So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Doctor Strange]

Perhaps. I'm no major expert on Pyle - or Wyeth - but I do have a first edition of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Douglas Fairbanks, who more than anyone else cemented the cinematic image of pirates, designed his Technicolor film "The Black Pirate" to look like it was painted by Pyle and Wyeth. The effect, on a big screen, is stunning. Wyeths who live in my area and have seen it on our screen have emerged very impressed.

 

[vitanola]

Perhaps. I'm no major expert on Pyle - or Wyeth - but I do have a first edition of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.

Did someone say Pie Rats?

 

[GHT]

There are people who make a career of deconstructing Beatles tunes, in attempts to cast light on why so many of those songs have such long legs. One fellow in particular is very good at breaking down into layman's language just what the musical theorist's terms mean and their effects on what we hear. It's interesting, even to one as musically illiterate as I am.

Somewhere there's a very funny interview with The Beatles accusing them that their song Day Tripper was about Lesbians & prostitutes and did they have a comment about that, to which John Lennon answered: "What's all the fuss about? We just wrote a simple song about Lesbians & Prostitutes." Seeing no mileage forthcoming, the interviewer waxed lyrical about their latest release, namely Eleanor Rigby, and then asked what it was that inspired the song to which Paul McCartney answered: "Two queers." Not an acceptable term these days, but his reply was straight off the cuff.

 

[Zombie_61]

...If Lizzie is right about needing exposure when young, then thank God for the boob tube and local library because that was my only exposure as a kid as my family wasn't listening to classic music, reading Shakespeare or discussing Plato...

I seriously doubt I'd have the appreciation for various genres of music if it weren't for Carl Stalling's brilliant use of those songs in the Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1930s-1950s. He might have only used a snippet here and there sometimes, but it piqued my curiosity enough to make me seek out original recordings when I got older. Those PBS shows were far too pretentious and boring for my tastes.

I went to the Guggenheim Museum in NYC to educate myself on modern art and it was interesting. However, I also went to the Cartoon museum in San Francisco and I was blown by an original Bill Watterson panel of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. And that was fun.

Many years ago a good friend became the "commentary" cartoonist for the local junior college's newspaper. Not long after he was given this task we went to see an exhibit of Chester Gould's original "Dick Tracy" comic strip artwork, and afterward my friend commented that it was a revelation to him to see Gould had used white paint (or whatever Gould used) regularly to cover his artistic mistakes so they wouldn't show when the strips were replicated for publication. "Now I don't feel so bad about using White Out."

...There is such a thing as overthinking. In most creative endeavors, it's the vibe at work more than the thought. Most of us can return to our better work and see that, yeah, that's why that works so well. But that wasn't where our heads were while we were doing it.

In the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon there's a segment in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono are alerted to the presence of a young homeless man wandering the grounds of their estate, and they have a discussion with him. The young man was convinced Lennon was somehow speaking directly to him through his lyrics, and Lennon's response was essentially, "How could I be thinking of you? I'm thinking about me, or at best Yoko if it's a love song. I'm singing about me and my life, you know? And if it's relevant for other people's lives, that's all right." It's really that simple. Most songwriters are simply writing from their own experience, but others have had similar experiences so those lyrics resonate within them.

On the other hand, once The Beatles learned of the rumor of Paul McCartney's death they occasionally included veiled references to that in their lyrics for their own amusement, just to see what the fans would make of those lyrics and how they'd be interpreted. So, sometimes, songs are just "for fun".

 

[tonyb]

...
I studied art in high school and university but at the end of the day I still prefer a Norman Rockwell illustration over a Picasso.

It's can be fun to show people Picasso's early work. Most would never guess its creator.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

It's can be fun to show people Picasso's early work. Most would never guess its creator.

Some years ago I toured the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It's full of his early work - dull, dim gray and brown stuff, nothing at all like the colorful, vivid, almost hallucinatory work of his Arles period.

 

[Edward]

How many man-hours are wasted each year by people trying to put in micro USB connectors upside down?

