Yes, There is a Right Way – and a Wrong

Smashing the fallacy in the arts that “any way” is “valid” just because you feel it is

HACKDOM PREFERS CENSORSHIP TO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Last month, a Substack author posted this video.

“Too slow,” I wrote.  The Englishwoman who posted the video replied and a thread developed between us, which, after several days, she deleted.  In lieu of her actual comments, I must paraphrase her argument (and mine). 

She “felt” that there were many ways of delivering “the text” and that this way was as “valid” as any other because she was persuaded that Hamlet was actually thinking about what he was saying.

I replied with this quote:

Brine, Adrian, & York, Michael, A Shakespearean Actor Prepares (2000), p. 96.

Rather a direct hit, don’t you think?

Her response? “Thank goodness we don’t have those around any more.”

Michael York, a piker?

What about Jacobi, McKellen, et al, I responded, listing a dozen superior practitioners? 

Are these superbly trained and gifted Shakespearean actors all to be disdained for their delivery of Shakespearean language, which is consonant with the quote above?

There are other ways of delivering “the text,” she insisted, that are just as “valid.”  No reasoning was given, other than that she “felt” it was a good and true performance in her eyes. She believed him. (I didn’t.)

[Calling a playscript or a novel a “text” is a neutering. One best eschews academic de(con)structions such as this. They are poison darts. But their use immediately discloses the unthinking nature of the writer.]

The soliloquy you favored, I replied, is intentionally performative. While vapid writing must be accompanied by such gimmicks, it is unnecessary with Shakespeare because all the meaning and music an actor ever needs is already in the words! One only has to deliver them propertly to convey the inner life of the character and highlight the beauteous language in so doing.

Next time you come to my restaurant and order a pizza, and I’ll load it up with pineapple chunks and drizzle honey round the crust.  If you object, I’ll tell you it’s a pizza and you’ll still have to pay me. But anyone who knows what a pizza really is, knows what a pizza is not.  Yes, there is a wrong way. 

POOF!  Next I looked, the thread had vanished  Perhaps she wished to minimize her discomfort; but censoring the ideas was, I believe, just as important to her.  However, I do not appreciate the deletion of my words. More importantly, there is a principle to be discussed, which is key to Western civilization. Hence, this essay.

YES, THERE IS A RIGHT WAY

Is it all as subjective as my female interlocutor would have the world believe? No. In every art, there is a right way; there can be many. But there is also a wrong way; in fact, many more than there are right ways.

Overwhelmingly, practitioners of the arts, even those who are professionally employed in the US and Europe, are unable to commit to the assertion that there is a right way. Many hasten to deny it. They claim that all expression is "valid," a lazy term often heard and never, it seems, defined. It means that anything goes, that there are no standards, and most gravely, that there is no Truth. (Anyone who has tried to fly by jumping off of a cliff learns the sudden lesson that, after all, gravity is true.)

But if something can be anything, then it is nothing at all. And that is what there is nowadays in the arts: Nothingness. Because nothingness is what is posited, therefore, nothingness is realized. One can only discover what one posits. Without theoretical parallel lines or the point in space, how could the real-world applications of theoretical geometry have come to be?

For at least five centuries before our own, the goal of the Artist was the discovery of ideal Beauty, which is covalent with Truth, and its expression in a finite medium. There have always been precious few Artists (with a capital “A”), just as there are few prophets or geniuses: Their scarcity made their discoveries that much more precious.

van den Broek, Venere e Amore. Photograph by Richard Kuslan, Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved.

Over the past 100 years, nihilism has eviscerated the arts — theater, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, literature. So-called artists (with a small "a"), led by philosophers and savants who could not see beyond their own dirty hands, proclaimed the end of Beauty and Truth (and God) and littered the museums and the concert halls and the libraries with trash.

“Oh, so THIS is art!”

Many millions who glibly and arrogantly call themselves artists, but who are, in truth, hacks who are blind to Beauty and Truth, devote themselves to the mere regurgitation of their mundane, ugly, material existence. In fact, I think they are in love with ugliness, delight in the wallowing in their mud.

I do not profess to be an Artist. An Artist is a rare being with a kind of sight and an insight that few possess — one can see for us who can not see as he does, and are, also, blessed with the great gift of innate talent, which they refine by disciplined training and hone with experience, so that they might better express it. But I have seen, read, heard, experienced enough of the ugliest of human existence that the divine Ideal becomes a marvelous refuge, an invigorating sanctuary of blessed contentedness — if even for a moment.

Doesn’t this appeal to you as well? Isn’t real gold thousands of times more valuable than its weight in pyrite?

A consequence of nihilist ideation is the wholesale destruction of standards of aesthetic appreciation and artistic technique. Rather than recite the chapter and the verse here, may I please direct your attention to my essay, Conversation on Beauty, a summation of a dialogue with a friend, which develops these ideas. Stephen R. C. Hicks’s excellent Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault explains the philosophical bases for much of this nihilist ideation.

Sure, go ahead and deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy in slo-mo; write “poetry” without rhyme or meter or music; splash paint willy-nilly on a canvas — and say it’s “valid,” and call it “Art.” But that would be wrong.