RavenxDrake wrote:To contribute something other than sexy pictures...
Vedius Pollio: I'm curious who's work your deriving your definition of philistine from, because it deffinitely does not match mine.
To my mind, Philistines are neither the smuggly pedantic champions of a given niche, nor are they the "Haute Posseur" who adopt and discard artistic styles like shoes, picking the ones that match this season's fashions.
A philistine is one who is not only lacking in cultural and artistic depth and aestitics, but is either sanctimoniously indiffernt or openly hostile to such things. The philistine is the indiffernt mother who considers reading a waste of time when you could be out working, the middle-class factory worker who ignores the museum on his day off to go watch a ballgame because looking at painting of naked broads never did anything useful... One who not only does not understand the nature of cultural aspects, but wilfully disdains them, regarding them with bemused confusion or outright contempt. Such is my understanding of the word, at least, unless it's evolved considerably in meaning...
As for Shakespeare... he's a hack. Good writer from a technical standpoint, but an absolute hack. His rhythm and meter are impressive, don't get me wrong, but his works are purely derivative muck who's salicious nature drew throngs of common mud-farmers and eel fishers to the theatres. Much as we'll be juged by the writings of King and Clancy because there so prolific they'll have to survive, so do we judge him so great because we don't have that much to compare him too. His popularity with the common drudge spread his plays over a large swath of the world, even during his lifetime, insulating him against anonymity...
My conception of philistine DOES match yours, just in a broader sense. (I'm thinking of the philistine in the Petronian-Flaubertian-Nabokovian sense. In Nabokov's works, most of his Soviet characters, plus Mrs. Haze, all qualify as philistines. In Flaubert, we have Homais. In Petronius's Satyricon, possibly the world's first novel, we have a very tasteless character called Trimalchio.)
Your criteria are:
1. Aesthetic shallowness.
2. Hostility to art.
Now, hostility to art can take many forms. The most obvious of these is ignoring art alltogether. However, a person who doesn't care about art isn't neccessarily a philistine. Alexander Pope said: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing/ Drink deep or else not taste the Pierian Spring."
In other words, a person with no interest in art at all is actually BETTER than a person with a little bit of interest in art. This is like saying that a person who knows nothing about the stock market is better than a person who learns a little bit about share trading and loses all of his money through bad investments. To illustrate this idea further, we have journalists. Journalists are rarely artistic, even if they write book reviews for a living. But they cannot be entirely dismissive of art and literature, because their social position requires them to follow artistic fashions. So, they are quasi-artistic, and have no competence at all when it comes to reviewing. If you live in Australia, you can find good examples of stupid art journalism in the Weekend Australian Review, the Australian Book Review and The Age's A2.
(I'm not saying that all journalists are bad, but most of them are pretty vulgar.)
Now, as I said, telling people to stop wasting their time with books is a very crude form of artistic hostility. It's like the difference between hard-sell and soft-sell. There are worse types of hostility:
1. Demanding that artists be "practical". (In other words, reducing art to a form of self-help, or a form of community empowerment.) In other words, instead of saying that art isn't practical, this soft-sell technique says that GOOD art is practical/vulgar and BAD art is elitist/experimental. There are some sections of Australia's arts industry where The Vagina Monologues is given more respect than Marcel Proust and T.S. Eliot combined. (This is because Proust and Eliot were "elitists", an "elitist" being anyone that a journalist or a social worker finds too dense.)
2. Jingo-pacifism. This is similar to (1). It demands that every work of art should be a protest piece. (For instance, a Jingo-pacifist would only tolerate Dtiberius because he "undermines gender relations". A Jingo-pacifist cannot fathom the concept of
DICKGIRL GRATIA DICKGIRLIS.)
Jingo-pacifists are the ones asking artists to respond to wars, by co-signing declarations and writing protest poetry. (I say "jingo-pacifism" because pacifism and jingoism are really the same ideology: senseless warmongering or senseless peacemongering. There is really no difference between an anti-war poem and "Charge of the Light Brigade". They're both 1D.)
3. Sensationalism. A sensationalist doesn't have to demand practicality, though a person can be both a sensationalist and a jingo-pacifist. It is basically a form of artistic ADHD: sex, bright colours, strobe lights, and jingles are elevated over everything else.
The problem isn't that these things are bad (though they do open the doors to a lot of crudeness). The problem is that after a society rates art by the amount of crude content, and not the style, the artist is left with NO INCENTIVE to produce anything substantial. This is what killed Roman theatre.
(Anyway, a man going to a ball game instead of a museum is crude. But so is a professor who prefers "trangressive" GLBT cabaret to good old Ibsen.)
So, philistinism isn't just about attacking art altogether because bad art is just as awful as no art, and possibly worse.
(would you still consider Shakespeare vulgar after reading Julius Caesar? What about after reading Henry VI Part II? Both of those plays present a pretty unflattering, and even slightly Machiavellian, image of common people, and would have appealed to nobles.)
"Leopards invade the temple and drink the wine from the chalices; this happens suddenly; in the end it was forseen that this would happen and it is incorporated into the liturgy."
-Kafka-