There's the thing... the odds should be fifty fifty, yet it's about 75% of the time I find I have it wrong way up on the first go....

This is of course why USB-C is so superior, as it's the same either way up....

The annoying part of this is that the same people who will poo-poo your interests will declare their interest(s) as something that can't be dismissed.
Reminds me of a line for a sci-fi event I was once in, and a sports event line at the same venue was right next to our line. A baseball fan, painted in team colors, actually told a guy dressed as a Star Trek character to 'get a life.'
People in my line were aghast at the hypocrisy of that statement. Nobody in the sports line could see how dumb that comment was.

Back in October 2000, I went to a Rocky Horror convention in Las Vegas. We were in one half of the Cashman theatre, right next door to a Soldier of Fortune convention. A bunch of us wandered into the wrong hall by mistake. Us: fishnet stockings and eyeliner. Them: ALL The Guns. We looked at each other. They backed off in a hurry. One of the funniest things I've ever seen.

There's nothing inherently wrong with what gets dismissed as "commercial art." Pretty much everything about which we wax rhapsodic on the Lounge was mass-produced product manufactured by workers-for-hire. The people who made the movies, the music, the fashion, and much of the other stuff that we relish from the Era were, in essence, just grinding it out for the piece rate. That a lot of so-called "commercial art" has endured and a lot of "fine art" has been forgotten has to tell you something.

Indeed. After all, Casablanca was only ever intended by design to be a tacky little propaganda piece. Didn't stop it being great cinema.

The distinction isn't nearly so neat as some would attempt to make it. Think Piet Mondrian, and all he "inspired." Think Braniff International and Alexander Calder back in the '60s and '70s.

As a huge fan of commercial art and a keeper of a modest but growing collection of it, I wouldn't take exception with your take on the lasting impact of it vs. "fine art." Fine artists (I'm tempted to put it in quotes) can be like would-be novelists: legends in their own minds. Some of the most creative, clever visual art has been made in service to commerce. Give at least a nod to the marketing department for that. And of course many high-brow arts were once popular entertainments. Shakespeare. Jazz.

There's footage of Charles Eames voicing his reluctance to characterize himself an artist. He thought it akin to calling oneself a genius -- immodest at best. But many wouldn't hesitate to call him both. If you've watched TV today, or entered an airport or an office building, chances are excellent you've seen examples of his work, some of which dates to the late 1940s.

Another way of putting it is that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Those who dismiss the popular merely for being popular are as anti-meritocratic as those at whom they sneer.

A common gripe among the post-secondary educators I know is that the public higher education system is being increasingly regarded by many of those ultimately holding the purse strings (the elected representatives in the federal and state legislatures) as trade and professional schools and that funding shortages ought first sacrifice the humanities. Apparently a well-rounded liberal arts education isn't so highly valued.

It's darned nigh impossible to get people excited about things they've never been exposed to. Maybe that's the point.

Here in the UK there's an increasingly heavy push towards what they call STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) as more "worthy" than other fields of academic endeavour. This, of course, is in the context of a culture that values a university education solely in terms of its capacity to enhance employment and salary prospects. The people behind this are best described by Wilde's definition of a cynic - "one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

The thing is, people can blame the Education System all they want -- but the best way to get kids interested in The Pleasures Of The Mind is to expose them to those pleasures when they *are* kids. If you want kids to be interested in serious reading, have serious books around the house. If you want kids to appreciate music, expose them to it. If you want kids to think, show them that you, yourself, think.

And don't be snobby about media -- there's a lot of good media out there. I didn't learn to enjoy opera, modern dance, and jazz because I took courses on them in college. I learned that they were enjoyable when I was five from watching "Mister Rogers."

Completely. I love Shakespeare because my parents took us to see it when I was nine. We saw Kenneth Branagh as Henry V (this was before he made the film version), alongside Brian Blessed.

