On bullshit

Art—oh, we’re not yet done with Art—is bullshit.

I rarely feel the need to justify my use of rude words, I enjoy them so, but in this case there is a genuine reason for this usage. I refer to an article by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt from which I take my own post title: “On bullshit.” Frankfurt seeks to set out the difference between bullshit and lies: the crux of bullshit, according to him, is not that it seeks to deceive. Bullshit may deceive, but it may also be accurate. The bullshitter, according to Frankfurt, is not interested in the truth values of his statements: he is solely interested in the effect that they have, and the desired effect is usually to impress, to elevate, to create a sense of worth.

Art is bullshit. Especially music, and specifically the Romantic aesthetic—that which many would assert is the only “true” aesthetic of music, that which claims that music has “meaning”  or somehow objectively “expresses” emotions—is bullshit. And if you buy into this, you are buying into the bullshit. I want to be clear: you are quite entitled to, if this is how you enjoy music. Really, I mean that. But I don’t really enjoy music that way, and I am sick of being told that this is inferior, unsubtle, or lacking in true understanding. I don’t do the bullshit, and I don’t see why I should.

Let’s talk about Beethoven, and that half-hour of bombast that ruins the previous three movements of his ninth symphony: the famous setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” “The symphony’s roots are in German poet Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 poem ‘An die Freude’ (‘Ode to Joy’), which has as a central theme mankind’s earthly happiness,” declares Terrence Hackett, and everyone tiresomely points out—and Bernstein tiresomely apotheosized—the claim that Freude (“joy”) here is a veiled reference to Freiheit (“freedom”). The ninth symphony, inspired by this hymn to liberty, was completed in 1824, and only a churl such as I would feel the need to direct your attention to the fact that this final movement bears something more than a passing similarity to the last movement of the 1808 Choral Fantasia—which not only does not use Schiller’s poem, but for which Beethoven composed the music first and then, only shortly before the performance, commissioned a poet (whose identity is still not certain, so minor Beethoven’s textual requirements at that point) to write words fitting the music already written. Enjoy the symphony if you must—I defend to the death your right to be wrong on this point—but if you persuade yourself that there is any “inspiration,” any “roots” of the music in the Schiller text—retrofitted to a melody written a decade and a half earlier—then you are indulging in bullshit.

Mahler’s sixth symphony of 1904—“The Tragic,” as it is called, though not by him—is an intensely personal work. The erratic rhythms of the third movement depict his two daughters playing: “the unrhythmic games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand,” as his widow later put it. Tragically, the elder daughter died and this, coupled with Mahler’s own diagnosis with a terminal heart condition, and the forced departure from his job as conductor at the Vienna opera house, formed a “triple hammer-blow” of fate—the three fortissimo timpani strikes which punctuate the final movement. Except … except this is bullshit. These interpretative nonsenses all stem from his wife Alma Mahler—a fascinating, extraordinary woman, but not one adverse to bullshit of her own. The third movement was composed before his younger daughter was even conceived; Mahler himself, as late as 1907, was of the opinion that his condition was far from a death sentence and merely prohibited over-exertion; and in his revision of the work he actually removed the final of these supposedly fundamental “hammer blows”—though so prevalent is adherence to bullshit that the majority of performances reinstate it. Once again: enjoy this music—it’s too long and over-the-top for my tastes, though it has some fine moments and the ending is, fairly literally, sensational. But why bullshit in pseudo-autobiographical silliness? If you enjoy the music, why do you need these justificatory crutches? Only to claim that the music is “deep,” that it is “personal,” that it is “Art.” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

These are only the most egregious examples: the cases where the bullshit happens to be exposable; but the principle behind them—the idea that music somehow carries meaning, or can somehow literally recreate (rather than emulate) emotion or personal connection—is the bullshit. I don’t reject the pleasure in the Romantic aesthetic, though I only indulge in small doses; neither do I say you are wrong to totally immerse yourself in it, if that’s how you get your kicks. But it is, in Frankfurt’s terms at least, bullshit.

