Sunday, April 02, 2006
More on art and politics ...
Patrick Kurp considers Ozick vs. Sontag. I think that many among those claiming to possess an artistic temperament are also unreconstructed worshippers of despotism, happiest when patronized by some modern equivalent of a Renaissance condottiere. This might explain the hostility among such to the free market and the bourgeoisie.
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Well I read the post you link to, Frank, but it is all above my head. It is why I find "literariness" so intimidating. Is Mr Karp's post a "clever" way of having a go at Sontag and Orzik, by saying that Zbigniew Herbert would have put one or both of them into the worst circle of hell; or is he having a to at Herbert (?); or have I missed the point entirely (probably)?
ReplyDeleteI think Mr Karp's post would have been made clearer if he had provided a link to the article on which he comments. But maybe not.
I find a lot of "literary criticism" and book reviews are like this, I just don't understand them and end up feeling as if I am missing out on something that everyone else knows about except me.
I have read quite a bit of Sontag, incidentally, so know what I think about her writing, but not the other two people discussed by Karp.
I linked to that post, Maxine, principally because of the extract from the Herbert fable, because it reinforces a point I made in a piece I wrote for Boulevard last year (unavailable online). The point had to do with the contrast between artists in comfortable circumstances in free societies making fashionable protests that not only cost them nothing but win them undeserved plaudits and those - like Vaclav Havel and Solzhenitsyn - whose protests were both risky and personally costly.
ReplyDeleteAnother point I made in the same piece was that one of the problems with artists declaiming on matters of poltics and geopolitics is that they often simply don't know what they're talking about. As for the Sontag-Ozick matter that is the subject of Patrick's post, yes, it would be helpful to be able to read the whole Ozick piece, but it isn't available online. I confess, though, to not being much of a Sontag fan. I also agree that much "literary" criticism can be off-puttingly oblique and obscure.
Thank you, Frank, a lucid explanation.
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