A multi-part exploration of the question: What is Art? Stefan Molyneux makes the case that Art is often an argument for focusing on something which is easy for society to overlook. How do we put art in context? What can we learn about the artist by viewing their art? How can you explain modern art?
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| Hi there, everybody. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing very well. | |
| So in the call-in show last night, we went Extend-O-Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong with... | |
| I guess, a guy, a girl, and a girl, about relationship stuff. | |
| And I didn't get to the question, which I'd like to take a swing at. | |
| Now, I do have, for those who don't know, I have some experience in the art world. | |
| I have written hundreds of poems, about 30 plays, I don't know, four or five novels. | |
| And, of course, I was in theater school for almost two years, studying acting and playwriting. | |
| I was in, of course, a number of plays and so on. | |
| So I have some experience in the art world, although not in the category of wildly successful artist, just to be very clear. | |
| I thought the world wanted a new artist. | |
| It turns out it just wanted another philosopher. | |
| So that's the way it is. | |
| So I have, I think, more than dabbled, but it's never been my primary profession. | |
| I also wrote a puppet play based on ancient Greek myths, Believe It or Not, which was actually, that one was actually produced. | |
| So, this is a great question, and basically it is, what is art? | |
| It's like that old comic where there's a guy at an easel, and the door walks in and says, hey, I'm art. | |
| I'm the guy you do everything for. | |
| What is art? | |
| Are there limits wherein something becomes so much of a parody of art that... | |
| It is no longer art. | |
| These are all very, very important and deep and essential questions because art is foundational to who we are as a species. | |
| I mean, from cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel, art has driven us as a species before we even had written language. | |
| It's very, very important stuff. | |
| And I'm going to make a case here that I'm sure there will be some exceptions to and some holes in. | |
| It's a very, dare I say, broad brush strokes. | |
| So if you find counterexamples, it doesn't necessarily disprove the general thesis, which is not exactly a weasel word of saying there's no null hypothesis. | |
| I mean, I think there is a null hypothesis which we'll talk about as we go forward, but enough of the intro, let's get going with the theory. | |
| Now, these are examples and arguments at the beginning here, just taken from Ayn Rand, which set the stage for what it is that I want to say. | |
| So, Rand made the argument that art is a psycho-epistemological recreation of reality, and by that, she sort of gave the example of if you are a painter who comes to a bad end in a Christa Burke song, then You have a choice of anything that you want to paint, you can paint. | |
| You're not limited. | |
| A photographer, you're somewhat limited by budget and so on, but as a painter, you can paint anything that you want. | |
| Now, if you paint a picture of something beautiful, then you're making a case. | |
| You are drawing the viewer's attention to something, and you're saying, yes, yes, I know that there's ugliness in the world, But I wish to remind you and draw your attention to that which is beautiful. | |
| And saying, yes, there is ugliness in the world, but let us refresh ourselves and reinvigorate ourselves and feast our senses on that which is beautiful. | |
| Beauty is the most important thing to remember and to focus on, and the painting draws attention to something beautiful. | |
| If, on the other hand, you paint something very ugly, then you are saying, well, I know that there's beauty in the world, but we really need to focus our attention on that which is ugly. | |
| And that is a case for the importance of reminding ourselves of ugliness in the world. | |
| Because the artist is focusing his or her, and I'm just going to go with either one, just so I know he's or her. | |
| The artist is focusing his attention and focusing hours or dates or months or sometimes years off his effort. | |
| He's focusing his attention on... | |
| The recreation of something and the focus of something. | |
| Something is in the middle of the painting. | |
| Something is in the environment. | |
| The environment of the painting is created of light and dark and colors and it all draws your attention and the artist has spent Weeks, months, or years, creating something and is saying that this is the most important thing to look at, or at least it was while I was creating it. | |
| Because I could have created everything, anything, but I created this and only this. | |
| So because the artist has focused so heavily on the subject of his painting, the viewer of the painting is invited to come in and focus on the same thing and to meditate. | |
| Which is basically to ask the question, why did the painter choose to paint this rather than anything else? | |
