Charles Murray Challenge (Belated Edition)
In a 2003 interview with Steve Sailer to promote his book Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray said the following:
To which, Steve challenged his readers to come up with works that would meet that criteria. (Steve’s review of the book is here.) Well, I have belatedly taken up the challenge.
First of all we must clarify what we mean by work that anyone will care about 200 years from now. Now it is quite apparent to me that the period since 1950, contrary to many theorists, was not a total artistic wasteland. In fact a rather large amount of good work has been done since that date. I have no doubt that someone will care about the poetry of say, May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, John Hollander and Galway Kinnell or the songs of Paul Simon, The Clash, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Gwen Stefani in the 2207, just as poetry lovers today still care about the poetry of Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, George Darley, William Morris and George Meredith. If that is the standard, quite a bit of work from 1950 on will survive in one way or another. However, what I think Murray really means is work that the generally cultured person, as opposed to the specialist or an obsessive like me, is likely to know or at least have heard of, that is to say work that has true greatness, stuff that compares reasonably with the likes of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Austen, Whitman, Browning in literature or Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky in music. In that sense, the period since 1950 can be judged fairly harshly. It has produced lots of good, minor art, but failed, for example, to produce anything in painting the likes of Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Turner, Van Gogh, Manet, Renoir, Degas, or even Picasso or Matisse, to mention only a random few.
The one exception is film. The one thing most apparent from my list is that most of the artistic energy of the late 20th century has gone into film. I suspect this does not necessarily have anything to do with the underlying health of the culture so much as the fact that film is still pretty much virgin territory. There is just so much low hanging fruit to pluck. It hasn’t all been done before. Add to this that film is still pretty much a popular art form, that has to serve its audience, and you have gone a long way to explaining the relative well-being of the art form. Harsh elitist art theories won’t put bums in the seats (and with a paint kit that expensive a film better bring in an audience). Similarly, pop music, which also has to immediately connect with its audience, is fairly strong. Classical music, regrettably, is all but dead; there are still decent composers out there, but none of their work is entering the general repertory. Fortunately there are still good classical performers out there and a plethora of archived recordings.
Excluding film as something of an outlier, the one other thing you will immediately notice is that the great European cultures have nearly dropped off the map as far as achievement. The great art, such as it is, since 1950 has been largely produced in obscure places like Latin America, Czechoslovakia, Jamaica, and Canada. The United States has fared much better than Europe, but is not as dominant as one might think, and much of the American art on the list below has been produced by blacks.
What surprised me was just how many of these works were Canadian. To a certain extent this may be selection bias; being Canadian I just know that much more about Canadian culture. And yet I know enough about art around the world, that I don’t think it can entirely account for this disparity. My own theory is that Canada came rather late to modernist game, and avoided, at least for a time, many of the destructive tendencies that played havoc with the arts since 1900. Of course now Canada has gone the whole hog for the modern project, but up until the late fifties Canada was still a very traditional, British place, committed to God and Empire, in contrast to those wild, godless Yankees. Canada had no artistic achievement to speak of before the 1940s. That brief interval between Canada’s artistic awakening in the 40s and 50s and full entry into modern culture gave rise to a lot of achievement. The Canada of Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, Norman McLaren, Yusuf Karsh, Bill Reid and Norval Morrisseau was actually a pretty impressive cultural flourishing, especially considering what the rest of the world was like. That distinctive culture is gone. In general, the longer and harder a place holds on to traditional values the more complete its collapse into modernism. The arts scene in Canada is now pretty dismal, and its products are indistinguishable from arts scene anywhere else. Canadian cities west of Quebec are some of the most bland places on earth. Nobody builds in Ontario Gothic anymore. In contrast, those revolutionary Americans, who adopted parts of the modernist project at an earlier time, have in many ways better managed to hold onto some sense of tradition. (Quebec, until the 1960s a bastion of ultra-traditional Catholicism, is even worse off than English Canada.)
