IS IT ART? PART TWO
Is kitsch as a concept over? It should be. Especially when you consider that the man who painted the above painting, “Murder in Mississippi,” Norman Rockwell, was long considered a kitsch artist, and was one of the main targets, along with O. Henry(!) and rock n’ roll(!!), of critic Dwight MacDonald’s provocative diatribe, “Masscult and Midcult.”
But what do you think? Is the painting art?
A QUICK QUIZ
FOR MORE than 80 years the artistic establishment (money) has pushed a concept of scorn designed to dismiss and prohibit populist art. The concept has been called: kitsch. Most often meaning, what the masses like. The concept, at least the scorn, extends to political art. “Art must never in any way be political,” arts mandarins say. A mantra of theirs for decades. Anyway, today’s quiz presents a sequence from a kitschy old movie, “Gold Diggers of 1933,” directed by Busby Berkeley. Made during America’s Great Depression, at a time when many World War I veterans were living in shantytowns, or on the streets.
WARNING: The sequence is political.
BUT: Is it ART?
Best answer gets an “Attaboy!”
WHO?
(image c/o freepikdotcom)
AN EASY CHOICE, really. In this time of Amazon and other tech giants pushing gigantic data centers on us nobody wants; the Bayer company promoting glyphosate; Ford Motor creating vehicle spyware to monitor us; concert ticket giants scamming performers and audiences alike: how can anyone, ANYONE today be an advocate/toady for Big Business? But, yes, there is such a person.
And so, conservative journalist and pundit Michael Lind has won April’s PUPPET OF THE MONTH.
(image c/o wikipedia)
Congratulations, Michael! Puppets everywhere (there are a lot of them) are proud.
WHO MOST DESERVES TO WIN?
(public domain)
TO QUALIFY, nominees must work or have worked in a creative field, and have demonstrated pronounced willingness to dance to puppet strings through fealty to billionaires and/or monopolies in our current top-down, controlled-from-above society.
Nominees for April:
-Canadian author Stephen Marche, who’s published a book written by AI devices and in April said, “Writers must accept artificial intelligence.”
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-Political commentator Michael Lind, who in April penned an article for Unherd titled, “Big Business Is Good, Actually.” (Unherd is owned by UK billionaire Sir Paul Marshall.)
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-Brown University professor Glenn Loury, who in an April article for Unherd called AI “The Equality Machine.”
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-Film director Steven Soderbergh, who in April announced he’s using “a lot of AI” for two upcoming movies, one a documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
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-A joint entry, Sandra Bullock and Reese Witherspoon, who made splashy announcements for Variety magazine supporting AI in the film business.
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-Vice-President J.D. Vance, sycophant not only to our increasingly unpredictable President, but also to his mentor and long-time financial backer, tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance qualifies because he made his name, in part, as an author.
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WHO’ll win? Stay tuned!
For many defenders of today’s status quo literary scene, elitism and snobbery are the point. I call them Woolfists. Those who’ve adopted the classist ideas and high-brow poses of classic literary snob Virginia Woolf.
THE QUESTION is: Who’s the Top Snob? Who’d receive the award, if there were any such award to give out? We’ve identified five candidates, though there may be more.
NOTE: We’ve excluded literary critics from consideration. There are too many of them! All trying to be Addison DeWitt.
VOTE NOW! Comments and suggestions welcomed.
We live in a hyperfast electronic world with no space for humanity. We’re detached from reality. Most of our entertainment consists of escapes from, or bad simulations of, reality. The biggest part of the publishing business at the current time consists of various versions of fantasy. Sci-fi, romantasy, fake medieval pseudo-histories of thrones and dragons, lords of hobbits or robots, idiotic spaceships talking lions and what not. At their core, nonsense.
Recently I read (reread really) Mario Puzo’s little-known first novel, The Dark Arena, published in 1955. A tough narrative set in post-World War II Germany during the American occupation, when the landscape consisted of bombed-out ruins and life was brutal.
The novel wasn’t a hit when it came out. Too much reality. Maybe for the same reason, it’s been ignored by critics and cognoscenti in the decades since. A hard portrayal of societal chaos: perhaps a cautionary look at where we’re headed.
The book got me thinking about realistic fiction– though The Dark Arena might better be classified as Zolaesque naturalism. “Realism” in the context of a defanged literary world has always been a narrow version of the term. Guaranteed not to offend powers-that-be in the clubby world of the literati. Never going too deep into human nature and the human condition, much less the broader context of society and its layers of crimes and cruelties.
ANYWAY, some off-the-cuff reality ratings of several in-this-world novels:
-Wuthering Heights/Bronte: 92
-Bleak House/Dickens: 96
-The Idiot/Dostoevsky: 97
-The Dark Arena/Puzo: 98
-City for Conquest/Kandel: 98
-Don’t Stop the Carnival/Wouk: 88
OTHERS
-The Great Gatsby/Fitzgerald: 50
-Vineland/Pynchon: 40
-Harry Potter/Rowling: 20
-The Hobbit/Tolkien: 10
Thoughts? Suggestions? Let us know!
-K.W.
OUT-OF-CONTROL MONEY
(image c/o onlocationxp)
EPSTEIN FILES revelations are showing the true face of our corporate-financial overlords, and it’s not pretty. More like viewing a monster movie.
(image c/o Famous Monsters of Filmland)
IN A MOMENT of perfect timing, this Sunday is THE SUPERBOWL. (“Yaaay!”) Don’t expect regular people to be there. Hyper-expensive seats and skyboxes will be filled by corporate types, most of them there on your dime via tax write-offs and deductions as “business expenses.” Right now there are tighter restrictions on aid to the poor in order to pay for those at the top of the too-steep American hierarchy: those at the game.
