Second Act comes out in the UK one week today. Some people who pre-ordered have been getting their copy early, so if you order it now, you might get it early!
Amazon UK. | Amazon US. | Amazon Canada.
Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit: Thou art essentially mad without seeming so. Henry IV, part I
Derivative is often used as an artistic insult. Reviewers and critics wanting to describe why a work is lacking will say derivative, as if to mean it is a mere copy, and not a very good one. They are wrong. All art is derivative, it is produced in great chains and webs of influence. Everything derives from something. What they mean (and it is not merely ironic, but telling of their critical attention) is imitative. Samuel Johnson knew this, of course, and perhaps more critics should be made to read one Rambler essay every day over breakfast.
All imitations are inferior. No-one values mock Tudor houses, reproduction furniture, or cover bands as highly as the originals. You might think they are good, you might even prefer them, but that is not the same as judging from a position of knowledge that these things are aesthetically better. My Jimmy Stewart impression is pretty good, sometimes it gets a laugh. I wouldn’t recommend you spend time watching me rather than Jimmy, though. (This is why the new Ripley is not good; it’s pure imitation, top to bottom, and too slow at that.)
Many people do say they think that “lesser” works are better. They like imitation furniture that is new and clean and fits with the style of their room. Fine. But to go beyond preference to taste, we must know how each work compares to each other. Spend several years reading Wordsworth and Shakespeare and then you’ll read the imitators very differently. Trapse the galleries and museums and you’ll start to see your mock ornaments in another light. To imitate is to diminish.
This is a good thing. A life is optimized for easy pleasures will receive nothing greater. Just think how quickly some people decide what they like and stick to it. A long life with so little to fill it! Many believe aesthetic judgement is subjective. People should enjoy what they want. Snobbishness is unkind. If I like it, it’s good. And so on. All true, all true. The best wine is often the cheapest. But knowledge is real. Truth is real. Some art survives; most doesn’t. How frequently it is the imitators who are winnowed out!
We have to ask why some works survive. Why Homer, Chaucer, Milton; why Vermeer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt? Neo-Kantians will forever believe that great art represents something great about themselves: reading makes you empathetic, appreciating great art brings out deep human values in you, and so on. This is so much contemptible, egoistic, pseudo-philosophical nonsense! Great art survives because of itself! Not because of some Bloomsburyite sect of self-satisfied, secular priests of highbrow taste and fine feeling. The very idea is a gross affront to the concept of art and beauty.
We have not preserved cave paintings, monk chantings, cathedrals, and tapestries because of some vague, post—eighteenth century, upper-middle-class preoccupation with being thought to be an aesthete or a cultured person. The art is the font of seriousness, not the art appreciator. The neo-Kantians are self-promoting liars, snobs, and hypocrites. They have not really seen the art they praise at all. We must enter into art as we enter into a church, in awe at the seriousness not of ourselves but of the work.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
The argument that Taylor Swift is as a good a lyricist as the Romantic poets hasn’t yet been made by anyone with a serious knowledge of those writers. The idea that her lyrics will be taken without her music, her performances, and read in poetry books four hundred years hence—which is where most of the great Elizabethan lyrics come from—is laughable. We say these things to defend ourselves, to promote our own taste, not as a way of seriously discussing art.
Knowledge in the arts is so often shrugged off by those who want everyone’s taste to be considered equally valuable. But your taste is not a reflection of your moral character. Not at all. Just look at how morally awful so many great artists are, not to mention the critics. We are talking about knowing a body of work the way a scientist knows a body of knowledge. In her 1991 MIT lecture, Camille Paglia described the way a feminist scholar had critiqued fashion photography, seeing symbols of domination and abuse in the poses and clothes. It was ignorance of the history of art, Paglia said, that left this well-intentioned scholar unable to see that high fashion photography from 1940-1990 was an important chapter in the history of art. We can only see what we know. Ignorance can have very clear vision.
In our quest to call the imitation good we repress all this, repress even our own instincts. We know quality when we see it. It always tells. It rings like crystal and gleams like a bird’s eye. Children respond very differently to great poetry than they do to the dross so often pushed off onto them by children’s authors. Yes, it’s fun. Yes, that’s a good thing. No, they don’t pause and go quiet when you read it to them. They don’t ask you, quietly, about it a few days later. They don’t agree to memorise it. Few play classical music to children anymore. The days of Fantasia and Looney Toons are long gone. The philistine supremacy is real. But try them with Bach, Vaughan William, John Adams. They listen. They hum. They dance. Show them the great door at Canterbury Cathedral and they are enthralled. They do not have the critical capacity or the deep knowledge to tell you why, but they do at least listen to their instincts. Great art catches them like the smell of fresh bread or the first light of the day. What the eye finds beautiful, says Nietzsche, the hand wants to draw.
This is what you must do. Follow your instinctive ability to see and to feel greatness. Be confused. Immerse yourself in what makes no sense, but which you are sure has some large value. Once you put any personal feelings and judgements aside about whether a piece of art is snobbish or accessible or what you like and simply experience it, you will have a very different view of art. And you will start to see imitations for what they are. Not derived from greatness, but small, weak copies. Life should not be optimised for what you currently enjoy. That runs out fast. Instead, you should be working, slowly, to discover more of what is great. To find something of which you can say with satisfaction—how derivative!
