Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad

Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly below. As always, his insights inspire and his language clarifies:

A great article. Thanks for pointing it out. I’m a pluralist too, and this jeremiad seemed a little mean-spirited—though you have to wonder how a jeremiad could avoid being so.

Still, the definition of art he prefers—”mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them”—does arouse some nostalgia in me for a time when pleasing the senses (instead of exciting, repelling, or rebuking them) wasn’t hopelessly naive.

In poetry, the modernists are responsible for art that is “indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it,” but that has done little to change public taste and much to discredit poetry as obdurate and pretentious.

The real casualty in “the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic” is, as Kimball so smartly points out, art itself.

And I would call it, as he does, a tragedy, except that art seems finally invulnerable to our fashions. Some artists will always be immune or, more accurately, attuned to contemporary modes AND eternal ones.

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