The Theory of Money and Credit
We're halfway through, believe it or not, five down, five to go, and we've made it to the 20th century, and my topic today will be, this afternoon will be modernism.
My epigraph is taken from an epigraph in Paul Berlain's book, Loss of Money in the Market, which is Edward Pound writing to James Royce in 1918.
Why in Christ's name, we are all millionaires? I don't know.
But the thing is that that manifests a certain fundamental attitude in modernism.
To go back to my initial parable of the cave, where I try to define the fundamental artistic transactions,
let's go back to those cave man days and imagine some progress has been made, and one day our cave man artist says to the group,
Well, things are a little different now. You guys still go out and kill the mammoth, and you still bring me the meat while I stay in the cave, except the drawing I'm going to do today, don't expect it's going to look like the mammoth, in fact, it may not look like anything, but don't let that upset you, and that drawing I did of the god of hunting to help you guys kill the mammoth, I'm going to cover it with mammoth lung today.
I'm feeling impressed with today, but I still want to man this meeting.
I'm sorry, but that's modernism for you.
I'm going to ask you to rethink modernism today in light of what we've been discussing,
and this may be my most controversial lecture, but maybe modernism needs some rethinking.
And I want to do it in light of the fundamental issue that's emerging, I felt we could really focus on this morning, and it's the question, are artists better off being shielded from the market or actually being exposed to oppressors?
And there's a simple answer to that, and I look at the example of a serialized novel in Victorian Britain, it shows that there are pluses and minuses to market pressure.
that indeed we can see the novelists themselves complaining about commercial pressures.
We can identify ways in which their novels became aesthetically worked because some
of the commercial pressures, sometimes they're too long, sometimes they're too short,
the commercial reasons.
On the other hand, I've pointed out ways in which the commercial systems could,
and, in many ways, improve their work through the feedback system of seeing what the audience
liked and did like, of support, you know, one obvious factor in the commercial nature
of 19th century publishing for us people to produce novels at the rate of sometimes two
every three years, let's say.
Sometimes they were rough because of that and maybe had less aesthetic value.
On the other hand, we have more novels out of these people.
James Royce took seven years to write Ulysses, and I think 13 years to write Finnegan's Way.
In effect, we have three novels from his whole career.
Now, maybe we should be thankful for that, looking at Finnegan's Way.
But, you know, the output of 19th century novelists is much greater than that of the most 20th century novelists, especially the ones that we think of as artists.
And, yes, individual novels may be more aesthetically perfect because the author took more time on it,
But would you really like fewer novels out of Dickens in your terms
for the few we had being more aesthetically perfect?
There's a trade-off there between writing a lot of novels
with some aesthetic failing and writing fewer
that are aesthetically more perfect.
That's a genuine trade-off and you can argue either side of the park.
But I do want to suggest in just some sort of basic way simply this aesthetic
and Commercial Pressure to turn out novels.
It was very difficult on the novels, but in many ways,
it may have left us with a richer world of literature.
Now, as I talk about modernism, I want to think about it in these terms
that it's specifically developed as an anti-commercial movement.
That is, I, and a lot of people have been restating it that way.
Lawrence Laney in his book, Institutions of Modernism, that I recommended to you, and Paul Delaney in his book,
Limited for Money in the Market. So I, I didn't develop this theory. I'm just capitalizing on the work of others here.
Again, the way modernism presented itself is that it's set off on this deliberate aesthetic port, and it happened to be
and the Incompatible Commercial Consideration, but people like Lady and the Lady have suggested
that in fact modernism set out to define itself in opposition to commerce, the Lady quotes
Edward Pound at one point in some way formulating the essence of modernism, nothing written
for Pay, it's worth printing, only what has been written against the market.
And you can find a lot of these statements from Arnold Schoenberg about music,
right down the line you can see the modernists exclusively defining themselves against the market
by claiming that precisely if something is commercial it lacks artistic merit,
and if something is not commercial, it must have commercial, it must have artistic merit.
In fact, what I'm going to argue is modernism is the key source of our anti-commercial bias.
That when you have an anti-commercial bias in culture,
you're buying in to what is essentially a modernist myth.
So how does that develop?
It really develops in reaction to the emergence of a mass market
for Culture for the first time ever in the world in the 19th century in England and in Europe
and eventually the United States.
This was a tremendous change in human life, an ethical change
and it understandably did produce some interesting reactions.
Before 1800, what we see of culture was a necessity and a lead phenomenon restricted
to a really small part of society.
Both Shakespeare and Love and Omidate have helped crystallize that.
When we saw in both works, culture really revolves around the court,
occasionally filled over into some popular areas and artistic endeavors like the theater
or operetta, but basically when we now as cultural science look back at things before 1800,
And we are inevitably looking at largely the elite phenomenon centered around aristocratic or in some cases church centers and somewhat spreading out.
For example, in literature, you would have these two appear in literacy. Literacy rates were basically so low that if you talk about literature up to 1800,
and talking about things that are being read by a couple of thousands of people, both because below literacy rates, the extent of this and so on.
What populism made possible in the 19th century was the most productive literature, the spread of literacy.
Richard Altman's book shows that, what's interesting in that book is he definitely considers every outsourced human profit attempt to spread literacy in England.
Church organizations, wonderful philanthropists who would open up libraries for the poor and provide them with literacy for free.
And one after another these projects failed.
Why did you say we're not market oriented?
You went to the wonderful free library and there was all this moral religious literature
for you to read to uplift you and the working class stayed away and grows.
Who made the English working class literate and gave them the habit
of reading the capitalist book selling industry because it gave them what they wanted.
Now, in the course of the 19th century, cultural elites were appalled at that result because what they saw was that the plight of widespread cultural literacy and making leading a habit was what they regarded as the states that it takes.
When you think about the logic of the other world, you know, the 18th century news, as we see here, revolves around the poems of Arivander Polk,
an administratively sophisticated, politically written poem, but they were read by hundreds and maybe thousands of people.
The idea that you could take millions of people and get them to read post-Essay on Man or post-Essay on Citizens, that seems to be a numerical group thing.
What is truly impressive is you could get them to read Dickens novels.
I want to stress that we're talking about changing things here, but it's not necessarily a pure debatement far from it.
And when you look at what was the basis of wise presidency in 19th century women, it's pretty impressive.
So much so now that we assign those books in universities.
So much so now that cultural pessimists lament the fact that the average college student doesn't read Dickens for pleasure, but instead goes to a movie or watches television.
It's interesting to realize that in the 19th century reading a Dickens novel was looked down upon with the same contempt that people long looked down upon as reading or watching television and going to movies.