The reader may be somewhat surprised to see Reid and Morrisseau on this list. In fact when I suggested Reid’s work over at Pith and Substance as one of British Columbia’s main contribution to world civilization, someone called it “a quick yen earner.” This is ridiculous. Reid and Morrisseau are great artists, comparable to just about anything in the European tradition. They need no apology. But the sentiment expressed by the commenter is not unindicative of their treatment at the hands of the artistic establishment. Reid and Morrisseau are not in the mainstream. Their work does not fit easily into the status game played within the white artistic community and has mostly been relegated to Anthropology museaums instead of art galleries. Morrisseau, easily the best painter Canada has produced, only had his first showing in the National Gallery last year. But white condescension was a benefit to these artists. Since their work was considered more folklore than high art, they were expected to maintain a stronger attachment to tradition. This was all to the good of their art. As Steve Sailer has noted, while cultural exchange may fuel artistic innovation, isolation may be just as important:
In a somewhat similar fashion, Native Canadian artists got all the benefits of European advances in technique, while keeping the benefits of isolation from the theoretical games that were destroying the European arts tradition. This combination of European technique and traditional form set off something like an artistic explosion among Native Canadians, one which only now may be slowing down.
On a sadder note, most of the artists I have listed below got their start before 1950. Robert Penn Warren, probably the best of the poets on the list, was born in 1905 and already published a superb novel in All The King’s Men before 1950, before focusing more on his poetry from the 60s on. All of the jazz is from the 1950s and early 60s. The youngest guy on this list is Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. The rest are all getting pretty old or are already dead of old age.
NOTE:
With the exception of film, I have not included anything from the Middle East, India, or East Asia. I just do not know enough about work done there since 1950 to be helpful. I also do not know enough about African or Latin pop music to be of use there either. On the other hand, I have tried to make judgments purely on artistic merit. Thus, important technical innovators whose work leaves me somewhat cold, like the films of Jean-Luc Godard, have not been included.
The difference between a major and minor artist is always somewhat debatable. There is no hard and fast line, only a matter of gradations. It is, I suppose, possible to argue that say Swinburne, at least in pieces like Hertha and Anactoria, was a major poet, but not, say, Beddoes (good as he sometimes was). I seriously considered the poems of James Merrill and Jay Wright, the songs of Townes Van Zandt, Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the criticism of William Empson and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for this list.
I have been somewhat stingy in the matter of pop music. Individual songs and performances I consider undoubtedly great include Ray Charles’ Hard Times, Astrud Gilberto’s The Girl from Ipanema, Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night, Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, Emmylou Harris’ If I Needed You (with Don Williams), Neil Young’s Hey Hey My My, Roy Orbison’s Crying (with k.d. lang), The Cranberries’ Linger, Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, among many others. But I don’t think that any of these artists ever consistently reached the level of Dylan, Marley or the Beatles. Therefore they are not on the list. I applied a similar standard to poetry.
ALSO NOTE:
When Steve Sailer originally asked his readers to suggest work that would meet the Charles Murray challenge, the most common responses were Vladimir Nabokov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I expect that both of them will last in some way or another, but while I admire the work of both men, I do not think that either of them match the work of the writers below. They are true, but minor, artists. Solzenitsyn is a very good writer, but he owes his outsized fame more to his personal bravery and historical importance than to his greatness as a writer. The Gulag Archipelago is a work of art, but I suspect it will be of more interest in future to historians than artists. Nabokov is perhaps the best and certainly the most spectacular stylist in English since 1950, but his work seems to owe its popularity more to its flashiness than its depth. No one writes more extatic prose. His books are fun, but there is not much there there.
I apologize if you favourite work is not on this list. It may be very good work, but probably not great work. I too have personal favourites (the films of Eric Rohmer, the criticism of Harold Bloom, albums by U2, fiction by Ursula LeGuin) that hold a special meaning for me, but which I could not justify including on this list. No insult is intended to them or to you.
Classical Music
Dmitri Shostakovich
String Quartets
Symphony No. 10
Benjamin Britten
Billy Budd
Jazz
Ella Fitzgerald
The Duke Ellington Songbook
Miles Davis
Steamin’
Workin;
Relaxin’
Kind of Blue
John Coltrane
My Favorite Things
The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions
Pop Music
The Beatles
Bob Dylan
Aretha Franklin
Amazing Grace
Bob Marley
Nirvana
Dance
Georges Balanchine
Sir Frederick Ashton
Novels
Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth
Operation Shylock
Sabbath’s Theatre
Poetry
Paul Celan
Octavio Paz
Jaroslav Seifert
Robert Penn Warren
Criticism etc.
