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Trashing the Culture
It’s going on 30 years since we last heard from Dieter. He was the ultra-Berliner who hosted the fictional German TV show Sprockets on Saturday Night Live. The skit laid into artsy-craftsy pretentiousness with a surgical edge. Dieter’s blade didn’t stay out of the sheath long enough; insufferable phony airs survived the onslaught and still thrive. Sprockets was the kind of parody that begged for imitators. No one could succeed taking on the legions of Western Culture’s attackers — abetted by fifth columnists spiritually sacking our academies — all alone.
Pseudo-sophistication’s drag on authentic culture isn’t subsiding. At the present rate that poseurs are gathering elitist appeal they threaten to overtake the fine arts altogether. Rather than suffering the unmerciful filleting they’ve earned, they’ve got a youth brigade threatening fans of any creation that isn’t 200-proof schlock.
If “creativity” equals an insipidly uninspired punch line, why bother toiling away with anything worthwhile?
A good example of how far things have gone came in 2018. That was when Avital Ronnel, a professor of “German and comparative literature” (i.e. woke going for broke) at New York University, was accused of sexual harassment by her doctoral mentee Nimrod Reitman. The lady claims to be a lesbian but can’t keep her hands off younger boys. She holds the “Jacques Derrida chair” at her institution. This “lesbian” seduced the namesake of that position’s son when he was 16 and she was 27. They moved in together shortly thereafter. We live an age where academics adopt sexual persuasions that don’t fit for the political purpose of being oppressed. The many benefits of “persecution” have come to outweigh any burdens imposed.
The number of accredited sources describing Ronnel as “brilliant” could easily fill a page. YouTube serves a free buffet of this lecturer. Do psycho-babblings like this float your intellectual boat? Her orations name names from the Western canon — citing brief passages from them — with profligacy. Fortunately for her all these people are dead and can’t stand in the way of extravagant interpretations. Any living academician would risk the wrath of postmodern lynch mobbery by asking any pointed questions.
In the Salon article linked above the good prof is quoted defending her actions with Reitman as “florid campy communications” and “hyperbolic gay dialect.” This is Reitman’s description:
“She put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself — her buttocks — onto my crotch,” he said. “She was kissing me, kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” That evening, a similar scene played out again, he said.
If that’s how she describes a randy groping, imagine what could be done with an abstruse Heidegger quotation? Keep in mind, Ronnel was past 60 at the time, while Nimrod — who says he’s gay — was 34. His academic mentor was not the kind of game that jager was inclined to trail. Goethe, Holderlin, Schiller and Nietzsche might be less than keen on a source expounding their works with such florid campiness.
Nimrod, and the wider world, had reason to be wary of the lady’s motives when his instruction required that the two share the same Paris apartment. With Dieter still Sprocketizing, Dana Carvey could have em’ rolling in the aisles doing the Derrida chair. Professor Ronnel’s verbatim comments could provide every word of the script.
If you think any of this is hyperbolic straight communication, you don’t have to look hard, deep or carefully, to think otherwise. In 2020, NPR ruled Cardi B and Megan the Stallion’s WAP “song of the year.” How did we get to this point? I have yet to come across an intact human intellect finding music in that audio ordeal. It’s more like an attack on anything remotely erotic known to functioning senses. What is it about, not only Western culture, but culture generally they hate so much?
Why, do you suppose, the National Endowment for the Arts gave $20,000 in 1987 to Andres Serrano for “Piss Christ? Twenty G’s for something that took ten minutes max comes to $120,000 an hour. The finest DEI experts don’t even make that much. Who says your tax dollars aren’t wisely spent?
Whoever comprised the NEA’s jury doing the awarding, the number of independent critics keen on the verdict was stunning. What kind of hayseed, many of them asked, finds anything offensive or untoward placing a depiction of their savior enduring Roman Empire-era cruelty placed in a vessel of urine? Christ on the cross was sacred to most U.S. citizens at the time. Profaning it was the NEA’s idea of imbuing the people with cultural refinement.
