The problem with graffiti isn’t the graffiti so much as the canvas. A beautiful Monet painted without permission on the side of your house is a little less troublesome than a 16 year old’s street tagging, but it’s still unsanctioned. Of, course this isn’t quite the same as sanctioned temporary graffiti on a beautiful centuries old cathedral.
My solution is installing giant projectors to display Claude and JMW Turner throughout metropolises, and then having drones fly through such cities every so often during a feast day to play Haydn or Elgar. Fly the Enigma Variation into Slough and whoever attacks it is recorded and sent to prison as both a vandal and philistine. As for graffiti, Baudrillard is right that it only works whilst displaying the inexpressible; to my mind, it all went wrong when Banksy came in and occupied such a cultural space with a bourgie anti-Brexit message. He was promoted during the time when the BNP were so popular they managed to win a council seat in Tower Hamlets, when the voice of the working man was something that the centre was quite terrified of. Meanwhile, the graffiti in the church reads exactly like a humiliation tactic of some Roman occupation, even if it's just fogies in the Synod shoving this forward.
I think MAYBE you're being a little unfair to Eagleton. Not that you're wrong in your judgement of him - but that book of his has positive virtues as well which makes it far from the worst of the critical theory crowd. The main purpose of the book, which it accomplishes well, is to give a general (and very useful and readable) survey of various theoretical approaches to literature. He is totally up front about the fact that he himself is a partisan of one of those approaches, but he tries to give a fair account of others also. If one reads the book in the spirit in which he wrote it, one certainly will see that (as a Marxist) Eagleton does not accept the idea of literary value independent of its social/political uses, but one will also understand from his survey of different theories that this is not the only possible way of approaching literature, even if Eagleton himself happens to think it is the right one.
Far, far worse than this are the legions of literary scholars who simply ASSUME as an unquestioned fact the approach which Eagleton adopts, and who do not acknowledge any other possibilities. This has been for many years the dominant stance of much of the academy - one can't even really call it "Marxism", because it is too unconsidered to be aligned to a ideology, though one might say that it is "Marx-adjacent" or "Marx-derived".
Also worth noting that Mr Eagleton published "After Theory," and in his other works attacks the sort of relativism that Mr Oliver ascribes to him here.
Eagleton’s ‘Literary Theory’ has plenty of merit, if only as an initiation, and the man is not completely irredeemable. But he never abandoned the idea that every artist ultimately serves some vested interest or other; again, an idea not entirely without merit, but also a bad-faith multiplier.
He would certainly say that every artist is ultimately influenced by their context, especially the material conditions of that context, but I don't know if he'd support the stronger claim that every artist has some "vested interest," unless this means that every artist is endorsing a particular worldview -- a proposition that doesn't seem outrageous to me.
Yes, context is always worth noting, and I suppose we always ought to be cautious about claims of value-neutrality. But taken to its natural conclusion the idea seems to be that aesthetics is always the servant of something else. That’s how we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which might not be unwarranted, as long as we are aware that a baby exists in the first place.
It is a tremendous demerit to the humanities that it produces and promotes so many Marxists. It suggests a total disinterest in the last 200 years of scholarship outside their own field. It's like thinking that phrenology is still state-of-the-art neuroscience.
Of course the occasional Marxist is perfectly wholesome; what is an academy without it's eccentrics? But if the Marxists are dominant, then something's gone badly wrong.
I have no idea what it's like on the inside, but from the outside I think they (Marxists, critical theorists, aggressively ideological leftists generally) really have established themselves as the public face of a number of fields.
To be fair: the median academic doesn't want to, and may be actively discouraged from, doing any real public engagement. So if the Marxists have run off with the ball... well, where was the defense?
The problem with this installation is that it is laughably inauthentic as art. The idea of taking theological questions from marginalized people and elevating them so that they become the basis for discourse is a good idea -- maybe not as art, but as some kind of cathedral-worthy installation. But doing that by packaging the questions in "graffiti" that looks as if it was generated by a second-rate commercial artist or perhaps by AI -- that IS a problem, because it bowdlerizes the questions and turns them into something wholly inauthentic. If the designers really wanted to elevate the voices and ideas of marginalized people, they shouldn't have hired non-marginalized people to add an artificial sheen to their ideas. If they wanted to do this project meaningfully, they should have worked with the question-askers to create the art, not just repackaged it in a way that looks as if it's McDonald's scrambling for contemporary relevance.