I was actually astounded to go back and look at books attacking reading in the 19th century.
and so on.
There were substantial anti-leaning campaigns in early 19th century literature.
People were convinced that this was destroying the working class, that they were picking
up this habit of reading.
A lot of, I'm not talking about this, this is for real, the whole book is written on
on this subject, and it's a partially old moralistic campaign, the same kind of objections
that were raised at Ludwig Mises Theater, that people said both the moralists were up there,
you know, there's sex and violence and book race, there'd be media.
But I was shocked to see that it was a more abstract, media-oriented argument.
You know, a lot of people now object to politics not on the specific grounds of the content
of the Program, but they would say it's a bad habit watching television.
You get locked into it, you feel it's like a drug, you get addicted to it.
What really surprised me was to see that that argument was made against reading novels in the 19th century.
Martin Arnold's father, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Ludwig's School,
one of the most prominent of Quentin's family, in which he condemned the horrible
of Serialized Novels, and he said, it's just awful now,
these kids can't wait for the next installment of the novel to come out,
and they read it instantly, and they don't do their schoolwork,
instead they want to read the novel, and they're hooked into it, they're addicted to it.
I mean, he's not even saying anything about the content,
but just about the habit of these serialized novels.
Every time a new medium comes along that's popular, the intellectual, cultural, moral elite objects to it, you know, the late Plato objects to it. All these things now that we hold up on a platform and contrast with the basement of our culture, they were regarded as the base culture in their day, and indeed there was a real class panic in the 19th century, precisely as literacy spread to the middle and lower classes, and they were
are finally getting real entertainment and have novels being written with that of Mises audiences that they could teach in as well.
Again, many of them were no doubt trash, many of them have been forgotten.
But all of the novels that we now teach in universities with masterpieces were in fact popular in their day, different degrees of popularity, of course.
But this created a kind of cultural pattern in the 19th century, this sense that the old forms of the cultural elite were being displaced.
One perfect way to see it is in the status of poetry. Going into the 19th century, poetry was regarded as the highest form of literature and almost as the essence of literature.
So that you would teach poetry in university then, not English poetry, but Latin and Greek poetry, but still poetry, and anyone with literary aspirations to immortality, to be a great writer, would want to go into poetry.
The book is, if you had the brains of the 1800s, you would have seen it as a novel of where to go.
That a lot of great poetry has been written, and you want Salerno, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare,
but not too many great novels have been written by the enemies.
In newer terms, the great history of the 1970s is in a way a shift in power from poetry to fiction.
And much of the reaction at the time was a result of an older, poetry-oriented elite feeling it was losing its grip on the world of literature.
So that, for example, the first Marxist criticism of popular culture comes from what the words were.
Long before Marx, Ludwig was a member of the Francis School, 150 years ahead of time.
Ahead of Time. In the process for the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads that Woodworth wrote with Coleridge that came out in 1800,
Woodworth offers these poems as an alternative to the debate space of contemporary readers.
And he gives a pure, cyclical argument. He says, people are more and more forced into cities, and their lives are becoming more and more monotonous, and as a result, they need sensation, their clothing is kind of morbid excitement, and they turn to these deep German dramas and gothic fiction.
You know, because the industrial world has all their senses, and so their taste has been debased,
and we're going back to the future and the countryside and the roots of school virtual,
and our poems are a fuel for this. I think it's a fuel of fact and fuel of argument.
He doesn't quite use this language, but he talks about urbanization, talks about all the things that the Marxists complain about in modern life, and also sees romantic poetry as a cure for that and an alternative to these debate forms of mass popular literature,
and the German melodrama and the Dauphine novels with their sensational plots and their
blood and gore.
Of course, it's fascinating.
It's only about four sentences in a question.
It's a lot better reading in a dialectic and in logic than just outside of your head.
We're going to say for about four sentences or a whole time we're going to take a whole
book of purely driven tones to say, but it's important to see that there are arguments
The reason it was made that early is I think it really gives a sense of the context for modernism and for much of the Marxist critique of commercial literature.
The old elite didn't like what was happening. There was a great power shift going on and you can see the fact that going into the 19th century,
Poetry was still a best-selling form of people like Walter Stock in his Scottish tales, like
Marmion and Leo Latham's book, Lord Byron in his Oriental tales, like the Broward, the
Rider-Bider.
He sold really several amounts of bogs for poetry.
Some of Byron's poems would sell 10,000 copies in a week.
I used to be told I was going to be killed for that, and now I sell 10,000 copies in a lifetime.
Now this business cycle, if you look at the violent poems that sold, they were hails,
liberating a woman from her perfect harem, killing a falcon on the way.
They turned out to be pretty blood and death themselves.
Now one of the great cultural forms in the 19th century, 1816,
Walter Scott's Written Poetry to the Novel, published anonymously to get a great reputation as a poet, and he didn't want to ruin his reputation by being caught writing something so vulgar as a novel, so he published his novels anonymously for many years.
was a, it wasn't the greatest kept secret in British Murray history but it's a sign that he himself looked down upon novel writing as a way to make money but his novels were so successful that it really opened up the whole possibility that suddenly you can't see that there was a lot of money to be made in novel writing and people like Dickens came along to something more was even possible so what you have is this tremendous expansion
In the 18th century there were books for the lucky that they sold hundreds of copies, maybe
5,000 copies.
The King of the Room is Founded, and our Frankenstein, for example, was written by Mary Shelley in
the 1850s.
I don't install it as a very successful novel.
It turns out that in the whole of the 19th century it sold only 7,500 copies.
I found that astounding when I was studying that.
The Federal Reserve is a very good sale, it sold a lot of copies, it had the movie rights, we'd be a rich woman today, but still it gives me some sense of what we're talking about, how fast people were, ridiculous, selling 40,000 copies, 50,000 copies, 100,000 copies, that's a huge demographic shift in the industry, and it of course had consequences, 100,000 leading
are not going to have the same pace as 500 years, though that doesn't necessarily mean
that they have bad taste, that's of course what the old cultural elite thought, that these
novels aren't bad taste, and in what respect we say no, but I mean in fact the Victorian
public had pretty remarkably good taste, and as a picture they liked, and we still admire
Today as models of fiction, but this is the cultural pressure that generated modernism,
that a certain kind of author and artists in other fields felt this new pressure of
the mass market, and we talk about the real effective commercial pressures, if you wanted
that market, there were certain things you had to do, you had to write a certain way,
Well, I think he kind of thing spoke to poetry and was an enormous bestseller in poetry.
I think he was handed, I think, a £25,000 debt as an advance from a publisher for one of his poems.
I think that's right. That's right. Millions of dollars for a poem.
So, and that's it. None of these things happen overnight.
