| | > What better testament to man's greatness than David--a beautful subject, beautifully executed, with wondrous technical merit. And the subject of the art from a parable about a normal man heroically triumphing over a superior foe.
Indeed. What a wonderful transgressive moment! What a narrative recapture, an epistemic revolution!
So long as one remembers the orginal context of the Torah from which the figure of David comes; that of the small figure of Israel empowered by the Lord against the forces of pride and superior strength represented by Goliath the Dorian Phillistine, then very well. It is a figure long venerated by Jews, Christians, socialists... even postmodernists.
Of course, Michelangelo intended to reclaim the figure of David- an archetype of what Nietzsche would call 'slave morality', for a worldly and passionate ethic (though far from identical with Objectivism). And more power to him! But when contemporary cultural left writers do the same, reclaiming the images of the past as heroes to empower marginalized passions, Objectivists denounce it as nihilism or envy or levelling or postmodernism.
The very artwork here picked as an example of an incarnation of a triumphant Western aesthos derives its strength- undeniably- from what would now be called a postmodern motion: the reclamation of a central figure of Judeo-Christian monotheism for a renascent Pagan worldliness. It is the 15th century's equivalent of "queer pride" or "the virtue of selishness". Outside of this context of clashing perspectives and power structures, the work loses much of its meaning.
Today, feminist fantasy writers reclaim the figures of Morgana and Hypatia. Gay writers reclaim Greek homoeroticism. And others of us remember the names Aspasia and Thais with pride. The David is a wonderful work, but like Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo, it yields multiple interpretations, and more questions than answers. 'Tis wonderful that Michelangelo could fashion the eternal underdog into the pride of Prometheus. 'Tis wonderful that Ayn Rand could make a novel about a strike into the crowning artistic vision of Promethean capitalism. That is the point. You must change your life.
The 'Western tradition' and the trangressives and multiculturalists should not be fighting each other. The great art of the West was fashioned in its time with purposes far closer to those of the left-academy, the Castro, and the rock concert than to those of William Bennett. And today's dissident culture, whether that of Umberto Eco, Gayle Rubin, or Madonna, recalls the spirit of music far better than the real 'deadheads': those cultural conservatives who prattle on about mummifying the radical 'great works' as corpses in stony catacombs.
If someone wrote Medea or Hedda Gabbler today, it would be denounced as a nihilistic feminist attack on the family and objective values. "Rivers run back upon your courses", chants the Witch in a paean to a most postmodern discordianism. Macbeth contains lines of bitterness to make an existentialist flinch, as does Hamlet. Goethe, who apparently knew nothing about a benevolent sense of life, wrote Torquatto Tasso by his own confession to prevent his own suicide. Beethoven's 7th Sympthony resonates in a panorama of dread and despair that would mark a Samuel Beckett for traditionalist assassins. Unlike today's anti-American musicians, Dante loved his countrymen... enough to put most of them in Hell.
The great poets of the West? Blake, Whitman, Byron, Poe, Yeats, and Matthew Arnold would all, if they wrote today, be denounced by Objectivists as whim-worshipping mystics. The great historians? Such as Tacitus' idolizing of a mythical Germanic virtue to remonstrate his own culture? Shades of I, Rigoberta Menchu and Black Athena! (I disagree with all three, for the same reasons) Beethoven, who borrowed Schiller's drinking song? Mozart and Tchaikovsky, who borrowed low culture 'fairy tales' for their masterpieces? Yet today the equivalent would be denounced as egalitarian; suppose a multiculturalist advanced an Mexican or African or Japanese folktale and asserted it as the equivalent in universality as, oh, I don't know, Faust.
Gratuitous sex? Every read Lysistrata? A Thousand and one Nights? Ovid? Malevolent universes? I suppose we must then discount Euripides and the Norse sagas, not to mention Wagner. Depiction of that not worth depicting? What about the orginal, literal, malevolent universe: "the universe of pain", the Inferno (one of my favorite pieces of art). 'Mindless' hedonism, shades of those horrible hippies? "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread..." Not a great work of art? Then give credit to Allen Ginsberg. The social customs of unassimilated Persians under the caliphate (if not the Sufis) would not have been strange, or unfamiliar, to the Beatniks with their hipster code. (yeah, they were both *cheap*, "on principle")
Why must a double standard be applied to a D.M. Thomas, an (early) Erica Jong... or an Annie Sprinkle? Good masculine Westerners roll their eyes when some feminist bleeds her personal relationships on paper and calls it art, yet Sharon Olds or Margaret Atwood had nothing on Catullus in this regard. Herotica and Black Lace is porn; Sappho, Juvenal, and Petronius are great literature.
Goddess! And Objectivists wonder how any one else could fail to see the obvious superiority of West-wing, West-handed, Western culture with its stunning single theme of the triumph of the West, as an endless approach to the summit of the beatific vision of John Galt and rational man. Could it be that there are other heights, just as the hated multiculturalists and postmodernists claim? Could it be that we have another case of the posh and pampered complaining that the vernacular isn't being pushed back out of their precious neighborhoods? Could it be that others of us are well schooled in the greatnesses of Western civilization, and yet feel the value of our own narratives marginalized, and ourselves continuously dismissed in the uses of our faculties?
Oh, of course not. Nihilistic envy! Ephemeral feminist nonsense!
Fancy that!
Y / ]o
P. of Cyprus
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