Also, even the questions are slick and do not sound like the voice of anyone besides ChatGPT, even when I abstract away from the risible "graffiti."
Somewhat, but the fact that they think it is permissible at all is what is at issue. There are of course many fairly awful modern art installations in churches that are permanent.
Yes. Because they weren't even committed to producing real graffiti and actually vandalising the building like some revolutionary vanguard of the vulgar. So bourgeois, as Eagleton might say.
If the graffiti were placed on anything else of beauty would we be similarly bothered? The answer is yes. Graffiti on the David, Eiffel Tower, or even a Bansky would spoil the underlying art. That’s what graffiti does. That it is temporary only softens the blow after the initial shock as in, “You’ve tattooed your face?!” “It’s only a temporary tattoo mom.” We’re not suddenly in admiration of the art when we’ve discovered that it’s temporary. Our reaction is the same: it’s horrible, get rid of it.
We've visited Canterbury Cathedral twice. I'm trying to imagine a visitor (or tourist) paying £18.00 ($24 US) to see one of the most cherished sites in Western Christianity, and then discovering the cathedral "decorated" with graffiti. I can go to virtually any highway underpass, industrial building, or other abandoned structure in north London and see better-quality "voices from the unheard." And it's free. Just a few blocks away are the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, despoiled by Henry VIII, and I'm likely to be more moved and impressed by ruins than by graffiti.
Graffiti in a cathedral just seems like you’re intentionally marring the cathedral. It seems to me like a very bad idea. People don’t come to church to stare at graffiti but rather to experience our God in the liturgy and sacramental life of the Church. Stained glass, paintings and sculptures reveal God and provide a focal point for us to contemplate Him. I don’t see how graffiti does that. The sacraments are how we experience ourselves as the Body of Christ, and the recognition of Church as the mystical body and also bride of Christ compels us to discover Christ in the poor and marginalized. It forces us to rectify the systemic structures that lead to poverty and oppression. Perhaps I’m dense but I don’t see how graffiti advances this. Being Church and serving the poor and marginalized seems to me a better course. I don’t think God’s preferential option for the poor means to paint graffiti on church walls, I don’t think the idea that graffiti is the art of those who have no voice compels us to spray paint the cathedral with slogans.
I suspect if we knew more about who created the modern stuff and what it was deemed to represent, there would be a lot more cohesion with my thesis. Even St Pauls has some of that stuff, valued entirely for the value they have created in it.
Chichester Cathedral is worth looking at. And obviously Coventry. Both have amazing work done in the ‘50’s which sort of works with the architecture, which in Chichester’s case is Norman/Early English.
I think maybe what the NYTBR editor said isn’t quite as bad as you made it out to be.
“Yeah. I mean, look, I bring up all the time. I still have not read Middlemarch by George Eliot, but I have read, I don't know, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon, right? So which is more valuable? I don't think there's an answer to that. I think it's just where your taste leads you.”
More simply: massive “hello fellow kids” vibes.
“Language is the people who speak it, and graffiti is the language of the unheard.”
From one day to the next, I see too much graffiti already; I sometimes go to churches solely to escape it.
Quite
The problem with graffiti isn’t the graffiti so much as the canvas. A beautiful Monet painted without permission on the side of your house is a little less troublesome than a 16 year old’s street tagging, but it’s still unsanctioned. Of, course this isn’t quite the same as sanctioned temporary graffiti on a beautiful centuries old cathedral.
My solution is installing giant projectors to display Claude and JMW Turner throughout metropolises, and then having drones fly through such cities every so often during a feast day to play Haydn or Elgar. Fly the Enigma Variation into Slough and whoever attacks it is recorded and sent to prison as both a vandal and philistine. As for graffiti, Baudrillard is right that it only works whilst displaying the inexpressible; to my mind, it all went wrong when Banksy came in and occupied such a cultural space with a bourgie anti-Brexit message. He was promoted during the time when the BNP were so popular they managed to win a council seat in Tower Hamlets, when the voice of the working man was something that the centre was quite terrified of. Meanwhile, the graffiti in the church reads exactly like a humiliation tactic of some Roman occupation, even if it's just fogies in the Synod shoving this forward.
