Alice Neel's Canonization by the New York Times

I was at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday, finally able to wander into the galleries displaying the works of artist Alice Neal. It was one of those times (very frequently these days) when I felt myself at odds with the Zeitgeist as proclaimed by the New York Times.

Neel's paintings are fun to look at. I was reminded of David Hockney's paintings, although they lack the sociability of Hockney's work. In any case, as I read today online such is the company in which the NYT places Neel: "This array confirms Neel as equal if not superior to artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and destined for icon status on the order of Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney."

But, really, Vincent van Gogh?

I am not an art critic, have not studied art history, but I have looked at a lot of paintings. There are many paintings by Neel that I find pleasant to look at, for instance, the one at the top of the post of "Two Dominican Boys of 108th Street." (Click to enlarge.) It is really quite charming, but from today's perspective (it was painted in 1955), one can't help feeling that it is a little patronizing.

Is she really a major artist? Why do I suspect that if she were not a "radical feminist" she would not receive this accolade? Would not indeed have major galleries of the Museum given over to her work. It is one of those exhibitions where the Met's publicity machine brings in the numbers, with people carefully reading the captions that reveal Neel's political and social ideas. Not much about the art itself, the craft. The other painting shown here is entitled simply "The Marxist Girl" (from 1978). It is not patronizing, like "The Dominican Boys," but it is evidence of Neel's bona fides. If you hear people talking about the show, be sure you will hear them talking about Neel's "radical" vision.

The Stasi = Cancel Culture

For a while I have been wondering who the cancelers are. I mean who are these people who jump out of the woodwork demanding blood when someone is incautious enough to say something they find offensive? I thought we lived in a time in which everything is relative, right? To be serious, however, does anyone reading this perchance know such a person? I know lots of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of the name of Donald Trump, but they are not cancelers. So who belongs to this invisible crowd?

It just hit me the other day that our current cancel culture works like the Stasi. For those who don't remember East Germany, the Stasi was the State Security Service, which, according to Wikipedia, "has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed." It's worth looking at the Wikipedia article, just to see the complexity of its resources. Alongside tens of thousands of official employees, the Stasi also relied on almost 200,000 "civilian informants, in other words almost 2.5 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 60. The purpose of which, lest we forget, and this is why the Stasi reminds me of cancel culture, was "to root out the class enemy." Cancel culture is rooting out deviant ideas.

Isn't that exactly what is going in the United States now? A very small percentage of people have a large majority of people scared to open their mouth to offer an opinion. Like the "civilian informers" in East Germany,  the cancelers are ordinary people. And invisible, hiding behind the anonymous nature of the internet.

 Image: LifestyleInquirer

A more unxious and hectoring Hillary Clinton

I am surprised that no one has yet compared Meghan Markle to our former First Lady. It should not come as a surprise that Meghan Markle is reportedly running for president. Unfortunately for Meghan, the draw is Prince Harry, just as it was Bill, who gave Hillary her outing in the public eye.

Image credit: Toons Mag

New York Headlines of the Day NOT

I just tried to set up a blog with the above title and was told by Google I could not do so. The idea for such a blog came to me, as it occasionally does, because the headlines in the New York Times regarding Trump and conservatives generally (and today's, October 9, 2020 are a doozy) are from the get-go biased. My idea was to set up a blog giving an alternate headline of the day if, for instance, Obama were in office or, alternately, if the New York Times were predisposed to Trump. Today's headline reads:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, TRUMP ENDS TALKS ON AID"

Let's say that Obama were in the White House on this date, would you be surprised to see the following headline:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, OBAMA TEAMS CONTINUES SEARCH FOR VIRUS"

In the second scenario, insert TRUMP for OBAMA.

I think everyone can see what is meant.

From the get-go, however, the New York Times has led the way in maligning an elected president, as can be seen in the image above, right after the election in 2016. I encourage folks to keep their own record.

The true downside of this media bias is its effect on the people of the Upper West Side, where I live. Their blood pressure rises every time they look at the front page of the Times. They have been turned into haters. They wish an elected president would die. These are people who are well educated, have a good income, and so on. But the worst part is that well-educated people have simply stopped thinking. I have friends who have law or literature degrees who nowadays reading nothing but The New York Times. One recently told me he finds even the long essays in the New Yorker too long. How pathetic is that. People in the former Soviet Union read through the bias, knew what the papers reported was false or biased. Americans, living in a free country, have given up thinking.

Group Think

In these times, when one feels despair about the intellectual state of America, it is enlightening (a word used advisedly here) to look at other times, other places. I speak of the Enlightenment itself. In connection with a book I am reviewing concerning literary journals in 18th-century Germany, I have been led to read a piece that appeared in an online forum called Republic of Letters, in which appeared, in 2008, a piece by the scholar Elena Russo, entitled "Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau." It is of course an exceedingly arcane subject, concerning a quarrel between two of the major French philosophes. Diderot, it seems, was channeling the Roman philosopher Seneca in order to demolish intellectually the status of Rousseau. In a familiar tale, the two had as young men been friends, but in the course of time fell out. Rousseau could be quite contrary, and Diderot seemed to fear for the slander that Rousseau might publish about him. So, intellectual feuds come and go.

