The Arts in America
National Public Radio has as one of its sign-offs: “A great nation deserves great art.” That’s something our nation doesn’t have. What we do have is pedestrian art, gutter art, protest art…
In music, George and Ira Gershwin, Samuel Butler, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, John Philip Sousa, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, et cetera, have given way to rappers and other junk music composers.
Literature has yielded to grade-school scribblings and scatological tales, while poetry has been stripped of rhyme and meter. Once we had Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melvlle, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson….
Classical art (painting) has been replaced by modern art, e.g., the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and his action painting. His No. 5, 1948 sold for $140 million in 2006, demonstrating once again that people no longer know the value of things.
And Harry Moses’ 2006 documentary film Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? re-affirms that the f word, like bacteria on our skin and in our large bowel, thrives everywhere in our culture.
We’re back to the f word, which launched the two previous blogs.
The f word, after all, is protected, like the bald eagle, Southwestern willow flycatcher, and Salt Creek tiger beetle, not by the Endangered Species Act, of course, but by the majesty of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….” And the free speech clause trumps just about everything.
We once had obscenity laws – before the current fanatical devotion to (and abuse of) the free speech clause – which kept the f word out of public discourse. The laws went out when the new paganism came in.
If a great nation deserves great art but doesn’t have it, what does that say about that nation? Perhaps it has lost its claim to greatness.