue that virtue itself had lost? Skeptics wondered whether the triumph of the aesthetic represented the final moral defeat of the bourgeoisie.
If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: isn’t this getting close to the evolutionary view?That is doubtless an exaggeration—and anyway we are getting ahead of ourselves here. The books in question have more positive and enthusiastic purposes. About our ideas on beauty and why we like what we like, they are primarily philosophical, and seek to explain and defend the place of cultural refinement in a life well lived—and in any life worth living, Dutton might say. His Darwinian argument is that music and literature and much else are deeply rooted in human nature itself. This in turn raises questions about sources and origins. Where do we find the earliest signs of aesthetic sensibility? Is it in a primordial appreciation of nature? Can Africa’s Omo Valley really be where it all began?
Landscape and Universals
You don’t travel far with either author before the question is raised whether trees and rivers and hills are universally appealing. For most ordinary men and women (though varying with levels of articulacy) this could range from a hushed “look at that!” to my own excited reaction not long ago. Driving one morning around a curve in a country road I saw a sunlit view—rolling hills, low light, willows by a stream—and “God, that’s beautiful!” burst unbidden from my lips. There may have been sheep and cows too. Not a very original expostulation, you will say, but the question is this: was it as spontaneously unmeditated as it seemed to me at the time? While the words “instant” and “instinct” sound similar, do they here mean much the same thing?
Dutton would unequivocally answer “yes” and give his reasons. Evolutionary psychology (or EP) suggests that landscape preferences are deeply ancient and originated in Palaeolithic times, and critical judgements about suitable real estate started way back then. However “disinterested” the appreciation of beauty either is or should be, according to Immanuel Kant, a beautiful Pleistocene landscape was always a matter of lively ancestral concern, and it was valued for straightforward down-to-earth reasons. According to The Art Instinct the deep source of my excitement as those sunlit hills came into view was a primordially laid-down pattern of instinctive response. What is surprising, however, is that with rather more equivocation Roger Scruton seems to agree.
According to the author of Beauty, Kant also thought that our response to nature was spontaneous and unstudied. Standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon you are at once struck dumb with wonder. Views of nature please us immediately and without concepts, said Kant—and speaking for myself I’d have to say that’s how I felt that day. Unaware what was coming, and attending to nothing but a winding road, I was immediately riveted by the view, and my reaction was as unconceptualized as only passive visual sensation on the threshold of attention can be. Kant also maintained that “the primary exercise of judgement is in the appreciation of nature,” a statement glossed by Scruton when he adds that “a faculty that is directed towards natural beauty therefore has a real chance of being common to all human beings, issuing judgements with a universal force.”
It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators.Now, unless I’m mistaken, this tells us that a sense of “natural beauty” is “universal” and shared by “all human beings”—pretty much a matter of human nature you’d think, or what Kant himself called a sensus communis. In the course of his discussion, Scruton twice refers to “our species,” and when mankind as a species is invoked can the universalities of origins, sources, evolution, genes, homo sapiens, Darwin, the lot, be far behind? Our mastery over nature converted the primeval world “into a safe and common home for our species” Scruton writes on page 61. Then on page 65, elaborating on the contrast between the “free” beauties of nature and the “dependent” beauties of art, he tells us that “there is something plausible in the idea that the contemplation of nature is both distinctive of our species and common to its members.”
If the contemplative appreciation of nature is distinctive of our species perhaps it is also instinctive in our species: isn’t this getting close to the evolutionary view? Dutton and Scruton start from very different premises, to be sure, yet aren’t they talking about much the same thing?
The Failings of EP
But no—Scruton won’t have any of that. Agreeing with an Australian philosopher, the late David Stove, he dismisses evolutionary psychology as “Darwinian fairytales.” As for The Art Instinct, although it receives bibliographical mention at the back of Scruton’s book, neither the work nor its argument is engaged directly (both books appeared in 2009, The Art Instinct a little before Beauty). Instead, two other proponents of evolutionary psychology, Ellen Dissanayake and Geoffrey Miller (whose contributions are described in Dutton’s book), are made to represent evolutionary aesthetics overall.