| And does it say something in general about the human condition, or does it say something in specific about the mindset of the painter? | |
| So these are very important considerations when it comes to art. | |
| When you are looking at a painting, you are looking at something that is kind of obsessive. | |
| And the painter has poured heart and soul into creating the painting. | |
| And the painting subject and tone and content is an argument for that which is important and overlooked. | |
| Important and overlooked. | |
| So, I mean, of course, lots of artists practice on bowls of fruit for a variety of reasons. | |
| A lot of challenges in a bowl of fruit. | |
| And there are, of course, some famous paintings that have bowls of fruit in them. | |
| Now... | |
| The artist is saying not, well, we often overlook bowls of fruit, although I guess when they were painted more commonly, bowls of fruit were actually quite rare because of seasons and lack of a supply chain, so to speak. | |
| So the artist is not saying exactly, well, you know, we often overlook bowls of fruit, but I really want you to meditate and focus on these bowls of fruit. | |
| But what the artist is doing is displaying his skill in the recreation of the bowl of fruit in the painting. | |
| Look how amazingly well the banana and the apple and the grapefruit and the pomegranate and all, look how well they're reproduced. | |
| And before photography, right, this was a huge challenge. | |
| And there were Renaissance painters who were also, they also dissected corpses to figure out how the muscles moved under the skin just so that they could get everything just right. | |
| Of course, also working with live models, which, since there have been photography, it's really not as common anymore. | |
| Like, I don't know if this is still true. | |
| When I was a kid, there were chalk artists who would set up shop in a mall, and they would do your picture. | |
| And I don't know, photography studios now are cheap enough that I don't think that's a thing anymore. | |
| I don't think that's a gig anymore. | |
| But my brother and I got one done, as did a friend of mine's mom and all that. | |
| Pretty cute. | |
| And so there were a number of pictures hanging in my childhood flat, eh? | |
| Apartments. | |
| One of them was a sort of pinched mouth with sort of two little squares for a mouth and a vacant, hollowed-eyed face by Paul Klee, I think a German artist. | |
| And another was a woman reading a book. | |
| And I always remember looking at this as I can't remember the name of the book. | |
| I don't think I even knew. | |
| It's a woman reading a book with her little pinky sort of curled out, and a quite lovely little painting. | |
| And on the other hand, though, you know, artists and hands are like mortal enemies. | |
| Artists just dread hands. | |
| Hands are very, very hard to get right. | |
| And one of the hands was done well, and the other hand basically just slithered off the table like a tentacle, and he just didn't bother doing the other hand, which I can sort of understand. | |
| And there were other paintings, too. | |
| We had sort of an eclectic mix of pictures in the house when I was a kid. | |
| Now, the Paul Klee painting, this sort of saucer-faced, hollow-eyed, pensive, square-lipped, androgynous person, It always struck me as an argument for this is essential. | |
| This is the essence of something. | |
| This is important. | |
| And the more generic the face, the more general its application. | |
| So if somebody makes a picture of Brad Pitt, they're not saying something about the human condition. | |
| They're saying... | |
| Brad Pitt. | |
| But if someone makes an androgynous picture, they are saying something about the human race as a whole, and I'm going to assume, I don't know really much about Paul Klee at all, K-L-E-E, I think, but I'm going to assume that this came out of the war and trauma and dissociation and all of that kind of stuff. | |
| This is a sort of emotionally dead and unreachable person in the picture. | |
| So, art is, I'm going to argue fundamentally, an argument for what we should focus on that we have a tendency to overlook. | |
| Art is an argument for what we should focus on which we have a tendency to overlook. | |
| When the world was ugly, Paintings were beautiful. | |
| I'm thinking Henri and all the other people In the sort of Renaissance period and so on, I mean, there was still starvation, disease, lots of people were ravaged by smallpox, there was polio, there was, I mean, just, it was a very difficult life. | |
| People died often of tooth decay, and I can't imagine, you know, as a friend of mine said, asked when we were teenagers, can you imagine in the Middle Ages, you know, there are all these princess bride kind of... | |
| Golden-haired princesses in medieval fantasy stories, but basically you'd be kissing someone who'd never brushed her teeth. | |
| Now, not an excess of sugar or anything, but still, you... | |
| So, when the world was ugly, or as the Monty Python guys have, he must be a king. | |
| Well, how do you know? | |
| Well, he hasn't got shit all over him. | |
| Well, that's actually quite true, right? | |
| And so when the world was ugly... | |