It's not like, okay, 1850s, people who write poetry said they'd stop as well right now.
of the World.
Those are, but broadly speaking, you can watch the paintings in public place over the 19th
century, a shift from a poetry-based popular literature to a novel-based popular literature.
And you can see how the poets began to feel left in the dust and why they started to comment
negatively against commerce.
and Blake to see the perfect quality, and while the novelists are thinking of raising their posts to cities like Birmingham that are buying their books, but Ludwig was talking about an additive phenomenon now, and I'm sure more volumes of poetry were being sold at the end of the 19th century than in 1800, but relative to
The novels being sold have looked bad.
I'll start with Robert, this is a sign, I'll listen to Robert Darnton, the French historian on your new bibliography,
because he spent his whole life looking at the French book brain, and he's written some remarkable books,
this book on the French encyclopedia called The Business of Enlightenment,
and the National Study of the Development of the Interest Structure of the Health Publicity Industry confirms much of what I've been saying about the human public interest industry, but he talks about the paradox of the situation of writers in the 19th century.
As the publishing industry developed, never had writers had greater opportunities
to get published and to make money, but that, at the same time, created immense frustration
because some made so much more money than others, and you had a kind
of revolution of writing expectations.
As the markets opened up, and there were more and more opportunities to publish and more ways
to make money from public aid, people in fact got more frustrated, because more people wanted
to go into the publishing industry, into the writing industry, and they might, in fact,
do much better than 18th century writers did financially, but they didn't, let's say,
do a lot of difference, and Duncan talked about the generation of ending in the French intelligentsia.
He goes back into the 18th century and sees it actually as one of the causes of the French revolution that precisely the expansion of capitalism made possible led to great frustration which was never enough.
And he suddenly began to have the phenomenon of the unemployed intelligentsia, who people felt had been lured into running the promises of the other world.
And so the generation of anti-commercial sentiment in the 19th century has a lot to do with that logic, you understand that, that it's not that capitalism doesn't deliver the goods, but it also doesn't deliver enough goods to sacrifice certain people, and if the people like schools, that means they're the most vocal people in this regard.
One of the books I suggested was John Bader's The Intellectuals and the Maths, which develops this argument as well.
And so when you get to the 20th century, you have a lot of solid language mentality having developed in the intellectual world and the world of writers.
Here it's astounding how many people were able to earn their living writing in the 19th century in a new way that had never been possible in the world.
The literary world expanded exponentially. I didn't even talk about the phenomenon of magazines in the 19th century.
And in many ways, magazines were a better source of steady income.
And many of these novelists actually made their steady income writing book reviews
which were disproportionately rewarded.
You could get one-tenth of the money for writing a novel,
for writing one-hundredth the length of pages.
I'm just making up those figures, but that's roughly what we're talking about.
and so a lot of people were able to support themselves.
Gorgelia was an example, tiny book reviews and other little essays.
It was a vastly expanded market, totally made possible by paper, a better distribution system
for magazines, the elimination of toxins on magazines, which occurred around the middle
of the 19th century and so on.
You know, people complain, say, about the 20th century, oh, poetry isn't supported the way it was in the 18th century.
I mean, the number of practicing poets in the United States today undoubtedly exceeds all the poets in the history of humanity, in every corner of the earth.
You know, my university alone has 300 poets in this department.
You know, we remember maybe 50 poets total from the 19th century in England.
And now, to add up just in the academic world, there are thousands of poets in America.
What they're complaining about, again, is not something absolute, but something relative.
They're earning living, but they're not earning as big a living as Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise
and all these people out in public.
Again, our feet pound the floor, why in Christ's name we aren't all millionaires, I don't know.
You know, that's always a problem in Catholicism.
It's totally across the wall, but doesn't spread it around equally.
I don't think that's wrong, but it does show why people begin to prevent it.
Mises is very good at discussing this in the anti-capitalist mentality,
especially when he talks about the resentment of the liberati.
He analyzes the process there.
What's useful in saying is the situation out of which modernism grows,
the idea that the market is falling, not absolutely, but relatively.
and Money is not supporting us to the extent it's supporting other people.
And so you get art novelists, artsy novelists in the late 19th century, early 20th century,
basically they're resentful that they're not making as much money as Dickens did.
Now, it turns out they're not willing to do what Dickens did.
Mises audited halfway, right novelist, it would be popular, but they resent that and so they start
The market side has turned their disadvantage into an advantage, or their necessity into a virtue, and you start to generate this new, modernist ideology that is something distinct from the market, that evidence that it's not authentically good, and a totally illogical conclusion from that, that if something falls in the market, that proves that it is good, that it's not illogical, you know, the first premise is good,
Finding Artistic Myths of the 20th Century Modernism, and that's the premiere of Stravinsky's
Right of Spring in Paris. Maybe the single most famous artistic premiere of the 20th Century
with the possible reason for being tied to the Caribbean with several of those wonderful
records, but I suppose you know the story that the Agra Ballet Company is staging the
in the Right of Frame for its music under the riot, and the audience booed, scammed,
drowned out, the orchestra, and the pre-year of this great masterwork of the 20th century
Right of Frame is ruined.
We have paid ever since for that night.
I'd like to pistol with that audience, if only they'd behave themselves better.
Since then, we have not been able to boo at the premiere of any modernist work.
We have to sit there and suffer.
No matter what class the audience serves up, we've got to behave and not run with it,
because we mustn't ever recreate the sadness of that night.
Well, the person is just a story, but it's a myth.
and let me just tell that opening night audience a bit.
We now know Rite of Spring is a great, great piece of music, and I love it.
And in fact, the Kampar topic talk show that is involved is in St. Paisa.
It's a wonderful performance by Lance Holtsakowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performing it.
The fact is, if we do act that premiere, we might not allow some music
for the Review, Balls and Plays.
Now, Pierre Moncure was conducted, one of the great, one of the ten greatest conductors
of the 2017 State of the Man Algebra, as Bayer, and he went on to record it
with the Boston Symphony, which was a great performance, but it was very hard
for that premier night for the orchestra, the rhythms were very complex,
they didn't have enough rehearsal time, they weren't playing it very well,
as you kind of might imagine, it was the first time,
and so on.
He's by far the most good.
He couldn't lift that orchestra in state to give a performance of it that was good.
But that really wasn't the problem.
In fact, the problem was the choreography.
Ludwinski, greatest male dancer of the 20th century.
But he wasn't that great a choreographer.
And this was one of the first ballets he choreographed.
They're typical.
He's a great dancer.
But now, he's got to be a choreographer.
