A panoramic view

Panoramic photography was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the rise of movies. Photographers would take multiple still photos from different perspectives on a scene, then assemble the photos next to each other to recover the full scene. A panorama could project a scene wider than a person could see at one glance by the naked eye.

The Library of Congress' American Memory collection includes almost 4,000 panoramic photos, from 1851 to 1991. Most date from the heyday of panoramic photography in the early 20th century. The panorama on the upper left is of Boston around 1894, looking west from the Old North Church. The State House sits almost at dead center.

If you browse by category, you'll find all sorts of fascinating subjects: African-Americans (including early civil rights meetings), airplanes, the Anti-Saloon League .... My favorites are "bathing beauties" and "beauty contests." Curiously, they all date from the 1920s -- the first decade in which such things were not a complete scandal, I suppose.

Is modern art that bad?

Are the Philistines on the march over at the Guardian? Joe Queenan just published there a splenetic outburst against modern art. He doesn't seem to like much after about 1900. Terry Teachout does his own examination of Queenan's hostility at the Wall Street Journal. Complaints about modern art -- I don't mean just negative reactions to anything new, but sustained, visceral dislike for the modern -- are as old as modern art itself.

There is a problem with artistic modernism, especially music. But the problem is more recent than Queenan thinks and dates from the 1950s, not the 1900s. It is true that the "break" that defines modernism happened some time in the decade or so before 1914, and much of modern art's problem with the general public dates from those years. But the literature and visual art of that period have long since been been assimilated by both critics and the general public, and the same is true of most of its music. The later art of the 20th century has just been a working out of that moment: the breakdown of inherited realist, classical, and romantic esthetics.

Since 1945, the fates of the arts have diverged. Literature has proven the most conservative, largely abandoning the modernistic experiments of, say, Proust, Joyce, and Nabakov. There is widespread admiration for their achievements, but few serious imitators. Literature's close relation to time-bound narrative, reinforced by the ubiquity of movies and television, made that fate difficult to avoid. The visual arts suffered a different fate: widespread appreciation of and big money for signature breakthrough works. Still, there were fewer and fewer serious imitators and practitioners in the last century's concluding decades.

Something entirely different happened to music. While undergoing wrenching changes from the end of the nineteenth century -- the rise of commercialized popular music, the influence of non-Western musical cultures, the exhaustion of the classical-romantic paradigm -- Western "art" music was still vigorous down to the Second World War. The distinction between "popular" and "high" music had not yet become a chasm. Contrary to Queenan and other critics,* the twentieth-century repertory is second only to the nineteenth century's in being studied, played, and listened to.**

The true failure of modern art happened after 1945. The sheer destructiveness of the Second World War had multiple, devastating impacts on European centers of art, reinforcing the existing disruptions of war, revolution, and exile. Classical music, especially the core Romantic and Austro-German traditions, has taken its time recovering from the way it was misused by the collectivist movements and totalitarian states of the first half of the twentieth century. The straddling of popular and classical musical cultures, by the 1950s, seemed fatally compromised by either accusations of "selling out" or knuckling under to the agit-prop demands of "socialist realism." On the other hand, the unprecedented explosion of techniques and resources for popular music, starting in the late 50s, pulled audiences elsewhere. Then television miniaturized everyone's mind.

And something else went wrong in the decades after 1945: the academicization of once-radical artistic tendencies, especially Expressionism, a movement that started in Germanic countries as a reaction to the popular cheapening of Romanticism. Expressionism was a brief but potent episode of "hyper-romanticism," in the sense of validating the artist's expression of (usually negative) inner feelings, regardless of external form or audience comprehension. It's impossible to systematize such a tendency. The originating works of this movement have still not lost, and probably will never lose, their power to shock. Yet, starting in the 1920s with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, attempts have been made to reduce it to formula. Formulas enabled lesser talents to create lifeless imitations of something that can't be mimicked. Appreciation and artistic creation became mired in a familiar Germanic-academic tendency to load esthetic values down with a lot of heavy theorizing.† After 1945, the spread of higher education put this questionable and half-digested theorizing on everyone's dinner table, as it were.††

Esthetics begins and ends with the senses, not Theory.‡ The origins of modern Western art lie in the happy symbiosis of the inward feeling of the northern peoples (Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others) with classical notions of proportion, form, and timing preserved by the Italians and French. Modernism began to sprout in the late nineteenth century when that symbiosis broke down, and the Germanic and the non-Germanic went their separate ways.
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* Like Henry Pleasants, whose Agony of Modern Music (1955) is entertaining, right in many details, and wrong in the big picture.

** I use "nineteenth century" loosely, running from late classical (late Haydn, mature Mozart and Beethoven) through late romantic, bordering on modern (Mahler and Strauss). The "high" modern period ran from the 1890s until the 1950s, from Debussy through, say, Bartók and Bernstein.

† A complaint made earlier and more effectively by Tom Wolfe in his Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. The Germans themselves have a nifty term, Augenmusik -- "music for the eyes" and not for the ears.

†† Perceptive readers will sense the tortured ghost of Allan Bloom and his prolix, controversial Closing of the American Mind haunting this posting. The trouble with Bloom's book is that he took twice as many words as needed to make his (largely valid) point.

‡ "... this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors ..." (Schoenberg himself).

Galison on science and objectivity

Virginia Postrel, of Dynamist Blog and former editor of Reason, comments on an interesting new book, Objectivity, by Harvard philosopher of science Peter Galison and co-author Lorraine Daston of Berlin's Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The book explains the different connotations of objectivity by examining its history in science and philosophy.

