“The Biggest Disaster in the History of Art”

“No one knows a thousand odours by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odours, they’re simply stenches.”

—18th century Parisian Master Perfumer Giuseppe Baldini to the young Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum (1985), translated as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by John E. Woods (1986), published by Penguin Books (2006)

Colin Holter’s post about whether or not horrorcore rap has or can actually inspire violent crimes seems to have hit a nerve with a lot of our readers. I too have found the debate to be of extreme interest on aesthetic as well as societal grounds. Indeed the notion that art (to use this term in its broadest possible definition) is capable of affecting human behavior to positive or negative ends is a deeply romantic notion, and one that tends not to sit well in cynical postmodern “been there, done that” discourse. But the belief that we can somehow transform the world around us through the words, brushstrokes, noteheads, etc. we introduce into the world remains a very powerful incentive for artistic creators in many disciplines to this day. It gives what we do some kind of meaning and purpose.

Ironically, the belief that an artist should not be in anyway restricted from any means of expression is also a romantic notion, and one that is ultimately at odds with the belief in art’s societal powers. If a certain type of artistic expression is capable of causing great harm to humanity, mustn’t it be forbidden? But perhaps in a world where any form of expression is not only permissible but regularly occurs to the greater ambivalence of the world for which it was presumably created, the impact of such an expression is somehow muzzled, both for good and for ill. In a world where we’ve heard it all before, art cannot make us kill, but perhaps it also cannot uplift us.

Over the weekend I watched a DVD of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967), which in 2007 was cited by Premiere magazine as the most dangerous movie of all time. I found the film to be an extremely effective metaphor for the ills of materialistic society, filled with Godard’s typically brilliant use of panorama and witty dialogue. There are elements of the plot which are undeniably disturbing—not a single likable character, lots of gratuitous violence including a matricide and cannibalism—but it’s pretty tame compared to other things I’ve seen both in motion pictures and on evening news telecasts.

To show you how my brain works, the episode I actually found most disturbing in Week End was a rant by a concert pianist who traveled through rural towns with his piano to perform for entranced locals:

There’s music you listen to and music you don’t. Mozart you listen to. Just imagine the royalties the poor man would get nowadays. Music you don’t listen to is what’s called modern “serious” music. No one goes to the concerts. Real modern music, paradoxically is based on Mozart’s harmonies; you hear bits of Mozart in Dario Moreno, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or whatever, fundamentally Mozart’s harmonies. Modern “serious music” looked for others, resulting in what is probably the biggest disaster in the history of art.

Could Week End incite a riot nowadays? I’m reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s quip to a reporter who was baffled that he remained in East Germany after government authorities censored one of his plays: “At least they read what I write over here.” Might Godard’s pianist be telling us that if no one is listening to the radical ideas we think we have, and therefore is not responding to them, that maybe these ideas do not have the power to change anything? Phil Fried mentioned, correctly I believe, that most of what we’ve been debating concerns words, and certainly images have proven very provocative over the millennia. But other than as a byproduct of the vagaries of personal taste, can music in and of itself be either a source of societal transformation or a dangerous threat to peaceful cohabitation? It is true that Plato recommended banning certain modes, and that Medieval clerics considered the tritone to be sonically evil. The ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu actually suggested outlawing all music since it ultimately could not be controlled by the state. But is anything in music truly an absolute from a perceptual standpoint or is the way we respond to sonic stimuli just a byproduct of our acculturation which varies from culture to culture and even from peer community to peer community? However, if our attitudes about music solely result from such acculturation and peer pressure, any music that goes against the accepted and presumed norms is somehow a threat to the status quo. And if that is the case, music might actually be capable of greater good (and greater evil) afterall.