Art, Music and the Wagnerian Dilemma

www.EllisWashingtonReport.com ^ | 11/27/10 | Ellis Washington

[EllisWashingtonReport]

Symposium: Art, music and the Wagnerian dilemma

Characters

Socrates

Richard Wagner, German Romantic composer

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker

Wimsatt & Beardsley, The New Criticism School

Ezra Pound, American expatriate poet

Publius, Pupil of Socrates and conflicted lover of Wagner's music

Socrates: We are gathered here today at my Symposium to discuss the venerated discipline of aesthetics and to seek to answer this question of the ages – Can immoral art be good? Or more pointedly, can an immoral person create good art?

Wimsatt & Beardsley: Yes, Socrates, philosophers call this paradox the intentional fallacy, which developed in the New Criticism School of the 1930s and was first used by us in a 1946 essay. A long-running debate in philosophy has centered around the question of whether art that is morally bad can itself be good (as art).

New Critics believe that an interpretation of a work should focus purely on its objective qualities; we should strictly disregard all external or extrinsic factors (biographical, historical, etc.) concerning the author of the work.

Leni Riefenstahl: The question of the intentional fallacy has tended to focus on controversial figures like Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Andreas Serrano ("Pi-- Christ" [1989]) or artists such as myself, for I was the German filmmaker for the Third Reich, the Nazi Party and for supreme chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, whom I immortalized in such documentaries as "Triumph of the Will," which chronicled the Nuremberg rallies, and "Olympia," a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I am profoundly ashamed of these movies now in light of Nazi atrocities and the human-rights genocide of the Holocaust, for my so-called art was exploited as Nazi propaganda. Nevertheless, many critics to this day consider my movies to be technically and artistically brilliant.

[nerdwithagun]

Oh, good article. I think yes, immoral artwork and artwork made by immoral people can be good, but there should be some consideration of how said artwork is displayed on case by case basis.

[Senator John Blutarski]

I think that the answer to this question was answered sufficiently well by the decision of the Israeli national symphony to perform works by Wagner, who had been a notorious and virulent anti-semite.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Wagner’s Music isn’t as bad as it sounds. -Edgar Wilson Nye, often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain.