What follows are selections from Lady In A Veil, by Lewis Lapham, his preamble to the Arts & Letters edition of Lapham’s Quarterly (Volume III Number 2). Rather than excerpts, the entire piece could be included herein:
On first opening a book that I’m not obliged to read for professional reasons, I’m content to let it pass by unless I can hear some sort of melodic line, even if the author offers to name the man who shot Jack Kennedy. With authors of great reputation, I blame myself for whatever fault can be found, and after a decent interval of years I return to the book in question in the hope that I’ve learned to hear what is being said. When I was twenty I didn’t know how to read Ford Madox Ford or George Eliot. By the time I was fifty I no longer could read J. D. Salinger or Ernest Hemingway. I’ve yet to learn how to read Finnegans Wake.
Regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic, I escape the chore of having to discern zeitgeists and deconstruct paradigms. At liberty to indulge my enthusiasms without apology or embarrassment, I’m free to take as much pleasure from the novels of Raymond Chandler and John le Carré as from the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Because I look for the value of the human currency (“very strong and very weak … very bad and very good”), I don’t much care whether an author chooses for her mise en scène the court of Henry VIII or the roof of a Harlem tenement, whether the artist draws a bandit on the beach at Yokohama or paints an angel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Goya’s etchings of the Napoleonic Wars, I discover an enlarged state and sense of being of the same order as the one met with in the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27 or in the sequence of images on exhibition in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
[…]
Usually I found myself on the wrong side of the critique, in some quarters regarded as an obsolete romantic, in others as a trivial bourgeois. Introduced to the modernist doctrines of alienation and despair, I took the notes but didn’t learn the lesson.
[…]
By the time President Ronald Reagan danced onto the White House stage in 1981, politics was fashion, news was entertainment, celebrity was art, literature a regional dialect spoken only in the universities.
[…]
It isn’t that the country now lacks for painters painting pictures or poets writing poems; nor is it to say that stores of human energy and hope aren’t to be found in the novels of Elmore Leonard or the songs of Bruce Springsteen. It is to say that with the dawn of Reagan’s bright new morning in America, the notion of art as the way into a redemptive future had withered on the vine. Once again, as had been customary throughout most of the country’s history, art was seen as an embodiment of the good, the true, and the beautiful only to the extent that it could be exchanged for money.
[…]
At the downtown exhibitions of conceptual art in the early ’90s, the gallery walls served as bulletin boards on which to post a syllabus of moral lessons imbedded in twisted steel and fluorescent neon light. Ugly was a show of virtue, and so was the lack of talent, the bombast recurring in the explanatory notes (“imperialism,” “otherness,” “void,” “difference”) pointing as garishly as road signs to the injustices of gender, race, wealth, and social class. It was not enough merely to look at a battered rubber woman or a pair of gold-plated tennis sneakers. What was important was the theory of the thing, not the thing itself, the knowing that beauty was reactionary and that the artists labeling the merchandise had come to think of history as a “dysfunctional idea.” The message brought with it the great good news that the arts, when not otherwise employed as political agitprop or commercial advertising, offered refuge from a dysfunctional grasp of reality with welcome escapes into the nearest mirror. Novels that in the 1950s set out to discover how it is with man in the company of other men gave way in the 1980s to the writing of memoirs intent upon discovering that when one really had a chance to think about it, the world and all its troubles were really all about me. The authors who would be king placed stylish gestures of self-loathing on the altar of self-promotion.
[…]
The existence of a civilization presupposes a public that has both the time, and the need, to draw sustenance from the high-wire acts of the artistic imagination. The United States never has produced such a public in commercial quantity, a fact remarked upon by the art historian Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New. “Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning—not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal.”