| People painted that which was beautiful. | |
| To remind people that there is beauty in the world that is often overlooked. | |
| But it's important. | |
| It's an argument for focusing on something essential which is often overlooked. | |
| As the world became more pretty, as the world became safer, you started to see the rise of I could say non-traditional art. | |
| Dadaism, which had a lot to do with nonsense syllables, nonsense words, nonsense poems, and so on. | |
| Surrealism, and the often grotesque art of the Weimar Republic. | |
| And in the 60s, of course, you see the rise of Andy Warhol, and of course Picasso with his jigsaw puzzling pieces and so on. | |
| So as the world became prettier or safer, then there was a reaction in the art world. | |
| And it wasn't just to the prevalence of photography, because photography, of course, allowed you to recreate the image of someone without years of training and hard work and so on. | |
| So it put a lot of portrait artists in many ways. | |
| Portrait art then became something which the rich did, because photography was available to the poor, or at least the middle class. | |
| So, as the world became safer and healthier, art had a tendency to say, well, remember, there's ugliness in the world, too, which we need to focus on, which is often overlooked. | |
| Now, I would also argue that the suicide of Christendom, known as basically the two world wars, which was one war with an armistice of two decades in the middle, That the suicide of Christendom had huge impacts on art. | |
| Think of World War I poetry, and a lot of the artists and poets were traumatized in the First World War, and this created a feeling that ugliness was necessary for people to see. | |
| Those who have gone through a war, I mean, they have definitely a, some of them have a desire to not talk about it, but I think a lot of them are driven by the need for other people to see the horrors of war so that it doesn't happen again. | |
| So, I think those are very important aspects of art. | |
| The absence of children in art up until the 19th century, well, I guess you could say with the exception of Emile by Rousseau, and a few others, but in general, children are as absent from Western history, excluding baby Jesus. | |
| They're as absent from Western art history as they are from, well, Randish novels or Indian novels. | |
| And I think that is important as well. | |
| So, I mean, there are children like cherubs will show up, but they're not real children. | |
| They're spirits. | |
| There is a Cupid who shows up a lot in paintings, and there is the mother and the baby Jesus and so on, but that's not a human child. | |
| That's not a real child. | |
| And you'll see occasionally sort of children in sort of scenes, but... | |
| Children being the focus of art was not wildly common. | |
| And Dickens really broke the mold with that. | |
| I think he's an incredibly great writer. | |
| Very stylized in many ways, but a very rich and deep writer. | |
| But he was the one who really focused on the experiences of children. | |
| And that was a very powerful moment in Western history when children came to the forefront and their inner lives were explored and the effects of childhood on adulthood were explored and that was very powerful and a very large change in the history of art. | |
| Now, of course, having children, you know, obviously prior to movies, it was mostly plays, and having children in plays is tough. | |
| What's that old Hollywood dictum, don't work with animals or children? | |
| And so there was some of that, but women weren't allowed on stage, and they were played by boys in Shakespeare's time, so it wasn't impossible. | |
| But when the novel came along, of course, you could really have children. | |
| In art for the first time. | |
| And the awakening of empathy towards children was really something quite astonishing and quite astounding. | |
| Childhood was, of course, incredibly painful for most families throughout history because almost, well, I shouldn't say, many, many, if not most families had at least one child who would die before reaching adulthood, and often more than one. | |
| And there's a lovely little scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin where the woman is talking about a little drawer that she has, like every mother has, filled with the clothing of the child who died. | |
| And she carries around that broken heart in her chest at all times. | |
| So childhood was a very painful situation. | |
| Period for a lot of families. | |
| And it was hard to bond with children because you didn't know if they were going to survive or not. | |
| And that was a big problem. | |
| When children began to survive in a more robust manner, which had a lot to do with the Industrial Revolution, when children began to survive in a more robust manner, then you could actually attach and really connect more with your children, which raises empathy and contributes to all those kinds of good things that come out of... | |
| I don't know why I said it like that. | |
| Good things. | |
| Some of you can get struck by the ghost of FM car commercial announcers, but anyway. | |
