I was at the library today and I took a look through their latest copy of The New Yorker. It had an eye-catching cover by Christoph Niemann rather than one of the too-frequent Barry Blitt political caricatures, which was a plus. One article of interest was Anthony Lane's retrospective of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books. (The illustrator visualizes Archer as Leon Redbone in an Inspector Gadget coat.)
But there's something hard to overlook when reading both the magazine and something like the Arts section of The New York Times. They tend to pander to a certain social and political class.
It's not good for anyone when the arts and coverage/criticism of them is equated with the politics that get lumped together with liberalism. Liberals just buy into the illusion that their bubble is classy. Artists get hooked into an unhealthy patronage system. Conservatives are passively encouraged to become and stay philistines.
Anyway, the last thing we need is more sectarianism.
2 comments:
Jer found the New Yorker article this morning, the cover of which is as you describe perfectly 'Archer as Leon Redbone in an Inspector Gadget coat.' The article itself is a good overview of Ross MacDonald's 'Archer' series but I didn't think it was necessary to use the LA fires as a hook for reading it. Others have written similarly, Chandler for sure and even more descriptive was Mike Davis's essay about California coastal fires in his book The Ecology of Fear. It's likely that book was well outside the experience, or the ideology, of the article's author.
I agree with you about the pandering to a certain social and political class. I used to like the cartoons posted on the New Yorker but lately they appear uninspired. I doubt this is the fault of cartoonists, more likely a change in the editorial staff that's lead to them choosing neutral, inoffensive, sterile cartoons that are obsessed with social justice. Thank goodness there are many sources of cartoon humor available on the internet.
The terms 'liberalism' and 'left' have definitely changed over the past decade and sectarianism has been promoted by those who see profit and loss in everything. The arts have long been supported by patrons but despite the fact the numbers of wealthy people have snowballed very few are patrons. Philistines now come in every political persuasion.
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Here's a link to the Phillipine archive website followed by the article itself:
https://archive.ph/
https://archive.ph/Zuizt#selection-1905.0-1913.14
The illustration for the article succeeded at the aim of catching the reader's eye and looked fairly good, but the artist might not have been familiar with the character. Probably wasn't, in fact. Chandler, I know, made several mentions in his Philip Marlowe stories of the Santa Ana winds, which have a big part to play in the fires in the area and the Southern California climate in general. The author of the article, Anthony Lane, was the magazine's movie critic for a long time. I'm guessing he slanted the piece to appeal to both the editors and the presumed reader.
They still do have some good cartoonists. I do like Ellis Rosen, and probably some others who I'd have to look at a copy of the magazine to name. It may well be true that some cartoonists, while funny on their own, take part in the whole pandering process. And of course you don't find someone as brilliant as the late Gahan Wilson all that often.
A society where one half of the population thinks the political beliefs of the other half make them evil is not a healthy one for making works of art in any medium. That's sort of what we have now, although I know it's not actually 50% and 50% adding up to 100. But the thing that so many forget is that art can and should be bigger than anyone's biases.
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I did check out that archive.ph place. It looks like it could be a very good resource. Especially for dealing with surprise paywalls.
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