In my experience, the humanities teach dogma and claim it's insight in order to condition the populace that dogma is insight. Even if you study contemporary art you will learn the intrinsic value of Koons and Hirst, despite the fact that the argument of Koons and Hirst is that art is valueless. It's dadaism squared yet since rich people buy it, we must learn a justification beyond "your betters like lording it over each other." The Arts and Crafts movement was an underground protest of mechanization held in contempt by the Belle Epoque. It was dogshit until WWI destroyed the previous era, at which point humanities taught us that the Belle Epoque was dogshit, which led to the rise of Art Deco, to which Bauhaus was an underground protest, WWII and Art Deco is destroyed and on and on and on ad infinitum. The contribution of the Humanities has been to teach the inviolable unchanging nature of taste and codify that which you are allowed to like, that which you are allowed to appreciate. The difference between a movie critic and an English teacher? The movie critic is paid for his opinion. Yhe English teacher is paid for regurgitating the committee opinion approved by the council of elders.
I don’t find myself disagreeing with this. I feel like we are mostly differing over “Humanities” and “humanities”. Even so, understanding the nature of the “Humanities” is an exercise that gives a useful lens on the world. I suppose we also differ on the threat/extent of “Humanities” indoctrination. It might be my sensitivity to susceptibility to a counter threat informed by my Chinese experience. I see these wars of ideological absurdity better than no war. Koons was actually put to use this way, right?
We're differing over "teaching." You recognize the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party requiring "art" to be that which supports Communist dogma. You do not recognize the threat posed by academia requiring "art" to be that which supports academia. Yet this is the very issue Douthat is grappling with: the argument that "the humanities" should not be critique, it should be dogma. He puts it in as many words: Fundamentally, you cannot learn art or literature without a baseline instruction in that which is good or bad. because we said so. Here, watch, he'll come at the SJWs with it: There's Douthat, arguing that if only we accepted the value of dogma for dogma's sake it would be easier to force people to accept a new dogma. Lamentably, the insistence that dogma has no value on its own is destroying a cultural institution that is 100% reliant on dogma. My kid? My kid goes to a school with heavy emphasis on inquiry. They do lots of humanities; not only did my kid learn color theory at the age of five, but they studied (and imitated) the art of a synesthesiatic in order to expand the emphasis and relevance of color. What was the name of that synesthesiatic? Don't know. But I know my kid, age five, looked down and said "my pants are like Jackson Pollack!" so you know what? I'm getting my money's worth. Me? At age five my teacher gripped my hand in hers until I cried to force me to draw my snowmen right and at seven we were forced to trace Guernica because cubism. My kid might be an artist. I was never going to be. I was never going to be a writer, either, because my sum experience was that writing is whatever someone else tells you it is and fuck off with that shit. Unless, that is, you go through their dogma and come out espousing their arguments and then there's some bullshit little journal that will publish your thinkpieces on Proust at a loss because that's the way the system works and that is what Douthat is here mourning. I don't think the humanities are bad. I think people who wrap themselves in the cloak of "the humanities" should be kicked in the nuts every time they open their fucking mouths. Because they are every bit as corrosive as the Communist Party.A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.
And the irony is that the very forces that have undermined strictly Western and white-male approaches to canon-making have also made it easier than ever to assemble a diverse inheritor. This should, by rights, be a moment of exciting curricular debates, over which global and rediscovered and post-colonial works belong on the syllabus with Shakespeare, over whether it’s possible to teach an American canon and a global canon all at once. Instead, humanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”
i think if discussions of media / disciplines based around it took a more descriptive and less prescriptive approach the whole council of elders thing would be improved. i believe that stories, symbols, and beliefs are enormously important to humans and there should be fields dedicated to analyzing them, but the generic oldass white dude book should be analyzed as a historical document and should not be forced onto bored high schoolers or libart freaks any more than they should be forced to read an 18th century shipping manifest - sure human experiences can be universal but a hell of a lot of things that are held up as high culture are impenetrable and don't connect, especially when they're taught and held up as something Very Important (aka, drink your milk and take your vitamins in book form) linguistics figured out the pres-des thing, i wish it would spread into the social from the social science
Douthat's entire argument is that your approach is literally cancer and is the proximate cause for the downfall of the humanities. Worthy of note: mk thinks I'm clever but doesn't consider that humanities-as-taught not only drove me out of practicing them, it has left me with a trigger-finger grudge that is older than you, young lady. It is the fundamental insistence in the necessity of "because I told you so" passing as unassailable maxim that has killed the humanities because fuckin hell, the ability to parrot back your professors is worthless for anything but training parrots.
i googled him because the article makes him seem like a wiener and oh boy i found a goldmine of wienerdom son of bigwig in a law firm ✓ ivy league dwimbus ✓ david brooks gave him a compliment once ✓ lol ✓ i'm all for the toppling of this institution - i think people go into english / literature / 'the arts' thinking they're gonna become writers and artists when instead they end up having to pretend that deeply boring people are the pinnacle of human expression i dunno. bring on the death of the liberal arts mindset!
