From: eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Uncritical thought (was: Unintelligentsia (was: Re: Spider...))
Date: 7 Apr 92 14:32:52 GMT

In <1992Apr5.135207.11266@math.ucla.edu> David Stein wrote:
>    You really do make very sweeping and vague statements yet provide no
>    evidence.

What would you accept as `evidence'?
 
>    What do you mean by "a long time"?  Since the 60's?  This century?

I'd date the period of strong Marxist influence from around 1910 and the
activities of the Fabian society in England.
 
>    Who is the "art-lit crowd"?  Only academia type people?  Writers and 
>    artists? Would someone like Ginsberg qualify or is he out?

Ginsberg would qualify, if you mean the author of "Howl".  The culture I'm
pointing at is more or less coextensive with the use of the term "avant-garde".
 
>    And does "predominantly" also imply "thoroughly"?  If yes, could you name
>    ten most influential art/lit critics from the period you referred to?  And
>    then indicate which ones are Marxist and which ones are "fellow-travelers"
>    (whatever that means when applied to art criticism).

That's more detail than I can go into without going back to primary and
secondary sources; I don't keep all this information swapped in.  Sorry, but
this discussion isn't high enough on my priority list right now for me
to do that.  If that means I `lose', so be it.
     
>   You know, I lived in a communist country for most of my childhood, and I
>   think people there would find your opinion naive and funny on both political
>   and artistic grounds.

And quite possibly they'd be right, if I were making statements about communist
countries.  I actually think the political consciousness of artists living
under communism was different, and in many ways healthier, than that of their
counterparts in the West.  The presence of *real* oppression tends to
concentrate the mind wonderfully about the humbug and pomposity of most
artistic *claims* about oppression (one of the things I admire Vaclav Havel
for most is his wry, understated way of making this point in public).
 
>    First, the way you throw in Marxism, Socialist Realism, and "decadent
>    modern attitude" smacks of the way many on the in the U.S. refer to 
>    Socialism (as in Social Democratic/Welfare/Liberal) as essentially 
>    identical to Communism of Bolshevik type.  Such deliberate blurring
>    of differences may be profitable politically, but also insults all
>    those who paid with their lives for their refusal of subservience to
>    Communism.

I don't understand why you think I merit this criticism.  I have not claimed
that the Western `art-lit' culture was all Bolsheviks, that's obvious nonsense.
I have merely observed that for a long time, its politics was dominated by
Marxist assumptions and ideas.  Some members were `hard-left' some were
socialist, some were social-democratic.  It's not making any judgement about
these ideas to call them Marxist.
 
>    The connection to art is that, of course, all those movements and schools,
>    which you dismiss on ideological grounds, have indeed clashed with the
>    communist power (_real_ power, not a "cocktail crowd").

You're mistaken in your belief that I "dismiss these schools on ideological
grounds".  I criticize them on grounds of arrogance and deliberate rejection
of the communicative function of art, but I don't see this as having been
*caused* by their politics, only *correlated* with it.
 
>    And about half of the artists who actively and vocally opposed the regime 
>    in Czechoslovakia would probably fit well into your "Marxist" register.
 
What conflict is there between this fact and any of my previous claims?

Actually, I think I'm beginning to get it.  I'm using "Marxist" in an
objective, historical sense, and you're hearing the term "Marxist" the way it's
used by conservative American politicians, as a club.
    
>   Even on artistic grounds alone your opinion is funny if viewed from Prague.
>   I don't know about the U.S., but in Bohemia the only time that the majority
>   of the art community were consciously Marxist or Communist was during the 
>   20s.  This ended in 1927 (or 1929) when the communist party had a pro-Stalin
>   coup which put off most of the writers/poets etc.

Sure.  Actually *living* under "scientific socialism" was wonderfully
enlightening, I'm sure.  An experience I wish our vanishing Western breed
of parlor Marxist could have.
 
>   Surrealism itself was seldom actively political as far as I know, unless you
>   mean that Cubism is Communist because Picasso was.  In Bohemia, Surrealism 
>   has been criticized by the Communists since its inception, and I have not 
>   heard it being associated with a political movement after WW2.

If its chroniclers are to be believed, Surrealism went through an intensely
Bolshevist phase in the late '20s and early '30s under Andre Breton's
influence.  It shed the Bolshevism but never lost a debt to Marxist
revolutionary theory (cf. the emphasis on using art to challenge the false
consciousness of the middle class).
 
>   And hasn't Dada been dead, as a movement or a school, for longer than your
>   lifetime?  Sure, its elements pop up here and there, like in the Sex Pistols
>   kind of punk, but there you could make a case for it being anti-Marxist, not
>   to mention anti-Communist.
 
Yes, Dada is long dead.  Sigh.  And you could "make a case" for Dada's being
damn near *anything*; that was part of its charm...
   
>    When I traveled extensively around the U.S., museums of both modern and
>    classical art were on my schedule, and I noticed no difference in how
>    popular they were.

That's because both are in deep trouble --- ask any museum director.  Modern
art for the reasons we've discussed, and older forms because the museums
have largely botched the job of commmunicating their virtues to the public.
Before anyone flames, I hasten to add that I'm not sure how anyone could
have done better --- it may be that TV and movies really have irreversibly
changed what we can hope for in this regard.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.thyrsus.com  (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)