Revaudo - good or bad for art?

[Mornche Geddick]

I've just been reading C.S. Lewis's essay Lilies that fester, where he imagines what it would be like if a clique of cultured people ruled a country.

You wouldn't just have to pass English Lit to get into the ruling class, you would have to show that you liked all the right poets and authors. Ted Hughes: Good, Rudyard Kipling: Bad. Ambitious young men and women would learn to fake the correct taste in art (before they had even left school), without caring tuppence for the thing in itself. Meanwhile anybody who had a genuine liking for the wrong style would get booted out. And the end result would be that art and literature, valued only as a means of advancement, would shrivel away and become a lifeless husk (among the ruling class anyway).

So, is this what has happened to art in Xurno? And if not, what factors are working to prevent it?

Note: C.S. Lewis's "Charientocrats" were to be trained in criticism and appreciation of art only, not necessarily in how to produce it.

[zompist]

A cynical answer would be: and that contrasts with art when? When was the golden period when no artists cared for fame, power, and money?

In Xurno, there are definitely people who get into art only because it's the route to political (and economic) power. It's actually a trite commonpalce in Xurno to wonder if the revolution destroyed art-- it's the equivalent of American pundits whining about how the current state of the country betrays the vision of the Founding Fathers.

The mores of Xurnese art do weed out most of the talentless-- you have to master some pretty intricate skills to be an Academician, whether you want to or not.

[dunomapuka]

Do you have any thoughts on particular stylistics? What do their paintings and sculptures look like?

[Legros]

A cynical answer would be: and that contrasts with art when? When was the golden period when no artists cared for fame, power, and money?

Fairly recent - when Eskimos carved ivory for themselves

[Ezekiel]

A further refinement of the question, with slightly more cynical tone:

First, I'd like to point out that art (or music, literature, etc.) is universally divided into (vague) "periods" where the "talented" artists (musicians, etc.) conformed to a set of stylistic norms. Example: During the "Neo-Classical" period, the focus of art was on distinct, abstract, idealized forms; this was the age when the universe was viewed as a gigantic clockwork device that could be reasoned-out with logic alone. The Neo-Classical period was followed by the Romantic period, which reacted to the cold, hard logic of its predecessor by saying that truth, beauty, and art were derived from individual, subjective and emotional understandings of the universe, and that only personal revelation and reflection could provide enlightenment.

In light of this fact, I ask: If art critics rule, as they do in C.S. Lewis' "Lilies that Fester," won't they simply be held to the periodically shifting standards of whenever they live?

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In light of this fact, I ask: If art critics rule, as they do in C.S. Lewis' "Lilies that Fester," won't they simply be held to the periodically shifting standards of whenever they live?

1. Aren't all political establishments held to the periodically shifting standards of whenever they live?

2. Be wary of caricaturing artistic periods, theories and movements. Romanticism, for instance, was a zeitgeist rather than an ideology, and very rarely manifested as anti-reason. (A useful guide to the shifts and continuities between artistic periods in Western history is Jacques Barzun's magisterial -- and sometimes contrarian -- From Dawn to Decadence. I don't always agree with him but he's a useful antidote to some common misapprehensions.)

[Mornche Geddick]

My own feeling is that Xurno isn't so bad as the state of things imagined in Lilies that fester - it may be more like Augustan Rome. There too, poets had to write the right sort of poetry - rural eclogues and love elegy were in, but "gigantomachies" (epics about the war of giants and gods) were out. But that didn't stop Virgil, Ovid and Horace writing poetry that is still enjoyed today.