For some reason Serrano never thought of doing anything similar with a Koran or a Mohamed likeness. Alas, the limits of artistic imagination. The valor of iconoclastic artistes is well displayed by the wide berth given to the religion of peace. Laymen are always so far behind the curve, they never realized the expression “piss on it” was actually profound artistic inspiration. Maybe the literary search for meaning was too strident, has it flipped — like the magnetic poles seem about to — into a search for meaninglessness?
Ideological fanatics have been on the job of placing Western culture in a fight to the death against all other comers for decades. Do they really see the arts as a zero sum game? If so, can’t they do any better than a banana duct taped to a wall? One of the beautiful people gave Maurizio Cattelan $6.2 million for that. Assuming materials were on hand crafting the masterpiece took less than 30 seconds. That’s nearly $6 billion per eight hour day, an amount beyond the wildest dreams of the most bloodthirsty ambulance chasers and Silicon Valley cyber-kaisers.
What authentic physical comedian wouldn’t leap at the chance for a grand entrance into the Sprockets studio leashed and waddling on all fours? The cognitive detour necessary to get around a target like Sam Brinton is a tragedy of omission. Depriving the public of what the ex-Deputy Assistant Secretary might have done to Dieter’s hair-trigger libido amounts to criminally comic negligence.
Brinton first achieved celebrity describing a childhood of abuse and conversion therapy to the UN. There isn’t a snippet of evidence a word of it is true. He claimed to have been hospitalized seven times as a child after fatherly beat-downs. No medical records support that statement. The supposed therapist applying medieval methods has never been named. Is there any actual doubt he was appointed a Deputy Assistant Secretary at The Office of Nuclear Energy for reasons other than his hideous appearance and proclivities? If the executive branch continued following this kind of criteria choosing its “experts” how much longer could dystopia remain at bay?
Da Vinci said that “A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned.” Cattelan and Serrano defied that credo with abandon. If “creativity” equals an insipidly uninspired punch line, why bother toiling away with anything worthwhile? Whatever your vision and ideological commitment, you still need to eat. Teddy Roosevelt railed against “malefactors of great wealth” a century ago. Whatever their sins at the time, they did exhibit a capacity for taste in the creators they rewarded. Much of curation today is in the clutches of a seething tribe. Art, for any purpose other than misanthropy, is held by them to be a crime against humanity.
Maybe I’m giving Michael Myers too much credit. He’s taking on other prey these days. The Beverly Hillbillies was onto the scammers three decades earlier. I hesitate to cite that show. Every time a hyperlink is necessary, I remain stuck for episodes on end.
A little over a century ago Marcel Duchamp submitted a turned up urinal to a French art exhibition. The BBC described that in a headline: “The urinal that changed how we think.” Who that “we” is is less than clear. People, who don’t scour the history of the 20th century’s “cultural progression” never heard of this. You’d be hard pressed finding anyone who had in most public spaces, classrooms, churches, bars, coffee shops, art exhibitions … sparing readers the entire literary ordeal by Kelly Grovier, here is the highlight:
When it comes to contemplating Fountain, observers must rethink how an aesthetic object should be approached and put aside conventional biases about the nature of artistic craftsmanship. For the first time, the significance of a work of art has been detached utterly from the artist’s role in making it. After all, Duchamp did not forge the sculpture from clay with his own hands. Its significance instead lies in the object’s ability surreptitiously to skirt the scrutiny and prejudices of the eye and to engage the mind instead in a match of philosophical wits. Sliding from eye to ‘I’, Fountain gushes with conundra about the very nature of creation and what it really means to be a maker.
Without time to rifle Grovier’s oeuvre, is it safe to assume exposure to it wouldn’t have had Da Vinci changing course? Wannabe pretentiousness is annoying enough without fanfare. When backed by our leaders, who would bring enlightenment to the world and free them from shackles, where are “we”?
USAID, presently depicted by many mediacrats as an innocent victim of the Trump regime, funded an educational program for the edification of oppressed Afghan women. A central feature was Duchamp’s prankster exhibit. The students there wearing burqas, like teeming hordes of Western women in skirts, didn’t get it. Would Da Vinci, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Durer or even George Caleb Bingham, have left a better Western impression?
Dieter …. We hardly knew you …
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
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A Tale of Two Films
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