Northrop Frye
Anatomy of Criticism
Deogolwulf
Fewtrils
Painting and Sculpture
Pablo Picasso
Norval Morrisseau
Bill Reid
Robert Davidson
Photography
Yusuf Karsh
Edward Weston
Film
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
All About Eve
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
Singin’ in the Rain
Billy Wilder
Sunset Blvd.
The Apartment
John Ford
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
Stanley Kubrick
2001: A Space Odyssey
Dr. Strangelove
Francis Coppola
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now
Woody Allen
Annie Hall
Hannah and Her Sisters
Deconstructing Harry
Martin Scorsese
Raging Bull
Steven Spielberg
Schindler’s List
Saving Private Ryan
Alfred Hitchcock
Vertigo
Psycho
Kenneth Anger
Short Films
David Lean
Bridge on the River Kwai
Lawrence of Arabia
Anthony Minghella
The English Patient
Francois Truffaut
Jules and Jim
Two English Girls
Werner Herzog
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Vittoria De Sica
Umberto D
Federico Fellini
Nights of Cabiria
8 1/2
Bruno Bozetto
Allegro Non Troppo
Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon
Ikiru
Kagemusha
Ran
Hayao Miyazaki
Princess Mononoke
Ingmar Bergman
Summer Interlude
Summer with Monika
The Seventh Seal
Wild Strawberries
Persona
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Rublev
Satyajit Ray
The Apu Trilogy
Norman McLaren
Short Films
I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question.
To which, Steve challenged his readers to come up with works that would meet that criteria. (Steve’s review of the book is here.) Well, I have belatedly taken up the challenge.
First of all we must clarify what we mean by work that anyone will care about 200 years from now. Now it is quite apparent to me that the period since 1950, contrary to many theorists, was not a total artistic wasteland. In fact a rather large amount of good work has been done since that date. I have no doubt that someone will care about the poetry of say, May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, John Hollander and Galway Kinnell or the songs of Paul Simon, The Clash, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Gwen Stefani in the 2207, just as poetry lovers today still care about the poetry of Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, George Darley, William Morris and George Meredith. If that is the standard, quite a bit of work from 1950 on will survive in one way or another. However, what I think Murray really means is work that the generally cultured person, as opposed to the specialist or an obsessive like me, is likely to know or at least have heard of, that is to say work that has true greatness, stuff that compares reasonably with the likes of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Austen, Whitman, Browning in literature or Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky in music. In that sense, the period since 1950 can be judged fairly harshly. It has produced lots of good, minor art, but failed, for example, to produce anything in painting the likes of Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Turner, Van Gogh, Manet, Renoir, Degas, or even Picasso or Matisse, to mention only a random few.
The one exception is film. The one thing most apparent from my list is that most of the artistic energy of the late 20th century has gone into film. I suspect this does not necessarily have anything to do with the underlying health of the culture so much as the fact that film is still pretty much virgin territory. There is just so much low hanging fruit to pluck. It hasn’t all been done before. Add to this that film is still pretty much a popular art form, that has to serve its audience, and you have gone a long way to explaining the relative well-being of the art form. Harsh elitist art theories won’t put bums in the seats (and with a paint kit that expensive a film better bring in an audience). Similarly, pop music, which also has to immediately connect with its audience, is fairly strong. Classical music, regrettably, is all but dead; there are still decent composers out there, but none of their work is entering the general repertory. Fortunately there are still good classical performers out there and a plethora of archived recordings.
Excluding film as something of an outlier, the one other thing you will immediately notice is that the great European cultures have nearly dropped off the map as far as achievement. The great art, such as it is, since 1950 has been largely produced in obscure places like Latin America, Czechoslovakia, Jamaica, and Canada. The United States has fared much better than Europe, but is not as dominant as one might think, and much of the American art on the list below has been produced by blacks.