Here's my beef. You cannot have a discussion of the value of art without defining art and the way artists define art is almost always the way they define themselves. Critics, on the other hand, generally assume a negative definition of art (what art is not) that influences them just as much. Those who make? Inclusive. Those who critique? Exclusive. But eventually the exclusionists are forced by reality to include something they've hated (because it's successful) or exclude something they love (because everyone else hates it) so they must then redefine everything and retcon the universe so that they don't look like a bunch of people whose entire career is to be proven wrong. Just take it to the surrealists: there's a spectrum that goes Escher - Dali - Magritte - Duschamp in order of mass appeal to snob appeal. A citizen is likely to recognize Escher in a TV commercial. An art snob is likely to consider Duschamp too mainstream because he's in the Tate, not the Staadelik or whatever. Yet Escher was rich in his own lifetime while Duschamp is still fought over. Urinal with someone else's name scrawled on it? GENIUS. Banana duct-taped to a wall? RIDICULOUS. Why? Because the fuckin' urinal was a hundred years ago. But why are we even talking about the banana? Because it was at Art Basel Miami (which is its own zen koan of ridiculousness). Meanwhile there was an undergrad at my college whose thesis was a Penthouse and a steak stabbed to the wall with a switchblade that has been entirely forgotten by the universe because there was an undergrad at every college whose thesis was the same. And we teach that Escher isn't art but Duschamp is and then we have to stroke our chins and argue about whether a urinal or a banana or a steak-and-centerfold performance art piece is art when the common knowledge? The one we're supposed to educate our way free from? is that of course it's not. Fuck off with that shit. Wanna see the most popular piece of art of the 20th century? But what is it saying? It's saying "dappled light is beautiful and so are doric columns and so is the female form." Same year? Art critique was all about Picasso. But you don't learn that Picasso because it doesn't say what people want you to take from Picasso which is "cubism" so when you say "Picasso" everyone always goes immediately to Even now you aren't allowed to say shit about Maxfield Parrish for the same reason you aren't allowed to say anything about Thomas Kinkaid or anybody else. I was actively forbidden from writing a report on Bierstadt in High School because he wasn't "important" enough. That painting, by the way, was the cover for the textbook for the class I wasn't permitted to write a report for. No, no. If you want to do American art, your only choice is Grant Wood or Jackson Pollock because we fucking said so. Now - name one Grant Wood painting that isn't American Gothic or, fuck, tell me what this painting is about. Thing is? Artists care about what makes art art because they're trying to recreate it. Nobody gave a fuck about Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth until George Lucas explained that Star Wars was a paint-by-numbers of it and then all of a sudden, all screenwriters are required to read Hero of a Thousand Faces while literature students? Get to write diatribes about why Campbell is wrong. Because their teacher said so. Ask a literature professor why you're studying Poe but not King. Know what he'll tell you? "Because Poe is a classic." Point out that Stephen King has sold 350 million copies of his books and he'll tell you that popular taste doesn't dictate what art is. he does. Then ask him why you had to read Last of the Mohicans but wait a bit because he'll probably see the trap: you read Last of the Mohicans because it was really fuckin' popular in 1822. So. If people 200 years ago liked it? You're golden. If people like it now? It's trash. And that's entirely because there's no inherited wisdom about what is or isn't trash if it hasn't been digested through four generations of literature departments, and that's why they all deserve to die.
Just for the record, I'd badge this comment if you didn't make it abundantly clear how you feel about getting those. I was that asking student until I got tired with being branded as a tasteless contrarian during every fucking humanities elective I had to take, level of education be damned. My life changed for the better the moment I learned that courses like 'criminology for non-law majors' can count as 'humanities elective'.
By fourth grade I routinely wrote my assignments in the form of parody. I would stick to the absolute letter of the law as far as the assignment was concerned while also stretching everything to its most ridiculous extreme. I got thrown out of a class a year - permanently - for about six years. I have yet to meet an English or Art teacher who is willing to discuss any assertion beyond "because I said so."
Good one. I went for a lazy solution, where after discovering that all Polish Lit teachers have massive hots for Adam Mickiewicz's works (mostly overrated, Pan Tadeusz is the only good thing from him we have in syllabus/canon), I'd take his collected works, pick a poem at random, use it as an opening and make as many connections to it as it was humanly possible. Double points if I managed to draw a parallel with said Pan Tadeusz, which usually meant I could expect a solid B even if my entire argument was about as sound as Soviet engineering. True => "Because I said so" can time out Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha, so it's probably too sophisticated for all but chosen few.I have yet to meet an English or Art teacher who is willing to discuss any assertion beyond "because I said so."
that's where the descriptivism comes in because it allows you to sidestep this whole thing prescriptivists should exist, but they shouldn't be enshrined or taught in anything other than persuasive writing classes and they definitely shouldn't be put on the same level as like... things that are actually useful but really we agree here, just we have different styles of rambling
it's a language study jargon thing (although i've heard it in philosophy abt morals?): prescriptivists are the ones that prescribe rules for language ("never split infinitives!") and descriptivists are the ones that describe the way people actually speak ("in english, adverbs are often placed between verbs and the infinitive particle to"). i'm bringing it into the wider world because i think it captures the distinction between Humanities the institution and humanities the study of society/culture - the Humanities try to tell you what's good or bad and the humanities tell you the things that are out there and what purpose they have i'll define my keyterms a bit better next time
This is the first I'm hearing about Escher not being a "real" artist. I am completely willing to believe that this is because I am a soulless math nerd who only talks about art with other soulless math nerds and engineers and we all love him because he made art about soulless math nerd things, but it's still news to me.
I was in a humanities class. There was an Escher exhibit a hundred miles away. I was not allowed to count my visit to the Escher exhibit as a necessary extracurricular "art experience" because Escher was deemed to not be an artist. To your point, the first Escher book I ever saw was owned by one of my math teachers. Four years previously we all piled in the school bus to see the Armand Hammer Collection, despite the fact that it's mostly art stolen from Jews by the Soviets.