Things I Don't Understand About the Oscars, part deux

More things I don't understand about the Oscars:

The last list is better understood if applied to Washington/Wall Street. 

There are red carpet dresses and addresses for sure.

There are, regrettably, even more numerous Bill Mahers and Sean Penns: more, certainly, in powerhouses than in HollyBollyJollywood, if that could be imagined.

There are a host of rich people who want, really want, to be cool oppressed people. They like the cachet and groove of self-conscious self-marginalization. They don't want to be poor or discommoded for real, mind you. Of course the gay crowd and the uber-feminists are these, obviously. But so are many Republicans, whose rhetoric has descended from the lecterns of Burke and Reagan to the grim couch of Beavis and Butthead.

There are piles of ironic solipsism spotting the field of commercial-politik (please note I have conflated these two worlds: they have been glued into the same Tower -- especially in these last few months of frenzy and bail-outs). Politics, philosophy, sociology and culture only follow spiritual realities. But on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and the used-to-be-big-three, there is no other world that the DC/Wall-Street infinite mirror.

There is, of course, the importance of sex, exotic sex, transgressive sex, transgendered sex, forget-gender sex, and especially, stick-it-to-the-church sex. Sex is sacrament, especially sex that is oppressed. Salvation, in today's AC market culture, is the liberation of the repressed.

There is the importance of music and (f)art as liturgical act in time of economic trouble. Transgressive art is especially redolent of religious intention. Look at the usual abstract, expressionistic and transgressive grim freneticism ... open your eyes and read into it augury and haruspication, the reading of tea leaves and Aztec heart surgery. You'll find the best of AC liturgy and mystique right there, in spades.

There is, at the end, a lot of modern importance. And that is all the trouble.

Comments

[jcw]

Father, bless. I was especially intrigued by your statement: "There is the importance of music and (f)art as liturgical act in time of economic trouble." Why do you think music and art seem to rise in importance, as a liturgical (which, I believe, has a public connotation, from "leitourgia," about it) and public act, in time of economic trouble? My very limited experience as a songwriter has shown me that when the times are tough, people do not have the extra money to spend on the leisure of art and music. It is a difficult pill to swallow, that the creative work one does as a musician and a pursuer of its fine arts is unnecessary and useless, but I wonder if the fault is found both within the speaker and the society to which the song is sung. Does the fact that there is little place, time, wage, or heart given to these fine arts not illustrate some of our heaviness of heart?

[Fr. Jonathan]

Joshua, AC is "Antichrist." I hate to spell that out, as it sounds so chiliastic and "Left Behindish."

That is a poignant note, your idea that abstract art stops at the Cross in its splintered state. One wonders what happened in the arts in La Belle Epoch, when cubism and fauvism rose up? Was it just an absinthe hangover, from too much louching? Or, in my darker suspicions, was it radiation poisoning from having drawn too near the occult? I mean, look at Ravochol, Rimbaud, Baudelaire (to some extent) and Verlaine (before his Catholicism) and the Pole, Apollinaire (to every extent), and Cocteau, not to mention Braque, Mondrian, de Kooning, Duchamps, Kandinsky.

Strange things crept out of Pandora's little box in those years, and it is interesting that soon thereafter a rather large war broke out over really nothing at all -- or nothing understandable, at least.

The second WW was simply an extension of the first, with l'entre deus guerre of twenty depressing years.

I don't know if abstraction halts at the Cross. I think it is the condition of human nature that decays when strayed too far away from the Cross, and too close to AC.

[JCW]

Father, bless. "AC" = anti-Christian? The problem, I think, with abstract art is that it shows the world in its splintered state, but does not show a world whole and together. If read, perhaps, in the light of the Gospel, abstract art halts at the Cross, unable to move forward to the empty Tomb.