I think MAYBE you're being a little unfair to Eagleton. Not that you're wrong in your judgement of him - but that book of his has positive virtues as well which makes it far from the worst of the critical theory crowd. The main purpose of the book, which it accomplishes well, is to give a general (and very useful and readable) survey of various theoretical approaches to literature. He is totally up front about the fact that he himself is a partisan of one of those approaches, but he tries to give a fair account of others also. If one reads the book in the spirit in which he wrote it, one certainly will see that (as a Marxist) Eagleton does not accept the idea of literary value independent of its social/political uses, but one will also understand from his survey of different theories that this is not the only possible way of approaching literature, even if Eagleton himself happens to think it is the right one.
Far, far worse than this are the legions of literary scholars who simply ASSUME as an unquestioned fact the approach which Eagleton adopts, and who do not acknowledge any other possibilities. This has been for many years the dominant stance of much of the academy - one can't even really call it "Marxism", because it is too unconsidered to be aligned to a ideology, though one might say that it is "Marx-adjacent" or "Marx-derived".
Yes this is fair
Also worth noting that Mr Eagleton published "After Theory," and in his other works attacks the sort of relativism that Mr Oliver ascribes to him here.
Eagleton’s ‘Literary Theory’ has plenty of merit, if only as an initiation, and the man is not completely irredeemable. But he never abandoned the idea that every artist ultimately serves some vested interest or other; again, an idea not entirely without merit, but also a bad-faith multiplier.
He would certainly say that every artist is ultimately influenced by their context, especially the material conditions of that context, but I don't know if he'd support the stronger claim that every artist has some "vested interest," unless this means that every artist is endorsing a particular worldview -- a proposition that doesn't seem outrageous to me.
Yes, context is always worth noting, and I suppose we always ought to be cautious about claims of value-neutrality. But taken to its natural conclusion the idea seems to be that aesthetics is always the servant of something else. That’s how we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which might not be unwarranted, as long as we are aware that a baby exists in the first place.
It is a tremendous demerit to the humanities that it produces and promotes so many Marxists. It suggests a total disinterest in the last 200 years of scholarship outside their own field. It's like thinking that phrenology is still state-of-the-art neuroscience.
Of course the occasional Marxist is perfectly wholesome; what is an academy without it's eccentrics? But if the Marxists are dominant, then something's gone badly wrong.
I don’t know how dominant they are but there are too many yes
I have no idea what it's like on the inside, but from the outside I think they (Marxists, critical theorists, aggressively ideological leftists generally) really have established themselves as the public face of a number of fields.
To be fair: the median academic doesn't want to, and may be actively discouraged from, doing any real public engagement. So if the Marxists have run off with the ball... well, where was the defense?
I don't think that the problem of this art installation (https://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/news/posts/delight-and-displeasure-art-installation-s-questions-to-god-divide-public-opinion/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) relates to aesthetic relativism; I disagree with your diagnosis, Henry!
The problem with this installation is that it is laughably inauthentic as art. The idea of taking theological questions from marginalized people and elevating them so that they become the basis for discourse is a good idea -- maybe not as art, but as some kind of cathedral-worthy installation. But doing that by packaging the questions in "graffiti" that looks as if it was generated by a second-rate commercial artist or perhaps by AI -- that IS a problem, because it bowdlerizes the questions and turns them into something wholly inauthentic. If the designers really wanted to elevate the voices and ideas of marginalized people, they shouldn't have hired non-marginalized people to add an artificial sheen to their ideas. If they wanted to do this project meaningfully, they should have worked with the question-askers to create the art, not just repackaged it in a way that looks as if it's McDonald's scrambling for contemporary relevance.
Also, even the questions are slick and do not sound like the voice of anyone besides ChatGPT, even when I abstract away from the risible "graffiti."
BTW, graffiti can certainly be art (see https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/290/3755), but this "graffiti" does not deserve that name.
Does the fact that it is temporary make a philosophical, or practical difference? Or neither?
Somewhat, but the fact that they think it is permissible at all is what is at issue. There are of course many fairly awful modern art installations in churches that are permanent.
Yes. Because they weren't even committed to producing real graffiti and actually vandalising the building like some revolutionary vanguard of the vulgar. So bourgeois, as Eagleton might say.
Absolutely! Removable graffiti. Sort of doesn't count.
If the graffiti were placed on anything else of beauty would we be similarly bothered? The answer is yes. Graffiti on the David, Eiffel Tower, or even a Bansky would spoil the underlying art. That’s what graffiti does. That it is temporary only softens the blow after the initial shock as in, “You’ve tattooed your face?!” “It’s only a temporary tattoo mom.” We’re not suddenly in admiration of the art when we’ve discovered that it’s temporary. Our reaction is the same: it’s horrible, get rid of it.
We’re not suddenly in admiration of the art when we’ve discovered that it’s temporary. Our reaction is the same: it’s horrible, get rid of it.
We've visited Canterbury Cathedral twice. I'm trying to imagine a visitor (or tourist) paying £18.00 ($24 US) to see one of the most cherished sites in Western Christianity, and then discovering the cathedral "decorated" with graffiti. I can go to virtually any highway underpass, industrial building, or other abandoned structure in north London and see better-quality "voices from the unheard." And it's free. Just a few blocks away are the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, despoiled by Henry VIII, and I'm likely to be more moved and impressed by ruins than by graffiti.
Indeed
Graffiti in a cathedral just seems like you’re intentionally marring the cathedral. It seems to me like a very bad idea. People don’t come to church to stare at graffiti but rather to experience our God in the liturgy and sacramental life of the Church. Stained glass, paintings and sculptures reveal God and provide a focal point for us to contemplate Him. I don’t see how graffiti does that. The sacraments are how we experience ourselves as the Body of Christ, and the recognition of Church as the mystical body and also bride of Christ compels us to discover Christ in the poor and marginalized. It forces us to rectify the systemic structures that lead to poverty and oppression. Perhaps I’m dense but I don’t see how graffiti advances this. Being Church and serving the poor and marginalized seems to me a better course. I don’t think God’s preferential option for the poor means to paint graffiti on church walls, I don’t think the idea that graffiti is the art of those who have no voice compels us to spray paint the cathedral with slogans.
Indeed, but the commissioners of those presumably thought they were great art. Whereas this is merely about diversity I fear
I suspect if we knew more about who created the modern stuff and what it was deemed to represent, there would be a lot more cohesion with my thesis. Even St Pauls has some of that stuff, valued entirely for the value they have created in it.
Chichester Cathedral is worth looking at. And obviously Coventry. Both have amazing work done in the ‘50’s which sort of works with the architecture, which in Chichester’s case is Norman/Early English.
oh yeah, I don’t deny it’s possible at all, even some modern stained glass can be very splendid
I think maybe what the NYTBR editor said isn’t quite as bad as you made it out to be.
“Yeah. I mean, look, I bring up all the time. I still have not read Middlemarch by George Eliot, but I have read, I don't know, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon, right? So which is more valuable? I don't think there's an answer to that. I think it's just where your taste leads you.”
From The Daily: The Year in Books, Dec 31, 2024
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736?i=1000682223304&r=525
I also didn't care much for Middlemarch.
I prefer her more intimate character studies, namely Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner.
In your opinion, how many of the poor spray-can holders do you think are thwarted manuscript illustrators?
Floss is perhaps my fave but middlemarch is clearly the masterpiece
Have you ever asked the question of yourself that you're in fact the philistine? 😎
Have I denied such?
I'm reminded of myself dancing, but, likewise, is it the style or the meaning that's in question?
Ironic that it is the religious conservatives that are now pushing for a return to reading the liberal classics !
who is doing this?
Ever read the ground breaking book by
Elaine Castillo
‘How to Read Now ‘ ?
On ‘The Free Press, which euphemistically costs money . ?
Shilo Brooks
Ballerina Trad Wife Larissa Philips
Niall Ferguson
‘Without Books We Would Be Barbarians ‘
Plenty more on Substack
Ironically they all seem to write only in the 1st person ?
Even though they deny it
Chapman U & other colleges.
There are prep schools popping up with this general thought process of management by classical reading.
Way back David Allen White began teaching
Shakespeare at the Navel Academy.
Yes of course there is a concerted effort by the
Right Wing to use the great literature as a propaganda tool in their plan to take over the education system.
BTW The Greeks and Romans scribbled graffiti also though is it as valuable as Banksy.