Israel is dying. It's taken too long.  And I'm just watching the American "left", and the very serious intellectual left—anglophone and affiliated—live down to expectations. 

Women's Studies departments are the result not the cause. CRT is the result, not the cause. Academics lead from the rear. And Edward Said was a putz. 

The Professor of Politics

updated

How does his Olympia address us? With what sort of attention? From what specific distance?

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T.J.Clark in the LRB. Smart but he works too hard. He knows his shit, but erudition is cautiousness.

Velazquez is painting portraits of servants dressed up in costumes. But they look out at us as our equals, or superiors, or as creatures of indeterminate status—simply as others—with the full weight of their humanity.  If you look at the range of his work it becomes obvious. That's a stunning thought considering his role. 

On the secondary pics above; the character is both frontal and in repose. He has three legs! It's a brilliant touch to an image of ambiguity. 

Clark, Masters and Fools 

How does his Aesop address us? With what sort of attention? From what specific distance? Many Velázquez portraits provoke questions of this kind (think of Don Juan of Austria) but here they are intensified – exacerbated – by the suspicion that a particular set of features has been shifted by the artist to embody an entire worldview. What could be more particular than Aesop’s face? But when has a face been more imprinted with a philosophy?

Could it be, in the first place, that the very words ‘expression’, ‘address’ and ‘us’ are the wrong ones to apply to Aesop’s way of looking? Does Aesop as Velázquez imagines him exist, or exist primarily, in a world made up of interlocking subjectivities? He is, remember, the master of animals. The world he takes stock of may include ‘us’ only as objects or processes of a certain kind – entities, outsides, behaviours, patterns of dominance and submission. Such a way of thinking is no doubt extreme, or at least uncommon, but doesn’t Aesop’s whole attitude make it seem reasonable – realistic? Doesn’t his face ask us to rearrange our notions of normality? What’s normal, he asks, about reading other minds?

I reach a familiar impasse. I have no words, or none that strike me as convincing, for the way Aesop looks – the way his features hover between irony and resignation – but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what his look intends. On the contrary, the wordlessness of Aesop’s communication makes his intention all the clearer. I have a good idea what he’s contemplating. I understand the quality of his distance: he is assessing not addressing me, would be one way of putting it – reaching a judgment but not pronouncing one. (As is his way with the world in general.) And isn’t this partly what we mean by expression – isn’t this what expressions are for? Expressions, especially ones as charged and impenetrable as this, are for where words fail us, where we’re lost for them. Aesop’s original muteness – the original muteness of each individual, the stumbling of the infant into speech – is part of his power.

Near the end of the piece. 

There used to be a strand in the Velázquez literature that proposed that Aesop, Menippus and Mars were pictures, all three, of court jesters playing at being philosophers and gods. I see why the notion was discarded – it came out of a period when Velázquez’s art was interpreted too much in a late-19th-century Realist way. Nonetheless, the idea does speak to something.

How does his Olympia address us? With what sort of attention? From what specific distance?  That was a new question 50 years ago. 

The painting of the Spanish Golden age, and specifically Velázquez, is the origin of 19th century realism in France.

I'm piling it on.

Panofsky dismisses the story of the Holy Roman Emperor picking a paintbrush off the floor, but the same story is told about Philip IV. Velazquez’ royal portraits are tragic; they show the weaknesses of an insecure man, yet they show him great respect. Stripped of the obligatory pomp, it’s the same respect Velazquez showed Pablo de Valladolid. Brown ends his book writing that Velazquez “...discovered a new way to transmute images of kings and queens and princes and princesses into a new form of art which continues to grow in power long after the memory of his protectors has faded nearly into oblivion.” Brown, the defender of progress and art for art’s sake, stripped of its full depth of meaning, can’t see the obvious. Velazquez’s “new way” and “new form of art” describe the end of monarchy. The maturation of his technique, the curiosity that drove it, and the obligations of his calling diverged, but the form of his obligation changed as well. The glorification of a master became the sympathy for a friend, in ways that neither king nor servant could admit. We’re back to Baudelaire, and Renoir, von Rauffenstein, and de Boeldieu, the originating tragedy, later played as kitsch, (as farce).

Koerner in 2019 on Bruegel: In Love with Multiplicity
Sauerländer in 1996 on Koerner and Baldung: The Return of the Repressed

I've said it before, here or elsewhere; I've never forgotten Sauerländer's review: describing an art historian manifesting his own sense of the present in his description of the past. And now the historian has moved from a description of faded, decadent, idealism to a new acceptance of the multiform. Koerner's claims for Bruegel vis-a-vis Titian and Velázquez are silly, but I love Bruegel. I feel for his work as Koerner does.

And it all follows the transition I've been watching and describing since I was a teenager. I smiled in 1996, and I smiled today. And everything I write is unpublishable.

Koerner

The exhibition celebrated the master’s hand by detailing, in explanatory displays and photographs in the side galleries, Bruegel’s artistic process layer by layer. This new emphasis on materials and making was a welcome corrective to most previous scholarship, which had been concerned with meanings. There has never been a better painter than Bruegel. Always flawless in his design and execution yet different in each of his works, the peerless painter of the low-life genre yet attaining a monumental vision of the whole, a virtuoso in the ways he manipulates paint yet never contrived, he makes his only rivals (Jan van Eyck, Titian, and Velázquez) seem limited, repetitive, or artificial by comparison. 

Along the entire left edge of Christ Carrying the Cross, a framing tree curves in and out of the unpainted edge of the panel, its bark roughly the color of that naked wood. Bruegel has so much to say that presses up against this narrow strip: in details that only the closest inspection brings to light, he has squeezed in a little gallery of everyday life, including a poor young couple dragging a basket with newborn calves toward town, in reverse of the great counterclockwise parade. He captures the quiet resistance of the ordinary—what W.H. Auden celebrated in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” his poem about Bruegel: the “untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” 

The exhibition obscured this important aspect of his work by making Habsburg sovereignty the starting point and frame of Bruegel’s oeuvre. In the first gallery, the artist’s earliest sketches followed visual documents showing how his works had hung in the imperial collections. This made the Habsburgs seem as if they had been his patrons, when of course he pitched his prints to a very broad audience, and the main client for his paintings was a well-to-do burgher not unlike himself—Jonghelinck’s brother Jacques, who made his living as a sculptor and medalist. 

Much more crucially, Bruegel was profoundly skeptical of sovereign power. In his world, attempts at mastery inevitably fail: Icarus plunges unnoticed into the sea, King Saul falls on his sword, and the Tower of Babel leans as it spirals into the sky, structurally flawed and doomed to fall even without divine intervention. And meanwhile the powerful are foolish, violent, and cruel. In Christ Carrying the Cross, soldiers wearing the red garb of Habsburg mercenaries force Christ to crawl to Calvary; in Massacre of the Innocents, Herod’s army wears Habsburg uniforms. After the Protestant revolt of 1566, Spanish forces marched on the Netherlands to crush dissent and stamp out heresy. Arriving in 1567, the Duke of Alba placed the region under martial law, disbanding citizen militias, replacing native officials with Spanish ones, and executing many thousands, including the Counts of Egmond and Horn, who were beheaded in the Grand-Palace of Brussels, just a few blocks from Bruegel’s workshop on the rue Haute. Alba also clamped down on peasant customs and festivals, like the ones the artist lovingly portrayed.