| The presence of children in Western art was foundational, I think, to creating empathy for children. | |
| And, of course, as empathy for children grew, so concomitantly did the movement to Put in government schools and indoctrinate children and dehumanize them and all the stuff which in a presentation I've got called The Truth About World War I. One of the core theses is that you couldn't really have World War I without government schools indoctrinating children as to the virtues of the state and having children bond with the state and its agents through teachers and so on. | |
| I make the case there so I won't remake it here. | |
| But what Dickens did, and apparently was a fun and playful father, although not necessarily a very good husband in many ways, but he said that children, the inner lives of children, the hearts and minds of children, are very important to focus on and often overlooked. | |
| And there are Many reported instances. | |
| I mean, he was a total rock star of his time. | |
| He was apparently a fantastic reader of his own work, and his tours were... | |
| I mean, he was a rock star. | |
| And the people would just, like, weep for a month after reading about little Dorrit or David Copperfield and so on. | |
| I get this. | |
| I read many years ago a biography of Charles Dickens, and... | |
| In a similar way that Princess Diana's death in the 90s uncorked a lot of grieving and actually improved the mental health of British people for a time. | |
| The empathy that Dickens showed towards his child characters helped people reconnect with their own childhoods with some grieving and I think did something to really help the growth of empathy in the 19th century, which you can see In some of the welfare state reforms, in the corn laws, which is freedom of trade, in the, I think it was the 1850s, in the limitation of the work week, in the banning of child labor, and so on. | |
| I'm not saying that these were necessarily the perfect solutions, but there was a growing empathy towards that. | |
| And in the same way that... | |
| Empathy towards women grew up, and a lot of male writers like Samuel Richardson and so on wrote, quite compellingly, about women and their challenges, which was, again, somewhat new in literature. | |
| So, art, I would argue, is an argument for what we should focus on that is often overlooked. | |
| Because if it's something we should focus on that isn't often overlooked, then art doesn't really add anything to the equation. | |
| I mean, there's not a lot of art that makes the case that we should think about sex from time to time. | |
| We should remember that sex is an important and enjoyable part of life. | |
| There's not a lot of art that does that because that's kind of what we do. | |
| In the same way, there's not a lot of paintings of chocolate Because chocolate is tasty, people think about it, we focus on it, and so on. | |
| So, again, this is obviously a conditional and exploratory thesis. | |
| I'm not going to say the case is closed, bang the gavel or anything, but if we sort of accept the idea that art is an argument for what we should focus on, that is often overlooked. | |
| And it's important to focus on. | |
| We should focus on it, and it's often overlooked. | |
| So, you've probably seen, and this is more often the case in pictures than it is in paintings, but there is the traditional... | |
| Portrait of giant skyscrapers, you know, those vertical ice cube trays of giant skyscrapers, and yet, at the bottom of the skyscraper, or perhaps a street or two over, there is the shaggy-faced, weather-beaten man huddling in front of a cardboard box trying to keep warm. | |
| Now, of course, that is an argument for something we should focus on, which is easy to overlook, or which is often overlooked, which is, in the midst of all our wealth as a society, how can we allow people to remain homeless and hungry and cold and poor and all that kind of stuff? | |
| And that is an argument. | |
| And some, of course, some artists are very clear. | |
| Bertolt Brecht was very clear in his devotion to communism and so on, and a lot of the, I think it's 90% of Scripts in Hollywood in the 1930s were written by guys who were part of a union whose head was directly communist and a lot of it was pretty explicitly communist focused and trying to Advanced communist goals. | |
| And to communist great credit, they recognize the power of art and allegory very powerfully. | |
| Mother Courage and Her Children and so on. | |
| Other Bertolt Brecht plays are very important to examine with regards to this propaganda. | |
| And you could see this, right? | |
| There was this tide of writers that until the Nazi-Soviet pact of steel. | |
| They wanted America to go into the war because Nazism was an enemy of communism, which narrowly won. | |
| And so they wanted America to go into the war, but then as soon as there was a pact of steel between Germany and Russia, they then didn't want America to go into the war because it would have meant fighting communists. | |
| And then when that pact of steel broke down and Germany invaded, well, they wanted to go back to the, you know, let's go into Europe. | |
| So you can see all of this stuff happening. | |
