Charles Murray fights stupid post-modernism with greater stupidity of his own
Elena Nakashima
construct are fools but so is Murray for arguing there is scientific
basis for artistic quality.
Perhaps, the stupidity of the post-modern position grew out of the
confusion caused by modern art where standards were demolished, where
the baby was sometimes tossed out with the bathwater. Much of
contemporary art is judged mainly by arguments amongst critics, and no
matter how sincere this discourse it's more a matter of intellectual
gamesmanship than opinions on the art itself. I think it's much easier
to draw conclusions of quality on more traditionalist expressions in
art. For example, a representational painting can be judged by how it
depicts the sky, a woman, a bowl of fruits whether in terms of realism
or other, more experimental, approaches. But, take some modern
painting where some guy simply drew a line across the canvas and you
think.. what the hell? but then an art critic comes along and gives
his highfalutin reasons for calling it a masterpiece. In such climate,
one can easily feel that artistic worth is really just a construct
amongst snobs and intellectuals.
Same with movies. Most of can agree that Citizen Kane and Seven
Samurai are truly great, not just because critics have said so but
because the evidence is simply there. But, take a movie like some
really strained European art movies and you begin to suspect that
maybe their 'greatness' lies with how much pseudo-intellectual
bullshit you can pile up. For example, someone please explain why
latter day Godard is supposed to be great, why it's worthwhile to sit
thru Hail Mary and King Lear.
http://www.transhumanism.org/pipermail/wta-politics/2003-November/001169.html
Charles Murray's All-Stars
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/teachout.html
by Terry Teachout
November 2003
DESPITE THE faddishness of post modern ways of thinking, I doubt
very
many people truly believe that quality in art and literature is
only
an arbitrary construct, imposed by the powerful on the powerless
for
political purposes. Even intellectuals who pay lip service to this
fundamental tenet of postmodernism, I suspect, hew in private to
the
more common view of aesthetic quality summed up by the art critic
Clement Greenberg:
One of the wonderful things about art is that everybody has to
discover the criteria of quality by himself. They can't be
communicated by word or demonstration. Yet they are objective. .
.
. You have to find out for yourself by looking and experiencing.
And the people who try hardest and look hardest end up, over the
ages, by agreeing with one another in the main. That I call the
consensus of taste.
Still, it appears that a certain number of nominally educated
Americans do indeed believe such terms as "quality," "beauty," and
"greatness" to be wholly subjective. For them, Shakespeare,
Beethoven,
and Rembrandt are "great" not because of the towering and
self-evident
merits of their work but because greatness has been ascribed to
them
by virtue of their status among dead white European males. Given
the
incapacity of such minds to apprehend the greatness of art through
its
immediate experience, how else might one persuade them of its
objective existence?
The hallmark of Charles Murray's work is its commitment to the
persuasive power of statistical analysis, the fruits of which he
invariably presents to his readers in a calm, reasonable tone, no
matter how explosive their implications may be. In this respect,
Murray's latest book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of
Excellence
in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950,* is entirely consistent
with his earlier Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1998), in
which he sought to persuade skeptics to accept conclusions about,
respectively, welfare and intelligence-testing that cut sharply
against the grain of conventional wisdom.
In Human Accomplishment, Murray takes a similar tack, setting out
to
demonstrate that some artists and scientists are objectively better
than others, and that their collective achievements can be both
measured and subjected to meaningful statistical analysis. In his
words:
It is possible to distinguish the important from the trivial, the
fine from the coarse, the credible from the meretricious, and the
elegant from the vulgar. Doing so is not a simple matter, and no
single observer is infallible, but a realm of objective knowledge
about excellence exists. That knowledge can be tapped
systematically and arranged as data that meet scientific
standards
of reliability and validity.
To those unconvinced by the postmodern world view, the first part
of
this claim will seem so obvious as to border on truism. But is it
really possible to make "scientific" use of our "objective
knowledge
about excellence"? And if so, does it make sense to apply identical
methodology to such profoundly different realms of human thought as
art and science? For all its surface reasonableness, Human
Accomplishment turns out to betray certain assumptions about the
world
of art that are so problematic as to call into question the
fundamental validity of its author's approach.
THE UNDERLYING premise of Human Accomplishment is what postmodern
scholars, with their stress on social and political context, refer
to
contemptuously as "the great-man theory of history." Murray,
unabashedly, puts it like this:
One may acknowledge the undoubted role of the cultural context in
fostering or inhibiting great art, but still recall that it is
not
enough that the environment be favorable. Somebody must actually
do
the deed.