The problem, in fact, the problem was the choreographies, the dynasties, greatest male dancer of the 20th century, but he wasn't that great a choreographer, and this was one of the first ballets he choreographed, Dan Tipical, he was a great dancer, but now he's got to be a choreographer, Diogo Leblon, it's virtually the first thing he choreographed, maybe the first native thing he choreographed,
Remember Dick Fox, American Bandstand, where there were rating records, you know, 98? Why, Dick would ask? It's easy to dance to.
Well, a fuck-ridden printout would not have gotten a 98 on American Bandstand.
Did you see, you know, an orchestra cannot play it, but it's still not easy to dance to.
And I don't know if it's out on DVD, I luckily take it, but if you ever see this recreation of what the ballet looked like, it's pretty laughable.
Oh, and then there's potassium. I went to this exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York,
because it was the history of Guadalajara, and they, the great master of the Ballet Rouge, the great Uncle Stadio,
and they had all this stuff for the calcium, and I talked to a writer, Spring, and I said,
Well, this can't seem like a fancy success, right? It looked like a Daniel Boone movie.
It looked like, you know, silly American Indian costumes.
And I said, wow, this is just ridiculous, y'all. Someone silly, I'd be like, look at that.
And then I found photographs. And they reproduced them perfectly.
I mean, it looked like bad costume made out of an American record.
So, I would have laughed. I laughed at the costumes the first time I saw it.
for it. I hate to say it. Actually, I think in the, there's a 1980s movie about Nijinsky's life with Alan Bates as Nijinsky and George Filipano as Alan Bates' novelist and George Filipano as Nijinsky. I think they have a brief recreation of that. And, you know, it really was bad, even though we can now say Writers' Thing is a great thing to do, but probably that was a fan production.
People who were put right to laugh at it, and who did it? Yeah, I get it, it shouldn't be bad or rough to compose things like that, or choreographers, but still, the idea that this was some great performance of right and free, and only the first things to pitily always made them reject it is a complete myth.
Moreover, it now turns out that there are enemies of Diaghilev, I think, who pulled people in the crowd to boo, although I know Diaghilev paid people in the crowd to boo to create a scandal and promote the work, but, you know, there are many such stories, this I think is the most famous one, which is supposed to teach us never reject a work of art.
This is part of moving to free the artist from any audience pressure. That's why this myth is told and retold. And while we're told, nobody appreciated Vincent van Gogh during his life. We've actually bought the line that nobody appreciates Picasso and that Picasso had to struggle and struggle to get a breakthrough. He was a very wealthy man early in his career. He was a very wealthy man early in his career. He was a very wealthy man early in his career. He was a very wealthy man early in his career.
We're very carefully with the viewers, that's the general book I told you about, proves that.
And I think we are, we kept it really ingrained in us so that we're afraid to devise any modernist work
because we've been convinced that modernist artists have to struggle.
You know, if CSI were to raise my hand, they'd go, you know, six months into that phone call,
Modernism was very well organized, lots of great self-promotion, self-publicity and part of it was convincing us that we're too dumb and we don't know what's going to happen in the future.
to a virtual half-century far in modern music and modern pages.
Now, drawing upon Lenin and Bologna, I want to look into some more detail on this modernist reaction.
One of the forms we've talked, and this is again important for us as we think about things in economic terms,
Both Lainey and Lainey showed that for all the scorns for marketing and commerce in modernism,
in fact, it developed a very recognizable marketing strategy, which we call myth marketing.
That is, in reaction to the mass market, these modernists, together with various cultural middlemen, art dealers,
in a private edition, a limited round of 1,000 copies, they knew that the listings was not going to be bestseller.
How did they figure that out? And so they pursued the opposite strategy, which was to price it higher,
And they actually targeted the book collecting market, not the book buying market.
And later you've got a careful study that's shown that, again, the myth of Ulysses as this very high-ranking group of brilliant intellectual artists subscribed to the initial publication.
and they could show that people like Andre Gein, I believe that he didn't lose his threshold for among the original subscribers, but Lady went down the list, down the first few days, and then into one rare book dealer after another, buying this thing, and he said, you know, even at a very expensive price, Lady calculates it cost as much as a month's rent in a pirate's apartment, that's how they tend to give us an equivalent for it.
for Buyers and Book Dealers and they knew that this thing was going to go up in price as a collectible.
And the book that he released was marketed as a limited edition collectible and part
of Joseph's remediation was that he got a certain number of copies which were worth more
than royalties he could get at the time or any kind of a band and indeed the book,
well I don't know what a book he released sells for now but I think that's on eBay,
and so forth.
And he goes all the way back to William Blake in the 1800s.
He despised the commercial market, and then he was a small business man, and he published
a book himself on his own little printing press, and he chose to price them higher.
And you know, that sounds crazy, but you know, goes through the ads you get in the mail for
I mean, this is a community of capital astrology, that you take a book that anybody can buy
for five bucks and put it in a letter by binding and have it introduction by somebody and study
it as only five hundred thousand people and you can charge a hundred bucks for it.
That's a strategy that the boys have figured out didn't work too well for the state, I have to say.
But he made a living, and it's exactly the strategy pursued in George Ludwig's, and it's way more than that.
I mean, they thought that, still, they were safely trying to transfer to the book market,
while it was already there in the art market.
Modernist artists, painters were doing quite well already by the 1920s,
because they were selling unique collectible albums.
and you could see already often the prices were going up and this was not lost
on other modernist artists, in this case, the writers.
So there it is, modernism in terms of its economic underpinnings
to a large extent took the form of niche marketing.
And that's what I was saying earlier today,
capitalism supports a whole range of cultural people including everything
and so on. Modernist market returned to patients. There was a kind of nostalgia for patients.
Patients, again, when people had patients, they realized what a problem they were. And
you get these statements like Dickens saying, thank God we don't have to rely on patients
anymore. The market has liberated us from patients. But the people who felt frustrated
by the Market, they didn't see what was wrong with patrons, they just saw what was wrong
with the market, and so they wanted to get back to patronage.
And typically there was so much wealth flowing around in the 20th century that a new class
Participations developed, sons and daughters of wealthy families, some people who in business
manner made a lot of money themselves and wanted to spend it on art and get the procedure.
He was a very, very strange person. He was a member of the Lloyds Bank House Support CSIS at a key point in his career.
And so, you know, I think we have this image of these starving, struggling artists, and, you know, they're all living in nice apartments, traveling to Italy for vacations, throwing parties, I mean, it really, it's very much one of the catiest things of modernism, the way it's promoted, to make us all feel bad that we owe them more money than we want, why aren't they?
I'll leave you there.
Now, again, it's quite amazing the number of patrons who came forward in the 20th century.