Both thinkers, however, are too idiosyncratic to fill this role, and might be seen as easy game. In Homo Aestheticus and elsewhere, Dissanayake had proposed that art arises from the human need to decoratively “make special” our ceremonies and religious rites. Making special by means of ornamental art supposedly encourages group cohesion, and thereby confers a collective advantage. Scruton allows that the theory has something to be said for it, but says it “falls critically short of explaining what is distinctive of the aesthetic.” Again, in The Mating Mind Geoffrey Miller pushes Darwinian fitness theory further perhaps than is entirely safe: like the peacock’s tail, both beauty and art itself are lumped in with all the other phenomena of sexual selection and reproduction. Not unreasonably, Scruton comments that “even if the peacock’s tail and the “Art of Fugue” have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.”(37)
Whatever evolutionary psychology may say, or evolutionists might think (Scruton argues), it is man’s nature to have been divinely touched with rationality, for “it is the very capacity for reasoning that distinguishes us from the rest of nature.” Reasoning about things we know and have experienced enables us to make the fine discriminations required in aesthetic judgement; reasoning allows us to enter into the mind of the artist and understand his intentions—what the poet was driving at, what the painter meant. After which on page 38 Scruton sweeps the whole Darwinian argument aside:
As things stand, the evolutionary psychology of beauty offers a picture of the human being and human society with the aesthetic element deprived of its specific intentionality, and dissolved in vague generalities that overlook the peculiar place of aesthetic judgement in the life of the rational agent.
The Evolutionist’s Response
So that’s that. But is it also how things stand with Denis Dutton? Within his evolutionary scheme of explanation, does a painter or poet know what he’s doing, mean what he says, and can we understand his intentions ourselves? The Art Instinct has in fact a lot to say about intention and intentionality, and it is never vaporous or vague. Fitness theory—the signs of vigor and male prowess that brilliant tail feathers and menacing antlers and fighting ability show—is important in Dutton’s argument, and it places conscious intention and visibly displayed individual achievement at the center of evolutionary aesthetics. Moreover, his thinking about Palaeolithic origins in the past is informed by research among tribespeople in the present. Evidence of self-conscious artistic intention is something he encountered doing fieldwork in New Guinea villages, where “the work of individual dancers, poets, and carvers is a focus of fascinated attention.”
From Scruton’s comment above you might think that evolutionary psychology had as one of its aims (or anyway one of its effects) an anthropological “abandonment of the author function,” a denial of individual agency, a view of abstract historical process without individual influence or meaning, of predetermining forces that supervene and displace the writer’s mind. Not so, says Dutton—quite the reverse. It is in novels, poetry, and drama that individual demonstrations of superior skill, style, and imaginative intelligence provide some of evolution’s most persuasive indicators:
We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, descriptive uses of language and regard these qualities as showing that a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations—stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such as poetry—are similarly judged.
Behind every act of speaking, descriptive or artistic, looms the idea of the fitness test. Human beings are continuously judging their fellows in terms of the cleverness or banality of their language use.
Skilled employment of a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, wit, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing on how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic uses of language are particularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.
Listing 12 “signal characteristics of art considered as a universal, cross-cultural category,” Dutton emphasizes the universal admiration for individual skill and virtuosity; the way relatively static traditional styles are the measure against which individual innovations are tested, registered, and adopted for mainstream performance; the role of novelty and creativity as “the locus of individuality or genius in art, referring to that aspect of art that is not governed by rules or routines”; and the potential for “expressive individuality” wherever exhausted conventions produce boring work for weary audiences.
‘Even if the peacock’s tail and the “Art of Fugue” have a common ancestry, the appreciation elicited by the one is of a completely different kind from the appreciation directed at the other.’As for the common argument that artistic individuality is a “Western construct” (a postmodern claim, and certainly not Scruton’s), drawing again on his field experience Dutton declares this to be false: “individual talent and expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere.” So standing back a little we can see that the supposedly contradictory propositions about universality and individuality are not so incompatible after all. Yes, on the one hand, a universal “art instinct” is the biological foundation of music, painting, and literature. Yes, on the other hand, the particularity of individual genius is indispensable for climbing art’s highest peaks. What’s not to like?