I don't dismiss the possibility that my views on the matter aren't commonly held. Still, a sort of know-nothing pride has descended upon the land. "Elites" is a common put-down of the educated (formally or not) and appreciators of "the arts." It's a sort of snobbery in itself. I mean really, just who is looking down on whom?

WE're seeing the same in the UK - along with the demonisation of expertise. What it results in are tragic cases like the Charlie Guard episode, and the funding damage it has wreaked upon a hospital which is a world centre of excellence in children's medicine.

But wotthehell, there's a place for cotton candy. But if that's all a person knows, a high quality chocolate would be a revelation. Or so I would hope.

Depends on how open-minded they are. I well remember going on a school trip with a bunch of kids who were from much lower income families. Given a steak for dinner one night in the hotel, they complained that it was 'gross', and wanted a burger instead. A lot of people are only comfortable with what they know, even when presented with "better".

As the story goes Buster Keaton once sat impassively on a stage as some goateed, pipe-smoking cineaste declaimed on the hidden meanings of his work, and then turned to him and asked him to explain a particular scene. Buster replied "Well in that scene, I was trying to be funny."

I've seen the same thin happen with Rocky Horror - including even one piece which interpreted the whole thing as a critique / parody of Christianity. Some of the songs in the show had been written before O'Brien began work on the show (Super Heroes, for instance, which he claims was about the rise of fascism in Europe), but he's often said that he came up with the idea for the show while on some mushrooms...

Somewhere there's a very funny interview with The Beatles accusing them that their song Day Tripper was about Lesbians & prostitutes and did they have a comment about that, to which John Lennon answered: "What's all the fuss about? We just wrote a simple song about Lesbians & Prostitutes." Seeing no mileage forthcoming, the interviewer waxed lyrical about their latest release, namely Eleanor Rigby, and then asked what it was that inspired the song to which Paul McCartney answered: "Two queers." Not an acceptable term these days, but his reply was straight off the cuff.

They were good comedians, the Beatles. If they'd stuck at it, they could have been almost as entertaining all-round as The Monkees. They were certainly nearly as musically important.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not a particular fan of the Beatles' music, but "A Hard Day's Night" is a fine piece of film comedy, especially when you consider that the mid-sixties were the absolute rock-bottom nadir of movie comedy in the US. Compared to the constipated, poorly-conceived Hollywood comedies of the time, the Beatles come across as the Marx Brothers. They could have had the same impact on film audiences as Woody Allen had if they'd wanted to really focus on moviemaking.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Here in the UK there's an increasingly heavy push towards what they call STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) as more "worthy" than other fields of academic endeavour. This, of course, is in the context of a culture that values a university education solely in terms of its capacity to enhance employment and salary prospects. The people behind this are best described by Wilde's definition of a cynic - "one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."...

I'm a first generation college kid who went to a state university. There was an anti-intellectual bent in my house where education was seen as something you used to get a better job - not something to further your mind.

Something in me always took to learning things just to learn them, but I knew in my house to keep quiet about that and just focus on "I'm going to college so that I can get a good job." Hence, while I received a liberal arts education, my major was in economics as I was targeting a career in finance.

But I was also an English minor and took elective course in all sorts of fields - communications, psychology, physics, history, etc. Yes, the economics helped in finance, but as I moved along in my career and got into management, I'd argue that the broader knowledge and ability to think about things in abstract / look for patterns / recognize historical echoes / understand (to some extent) how people are motivated was much more important than my knowledge of economics.

Those are all "soft" skills not related to STEM (we have the same STEM fever here in the US that you seem to be having) or any "specific" or immediately "applicable" knowledge, but they were, IMHO, much more important to helping me in my work. Also, IMHO, they have helped me to both understand and enjoy life more.

To be fair, though, I understand the pressure on kids today as college costs a lot - a whole lot more than when I went in the '80s (even adjusted for inflation) - so they feel a need to quickly monetize their education to pay off their loans. The STEM fields fit that bill, at least right now. So I get it, but still believe the broader and "softer" skills of the humanities are very valuable and will lead to a long-term and more fulfilling success for many. But, there are no guarantees, especially in any specific example, so the immediate rewards of the STEM fields are compelling.