The SUPERBOWL– where even the players are millionaires, some near-billionaires– is an orgiastic celebration of greed for the monied elite. The football stadium and its environs is the perfect setting for an out-of-control Epsteinesque party; sports stadiums perhaps the best example of how politicians, and by extension We the People, are manipulated and defrauded by Big Money. Billionaire team owners, like pampered five year-olds, threaten to take their toys elsewhere unless a city or state (taxpayers) help pay for the giant stadium along with endless subsidies and tax abatements. The owners almost always get their way.
(A possibly even more egregious example of sports excess is college football. Prestigious universities have become mere adjuncts to the money-generating sports teams.)
A NEW SCAM is being currently run by the wealthiest tech moguls on the planet in regard to data centers. “Build us more data centers! We need them for AI! Allow us to consume enormous amounts of water and energy– or we’ll locate in another state!” Tech guys could invent the Destroy Humanity Machine– maybe they have– and offer it as a gift, accompanied by empty promises, and hapless politicians would comply.
America today.
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(Be sure to read this poem at our Fast Pop Lit site about the 2025 Super Bowl.)
(Also, we just posted a short humor piece there which includes an NFL player.)
-Karl Wenclas
NEW “FICTION”
(image c/o USA Today)
At the beginning of our marriage, my husband seemed normal.
The first thing which aroused my suspicion was his insistence on moving his own sofa into the modest house we’d bought.
“Honey, I thought we’d get a new matching living room set,” I told him. “There’s all kinds of sales going on right now.”
To that he stared, as if his best friend had died.
“You see, I’ve had my sofa a long time,” he explained. “I feel close to it.”
I said that was okay, too. Whatever he wanted. It was all okay. I was a new wife and was in love with him and wanted everything to be okay.
Looking back though, the first clue before our marriage was when we were handling the legal end of it. He was thrown that I had to send for a copy of my birth certificate. “You don’t have a birth certificate?” he asked, surprised.
“Oh, I have one. Had one, I mean. Or my parents had it, but I have no idea what happened to it. I mean, who ever needs their birth certificate? But it’s fine, there’s one on file. I’ll send for it.”
Then there was the eyebrow incident, when he realized my eyebrows were naturally dark. Black, actually.
“I didn’t know your eyebrows were so . . . dark,” he remarked, touching them with his finger early one morning.
“Of course they are, silly!” I said. “It’s my Slavic background on my mom’s side. She always said we had some Tartar blood in us. Did you think it was make-up? Besides, thick black eyebrows are the style right now.”
“Tartar?” he said.
Don’t get me wrong. By all indicators he was a good husband. He made very good money. Many bonuses. Though he was always vague about what he actually did.
“A government job,” he’d say. “Removals, er, maintenance. Cleaning things up.”
He’d leave early morning with a large duffel bag crammed with what he said were clothes and “work stuff.”
Then there was his attitude toward my doctor.
“You have an Indian doctor?” he asked, shocked. “Do you really have to see him?”
There were his pat-downs of me, which he explained as foreplay, and then wanting to put me into handcuffs. Or his practicing barreling through doors, which he rationalized as exercise. Or the time I caught him down the basement late at night listening to German martial music. I thought I glimpsed his arm go up in a straight-armed salute, but I wasn’t sure.
Eventually, as media stories about ICE began to appear, he’d steer me away from watching television. “Er, that’s not about us,” he’d say. “Not our concern.” Then the TV stopped working altogether. The cord to plug it in had been cut.
The next day he decided we had to move from the house. “Temporarily,” he said. “I hope.”
A suitcase for himself was already packed. He brought mine out from a closet. “Hurry!” he said. “Grab some clothes. Load it up.”
His duffel bag waited in the back of the truck. He handed me a blue ski mask.
“Here, put it on,” he requested. “Just do it”– as he wrapped a green scarf around his own head, only his hazel eyes and pale eyebrows visible above it.
We clambered into the truck. Outraged demonstrators filled our street. Their outrage was directed at us. In the truck, engine coughing to life, we drove fast up curbs and down alleys to get away. The mob continued to follow. Whistles and shouting. In the distance ahead of us, another angry crowd, carrying signs while growing ever larger.
I thought then to ask a question that’d been on my mind.
“Honey, do you work for ICE?”
-K. Wenclas
OR: We have a short post addressing that question at our NPL News blog, here.
Read it, then support the project!
COUNTERREVOLT OF PROFESSORS AND CIGARS
(images c/o storablesdotcom)
TO EVERY CHANGE there ‘s an inevitable reaction. We’ve been seeing this in American culture– higher levels of the academy anyway– via expressions of outrage about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs designed to level the playing field amid inevitable advantages built-in to our society, especially upper levels of society, over 250 years.
The Great Reaction has begun! An attempt by some of the most privileged members of society to return to a never-fair-or-efficient status quo. Ivy League voices are at the forefront of the sudden noisemaking.
Like pricey cigars, much expense went into creating them. Private schools. Tutors for standardized exams. Everything paid for. Much care and nurturing. They were made in a climate-controlled or climate-friendly environment, and have been stored in humidors to ensure their delicate constitutions are preserved without disruption.
Now, suddenly, the expensive cigars, er, I mean, intellectuals, have risen in outrage! Aristocrats on the march! Upset at mere hints at mild changes to their privileged environment. The status quo must be maintained! The prospect of change is intolerable to them.
Study the biographies of the loudest voices against DEI programs actual or proposed (those in support of the Jacob Savage Compact Mag essay), and you see they themselves have not been inconvenienced. The thought of potential inconvenience was quite enough to set them off.
Most of them in fact benefited throughout their lives from family connections and class background, were recipients of a very different kind of affirmative action program. One to ensure they’d always remain, at home, school, or work, within their comfortably safe humidors!
-KW