Peggy Guggenheim is obviously one of the most famous in the field.
A number of the rock controllers supported art in various forms.
So, in a certain way, you can say the market stepped up
and restored patronage in the kind of upper middle class form.
Now, there is a bad side to return to patronage that is worth the suffering to sort of bring
out what I'm talking about in modernism, and Edward Hound is the focus of this.
For Edward Hound, it turned off the return to patronage, the real return to patronage,
namely a return to Renaissance tolerance, and if you couldn't get a Renaissance tolerance,
In fact, this pirate would do almost as well, and his name was Mousseline.
As you may know, Brown ended up in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington,
in the Washington, D.C. area after World War II.
Because during World War II, he was the Tokyo Rose of the Western Front.
He had named a broadcast on behalf of Mousseline and fascism.
and the US I didn't know what to do with them after the war, maybe at the time the most famous
living American poet and he's been broadcasting for fascism during the war and appealing to
for American Groups that lay down their arms in support of Lutheranism and that sort of thing.
You know, by all standards, quite honestly, he should have been executed for being afraid of him.
And if he hadn't been ever found, he undoubtedly would have been.
And the solution they came up with was to say he was crazy.
They didn't do this to Copiel Rose, for example,
And, you know, we continue to write poetry from St. Elizabeth, and many of the last samples were written there and published from there.
In a way, it's a very sad story, but people, you know, are reluctant to face the consequences of it.
He was this man that fought the world over mostly and thought that there should be patience for all of us, that a man like him does not have to depend upon the market to support him, that people should, you know, that there should be patience for him, he could be relieved of the pressure of the market and support it, so they could write these incomprehensible pantos, which could
And you can see the town celebrating this very typically nasty, let us say, death-discantles
and starting to make the connection with Lucolini and starting to wonder whether Lucolini is
This is the answer, whether he can do for the 20th century what Malacheska did for the 16th century, and could Mussolini be the new patron of art that among other things could relieve Pound of any market pressures and give him the kind of result he needed to be the great art he wanted to be.
This is from a letter, a pound star, to write to a woman he knew who was an American woman, but who was connected with the Lutheran circuit.
I mean, if you go down to Rome, Georgia, off to Rome, Georgia from here, yeah, not too far, I mean, they're in the town of Rome,
And there is a, it's the famous wolf statue of Ronald Reagan from the Seawolf, the founding of Rome with a gift of Mussolini to the sister city, the sister city of Georgia.
It was partially removed for many years after World War II, but it's back now. It's all coming back.
I mean, there's a lot of interesting relations between Mussolini and Americans before the war.
This is a letter that is very important, asking her to help him approach Mussolini and wrote a great art project, this is the source for government support of the arts.
To pull off what I said the other day, it would be quite easy to make Uberly the intellectual center of Europe, and that's by gathering 10 or 15 of the best writers and artists.
The firmament will not be expensive. The whole thing depends on the selections and the manner of the invitations.
Next sentence. I shouldn't trust anyone's selection to save my own.
That's a mistake. You know, give me the cause and I can put together the 15 greatest minds in Europe and Italy and we'll have the renaissance again.
There's no use going into details until one knows if there is or could be an exclusive intent in the idea.
And that is to say, if the dictator wants a literary court, a court of letters, he could be court-aided in the letter aureole, he could use this down there.
If he is interested in the procedure of sigismundo malatesta, in getting the best artist of the time to remedy a small thing with no great resources.
I know in a general way that Pacquiao includes literature on the art of this program that is very different from being ready to take specific action.
Who's going to be willing to back up his words and produce a cultural revival in Europe? If so, I'll leave it.
You have to avoid the superficial prejudices that dead wooded academies toward pedagogical figures.
The life of the artist is always concentrated in a very fluid individual's day and night and the rest follow or adapt or exploit.
So it doesn't want any bureaucratic procedure in it. It's neither do they. We get together, we'll solve the problem.
and so on. It makes things run on time. It can make the arts run on time, too. And that's
what he was admired for. The Duterte doesn't mess around with little things like rule of
law and that, get things done. Let's even do it in the arts now. I'm not making this
up. This is great now, the last paragraph. He only has an opportunity now. This is 1924
on Friday. An opportunity that John had 30 years ago or even 10 years ago. Never anything
Infected, who would have been stupid?
France is too tired to offer serious opposition,
America is too far from civilization,
and won't for a hundred years,
distinguish between the first race and the second race.
She will always stay content with copies.
And then, a year later,
he asked her to arrange a personal meeting
between him and these ladies.
In 1924, and half of this is in Italian, but I'll translate it because that came so fast.
It's a topic to be opened by your asking me so many one simple question, or even getting
Ruth Mondo to ask you, so long as you get a direct, definitive answer.
And the question is, does he want Italy to be truly the center, not a center of European
in Life, The Intellectual and Cultural Center of Europe, as it was in the 16th and 16th centuries.
If he, if so, he could have my support.
For a week or a year, we've been waiting to get the support of Ezra Fowl, though he did
be, I mean, the sheer pretentiousness of that, it was about nearly in proportion, but it is,
You know, I want, and this is not an isolated or off-base example, don't tell me Pound was praised in 1944, I mean this was the central figure in Anglo-American modernism, the patron of drugs, the patron of oil, very much closely connected with him, Winsor and Lewis, this was a man who was absolutely the center of what we think of Anglo-American modernism.
and that's what's going on in the 19th century, if I could just get an Italian dictator as my patron, we can really bring Europe to life.
And again, a proud Ludwig free example, but not all that is free and it's a story that is increasingly being told
but the connections between modernism and the European right are quite deep and extraordinary.
The myth is that by and large modernism was left-wing, but you look at Yeats, he was writing some very ugly pro-fascist things in the 1930s, so much so that a book on the boiler has never been printed to this day.
Obviously in Germany there are lots of figures, the most famous of whom will be Martin Heidegger,
In some ways, it was two or three years of an option party.
We'll talk a bit about that tomorrow.
But certainly, there were sympathies with the Italian future painters with fascism in France,
the old force of figures that were sympathetic to fascism in the 1930s.
There was that famous scandal a couple years ago
The Belgian-American deep-destructive critic of Yale, Paul De Man, discovered to have written pro-fascist journalism during the early years of World War II, back in Belgium, so it seems in a way so strange to us, but modernism bore into the left and the right, it is both the left and the right, we're socialist, anti-market, anti-commercial and anti-fascist.
and it was very tempting for artists to make a deal with either the European left or the European right since they thought it was a little further to the commercial world.
And above all, we see this idea, and we'll see it again in talking about COVID, talking about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany tomorrow,
that the attraction of the political scene is they seem to care about artists.
They seem to give the artists a central role in the culture, and Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini was part of their political program to look very carefully at the arts and to encourage the arts, and if you could get on the good side of one of these dictators, it actually was very profitable to your career and all the architecture they sponsored.
and the various forms of music, painting and literature they sponsored.
And you can see here, the town wants to get back before capitalism.
And of course, the campus was full of crazy American populace attacks on capitalism.
Although it's right about some of the economic issues, it seems like the gold standard.
But here you can see an extreme form, but therefore a clear form,
of this terrible temptation of the modernists that the market had depraved them, that the
market didn't specifically value them, that it made other writers millionaires and not
them. And so therefore there must be something wrong with the market and the enemies of the
market must then be our friends. And in some cases it turned out to be fascist dictators
and other cases, Soviet counties dictated, but the political and economic extremism of modernism has its roots in this profound aging generated by the market system, and again, it's not that these guys weren't doing actually pretty well financially, these guys were not
but they weren't making any revenue as much as other people and that proved to them the fundamental justice of the capital system and the market as a basis for culture.
And so again the idea is, it turns right across the board the notion that the truth of your power as an artist is precisely the unmarketability of your art.
that if you're unsuccessful, your stuff can't be good, and you can offer the fact that you're unsuccessful as proof of your season.
And increasingly, you therefore get the cost of difficulty and impossibility of communication in art.
Art, and right across the board, in painting, in music, and in literature, you get artists
deliberately insulating themselves from the market. Let's say, you know, writing is basically
incomprehensible books, so they, they can't be blamed, you know, if their books fail in
the market, they say, oh, the audience just doesn't understand me, I'm too profound to
to be understood and, you know, writing music that no one wants to listen to and then say,
oh, this tune's how great I am because the audience doesn't understand me.
Now, again, I admire Joyce.
I've never been a real fan of town's poetry.
I obviously think highly of Eliot and Yeats and Pete Penn.
And so in many ways, I generally admire this generation of artists.
The problem is, once you establish the principle that all is only good if it's difficult, all is only good if it's rejected by the market, you essentially have no standards left whatsoever.
Anybody can write incomprehensible music, anybody can write two incomprehensible papers, anyone can write an incomprehensible post.
It's very difficult to tell good incomprehensible prose from bad incomprehensible prose.
I see them all the time in my grade in the paper, but that's how the first generation of modernism opened the floodgates and that's where it starts to go bad and especially as modernist art tends to define itself in negative terms
and insists on finding itself on what it does not do in opposition to traditional art or commercial art.
I have a really hard time with abstract expressionism as a form of paper,
and I will ask people why I should like this thing by Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning
or Rothmore, Rothwell, and they'll say, what's so good about this? It doesn't represent anything.
And I'll say, yes. And they say, it's just a page. The tangibility of this is table evidence.
You can see that it's just a page and it's not a painting of something. And I'll say, yes.
and then, you know, they'll show you like a blind canvas.
It shows a little bit of work.
Yeah, it doesn't represent anything.
And it's the same thing when, you know, I'll ask for modernist music.
And I, for example, I actually, when I was growing up,
brought into a lot of this modernist ideology
and I've utilized Sturmburg's music, for example.
And it's very easy for people to always just say that, you know.
I could say I like Brimberg's music and Go Home and Listen to Bob, but you know, I will just, you know, like, I'll say I prefer first and fourth and fourth passes.
I don't feel much like the second and third. I don't like Brimberg either, but I like Faircraft and Ike. I like his violin concerto better than his piano concerto.
I own five recordings of his opera motifs, and I really do know the guy's music.
and by the way, I'm so bold, I can't stand listening to this, but I actually sit there and hum along with Moses and Aaron.
It was, I'm here, he's here, I'll get him after that.
Which is Moses talking about God, alone, eternal, all present.
I mean, I could actually hum the tune for Moses and Aaron.
So I'm not speaking of Higgins when I talk to the father.
and so on.
But beyond Sternberg, I have real problems when we get to even someone like the student
Hans-Hermann Boehm-Bawerk, and beyond that, I cease to follow what's going on.
You know, I ask people about bulls, and I ask about stock houses, and I ask about heads
up.
I need to test it, whatever.
And then I say, well, what's so good about this?
And they say, you can't have it in elevator.
Yeah. Yeah. And they always tell me what it doesn't have or what it doesn't do, and I'm supposed to like it because it doesn't have harmony, and all the statistical art has, and all the commercial art of music has harmony.
And every time I lose this, now again, maybe I'm wrong on this, and the people I respect genuinely like some of this music.
I'll kick off on classical music. After all this, I start to like things with minimalism, some of Philip Glass.
I really like some of the contemporary composers like Alton LaVault, Argo Paz from Estonia, and Peter Vaps from Latvia.
As you'll see, I really love Dr. Colvin, by and large, we'll be talking about him tomorrow.
He's in many respects a modernist, though in some ways an anti-modernist.
But what strikes me about so much of his art is his only claim to fame is rebellion.
And that, you know, I can understand what Sternberg is doing and can see the justification
for the Ways You Depart from Perhapital Conallery.
I still have, I would love to say to the guy, you know,
Fairfax, it's so beautiful, why couldn't you have written more of that and why did you have
to take me on to the second speech book page of the very easy school officer.
But still, you know, I can sort of see what's going on there
and why do you feel it can help to do what it does.
But beyond that, it does seem to me a great deal of modernist art is just different from the sense of being different, as we all find it a failure to put the courage and unwillingness to confront the greatest of past art and genuinely try to compete with it, instead we just try to do the opposite, as if somehow doing the opposite is necessary and good.
I want to say it was possible, because what I'm saying is that modernism developed its ideology,
its anti-commercial ideology, and tried to steal the artist from the market.
And there's a government support for the arts, and above all, academic support for the arts,
which is a form of government support for the arts.
And here's where I'll say that I think government support of the arts
can be, in fact, negative.
Now, we can all see in the context of this large version I created
whether artists are better often shielded from commercial pressures
or subjected to commercial pressures.
The idea behind government support for the arts
is specifically that artists need to be shielded from commercial pressures.
That's the logic behind it.
It's specific, you know, it's like no commercial artist need apply for these grants.
And, you know, the argument in favor of this is it can't hurt.
You get arguments about the economics of it, but you basically feel, I'd say, it's useful for good.
And for any government supported us, you can point us to questions.
You can say this work was funded by the NEA and look how good it is.
And the worst you could say is okay, a lot of bad art was produced from this agency,
but at least something good is happening.
And even that's just the way you describe the market, that a lot of bad culture is generated,
but there's some good examples, and so let's just leave it at that.
and why would government support be any worse?
Well, my argument is that government support for the arts
sends a signal to artists.
It sends a signal that commercial art is bad.
And it, above all, sends a signal that pleasing an audience
is bad.
It always sounds crazy, but think about it,
how ingrained that is in our ideology about aesthetics now,
I think it's a bad thing to come to the conclusion that pleasing an audience is a bad thing. I think what's wrong with so much particularly contemporary painting and contemporary media is that it actively speaks to the deep-pleased audience and to avoid having a pleasing audience and the way to do that is to get a post in a university.
Now, I know some people who are good composers working in universities, I particularly know some people who are good painters working in university environments and so on, I'm certainly not going to play and suggest that it's a uniform, fast situation, but I do think the cumulative effect of foundation support for the arts
and the whole apparatus, the academic support for the arts has created a sterility in much modern and contemporary art, and the fielding of these artists has really cut them off from any feedback, just go to any really show of art at a university, you know, there are all kinds of things going on in the world, and it's been a wonderful experience.
There are so many great shows of art at the universities, you know, there are all these polite companies,
much like the salieri in the movie about Mozart's work.
You know, these polite, non-committal artists, there's something to be said for the market
as a genuinely disciplining and energizing force, and being forced to prove real people
have to put up their own money to support what they're doing,
It's amazing that Arnold Thurnberg couldn't get a grant to finish Moses and Adam.
He wrote two acts of it. He was a tremendous financial partner.
When he moved to the United States, he had a speech in order to make a living.
He applied to the Guggenheim Foundation and several other foundations.
And they put down Arnold Thurnberg.
And, you know, I would love to know who grouped out the grant those years instead of Thurnberg.
and Brighton, to death, you know, Sid Keefe, Spetsun, Rupert Brooke, and all these great British who lost a whole generation of artists in World War I and they supposedly, and I've read about this, I wish I had saved the article, they created a committee to draw up a list of all the great young artists in Britain who would not be sent into World War II as to publish the list and even recognize a single one of the names. In other words, when the government had been charged
of this whole apparatus of non-market funding for the arts has actually fed into this whole ideology that art is good only if it's difficult.
As you can see, I teach times of the market forcing changes in art.
If you go to commercial art galleries around the country, places like Santa Fe, which has a lot of good art galleries,
You're increasingly seeing representational painting as what's selling, and it looks a lot better to me than the aspect of expressive painting you used to see in every gallery around the country.
And in music, again, supposedly the market has failed in supporting classical music, but this wonderful label, ECM, promoted the music of our old pair.
And if you've not heard this, it's like post-modern medieval music.
Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, a piece called Prophecy and Arbots, uh, uh, Steady, uh, a wonderful St John's Passion, uh, really remarkable music, uh, guys from Lithuania, uh, who would have heard of it except a record label discovered him and it's promoted him.
and I think it's, you know, the most beautiful music, choral music, Hiddleston just came to play and so I see market forcing overcoming this fluidity, the second phase of modernism, all because, again, artists, they balked at the competition, they balked at the market competition with their fellow artists, they balked at any kind of competition
I think there are undoubtedly cases where some elite art has been produced, and I actually have, particularly in these states, you know, I love the late writings of Sanders Beckett.
It doesn't get any more pure, difficult, and unmarketed aria as it does that.
I will confess to having a warm spot in my heart for such a delightful book as it works with Boehm, and it will stand by Becky.
And I'm glad that Peggy Guggenheim supported him at certain points in his life, and freed him from market pressure, freed him from having to be a preacher, which is a great nightmare for his life, with people in front of a classroom, and so on.
And, you know, what's great about the capitalist world, it's produced so much wealth that it can support people on the margin and support people in need.
But by and large, this ideology that something is necessarily good makes it difficult, or necessarily good makes it expensive,
I think that's been a very dangerous tendency in 20th century art and very much in cloud
coverage by systems of support for the arts that exclusively rule out faith, as I said
in my first lecture, that is, you can see obviously why these artists played it, I think we all
Why am I not a millionaire?
That's why we have all these games now, marry a millionaire, all these shows that try to offer for the average American a chance to be a millionaire.
But that's just not the second thing for most of us, and allowing the market to distribute wealth is probably our safest and best way of doing it, even in culture.
and so on, because it does leave room for all these special papers,
and as I said, niche marketing and special papers and so on.
At the same time, though, I think by and large, I think works of art have more vitality
if the artist is in a dialogue with an audience.
And so, in fact, you know, there's signs to me that the history of 20th century art, painting, music, was very different 100 years from now.
And many of the writers that we now think of as central were being forgotten, and many writers who were thought of as peripheral were being thought of as important.
The 20th Century ended, they had all these polls. Who's the greatest writer of the 20th Century?
We all know who won. When people anywhere were polled, who was the greatest writer of the 20th Century?
Who was the greatest book of the 20th Century? It was Lord of the Rings, One Hand Bound.
I mean, that's a modernist nightmare, to hear that, that this pseudo-medieval epic was sold for hundreds of millions of copies, that that should be what was held up, and, you know, the great work in the 20th century, and you can just see modernists say, oh, we told you so, you see this commercial work,
It is somewhat hokey, and the plot is a little flaky at times, but you know, it's about as if it were brilliant.
It's worked on a vast scale. It is deeply plugged into mythology. I personally think it's a great work, and I'd love to reread it.
It's more effective, say, for some of the modest novels I've had to read.
And again, I think, as I was saying about the Da Vinci Code earlier, this is a more extreme case.
I think it's a real tribute to popular leadership that that's the book that more than any other of the market has a place.
It's not in the surface of it. It doesn't look like something that would be popular.
That's certainly what any publisher that's heard it down said, and it's hilarious to read the various
and a lot of philosophical publications over it, people that just, I mean, the past history of it, just pulled out of itself, and yet it has, and now it's been made into movies, and it's emerged as the great mythic story of the 20th century, I really loved it, and I think it's a great work, not in certain ways, but still, very often, I have to say, I like decades-old prose that I like, Tolkien will have absolutely the opposite set of virtues, but that doesn't mean that Tolkien doesn't have good virtues.
and finally, I would regard that as a great market success of the 20th century, one that in fact would have been already unpredictable and who would, I mean, people rushed to indicate it or vote on it, of course nothing has had any comparable effect, but there's something about it, it's written into its own way very well written, it is written by someone who deeply knows the mythology he's basing it on and is able to work it up and, you know, it's quite remarkable and while it's finally being thought of at university,
and Human Action.
But it's like academics were virtually the ones to discover this work.
It's like the whole look of the world, how to understand how brilliant it was.
Ironically, it's written by an academic, and it's a deeply academic work.
And it's all really, really soft with a lot of interesting aspects of modernism.
And it is a book that reflects the tragedies of the 20th century and the First World War,
the Second World War.
And there are lots of interesting ways that it can be discussed with it in that sense.
And it's related to the whole question of the making of these things.
And I think it's a great book.
In a way, it's an emblem for everything I'm trying to say here, that here's this work that was a great, enormous work of success, totally improbable and totally against any law of modernism, except the idea that I think it is difficult in its own way.
You know, I, the successful ordering is my example, but I actually have greater trust in markets than I do in academics.
I think in some ways the market is a better judge of its better quality than professors are.
And I'm not normal most. I'll move down and take questions. Yes?
I was looking at the problem to see if we had an equation in Man-Economy for religion.
Can you give me an example of auto-care in Man-Economy?
In terms of the human community, I'm sure you know why human methods are very, very expensive
because they're not as readily available as the methods in the world.
Well, first of all, I wasn't criticizing the roads relating to us police, so this is fine, great, if, you know, it was a pure market transaction, I would just point out that this modernist with an anti-market ideology actually pursues a well-known market strategy, and that's fine.
But do you think CDs cost the same as other CDs?
Oh, you've got to go on the internet.
Well, aren't they a dollar more expensive?
Oh, no way. I mean, I buy them all the time.
Oh, look, I go on the internet through Power, I get hard CDs for $14.
Oh, if you're in Canada, you've got, yeah, that's your problem. You're in protectionist Canada. Go on the Internet. I mean, honestly, I mean, I, you know, I buy CDs all the time. At most they're a dollar more expensive, but I don't, I mean, we don't get them on sale, they're cheaper.
Okay, well, yeah, I could have gotten this $415. I swear to you, yes. And by the way, I mean, I still owe a couple of dollars. I mean, if you had a more precise view of this, but we're talking with 40 times more expensive than another book.
Okay, the question is, do I think the anti-commercial tax of modernism is incidental to it, or necessary?
My answer, no, I was trying to make the radical thesis that modernism is not anti-commercial because at heart it's rebellious,
but rather that it's rebellious because that is how it's anti-commercial.
Now, that's undoubtedly an overstatement and, you know, too sharp a reversal, but it's worth considering, that's why I'm asking you to read the following.
What people, especially like Lainey, have argued is that, in a weird way, the anti-commercial animus is first, and it generates the rebelliousness.
that because they feel disappointed in the market and are afraid of the market, they deliberately pass an art that they know is not going to succeed in the market and surrounded with an ideology that says that if it's anti-market, anti-commercial, it must be good art and that is an exaggeration and as I said, I respect in many ways the internal logic
of Modernism. I mean, Schoenberg wrote the way he did because he drew some conclusions
from late Bavarian sonality and the wandering toward state sonality, and especially in prison,
and he was trying to figure out the logic of where music could go from there, and there's
a strong sense of the economy of art in modernism, and what these artists would claim is we are
Following out the logic of this art from the market, we will not take in our devotion, see what the music demands just to please the public.
That's the self-presentation of modernism and that's the way it's been understood for many years and I was brought up on that argument and in some ways it's still accepted.
The Federalist was just so tentative to consider the alternative that what he realized is he never was going to be Wagner.
Why, if he might endure a leader, add as many trombones as he could, and conquer the plume, he could never outdo Wagner.
And so he came up with an explanation of the dark that would make a virtue out of his necessity, or make a virtue out of his loss.
How Boehm actually suggests that in his theory of revisionary ratios, for example, is that, you know, Boehm talks about how one strategy of all this is, what is more, that you're faced with a tremendous platonic powering, part of such a genius, and so you make austerity a feature of your art.
This is very well explained in Ludwig that Thunberg tried to outbounder Boehm-Bawerk in his own book, both harmonically and in terms of scale, the girl leader requires a large orchestra, and even about human opera, and there's a certain sense to which Thunberg failed at that, so he says if I can't beat him in harmony, I'll take harmony out of my works entirely, and make him sound sort of simple-minded by comparison. So I ask you to take this other perspective on it considering.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. I mean, I find the word enjoyable. Enjoying horseback, watching
Dan Sucker for an hour and 45 minutes, I'm going to kill myself. I love it, too. I love
I love the original group in the play, and I love the opera, and I really do like what I said, I don't know Lulu well enough, but I love his violence in general, for example, and the lyrics to me, so I do know Baird's music, but Baird is often regarded as the sell-out in the second day of the school, that Dayburn really was the boat of the sunburn and carried out a lot of the music, and to say that Baird was the one who commercialized itself, because he made a compromise,
In the Stenberg's 12 tone system, you must always avoid harmony at all costs, even if it falls upon you that the 12 tone row will generate some harmony, you must be ready to avoid it.
There are harmonic moments in the Baird Violin Concerto, for example, that make it difficult for you to box around, for example, in the Violin Concerto, and Stenberg wouldn't allow that.
So, it is funny that people will complain, oh, Alvar Baer, that's commercial 12-12 music.
On the other hand, he's by far the most successful of the three people, who really do like to listen to those violins compared to some of the...
Yeah, and that's more accessible, that bams it in terms of modern aesthetics.
So, you know, Baird is a complicated case, as I would have to, again, I take in several issues that I do face with optimism.
But again, I find it really interesting in that case that a lot of the really hardcore musicological types will say, you know,
Bird, he stole the...
Bird went hungry, by the way, he said.
Yes.
I was wondering what you thought of your arm-defeating,
how did that affect your career?
Well, I mean, I, you know, it didn't seem nice to get a nice or soft to hear on that,
so I won't say some of the things that are right on the wall.
are, you know, to me that part of the, on the one hand, is part of the silliness of modern
siloology that we're now supposed to believe that graffiti is art. However, it does occur
to me, in many cities today, you see beautiful art posted on walls, and you see this, and
it's representational. And so, some of this street art is actually rebelling against what
of Modernism, you know, if it's just someone telling me, oh, it's outsider art and it's
rebellious, and look, they painted a curse word on the wall, that's great art, to mean
that they're reducting that assertive of much modernist ideology, but if you're referring
to the fact that many cities today, these students gloriously represent art, often of
an opposite nature, you can sort of tell the neighborhood from what the, is that what you
mean by graffiti?
and the quality of some of this art that you see and around the world.
I'm just trying to think where I most need to explore a remarkable example of it
and I'm kind of blanking out on it. Oh, Rio!
When I was in Rio last fall, there was this amazing mural
of the girl from Ipanema 40 years later.
This girl was a remarkably clever idea. It was in this Ipanema's flair.