...Depends on how open-minded they are. I well remember going on a school trip with a bunch of kids who were from much lower income families. Given a steak for dinner one night in the hotel, they complained that it was 'gross', and wanted a burger instead. A lot of people are only comfortable with what they know, even when presented with "better".....

Heck, even what is considered "better" has changed over time - as lobster was once cheap food and chicken, at one point, was the special meal for when important guests came over. That said, some things - not necessarily better or worse things, just different things - take time to develop an appreciation for which also requires a willingness to try those things and to take the time to learn about them.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I count myself extremely lucky that my parents were aspiring pseudo-intellectuals with bohemian/beatnik friends who exposed my sister and I to the arts from an early age. Neither of them had gone to college (my mom did a couple of years at NYU on the GI Bill, but quit to become a full-time partner with my dad in their photography biz) and they'd both had a hardscrabble youth in the Depression with their struggling immigrant parents (some of whom were actually illiterate). They themselves made a dedicated effort to appreciate "high" culture as part of the postwar American Dream, going to classical concerts and Broadway shows from the late forties through the mid-sixties.

Once we were out of early childhood, they took us to see the important films - e.g., I saw stuff like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet when I was 12 - to free NY Philharmonic concerts in Van Cortandt Park, to the NYC museums and Broadway shows, and we watched classic foreign films and BBC dramas on WNET (as well as "better" mainstream TV). They had a stack of ten-inch LPs of classical performances from obscure European orchestras they'd gotten for a dollar apiece in the fifties from the "Musical Masterworks Society" that I devoured... So I actually came at rock/popular music backwards, in college after having been mainly into classical, early jazz, and some folk music in my teens.

Which is to say that as much as I love Carl Stallings music in those WB cartoons, it was NOT my intro to classical music.

I tried to do the same with my own kids, but while they have turned out to be masterful third-gen film/TV buffs and they (particularly my daughter) appreciate art and folk and jazz music... neither developed an affinity for classical music. I consider this a sad failure on my part. But compared to the "my dad's favorite film is Star Wars" upbringing that it seems the majority of kids have nowadays, I guess I did okay.

The aspirations of my greatest generation parents to partake of the "high culture" bounty and imbue their kids with appreciation for the arts seems to have largely fallen by the wayside nowadays. And today's insane media oversaturation and Borg-like reliance on mobile devices for everything hasn't helped. Ironically, with undreamed of instant access to the entire world's art, music, and knowledge... the majority of people seem dumber and less interested in intellectual/cultural self-improvement than ever.

 

[Fading Fast]

...The aspirations of my greatest generation parents to partake of the "high culture" bounty and imbue their kids with appreciation for the arts seems to have largely fallen by the wayside nowadays. And today's insane media oversaturation and Borg-like reliance on mobile devices for everything hasn't helped. Ironically, with undreamed of instant access to the entire world's art, music, and knowledge... the majority of people seem dumber and less interested in intellectual/cultural self-improvement than ever.

I don't know about "dumber" (I'm not picking on the word, just don't know that I could defend that specific argument), but everything else you said here ⇧ seems spot on to me.

Also, I love your parents' approach to your upbringing.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Yeah, I agree that "dumber" isn't quite the correct word. Hey, they can't all be gems!

As I get older, I find myself more and more impressed with what my parents accomplished in all kinds of ways, considering that they started off after the war with absolutely nothing. And that includes without any kind of push towards appreciating culture beyond popular movies and radio from their own parents, who were immigrant Jews working hard selling candy and cigarettes just to survive through the thirties.



(Before my time: late forties or early fifties. Taken by the Hudson River at the Greystone station in Yonkers, I think. Jacketeers: note that my dad's wearing his M-41 field jacket.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the best way to introduce kids to art is not tell them it's art, and don't, under any circumstances, try to tell them it's "good for them." Just expose them to it as casually as you'd put a bowl of corn flakes in front of them, and see if they take to it.