Sauerländer

In Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Fitelberg, a Jew from Lublin living in Paris, says to Leverkühn, the German composer: “You probably do not realize, cher Maître, how German is your répugnance, which…I find characteristically made up of arrogance and a sense of inferiority….” Like Mann’s novel, Koerner’s discussion of the tension between the godlike self-elevation and the sinful fallen state of the artist is a commentary on the intellectual and spiritual turmoil of German art. One certainly cannot imagine a similar book being written on Venetian or Florentine art of the same period. And in a curious way Koerner himself seems deeply—or should we say narcissistically?—involved in the ambivalences of the obscure topic he has chosen for his remarkable book. It is this involvement which makes one think not only of Leverkühn but also of Thomas Mann.
Koerner’s book is difficult to argue with. It is enormously learned but it proceeds less by arguments than through the use of an evocative rhetoric and ingeniously chosen associations. Koerner himself is well aware of his own suggestive technique and illuminates it with a telling biblical metaphor:

Does not the whole character of our interpretation represent the kind of knowledge precipitated by the bite into the apple: fallen knowledge as the advent of a plethora of meanings without the authority of a meaning, and as the loss of an unequivocal and “natural” access to things and to the meaning of things?

The loss of stable meanings and established authority, and the resulting uncertainties about truth and falsehood, according to Koerner, are thus not simply the product of our postmodern and poststructuralist age, but have been with us since the Fall. Against “a plethora of meanings,” arguments are of little help. But Koerner is much too intelligent and self-conscious a writer not to see the traps in which fallen knowledge may be caught. “One sometimes wonders,” he writes, “whether what art historians discover as the implied beholder is not really a reflection of themselves transposed in the historical material.” Turning narcissism into a method of interpretation was perhaps the price he has had to pay for writing a stimulating book that offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship.

The last few posts are updated a bit. I'm back at the megillah 
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Baroque art is the art of perception, the space between what is,in an ideal sense, and what we experience. Velázquez is a the first painter to paint the world and as it appears to the eye; the other way to put it is to say he was the first painter of illusions.  Jonathan Brown on the portrait of the bufón, jester and actor,  Pablo de Valladolid 

The figure, clad in a black velvet suit an wrapped in a cloak, stands with both feet planted firmly on the ground, his right arm dramatically thrust into space. The marvelous economy of the pose is intensified by the handling of the surrounding space. Pablo is set against a light-colored ground, which is almost completely undefined except in the upper right corner, where the color turns darker, and the shadow at his feet, trails inconsequentially off to the right. The juncture between floor and wall, the key to imparting a sense of space, has simply been omitted. And the figure does not float or appear to be unduly flat. Indeed, the absence distracting elements of any kind brings the jester to life with startling directness. Implicit in this painting is a remarkable challenge to the rules and procedures of Renaissance painting. Through the exercise of his powerful creative mind, Velázquez appears to arrived at a conclusion which, to us, seems obvious – conventional rules of painting produce conventional pictures of the world. Put another way, Velázquez had come to understand that paintings executed by following the classical produced a view different from what the eye sees.  Works of art governed by rules were almost by definition a mental fiction, and Velázquez was interested in perceptible fact. Pablo de Valladolidis based on a simple optical phenomenon—it is impossible for the eye to focus simultaneously on different planes of depth. Thus, the background of a portrait can be treated almost as a blur without any loss of verisimilitude, if one or two cognitive accents are given the viewer. In fact, the illusion of reality gains immeasurably from but far-reaching change of approach. In Pablo de Valladolid, as in the Portrait of Philip IV in Brown and Silver, Velazquez begins to experiment with a novel approach to the art of representation which would eventually redefine the relationship between art and nature.[i]

What’s ignored is that Velázquez is a loyal and committed servant of the most reactionary, absolutist monarchy in Europe,  and has given his king a life sized image (the painting itself is 209 x123 cm) of another, lower, servant represented in a fully realized psychologically astute portrait of another human being, a picture that at the same time has a hieratic classicism, almost the distancing of a still life. Manet called to it “possibly the most extraordinary piece of painting that has ever been done.”[ii] To us it’s almost Brechtian. 

There’s no inherent contradiction between political absolutism and the materiality in Titian’s paintings, in the literary classicism of Poussin and Claude or the physical grace of Baroque sculpture. Tensions are resolved one way or another, or awkward subjects are avoided. Velázquez’ paintings are defined by paradox. To sense this fully you need to look at -and ideally of course to stand in front of- the portraits of the people he served, his superiors, not his equals or below. Here's  Brown's description of  Philip IV in Brown and Silver.

[I]t is here the first time that see the remarkable and original technique which sets Velazquez apart from almost every other artist of his day. In this portrait, Philip wears a costume comprised of a tunic and breeches decorated with silver brocade, under which is an ornate blouse of silvery white and black. On his shoulders there is a black cape also embroidered with silver thread. The challenge of depicting an ornate costume of this kind lies in reproducing the dazzling play of light on the surface without sacrificing the intricacy of the design. The artist who concentrates on the pattern is inevitably forced to imitate the dull geometry of needlework, as dozens of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century court portraits show. But Velazquez’ approach, which aims at capturing the fleeting effects of light as it glances off the silver threads, is not only difficult, but runs the risk of minimizing the intricate workmanship of the garment and thus displeasing the wearer [a note shows that a portrait had been rejected for this reason]. His solution to the dilemma is a brushstroke of genius. Realizing that a high degree of finish was fatal to rendering  spontaneous effects, he resorted to using a sketch-like technique in a formal, official work of art. 

From our perspective, this seems like a logical and not especially innovative idea. But in the context of the seventeenth century, it was virtually unprecedented. A sketchy technique is of course not unknown in the work of other great seventeenth-century painters, but there is a difference of degree which is crucial. In the Portrait of Philip in Brown and Silver, Velazquez abandons the fluid technique of sketching in oil used, for example, by Rubens, and instead utilizes short, succinct, impastoed strokes of infinite shape and size which are applied so that they appear to hover above the brown ground. Seen at close range*this busy tangle of brushwork appears almost random and formless, But at a distance, it reproduces the glittering surface of a richly brocaded costume with remarkable fidelity.[iii]

The passage is confused. There’s no reason to think that Velazquez, once the issue became clear, was ever not interested in the duality that’s visible in the painting here. After all he had begun with solidity, not the reverse. The question more likely is how much practice it took get the result he wanted: light implying structure. And Brown is confused again writing about Las Meninas, or rather he refuses to accept the contradictions that lay behind in.

Las Meninas is the culmination of  a lifelong examination of the relationship between art and  nature. Velázquez seems to have tried to create art without apparent artifice and thus to reduce the gap between what the eye sees in nature and what the eye sees in art. The desire to attain greater naturalism in painting was widely felt in the seventeenth century,  but no one went further in achieving it than Velázquez. The proof of his success is Las Meninas, a painting in which his new type of artistry is used to produce an intense encounter with reality. 

In planning the calculated approximation of art to nature, Velazquez had to redefine the traditional relationship between painting and reality. 64 Renaissance theory placed the intellect at the center of artistic activity; the painter's mind was required to mediate between the haphazard world of appearances and the ordered, harmonious world of art. If the idea of beauty changed according to time and circumstances, the value of an accepted canon of beauty was never challenged. Works of painting which merely recorded natural appearances, such as still life and portraiture, were assigned a lower place in the hierarchy of art than were those which aspired to express universal truths about man, nature, and the divine in an ideal style. In Las Meninas, however, the illusion, not the improvement, of everyday reality is given primacy. For whatever the picture may be, it is a brilliant tour de force of illusionistic painting.

“…to create art without apparent artifice” . “…the illusion, not the improvement, of everyday reality is given primacy. “…a brilliant tour de force of illusionistic painting”  But the artifice is apparent; illusion has replaced the ideal, and all this is in an art made to celebrate Catholic absolutism. You can see why Brown’s head is spinning.

Velazquez’ job was to project to the world the authority of the Spanish throne, to proclaim the divine right of kings, but as he matured he became a master of  tricks and illusion. Physical solidity gives way to flickers of light and the mere perception of solidity.  He painted people of every rank with emotional directness and honesty, so we see weak and melancholy kings and proud dwarfs. He was a loyal both to the king and to his own perceptions, and for the first time in Christian art we’re presented not with an embodiment of ideal truth but images suffused with the need to believe.  Velazquez was the first artist to depict the monarchy, and maybe even god, as a noble lie. 