“The English do not much care for music,” the waspish conductor Thomas Beecham is purported to have said, “but they love the sound it makes.” The delight with which this apocryphal bon mot is paraded around the internet and in columns by the great and good of music criticism demonstrates how much the Art snobbery that insists that this bullshit is necessary for true appreciation of music still permeates our culture. Less wittily the 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick, in his magnificent demolition of the Romantic aesthetic On The Musically Beautiful, spoke contemptuously of the pathological appreciation of music, which—desiring, as he did, a return to classical aesthetics—he contrasted with the active, the analytic, the appreciation of form and structure. Though I have more sympathy with Hanslick’s concept of analytic appreciation, the value judgement he sets up between analytic and pathological appreciation is as elitist and unnecessary as the Romantic, Rousseauian worship of the emoting individual. It is also as illusory: who would listen to a piece whose structure they appreciated but the sounds of which they hated? Having myself performed Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX—a piece intricately structured around the Fibonacci sequence, but which starts with the same discord repeated 229 times—I can tell you: very, very few.

Romantic, modernist, classical, jazz, pop—whatever your tastes in music, they start with Hanslick’s so contemptible pathological, with the sound it makes. And there is no shame, no inferiority, no lesser appreciation in staying there: the rest is bullshit.

On Art

Enough! Enough, I say, with your talk of Art. I shall have no more of it: it is meaningless, it is useless, and it is elitist. You can have “the arts,” you can even have (at a push) “work of art” as “something created.” But Art, oh! that capital letter, that mythical finger that comes down from the sky and selects certain cultural items and purports to grant them greatness, this is not only balderdash but culturally regressive balderdash at that. So, let’s start with—

—well, in fact I have just remembered that, right back at the start of this blog, I convened the International Court of Poetic Justice to hand down apposite and suitably amusing penalties upon those who commit poetry. You may have thought that this was a one-off piece of whimsy, despite the promise of its return, but it conveniently turns out that it’s actually been very busy, looking into precisely this question. As so many of the initial pleadings cited “it’s Art” in their defence, the court decided to look into the whole matter and, as such, started an inquiry and summonsed Art to appear before it. So let’s start by paying a visit to the court, and observing the proceedings.

Counsel for the Inquiry: You are, or you claim to be, Art, am I correct?

Judge (interrupting): Where’s Robert Jay? I want Robert Jay. Couldn’t we get Robert Jay?

Counsel (irritably): He’s too expensive, m’lud. Plus this was largely written on a beach in Brazil without a thesaurus to hand.

Judge (disappointed): Oh well, you may proceed.

Counsel: Thank you, m’lud. I shall try to use the word “propinquity” if the opportunity arises. (To Art) So, you are, or you claim to be, Art?

Art: Yes.

Counsel: I put it to you that, your presence in this court notwithstanding, you do not exist. That you are nothing but a myth used to justify matters of taste, and give a fake sheen of objectivity to what are actually purely subjective claims.

Art: But if this was the case, why would so many people agree on my existence?

Counsel: There are many myths in which a majority of people have believed in their time. Fate. The humours theory of health. Fairies. That whole “God” business. Belief in you certainly does not grant you objective existence, and it only would grant you secondary existence as a “social construct” if it were consistently applied. I suggest that there are many different types of entertainment in the world, and that you are simply a label used by people who wish to claim that their favoured form of entertainment is superior to others.

Art: No: I am that which is of objectively higher quality, or more essential to culture.

Counsel: But who gets to define quality? It seems it cannot be popular acclaim, or else One Direction would have a greater claim to being Art than Bach. It seems to me that you are used precisely to try to justify an elitist oligarchical set who wish to maintain that their tastes are more important than those of the majority.

Art: No, I, Art, endure. I am not transient; this is evidence of my quality.

Counsel: Oh, I certainly agree that the passage of time filters culture; but endurance cannot be the necessary condition for being Art because, otherwise, we would never be able to speak of new creations being Art. Yet clearly one need only look at the Turner Prize, or go to the Tate Modern, to see something made last year being given your title. So it cannot be the case that that which endures is Art. The quality that is Art must lie elsewhere.

Art: But I, Art, have meaning.

Counsel: Is that so? As a criterion of demarcation, that seems odd. The graffiti outside my office indicates, quite clearly though improbably, that “Kilroy was here.” Is it Art? Conversely, does this not make the whole concept of “abstract Art” an oxymoron? And where is the meaning in a Bach Partita, or a Rothko painting? It seems to me that we value these for how they make us feel, not for a specific message. And that feeling is a personal, subjective response: otherwise everyone would, surely, like the same things. You, Art, are merely a stick with which to beat people with different tastes. “You must appreciate this, it is Art.”

Art: No, no, I give a deep insight into the mind of the artist, I provide a connection between the audience and the creator.

