Art Trumps politics
HOW THE SEARCH FOR ORDER IN POLITICAL CHAOS OFFERS US A CONSTANT SOURCE OF WONDER BY DUSTIN PARKES
GENERATION WEALTH REINFORCES THE ASSUMPTIONS OF THE LIBERAL ELITE, AND COMES ACROSS AS AN ENDORSEMENT OF A
PATRICIAN CLASS: ‘LOOK AT THE NONSENSICAL SPENDING OF THESE FREAKS WITH MONEY AND THE EFFECT IT HAS ON THE IDIOT POOR.’
There exists a tendency in criticism of late to suggest that works of art be enjoyed simply for the sheer wonder they invoke. Perhaps it’s an attempted course correction for the inclinations of modern audiences toward deriving meaning from every bit of text presented, and, so the thinking goes, eliminate all the joys inherent to art in the process. The state of mind that over-critical reading prompts is best stated by Septimus in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”
What the myopic perspective of Septimus fails to consider, however, is that a shoreline is never truly empty, and, by definition, must touch a body of water – something better accounted for by the Venetian proverb that Nassim Taleb quotes in Antifragile: “The sea gets deeper as you go deeper into it.” For the more scientifically inclined among us, it’s a message in sync with Richard Dawkins’s argument in Unweaving the Rainbow. While John Keats bemoans the impact Isaac Newton’s discoveries have on poetry, Dawkins suggests the birth of several new lines of poetry for each one that science has diminished.
The occurrence of the seemingly inexplicable might be a source of awe among the complacent, but for the curious, it’s viewed as an opportunity.
Which bring us – as most things seem to these days – to the unfathomable presidency of Donald Trump, which has proven to be a very deep sea indeed. Since his election and subsequent inauguration, every explanatory blog post, theoretical think piece and speculative hot take published has created more questions for every answer it has offered. Now, more than six months later, it’s become impossible to look at any element of our culture without considering its interactions with the Trump presidency.
Even when artists and entertainers go out of their way to avoid the issue, they’re often criticized for verging on irrelevance – Jimmy Fallon’s a- political “normalization” of Trump on The Tonight Show, Lady Gaga’s “style over substance” during the Super Bowl Halftime Show and George Saunders’s “abstract avoidance of the current political climate” in his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
In order to avoid an audience’s inferences, it seems to take a concentrated effort on the artist’s behalf to leave the topic well enough alone. The range to which we’re willing to ascribe meaning, though, is probably best seen in the world of nonfiction, where recent releases have been an interesting assortment of head- on tackles, obligatory mentions and serendipitous relevance to Trump’s America.
In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes refer to the election results as a Clinton loss rather than a Trump win, placing the onus for the rise of the fauxpopulist president squarely on the Democratic candidate’s shoulders through salacious insider accounts. Meanwhile, Nato Thompson begins Culture As Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life with a direct comparison between Trump’s message and the Culture War of the 1990s, in which Republicans tapped into the American people’s fear of social change.
However, without a doubt, the most fascinating publication to provide answers for how Trump ended up in the White House does so by accident. Lauren Greenfield’s sprawling 500- page photo collection Generation Wealth documents three decades of the indulgences of the wealthy and the subsequent scramble of poorer classes to emulate the garishness of celebrity culture and the braggadocious pursuit of having more for no purpose other than flaunting.
As you first flip through the collection, the photographs – organized into sections titled “I Shop Therefore I Am,” “The Princess Brand” and “Make It Rain,” to name a few — seem meant to mock the vapidity of consumerism while suggesting that every negative stereotype associated with rich kids and new money is true. But as you dig deeper into the photos, you realize that this is only half the story being told. The other half – pointedly narrated in sections titled “The Fall” and “The Legacy of Gordon Gekko” – reveals people at the opposite end of the income divide trying to literally keep up with the Kardashians.
In so doing, Generation Wealth exposes a feedback loop of class appropriation. The wealthy take on the fashionable characteristics of the poor to proportions of excess, which in turn prompts the impoverished to attempt to mimic the celebrity culture that surrounds them — only without the support mechanisms of fame or fortune.
At no point are the photos or pieces of accompanying writing so explicit as to say so, but looking at this book in 2017, it’s impossible not to view its central thesis as: this is the culture that gave rise to the presidency of a reality television celebrity. It posits, like so many books before it, that Western culture is in decline.
It’s a contention that – much like the tweets of the U. S. president — should be taken seriously, but not literally. For generation after generation, our culture has been in such a supposed state of perpetual deterioration that one is reminded of a radioactive isotope decaying toward a non- existence it will never reach. It’s the tiresome tenet of the “declension theory” that every new generation is destined to allow the standards of its culture to decline.
But remember how this essay began by contrasting a quote from Arcadia with a Venetian proverb? On the surface, the photographs in Generation Wealth can be viewed solely with a sense of wonder, but by going deeper into its sea, we’re presented with an increasing number of curiosities, the further investigation of which offer no shortage of intellectual pleasures.
As we’ve already established, the photographs in Generation Wealth ultimately portray the income gap between the poor (inundated with popular culture) and the wealthy elite (inundated with themselves). This, it’s meant to suggest, is a sign of our culture’s decline.
However, in targeting the wealthy elite like this, and commenting on our putative decline toward a President Trump, Generation Wealth reinforces the cultural values of previous generations – mostly set in place by the social elite. It comes across almost as an endorsement of a patrician class: “Look at the nonsensical spending of these freaks with money and the effect it has on the idiot poor.”
By attempting to confirm all of the assumptions of one set of elite about the other, it caters to the worst tendencies of the liberal intellect. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Greenfield referred to Trump’s election as “the apotheosis of Generation Wealth.” She told the magazine, “It’s almost like this work helps explain how he got here. Not that it’s about Trump, but it’s about the culture that gave rise to his election.”
This, of course, represents a great irony: in its commentary on the culture that gave rise to President Trump, Generation Wealth reveals itself, or rather the principles it bolsters, to be an unwitting contributor. The distance from which it hurls its observations upon us reinforces and represents the same distance which caused the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, to seem unapproachable; and the same smugness for which liberals are so frequently criticized.
While a critical reading of Generation Wealth suggests it mourns the disappearance of the middle class, the middle class isn’t represented at all in its pages or in its overriding message. A 500- page photo essay – while stunning in its composition and the uniformity of its theme – is not the most accessible of publications. If you require any more evidence of the audience for whom this work is intended, the book itself costs a staggering $95 in Canada.
One might imagine a parody in which photographs are taken at the homes of retired philosophy professors with stacks of Generation Wealth on their coffee tables. These, of course, would be contrasted with down- and- out cultural studies students reading the book in shabby living rooms full of found furniture.
This piece of writing began with a reference to Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play about the dichotomy of chaos and order; and how evidence and truth are interpreted by both scholars and regular people. Living in a time of constant uneasiness and perpetual disruption, our minds crave something resembling order to bring us out of the chaos in which we find ourselves.
This, paradoxically, offers the best explanation for how the seemingly inexplicable can occur: we induce it with our need for meaning. We elect a leader who stands out with bold pronouncements, not because we necessarily believe them, but because the certainty is appealing. However, it’s a short con. We might want to believe, but we remain incapable over the long haul. For every explanation that’s offered to us, our critical nature reveals its flaws until we’re left with a useless solution that glumly suggests there are no easy answers.
This is why we’re best off – as current art criticism keeps suggesting – admiring the wonder of things. The only question is whether we’re content to find that wonder in the simplicity of the shoreline or the depths of the sea.