| Now, of course, if we go back, or just swing back and forth in time like this, I go both ways, chronologically speaking. | |
| In the medieval period, in the sort of high dominion of Christendom, the art was, of course, religious in tone and in context, because they wanted everyone to focus on religion. | |
| And the general horror of the world around them needed to be counteracted with the beauty of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and the saints and the stories of the Bible and so on. | |
| It was an attempt to make things more real. | |
| And better looking than the world around them as a sort of foretaste or foremark of heaven. | |
| And, you know, it was tough to make the case that this was the best of all possible worlds created by God and inhabited by his children, you know, when 10% of the population regularly died from starvation and illness and wars and all that. | |
| So, There was, of course, this is what you should focus on and it's easy to overlook. | |
| Remember, this is a reminder. | |
| If you think of icons and little prayer shrines and so on in homes, these are a kind of art or iconography that reminds people to focus on that which is essential, which is easy to overlook, which is their religious devotion. | |
| The art, of course, of the propagandistic art of totalitarian regimes is also pretty foundational. | |
| To imprint people with, you know, workers of the world unite, and I obey my government, and loose lips sink ships, and all that. | |
| I mean, Uncle Sam wants you. | |
| These are all artistic representations that are telling people to focus on something that's easy to overlook, or which they may have a self-interest in, called survival in overlooking. | |
| And these are all very important things to recognize that are occurring for you. | |
| But there's a lot of programming. | |
| It's called programming for a reason, people. | |
| And that stuff is occurring continually. | |
| So it's important to keep your eye out. | |
| What are people focusing on that is telling you that this is what you need to focus on and this is what is easy to overlook? | |
| I mean, for instance, in the In the show Friends, to my memory, there's not a single, happy, functional, positive family unit. | |
| Rachel has a kid out of wedlock, and Chandler and the black-haired woman, I can't remember her name, They can't have kids, so they end up adopting. | |
| The Tom Selleck character is not married and has no kids. | |
| Ross has a kid with a lesbian woman, a woman who turns out to be a lesbian who divorces him, and they're raising the kid and all that. | |
| And this is just the general pathological hatred that people in the media have for the nuclear family. | |
| And, you know, this isn't any kind of negative or hate on for lesbian families or something like that. | |
| It's just that they're conspicuous in their absence. | |
| And they have programmed a whole bunch of people to think that, you know, casual sex with kids, with friends, you don't have to be committed, you know, this all works. | |
| And of course it doesn't. | |
| I mean, it doesn't in real life, but it can be, you know, everyone can pretend that it works for pretty people on a soundstage. | |
| Men are dumb. | |
| Men are dumb. | |
| Women are wise. | |
| If a woman is upset, it's a man's fault. | |
| If a man is upset, he's being irrational. | |
| I mean, all of these tropes are regularly pounded, and not even subtly, like a railway spike to the forehead, regularly pounded into people's minds. | |
| There are sinister forces at work out there that only significantly expanded government powers can keep you safe from. | |
| You know, like... | |
| Some new... | |
| I gritted my teeth and watched one of the new Katherine Hegel shows, State of Affairs or something like that. | |
| And yeah, in it, you know, well, there's chatter from this radical group, and we've got to move here, and we've got to do that, and I can't tell so-and-so about this, and it's all got to be covert, and it's keeping people safe, and otherwise, right, this is all, this is regularly pounded in. | |
| There are sinister, dangerous forces out there, and only people who are unaccountable and invisible can keep you safe from them. | |
| It's regularly pounded in. | |
| And this stuff, of course, has gone through the roof since 9-11. | |
| Again, it's just to Weaken your resolve to argue against transparency and visibility in the state. | |
| This just doesn't show up. | |
| You can't see this stuff. | |
| It can't be allowed to be visible. | |
| Having attractive people, and this is something more, of course, more to television and movies, although on radio it would be attractive voices, but having attractive, competent, confident people portray the moral argument that you like and want is, again, a similar, very cheating way to get things across. | |
| The ultimate one, of course, is that women will only date men of a certain political persuasion. | |
| Yes, I'm talking to you, West Wing. | |
| That's important. | |
| Very important to recognize as well. | |
| That's very much programming the sperm flow, right? | |
| And the sperm flow is, you know, need eggs or DNA dies. | |
