On the way to Nebraska City an objective standard of beauty was at last determined

The Christian Poptimist, part 2

Sommelier: “May I suggest this selection of music, which, I assure you, will go very well as a sonic accompaniment to the essay you are about to read?”

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I’m sitting around in my backyard, having just finished reading Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania: Pop Culture’s addiction to its own past. The chapter discussing the Japanese obsession with pop cultural esoterica starts with this great quote: “There was a time, in the early nineties, after CD-reissue programs had gotten under way but before reissuing went into absolute overdrive, when a lot of records by major artists and cult icons remained out of print. Things you take for granted as easily accessible were unavailable everywhere in the world. Except for Japan.” Japan’s fascination with American pop culture has been returned in kind: American pop culture is, to a great extent, influenced and shaped by Japanese culture in a sort of feedback loop. Strange, then, that I myself missed the japonisme that my generation seems to have embraced: I didn’t collect Pokémon cards or play Nintendo games or watch anime at all. In fact, the only anime I’ve watched all the way through is the English dub of Trigun, that chronicle of the doings of Vash the Stampede; and I did that only a year or so ago, with my middle-school-aged kids. The soundtrack albums Trigun: the First Donuts and The Second Donuts quickly became popular at my house. They struck me as rather disorienting at first: why does this anime have rock music in the soundtrack? But right on top of that puzzlement came these related observations: what would a fully authentic and genuine Japanese music—the opposite of what Reynolds rails against in Retromania—even sound like? And: something’s off about this rock, it doesn’t seem to come from the same place as the rock I know and love, something’s different. Indeed, there is a sort of plastic sheen to this music, a too-perfect aura around it, similar to the productions of university jazz programs or the high-culture, black-tie renditions of medieval tavern songs they play on the local classical station on Sunday mornings. What I think I’m detecting is the whiff of pseudo-authenticity which Reynolds describes in Retromania: this is music made, not so much as part of a living native tradition, but as part of a curatorial tradition—the outpourings of a museum culture. Reynolds doesn’t have much positivity for pop nostalgia; his book is an extended bewailing of the forces of museum-ification which rock and pop, to him, ought to have been reacting against. But I’m not of his opinion: in my entire life I’ve never felt the need for the culture of today to be in reaction against the culture of yesterday. The past is full of wonderful, beautiful things people have made; museum culture and pop nostalgia are simply ways of managing the enormous amount of beauty that has been created in the world. But what is beautiful and what is ugly? That’s the eternal question, isn’t it! Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Furs is ugly. But so is Sallman’s Christ in Gethsemane. Bacon’s Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion is at once ugly and beautiful. But so is Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus is beautiful. But so is Picasso’s Guerenica. What is beautiful? What is ugly? First Reformed is a beautiful film. But so is Taxi Driver—and Taxi Driver is also ugly, but so is First Reformed. What is beautiful? What isn’t? Now the scene switches and I’m hurtling down Highway 75, headed to Nebraska City from Omaha. My daughter wants to play the soundtrack to Trigun. Can we listen to The First Donuts? she says, and also The Second Donuts? One at a time, my wife says; my daughter clarifies: I don’t mean simultaneously, I mean sequentially. Then I note that a person might be able to run two Spotify applications at the same time. It’s possible to open YouTube in as many windows as you want at once. Daughter: My tablet won’t let me do that, I tried. Me: When I was just a little older than you—eighteen, nineteen—I had two CD players, a turntable, a reel-to-reel tape machine, a radio receiver, and a synthesizer all hooked up to the same mixing board, and I would play them all and record the result. Daughter: Huh. Me: I made a cassette-only album called Megalizer using all of those sound sources together along with some drum machines and screaming. Daughter: That might have been music, but I doubt anyone would call it good music. That’s when the conversation got very interesting. I can’t recall the exact back-and-forth but it went something like this: Is a forty-five-minute-long slab of simultaneous nonsense really “music”? Of course it is. Music is just organized sound, and who is to say what counts as organized and what doesn’t? It is much easier to say something is organized than that it isn’t—how can one make the definite statement that “this has no organizing principle whatsoever”? You’d have to be God, you’d have to be omniscient to say that . . . and I’m not ready to say that my definition of what counts as “organized” is the exhaustive one. Besides, there are levels of organizational awareness, gradients of organizational apprehension . . . Bach’s music is profoundly organized, but the organizing principles often require serious study to understand or even notice. No one would say, though, that the organizational aspects of his music don’t exist until they are noticed. If I try to follow along during a Bach fugue and lose my way I can’t say “this music is chaotic, it’s just a wild scramble of things happening at the same time” without betraying my deep ignorance. The same could be said of other kinds of organization. If beauty means orderly, then there are quite a lot of different kinds of beauty in the world. But maybe being orderly isn’t enough to qualify something as beautiful? Some people say that beauty has something to do with meaning. A meaningless piece of art—a slab of random noise—doesn’t have “meaning” in the same way that Bach’s church music does. I would tend to agree with that, depending on what is meant by “in the same way,” but there’s that trap again: does the art have no beauty if the meaning isn’t understood? And what of different kinds of meaning? The uses to which art is put are incredibly varied. One piece of art “means” one thing to one person, and another thing to someone else. One work has no meaning or significance to some art lovers, and an abundance of meaning and significance to others. For myself, reading Simon Reynolds’ Retromania clued me into a good deal of meaning found in some of the turn-of-the-millennium electronic music coming out of Britain that I had previously dismissed, music by bands like Boards of Canada; previously I had thought of it as just generic beat-based ambient stuff but now, thanks to Reynolds, I hear so much nostalgia in their sounds and I can understand some of the meaning that they put into their music. The meaning was there the whole time; I just hadn’t noticed it. There are many, many artworks of which I’m not sure of the meaning but I’m not ready to say that, for instance, Mark Rothko’s pictures aren’t beautiful simply because I don’t understand them. “Beauty” must, therefore, exist somewhere between organization and meaning, somewhere adjacent to form and substance. An exquisitely-crafted but soulless artwork—is it beautiful? A heartfelt, messy scream into the void—is it beautiful? Who am I to say? At most I can say that it behooves the potential naysayer to find out why the artist made a particular work—what they were trying to do with it—and if anyone else has found anything of value in it. I agree there are horrendous, disgusting, atrocious artworks out there; there are also bland, boring, tedious artworks. But if I find one work boring and ugly and someone else finds it interesting and beautiful—who am I to say that they are wrong? It’s not that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it’s that beauty is so big that no one beholder can see the entirety of it. The book of Proverbs says that “it is the glory of God to conceal a matter; the glory of kings to discover it.” Far from being a thing we can easily understand and interpolate, the much-sought “objective standard of beauty” is something that was hidden at the creation, just waiting to be found; but it is much, much more complicated than we have yet understood. This is my creed so far: I believe there is an objective standard of beauty; that it is in the mind of God; and that when we make art which works, which communicates something of value, which is pleasant in some way to someone, somewhere—we have revealed a little more of the shape of that objective standard of beauty, which is vast and ecumenical beyond our imagining.

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