OK I’ll say it: I‘ve hated most of the art of my moment.
This is an uncomfortable and inconvenient admission: uncomfortable because I’ve longed to like what’s being made today; inconvenient because it’s easier to be in the swim, go with the flow, nod like a dashboard doll at the fashions du jour. I don’t fancy myself a stick-in-the-mud, harrumphing about the genius of yesteryear. I’d rather belong to the progressive than the reactionary camp. I’ve tried to cherish the visual, musical, and literary innovations deemed cutting-edge by the au courant. But after a lifetime of trying, facts are facts: with a few gleaming exceptions, I shy from the new and devour the antique. The music I love was mostly composed between 1650 and 1950; in museums I hie first to Old Masters through Post-Impressionists; I quarrel with literature made after World War One. Yes, there are exceptions, I insist I’m not close-minded, but love resists tutelage: we lust where we lust. Urged to read a recent book, I groan, “In preference to Shakespeare?” Ditto with Handel, Caravaggio, Monet, Montaigne, Thoreau, Henry James ... My needy soul seeks shelter in the old.
Why, I wonder. Am I deficient? Obstinate? Inflexible? Unimaginative? Timid? I’m not, I’m pretty sure, a polemicist conspicuously defending the tried and true. I’d prefer to be “broad-minded,” cross my heart.
I blame irony. Irony is the opposite of sincerity. Irony pits smarties against stupids, those who get the joke against those who trust. There’s no irony in a cathedral. Neither in Bach, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. As literacy and sophistication expanded from the Renaissance onward, makers appealed increasingly to the cognoscenti. Conversation about art grew more complex and convolute. Consider John Cage’s 4”33” as an example: are its four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence “music”? You’ve got to be a real smartie to engage in that debate.
I’m not being binary here – irony bad, sincerity good, pick your side. Irony advanced gradually during the centuries, as spice wriggles into bland cuisine. Some spice enhances flavor; too much destroys pleasure; palates differ. Some folks find cacophony thrilling; some (I kid you not) deem Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a masterpiece. Art in the twentieth century grew ever more smarty, subversive, ironic. Irony appeals to the mind, not the heart. However exciting, irony isn’t soothing.
Art nurses me, quiets my roiling soul: no mind-game, but essential balm. I require it as an addict his fix, lest I go mad. I can’t imagine life without it.
No one wants an ironic nurse.
My dad died when I was sixteen. First thing I did, home for the funeral, was play the record (remember them?) of Brahms’ German Requiem, as sincere and sympathizing a piece as any I know. Soon thereafter I wrote my first poem. Professors and my college roommate introduced me to the physic of the visual arts. What I seek from art is not a discussion but a soul-bath, a tender hug. My need’s as ceaseless as a flower’s for the sun. I’d wither without it.
My words strive for sincerity, both in what they say and how they sound. I want to share as much of myself as truly and sweetly as I can, for such sharing, I believe, is the seed of love, and love the only good reason to exist. I eschew sneering, snickering, winking. I gravitate to art that’s whole-hearted, whether hearty or hurt: no tricks, meanness, lies.
This is admission, not prescription, an attempt to understand my fusty preference. Folks should conceive and consume the art their hearts desire. I make mine to convene, cohere, console.