In the inventory of his fine library one finds very few books of devotion in comparison to what was usual among people of good breeding and social position. There were, however, numerous books on mathematics, architecture, history, and Spanish and Italian poetry. If one excepts the years of Velázquez's youth in Seville, when as merely one more of the artists of his generation, he had to work for ecclesiastical patrons, religious themes occupy an insignificant position in his works and are always the response (Christ on the Cross, The Coronation o the Virgin, Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit) to specific royal assignments. Of course we cannot think of Velázquez as a religious skeptic (an attitude inconceivable and obviously unconfessable in the Spain of the time). In contrast to his contemporaries, however, he distanced himself from conventional religiosity; this absence of the religious is nevertheless accompanied by a dignified and serious tone of mercy toward all creatures, by a "modern" and lay humanism, that makes him unique. [iv]

Panofsky dismisses the story of The Holy Roman Emperor picking Titian's paintbrush off the floor, but the same story is told about Philip IV. Velazquez’ royal portraits are tragic; they show the weaknesses of an insecure man, yet they show him great respect.  Stripped of the obligatory pomp, it’s the same respect Velazquez showed Pablo de Valladolid.  Brown ends his book writing that  Velazquez “…discovered a new way to transmute images of kings and queens and princes and princesses into a new form of art which continues to grow in power long after the memory of his protectors has faded nearly into oblivion.”  Brown, the defender of progress and art for art’s sake, stripped of its full depth of meaning, can’t see the obvious. Velazquez’s “new way” and “new form of art” describe the end of monarchy. The maturation of his technique, the curiosity that drove it, and the obligations of his calling diverged, but the form of his obligation changed as well. The glorification of a master became the sympathy for a friend, in ways that neither king nor servant could ever admit. We’re back to Baudelaire, and Renoir, von Rauffenstein, and de Boeldieu, the originating tragedy, later played as kitsch, (as farce).

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[i]  Brown, p.101

[ii]  Svetlana Alpers The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others,Yale 2007 p. 232

[iii] Brown, p.85
[iv]Perez Sanchez, p.22

here or  here
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Aristotle and Montesquieu on virtue ethics. 

Aristotle:

The distribution of offices according to merit is a special characteristic of aristocracy, for the principle of an aristocracy is virtue, as wealth is of an oligarchy, and freedom of a democracy.[i] 

Montesquieu:

We have just seen that the laws of education should have a relation to the principle of each government. It is the same for the laws the legislator gives to the society as a whole. This relation between the laws and the principle tightens all the springs of the government, and the principle in turn receives a new force from the laws. Thus, in physical motion, an action is always followed by a reaction. We shall examine this relation in each government, and we shall begin with the republican state, which has virtue for its principle.[ii]

The Baroque period was seen for a long time as decadent, and Mannerism justifiably still is. The Baroque is stylish without fear of condemnation, sensuous but no longer prurient.  In the most common art historical definition, this refers to the Rome of Borromini and Bernini, but also Rubens, and the Flemish Baroque. In the broader sense that Panofsky uses it refers also to Cervantes and Shakespeare. In both the central theme is the experience of time. For Bernini as for Leibniz,  time is abstract and material. As Vesely says “Leibniz's understanding of the senses is still based on the integrity of the scholastic world in which the sensible or visible is a manifestation of the universal order. This manifestation is also our main encounter with beauty, in which the perfection of the order is revealed.”The unity is stretched, twisted, folded; our experience changes as we move around it but the unity does not.  This is the birth of what became the secularized idea of aesthetics,  je ne sais quoi,  and also of what we now call glamour, a mode of aristocratic individual performance, judged not just by how closely it hews to custom, but how well, how gracefully, with how much charm or style. But who judges the performance? That’s the unresolved question at the heart of the Baroque in its standard definition, as a renewed but vibrant Catholic conservatism. Beauty as such, a new ideal no longer in a direct relation to justice or truth, is a byproduct of the rise of science, as Vesely puts it in a new age of divided representation.The Baroque is a flowering, and flowers mark an end, not a beginning.  The wider age of the Baroque is the age of theater and literature, the age of the comedians and ironists who mock scholastics and philosophers, as Aristophanes had. It’s the rise, or return, to democracy, the idea of virtue ethics according to Montesquieu, and only briefly of  virtue ethics as defined by Aristotle. 

There’s another Baroque, another form of the final flowering of aristocratic art, not as dynamic, but visceral and more purely visual in its realism and use of illusion, that’s more conflicted. The Spanish Baroque comes down to us as the source for Warhol, through Manet and Degas, through the photography of Nadar, to the French discovery only after Napoleon’s looting of Spain, of Velázquez and the Spanish Golden Age. The Italian Baroque of Caravaggio and Bernini was the product of a new understanding of time and individual experience, focusing on idealized figures as actors in motion. The emotionalism is the controlled emotionalism of performance. Spanish painting by comparison, was static or florid.  El Greco rendered that floridity substantial, with a toughness that made it more than eccentric, more than mannerist. But the new ambiguities largely lay elsewhere. The central figure of course is Velázquez.

Velázquez’s early life made him an anomaly in Spain. He grew up in a literate household; his family claimed descent from minor nobility, but his father wasn’t put out by the thought of apprenticing his son to a tradesman.

Unlike in Italy, where by 1600 the connection between the arts and letters had become well established, in Spain the two had never been joined. The consequences of this failure were profound, because it was through the identification of painting with poetry that the former gained the status of a liberal art, as opposed to a craft. In practical terms, this meant that painters were regarded by the ruling class of Spanish society as the social equals of blacksmiths, coopers, and carpenters. The reasons for the existence of this attitude are complex, but there can be no doubt that the most important was the deeply-ingrained aristocratic prejudice against commerce and manual labor. Painting in Spain was considered to be a handicraft and painters were therefore artisans whose work was essentially characterized by physical rather than mental activity. [iii]

His master Francisco Pacheco was an anomaly as well; orphaned and put in the care of an uncle, he’d grown up in a community of humanists and had joined his uncle in  an informal academy founded by Juan de Mal Lara,a playwright and poet and follower, and cribber, of Erasmus. Other than being Velázquez’ teacher and father-in-law, Pacheco is remembered now mostly as the author of  a treatise and defense of painting, Arte de la pintura,, including biographies of Spanish artists. He spent more than 40 years on it and it was only published posthumously. It’s the first major source we have on Velázquez. 

Pacheco was the supreme embodiment of a type common during the Spanish Counter-Reformation: a faithful servant of a Church defending itself against Protestant reform with closed and intransigent dogmatism, but also a person who, with a bow to moral allegory, demonstrated an evident familiarity with classical tradition and the gods and goddesses of pagan Olympus.[iv]

Pacheco was the official censor for Seville’s Inquisition. Mal Lara had been arrested and detained in 1561 on rumours he’d written anti-clerical poetry, but later anti-clerical elements in his Filosofia vulgar(Common Philosophy) were ignored, or maybe the examiners didn’t even bother to read them.[v]In 1566 he moved to Madrid to join the court of Philip II. This is the confusion where Velázquez begins in Spain and even more, in provincial Seville. 