| And the entire history of billions of years to result in me ends with me. | |
| The whole DNA combinations that are me ends with me if I can't get a woman to... | |
| Offer upper eggs to my sperm. | |
| And so, if you make the most attractive women, only attract it to guys with a particular political persuasion. | |
| If you portray, for instance, conservatives as stodgy and unattractive and weird, and if you portray liberals as sophisticated and attractive and easygoing and confident and tousle-haired and all that, | |
| and they have relaxed and open-body postures, whereas the conservatives are hunched over and tense and all that, Well, again, you're programming men to adopt a liberal position in order to gain access to eggs. | |
| And that's a very powerful way. | |
| This is not exactly what is art. | |
| This is more what is propaganda. | |
| But, of course, it's used in the realm of art. | |
| Of course, also, if you portray liberals as funny and conservatives as dour... | |
| Then when you make people laugh, they're much easier to program, right? | |
| Because their defenses are down. | |
| And this is why shows like Jon Stewart and Friends and, you know, the lefty pantheon of socially disruptive forces are so effective. | |
| And, of course, comedy has a lot to do with certainty. | |
| Like, you are certain that The object of your mockery has no redeeming qualities and no case to make whatsoever. | |
| And so when you are certain and you have the ability to make people laugh, it's generally pointed at the right from the left. | |
| And it's very effective. | |
| It's very effective. | |
| Young people consume hundreds if not thousands of hours of this programming and then we wonder why the young tend more towards the left. | |
| Well, because they're Programmed by propaganda rather than instructed by reality. | |
| And again, I'm neither left nor right. | |
| I'm simply pointing all that out. | |
| So if we accept the case conditionally, you know, with the requirement of future mulling things over, That art is an argument for what we should focus on that is easy to overlook or often overlooked. | |
| We can also look at the plays of Tennessee Williams in this context as well. | |
| And the plays of Tennessee Williams contain, of course, what has been famously called the moth women, the women who were attracted to the light but destroyed by it. | |
| Well, I mean, Tennessee Williams was gay. | |
| And I actually remember many years ago attempting to read one of his novels, which started off with golden showers between two gay men, and I really couldn't get much further. | |
| Not because of the gayness, I don't care about that, but the golden ickiness. | |
| Not my cup of joe. | |
| And his female characters, I mean, he said, again, somewhat famously in art circles, I am Blanche Dubois, the heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, which he wrote when he was, I think, staying in, I can't remember, New Orleans or some town. | |
| And he had a street fire that would go rattling up and down his road, his street, outside his window. | |
| And it would put the title of its destination so people would know where it was going. | |
| And one was Desire and the other was Cemetery. | |
| I guess Desire Street and Cemetery Street were... | |
| It's Destinations, and that's why he got the name of his play. | |
| And his argument, I think, was for... | |
| You can see this in The Glass Menagerie about his extremely frail sister, for which there is some sinister potentialities in her history that have never been confirmed, but she ended up, I think, being institutionalized and so on. | |
| So his fragile sister shows up in the character of Laura. | |
| And... | |
| He repeatedly made the case for the need for society to be sensitive to fragile people, that there was this sort of robust, unthinking, uncaring, unconsciously manipulative group of people who had this sort of elemental strength. | |
| They were sort of body without mind, whereas his moth women were sort of mind without body. | |
| And these Steinle Kowalski strong, robust creatures just basically trampled all over these frail, broken creatures without any sympathy or empathy or anything like that. | |
| And he's making the case that it's important to look at the fragile people in the world who are easy to overlook, easy to exploit, easy to manipulate, but we need to be sensitive to who they are and what they need. | |
| And I think this was a case that was repeatedly made. | |
| And you could make the case that he was trying to tell The macho men in the gay community to really treasure and value the frail neurasthenic men in the gay community. | |
| And I think that's an important consideration. | |
| That's not provable. | |
| I don't think you understand. | |
| But, um, he could not write directly about homosexuality. | |
| I think E.M. Forster did write about homosexuality in the novel Maurice, which, you know, room with a view. | |
| That's the novel to read, in my opinion, but... | |
| But that, I don't think, was published until many years after his death, or many years later it was kept in a drawer. | |