The heart of this book, accordingly, is a series of lists of great
artistic and scientific deeds done between 800 b.c.e. and 1950,
along
with the 4,002 "significant figures" who did them. These lists are
not
idiosyncratic. Rather, they have been compiled through an analysis
of
standard reference works, an approach consistent with Murray's
contention that "given a large number of expert opinions about a
dozen
specific qualities of a work of art, we will not see a random set
of
responses, but ones that cluster around a central tendency." This
central tendency he takes to be the "objective" element in Human
Accomplishment.
A specific example will help illustrate the approach. In order to
create his inventory of significant events and figures in Western
visual art, Murray consulted such reference works as Helen
Gardner's
Art Through the Ages, H.W. Janson's History of Art, and Wolf
Stadler's
twelve-volume Lexikon der Kunst, compiling in each case a list of
artists mentioned and the frequency with which they are cited.
These
lists were then combined to create a preliminary list of 1,232
names,
and the individual sources statistically analyzed to determine how
closely they correlated with one another.
In all cases, the correlation coefficients were exceptionally high,
leading Murray to draw the following conclusion:
Because different critics are tapping into a common understanding
of importance in their field, they make similar choices. Various
factors go into the estimate of importance, but they are in turn
substantially associated with excellence.
Murray defines his "significant figures" as those mentioned in at
least 50 percent of his sources; in all, 479 Western artists made
the
cut. Each of these figures was then assigned an "index" score
indicating relative position within the list on which his name
appears, with all top scores arbitrarily set at 100.
In the Western art list, the top scorer is Michelangelo, followed
by
Picasso (77), Raphael (73), Leonardo (61), Titian (61), Dürer (56),
Rembrandt (56), Giotto (54), Bernini (53), and Cézanne (50). The
highest-scoring names on the other lists are equally familiar.
Western
literature, for instance, is led by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante,
Western philosophy by Aristotle, Plato, and Kant, and Western music
by
Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. This reinforces Murray's contention
that
the so-called "canonical" figures in Western culture are, in fact,
not
merely famous but objectively great.
READERS OF The Bell Curve will immediately spot the resemblance
between the method used by Murray in Human Accomplishment and the
methodology of standardized intelligence tests, which measure in
varying degrees a hypothetical "general intelligence" factor common
to
all tests of cognitive ability and known to psychologists as g.
Because g is a mental capacity that cannot be directly measured as
one
measures (say) blood pressure, it resists simple definition.
Indeed,
the experimental psychologist Edwin Boring, writing in 1921,
famously
went so far as to "define" intelligence as "what the tests test."
The seeming circularity of this nondefinition has long been
remarked
by hostile commentators who disapprove of intelligence testing, and
it
is likely that the same sort of case will be made against the way
Human Accomplishment approaches the question of greatness in art.
For
Murray, greatness is what the experts say it is, a definition that
will hardly convince those who believe the experts are themselves
part
of the problem.
Equally unsatisfying to some readers will be the conclusions Murray
draws from his data, though few if any of these conclusions will
come
as a surprise to those untrammeled by political correctness.
Ninety-eight percent of his "significant figures," for example, are
male, and most of them lived in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy
(in that order), which collectively account for 72 percent of all
significant figures active between 1400 and 1950.
Nor does Murray shrink from interpreting these now-uncomfortable
facts
by means of equally uncomfortable arguments from history. Among
other
things, his data lead him to conclude that human accomplishment in
the
arts and sciences is "facilitated by growing national wealth" and
"fostered by political regimes that give de-facto freedom of action
to
their potential artists and scholars." Even more controversially,
he
argues that Human Accomplishment is "fostered by a culture in which
the most talented people believe that life has a purpose" and which
"encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as
individuals, and encourages them to do so."
In practice, of course, what this means is that the Judeo-Christian
West has done the most to foster Human Accomplishment throughout
the
latter part of recorded history, and that non-Western cultures will
similarly thrive only to the extent that their values resemble
those
of the West. Such a conclusion might have been deliberately
calculated
to enrage postmodern thinkers.
EVEN THOSE predisposed to agree with Murray's findings, however,
may
quarrel with him in at least one important respect. For he observes
another tendency in his lists of significant figures, which is that
their numbers have declined noticeably in the course of the last
century.
