Gotham Diary:
Kant Never Did Anything
5 December 2014
It is not a good day for taking pictures, so I simply removed the garish construction colors from this view of the entrance to the new subway station. At the bottom, I presume, is the mezzanine level, where the token booth and the turnstiles will be — beyond which a further course of escalators will descend to the tube level, which is about seven storeys down.
As you can see, I might easily have passed through the plywood panels and popped down the steep metal stairs. That’s how close you can get to the entry structures. They are surrounded by tightly-pinned hurricane fencing, but otherwise they stand in the middle of open sidewalk. The construction zone is receding quickly — at the moment. It seems to be disappearing from the other side of 86th Street as well. The southeast corner, which I mentioned the other day as being notoriously awkward, has been almost entirely opened up. The northwest corner, where the barricaded perimeter of a big hole in the ground diverts normal patterns, is still a mess, with concrete traffic barriers taking the place of curbs and creating inadvertent bottlenecks for pedestrians who are not waiting to cross the street. The sidewalk pavement at the southwest corner, alone of the four, is still raised above the roadway, but there isn’t much of it, as sidewalks in both directions were long ago sharply narrowed to make room for vehicles. All in all, the intersection of Second Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street remains one to avoid.
This morning, I ran errands on the early side, because I was both behind schedule and hungry. I wanted particularly to go down to Agata & Valentina, at 79th and First. I ought to have stopped in there yesterday, on my way home from a pre-Remicade infusion exam, but I was too comfortable in the taxi that I managed to snag right at the hospital’s front door. So off I went today. I was thinking about making a chicken stew.
It was coq au vin to start with, but for some reason the name of the dish insisted on being understood. Coq au vin calls for a cock, a grown chicken that has not been castrated. I don’t think that such a bird can be had in today’s world, or would be wanted if it were available. It would be tougher and gamier, and much less meaty, than a capon or a hen. It would require long cooking. The chicken that we use for coq au vin doesn’t need, or even benefit from, such treatment. So although I’m going to use the usual ingredients (pearl onions and mushrooms), I’m going to adjust the method. First, I’ll lightly brown a handful of mirepoix in some butter. Then I’ll brown the chicken, and, after that, the onions and the mushrooms. Then I’ll pour in a combination of broth and pinot noir, bring the stew to the boil, and then simmer it slowly on the stove. The chicken — thighs and drumsticks — ought to be done in about half an hour. I’ll strain the sauce and reduce it to a rich, syrupy thickness, perhaps with the help of some heavy cream.
I want to make a soup, too. Once again, I’ll begin with mirepoix. Agata is now selling little tubs containing layers of roughly chopped onion, celery, and carrot. A little more chopping will make this indispensable mixture perfect. When the aromatics are fragrant, I’ll chop and add a butternut squash, a parsnip, and an apple. When the fruit and vegetables are soft, I’ll purée them: voilà! It’s just the sort of weather for such a soup, which will also stretch the stew, which I’m hoping to serve tomorrow night as well, if Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil manage to cross town. Fossil is on the edge of a cold — I could hear it in his voice this morning. Kathleen, unfortunately, is here for one night only. She returned from Dana Point late last night, and she leaves for Phoenix tomorrow afternoon. I hope that she’ll really like the stew.
Before we got up this morning, I asked her if there was anything particular that she wanted for dinner. As usual, she replied that she can’t think about food when she’s not hungry — it’s too abstract. That’s of course the only time that I can think about it; when I’m hungry, I can’t think about anything. I was taught, not by my mother, who did everything that she could think of to discourage my culinary inclinations, but by the young women among whom I lived during and after college, never to go grocery shopping when hungry, and I have found this to be a good rule. Everything looks good when you’re hungry, and not only good but easy to cook.
***
After reading his memoir, The Unexpected Professor, I ordered two other books by John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts? In the first book (which is also the earlier), Carey retails the history of the creation, by so-called intellectuals, of “the masses,” a subhuman goo incapable of education or other improvement. Some intellectuals believed that only by rising up against the capitalists and seizing the means of production could the masses discover their own humanity, but more were inclined toward modernism, as it came to be called in English. Carey is very good about modernism; he shows how distinctly and persistently opposed to humanism it is.
One of Carey’s chapters is entitled “Natural Aristocrats,” and I found myself wondering where those so-called intellectuals got the idea that they were the natural aristocrats. Who died and made them king? In What Good Are the Arts, Carey provides the answer: Immanuel Kant. Writing at the climax of the self-conscious awakening to the idea of art that swept Europe at the end of the Eighteenth Century, Kant weighed in on the newly-invented subject of aesthetics, even though he had little taste for art and none for music. The point to be made here is that Kant identified the greatest artists as “geniuses,” because, as Carey says, they had access to the “‘supersensible’ realm in which the moral and the aesthetic are bound together.” This endowed art with the strange prestige that it still possesses, while also transforming appreciation of the arts into the best credentials of the highest minds. A thinker like Nietzsche may not have created any art, but he certainly threw himself into polishing those credentials.
And this is where the link between the two books ought to be found — or so I’m thinking at the moment, a mere two dozen pages into What Good Are the Arts? The whole business of intellectual contempt for ordinary human beings beings, in Carey’s earlier account, with Nietzsche, who of course conceived of the übermensch, or superman. It’s clear to me now that Nietzsche was merely inserting his own personal plug into a socket powered by Kant’s idea of genius. Schopenhauer, also very much plugged in to that source — what German thinker of the time was not? — carried Kant a bit further by insisting that, if art required geniuses to create it, then it demanded at the very least a superior type of person to appreciate it, not, as Carey quotes, “that manufacture of Nature which she produces by the thousand every day.” What followed inevitably from this kind of puffery was a program designed to prove the point, by serving up work that ordinary people were sure to hate. The fact that ordinary people didn’t appreciate modernist art would demonstrate their inferiority. It was an awful racket.
The Intellectuals and the Masses convinced me that modern, or more properly modernist, art cannot be worthwhile insofar as it is merely modernist. (It may well, as I wrote the other day, be beautiful, even though the modernist aesthetic forbids beauty.) And by “modernist” here I mean, simply, anti-humanist, work that is designed not so much to pass over the heads of ordinary people as to repel them.
So I was surprised, in the very first pages of What Good Are the Arts?, to find Carey willing to include Piero Manzoni’s The Artist’s Shit under the rubric of art. He may by the end of his chapter, “What is a work of art?”, retract that judgment, but I’m impatient with any willingness to allow “the art world” to decide what is and what is not art.
Meanwhile, what is the etymology of “decoration”? I haven’t unpacked the OED yet.
Bon weekend à tous!