| Sort of like A Long Day's Journey Tonight by Eugene O'Neill, which broke him in two to write, and which he would not allow to be produced until at least ten years after his death. | |
| And A Long Day's Journey Into Night, to me, is a plea for rejecting the surface appearance of families, because Eugene O'Neill was writing about his own family very explicitly. | |
| And his mother is a morphine addict, his father is a famous actor, and he had a brother who died. | |
| But in the play, he gave himself, the character based on him, he gave the name of the child who died. | |
| And so, by outward appearances, his mother was attractive, his father was a successful actor, who was embittered by being trapped in a sort of Three Musketeers commercial success play, which prevented him from doing better, more quality works like Shakespeare and so on. | |
| So, to outward appearances, this is a successful and attractive family, but the inner experience of the family is that it is a living hell with a mother who is incredibly fragile and destructive and murderously addicted to personality-erasing opiates. | |
| And I think it's a plea to say it is important to focus upon the dysfunction of families and not simply look at them by outward appearances. | |
| And that's, I mean, who can really argue with that? | |
| I mean, it is also, of course, a wonderful opportunity for a particular actress to do some true scenery-chewing acting. | |
| But the agony of this family in full display, unedited, unsentimentalized, is very important to recognize and to understand. | |
| It's the same thing with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. | |
| A piece of Steph Bot trivia. | |
| I did excerpts from the zoo story in my audition for the National Theatre School. | |
| And... | |
| Edward Albee has a somewhat sane couple having a dinner party from hell with a completely insane and dysfunctional couple named George and Martha after, of course, George and Martha Washington. | |
| He's saying this is where America is. | |
| And again, an evisceration of the nuclear family. | |
| And, sorry, spoiler, they talk about A son who turns out to be made up and fictional, which of course is the self-absorption of the baby boomers, which led to the significant birth rate decline that has been occurring for the last generation or so. | |
| In all of Italy, I think just over half a million babies were born last year. | |
| I mean, Italy's reproduction rate is, what, 1.2 or something like that? | |
| Not that people have a duty to reproduce or anything like that, but all who enjoy life. | |
| A rational case can be made to give the gifts that you have yourself enjoyed and valued. | |
| And that gift called life would be one of them. | |
| And he is also saying, I think in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, If I remember rightly, George is a successful academic or writer or something like that. | |
| And he's saying that great material success or great professional success can easily coincide with massive psychological dysfunction. | |
| Like really pathological craziness. | |
| Which to me is... | |
| A very important lesson. | |
| I remember reading Ann Coulter's, I think it was Demonic? | |
| And a lot of the people who blew up buildings and so on in the Weatherman Underground or Weather Underground was the name of the radical group in the 60s. | |
| And, you know, a lot of them became professors. | |
| And Bill Ayers, I think, is friends with Barack Obama and even may have launched his presidency or his... | |
| Sorry, he launched his political fortunes from his living room and so on. | |
| That people who have done what the majority of society considers egregiously criminal actions... | |
| Well, that's, you know, Nixon tells one lie not under oath, and the Republican Party demands that he quit. | |
| Clinton tells multiple lies under oath, lies to his wife, the nation, friends, family, and... | |
| Gets to hang on, right? | |
| I mean, this is just how standards change over time. | |
| And of course, relative to particular political parties, of course. | |
| So I would argue that if we look at art as an argument for that which is Important to focus on, but tends to be overlooked, or the artist feels something is being overlooked. | |
| I think we can put a lot of ours in context with this. | |
| Again, it doesn't answer a lot of things, but it answers a few things. | |
| Now, the challenge then, of course, to what we will talk about, In the next podcast on this topic, the challenge is to try to figure out where extremely non-representational modern art, you know, the spatterfest of Jackson Pollock and the voice of fire, three lines of color and so on, where does all that fit into this thesis? | |
| Also, I'd like to touch on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories and a few other things. | |
| But those are challenges as well because what is all of this non-representational, highly stylized, abstract art doing relative to this thesis? | |
| So thank you so much for listening. | |
| Of course, if you find this stuff helpful or interesting, please, please, please help us out. | |
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| www.freedomainradio.com to help us out. | |
| I hope you do have a wonderful day. |