What surprised me was just how many of these works were Canadian. To a certain extent this may be selection bias; being Canadian I just know that much more about Canadian culture. And yet I know enough about art around the world, that I don’t think it can entirely account for this disparity. My own theory is that Canada came rather late to modernist game, and avoided, at least for a time, many of the destructive tendencies that played havoc with the arts since 1900. Of course now Canada has gone the whole hog for the modern project, but up until the late fifties Canada was still a very traditional, British place, committed to God and Empire, in contrast to those wild, godless Yankees. Canada had no artistic achievement to speak of before the 1940s. That brief interval between Canada’s artistic awakening in the 40s and 50s and full entry into modern culture gave rise to a lot of achievement. The Canada of Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, Norman McLaren, Yusuf Karsh, Bill Reid and Norval Morrisseau was actually a pretty impressive cultural flourishing, especially considering what the rest of the world was like. That distinctive culture is gone. In general, the longer and harder a place holds on to traditional values the more complete its collapse into modernism. The arts scene in Canada is now pretty dismal, and its products are indistinguishable from arts scene anywhere else. Canadian cities west of Quebec are some of the most bland places on earth. Nobody builds in Ontario Gothic anymore. In contrast, those revolutionary Americans, who adopted parts of the modernist project at an earlier time, have in many ways better managed to hold onto some sense of tradition. (Quebec, until the 1960s a bastion of ultra-traditional Catholicism, is even worse off than English Canada.)
The reader may be somewhat surprised to see Reid and Morrisseau on this list. In fact when I suggested Reid’s work over at Pith and Substance as one of British Columbia’s main contribution to world civilization, someone called it “a quick yen earner.” This is ridiculous. Reid and Morrisseau are great artists, comparable to just about anything in the European tradition. They need no apology. But the sentiment expressed by the commenter is not unindicative of their treatment at the hands of the artistic establishment. Reid and Morrisseau are not in the mainstream. Their work does not fit easily into the status game played within the white artistic community and has mostly been relegated to Anthropology museaums instead of art galleries. Morrisseau, easily the best painter Canada has produced, only had his first showing in the National Gallery last year. But white condescension was a benefit to these artists. Since their work was considered more folklore than high art, they were expected to maintain a stronger attachment to tradition. This was all to the good of their art. As Steve Sailer has noted, while cultural exchange may fuel artistic innovation, isolation may be just as important:
Let's use Liverpool in the early 1960s as an example of creativity: you could buy all the records you wanted of American black musicians (openess), but there weren't any American black musicians in town to monopolize the music jobs (opportunity). So, local English kids were needed to play American music in the dance halls, and they started to bring their own spin to it.
In contrast, music has gotten bogged down in a racial caste system in the last two decades, which is a big reason why it's gotten boring. For example, when rap first came out, white bands like the Clash, Blondie, and Talking Heads did a few rap songs and nobody minded. But after awhile, that kind of crossover became unfashionable. Nowadays, you have to be as good as Eminem for whites to do hip-hop. Similarly, blacks have lost all interest in the electric guitar. On "Live at the Apollo" the other night, a black guy came out carrying an electric guitar and got booed off the stage. So, there's lots of diversity, but little cross-fertilization.
In a somewhat similar fashion, Native Canadian artists got all the benefits of European advances in technique, while keeping the benefits of isolation from the theoretical games that were destroying the European arts tradition. This combination of European technique and traditional form set off something like an artistic explosion among Native Canadians, one which only now may be slowing down.
On a sadder note, most of the artists I have listed below got their start before 1950. Robert Penn Warren, probably the best of the poets on the list, was born in 1905 and already published a superb novel in All The King’s Men before 1950, before focusing more on his poetry from the 60s on. All of the jazz is from the 1950s and early 60s. The youngest guy on this list is Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. The rest are all getting pretty old or are already dead of old age.
NOTE:
With the exception of film, I have not included anything from the Middle East, India, or East Asia. I just do not know enough about work done there since 1950 to be helpful. I also do not know enough about African or Latin pop music to be of use there either. On the other hand, I have tried to make judgments purely on artistic merit. Thus, important technical innovators whose work leaves me somewhat cold, like the films of Jean-Luc Godard, have not been included.
