by Gary Corseri
“A cry of absence, absence in the heart.” --William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!)
Way back when, Willie Nelson had a song about his heroes always being cowboys. For me, at least from my teenage years, they were writers, painters, sculptors, composers. They were the kind of people who wouldn’t take guff from anyone, and who would tell it like it was—and is. Hemingway, for example, at the height of his fame, taking a principled stand against Franco, addressing a New York audience of progressives at a pro-Spanish Republic event organized by poet Archibald MacLeish. The writers’ works would lead me to their lives—and much as they tell you now to forget about the bios, much as this 1930’s New Criticism still gluts the academic milieu, so much do I know in my viscera that the life and the work form a whole: one informs and completes the other.
But a strange thing has happened. Almost half my lifetime—some thirty years-- ago, the kinds of people who became artists began to change. While Kerouac was dharma-bumming the country, Ginsberg reciting to his harmonium, Baldwin speculating brilliantly with those darting, exophathalmic eyes, and Sylvia—my God, It still hurts!—sticking her beautiful head in an oven—a lot of my contemporaries were exercising their gluteus maximus in writing workshops while postulating visions of tenure-track sugar plums.
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In a few short years we’ve gone from artist-as-recreant, miscreant, Colin Wilson-outsider, to artist as consummate insider: slick, snake-oil salesman Administration-shill, able to hobnob with D.o.D. Secretary Cohen at bigwig party events the night the bombs start raining over Kosovo, or do a two-step Uncle Tom-thank you Massa’ Daddy Warbucks, jes’ keep the money flowin’ an’ I won’t bring up the W.M.D.’s, the C.E.O. robberies, the child-bashing-education-stealing, the health-care-environment-depleting, multi-multi shenanigans and depredations that would break the hearts of stone-cold statues had I the courage to open my mouth and wail about what I see so clearly around me day by day by day.
It’s a damn shame. It’s a goddamn, crying shame. No doubt there are first-rate artists out there, struggling to put it down in verse and drama, painting and sculpture, immortal music seizing the energy of creative change that Stravinsky captured in “The Firebird,” that Giacometti welded into screeched-out bronze, that Arthur Miller sizzled to perfection in The Crucible, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman. When we bewail the loss of our public airwaves to the pirates of Faux News, the Conservative Bullshit Service (CBS) or Clear Channel, we go only halfway if we fail to recognize how we have lost our Arts—highbrow and populist—over these past thirty years.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0210-03.htm I've been saying this for the past 20 years now, that (my generation in particular ) does not seem to be producing the types of artists we've seen in the past. Having been a writer for many of those years, I can tell you first hand why this is happening: no one is interested in art for art's sake anymore. The only types of books that sell are non-fiction and genre fiction trash. Society now treats art as disposable art of the moment (vis a vis American Idol). It's truly sad, because the highest of concepts, beyond religion, beyond science, beyond government is art, in my opinion.
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