Among the Intellectualoids: Corpus Delicti
Kimball, Roger
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS by Roger Kimball Corpus Delicti F or a moment this past June, it seemed like old times. The excitement was palpable. Not since the Mapplethorpe and Serrano scandals in...
...If a play isn't worth dying for," he said at a luncheon speech shortly before the flap over Corpus Christi broke, "maybe it isn't worth writing...
...How many plays have you seen, Dear Reader, that were "worth dying for...
...The unspoken assumption is that if something is art, it is therefore exempt from ordinary moral considerations...
...72 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator offer nothing to appreciate...
...As Goethe put it, "only the mediocre talent is always the captive of its time and must get its nourishment from the elements that time contains...
...04 The American Spectator • October r99 8 73...
...What makes it art...
...Curtain...
...And more to the point, what makes it good art, worthwhile art, art that deserves our support and commendation...
...We will have to wait until the play is actually staged later this fall to see how McNally responds to the controversy his work has sparked...
...Many observers believe that he will somewhat tone down the Jesushas-sex-with-his-disciples theme...
...Actually, the bit about Viagra and condoms was my exercise of Artistic Freedom...
...But one mustn't overlook the element of posturing that often accompanies such gestures...
...But the interesting question about art that deliberately comments on its time is: What makes it more than a mere commentary...
...The art world today retains little of the idealism that permeated the early years of Romanticism...
...Because the play features (in the words of one admiring observer) "a gay Jesus-like figure who has sex with his disciples offstage," various religious groups protest...
...Outrage...
...Cries of censorship and religious intolerance echo everywhere: "A chill swept the theater world" (New York Times, June 4, 1998...
...Now that in places like New York City there are more artists per square foot than at any time in history, the amount of bad art being produced has skyrocketed...
...A few years ago, a movie of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ caused an uproar because it included graphic sex scenes involving Christ and Mary Magdalene...
...It should also be noted that the fallacious idea that art must be offensive to be important has made it extremely difficult to blow the whistle on fraudulent work when one encounters it...
...Like everything important in human life, art must be judged on the basis of first-hand experience: No formula can be devised prescribing its assessment, including the formula that what is despised today will be championed as great work tomorrow...
...An artist, as the word's etymology reminds us, is first of all someone who makes something...
...But as W. H. Auden rightly pointed out, "'the unacknowledged legislators of the world' describes the secret police, not the poets...
...The really splendid thing about the controversy over McNally's play is how perfectly it epitomizes some contradictions in the art adoration professed by our self-appointed guardians of the "cutting edge...
...What really makes the episode significant, however, is the way the forces of politically correct orthodoxy instantly closed ranks to champion a work of art not despite but because of its moral and religious offensiveness...
...Nor should one forget the many counter-tendencies...
...It is a form of therapy or political grandstanding that draws on the prestige of art to protect itself from criticism...
...The philistines are temporarily beaten back and the world is once again safe for Artistic Freedom...
...Act Two: in response, the Manhattan Theater Club withdraws the play...
...As the search for something new to say or do becomes ever more desperate, artists push themselves to make extreme gestures simply in order to be noticed...
...An inexorably self-defeating logic takes hold: at a time when so much art is routinely extreme and audiences have become inured to the most brutal spectacles, extremity itself becomes a commonplace...
...The insistence that art reflect the tangled realities of contemporary life is a temptation that most artists should resist, if for no other reason than that giving in to that temptation is a prescription for ephemerality...
...Poetry, Auden said elsewhere, makes nothing happen: its province—like the province of all art—is in the realm of making, not doing...
...Other prominent playwrights threaten to withdraw their plays from the theater unless McNally's play is reinstated...
...This is an ambition that many artists continue, in more or less mundane ways, to harbor...
...Rimbaud was a drug-drink-and-sex-crazed madman...
...But of course the moral of the story is pretty much the opposite of what McNally and his vociferous supporters would have us believe...
...And perhaps on occasion he is...
...I offer them up freely for next year's scenario...