 

[tonyb]

I think the best way to introduce kids to art is not tell them it's art, and don't, under any circumstances, try to tell them it's "good for them." Just expose them to it as casually as you'd put a bowl of corn flakes in front of them, and see if they take to it.

Yup. And if you want to involve "at-risk" kids in more socially desirable activities, DO NOT SO MUCH AS SUGGEST that is what you are doing. Tell 'em hotties might be found there, or something.

 

[tonyb]

...

They were good comedians, the Beatles. If they'd stuck at it, they could have been almost as entertaining all-round as The Monkees. They were certainly nearly as musically important.

Ten thousand comedians out of work, and we get this guy.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My favorite example of how to make "culture" appealing is the radio panel show "Information Please." It was a stump-the-experts deal with a panel made up of newspaper columnists, composers, Broadway playwrights, and other such personalities, hosted by book critic Clifton Fadiman. The tendency today would be to think of a show like this as being impossibly highbrow for the masses, but the masses loved it -- because mixed in with the "high culture" were some of the most head-slapping jokes and lowbrow puns you'll ever hear. The "intellectuals" made no attempt to be Elite, and came across, in all cases, as approachable, likeable figures with no pretentiousness about them at all. You could learn a lot and have a lot of fun at the same time -- and if you sent in your question and stumped the panel, you'd win a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For over a decade this was one of the most popular programs on the air, and it wasn't New York Intellectuals that made it a hit. You'd be surprised how many questions were sent in by Harry W. Appleknocker of Bent Sprocket, Iowa.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
The following is worth about as much as it cost you, seeing how it's wholly anecdotal and all, but having gotten moved around with too great a frequency during my early years, I attended schools in small towns and medium and large cities and got a taste for the differences. The overall quality of instruction was superior in the smaller places. The size of the burg certainly wasn't the only distinction between those places, of course. But hailing from the middle of nowhere no more makes a person a rube than being raised in a city imparts a greater level of sophistication.

 

[Fading Fast]

I think the best way to introduce kids to art is not tell them it's art, and don't, under any circumstances, try to tell them it's "good for them." Just expose them to it as casually as you'd put a bowl of corn flakes in front of them, and see if they take to it.

I'm not going to kid anyone or rewrite history, growing up, a lot of the cultural stuff on PBS bored me, but since my parents were dismissive of all that "fancy culture," I was a bit interested in it and would watch some of those shows quietly on an old B&W TV that was tucked away in a small room.

The same held for literature - my Dad was pretty dismissive of "my books." I remember him giving me a dismissive look when I took "Anna Karenina*" with me to sit in the car when he had to go inside to "bank," back in the days when going to the bank could take forever.

Hence, I never had to "overcome" having any of that stuff forced on me or even being encouraged to watch or read it. I came at it with the same interest a kid comes at anything he doesn't know about. The PBS stuff - meh, some worked, some didn't; but I loved books from day one.

I don't know what the answer is - what Lizzie says here makes sense to me as it seems to strike a good balance between encouraging (which we know can have the opposite effect on a kid) and not helping at all. Like others, my early exposure to classical music was cartoons - what an epiphany it was later to learn that it was a complete genre and not just a soundtrack to cartoons.


*Still have no idea how the name is pronounced. I've heard several versions.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'm not a particular fan of the Beatles' music, but "A Hard Day's Night" is a fine piece of film comedy, especially when you consider that the mid-sixties were the absolute rock-bottom nadir of movie comedy in the US. Compared to the constipated, poorly-conceived Hollywood comedies of the time, the Beatles come across as the Marx Brothers. They could have had the same impact on film audiences as Woody Allen had if they'd wanted to really focus on moviemaking.

Lennon was a huge fan of the Marx Brothers. He said he actually liked the Monkees because they reminded him of the Marx Brothers. He actually got the Monkees and enjoyed it or what it was.