Reading endless apologetics and getting lectured about how "we have to separate the art from the artist" or how we have to "keep politics out of it" is one of the surest ways to get me yelling. All I can think about is Hanna Gadsby's incandescent rant about Picasso and how if you really believe you can separate him from his art, just take his name off one of his paintings and see how much it fetches at auction. All I can think about is somebody pointing out a decade ago how quickly all these apologists run to defend the reputation of yet another monster, rather than the well-being of the lesser-known artists they abuse. I remember a journalist telling me (in workshop at Darmstadt) that we just *couldn't* subject some asshole conductor to any real accountability, despite a lifetime of him acting like a monster, because "his Debussy recordings are incomparable."
Thanks for that. To me, there are a few things at play here that get flattened when we use the "separating the art from the artist" label.
Nothing should excuse living artists who have been credibly accused (or even convicted) of harm/gross misconduct from facing accountability for their actions, or dead artists from having their works reevaluated in new light for similar revelations.
From there, however, I mistrust the idea that an artist's conduct should absolutely dictate the value of their art — as much as I mistrust the idea that an artist's biography should never be considered against the art. There are meaningful ways of working between those two poles, which is something I think Gadsby missed with that underbaked exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The auction line is a good joke, but it's not a good argument.
There are artists who have been terrible human beings whose works I cannot engage with. I may get to a point where I can again in the future, I may not. But there are also artists who are equally as reprehensible whose works I can engage with, both on the merits of the work itself AND with the biography of the artist in question. If I'm lucky, I can do both at once.
I think the argument she's making there is that a lot of times the "value" of a work of art is directly tied to the name attached to it, not to the art itself. If I were to extend the argument further, I'd make the claim that *no* artist -- or, to be more specific, let's say no composer or musician -- is irreplaceable.
I struggle to think of a pre-War composer who was as awful a human being as Picasso, but let's go with Stravinsky. He was a fascist sympathizer, and as a composer dreadfully unoriginal (The Rite of Spring sounds really great until you match it up with the book of Russian folk music he was flipping through when he wrote it, and you realize a lot of it was almost direct transcriptions of the first melody on the page).
If you take all his music and toss it in a vault for a couple hundred years, how much would you really struggle to fill that gap with somebody from the same time period who wrote music that was at least as interesting? I'd argue not very much.
Postwar, while I don't think he was a monster, I think Stockhausen was also a rip-off artist and something of a creepy-guru-bro. And he got his hands into *every* cookie jar in West Germany, to the point that a whole generation of musicians equates "new music" with *his* music. Was there really anything he wrote that is irreplaceable? I think probably the most interesting piece of his was "Plus-Minus," and most of the musical ideas for that came from Mary Bauermeister (if you look at his sketches it's all Fibonacci numbers and combinatorics, mind-numbing in how conventional it is), and the graphic design came from Cardew.
"Engage with" is fine. But do we *need* to give their art pride of place? Are there really no alternatives without the baggage?
Probably part of the problem is we don't really have any useful way to judge the quality of art itself, so we go with novelty and celebrity-worship.
But I take your point, and I have to confess that I haven't really followed Gadsby past her first two specials, and I agree (from what I read, at least), that her exhibition was pretty … wobbly.
Thanks for this post, as well as all your posts interrogating the public face of the elite. I wonder if a closer look at the financial operations of classical industry would bear fruit. How much does Dudamel make? What is Netrebko's fee? How big is the disparity between headliners and second-string soloists, not to mention first violin? Who actually holds the purse strings? I'm a jazz cat first, classical music is my second language, but from where I sit, it seems like the whole world of grand opera and the state-sponsored symphony is essentially "the rich at play." (Joseph Kerman in CONCERTO CONVERSATIONS (I'm paraphrasing): "Opera is one of the few places left where the rich can display their clothes and pearls in front of each other.") I am going to Yuja Wang and Thomas Adès at the end of the month in NYC, and the cheapest pair of tix total $500. I'm paying it, but it is really a stretch.
The US and Europe are two incredibly different financial beasts when it comes to this; my take after about 20 years in New York and now living in Berlin for the last 5 (and having traveled here for work fairly consistently beforehand) is that it is a more democratic experience as an audience member. Cheaper tickets, smaller houses, and much younger audiences. So that’s a plus. But the industry is a different kettle of fish.
I’ll put it this way: When I did digital media for classical musicians, one of our clients sent a nice bottle of bourbon to their team (me and two senior staff members). I joked that the person who couldn’t afford such a bottle normally should be the one to take it home. This was both absolutely true and not at all well-received. (As for the bourbon, I’m sure it’s still sitting in a closet in those offices.)
Reading endless apologetics and getting lectured about how "we have to separate the art from the artist" or how we have to "keep politics out of it" is one of the surest ways to get me yelling. All I can think about is Hanna Gadsby's incandescent rant about Picasso and how if you really believe you can separate him from his art, just take his name off one of his paintings and see how much it fetches at auction. All I can think about is somebody pointing out a decade ago how quickly all these apologists run to defend the reputation of yet another monster, rather than the well-being of the lesser-known artists they abuse. I remember a journalist telling me (in workshop at Darmstadt) that we just *couldn't* subject some asshole conductor to any real accountability, despite a lifetime of him acting like a monster, because "his Debussy recordings are incomparable."
Great. Now I'm feeling stabby again.
Thanks for that. To me, there are a few things at play here that get flattened when we use the "separating the art from the artist" label.
Nothing should excuse living artists who have been credibly accused (or even convicted) of harm/gross misconduct from facing accountability for their actions, or dead artists from having their works reevaluated in new light for similar revelations.
From there, however, I mistrust the idea that an artist's conduct should absolutely dictate the value of their art — as much as I mistrust the idea that an artist's biography should never be considered against the art. There are meaningful ways of working between those two poles, which is something I think Gadsby missed with that underbaked exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The auction line is a good joke, but it's not a good argument.
There are artists who have been terrible human beings whose works I cannot engage with. I may get to a point where I can again in the future, I may not. But there are also artists who are equally as reprehensible whose works I can engage with, both on the merits of the work itself AND with the biography of the artist in question. If I'm lucky, I can do both at once.
I think the argument she's making there is that a lot of times the "value" of a work of art is directly tied to the name attached to it, not to the art itself. If I were to extend the argument further, I'd make the claim that *no* artist -- or, to be more specific, let's say no composer or musician -- is irreplaceable.
I struggle to think of a pre-War composer who was as awful a human being as Picasso, but let's go with Stravinsky. He was a fascist sympathizer, and as a composer dreadfully unoriginal (The Rite of Spring sounds really great until you match it up with the book of Russian folk music he was flipping through when he wrote it, and you realize a lot of it was almost direct transcriptions of the first melody on the page).
If you take all his music and toss it in a vault for a couple hundred years, how much would you really struggle to fill that gap with somebody from the same time period who wrote music that was at least as interesting? I'd argue not very much.
Postwar, while I don't think he was a monster, I think Stockhausen was also a rip-off artist and something of a creepy-guru-bro. And he got his hands into *every* cookie jar in West Germany, to the point that a whole generation of musicians equates "new music" with *his* music. Was there really anything he wrote that is irreplaceable? I think probably the most interesting piece of his was "Plus-Minus," and most of the musical ideas for that came from Mary Bauermeister (if you look at his sketches it's all Fibonacci numbers and combinatorics, mind-numbing in how conventional it is), and the graphic design came from Cardew.
"Engage with" is fine. But do we *need* to give their art pride of place? Are there really no alternatives without the baggage?
Probably part of the problem is we don't really have any useful way to judge the quality of art itself, so we go with novelty and celebrity-worship.
But I take your point, and I have to confess that I haven't really followed Gadsby past her first two specials, and I agree (from what I read, at least), that her exhibition was pretty … wobbly.
Thanks for this post, as well as all your posts interrogating the public face of the elite. I wonder if a closer look at the financial operations of classical industry would bear fruit. How much does Dudamel make? What is Netrebko's fee? How big is the disparity between headliners and second-string soloists, not to mention first violin? Who actually holds the purse strings? I'm a jazz cat first, classical music is my second language, but from where I sit, it seems like the whole world of grand opera and the state-sponsored symphony is essentially "the rich at play." (Joseph Kerman in CONCERTO CONVERSATIONS (I'm paraphrasing): "Opera is one of the few places left where the rich can display their clothes and pearls in front of each other.") I am going to Yuja Wang and Thomas Adès at the end of the month in NYC, and the cheapest pair of tix total $500. I'm paying it, but it is really a stretch.
The US and Europe are two incredibly different financial beasts when it comes to this; my take after about 20 years in New York and now living in Berlin for the last 5 (and having traveled here for work fairly consistently beforehand) is that it is a more democratic experience as an audience member. Cheaper tickets, smaller houses, and much younger audiences. So that’s a plus. But the industry is a different kettle of fish.
I’ll put it this way: When I did digital media for classical musicians, one of our clients sent a nice bottle of bourbon to their team (me and two senior staff members). I joked that the person who couldn’t afford such a bottle normally should be the one to take it home. This was both absolutely true and not at all well-received. (As for the bourbon, I’m sure it’s still sitting in a closet in those offices.)