Our modern notion of objectivity presupposes the modern division of subject and object, which itself is the latest transformation of the older body-soul dualism. Post-medieval science has seen three different meanings to the term "objectivity":

• "Truth-to-nature" (representing an underlying type or species of, say, a plant)
• "Mechanical objectivity" (all-seeing, all-knowing)
  
• "Trained judgment" (finding patterns and "family resemblances" in samples)

The oldest form, from the time of Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century and the century following, mainly encompassed the first type, with a little of the third. Our concept of objectivity today is distorted by the intervening mid- to late-nineteenth century form, which was mainly the second. Being "mechanical" meant "no wandering attention," "no falling asleep," "ever-attentive," etc., the machine equivalent of a god. The trouble is that this conception of objectivity is not human. It sets up a false ideal, the starting point for something called "scientism," which inverts the relationship between rational-thought-in-general and scientific method. The best-known type of scientism is positivism - the "just-the-facts" school of philosophy. This mistake is one of the causes of our present division of the Two Cultures and the collapse of the humanities since the 1960s. It gave rise to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, in turn the basis of the reactionary and utopian movements of modern times.

The hopeless naiveté of this approach was known before the rise of the false nineteenth century ideal. The trouble started with Descartes' mind-machine dualism, his universal skepticism, and Kant's attempted solution. Kant postulated "real objectivity" as the "thing-in-itself" free of space, time, mind, and the conditioning of the senses - by definition unattainable and meaningless. A generation later, Hegel had a better solution, because he grasped the key condition implicit in the Enlightenment ideal of "disinterestedness": objectivity is a relationship between subject and object and not about one or the other separately.* Unfortunately, both Hegel and Kant were poor stylistic examples and often very hard to understand. A major opportunity was missed to catch the division of art, philosophy, and science before it became what it is now, apparently irreparable.

In the last century, a more social conception on objectivity, "trained judgment," has replaced the nineteenth century's ascetic and sacrificial conception. While it's fine as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough. Taking it seriously leads back to number one. Students today typically never get to it, except by accident. But it's wrong to view objectivity as a given finished product. The point made by Hegel and the early Pragmatist philosophers (like Charles Peirce) is that objectivity is the endpoint of a process, even a struggle. Considered in its fuller sense, objectivity is a process. And it's not about you or it; it's about you and it.

POSTSCRIPT: And Virginia Postrel is back! She is struggling with breast cancer - head over to her Web site and wish her well!

And consider her comments on journalistic objectivity: think of a better formulation of "objectivity" than the "mechanical C-SPAN camera" metaphor.
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* This process is Hegel's famous "dialectic," but not the cookie cutter presented to generations of students or its misappropriation and misuse later promoted by Marxism.

A look back at Hopper

A short tribute to American artist Edward Hopper appeared in this space a couple months ago, following the opening of the retrospective exhibit of his work at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The retrospective is now on the road, showing currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, then moving to Chicago's Art Institute in January. Art and culture critic Martha Bayles of Boston College has written her own tribute to Hopper as a review of the exhibit.

The theme in her tribute is "painter of light," and that Hopper certainly is. Bayles' perceptive realization is that Hopper was a painter of light - the real thing and very difficult to capture on the canvas - and of not lighting. No one who has seen his paintings in the original can disagree. The origin of Hopper's early mastery of light is his native New England summers and autumns. This light is brilliant for a few months, but becomes unique in its mixture of shallow angle and distinctive landscape in fall and early winter.

The most common perception of Hopper's paintings is their strikingly absence of people in some cases, and their apparent alienation and lack of connectedness in others. All of them seem to be listening to something, but not to each other or to us. They also communicate a very American sense of transience and alienation. A sense of openness and possibility, but with people never seeming to quite fit in, is American as apple pie, although Americans often have a hard time recognizing it - Europeans and others usually sense it more quickly. It's a similar quality that Dvořák captured in the slow movement of his Ninth Symphony (From the New World). Amid the famous spiritual and Indian chant melodies, the movement unwinds into a musical "night on the plains," with its bright stars, distant lights and trains - and no one for miles.

If you're in Washington or Chicago during the Hopper retrospective, don't miss it.

Edward Hopper: An appreciation

For readers lucky enough to live in Boston, you had the opportunity to view the Museum of Fine Arts' exhibit of works by Edward Hopper that is about to close. Hopefully, other cities will get something like it soon.

Hopper is an American icon, and his pictures are well-known - in a few cases, like Nighthawks, almost clichés. He's usually classified as a realist, painting at a time when the dominant artistic trends were moving towards abstraction and expressionism. But his paintings, which have few people in them, have a strong abstract flavor to them, being dominated by Hopper's highly individual and instantly recognizable language of shape, light, and color. His human subjects are well-known for their seeming lack of connection with one another, as if each cannot get out of his or her private world of thought. Hopper was also influenced by, and influenced in turn, the language of cinema. The moments captured in his paintings leave a strong impression of being times in the middle - as if something important has already happened and something else is about to happen, but the quiet moment in between is what we see.

One example of Hopper's influence is the way he changed how people look at the ordinary. His mature works painted in the 1920s and 30s on the New England coast were the stimulus for later appreciation of Victorian mansions and lighthouses, for example - now we have all those calendars of rugged New England locales thanks to Hopper. But that's what great artists do: change how we see things.