Gotham Diary:
Art and the World
29 May 2014
Last night, after dinner, Kathleen and I watched The Monuments Men, the DVD having arrived in the afternoon. Kathleen liked it much better than she thought she would, and I liked it better than I did when I saw it the first time, in the theatre. Now I knew what to expect, I wasn’t disappointed. Unlike Robert Edsel’s book of the same name — which, although written in the straightforward breeze of manly books, devotes equal attention to the hurry-up-and-wait nature not only of war but of the acquisition of expertise — George Clooney’s film is a swashbuckling adventure, with great works of art taking the place of fair and helpless maidens. Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, and John Goodman also remind us of Robin Hood’s sometimes unlikely heroes. The director, who also stars, and Matt Damon are of course more than equal to updating the Flynn franchise.
The historical Monuments Men were brought into being by the horror of Montecassino, the ancient Italian monastery that the Germans fairly decoyed the Allies into bombing to destruction. George Stout and James Rorimer were both officials in American museums, engaged in the hands-on curation of artworks that a wave of philanthropy that followed the Industrial Revolution had borne out of the private sphere and into public institutions — where, let us hope, they will remain forever, or at least until a better version of the same basic idea comes along. The idea that these artworks were important not just in themselves, as aesthetic objects of appreciation, but as part of a tradition of Western meaning, was not a very old one, and it would probably be hard to find written evidence that anybody, even George Stout, regarded artworks as constituting a network of objects in which each refracted the luminousness of the others. I should be very surprised to find a consensus among museum curators, even today, holding the idea inspired by Kant, that artworks “are the worldliest of all things.” But this notion glimmers at the back of Stout’s exhortations to government officials, when he sought permission to tell military men what they could and could not blow up.
In the movie, these government officials — an adviser to Roosevelt in one scene, Harry Truman himself in another — ask whether it is ever right for a life to be sacrificed for the preservation of a work of art. Insofar as an artwork is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, it does not seem to merit the death of a human being. But the “worldly conception” of art makes a far bolder claim: art crowns, with beauty to be sure but also with something inspiring and ineffable that lies behind beauty and beyond words, the world into which we are all born. There are other things in this world, but the sense of beauty and meaning is apparent in very young children, as I learned from my grandson’s Utz-like regard for the differences between his (hideous) toy monster trucks. The sense of beauty takes years to mature, but there is little more to this maturing process than looking at things, having favorites and then outgrowing them. Choosing favorites is very important, because it constitutes an investment. Your choices mirror your understanding of the meaning of life, not just your own but everyone else’s. Conversely, the artworks that you regard as great mirror what the world means to you. They do more than mirror it: they embody its meaning. The existence of artworks, for anyone lucky or thoughtful enough to live among them, is a matter of unimaginable personal importance. To give your life for the preservation of a major work of art — and you decide what is major — even in a failed attempt, may be the only way to save yourself.
Cities are the matrices of worldliness, a truth recognized by both the friends and the enemies of civil society since the days of the Greek polis. Their man-made environments tend to evolve from the rudely utilitarian to the distinctive aesthetic stability that is best represented by Paris. (Although, the more I look at London, the more it seems an alternative Paris.) There are great buildings, of course, but it is the reach of the prevailing aesthetic into the back alleys and the peripheral neighborhoods that measures the worldliness of a city — the degree to which it has been intended by inhabitants of the city. It is hard for me now to resist the conclusion that cities are works of art. They are always unfinished, to be sure, and perhaps it would be better to regard them as projects of art. But they sound the depths of the great works of art, and I should not think twice about defending an evacuated city from destruction by any and all military means. How much richer our lives would be if the center of Augustan Rome still stood as it was built, and not in melancholy ruins.
***
Tante Hannah
Another friend of mine wrote,
Your “obsession” with Hannah Arendt you need to stop apologizing for! … Your authenticity is shining, unvarnished, as Arendt’s thinking and writing liberate the same in you.
Very nice to hear! But, being me, I reacted sharply to the idea of liberation. Almost the opposite seemed to be the case: what I feel Arendt’s writing has contributed to my thinking is consolidation.
Arendt was fond, in conversation, of talking about “trains of thoughts.” I am never entirely sure what this means, but it occurs to me that I, too, pursue certain trains of thought: about education, leisure, housekeeping, the study of history, political parties and “campaign finance” (a train that also lugs the problems of television and advertising), art and museums, and other topics. From the beginning of my serious reading of Hannah Arendt, which began with Between Past and Future, I have had at least the dim sense that Arendt was or would be providing me with concepts that would help me to “organize” my thinking. Responding to my friend’s compliments the other day, I saw that it was much more than a matter of organization, whatever that might mean. Arendt’s ideas have allowed me consolidate my trains of thought. Her idea of the world, for example, now informs my thinking about everything, from education (the point of which is to introduce the world to the “invaders,” as Arendt called children) to the arts (which, as I’ve just pointed out, quoting Arendt, constitute the worldliest of all things.) But the idea of the world is more than a common gauge that permits trains of thought to run on the tracks of others. It is the one and only thing worth fighting for.
Thus the strange asymmetry of the two World Wars. The First World War was vain and pointless, but its “resolution” created conditions conducive to bleak and alienated ideas about civilization that produced totalitarian movements in Russia and Germany. When these movements undertook the actual destruction of the world, it was necessary to fight a Second World War that was arguably the most valid and justifiable of all human conflicts. It would never have been necessary without the catastrophe of the First.
To suppress a peaceful culture by the imposition of a more powerful neighbor’s culture is to risk the destruction of the world so severely that it is better to regard it as undertaking to destroy the world. Even twenty years after the Cold War’s end, too many Americans and Russians remain in ignorance of this highest of moral laws.
Daily Blague news update: Asolando.