Responding to Crisis ...

[Otto]

I think it's indeed silly because the critic hasn't got to say anything on
the silence of the artists on the dead Iraqui children or the 18 million
Aids-deaths in Africa.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: <quail at libyrinth.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2002 3:25 PM
Subject: Responding to Crisis ...


> From Anne Midgette, "Responding to Crisis, Art Must
> Look Beyond It," NY Times, Sunday, March 3rd, 2002 ...

> On Sept. 11, catastrophe struck. By Sept. 19, one
> critic was asking why artists had not responded yet.

> "Art has lost the facility for rapid reaction or even
> considered response," wrote Norman Lebrecht, a
> columnist for The London Daily Telegraph, who is known
> as a provocateur. "What Picasso achieved in `Guernica'
> and Brecht in `Mother Courage' is no longer
> acceptable, or perhaps available, to painters and
> playwrights of the postmodern age."

> On the surface, this is a little silly. For an artist
> to process the events of Sept. 11, respond to them and
> promulgate the resulting work on a stage large enough
> to attract Mr. Lebrecht's notice, all within a space
> of eight days, would have been remarkable even with
> the speed of modern technology. The examples he cited,
> "Mother Courage" and "Guernica," created in response
> to the Nazi invasion of Poland and a brutal episode in
> the Spanish Civil War, respectively, each took several
> months to complete.

> But Mr. Lebrecht's assumption that art has a
> responsibility to respond to crisis is common currency
> today. In fact, Sept. 11 did inspire an outpouring of
> artistic response: photographs and poems; the composer
> Steve Reich's work-in-progress, "9-1-1"; and the play
> "The Guys" by Anne Nelson, to name a fraction of the
> new works. It also set off critical debate about the
> need for response and the inadequacy of that response.


> In his column, Mr. Lebrecht went on to say that
> artists have not fulfilled that responsibility. Other
> critics have echoed his position. "The fine arts have
> not been particularly responsive to the major crises
> of American history," wrote Karal Ann Marling, a
> professor of art history, in these pages in October
> (in a tone of observation rather than criticism)....

> One reason people think that art must respond to
> crisis is that there are many instances, historically,
> when a work of art has gained iconic status because of
> the appropriateness of its response. Whether as an
> image - from Délacroix's "Massacre at Chios" to
> Picasso's "Guernica" - or a longer piece (like "Mother
> Courage"), these works of art successfully
> encapsulate, and articulate, something that is both
> essential to the crisis and that lasts beyond it.

(snip)