My high school college prep English theme paper was about Adolph Appia, celebrated Wagnerian set designer. I was sitting in the Sunset High School, just down the boulevard from the Texas Theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was being captured. I had my first date there to see The Alamo with John Wayne. Then, all of a sudden, the Beatles came on the radio of my Chevrolet. And Wagner was an anti-Semite ad absurdum. And I know Jews who enthusiastically attend the Bayreuth Festival. Heavens! The point being that, initially it's all a blur. It was decades before I had any understanding of Appia or of Wagner's idea of "total theater," or any of the rest of it. Wasn't the same true for Tolstoy? Wasn't it all a blur? Was he prepared to receive a lot of things around him at the time of that writing, which seems like the writing of a younger person? It makes me wonder where he ended up. I've not ever been able to pursue. I've only been able to (unintentionally, mostly) get prepared to receive, if I'm incredibly lucky. Wasn't that true of someone like Tolstoy? Wouldn't he have had to get up every day and endlessly sift through the blur to make the sense he made, like the rest of us who bother to?
We are all trying to make sense of the blur - that's a lovely and poignant way of putting it. My sympathy for Tolstoy on that account ends when he tries to turn his loathing of Wagner, Puvis, and Baudelaire into a theory. At which he succeeded, but it's not a very good theory.
In defense of Tolstoy's taste, whatever one may think of it, that taste was his, it belonged to him, as opposed to being borrowed or adopted or worn like some fashionable costume. Art is a personal interaction between the viewer and the work, and the viewer has no obligation to anyone else's taste, only to be true to his own. As long as it is indeed his own, his taste is his business.
Yes, that's true, but nobody has to buy or read the book. My point is that I prefer someone who's true to his own personal taste, whatever it may be, to someone who simply adopts the prevailing or supposedly advanced taste of his time as "correct."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/04/09/carl-jung-creativity/
My high school college prep English theme paper was about Adolph Appia, celebrated Wagnerian set designer. I was sitting in the Sunset High School, just down the boulevard from the Texas Theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was being captured. I had my first date there to see The Alamo with John Wayne. Then, all of a sudden, the Beatles came on the radio of my Chevrolet. And Wagner was an anti-Semite ad absurdum. And I know Jews who enthusiastically attend the Bayreuth Festival. Heavens! The point being that, initially it's all a blur. It was decades before I had any understanding of Appia or of Wagner's idea of "total theater," or any of the rest of it. Wasn't the same true for Tolstoy? Wasn't it all a blur? Was he prepared to receive a lot of things around him at the time of that writing, which seems like the writing of a younger person? It makes me wonder where he ended up. I've not ever been able to pursue. I've only been able to (unintentionally, mostly) get prepared to receive, if I'm incredibly lucky. Wasn't that true of someone like Tolstoy? Wouldn't he have had to get up every day and endlessly sift through the blur to make the sense he made, like the rest of us who bother to?
We are all trying to make sense of the blur - that's a lovely and poignant way of putting it. My sympathy for Tolstoy on that account ends when he tries to turn his loathing of Wagner, Puvis, and Baudelaire into a theory. At which he succeeded, but it's not a very good theory.
"Perverted & at the same time self-confident" would make a pretty cool art critic profile bio...
busted
In defense of Tolstoy's taste, whatever one may think of it, that taste was his, it belonged to him, as opposed to being borrowed or adopted or worn like some fashionable costume. Art is a personal interaction between the viewer and the work, and the viewer has no obligation to anyone else's taste, only to be true to his own. As long as it is indeed his own, his taste is his business.
Until he writes a book about it!
Yes, that's true, but nobody has to buy or read the book. My point is that I prefer someone who's true to his own personal taste, whatever it may be, to someone who simply adopts the prevailing or supposedly advanced taste of his time as "correct."