Atdtda22: [42.2i] Kitsch in third-class, 610

[Monte Davis]

Paul quotes Roger Fry:

> I am actually looking at those terribly familiar but 
> fortunately fleeting images... reflect the average citizen's soul...
> I am appalled at the amount of "art"... complicated... sham... 
> degenerate...arranged "artistically"... every beautiful quality 
> obliterated... painful... horrible... can give no one pleasure...

Wow: he *did* suffer, didn't he?

Roger Fry was a brilliant critic and powerful advocate for modern art, but
jeez... this is the kind of thing that gives Bloomsbury, Modernist elitism,
and the very notion of education (and implicitly hierarchy) in aesthetic
judgment a bad name. For a minute after reading it, I wanted to run to
Capitol Hill and denounce some NEA grants. 

I don't think I'd enjoy looking around that room any more than Fry did. I'm
sympathetic to his sense that the first rush of "ornament every square
inch," made possible by "great inventive talent" applied to mass production,
had gone far too far.

But there's a thick gloss of *attitude* overlaid on that judgment (and in no
way essential to it). All the ornament not only gives him no pleasure, but
causes him pain -- pain expressed so repetitively and hyperbolically that
it's hard to take it as anything but self-congratulation. It's the princess
and the pea: my hypersensitivity is my patent of nobility, and this shoddy
democratization of what was beautiful in "thirteenth-century glass" and
"Greco-Roman carving"... it's Too Too Much, I may have to rip my eyes out...


This, foax, is the clash of civilizations that will be burlesqued in GR 183,
when Slothrop's gaudy Hawaiian shirt shows up a few lines after Tantivy has
been musing about an Impressionist or Fauve painting:

 " 'God almighty [cries Tantivy], what is *that* supposed to be... Slothrop,
do put on something civilized, there's a good chap... At least cover it up
with something-' "
Which will be Tantivy's own Norfolk jacket, its wool woven from sheep whose
portraits hang in the Savile Row tailor's fitting room. Surely the Fry of
this passage would "squeeze his eyes shut" even more histrionically than
Tantivy when the sun hits Slothrop's yellow, green and orange handkerchief.