The professional horizons that lay before the twenty-year-old Velázquez, the possibilities for work that awaited him, were no different from those his father-in-law had known or from those open to Zurbaran, his contemporary: religious painting, devotional canvases, monastic cycles and portraits, and an occasional ruggedly intense portrait or rigidly arranged still life.[vi]

Panofsky describes Titian’s relation with Charles V “extending to his whole family and entourage… [as] almost unique in the annals of art”.  He dismisses the story that Charles, “to the pained surprise of his courtiers” once stooped down to pick up Titian’s dropped brush, but says he treated Titian as “an equal in spirit if not in rank… their correspondence occasionally reads like that of two great and equal powers.”[vii]He also writes about Titian’s “best friend”, Pietro Aretino “the scourge of princes”, blackmailer, and pornographer.  With Aretino and Jacopo Sansovino “Titian contracted, almost immediately, a life-long friendship. A formidable alliance of the "Three Arts of Design" with literature, this "Triumvirate" wielded an enormous influence and its members were united by genuine affection as well as self-interest.”  Sansovino immortalized the three of them on the doors of the Sacristy of St. Mark's. Aretino died in 1556

…allegedly at a dinner party in his own house: when one of the guests had told a particularly funny and indecent story, it was said, Aretino roared with laughter and threw himself back in his chair with such violence that the chair tipped over and he broke his head. There is no shred of evidence for this story… but it throws light on Aretino's reputation — a reputation summarized in a famous "epitaph"… 

"Questo è Pietro Aretino, poeta Tosco, 

Che d'ogni un disse male, eccetto the di Dio;

Scusandosi con dir 'non lo conosco’ "

 ("Here Aretino lies, a Tuscan poet; Evil he spoke of all, except of God; When questioned why, he said 'Him I don't know' “)…

Aretino was perhaps the first publicist to make a living by misrepresentation and extortion; and — in return for praise or, no less often, for silence — he received honors, presents and huge sums of money from nearly all the princes of his time — including the two eternal adversaries, Charles V and Francis I of France. He led a loose life. He wrote indecent sonnets and equally indecent, often extremely amusing comedies while posing as a fervent believer and even aspiring to a Cardinal's hat….

It was indeed only in Venice, governed with an extraordinary combination of discipline and permissiveness… where life was strictly regulated in theory but very free in practice, and where political action was rigorously controlled while the liberty of thought, the liberty of speech and the liberty of the press were protected even against the Inquisition, that a man like Aretino could flourish. [viii]

Jonathan Brown writes that “the itinerant style of kingship practiced by Charles V gave his court an international scope and allowed him to choose his artists from an exceptional range of talent in Italy and Flanders.”[ix]It also means he dealt willingly with a wide range of characters. Panofsky notes his “wry sense of humor”.  When he renounced his crown in 1555, retiring to a monastery he took nine of Titian’s paintings with him, including the monumental ‘Triumph of Faith”, La Gloria”, “and he is said to have looked at it in his dying days with such persistence and intensity of feeling that his doctors took fright.” [x]

Charles V was a polyglot and European ruler. Philip II had been raised and thought of himself as a Spaniard. Titian worked for the son as he had for the father, but though Philip requested that he come to Madrid he never did. Veronese and Tintoretto turned him down as well.[xi] Philip created massive projects, and brought new and major works and more and minor artists, but even they brought new ideas. This was the beginning of the process that produced the great art in the Spanish 17^thcentury.  But after all this I’m still only interested in one artist, and not because he’s the best of them, but why; because his work is the perfect illustration  (and that’s the word for my purposes) as Bernini’s is, of a moment and a place, in the wider culture and politics of its time. I can’t separate my love of art from my interest in culture. I can’t separate sadness from the blues, or art from politics. If philosophy doesn’t interest me as anything more than a kind of literature, a kind of art, then art has to match it. Leibniz outside of mathematics is no more important than Bernini, no more or less of a product of his time, no more or less a brilliant mind. So what’s Velázquez? 

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[i] Aristotle, Politics, Book IV. trans. Jowett

[ii] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, eds. Cohler,Miller, Stone, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge , 1989, Book 5, Chapter 1

[iii] Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, Yale University Press, 1988) p.2

[iv]  Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, “Velázquez and his Art”,  in Velázquez,  Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Julian Gallego , Metropolitan Museum, 1989,  p 24

[v]  Patricia Manning, Voicing Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Brill 2009, p. 34 

[vi]  Perez Sanchez p. 26

[vii] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic. NYU 1969, p.7

[viii] ibid. p.11

[ix] Brown, p.4

[x] Panofsky, Titian, p 64

[xi]  Robert Goodwin,  Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682, Bloomsbury, 2015,  p. 140

research

Picasso in 1923

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration. 

Among the several sins that I have been accused of, none is more false than that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing. 

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything. 

The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable. 

They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.
Velazquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from the way he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velazquez painted. Rubens also made a portrait of the same king and in Rubens' portrait he seems to be quite another person. We believe in the one painted by Velazquez, for he convinces us by his right of might. 

From the painters of the origins, the primitives, whose work is obviously different from nature, down to those artists who, like David, Ingres and even Bouguereau, believed in painting nature as it is, art has always been art and not nature. And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic view of life.

and 1927

It was just at this period that we were passionately preoccupied with exactitude. One can only paint out of a view of reality, which we tried through dogged hard work (how we applied ourselves to this side of things!) to analyze in pictorial terms. ... How anxious we were lest something slip through our clutches (Que de scrupules de laisser échapper quelque chose). ...

Moreover. this feeling for exactitude is one I have always held onto in my researches. There is no painting or drawing of mine that does not respond exactly to a view of the world. One day I'd like to show drawings done in my synthesizing mode (dessins à forme synthétique) next to ones of the same subject done in a classical manner. People will my concern for exactitude. They'll even see that the [synthetic] drawings are more exact

"The philosophical role of illness – and how it can teach us to live reflectively"

Serious illness is a great calamity. It is unwelcome, violent, frightening and painful. If it is life threatening, it requires the ill person and their loved ones to confront death. Illness causes pain, anxiety, incapacitation; it limits what the ill person can do. It can cut a life short, stop plans in their tracks, and detach people from life, suspending the previous flow of everyday activity. In short, illness is almost always unwelcome but must be endured, as it is also unavoidable. We “each owe nature a death”, as Freud put it.

The link, in the original,  now an obscure reference, is to a BBC biography.
The author, (on the right side of the page)

Havi Carel
Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol
Disclosure statement
Havi Carel receives funding from the Wellcome Trust (Senior Investigator Award 103340).

Investigators are researchers.

My current research explores the phenomenology of illness. I am interested in augmenting the naturalistic approach to illness with a phenomenological perspective. I believe that as embodied persons we experience illness primarily as a disruption of lived body rather than as a dysfunction of biological body. But medicine has traditionally focused on returning the biological body to normal functioning, and has therefore worked from within a problem-focused, deficit perspective that ignores the lived body. A phenomenological approach can provide a framework for incorporating the experience of illness into the medical naturalistic account, by providing a rich description of the altered relationship of the ill person to her world.

Belles lettres as research. Anglo-American philosophy is now claim-jumping experimental psychology on one side and literature on the other.

Rules of submitting to Granta: "Please do not submit book manuscripts, academic essays or reviews."
No fucking footnotes. "Experience" and literature. Follow the links.

The research model of art, and politics. Follow the motherfucking links. Learn something.

"Continental and Anglo-American philosophy are collapsing in on themselves and on each other"
continuing

In the great portrait of Innocent X, in Rome, the sitter is looking to his right and up, meeting the painter's gaze and ours. We like Velazquez are standing.This seems to make the Pope uncomfortible, but he holds his tongue.

Velazquez at The Grand Palais.
My original reason for the trip.

"So, too, our Collegiate Gothic, which may be seen in its most resolutely picturesque (and expensive) phase at Yale, is more relentlessly Gothic than Chartres, whose builders didn't even know they were Gothic and missed so many chances for quaint effect."
MacDonald.

Velazquez knew at some level that he was an avatar of bourgeois democracy, and so did his greatest patrons. That's how it fucking works. 

Quibbling with MacDonald, not contradicting him. He'd get the fucking joke.

A repeat from January 2013, because sadly it will never grow old. It's been getting a fair amount of hits recently. Taruskin is smart, but he overplays his hand absurdly.
---

Richard Taruskin. For use here and maybe elsewhere. Annotations here and in the links.