The terms of the argument in Diderot's essay, however, strike a familiar note in respect of contemporary attacks on people with different opinions. Herewith two quotes from the essay. In the first, the author is discussing Rousseau. I include the footnote, which renders Rousseau's own words:

1. "The Dialogues and the Essai [writes Elena Russo] evoke a world in which individuals cannot endure being alone, but are eager to make themselves subservient to the opinion of the majority, regardless of what evidence and reality tell them": 'Once the spin is set in motion, each and everyone follows the current and increases its force. How can one mistrust one’s own opinion when one sees that it is shared by everybody else?'”[19]

[19] “Quand une fois le branle est donné, chacun suivant le torrent en augmente l’impulsion. Comment se défier de son sentiment, quand on le voit être celui de tout le monde?” (ibid., 892).

2. The other quote is from Diderot, in which he speaks of the intellectual fraternity that should guide public opinion, i.e., men like himself, which he calls an "invisble church."

"I am talking about that small flock, that invisible church which listens, observes, meditates, and speaks in muted tones, but whose voice prevails in the long run and shapes public opinion." [24]

[24] Je parle de ce petit troupeau, de cette église invisible qui écoute, qui regarde, qui médite, qui parle bas, et dont la voix prédomine à la longue et forme l’opinion générale.

Finally, the author says the following about Rousseau:

Rousseau, who had always seen the philosophical church as a malevolent secret society entirely devoted to his personal destruction, had been living in that hell for a long time.

"Invisible church" is an interesting expression, for it conveys rules and dogma such that they become established, every bit as much as those of a "visible church, but, unless you are contrary (like myself), you accept the dogma and even believe that there is nothing intellectually conformist or repressive about it. It becomes "naturalized," indeed "enlightened"; after all, everyone YOU know thinks the same way, right, and even use the same words. Faced someone who disagrees with the dogma, the "muted tones" that Diderot invokes disappear, to be replaced by screams that drown out the words of heretics.

Elite American youth

When I write "elite," I am referring to white kids who have gone to good universities, sometimes the Ivies, but also good state universities. They are, I believe, at the heart of the mobs that are currently protesting and, as I wrote in my previous post, have learned their hatred of American institutions from their professors. They are not the redneck-like protesters that were maligned by the press during the early days of lockdown. In fact, the photo above (in a recent issue of Book Forum), at a demonstration against Scott Walker a year ago, shows a young, buff, rather attractive male. I think he is recognizable as one of the elite white kids I am referring to. Were it not for the sign he holds above his head, one might guess he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, a very good university. I say U Wisconsin, because the political figure being protested by the sign was until 2019 the governor of Wisconsin. (Click to enlarge.)

What takes me aback is the sign about the young man's head. We know from it that he finds Scott Walker revolting, but his words reflect on him as well. Why would a well-bred young man be so vulgar? The vulgarity does not land on Walker; it lands on the young man. And why, when it is so easy to laugh at rednecks for their inelegant ways, does one not find this elite class equally offensive?

But most of all: What is with these young, privileged white males displaying themselves in all their vulgarity?

Photo credit: Mark Peterson Steidl/Redux Pictures

American self-hatred

This is an addendum to my previous post in which I mentioned the idealism of the college students I used to teach. The students were seriously interested in matters like:

-- What is the meaning of life?

-- Is there a God?

-- If there is a God, why are there bad things in the world?

These are questions that philosophers have thought about for millennia. Our earliest ancestors, even before they developed reading and writing, were concerned with these questions. It is a human thing. It was once the purpose of a humanities education to thrash these issues out with our students and to help them to understand the complexities of human existence. The advent of deconstruction did away with the need. Deconstruction informed students that anything that happened before them was evil, that their ancestors were bad people. They had not wisdom to offer. After all, look at how badly they did. They saw nothing good.

Interestingly, the United States is the only country in the world where this idea took hold. Despite the crimes perpetrated by Germany in the 20th century, you will find very few Germans, of the Left or the Right, who hate their country the way that Americans do.

Why this doctrine became prevalent among American academics is perplexing. The generation that spread it was among the best educated in American history. This generation first went to school in the 1950s, where they learned the 3 Rs, how to write a legible hand, and how to sit quietly at their desks. A small number of them went to college in the mid-1960s,  just when the universities were encouraging foreign-language education. Many like myself studied a foreign language and even studied abroad. In the early 1970s we entered the professions -- and turned around and began introducing the doctrine of deconstruction into the study of literature.

The literary works that these academics taught were part of what is called the "Western" literary tradition or the "Western canon." Most of the works, however, were by European writers, not (initially anyway) American ones. It was these works in which this generation of scholars had been trained. For instance, my dissertation was on the German writer Goethe (1749-1832). Was it perhaps because of a certain felt inferiority of Americans (vis à vis Europeans) that they began to undermine the Western canon of literature?