Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
My friend and I are in disagreement about something. My friend thinks Chopin’s Nocturne No. 6 in G minor is nothing to write home about. I think it is one of the most exquisite pieces of art ever crafted for human ears. ‘Nice,’ he says, shrugging his shoulders (I can’t see him because we are speaking on the phone – but I know he’s shrugging his shoulders), ‘but he’s no Beethoven.’ Now, my friend is no Philistine – he can quote Shakespeare and RS Thomas at will, however, for a man of such culture I was having trouble with his complete apathy for this most brilliant of geniuses. Was there something wrong with his cerebral cortex? Was there some medical reason to explain his diminished sense of emotion? Was he part-android? Granted, he never shared my love of New American folk music or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but these were divisive things for most people anyway (by most people I mean most people sad enough to care). But Chopin? His genius was universal, I thought. Even the lowest of the low brow liked Chopin. Who hasn’t seen The Deerhunter or The Pianist and not been moved? Who, upon hearing the Marche funèbre as the coffin of a loved one is carried somberly past weeping eyes, has not felt their lower organs dull with the ache of emotion? There is one note in the Marche that I believe is the greatest note ever written in music. ‘It is beautiful,’ my friend said of the Nocture No. 6, ‘but I didn’t move me in the same way. I guess you have to be in the mood.’
Of course I had hitherto never considered one’s mood as being of any importance in art. The subjectivity of art. Is there not a universal aesthetic to which we can all subscribe regardless of the day you’re having? I don’t suppose there is. Is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks any less of a painting when you’re on top of the world? Does ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM only sound comforting when you think you might do away with yourself. Do you want to switch it off when you hear it at your daughter’s fourth birthday party? And what about art as it stands today? On the balance of things, can we not say that there is more musical merit to a Chopin Nocturne than there is to a Miley Cyrus ‘hit’? Is one man’s Steinbeck another man’s Dan Brown? Do we have any measure of artistic quality at all? If numbers are to go by, then Steinbeck and Chopin lose by a country mile to the vast selling power of their modern counterparts (counterparts – I even feel nauseous saying it). For one, Chopin didn’t rely on showing his tits to get people to listen to him.
Not an uncommon criticism directed at me is that I should lighten up, get with the times, put down those old heavy books with their ideas and their big words. What are you watching Newsnight for when you could be watching Get Me Out of Here! I’m A Big Fucking Waste of Space. Or, Aidan, don’t you find that new tune by Britney Spears catchy? What – the one where’s she’s stripped to her underwear, blowing kisses at the middle-aged perverts watching the television? The one where she got her ‘songwriter’ to sit at a computer for five minutes and press the ‘Randomly Generate Song’ button on the keyboard? That one?
It all boils down to evolution and the intellectual wasteground that is modern society. In a world where conformity is comfortable, everyone who jumps out of the box is to be viewed with suspicion. It seems no longer possible to be a male singer, not look like a hobo who’s just robbed a Versace shop, and not sing in a whinging, Long Beach-tinged voice piped all down the length of their coke-torched nose. It is no longer possible to put a show on television after the nine o’clock watershed that doesn’t have one guy kicking the face off another guy. Must it contain at least one scene of prolonged sexual intercourse to be artistically acceptable? Is a novel no longer sophisticated if you actually know what’s going on when you read it? In the dismal process of social evolution, not unlike natural selection in the animal kingdom (I separate humans from animals for the sake of the polemical), those who look, act and speak the same will find shelter in the phalanx – the phalanx of cultural ignorance where they can prosper in utter blandness, usurped only when the next iteration of artistic fouling comes wheeling along.
I should have gone easier on my friend. After all, he did say he only preferred Beethoven.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
