Can America be "great" without great culture?

[pbrower2a]

(02-22-2019, 05:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-21-2019, 02:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Economic achievement usually leads to cultural achievement. A society capable of creating an economic surplus is able at the least to ornament what would otherwise be stark emptiness of the now-defunct Berlin Wall.

People will want to be entertained and inspired.

A prosperous society can see cultural ferment, as opposed to one left in a semi-barbaric condition, but by today's standards, past societies that produced great art had nowhere near the material prosperity levels that we have, who don't.

Partly it's because modern societies are just different. Traditional societies had rich elites and poor masses, but the elites were cultured and they sponsored great art. There was also much greatness in the folk arts too. In India, a relatively poor society, the place is loaded with cultural riches everywhere you look that are not just the product of elites. Latin American folk are is also rich and high quality.

Our society has liberated the common man to a greater degree, although this has been backtracking in the neo-liberal era. But this new empowering of neo-liberal elites in a new unequal society does not lead to an aristocratic culture that sponsors great arts. Today's elites are as deaf and dumb culturally as the masses they rule over. And the masses and elites alike are programmed only to see material goals. 

And our veneration of technology impresses us too much, and therefore robs us of culture as well. Tech acts as a substitute culture, and its physical accomplishments get all the prestige and the rewards, while the arts are looked down upon and left in poverty, although the elites do drive up art prices at auctions.

But high technology creates new media that artists can exploit. Artists do that when they get the chance. Just remember that when artists learned the rules of perspective, the art of the Renaissance made the medieval aesthetic.  I see the contrast between medieval and Renaissance; medieval art generally looks amateurish in contrast to Michelangelo, Leonardo, et al. Perspective also made analytic geometry and good calculus possible.

Art can prosper in communities under distress (surprise -- Rubens did great paintings in a depressed climate, and the great flowering of the French impressionists occurred in a country that had just been shamed in the Franco-Prussian War. Troubled Weimar Germany had an excellent artistic scene. Need I remind you that the noble House of Eszterhazy was able to keep Josef Haydn, arguably the most important of all composers of classical music, fully employed as a retainer -- and one of the most prolific composers who ever lived?)

It is simple enough to say that artists do art because they could not imagine  anything else as a way of asserting their personalities. So they have to make a living as a bartender or a bank teller -- neither job is their real selves. Art is the definitive expression of some selves (and I extend that to literature, cinema,  and music, of course). Art can be decoration and a substitute for clutter.

So when does art fail? Typically when it becomes pure propaganda, dumbed-down for the dullards, restricted to a didactic purpose, and perhaps having a questionable cause imposed upon it. Even advertising, with its limitations, can use artistic merit to draw attention to itself and the object or service that it promotes.

The grand gesture, the attempt to transform the client into something awesome, is usually a failure. Surely you saw my thread on the preferred styles of tyrants that I tried to extend to dope traffickers (people on a similar level of ethics and aesthetics). Artists can express themselves and get away with it. Artists are rarely competent enough to express someone else's bloated-but-deficient ego.



Satan Hussein, including a scene in which he emerges through a gateway suggesting a predatory bird. 

...and guess who?



This goes beyond normal decoration.