Recent stories of note:
“Oliver Anthony and the snobbery of American conservatives”
Stephen Daisley, The Spectator
A few days ago, the lottery that is the internet selected its latest winner-of-the-week (or loser, depending on your perspective): Oliver Anthony, a red-bearded, rough-faced man from the woods of Virginia singing an overtly populist tune, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” about the many misfortunes besetting America today. The political flavor of the music—rightly bemoaning inflation, welfare abuse, and the condescension of the elites—made the song the subject of a skirmish in the culture war. But hidden behind all that political flash is a less fortunate truth: “Rich Men North of Richmond” is kitsch. The lyrics, which are in a vernacular one might describe as “vaguely southern,” play like nothing more than a series of tweets set to guitar; the original sentiment behind the words may be genuine, but whatever authenticity existed is obfuscated by cliché packaging. Stephen Daisley of The Spectator has located a similar sense of artifice in the song, noting among its “banal” and “mawkish” presentation an absence of feeling. Kitsch art is dangerous, and a nation that fails to notice it is one in danger.
“Whatever Happened to Culture”
Joseph Epstein, Commentary
The triumph of kitsch makes for a proper segue here. How did we get to a point where kitsch could exercise such control over our minds and hearts? A great irony of the modern world is that one of its defining works, “The Waste Land,” is on some level about the lack of great art in the modern world. “The Waste Land,” a product of undeniable vitality, could, paradoxically, only have been written in a wasteland. Some may take this as evidence that complaints about the lack of great art in one’s world are the result of shortsightedness or solipsism, but such a rebuttal fails to explain why our times are more receptive to a song like “North Men North of Richmond” than we are “The Waste Land.” Joseph Epstein takes on a similar question in Commentary, examining what societal and technological shifts have occurred that seem to have broken the brains of twenty-first century Americans. His nostalgia is far from a lazy wish for an amorphous past—Epstein knows that if you must mourn something lost, you need to be able to name what it is that you’re mourning.
“Teasing a butterfly: Mina Loy’s search for ‘an alternative order of things’”
Sophie Oliver, Times Literary Supplement
Mina Loy is one of history’s only true non-conformists. An inaugural member of the Futurists who also exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts, a Dadaist until Dadaism received a label, a bohemian who finally settled with her daughters in Aspen—she was always slipping the clutches categorization. Ezra Pound credited her with writing some of the first truly American poetry (even though she was British), and she was, for a time, engaged to Arthur Cravan, an artist known as the “poet-boxer” owing to his propensity for singing punchy sonnets while he took punches in the middle of the ring (he was also Oscar Wilde’s nephew). Their engagement ended when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Mexico, where he had been hiding out while draft-dodging. Throughout this absurd and colorful life, Loy wrote, painted, and drew. Her poetry is sometimes dreadful, often funny, and frequently enigmatic. About her forays into the visual arts, less is known—most of her work has been held in private collections for the last century. But a full-scale retrospective on her artwork has recently been organized by Maine’s Bowdoin College Museum of Art, here reviewed by Sophie Oliver. The last time Loy’s work was exhibited like this was in 1959, making Bowdoin’s show practically a once-in-a-century opportunity.