The difference between a major and minor artist is always somewhat debatable. There is no hard and fast line, only a matter of gradations. It is, I suppose, possible to argue that say Swinburne, at least in pieces like Hertha and Anactoria, was a major poet, but not, say, Beddoes (good as he sometimes was). I seriously considered the poems of James Merrill and Jay Wright, the songs of Townes Van Zandt, Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the criticism of William Empson and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for this list.
I have been somewhat stingy in the matter of pop music. Individual songs and performances I consider undoubtedly great include Ray Charles’ Hard Times, Astrud Gilberto’s The Girl from Ipanema, Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night, Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, Emmylou Harris’ If I Needed You (with Don Williams), Neil Young’s Hey Hey My My, Roy Orbison’s Crying (with k.d. lang), The Cranberries’ Linger, Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, among many others. But I don’t think that any of these artists ever consistently reached the level of Dylan, Marley or the Beatles. Therefore they are not on the list. I applied a similar standard to poetry.
ALSO NOTE:
When Steve Sailer originally asked his readers to suggest work that would meet the Charles Murray challenge, the most common responses were Vladimir Nabokov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I expect that both of them will last in some way or another, but while I admire the work of both men, I do not think that either of them match the work of the writers below. They are true, but minor, artists. Solzenitsyn is a very good writer, but he owes his outsized fame more to his personal bravery and historical importance than to his greatness as a writer. The Gulag Archipelago is a work of art, but I suspect it will be of more interest in future to historians than artists. Nabokov is perhaps the best and certainly the most spectacular stylist in English since 1950, but his work seems to owe its popularity more to its flashiness than its depth. No one writes more extatic prose. His books are fun, but there is not much there there.
I apologize if you favourite work is not on this list. It may be very good work, but probably not great work. I too have personal favourites (the films of Eric Rohmer, the criticism of Harold Bloom, albums by U2, fiction by Ursula LeGuin) that hold a special meaning for me, but which I could not justify including on this list. No insult is intended to them or to you.
Classical Music
Dmitri Shostakovich
String Quartets
Symphony No. 10
Benjamin Britten
Billy Budd
Jazz
Ella Fitzgerald
The Duke Ellington Songbook
Miles Davis
Steamin’
Workin;
Relaxin’
Kind of Blue
John Coltrane
My Favorite Things
The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions
Pop Music
The Beatles
Bob Dylan
Aretha Franklin
Amazing Grace
Bob Marley
Nirvana
Dance
Georges Balanchine
Sir Frederick Ashton
Novels
Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth
Operation Shylock
Sabbath’s Theatre
Poetry
Paul Celan
Octavio Paz
Jaroslav Seifert
Robert Penn Warren
Criticism etc.
Northrop Frye
Anatomy of Criticism
Deogolwulf
Fewtrils
Painting and Sculpture
Pablo Picasso
Norval Morrisseau
Bill Reid
Robert Davidson
Photography
Yusuf Karsh
Edward Weston
Film
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
All About Eve
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
Singin’ in the Rain
Billy Wilder
Sunset Blvd.
The Apartment
John Ford
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
Stanley Kubrick
2001: A Space Odyssey
Dr. Strangelove
Francis Coppola
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now
Woody Allen
Annie Hall
Hannah and Her Sisters
Deconstructing Harry
Martin Scorsese
Raging Bull
Steven Spielberg
Schindler’s List
Saving Private Ryan
Alfred Hitchcock
Vertigo
Psycho
Kenneth Anger
Short Films
David Lean
Bridge on the River Kwai
Lawrence of Arabia
Anthony Minghella
The English Patient
Francois Truffaut
Jules and Jim
Two English Girls
Werner Herzog
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Vittoria De Sica
Umberto D
Federico Fellini
Nights of Cabiria
8 1/2
Bruno Bozetto
Allegro Non Troppo
Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon
Ikiru
Kagemusha
Ran
Hayao Miyazaki
Princess Mononoke
Ingmar Bergman
Summer Interlude
Summer with Monika
The Seventh Seal
Wild Strawberries
Persona
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Rublev
Satyajit Ray
The Apu Trilogy
Norman McLaren
Short Films
posted by Thursday at
6:19 PM
21 Comments:
"Excluding film as something of an outlier, the one other thing you will immediately notice is that the great European cultures have nearly dropped off the map as far as achievement."
