Europe doesn’t export its best wine to America. They keep it for themselves. There are a lot of things you can’t experience unless you have the resources to access them. And if you are lucky enough to experience those things, and you value those things, you often get accused of snobbery. There really are finer things in life, from exquisitely constructed music to exquisitely prepared food.
If you don’t like those things, that’s fine. But it doesn’t mean that excellence doesn’t exist. If Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Coltrane are boring to you that doesn’t mean that I am an asshole for thinking they are awesome.
it’s not snobbery to me until you get the folks that are all “well the 3 acme zippy amps at the 1972 someniteclub performance lacked a little bit of the texture that he had at the coliseum with the house band in 1958, except that tommy the trombone man had a cold the day before and was a little bit off”
that’s the kind of crap i can’t stand – with music, movies, whatever.
but yah – rock on with coltrane. 🙂
The best wine doesn’t get out of California either. It all depends on whose ox is being gored. Let’s go for instructive snobbery, I’m tired of the dumbed-down mentality.
Seriously? oh, why? SELFISHNESS! http://linkapp.me/IGy0x
The asshole-ishness is in the delivery. If I’m talking about movies with someone and they tell me their favorite is one that I hate, I don’t sniff and point out that it’s a terrible piece of crap with gratuitous nudity, fart jokes, and mysogeny. They’re stating their opinion and I can then respond with something like, “Well, that’s not my thing, but I understand a lot of people like it. I prefer this movie because blah blah blah.”
You can appreciate quality and sophistication in food, entertainment, art, etc and you can share your knowledge and enlighten people, too. But you don’t have to be a dick about it.
Excellence does not depend on style. Nor is it exclusively beautiful or aesthetic in itself. For the argument on style, one need only not Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, or some once famous performers now available (if you are lucky) only on Internet Archive. For the argument on beauty, I submit Picasso’s Guernica.
Arguments and accusations of snobbery in the context of politics have nothing at all to do with the philosophy of aesthetics. And everything to do with with what constitutes the cultural canon.
“Boredom” is a decisional category. It is a prejudgement of a work or an artist or a writer. Minimalism was an exploration of that fact, among its other aims.
There are two ways to come at “excellence”–the ideas and execution (and difficulty) in the work; and the lasting impact of the work. Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s music, Coltrane’s inventiveness combine both. There are always new ideas or details to notice or new connections with current life to make; the conversation with the work and thus the artist have the sense of life and continuing tradition.
The “snobbery” slur is the province of the putative representatives of “real Americans” or “folks who have to work for a living”. And it come with the same threat and anxiety not a few folks have sitting in school and being forced to think new thoughts that might be ruin their popularity with their friends.
What working folks did when they had the chance in the 19th century was to create schools and centers where they could learn to read and write, learn all of those bookish things that their betters were ever holding over them. And the Socialist and Progressive movements of the turn of the 20th century carried that forward. My tenant farmer grandfather was an advocate of education and served on the school board of a rural high school that got its building built in 1938 with WPA assistance. His attitude was close to the majority opinion in the rural South at that time; education and excellence were good things.
A good pork barbecue or Brunswick stew is as excellent in craft and presentation as a good nouvelle cuisine plate.
A lot of the folks condemning “snobbery” measure excellence by price instead of quality. You need only watch what they do. It is a projective defense of their own sense of exclusivity–of wanting to deny everyone else the good things they want for themselves.
Some things are authentically boring. Reading a Shakespeare play is boring to most teenagers. So it listening to Beethoven or Coltrane. Most teenagers can’t distinguish between a good wine and a great wine. For most people, these are refined tastes. You may never like them. You may like them after you learn a few things first. The key to them all is that they involve mastery and craftsmanship. And that makes them remote to the uninitiated. At a minimum, you have to be able to recognize the skill involved in their planning and construction. It’s easier to understand the brilliance of a cathedral than one of Beethoven’s sonatas. It’s easier to understand the brilliance of Faulkner or Fitzgerald than it is to understand the brilliance of someone writing in 16th-Century English.
My kids as teenagers learned that boredom is decision not to engage with something or someone for extrinsic reasons. Most teenagers adopt an air of disdain for anything that their parents or other authority figures suggest is “good for them”.
Works like Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven’s music require active engagement and consideration. And they are better performed than read.
I had the advantage of growing up in a media culture that was not anti-intellectual. I saw Richard III (a TV broadcast of the Lawrence Olivier film) sometime between the 6th grade and high school. I was buying paperback copies of King Lear (with facing definitions of Elizabethan terms) for 35 cents at the first book store to open in my small town. In junior high, there were a small bunch of us who started reading Shakepeare plays recreationally. My parents knew Shakespeare reputationally and by a few quotations.
When I was in the eighth grade, there was a televised version of The Mikado starring Groucho Marx as the high executioner. I saw “Flowers for Algernon” as a CBS television play. And several Paddy Chayeksky dramas as well. Also Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body”. The media today are full of bubbleheads who insert put-downs of math, science, literature, and intellect. Then, it was a different media entirely.
An appreciation of Beethoven was acquired through band; he was the most bombastic of the classical composers we played for concerts. From the 1812 Overture and the Fifth Symphony, which World War II propaganda associated with “Victory” through the correspondence of the opening four notes and and Morse code pattern for the letter “V”, I gradually discovered more an more of his work on my own. But it was the bombast and martial style that first caught my attention.
But then, I wasn’t “most teenagers”.
Boredom is a state of mind. You get there yourself and you get out of there by yourself.
I wasn’t bored by Shakespeare as a teen, but maybe that’s because my high school teachers didn’t make it seem like a chore. We learned that it was language meant to be spoken aloud and not read silently to oneself; we learned it was language dependent on acting and gestures and other real-life context. Various films made that explicit.
As for jazz, as a teen I was turned off by what was presented to me as the intellectual exclusivity of jazz, the idea that you had to be initiated, educated, and indoctrinated into what was “good” and “bad,” which was all bullshit once I actually heard the music and could decide for myself. I got scoffed at because my introduction to “jazz,” as a kid, was Sting’s backing band from his first solo album (which of course wasn’t “jazz”). I wanted to know more about the Marsalis brothers and Omar Hakim and Kenny Kirkland, so I went to find their stuff, promptly had my mind blown, and went to find out more about the musicians who influenced them. Short hop-skip to Miles and the other titans. And yet rock and classic R&B is what still turns my head, not jazz; I have no idea if that makes me more lowbrow or not, but I could really give a shit.
The idea that there’s a line between low art and high art is one of the biggest lies ever.
People like what they like.
But there is a difference between a lean-to patched together with two-by-fours and nails, and a Gothic Cathedral, and there’s a difference between what I can do with Iambic Pentameter and what Shakespeare could do with it. There is an art to cultivating vineyards that can produce the best wine.
Some things can only be fully appreciated when you understand what went into making them.
This matters sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. Do you know how hard it is to make Yorkshire Pudding? Doesn’t matter. How’s it taste?
I thought empirical testing proved no one can actually distinguish between wines very well.
This is true. I’m an artist and I am currently expressing my creativity with wool hooked art rugs. Most people have never seen anything like it, and it’s considered a handcraft rather than fine art. But I take it up a notch.
I agree that there are people who don’t appreciate the amount of time, skill, talent, and background that all go into creating fine things. People are shocked by the prices I put on my work, but the time, energy, materials, and all of the other things that go into the rugs has to be compensated for.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d27/Rughooker/dc9314f6.jpg