..."The relation of the music to the action is unaccountable," he thought, unable to comprehend the reason why Shostakovich would have "the heroine and her lover strangle her husband on a large stage-sized four-poster bed to a lively dance tune." But the reason is clear enough: the dance tune is there to dehumanize the husband, and to diminish the heroine's crime to a matter of cruelty to animals at worst. What condemns him is nothing more than the fact of his being a part of Katerina's hated environment: he is the beneficiary of the social system that oppressed his wife, and that suffices to just justify his "liquidation." And all of this is conveyed to us by the music alone….

In one way only was Shostakovich faithful to Leskov: in his shockingly
naturalistic portrayal of Katerina's sexual passion. It is lust, pure and
simple, that he portrays; ignited by a rape, it turns Katerina into a love-slave, giving the lie to the claim that she is a liberated, aggressive woman in an age of feminine passivity, that her audacity is another justification for her crimes. In fact, the carnal theme is exaggerated in the opera beyond anything in Leskov. The rape music reaches its climax with an unmistakable ejaculatio praecox, followed by a leisurely detumescence. The salacious trombone glissandos that portray the behavior of Sergei's member achieved instant world fame when an American magazine dubbed them an exercise in "pornophony."...

"The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent the scenes as naturally as possible. And 'love' in its most vulgar form is daubed all over the opera. The merchant's double bed is the central point on the stage. On it all the 'problems' are solved…. This glorification of merchant-class lasciviousness has been described by some critics as satire. But there can be no question of satire here. The author uses all the means at his disposal and his power of musical and dramatic expression to attract the sympathy of the spectators for the coarse and vulgar aims and actions of the merchant's wife, Katerina Ismailova.  Lady Macbeth is popular among bourgeois audiences abroad. Is it not because the opera is so confused and so entirely free of political bias that it is praised by bourgeois critics? Is it not perhaps because it titillates the depraved tastes of bourgeois audiences with its witching clamorous, neurasthenic music?"

The third paragraph is Stalin. The quote at the top is Elliot Carter.
"The Opera and the Dictator: the peculiar martyrdom of Dmitri Shostakovich", The New Republic, March 20, 1989. The last paragraph.

In the liberal West, as we have been proudly reminded in recent weeks, we do not believe in banning works of art. If it is because we believe that they cannot threaten life and morals, then we are more vulnerable than we imaged to the dehumanizing message of this great opera. If it's because we believe that ethics has no bearing on aesthetics, then the process of dehumanization has already begun. If, for its inspired music and dramatic power, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is to hold the stage today, it should be seen and heard with an awareness of history, with open eyes and ears, and with hearts on guard.

Moralists are a confused bunch. "If it is because we believe that they cannot threaten life and morals" It isn't.  [leading here].  "Democracies have freedom of speech not because governments grant it but because the government is not granted the power to take it away." [leading here] The speech of both members of the American Nazi Party and of Sarah Silverman, on stage or on the street, is protected by the 1st amendment.

Taruskin on John Adams' Klinghoffer
"Music's Dangers And The Case For Control" NYT Dec 2001

In a fine recent essay, the literary critic and queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore writes that ''to take art seriously -- to recognize its potential -- must be to recognize that there might be reasonable grounds for wanting to control it.'' Where should control come from? Unless we are willing to trust the Taliban, it has to come from within. What is called for is self-control. That is what the Boston Symphony laudably exercised; and I hope that musicians who play to Israeli audiences will resume exercising it. There is no need to shove Wagner in the faces of Holocaust survivors in Israel and no need to torment people stunned by previously unimaginable horrors with offensive ''challenges'' like ''The Death of Klinghoffer.''

Censorship is always deplorable, but the exercise of forbearance can be noble. Not to be able to distinguish the noble from the deplorable is morally obtuse. In the wake of Sept. 11, we might want, finally, to get beyond sentimental complacency about art. Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm. The Taliban know that. It's about time we learned.

More from, the Guardian  Interview with the librettist in 2012.   Taruskin attacked Barenboim in the same piece. Barenboim responds.  See also Nir Rosen and Joan Rivers


[if the video's gone: Sarah Silverman, The Aristocrats]
The Musical Mystique TNR, 2007

Belief in the transcendent human value of creative labor has always invested German romantic aesthetics with the trappings of a secular or humanistic religion. In the twentieth century, such a theory of art could be seen as a bulwark against totalitarianism. Adorno held it up as a counterforce also to the instrumentalizing and rationalizing tendencies of "administered" capitalist society, which turns human subjects into objects of economic exploitation. Since he was trained in music, he held up classical music in its least compromising forms (epitomized in the famously esoteric work of Arnold Schoenberg) as the chief example of "truth-bearing" art, as opposed to the dehumanizing popular music churned out by the culture industry for mass dissemination. 

Skeptics of this viewpoint, while often appreciating the loftiness of its aspirations, have pointed to the ease with which high ideals can shade into complacency, autonomy into irrelevance, and disinterestedness into indifference. My admittedly tendentious diction ("serve," "vehicle") signals my own skepticism as to the genuineness of its disinterestedness. This skepticism is not mine alone. Many have noted the relationship between this highly individualistic and self-celebrating concept of art and the social emancipation (or more accurately, the social abandonment) of artists with the demise of reliable aristocratic patronage, and suspected it of seeking a compensatory advantage. "Materialist" historians have long investigated the relationship between its high-minded claims and actual marketing strategies. 

Particularly as it pertains to music, the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy was pre-eminently a congeries of German ideas about German art that consoled and inspired the Germans at a particular point in German history. Even in the nineteenth century, it never won much credence in France or Italy or Russia (though Britain was susceptible). Now that the whole twentieth century has run its course and German music has run aground, the claim of universality is threadbare...

["...it never won much credence in France" (a link to Baudelaire). "L'art pour l'art". Nietzsche, in the original, uses the French]

And then later

To ask "what does it mean?" is death for music; but to ask "what has it meant?" can be illuminating. The one imposes arbitrary limits, the other welcomes all comers to share in the pleasure of engagement and response…. 

Higher is not automatically better; but opponents of snobbish pretension would be foolish to lose sight of the reality of the high-low gamut.

From the introduction to On Russian Music

It is yet another unfortunate consequence of the "poietic fallacy" that these pieces should have been read as attacks on Prokofiev–and "personal" ones at that, since they do not always reflect my opinion of the quality of the music, but rather my reaction to the ethical issues that its performance raises. He may not be altogether spared, but the "blame", if that is what one choose to call it (or the "problem", as I would prefer), is shared by all of the participants in our contemporary art world: composer, performer, audience, critics, mediating structures and institutions. “What is under critique in these pieces is not ‘the music itself’ but the whole network of social relations that comes into play in the maintenance of the activity we call ‘classical music’

Continuing an argument made first in an op-ed in the NY Times in 1991 that's not on the web, though the letters to the editor are.

Taruskin defines the "poietic" fallacy as "the conviction (or in practice the default assumption) that composers are the only significant historical agents in music and that scholarship should be an aspect of their defense against social mediation." 

The first paragraphs of Chapter 20, "Prokofieff's Return"

In January of 1990 Kurt Masur, soon to be appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, led the San Francisco Orchestra in a program that included Sergey Prokofief's familiar cantata based on his music to Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. The program had been set long in advance, and I was hired to write the notes for it. I did so during the summer of 1989, and was forced to confront anew the old problem of "political" art.

… Both film and music were shamelessly hyperbolic, dramaturgically blatant. They were, in short, propaganda. Could such a project possibly give rise to a first class work of art?  

"Like it or not, the answer is yes" I wrote in 1989, and went on to praise Prokofieff's music for its outstanding stylist and technical qualities, particularly the deftness, the originality, and the expressiveness of the orchestration. I felt I was making an effective answer to that complacent dictum that we tend to mouth in the West without reflecting: that art, to be authentic, must be politically or even morally "disinterested" (read: aloof). I quoted a letter that Ned Rorem had recently written to the editor of the New York Times, in which he had rehearsed his old refrain that "the more an artwork succeeds in politics the more it fails as art". Alexander Nevsky, I contended, succeeded both as politics and as art, and put the lie to what I called Mr. Rorem's smug and self-validating platitude. 