Counter-examples that refute this claim include Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting and Filth), Michel Houellebecq (Atomised, Platform), Ian McEwan (Enduring Love, Atonement, The Cement Garden), Radiohead (Kid A), Einsturzende Neubauten (Silence is Sexy), King Crimson (Larks' Tongues, Discipline), and Kraftwerk. The contemporary music that will last comes from Europe.
"Nabokov is perhaps the best and certainly the most spectacular stylist in English since 1950, but his work seems to owe its popularity more to its flashiness than its depth."
Man, your opinion is well stated, but so wrong-headed it upsets me.
Tolstoy is to literary art that captures the totality of society what Nabokov is to literary art that perfectly encapsulates strong, strange, brilliant personality. Humbert Humbert, John Shade, Deloyes Hayes, and Charles Kinbote have exruciating depth.
Lolita, Part II, Chapter 32
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate--dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed--an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.
A pointless exercise (your post, not mine), but shouldn't it be 'that criterion'?
A pointless exercise (your post, not mine), but shouldn't it be 'that criterion'?
Criterion is one of those Latin forms that is dying out - kind of like datum as the singular of data. Criteria works for both singular and plural in modern parlance.
As for which works will survive or in what quantity, I agree, that is anybody's guess. (Love in the Time of Cholera currently seems to be a lot less popular with most Lit professors than One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance. Time could change that.) I do feel, however, that Thursday's assessment that film (along with some popular music) is the big thing of our era and that the best non-cinematic works will be regarded as minor masterpieces is probably correct. Still, we may be remembered for many more such minor works than people like Murray would imagine.
So great to see someone give Deconstructing Harry its due. I think it's the best thing Woody Allen ever did.
I agree that film is where the action is artistically today.
I don't think Woody Allen will be much remembered. In his serious and semi-serious films he gives a snapshot of a strange era of cultural collapse from an alienated point of view, but his films have never been that broadly popular and that's unlikely to change.
I think Speilberg will be remembered more for E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark than for his (currently) more respected works.
I also think popular films like Star Wars will be remembered in the same way The Three Musketeers is remembered, with new adaptations and riffs on the characters being popular centuries from now. Whether Star Wars will be respected by critics as great art is another story.
Also like Tolkien Lucas created a new genre, the space fantasy where earth has no connection to the events, a sort of "middle earth" with high technology. He'll be remembered for that.
I agree that film is where the action is artistically today.
Artistically? Commercially certainly.
I'd expect Animal Farm by Orwell/Blair to have lasting appeal.
Robert Penn Warren? Surely a good but minor poet. But Geoffrey Hill is for the centuries, like him or not.
I would put Robert Davidson above Bill Reid, and (on the Canadian subject) add Leonard Cohen to pop music.
If you include Nirvana you must at least include Joy Division. Although I love them both I would not include either.
Anger's and McLaren's films will always have followers, but I can't see them on this list.
Gwen Stefani? Yikes. I was hoping we'd forget about her by 2009, forget about 2207.
Deconstructing Harry seems like a reach, but I'm a big Woody Allen fan, so I'm glad you included him.
I'd take Spirited Away over Princess Mononoke as a work that will last.
Overall, it's a terrific, thought-provoking post.
By Shostakovich, not just the string quartets and the 10th Symphony, but also the 24 Preludes & Fugues (1951), the 11th (1957), 13th (1962), 14th (1969) and 15th (1971) Symphonies, The 1st Cello Concerto (1959), the Violin (1968) and Viola (1975) Sonatas, and the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo (1974).
By Benjamin Britten, "The Turn of the Screw" (1954), War Requiem (1961), "Death in Venice" (1973), and 3rd String Quartet (1975).
By Francis Poulenc, "Dialogues des Carmelites" (1956), Gloria (1959), and Flute Sonata (1962).
Oh, and if there's any justice, some of the symphonies of Eduard Tubin and Vagn Holmboe will be better known in 200 years than they are today. But one hopes without much confidence.