Happily so. What blocks the passage from feeling to meaning is the replacing of the thing itself with the price or theory of the thing, which is the difference between money and art as the universal medium of human exchange proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer. “Money is human happiness in abstracto, consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.” The dictum accords with the twentieth century’s wars and devourings of the earth, accounts for the modernistic expressions of alienation and despair, speaks to the price paid for the shark in formaldehyde. Although it’s frequently said that the truth shall make men free, the precept is almost as frequently misunderstood. Truth as synonym for liberty isn’t a collectible. It is the joyous discovery of the enlarged sense and state of being that is the change of heart induced by the presence, incomprehensible and usually unannounced, of the lady in the veil.
At liberty to indulge my enthusiasms without apology or embarrassment, I’m free to take as much pleasure from the novels of Raymond Chandler and John le Carré as from the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Because I look for the value of the human currency (“very strong and very weak … very bad and very good”), I don’t much care whether an author chooses for her mise en scène the court of Henry VIII or the roof of a Harlem tenement, whether the artist draws a bandit on the beach at Yokohama or paints an angel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Goya’s etchings of the Napoleonic Wars, I discover an enlarged state and sense of being of the same order as the one met with in the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 27 or in the sequence of images on exhibition in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.”[…]Usually I found myself on the wrong side of the critique, in some quarters regarded as an obsolete romantic, in others as a trivial bourgeois. Introduced to the modernist doctrines of alienation and despair, I took the notes but didn’t learn the lesson.[…]By the time President Ronald Reagan danced onto the White House stage in 1981, politics was fashion, news was entertainment, celebrity was art, literature a regional dialect spoken only in the universities.[…]It isn’t that the country now lacks for painters painting pictures or poets writing poems; nor is it to say that stores of human energy and hope aren’t to be found in the novels of Elmore Leonard or the songs of Bruce Springsteen. It is to say that with the dawn of Reagan’s bright new morning in America, the notion of art as the way into a redemptive future had withered on the vine. Once again, as had been customary throughout most of the country’s history, art was seen as an embodiment of the good, the true, and the beautiful only to the extent that it could be exchanged for money.[…]At the downtown exhibitions of conceptual art in the early ’90s, the gallery walls served as bulletin boards on which to post a syllabus of moral lessons imbedded in twisted steel and fluorescent neon light. Ugly was a show of virtue, and so was the lack of talent, the bombast recurring in the explanatory notes (“imperialism,” “otherness,” “void,” “difference”) pointing as garishly as road signs to the injustices of gender, race, wealth, and social class. It was not enough merely to look at a battered rubber woman or a pair of gold-plated tennis sneakers. What was important was the theory of the thing, not the thing itself, the knowing that beauty was reactionary and that the artists labeling the merchandise had come to think of history as a “dysfunctional idea.” The message brought with it the great good news that the arts, when not otherwise employed as political agitprop or commercial advertising, offered refuge from a dysfunctional grasp of reality with welcome escapes into the nearest mirror. Novels that in the 1950s set out to discover how it is with man in the company of other men gave way in the 1980s to the writing of memoirs intent upon discovering that when one really had a chance to think about it, the world and all its troubles were really all about me. The authors who would be king placed stylish gestures of self-loathing on the altar of self-promotion.[…]
The existence of a civilization presupposes a public that has both the time, and the need, to draw sustenance from the high-wire acts of the artistic imagination. The United States never has produced such a public in commercial quantity, a fact remarked upon by the art historian Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New. “Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning—not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal.”Happily so. What blocks the passage from feeling to meaning is the replacing of the thing itself with the price or theory of the thing, which is the difference between money and art as the universal medium of human exchange proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer. “Money is human happiness in abstracto, consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.” The dictum accords with the twentieth century’s wars and devourings of the earth, accounts for the modernistic expressions of alienation and despair, speaks to the price paid for the shark in formaldehyde. Although it’s frequently said that the truth shall make men free, the precept is almost as frequently misunderstood. Truth as synonym for liberty isn’t a collectible. It is the joyous discovery of the enlarged sense and state of being that is the change of heart induced by the presence, incomprehensible and usually unannounced, of the lady in the veil.