Feminine Beauty, Male Display
No account of beauty would be complete without the effect of sexual attraction upon our judgement of personal appearance, and since Scruton has already written much on this matter it was to be expected that he would also have something to say in his latest book. Kantian ethics demand that individuals be treated as ends, not means: in his discussion of feminine beauty, it becomes important for Scruton to explain how a disinterested aesthetic admiration for the nude can be distinguished from mere lubricity. Invoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between “fantasy” and “imagination,” he claims that “true art appeals to the imagination, whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment.”
This is all very well—and not unpersuasive—until one looks at what he himself humorlessly writes about Titian, and about the reclining Venus of Urbino in particular. Suffice to say that it is less than convincing. No doubt some useful philosophical distinction between the erotic and the pornographic can be made, as he tries to do, and the contemporary curse of pornography is real enough. No doubt, also, Kant’s distinction between means and ends helps us understand what has happened. I do feel, however, that if feminine beauty is of such serious moral concern to Scruton, then one would like to see him turn his attention away from the inevitably voyeuristic temptations of reclining nudes. The serene dignity of the partially draped standing figures of the Venus de Milo and the Myrina Aphrodite, each of them Hellenistic, remind us that antiquity did some things so much better.
In contrast to all this, evolutionary aesthetics is more concerned with male fitness than female beauty. Darwin’s thinking about sexual selection by mate choice is the starting point, and here the peacock’s tail returns in all its glory: any specimen strong enough to provide the walking, squawking base for such extravagant excess proclaims its biological excellence to peahens for miles around. Yet Darwinian aesthetics sees physical ostentation as only the start. One could almost argue that it takes off from the point where Roger Scruton falters, confusedly pondering moral issues. Dutton’s approach certainly notes that a healthy body is basic, and that the fitness indication it provides has been the biological foundation of mate choice for millions of years.
But that’s just the beginning. Human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art. Minds were expanding, and artistic virtuosity not only gave access to your mind, it enhanced your attractiveness too. Gorgeous paintings gradually came to supplement gorgeous anatomy; sharp wit and sharp dialog supplemented physical prowess. Muscly warrior castes may have thought such developments effete, distracting, and incomprehensible, but in evolutionary terms they were no less effective in determining mate choice.
Human mental development and the emergence of language brought a whole new range of attractive intellectual features, all convertible into art.Dutton writes: “Grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, and originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities of mind constitute eloquence, and the admiration of eloquence is solidly on the list of human universals.” So it is that from a foundation of words, and intelligence, and with sexual selection operating, the glories of story telling and literary enchantment eventually grew—from tales about hunting bears told thousands of years ago to The Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.
Minimal Beauty and the Sense of Order
A photograph in Beauty shows a place setting at a dinner table. A folded napkin, tied neatly with a bow, sits on a plate alongside a knife and fork, with wine glasses ready nearby and lighted candles in the background. A suspicion that this heralds a chapter on etiquette soon proves mistaken (though I look forward to neat little bows on our domestic napkins in the future). In fact the accompanying discussion is among the more interesting in Scruton’s book, and it underlines two things. First, that an elementary sense of visual order lies at the foundation of the pictorial arts; second, that when the author writes of civilization providing “a safe and common home for our species,” this is the sort of home he has in mind. His species is cultural, not zoological, and most of it can be found within a leisurely day’s ride of what Englishmen call the Home Counties, not far from London.
“There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a website” Scruton writes, and however remote in scale and significance these are from the maximalism of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Beethoven’s Ninth, in each case we want things to “look right.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to be reminded of this amidst the welter of magazines dealing with house and home and the plethora of newspaper supplements about “design,” especially when more and more people call themselves “designers.” But because he feels that the more mundane features of modern life also belong in a general theory of beauty, Scruton usefully reminds us that “a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper” are more important to many people’s daily lives than the great works of art that may, if we are lucky, fill our leisure hours. They both confirm and express “our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility.” (12)
His ability to say helpful things about shoes and wrapping paper shows the practical turn of mind that is one of Scruton’s assets. His chapter on “Everyday Beauty” also treats gardens, distinguishing their aesthetic enjoyment from the open spaces of landscape. Kant had argued that, unlike works of art, landscapes “owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity, and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.” In contrast, writes Scruton, gardens are extensions of the human world that mediate “between the built environment and the world of nature.” Gardens have been made and enjoyed for human purposes in every civilization. Does this make them also aesthetic universals? Perhaps there’s a case for such a view:
This attempt to match our surroundings to ourselves and ourselves to our surroundings is arguably a human universal. And it suggests that the judgement of beauty is not just an optional addition to the repertoire of human judgements, but the unavoidable consequence of taking life seriously, and becoming truly conscious of our affairs. (82)
But what is true of politics and economics is also true of aesthetics. A tension exists between the claims of the collective and the claims of the individual, between the communal requirements of cultural tradition and the personal ambitions of artists. A small town with an established architectural style that has grown and matured over centuries may not appreciate the egoistic audacities of Frank Gehry or Sir Norman Foster. The residential community may want something that fits in, that does not stand out; something where age-old patterns are honored, not violated; a design in which the humble harmonies that make a house a home should be preserved. In brief, it may not want a big glass-walled egg in the town square.