...As far as I know, neither item enters into McNally's play (which, as of ROGER KIMBALL is managing editor of the New Criterion...
...And just as a table can be well or poorly made, so, too, a play or poem or painting can be well or poorly made...
...Jesus gets a prescription for Viagra and has sex with everyone, never forgetting to use a condom...
...Does this vision of balance and serenity diminish his achievement...
...Flourish...
...Theidea, of course, is that, by abjuring beauty and refusing to please — indeed, by going out of his way to be offensive—the artist is better able to confront deeper, more authentic, more painful realities...
...this writing, is not yet completed...
...but not every drug-drink-and-sex-crazed madman is a poet of genius...
...But it remains Romantic in its moralism and hubris about the salvific properties of art, summed up in44 The idea that art must be offensive makes it hard to blow the whistle on fraudulent work...
...There they go again...
...This is the easiest and also the most shallow response to criticism...
...And in our time, most art is not only bad but also dishonest...
...Matisse was one of the greatest and also most innovative painters of the twentieth century...
...It is time to recognize that art need not be adversarial or "transgressive" in order to be good or important...
...Act Three: the Manhattan Theater Club, faced with the prospect of mutiny, bravely defies the forces of darkness and vows that it will reinstate the play for its fall schedule...
...Act One: the Manhattan Theater Club in New York schedules Terrence McNally's new play Corpus Christi for its fall season...
...These themes were exacerbated as the avant-garde developed from an impulse to a movement and finally into a tradition of its own...
...Everyone is brought up on stories of how an obtuse public scorned Manet, censored Gauguin, and drove poor Van Gogh to madness and suicide...
...Great damage has been done —above all to the artists themselves, but also to public taste —by romanticizing the tribulations of the nineteenth-century avant-garde and its twentieth-century successors...
...McNally ups the stakes by playing the gay card...
...In a famous statement from 1908, when he was almost forty, Henri Matisse wrote that he dreamt of "an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the business man as well as the man of letters...something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue...
...These are some of the issues that Terrence McNally's play—like so much elsethat makes headlines in the overheated contemporary art world— raises...
...Art cannot help being of its time and place...
...How could it be otherwise...
...The truth is that most art is bad art...
...There are several things to be said about this...
...One might therefore conclude that Corpus Christi is exactly what McNally always suggested it was: a kind of cautionary tale...
...In part, this situation is a complication (not to say a perversion) of Romanticism...
...How many would you even want to see...
...they thought that Stravinsky was a charlatan...
...Not for nothing are words like "challenging" and "transgressive" the most popular terms of critical praise today...
...Exeunt omnes...
...These days, whenever one bluntly dismisses an obvious artistic charlatan — especially one who cloaks himself in the mantle of the avant-garde—one is immediately met by the rejoinder: "Ah, but they made fun of Cezanne, too...
...In the first place, the fact that these great talents went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the thought that because one is unappreciated one is therefore a genius...
...Both are guaranteed to be grade-A "transgressive" ideas, certain to "challenge" our society's narrow, bourgeois conception of divine omnipotence, among other things...
...McNally would doubtless approve...
...Similar considerations apply to the ambition to make art "relevant" to contemporary social and political concerns...
...The little drama precipitated by McNally's play reminds us of the extent to which today's liberal cultural establishment regards the practice of art as a form of guerrilla warfare against traditional moral attitudes...
...The truth is that the world has always been filled with would-be artists who are unappreciated precisely because they A gay Jesus...
...Not since the Mapplethorpe and Serrano scandals in the late 1980's had there been so much pleasurable, politically correct indignation abroad...
...Doing anything really well is difficult...
...This is not the only criterion that we employ to judge a work of art, but it is a fundamental starting point that no serious critic can afford to abandon...
...Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous comment that poets were "the unacknowledged legislators of the world...
...But think about that for a moment...
...An orgy of self-congratulation...
...The elevation of art from a didactic pastime to a prime spiritual resource, the self-conscious probing of inherited forms and artistic strictures, the image of the artist as a tortured, oppositional figure — all achieve a first maturity in Romanticism...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
