(02-15-2021, 03:43 AM)Einzige Wrote: Judging the quality of anything by its achievements is bourgeois.
It is hard to see any outstanding achievement as proletarian. Ask yourself whether a novelist like Pasternak, a historian like Solzhenitsyn, a composer like Shostakovich, a poet like Yevtushenko, a film-maker like Eisenstein, a mathematician like Gelfand, a military leader like Zhukov, a physicist like Sakharov, or the chief behind a space program like Korolev, a diplomat like Litvinov, or such renowned musicians as Gilels, Oistrakh, Rostropovich, or Svetlanov is proletarian. I have just mentioned a number of Soviet figures of high achievements. People can rise from being laborers (the proletariat) to being spectacular achievers noteworthy beyond their narrow circles in life. When they do that they are no longer proletarian. These people met bourgeois standards of high achievement. (I did not mention painting or sculpture because the Soviet Union between Lenin and Gorbachev was a great disappointment. Such art museums as I have visited several times in Chicago, Detroit, and Toledo have little Soviet-era art).
Is it fair to say that the Bach work to which I linked has much more wit and structural validity than "Enoree the Eighth" or "They're Coming to Take Me Away, ha! ha!"? Classical music above else is music with deliberate structure intended (so it is with writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, or cinema if it is any good) to appeal to something fully human. I can't quite describe it. Fugues, near-fugues, ritornellos, and sonata form have satisfied people for centuries. I'm not going to knock folk tunes or folk art, as these may themselves have more sophistication than meets the eye or the circumstances.
It is not folk art that is banal; it is Kitsch, work intended to appeal to the superficial delight yet prove empty under the often-flamboyant veneer of sophistication, that is debased. I've done painting, and it is often folk art. (I also do abstraction as parody). Don't get me wrong; I don't challenge the rules of perspective, and either way I do not do randomness. I may not fully understand the Golden Ratio, but I know its reality. I also know that some objects are completely unsuited to artistic depiction. Obviously I would never do a slaughterhouse or an automobile graveyard.
All artistic endeavors make themselves subject to criticism, and an artist, writer, or musician bares oneself to criticism. If one does not want to subject oneself to criticism for failing to be outstanding, then maybe one can do machine-paced work or rigidly-supervised labor or service. Matisse and Picasso, the painters who most inform my style, made it look easy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.