The aesthetics of everyday life lead ineluctably to the place of consensus and tradition. Scruton places a high value on collective agreement whenever settled understandings of hearth and home are threatened by a spirit of “tear down and start again”—regardless of whose hearths and homes are pulverized. He argues the conservative case for a civilized life that consists, fundamentally, in providing congenial homes for people of taste in a social order “that does nothing to disturb our perceptions but which radiates a simple message of calm sociability”(92). His eloquence on behalf of this ideal is moving, but seems perhaps a mite too bland. It needs a dash of bitters—the sort of thing provided by Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Whatever it does for the modern economy, and it plainly does a great deal, conspicuous consumption also “disturbs our perceptions” and does nothing at all for “calm sociability.” Some awareness of this is perhaps implied by the following contrast:
Our discussion implies that aesthetic judgement can be exercised in two contrasting ways: to fit in and to stand out.
Fitting in or standing out (and in the arts is there now a more popular way of standing out than being outrageous?), passively conforming or seeking attention, unconsciously accepting conventions or actively “making special,” these psychological alternatives have all sorts of implication—or they do for a Darwinian approach to art. Although he might be loath to admit it, Scruton’s thoughts on such matters as novelty versus tradition relate to cognitive evolution, and to our organized understanding of the world around us. This begins with the perception of patterns, and their interpretation, and the way living organisms respond to regularity and order.
Cognitive Evolution
It is over 30 years since E. H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, a book in which he advocated “an evolutionist view of the mind.” Such a view, he wrote, “has become inescapable since the days of Darwin,” adding that it is “thanks to the researches of ethologists during the last few decades that more is known about inborn reactions for which animals are undoubtedly ‘programmed’ than even Darwin could have surmised.” His particular interest was how perceived regularities in the natural world (of light, sound, heat and cold, pressure, physical resistance) enable ‘cognitive maps’ to be built up—systems of “coordinates on which meaningful objects can be plotted.” Such maps were essential to survival; they enabled living things to orient themselves in space; and he set out to connect the resulting “sense of order” with a theory of decorative design.
What did this order consist of? Amid the blooming buzzing confusion of the sensory flux, organisms detect patterns—patterns in time and intensity, in duration and force. The simple association of mere pleasure and pain might lead to valuing one pattern over another—but how did primitive organisms think? You might say the amoeba “developed a hypothesis” about the danger of approaching too close to something hot. Or you might say it “told itself a story” about the danger of hot things. Anyway the neurological rudiments of thought have been there, along with elementary representations, for millions of years. As James Hurford writes in his 2007 The Origins of Meaning, a natural evolutionary approach means “that mental representations of things and events in the world came before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences.”
We have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts.When referential language eventually came along, words and concepts multiplied to manage the patterns (Gombrich drew on information theory to explicate avian behavior: the signal to noise ratio of the peacock’s tail enabled it to cut through the surrounding redundancy). With pattern recognition came an embryonic aesthetic sense: “In both space and time, in sight and sound,” writes Brian Boyd, “we sense beauty in ‘the rule of order over randomness, of pattern over chaos.’” Before long, homo sapiens got the idea that playfully imaginative storytelling was even more fun than description, and you could have horses with wings (Greece), serpents with feathery plumes (Mexico), or priapic heroes that travelled underground (Australia). After that the arts really took off. On page 15 of Boyd’s 2009 On the Origin of Stories he writes that “we can define art as cognitive play with pattern.” This is universal among the higher mammals, he says, adding that play itself
Evolved through the advantages of flexibility; the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of action. Behaviors like escape and pursuit, attack and defense, and social give-and-take can make life-or-death differences.