And then I went to the concert. Between the summer of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 the world had changed. Not three weeks before the performance, the contorted corpses of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had shown up on television, the most startling evidence yet that totalitarian authority in Europe had suddenly collapsed.

The last

"Suffering and great as the ninetenth century whose complete expression he is, the mental image of Richard Wagner stands before my eyes," wrote Thomas Mann at the beginning of an immortal essay. We might not wish to claim a comparable greatness for Prokofieff. His sufferings were imposed, and his century was awful, the most atrocious and spiritually vacant in human history. But between man and times there was the same fatal congruence. As we say good riddance to the century, we may also find ourselves saying farewell, and sorry, to the man.

I'm not much interested in John Adams' music or in contemporary "classical" music. It's either academic or vulgar. And the struggle of Zionists to allow themselves to come to terms with their culpability is not something I'm able to take very seriously, at least intellectually. But art is concerned with honesty more than intellect. I love Titian's paintings for Philip II; I wouldn't expect a 17th c. European Protestant or an Amerindian to enjoy standing in front of a portrait of the leader of his torturers. That's another issue. Velazquez, in his works, has a conflicted even ironic distance from his own claimed beliefs that adds an intellectual aspect to his art, but I wouldn't use that to demand more. If I refuse to see Zero Dark 30, as I refused to see The Hurt Locker it's more from the fact that I'm too near to the events while at the same time too aware of world outside the American imagination to have the patience to watch America begin -and no more than that- to come to grips with the events of the past 10, 40 or 100 years. The US is responsible for more destruction than bin Laden was ever be capable of.  Chomsky is right: "Uncontroversially" George Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's." But that says nothing about the films as art, only about my ability to be a disinterested observer, not objective but removed. There's an issue when a culture becomes so insular and defensive that even a disinterested viewer finds little to look at, but there's a lot to look at in American culture.

I can't help but add Charles Rosen's review of Taruskin's Oxford History, in the NYRB.
Quoting Taruskin

William, (Guillaume), seventh count of Poitiers and ninth duke of Aquitaine (1071–ca. 1127), was the first European vernacular poet whose work has come down to us. The tradition, socially speaking, thus began right at the top, with all that that implies as to “highness” of style, tone, and diction…. A troubador’s subject matter was the life he led, viewed in terms of his social relations, which were ceremonial, idealized, and ritualized to the point of virtual sacralization. In keeping with the rarefied subject matter, the genres and styles of troubadour verse were also highly formalized and ceremonious, to the point of virtuosic complexity of design and occasional, sometimes deliberate, obscurity of meaning.

while adding this

I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.

And this, and this. The last is hanging on the wall above my desk. It cost a pretty penny.
---
Taruskin now has his own tag, including posts where he's not mentioned, but where his association with law is relevant.

I saw Zero Dark 30

the fish rots from the head

Leiter

And some philosophers think aesthetic judgments are not subjective!
The 1964 reaction to The Beatles. Just to be clear, I enjoy the Beatles and I don't think any of these folks are wrong (or right).

Both Plato and Sophocles wrote dialogues; their words and those of Nietzsche and Goethe describe and make manifest the central issues of their times and places. If they're read now by different audiences that's a matter of contemporary taste, not the words on the page. We order the world according to our preferences.

An old argument, rewritten in a recent note to an editor:

To understand the complexities of Velazquez' portraits of Philip IV, you need to stand in front of one. I like to use Velazquez because he's my favorite painter and because its so obvious that his beliefs and his art are in conflict. He was an arch defender of the divine right of kings but he can't help but paint his king as a nebbish. And his painting technique was a tour de force of open artifice. His highlights are flecks of paint that show themselves as that; they move back and forth from ephemeral -as image- to material in a way that's totally unsuited to absolutism. If his paint handing were rougher or smoother -either way- it would not have the same effect, but his brushstrokes function as fully and amazingly illusionistic while reminding you that's what they are. It's psychologically destabilizing. I like to say about Velazquez that he's the first painter to paint not the glory of kings but the need to believe in the glory of kings. His royal portraits are tragic, and also important for the study of the history of Europe.

Rembrandt,  Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653, Metropolitan  Museum, NY

Charles Simic wasn't born in this country.

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is."

working on this, years later. Fixing a few stupid mistakes and some bad writing. It's still a mess.

Gustav Grundgens in Fritz Lang's M (1931)

The conflict between sympathy and justice is as great a subject for art as for philosophy. It's hard to watch people struggling to face responsibility for their actions; it's even harder when the acts are recent, or ongoing. But how should we talk about German books, art, and film, made before, during, and after WW II? How should we talk about European and American art in general? [I wrote this a month after writing about Taruskin and Prokofiev. How did I forget that?]

I love Titian's portraits of Charles V and Philip II, both murderers on an epic scale. The paintings' craft is at odds with absolutist order, and they mark that disjunction with more subtlety than any document. Velazquez' kings are sad; his slaves are proud. He was the first artist to make works that less describe faith than the desire for it, but I wouldn't expect a Protestant, or Jewish, or Amerindian subject of the Spanish crown to admire his portraits of the king. 

I didn't want to see Zero Dark 30.  I'm too close, and too aware of the world outside the American imagination to want to watch a document of American attempts to come to grips with the last 10 years of war. Chomsky is right: "Uncontroversially" George Bush's crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's". But my hesitation says nothing about the film itself, only about my ability to keep a distance.

Objectivity is impossible. It's tempting to moralize if you know enough, but generalizing from indignation leads to disaster. Zionism is to American liberalism what climate denialism is to the American right. We're creatures of sense and experience, and blind spots are a given. I wasn't shocked to find out Chomsky's still a Zionist. The assumption that only Americans, or men, or whites, or heterosexuals, or people with or without PhDs, are capable of magical thinking is itself magical thinking: absurd. But this country specializes in that absurdity. Americans use soul-searching to pat themselves on the back, celebrating the recognition of error as yet another triumph. It's less American than the product of the sort of individualism this country helped spread to the world: a self-blind confidence, looking out with ironic detachment and lovingly at yourself in the mirror.

How do we acknowledge responsibilities while admitting the frailty of reason? The relation of ideas to acts is a problem of art, not science.

The best defense of journalism I know is by Nir Rosen, responding to accusations of treason, after embedding with the Taliban. The formatting is in the original.

objections to my article have been silly so far. i'm a journalist, not an american journalist. my job is not to serve as a propagandist for anybody, just to tell stories and my advantage is that i can tell stories that are hard to come by[.]
any comparison to WWII or the nazis always shows a lack of imagination, but in this case also a lack of understanding. the whole reason why its important to have people like me, able to hang out with militias in somalia, afghanistan, iraq or lebanon, is because they are not a formal army of a formal state, with clear goals, structure, hierarchy etc. on the contrary, their motives are not known and diverse, often at odds, they take up arms for different reasons and as anybody remotely interested in COIN knows by now (except for sassaman perhaps), they do not put down their arms through force, unless you're willing to use force like the russians in chechnya (and that hasnt worked for the israelis), but instead their goals and motives must be understood, and eventually a political accord must be reached.
moreover, journalists regularly embed with the american military when it is conducting operations, attacks, killing. whats the difference?
imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?

That's not a defense of objectivity but of disinterest, verging on amorality. Yet on questions of morality I'd trust Rosen more than most, and the reasons are in the same paragraph. He argues less from superiority than for honesty. He's an adventurer who's arguing for intellectual seriousness. Judgements of his moral seriousness are left to others. But he doesn't deny morality. A good surgeon knows he loves cutting people open. His first responsibility is to be good at his job.