In the fields of science and philosophy, Murray explains this
decline
as follows:
For many specialties within astronomy, biology, chemistry,
geology,
physics, and mathematics, the fundamental laws had been found
decades or centuries earlier. In philosophy, some of the
fundamental truths had been discovered not decades, not even
centuries, but millennia earlier.
In the arts, however, Murray draws a different conclusion. Not only
the number of great artists but the overall quality of artistic
achievement has been in decline, he contends, since the late 19th
century--that is, since the coming of the modernist movement.
"It is hard to make a case that the literature, art, and music of
today come close to the best work of earlier ages, let alone
signify
progress," Murray remarks in the introduction to Human
Accomplishment.
This turns out to be one of his main themes, and at regular
intervals
he supplies the attentive reader with further clues as to his
private
judgment of the matter. In, for example, his description of the
highest-scoring significant figures in Western art, he observes:
"The
presence of Picasso in second place will surprise and perhaps
outrage
some readers."
Anyone who fought last spring to get a ticket to the Museum of
Modern
Art's hugely popular Matisse-Picasso exhibition is likely to wonder
just who could be "outraged" by Picasso's high index score, second
only to Michelangelo's. The answer, one eventually concludes, is
Charles Murray himself, for at book's end he brings his anti-modern
views out into the open. Having previously argued that nihilism is
antithetical to Human Accomplishment at the highest levels, Murray
suggests here that primary responsibility for the measured decline
in
the objective significance of Western art lies precisely in the
prevalence of nihilism among modernist artists:
I hold that a stream of great accomplishment in the arts depends
upon a culture's enjoying a well-articulated, widely held
conception of the good. I suggest as well that art created in the
absence of a well-articulated conception of the good is likely to
be arid and ephemeral. . . . [F]or the arts, over a period
starting
in the late 1800's and extending through World War I, many of
those
who saw themselves engaged in high art consciously turned away
from
the idea that their function was to realize the beautiful, and
then
rejected the relevance of the true or the good as valid criteria
for judging their work.
AS FAR as it goes, this statement is perfectly plausible. But
Murray
takes it implausibly far. Without offering any specific examples,
he
claims that "most of the serious novels from 1920-1950" are "arid
and
ephemeral." When it comes to the visual arts and music, his
dismissal
of modernism is even more categorical:
[E]ach of the arts in the first half of [the 20th century] had a
channel that was a lineal descendent of pre-[20th-century]
traditions--men such as Stravinsky and Kandinsky, who were aware
of
the legacy and valued it, but sought, as artists had sought
before,
to use the raw materials of great art in new ways for their own
time. But they and other artists in this channel tended to come
early . . . , and their numbers dwindled as time went on. The
generalization remains: in large part, the visual art and concert
music of [the 20th century] is what visual art and concert music
become when their creators do not tap transcendental goods.
Once again, Murray is correct up to a point, but his sweeping and
unspecific dismissal of 20th-century art drastically diminishes the
force of his argument. Of course modernism produced far more than
its
share of nihilistic, antinomian art, as I and others have argued
repeatedly. But it is impossible to read Human Accomplishment
closely
without starting to suspect that Murray simply does not know very
much
about modern art. (If he did, he would never have yoked Igor
Stravinsky, the inventor of musical neoclassicism, with Wassily
Kandinsky, the inventor of abstract art, much less offered
Kandinsky
as one of only two examples of the tradition-based modern artists
whom
he claims to respect.)
This suspicion is further strengthened by Murray's concluding
remarks
on the state of Western art today:
The West's popular culture is for my money the only contemporary
culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling
and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to
write
serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and
charm than anything the academic composers turn out. . . . The
people producing the best work include some who in another age
could have been a Caravaggio or Brahms or Racine, and perhaps
dozens of others good enough to have made their way onto the
roster
of significant figures.
No apologies need be made, certainly not by me, for Western popular
culture at its not-infrequent best. But when Murray mentions the TV
series The Simpsons and the films Saving Private Ryan and Groundhog
Day (the only works of popular art cited by him as exemplary) in
the
same breath as Caravaggio, Brahms, and Racine, one inevitably
wonders
whether he has any business making critical judgments of any kind
about art of any period.
THAT MURRAY is indiscriminately hostile to modernism seems clear
enough. But has his hostility led him to go so far as to stack his
statistical deck?
