Young Fogey Rant

Just returned from the Met's movie theater simulcast of Boris Godunov with my grandmother as part of her ongoing 90th birthday celebrations. A frightening, awesome, wonderful experience of a magnificent though deeply flawed work that left me with tears trickling down my beard even after my Bubbie and I fell asleep for forty-five minutes of it. But it was with sadness that I realized yet again that in a few years I may be one of the only people I know left who is desperate for more experiences like this one.

The theater was as packed as one would expect for a Rene Pape performance conducted by Valery Gergiev. But excepting me, there were two people in the theater without gray hair. What is it about my generation that they will pack themselves like sardines to see anything by artists like Andy Warhol, The Decemberists, or Wes Andersen, and yet leave the greatest stuff of previous eras completely untouched? Does it really not speak to them? Or have our parents just failed to show them what's great in it?

I believe in great art. And great art, from whatever era, doesn't explain itself. It takes repeated exposure, time and commitment. Not all of it is going to seem interesting on the first try, and some of it still won't interest you on the hundredth. But when it comes together, you simply feel more alive, and willing to sit through a hundred mediocre performances, books, exhibits, films just to get to one great one. Once you've been bitten by the bug, there's no going back.

There's no reason art can't be entertaining, but the best of art does something beyond entertainment. If it's great, it never averts its gaze from questions that are by definition unable to be answered, and it goes to places in people's psyches that they would rather not visit or even acknowledge. It can sometimes feel like eating your vegetables, but just as people need vegetables to survive, they need art too. I really do believe that. Even if people don't believe in God, people still starve for elements of their lives in which they can put greater effort. People need something that is more beautiful, more truthful, and more meaningful than their everyday worlds. Because if life is no more than bills to pay and treadmills to run, how do we know that we're living it? Sure, there are all sorts of great artists today from every walk of life, but are they appreciated for what they are? It's true that some people turn to the Beatles or Otis Redding (let alone Outkast and Bjork) for wisdom and consolation, but how many more in the last forty years have done so because they just liked the tunes or the beat?

It was not always like this, it's well within living memory that there was an enormous public in America of all ages for the great art of the past. And if the tastemakers in my generation (whoever they are) have decided that the past is not worth preserving, who am I to tell them that they're wrong? But why the allergy to anything earnest? Why the allergy to the past? Why the allergy to art that burns to communicate something deeper than 'why so serious?' You can't cast off the mantle of the past unless you know it well enough to give it a real critique. Otherwise you'll just end up making the same mistakes that previous generations did and your children will resent you for leaving them to pick up the pieces of life that you dropped. This is the story of England between the world wars, of Rococo France and of Late-Imperial Rome. In our time, this is the process that the Baby Boomers seemed to start, and who knows how far my generation can take it before our children/grandchildren can do little but resent us for not preparing them for whatever gathering storm lies in our wake? If you can't accept that parts of life are serious, then eventually it becomes just as hard to accept the parts of life that are silly. Pretty soon you'll just end up allergic to anything that makes you feel an emotion deeper than 'eh' and whatever else you can conjure out of your own naval-gazing. Not only will you turn a blind eye the suffering around you, but you'll also miss all sorts of opportunities to take pleasure too.

...and get off my lawn!