If Rosen defends journalism, so does Baudelaire

It is painful to observe that similar errors are to be found in two opposing schools: the bourgeois school and the socialist school. "Let us moralize! Let  us moralize!" both sides exclaim, with the fervent ardor of missionaries. Of course, one preaches bourgeois morality and the other socialist morality, and, as a result, art is a mere question of propaganda.

Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue always rewarded? No; and yet if your novel, if your play is well put together, no one will take it into his head to break the laws of nature. The first necessary condition for the creation of a vigorous art form is the belief in underlying unity. I defy anyone to find one single work of imagination that satisfies the conditions of beauty and is at the same time a pernicious work. 

Everyone I know who's liked Zero Dark 30 has described is as a sympathetic study of human pathology, something between a film by Frederick Wiseman and De Palma's Scarface. Every criticism by Americans has been colored by a defense of America or its self-image.  Criticism by foreigners is predicated on the fact that it's yet another film by Americans about Americans and its victims are secondary. But that's criticism by refusal not obfuscation.

If it's a victory for feminism that Israeli women are allowed into combat, it's a victory for feminism that women are active members of Hamas. We all live within boundaries, and I'm not going to moralize about a movie that's more honest than its American critics. Spanish painting was about Spain. Russian films about soldiers in Afghanistan or Chechnya are about Russia. Israelis making movies about Palestinians are making movies about Israelis. Men making films about women are making films about men. If they think they're making films about anything else they're lying to themselves. Honesty is all that's required for art. Honesty and the the acceptance of honesty are necessary for real politics.

Contrast Rosen to Steve Coll, in the NY Review

Even if torture worked, it could never be justified because it is immoral. Yet state-sanctioned, formally organized forms of torture recur even in developed democracies because some public leaders have been willing to attach their prestige to an argument that in circumstances of national emergency, torture may be necessary because it will extract timely intelligence relevant to public safety when more humane methods of interrogation will not.

There is no empirical evidence to support this argument. Among other things, no responsible social scientist would condone peer-reviewed experiments to compare torture’s results to those from less coercive questioning. Defenders of torture in the United States therefore argue by issuing a flawed syllogism: the CIA tortured al-Qaeda suspects; those suspects provided information that helped to protect the public; therefore, torture was justified and even essential. In his recent statement to agency employees about Zero Dark Thirty, acting CIA director Morrell gave this argument implicit support when he said that the ongoing debate over the CIA’s treatment of al-Qaeda suspects after 2002 “never will be definitively resolved.” 

That is a timid tautology; it is also evidence of a much wider political failure. As with discourse about climate change policy, the persistence of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other forms of argument about the value of officially sanctioned torture represents a victory for those who would justify such abuse. Zero Dark Thirty has performed no public service by enlarging the acceptability of that form of debate.

"Even if torture worked, it could never be justified because it is immoral…."  It would have helped a bit if Coll had written "should", to remove the implication that he had some authority. As it is the sentence reads as if The School of the Americas or KUBARK never existed, or Henry Kissinger were never born. "Yet state-sanctioned, formally organized forms of torture recur… " because people think it works. "There is no empirical evidence to support this argument…." because as he says,  no "responsible social scientist" would perform the study.

Coll begins with assumptions of moral authority and does what he can to support them. He blusters; he takes the CIA at it's word.  After Julian Assange met with lawmakers in Reykjavik he said Assange was hoping "to transform Iceland... into the "Cayman Islands of First Amendment-inspired subversion." See a good response here.  Unlike Rosen, Coll is an American journalist: the first thing he defends is his own superiority.

Corey Robin likes to mock liberals; whiteness is a recurring theme (search the page for references to Israel, Palestinians or Zionism; there are none) [there were none at the time]. He claims the role of a white[?] defender of the legacy of the American civil rights movement; you think he'd link at least once in the past few years to Philip Weiss. 

Robin's post on Zero Dark 30 linked to Glenn Greenwald, doing what I'd done in the earlier version of this piece, talking about a movie he hasn't seen.

I have not seen this film and thus am obviously not purporting to review it; I am, instead, writing about the reaction to the film: the way in which its fabrications about the benefits of torture seem to be no impediment to its being adored and celebrated.

Now we've both seen it, and neither of us has changed our minds

Greenwald is a moralist, or he's become one, maybe feeling the aftereffects of supporting the invasion of Iraq. His first book received a lot of praise; now it seems to be forgotten.  He's left like Coll to proclaim the inefficacy of torture, while continuing the absurd fixation on bin Laden, still a fetish figure for Americans, rather than focus on larger issues: the ridiculous expenditures following stupid policies that have always and will continue to backfire. Greenwald fits the US model of pundit as scold, a reformed drunk defending America's lost honor. His need to feel superior traps him in an argument he should be smart enough to avoid.

Democratic freedom and democratic responsibility are a duality: obligation to self and other, not to "the other" in the language of hypertrophied rationalism but to human beings other than yourself. Democratic states operate under an extension of this duality: to defend equality under law is to defend equality of all under law—if all people are equal, that must include foreigners—but states are exclusionary by definition, and by necessity. To say "No one is illegal" is a statement of perfect justice, not law, and law must take precedence. In an imperfect world this is a problem without a solution. It's an aporia, something to be dealt with as a recurring element of a political process where there's no opportunity for sainthood. At the same time when I read of American authors' concerns over the extrajudicial killings of American citizens, I'm left wanting to remind them that assassination itself is a problem for a democracy.  Even allowing for the necessities of statehood, it's not enough to defend democracy at home, especially because it's so easy to compartmentalize. "Liberal Zionism" in America means defending equality where you live and institutionalized bigotry in the place you claim your heritage.  Zionism is less the equivalent of Irish nationalism than Garveyism for Jews, but the logically obvious parallel has been ignored. The logic of Zionism in the west is the rhetoric of white and non-white, alternating and simultaneously. African Americans never had that option. The extremity of the disconnect even among the intellectual class seems peculiarly American.  Zionism, like American nationalism, including Greenwald's wounded nationalism, is not an argument from observation and reason but moralism and exceptionalism.

Peter Beinart:

I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become--and I'm quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here--an "apartheid state."

Beinart is now the editor of Open Zion. His latest book has caused a scandal, a scandal only worth talking seriously because it shows how much Zionists have been forced to admit how conservative they are by definition.  But this is not a license for a new corrected moralism.  If more and more Americans are able to see through the pretensions of  Zionism it's not the result of any advances in political philosophy. It can't be explained using the terms liberals employ that might give credit to the human imagination.  It's not the result of moral progress, it's economics and demographics. We learn from experience and contact. Ideas are secondary; people do not change as much as they are changed. White liberals and academics tend to forget that the civil rights movement wasn't led by social scientists and political philosophers but by lower middle class blacks and their priests.  If the strength of ideas were enough, there'd be less need for Jadaliyya; it would be just another publication in its niche.  As it is it's another aspect of the changes that have produced the international bourgeois revolution of the Arab spring. You don't have to be a determinist full-on to notice that academics have the habit of trying to showing the effect of determinism only on those other than themselves. As'ad AbuKhalil mocks the NY Times Middle East correspondent for not knowing Arabic.  When the Washington post was hiring six months ago the job posting read: "A strong candidate would bring some familiarity with the Arab world and some knowledge of Arabic, but these are not required." But it's not just the mainstream press that's lazy. And it's not just Americans, but Americans as the product of a revolution and now the reigning world power, have a tendency towards self-absorption that at the moment is unparalleled.