I'm glad my obiter dicta (well-chosen, granted) were so memorable. I wish you'd justify your assertion though; his work seems to be just so many ugly, squat, goggle-eyed figures. I figured it was only as a function of white guilt and xenophilia that he is as well-known as he is.
If any piece of film will be remembered, it will be "Eraserhead". Stark beauty (vastly beyond the limits of Anger's narrow imaginative and thematic interests) and a perfect encapsulation of life from about 1920 to at least the present day.
Nirvana doesn't deserve so much a nose-scrunched "Really?" as a resounding "WTF"? How old are you, Thursday, twenty-eight?
Add to music: Queen. They've got endurance in popularity and worldwide appeal. I'm mostly struck by the variety of people that like them.
Nobody 200 years from now will have a flicker of awareness about anything on your list, with the shower scene from Psycho as a possible exception.
in 200 years, there will be few people interested in Western culture around to matter.
Who will speak English in 2207?
Western art: well, it will be like reading or listening to American Native lore in this time. It will seem like this to the bulk of the cultures who had enough kids to be running around then.
African/Asian art should be the big focus in 2207.
I think this post is sort of a sad or amusing form of hubris...I can't figure out which.
This list kills me; do you realize that the vast majority of works on your list are already all but ignored by the mass culture?
Seriously, do you know anyone outside a small group of nuts who have seen Aguirre, Wrath of God, let along didn't want to kill themselves half way through out of utter boredom?
And Nirvana? My oldest two kids are 16 and 19. They think Nirvana is complete and utter shit and so do the few of their many friends that have heard of them. (The weirdest part, though, is my 16-year-old is totally into Kiss and Iron Maiden. Haven't figured out where that came from.)
We totally overestimate even the very short-term popularity of contemporary works.
Orson Welles. "Citizen Kane"
Michael Curtiz. "Casablanca"
But...these came before 1950. *Sigh*
Nirvana? Gwen Stefani? Obscure Canadian poets whom nobody has ever heard of, outside of academia circa 1977? Come on. (Glenn Gould might be the only Canadian of true artistic note to come out of Canada AT ANY TIME...but even he was only basically a performer.)
Some thoughts of Fred Reed on our time:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/DarkAge.shtml
Nirvana???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gimme a break. They weren't even good musicians. Singer couldn't sing, and he couldn't play the guitar to save his life.
What about Led Zeppelin? They still sell a gazillion CD's even today almost thirty years after they broke up.
The Beatles still sell, and ensnare youth with their songs who become post-fans (much like Zeppelin).
Epigone, IGNORE what the media tells you is popular and watch what people BUY 25 years after the buzz has died down. No one will give a fuck about Britney, even though she sold alot, a quarter-century from now..........but Zeppelin and the Beatles will have ensnared new music listeners (amongst remaining whites) AGAIN by that time.
If demographic trends continue however, white western culture will be like the Sumerian culture of the old middle east, fantastic achievements forgotten by a differeent people.
I understand your patriotism, but Robertson Davies is not a great writer. He is a perfect example of a very good minor writer.
In general, we live in an analogue to the Hellenistic era. In the Hellenistic era there was an enormous production of are and literature. Then the tastes changed and it simply disappeard. The Greek literature we have now is written in the Attic dialect. The hellenistic works written in koine simply disappeared.
The same will happen in about 50-100 years. The taste will changed and the whole modern art and literature will disappear.
Not that what will come instead will be necessarily very good. Academic and antiquarian work generally isn't - read Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius if you doubt it.
Baduin
As Rod Dreher has pointed out this post anew, I thought I should correct some glaring omissions in the original post.
Thanks to Joe L. for the suggestion of Robert Davidson.
Also, Pablo Picasso was still going strong after 1950. Britten's Billy Budd (1951) just makes it in under the wire.
Sadly, I just plain forgot the great poet Paul Celan. That was my biggest omission.
Aside from Joe L., the most interesting suggestions were from Vinteuil, but, alas, after listening to those works again, I find I am going to stick with my original list for classical music, Billy Budd excepted.
Also, the Fewtrils of Deogolwulf over at the Joys of Curmudgeonry deserve to be here.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home