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Entry: The Customer is Always Wrong Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_customer_is_always_wrong#16519 Post contents: 1. Goethe (off the top of my head): "All the artists [literary and musical as well as visual] hate the bourgeois. But without the bourgeois, would there be any art?" 2. An exchange with a leading Paleo light, and someone whom I respect (and again from memory): MYSELF: True, the Baroque is derivative." THE PALEO: All art is derivative!" MYSELF: "Is cubism derivative? THE PALEO: "Cubism is bad art! [thus not answering the question] MYSELF: Well if someone can paint the front and the back of someone's head on a flat surface, I think that's pretty interesting." 3. High Torys ought not forget that many of the Modernists were NOT Lefties. Many were Tory (Eliot, Stravinsky, maybe Gaudi and Henry James (the last the John the Baptist of Modernism in the anglophone world). The relation of Pound and the Futurists to Fascism is well known. A Lefty once told me that even the conservative artist is doing something radical. Michelangelo gave Orthodoxy and Charpentier gave Royalism a new power and intensity, heretofore not imagined; whereas "Socialist Realism" of the Commies And Albert Speer of the racialist nationalists were as banal in art as their politics were evil. 4. Pollock is boring. (But he's better than the kitsch I see many conservatives embracing.) Rothko is sublime. His work can NOT be reproduced; one has to see it face to face. The expressive power of his painting surpasses Van Gogh, Die Brücke, or Der Blaue Reiter. I envy those of you in Houston who can drop in to the Rothko Chapel, a place I've yet to see. 5. John Adams claims he's just having fun. And maybe he is in <i>The Chairman Dances</i>. Yet I find his <i>Fearful Symmetries</i> more critical of pop culture than celebratory. He starts out with a "cool jazz" theme with 4 soprano saxophones, a theme that struggles to become a melody, without success. He alternates it with a boogie-woogie theme, and then begins a long development, tossing between these two themes, reminding me of Mahler's 9th, 1st mvt. Adams takes the listener to new worlds unimagined by pop culture. The sky darkens, the recap reaching a climax, and then, as in Beethoven's 9th 4th mvt. there's silence, followed by an utterly new world breaking in for the terminal development. Adams' <i>Common Tones in Simple Time</i> may be just about the best religious work a Gringo's ever composed. It's the religion of Californianity, but religious all the same. When the deep pedal point comes in, the effect is sublime. The conclusion is the best long ritardando since Mahler's 9th, 4th mvt. 6. The greatest Christian theologian that the 20th C ever produced -- a theologian that expanded and intensified Orthodoxy, and provided Orthodox an new power -- never wrote a word of theology: Oliver Messiaen. For my money, also the greatest Modernist composer. Put on your go-to-Meeting clothes and put on a CD of his <i>Appariton de L'Église Éternelle<i>. WARNING: If the base line blows out your woofer, don't blame me! You've been warned! Sent at: 2008 07 06