The only unthinking internationalism in this country outside the social life of immigrants takes place in the culture of finance and its attendant demimonde.  Club kids in Miami are more internationalist than American students of foreign policy. The romance of educated Americans with Paris or Matisse is little different than a fantasy of Borneo. Absurdities are universal; the absurdity of American political and intellectual life is something else. It's the politics of sincerity. Irony is seen universally as anti-political: reserved for enemies, never for friends, and never for yourself.  Young liberals are part of the gentrifying hordes who move into working class neighborhoods and throw the residents out of their homes.  Has there ever been an educated reformist movement so unaware of the perquisites of its own class? And the preferred art—as entertainment—of young technocrats, as it is for their teachers, is cerebral. The literary saints of American political science departments are Asimov and Tolkien, "speculative" fiction and fantasy. The failure of political thinkers to come to terms with the changes over the past decades have everything to do with a preference for theory over observation. The primacy of ideas—of theories of any sort—connotes that one can be either an idealist or a cynic; the mature politics of action demands principled casuistry.

The stupidity of American politics is the stupidity of the individual and the ideal, which is why the most profound American culture embeds in anti-politics. The anti-political comes by its politics honestly. Public politics in the US has been increasingly artificial; more than half the population has abandoned it and those who haven't float above it. Real politics is the politics of conflict not only between people but within them: people arguing with themselves. Arguments in Lebanon and Syria and Egypt, in Iran and even Israel are politically grounded: people know what it is to be pulled in two directions; they don't have a choice.  I picked those countries because they're places where politically-minded Americans either sound off like idiots or refuse to say anything, because there's no way to simplify the issues enough to allow them to say something their friends couldn't call them on as soon as the winds change. In America you can choose to be political and only people who choose to be political talk about it. And politics has become professionalized. The charm of European "continental" philosophers is that if their politics is a choice it's still a politics of amateurs; they're not philosophers, they're philosophes. The distinction is cultural but culture is key. Americans by comparison are either pedants of technocracy or if they have fantasies of Europe, of jouissance.

The self-described liberal philosopher and Zionist Martha Nussbaum famously launched an attack on the self-described radical philosopher Judith Butler; Butler now is in the position of defending the liberalism that Nussbaum claims to represent. There's nothing radical to her argument; it's a basic defense of civil and legal rights. For another example see Zizek, in Ramallah.  Nussbaum, Butler and Zizek all indulge magical thinking: they lie to themselves. Zizek is the least offensive because he's the most willing to offend. But I saw him speak in NY with the same filmmaker he joined in Ramallah, both of them with Badiou. Philosophers seem always to prefer their art as kitsch. And for radicality none of them match Rosen.

imagine if that one taliban commander had not screwed up my plans to go with them when they conducted attacks, and i had seen that too. isnt that interesting? isnt it important to understand who they are? and most importantly, wouldnt it make for a fun read?

That quote is dark irony, but it describes something central to democracy. Philosophers who defend democracy pretend it began in philosophers' books, but the books came later. First came coexistence. In politics as in life communication comes before grammar. The Greek playwrights were the foundations of democracy; the philosophers preferred kings. Philosophers are utopian by definition; theater can only be anti-utopian. Philosophers identify with judges but lawyers are actors playing roles. And even playing parts they choose, they have reason not to lose their sense of irony.

Bassem Youssef "The Egyptian Jon Stewart" went on Stewart's show and defended the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood even as he disagrees with them. They're part of his audience. American liberals seem not to have noticed that Stewart and Colbert never get attacked by the right.  Youssef and Stewart are important in their countries for the same reason: as amateurs, they're free to take politics more seriously than they take themselves; Youssef is the more interesting because he's living through his country's crisis. He has skin in the game.  But comedians understand democracy more than philosophers do: comedians and lawyers and novelists and honest journalists. Philosophers offer propositions; comedians show us the subtext.

So are Egyptian liberals now going to follow Turkish liberals and "pray" for the army?

The BBC

"I put it to Leila that the man whose departure she was calling for wasn't a dictator, but a man her compatriots had voted for. We got a slightly troubling answer. "Yes, but the people who voted for him," she said, "are uneducated."

I have heard several similar responses. One of those opposed to President Morsi is the political sociologist Dr Saed Sadak, from the American University in Cairo. "Morsi was rejected by the urban areas," he told me. "It was the rural parts of Egypt that voted for him and his Muslim Brotherhood." "Isn't that how democracy worked all over the world?" I replied. "Not everybody gets who they want, they can always vote him out next time."

Dr Sadek's response was blunt. "It's like you're telling me to keep the babysitters I hired even if they are beating my child, just because we gave them a fixed term contract."

Istanbul in 2008

Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, “have started to be everywhere,” said Ms. Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and it is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable. “We are Turkey’s image. They are ruining it.”

Egypt is divided, like Iran; the sooner Egyptian liberals accept that the better. And the Egyptian Black Bloc are no more political than Ultras, but the Ultras don't pretend. Worldwide, urban liberals see the rest of their homelands as flyover country. The sooner liberals understand how often their self-interest overshadows their principles -the sooner they learn to avoid the pitfalls of American liberalism- the better.  Many are still tempted by libertarianism, while more and more libertarians are willing to admit that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This leads us back to where democracy began: less in the demand for individual freedom than for an individual role in decision-making, with a concomitant acceptance of obligation.  Individualism is an ideology and it's infected every aspect of our politics, "left, right and center"; the phrase describes an object drifting in a sea of signification.  We will never see ourselves as others see us –all consciousness is partial– and others will never know what's in our heads. What's in America's head these days? It's got something to do with Zero Dark 30.

The US has tortured, and trained torturers, and supported states that used torture in furtherance of what are seen as US interests, which have nothing to do with democracy. This didn't begin after 9-11.  Let's stipulate that torture works, not against any and all. It can work as well as any successful raid in the drug war can be said to work, while being just as counterproductive as policy. It solves nothing. It makes more enemies. It's counterproductive in general and specifically for a democracy, as supporting dictatorships and monarchies is counterproductive in absolute terms and for democracies. Only democracy strengthens democracy.  Realism demands an acknowledgement of the existence of dictators and kings, but not more.

Optimists love to think of their successes.  Art remind us of our failures, and in a very real sense of the inevitability of failure, in death. Attacks on Zero Dark 30 are attacks on entartete kunst, as if it were the cause of decadence. The film is either a symptom or a record: as a symptom it's secondary. As a record it will last, as record and as art, because it says more about America than any document. 

Film critic Jim Hoberman in The Guardian, on why Zero Dark 30 will never work as propaganda

Like Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln was anticipated as a movie that would naturally reflect well on the current president and, indeed, on the eve of the Zero Dark Thirty opening and at the behest of senate majority leader Harry Reid, Spielberg hosted a special screening for a bipartisan senate audience. Zero Dark Thirty was repudiated, Lincoln embraced. The Oscar wars heated up. The Hollywood Reporter found that "negative talk is escalating", along with whispering campaigns: Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture, Lincoln distorts history. Perhaps so. Still, by putting an essentially positive spin on a bloody tragedy, Lincoln provides a history lesson with a happy ending. Zero Dark Thirty, whose chances at winning best picture seem to be nil, is the exact reverse – a success story with intimations of monumental failure. (Meanwhile, Argo – a movie in which movie magic is put to heroic use – emerged from its Golden Globes victory as an exciting feelgood, industry-flattering Oscar alternative.) 

Whereas Obama and his commanders followed the mission to kill Bin Laden in real time, Zero Dark Thirty presents Maya as its author and sole witness. She is the first to get the good news, the only American to greet the returning Seals, the person who unzips the body-bag and IDs the corpse. Maya is so important that she flies home alone in the empty bay of a cargo plane. Once again, she is blank and then, raison d'etre extinguished, she cries. 

Is Maya, like Ishmael, the lone survivor left clinging to the flotsam of the Pequod? Is she condemned, like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, to "wander forever between the winds"? What did it cost the girl (or Obama) or America to kill Bin Laden? Zero Dark Thirty slakes a thirst for vengeance and leaves an aftertaste of gall.

continuing in the next post
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"Moralize! Moralize!" both sides exclaim, with the fervent ardor of missionaries. Of course one preaches bourgeois morality and the other socialist morality, and as a result, art is a mere question of propaganda."

"You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness....