Taste
Gordon Kerry
‘Upskirting’:
Australian composer and linguistic purist Percy Grainger would have loved it – not
the activity, of course (who does?) but the word. No acronym shoehorned into
grammatical use (‘SMS me’) or Greco-Latin neologism (‘demystification’), just
two honest Anglo- Norse monosyllables. What you see is what you get.
I used the word recently in a
concert program about music and art in late nineteenth century Paris, but was
requested to remove it to spare the sensibilities of the audience. The theme
was the Moulin Rouge, the Parisian dance-hall in which a bunch of
absinthe-sipping men would gather to watch a line of comely young women do a
high-kicking dance called the can-can. Sounds like upskirting
to me, long before the Australian Open. When Offenbach had the Olympian gods
dance the can-can in his operetta Orpheus
in the Underworld, Paris was both scandalised and thrilled. Talk about
divine revelation.
But seriously, my point (which
I doubt would have offended an audience) was and is that great art in the
humanist Western tradition very often grows out of such challenges to
comfortable sensibility. Some of the greatest works are in highly questionable
taste.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for the Moulin
Rouge are masterpieces of design, and revealed amazing technical possibilities
to future painters. While
It goes beyond opera of
course. In an immortal couplet, Dame Edna Everage
once sang the praises of the Aussie pie: ‘As round and rich as Zara,/ As tasteful as Patrick White...’ I hope that Harold
Holt’s widow, Dame Zara Bate was amused; Grainger, who applauded ‘vulgarity’ in
art, would have loved it, just as he preferred the blowsy opulence of Richard
Strauss to the lapidary precision of Ravel. White (who, as every publisher
knows, was an Australian Nobel-winning author) fills his stories with people
who belch and suck their teeth while experiencing their own little hells and
occasional redemptions. In his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven literally goes from
the sublime to the ridiculous by depicting a cherub in the presence of God and
following it immediately a jaunty ‘Turkish’ march; Mahler, likewise, can swing
between high drama and klezmer in the flick of a conductor’s
baton.
Even those works of art which
seem non-threatening tend to administer a mild shock.
As Francis Bacon (not the
tasteful British painter, the Elizabethan one) famously noted that ‘there is no
excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’. Jane
Austen’s heroines are interesting because of their complicated relationship to
social expectations; one of Henry James’ heroes does absolutely nothing with
his life so as to defy (thereby fulfilling) the prophecy of a tragic end. The
seemingly abstract symphonies of Haydn or Mozart are actually full of sudden
emotional swings. Haydn’s tend to be funny; Mozart’s are, in Maynard Solomon’s
words, ‘shockingly voluptuous’ in their depiction of grief. The harpsichord’s solo
cadenza in Bach’s fifth Brandenburg Concerto may not be ‘about’ anything, but
its virtuosity and excess of spirit make it a direct ancestor of Jimi Hendrix’ exuberant lead breaks. As Aristotle knew, the
emotional purging of catharsis can be effected by joy and laughter as well as pity
and terror - sometimes simultaneously.
Experiencing great art in
whatever medium makes our sense of things different, however briefly, but for
that to happen we have to be open to the act of perception. The late Susan
Sontag’s much-quoted call for an ‘erotics of art’ reminded us that too much
interpretation of art can blunt our sensual experience of it. At the same time,
art which is detached from its context and co-opted as a symbol of taste and
refinement also loses its power to ravish or disturb. One five-star Melbourne
hotel seems to have the same plangent baroque oboe concerto on a tape loop in
its marbled foyer; classical music is used to accompany TV nature docos, a
genre known, according to Robert Hughes, as ‘bugs f*cking
to Mozart’. In both cases we’re not actually meant to hear the music; it’s just
there to remind us that everything is really nice.
In the late 1930s Sergei Prokofiev,
a composer who had survived Stalin’s Great Terror, attempted to portray some
glimmer of humanity in his ballet Romeo
and Juliet, one of the western culture’s iconic tragedies. Six decades
later ABC Classic FM assures us that ‘ironing is thrilling’ when you’ve got
Prokofiev’s music on in the background. Concert promoters need to sell tickets
and radio stations need to chase ratings, but we need to be careful not to
project a level of naiveté onto the audience, misrepresent works of art and
insult the creators and performers in the service of marketing.
The Catalans have a
distinctive Christmas tradition. Nativity cribs include the usual suspects –
Holy Family, shepherds, magi, animals – but there’s also a man, called the caganer, taking a
crap in the corner of the stable. Shocking, yes; blasphemous,
no. It’s a powerful image of how the Incarnation is an acceptance of
humanity in its fullness; it stops the scene from turning into a kitsch
fairytale.
Likewise, good art is the
enemy of kitsch, offering the opportunity to explore, reflect on and play out
the implications of being human in the widest sense. Shakespeare and Mozart,
Austen and White (and many others) are central to our culture and value-system
for precisely that reason. But we need to do the works and the artists the
courtesy of giving them our attention (so turn off the iron), of making an
effort to know the work’s original context, and understanding that they might
just discomfort us. Only then will what we see be actually what we get.
first published by The
Australian as ‘Good Taste vs Great Art’ June 2007