Disaster, Art, Life
Although few like to admit it, Walker Percy’s observation about disaster is largely true: in our era of contented tranquility, superabundance, and fading value systems, we tend to crave catastrophe as a source of meaning. We may noisily declaim that this economic collapse is terrible, that this or that hurricane or fire or administration is so horrific that we’ve lost our faith in humanity, but in moments of emotional agitation we are more alive than ever, and this vitality of opposition and ire and fear is more valuable to many than peace.
Artists are in particular infatuated with tragedy, and for good reason: without it, their art has nothing to discuss and descends into the mire of self-referentiality that makes so much contemporary creative work duller than pop-culture (and less enduring!). Creative people are thus always inclined to overreact, to declare that some bit of news is the end of society as we know it, the beginning of a new epoch, “a fundamental shift,” etc… .
Perhaps this is why artists used to be so infatuated with religion … biblical stories are full of disaster and conflict and tragedy. I think religion receded as a muse when real life events became more biblical in scale. As the people of the world became connected, they became more aware. Wars, famines, earthquakes … these things used to happen in isolation, without most of the inhabitants of the world even knowing that they were occurring. The Holocaust seems like something that could have happened only in the Bible, and Hiroshima seems beyond its contemplation. For a peasant in the English countryside, the tedium of daily life could not be measured against such grand tragedies. But the humdrum banality of today’s suburbs stands in constant contrast to war and famine and torture and oppression. Thus, artists have found their conflict … the struggle to live with the weight of this knowledge. And so, we get a lot of books about the angst of the non-suffering. As people tire of this genre, the demand for something grander takes hold, and something grander usually means something realer. A great writer could conjure grand stakes on his own, but lesser writers need the assistance of mother nature or global politics to provide their setting.
not to mention the people paying artists were usually churches. they didnt necessarily paint what they felt or wanted.
