When I studied Shakespeare years ago I came up with a theory, and it has been blown out of the water. Historians have found out a lot about Shakespeare’s life, but not everything. We can read about where he was born and where he went to school. We read about whom he married and his theatrical company. But there is this mysterious gap. Between having a couple of kids and showing up in London as a playwright, there are seven years that have been nick-named the “lost years” because no one knows where he was or what he was doing.
So I figured all academia must be pretty dense. I read a bunch of plays and knew exactly where he must have been. He was in Italy. He always placed plays in Italy. His themes were so often pulled from Italy. He must have been in Italy.
After I solved that little problem for myself I continued on with my life without giving it a second thought. I fell in love with theater and acting. I decided that a performance is a great way to communicate ideas and I decided to go into film. Then I found out about the liberal arts and started studying them. And then I realized something: my old conclusion was probably wrong. Shakespeare didn’t need to go to Italy to get the stuff he put in his plays. There are good reasons for him to have been using that subject material without a tourist trip being the reason. How did I figure this out? I was introduced to the same subject material.
Shakespeare lived near the beginning of the age of reason. There was a revival of thinking. Where had a lot of thinking been done before this age? Well, ancient Greece was one, and Italy started building on their tradition. As this reason traveled northwest across Europe, there were definite traces of Greece and Italy mixed in the thinking.
I realized what this means. Shakespeare had a liberal arts education. He didn’t go to a school on being a playwright to become the most famous of all playwrights. He studied the classics and learned about human nature. He must have read books like Plutarch’s Lives and The Odyssey. He had a store of subject material that he had internalized and then was able to produce plays that could speak to the low life of the pits and the nobility in the balcony, and continue to entertain a couple of hundred years later. If you want to create classics, it’s a good idea to study classics.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Aristocratic vs. Democratic
The arts only affect the people who experience them. If you don’t experience something, you can’t be influenced by it.
As we learn about the arts, we focus on the arts of the aristocracy. Why? It is because the royalty and aristocracy ruled history. DeTocqueville mentions that in a democracy the arts will change, they will increase in quantity and decrease in quality. Is this bad? Michelangelo was a great painter and sculptor. His paintings cover walls and ceilings. His sculptures are of giant marble. But the only people who could afford them were Popes and the very wealthy people of Italy. Then look at the hundreds of small paintings created by the Flemish painters of the 17th Century*. These were paintings that could be bought by almost anybody. They were small and many could be quickly produced. Which ones influenced more people in the time they were made?
Is art supposed to tell us about the character of a people? Is it supposed to inspire? Should we feel something as we look at them?
In our world there is a conglomerate of art. There is ‘aristocratic’ art and ‘democratic’ art. It is easy to look at the grandeur of the former and despair about the quantity of the later that is produced by our society. Are we compromising quality for the sake of quantity? I don’t think that is the question. Art is created to be experienced. Art is supposed to make a difference, to share the mood of the artist in order to impact the world. We have democratic art because we are living in a democratic world. Everyone wants to have art in their home, and music to listen to.
We live in a world where the aristocratic art of the past has been moved out of the homes of the aristocracy and been put into museums where it can be view by the masses. That shows where the power in our society lies.
So what does this mean to an artist? Just like an author, an artist must know their audience. Who do they want to reach? Then art must be created for those people. Speak in a medium that will communicate the ideas you want it to, and that will be experienced by the people you want it to be experienced by. If you create aristocratic art, just know it will only ever reach a select audience. If you create democratic art, produce it in a way that more people will be able to experience it. Art is being produced for the masses right now for a reason. As an artist, I would rather create art to be viewed by the masses, not the few.
As we learn about the arts, we focus on the arts of the aristocracy. Why? It is because the royalty and aristocracy ruled history. DeTocqueville mentions that in a democracy the arts will change, they will increase in quantity and decrease in quality. Is this bad? Michelangelo was a great painter and sculptor. His paintings cover walls and ceilings. His sculptures are of giant marble. But the only people who could afford them were Popes and the very wealthy people of Italy. Then look at the hundreds of small paintings created by the Flemish painters of the 17th Century*. These were paintings that could be bought by almost anybody. They were small and many could be quickly produced. Which ones influenced more people in the time they were made?
Is art supposed to tell us about the character of a people? Is it supposed to inspire? Should we feel something as we look at them?
In our world there is a conglomerate of art. There is ‘aristocratic’ art and ‘democratic’ art. It is easy to look at the grandeur of the former and despair about the quantity of the later that is produced by our society. Are we compromising quality for the sake of quantity? I don’t think that is the question. Art is created to be experienced. Art is supposed to make a difference, to share the mood of the artist in order to impact the world. We have democratic art because we are living in a democratic world. Everyone wants to have art in their home, and music to listen to.
We live in a world where the aristocratic art of the past has been moved out of the homes of the aristocracy and been put into museums where it can be view by the masses. That shows where the power in our society lies.
So what does this mean to an artist? Just like an author, an artist must know their audience. Who do they want to reach? Then art must be created for those people. Speak in a medium that will communicate the ideas you want it to, and that will be experienced by the people you want it to be experienced by. If you create aristocratic art, just know it will only ever reach a select audience. If you create democratic art, produce it in a way that more people will be able to experience it. Art is being produced for the masses right now for a reason. As an artist, I would rather create art to be viewed by the masses, not the few.
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