Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

How great artists become great

Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:

“Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters with poetry, drama, and opera; and, most happily, through discourse and conversation with good minds in pleasant surroundings—whether in the salon or the tavern, the palace or the coffeehouse.” (pp. 36-37)

And: “In 1809 [Beethoven] wrote to the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Hä̈rtel: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.’” (p. 37)

That intense engagement with the great works of the great minds reminds me of Michelangelo’s early and ongoing education.

When Michelangelo was a teen, according to biographer William Wallace, he was exposed to the best of the Florentine intellectual ferment:

“To begin with, the young boy was taken into the famiglia by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who treated him like a son. He spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici Palace, surrounded by the members of Lorenzo’s humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de’ Medici (respectively popes Leo X and Clement VII).” (The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work, p. 152)

That engagement with discussion, reading, and thinking, remained a lifelong passion. From James Hall’s Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body:

“Michelangelo venerated Dante throughout his life, and addressed two of his own poems to him. When he stayed in Bologna for about a year after the fall of the Medici in 1494, he is said to have read every evening to his patron Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi passages from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – only stopping when his employer fell asleep.” (p. 21)

Bridge over the Colorado River

From Popular Science’s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.” I love the drama of this photo of a bridge being constructed over the Colorado River:

You can almost feel the drive of the bridge’s arch sections to meet and complete themselves. It struck me as analogous to the energy flow between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

Creators indeed.

Here’s the description of the bridge at Popular Science:

“Temperatures upward of 115°F, winds capable of felling cranes, an 890-foot drop below: ‘Inhospitable’ doesn’t begin to describe conditions at the Colorado River’s new Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

“A 1,900-foot span designed to divert traffic from the narrow, switchback-laden road across the Hoover Dam, it will be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere when it opens next fall, with 106 segments of ultra-high-strength concrete forming a twin-rib arch. Workers scaled the canyon’s walls, digging notches for concrete foundation columns. To construct the 1,060-foot-long arch, they cast 24 feet of concrete at a time, while a separate, temporary cable-stayed bridge held up the unfinished ends until the gap was closed this year.”

For more wonderful, dramatic, and just plain interesting innovations from 2009 in Security, Health, Entertainment, Auto Tech, Computing, Building Technology, and more, visit Popular Science’s feature.

Talgam and Zander on leadership and music

Two talks at TED on music, leadership, and passion. In my next life, I think I want to be a musician.

Itay Talgam:

Benjamin Zander:

Coexist or Uncoexist?

A vigorous culture carries on its debates at many levels and via many media, all the way down to the bumper sticker. I enjoy the cleverness that goes into many stickers, as well as the ongoing one-upmanship.

These “Coexist” stickers have been around for awhile now:

Islam, peace, men/women, Judaism, paganism, Taoism/Confucianism, Christianity — can’t we all just get along?

In a gesture of inclusiveness, this version substitutes Hinduism.
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This spelling-challenged version adds science to the mix, thinks it’s important to distinguish the pagans and the wiccans, and seems confused about Buddhism — but is trying very hard not to leave anyone out.

The Coexisters are focused on religion, asking us to attend to the shared themes of many religions — spirituality, love, peace. Their goal is to achieve tolerance by abstracting away from the differences among religions.

But then along comes the Uncoexist response to rain on the parade:

Let’s not forget about the Communists, the theocrats, the Satanists, the pederasts, the Nazis, and the Klan.

Uncoexisters are focused on evil and politics, reminding us that there are evil people in the world and that many of them use politics to harm and control others. Their goal is to protect the free and the innocent from the evil.

According to the Uncoexisters, the Coexisters think: If only we could give Ahmadinejad a big hug, tell him how much we love him, and share a nice cup of chamomile tea, the world would be a better place. What a bunch of pansies.

According to the Coexisters, the Uncoexisters think: If only we could bomb the bastards into the Stone Age, the world would be a better place. What a bunch of troglodytes.

All of this is good at the level of bumper-sticker debate, and it is fascinating how graphic design can concretize and compress so much.

Assignment to the Coexister graphic designers, in keeping with the theme of inclusiveness: Can we please work in Sikh and Shinto?

And an assignment to the Uncoexister graphic designers, in keeping with the theme of lessons in danger: Can we work in Kim Jong-il and Caligula? (And that big E just sitting there is really bothering me.)

Is capitalism bad for art?

I will be giving a talk with that title at California State University, East Bay, on October 14. Thanks to Professor Stephen Schmanske and the Smith Center for inviting me.

My theme will be the relationship between art and liberal cultures, focusing on economically free cultures especially.

One part of my talk will discuss how economic liberalism is empowering for artists both materially and psychologically, and part of my evidence for that will be historical: Why were the greatest of the great eras in art history classical Athens, Renaissance Florence and Venice, the Dutch Golden Age, Paris in the late nineteenth century. Why not, say, Sparta in the 5th century BCE? Or Milan in the 15th century? Or Denmark in the 17th? Or Portugal in the 19th?

Another part of my talk will take up the perplexing question of why, since the late 19th century, so many artists have taken anti-business and anti-capitalist stances. Pablo Picasso is representative here, having said, famously, “The merchant — there’s the enemy.” A fascinating set of adversarial (and self-destructive) issues there.

The lecture is based on my current book project, The Fate of Art under Capitalism, which I discussed in an earlier post.

Architecture and politics

How structures concretize a political system’s core social dynamic:

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Feudalism: Build walls to keep the enemy out.
Examples: the medieval castle, the Great Wall of China.
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Socialism: Build walls to keep your people in.
Examples: the Berlin Wall, the Koreas’ DMZ.
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Capitalism: Create glass wall storefronts to attract other people.
Example: the shopping mall.
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So here’s a question: Is the above a cheap shot or an essential truth?

Artists, Capitalists, and the Fate of Art under Capitalism

My current book project is The Fate of Art under Capitalism. The research is done and I’m over halfway done with the writing. I love art, art and intellectually history, and political economy—and this book project lets me integrate them all.

One of the questions I take up is based on three observations:

1. Artists have never had it so good as over the last century—the number of practicing artists has skyrocketed, as has the amount of money we spend on art, as has the number of media and genres, as has the quantity and quality of artistic raw materials, and so on.

2. The last century has been relatively capitalism-and-business friendly. (I know what you’re thinking, free market friends of mine.)

3. Most artists, especially those in the artistic establishment, are anti-capitalist and anti-business. (Picasso is representative, in word if not always in deed, here in 1918 speaking of his dealer Léonce Rosenberg: “Le marchand—voilà l’enemmi” [“The dealer—there's the enemy”].)

So my question is: Why the dynamic of the cartoons below?

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Thoughts?

(Kudos to Chris Vaughan for drawing the cartoons for me.)

“Post-Postmodern Art” reprinted

My four-page essay on “Post-Postmodern Art” was originally published in The Newberry Manifesto in 2001.

It is also available in a re-print edition with images of the relevant works [pdf].