But it is “attention” and the incessant demand for attention by art and artists that Boyd emphasizes perhaps most of all. “Art dies without attention,” he writes, adding 20 pages later that “attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.” All of us seek attention, we are told, as a mark of acceptance, respect, and status; primatological studies show that “the more dominant a primate, the more attention others direct toward him or her”; and he then pursues this topic through an analysis of one of the most famous epic narratives of all time, The Odyssey. Asking rhetorically what Homer’s work can offer us after two thousand five hundred years, he answers that “it can stress the importance of attention itself … a sine qua non of all art. Art can affect minds over time because it so compulsively engages our attention.”
Art’s importunity appears to Boyd unproblematic, perhaps because he sees it in such heartily positive terms. Something else he approves are communal benefits both at human and pre-human levels. We learn that chimpanzees celebrate community through excited cries or matching movements and “derive a rich emotional response from harmonizing attention among themselves through pattern and rhythm, chant and dance,” while historian William McNeill “recalls the ‘sense of pervasive well-being’ that he experienced in the Army drill yard in 1941—‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.’” The implication being that a thoroughgoing incorporation into collective life is essential for everyone, that attention-getting is a social necessity in life as in art, and that ever-expanding creativity of every kind is desirable. As he writes on page 123, “For us, artistic creativity offers a good in itself.”
From Making Special to Making Vile
While walking recently I saw a sticker saying “Art makes me feel unsafe.” I wonder who wrote it, and why? Can it be that some art today is indeed unsafe and has a genuinely threatening purpose and character? In which case does evolutionary aesthetics throw light on the matter? As we saw at the beginning, although they differ in various ways both Roger Scruton and Denis Dutton are equally dismayed by the contemporary trashing of high culture. In his introduction, Dutton complains that “a determination to shock or puzzle has sent much art down a wrong path,” and he plainly feels uncomfortable with some modern trends. Scruton’s misgivings go deeper, and as an example of what he fears he describes a Berlin production by Calixto Bieito of Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail)” set in a Berlin brothel:
With Selim as pimp, and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, the stage was littered with couples copulating, and every excuse for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. At one point a prostitute is gratuitously tortured, and her nipples bloodily and realistically severed before she is killed. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the loudly orchestrated scenes of murder and narcissistic sex that litter the stage.
As Scruton adds, this “flight from beauty” into sordid sadistic ugliness can be found in many aspects of contemporary culture. There is a self-conscious “desire to spoil beauty in acts of aesthetic iconoclasm.” Desecration is his word for it, and he argues that for a certain kind of nihilistic mind “desecration is a kind of defence against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things our lives are judged and in order to escape that judgement we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”
While I am not religious I tend to agree. And I regret to say that evolutionary aesthetics appears to offer little defence against such nihilism. As the inquiries of critics such as Irving Kristol and Jacques Barzun suggested years ago, the purely egoistic activities of attention seeking and making special, and the hyper-individualistic drive for supreme distinction, increasingly take place in a moral void. Ellen Dissanayake writes (Homo Aestheticus, page 59) that “specialness may be strangeness, outrageousness, or extravagance” (my emphasis). So it seems that however outrageous it is, it’s still art, and the sacralizing of making special is fully compatible with the desecration of making vile. Having implied that attention-getting creativity is a good in itself (virtually the summum bonum) Brian Boyd adds correctly that “evolution does not aim at creativity. It aims at nothing.”
For his part Denis Dutton looks critically at modernism and says its assumption that “culture can give us a taste for just anything at all” is false. In other words, we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. I am very glad to hear this, and I hope it is true, because if it’s not, then Calixto Bieito and the film director Lars von Trier represent the future—the showbiz incarnation of that sick outrageousness that infects the entertainment industry today. And if that happens I suspect art will make us feel less safe still. It needn’t, and it shouldn’t, but it may.
Roger Sandall is a Sydney-based writer and the author of The Culture Cult. You can find more of his essays and commentary at http://www.rogersandall.com. He last wrote for THE AMERICAN about the elite attack on ancient Greek achievement.
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