Counsel: But this is just a dogma of the nineteenth century, and once again it returns back to how it gives one pleasure. Wagner was a despicable shit of a man, are you really claiming that everyone who enjoys his music enjoys a connection with his vile, supremacist brain? That seems deeply unfair on them. Bruckner was an obsessive-compulsive religious maniac, Gauguin a syphilitic pederast, and Mallory a thug and a rapist. Why would I want a connection with these minds? Can I not simply enjoy the product of them?

Art: No, you see the insight, the connection, enhances your understanding. This is why I, Art, have greater value than your so-called “other entertainments.” You do not need to sympathize with my creators, but I do make you empathize; as such, in encouraging empathy, I am morally improving.

Counsel: Once again, this is just dogma. Hieronymous Bosch’s depictions of hell may be thrilling, but the pleasure is ultimately sadistic. Turandot is nothing more than a manual for date-rape, and it’s a pretty poor defence of The Merchant of Venice that it is simply not as antisemitic as The Jew of Malta. Where is the moral improvement in these? I suggest that people who enjoy you, Art, ultimately are just people enjoying themselves. They may get some of their enjoyment from the illusion of enhanced understanding, even moral improvement; but actually all they are doing is simply enjoying themselves. Some people enjoy the emulation of religious fervour, and so listen to Bach; some people enjoy geometric simplicity, and so put Mondrian on their walls; and some people enjoy feeling that they are clever, and so read Finnegans Wake. And some people enjoy emoting, and so absorb themselves in romanticism. There is no common thread, simply the fact that all of the adherents of these entertainments feel the need to pretend that their enjoyment is morally or culturally superior, and so have invented the notion of you.

Art: But don’t you claim to be a devotee of late Wittgenstein? You seem to be trying to pin me down to a single necessary and sufficient condition, why can I not simply be a “family resemblance” concept, like game?

Counsel: This is true. (To the recorder) Defendant seems to have scored a point there, please strike it from the record. (Rallies) But if we are to take the linguistic turn, then we must examine how you are used, not defined. And the prosecution’s case remains that you have no use other than as an elitist attempt to justify the unjustifiable. You are, in fact, an gigantic exercise in begging the question; in covertly concealing one’s conclusions within one’s premises. “This is Art, therefore it must be good,” the humbuggery which we are expected to accept goes. But in actuality it is nothing more than “I think this is good, therefore I shall call it Art.”

Art: “Prosecution?” Isn’t this an inquiry, not a trial?

Counsel (sulkily): It’s a family resemblance concept.

Judge: OK, this has gone on long enough. Can we sum up please?

Counsel: Your honour, it is the prosecution’s case that Art has no objective existence, nor even any meaningful and consistent conceptual use. The prosecution suggests that there are multifarious forms of entertainment in the world, and that all value pertaining to them is a subjective response based on the pleasure that they bring an individual; that whilst it is perfectly acceptable (though a little silly) to adhere to nineteenth century aesthetics and appreciate certain entertainments because one believes that they are “deep” or “connect with the artist,” this ultimately is simply the locus of the pleasure, and grants them no higher status. Further, the prosecution suggests that if Art were merely a label attached to certain forms of entertainment—those that are “deep” or “meaningful” or “connective”—then this would not be problematic, but that it is used as a discriminatory and elitist weapon, as a (regrettably, largely successful) attempt to appropriate, validate, and grant an apparent objective superiority to certain forms of culture and to exclude others. As such, Art should be seen alongside other nineteenth-century pseudo-objective elitisms, such as the misappropriation of Darwinism in support of racial supremacism, and consigned to the waste bin of rejected anti-egalitarian dogmas.

Judge: Art, would you care to sum up your defence?

Art: Nah, it’s a fair cop, guv’. Guilty as charged.

Judge: Well, we got there in the end. No “propinquity,” though. Robert Jay would have got “propinquity” in there somehow. Henceforth, Art, you shall not be an acceptable defence in pleadings before this court. Further, though the purpose of this court is to rule upon specific instances of awfulness in the domain of poetry, it has been clear from the start that the court will define its own jurisdiction and whilst it is generally loathe to impose the gravest of penalties, in this instance it seems clear that the only option open to it is to declare your non-existence. Do you have any final words?

Art: Well, I was wondering, to be honest, about the rather substantial inconsistency between the relativist and pluralist arguments the court has used in this case and the absolutist and objectivist claims it seems to normally arrogate to itself in the prosecution of its cases; it seems to me that the author should have thought a little bit before making his serious case against the myth of objective value in precisely the context in which, presumably for the sake of humour, he has represented his own opinions as having absolute objective val…

(Disappears in a hurriedly imposed puff of reason)