Even though a plausible case can be made for his decision to
establish
a cut-off date of 1950 for his lists of significant events and
figures, doing so must have had some skewing effect on his data
bases.
In addition, he freely admits that the particular reference works
from
which his lists were compiled reflected a private agenda. "I am
choosing one type of expertise and rejecting another," he writes,
"allying myself with the classic aesthetic tradition and rejecting
the
alternative tradition that sprang up" in the 20th century.
The admission is admirably frank. In the end, though, it can only
reinforce the impression that, for all of Murray's elaborate
statistical apparatus, Human Accomplishment amounts to nothing more
than a massive exercise in circular logic. Even those who believe
as I
do in the continuing validity of the "classic aesthetic
tradition"--and who recognize, as Murray does not, that it is no
less
applicable to the great art of the tradition-conscious moderns--are
likely to come away convinced that the author of Human
Accomplishment
has cut his analytic cloth to fit his aesthetic tastes.
CHARLES MURRAY's well-intentioned efforts notwithstanding, the
question of whether or not it is possible to demonstrate
objectively
the existence of absolute standards of aesthetic quality will
probably
always remain open. That such absolute standards do exist, however,
seems to me indisputable. No matter how aggressively postmodern
thinkers may deny the significance of the consensus of judgment--or
the overwhelming dominance of Western culture--the whole of human
history and experience is arrayed against them. It cannot be
coincidental that, as Clement Greenberg observed, "the people who
try
hardest and look hardest end up, over the ages, by agreeing with
one
another in the main."
What also seems indisputable, if Human Accomplishment is any
indication, is that attempts to endow this striking concordance
with
the patina of quasi-scientific objectivity are probably doomed to
failure. To which one may respond: so what? Ideology-blinded
philistines who choose to deny the greatness of Shakespeare,
Beethoven, and Rembrandt (or, for that matter, Proust, Stravinsky,
and
Matisse) will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence,
statistical or otherwise. Again, so what? Experts or no experts,
all
music sounds the same to the tone-deaf.
_________________________________________________________________
TERRY TEACHOUT, Commentary's regular music critic and the drama
critic
of the Wall Street Journal, also writes about the arts at
www.terryteachout.com.
Rufus T. Frazier
Nakashima) wrote:
>Teachout is right. Post-modernists who think greatness is simply a
>construct are fools but so is Murray for arguing there is scientific
>basis for artistic quality.
Agree. Murry adopts a too narrow concept of "art" in order
to apply his analysis techniques. When all you have is a hammer,
all your problems look like nails.
>Perhaps, the stupidity of the post-modern position grew out of the
>confusion caused by modern art where standards were demolished, where
>the baby was sometimes tossed out with the bathwater. Much of
>contemporary art is judged mainly by arguments amongst critics, and no
>matter how sincere this discourse it's more a matter of intellectual
>gamesmanship than opinions on the art itself.
In other words, modern "fine" art has become literary. A notion put
forward by Tom Wolf in "The Painted Word".
>. In such climate,
>one can easily feel that artistic worth is really just a construct
>amongst snobs and intellectuals.
More to the point, government endowed and certified snobs and
intellectuals. They have a certain POV because the people who
provided the bucks and put them into their places of power
did so because it fits their tastes or agenda.
Elena Nakashima
> On 21 Nov 2003 11:53:15 -0800, nicoci...@yahoo.com (Elena
> Nakashima) wrote:
>
> >Teachout is right. Post-modernists who think greatness is simply a
> >construct are fools but so is Murray for arguing there is scientific
> >basis for artistic quality.
>
> Agree. Murry adopts a too narrow concept of "art" in order
> to apply his analysis techniques. When all you have is a hammer,
> all your problems look like nails.
>
>
> >Perhaps, the stupidity of the post-modern position grew out of the
> >confusion caused by modern art where standards were demolished, where
> >the baby was sometimes tossed out with the bathwater. Much of
> >contemporary art is judged mainly by arguments amongst critics, and no
> >matter how sincere this discourse it's more a matter of intellectual
> >gamesmanship than opinions on the art itself.
>
> In other words, modern "fine" art has become literary. A notion put
> forward by Tom Wolf in "The Painted Word".
That is one funny book. However, Wolfe's taste in art is abominable.
He thinks Norman Rockwell was great. And, not long ago he wrote a
piece in the New York Times magazine defending some ugly neo-classical
sculpture(shown in movie Devil's Advocate)as great art neglected by
snobs. Please.