The Patriot Post® · Musing About the Arts

Because I recently wrote a piece in which I fessed up to being less than impressed with so-called great art, I may as well go all the way and admit that even middle-brows would consider me low-brow, while high-brows wouldn’t consider me at all.

For instance, although I have enjoyed some foreign language films, and even a few from the days of silent movies, most of my favorites starred people like Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Irene Dunne, Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Alan Ladd, and Laurel and Hardy.

I can’t even pretend to have snobbish taste when it comes to TV. Although in the early days, I was a regular viewer of the somewhat pretentious “Omnibus,” a Sunday afternoon show hosted by the very English Alastair Cooke, my favorite shows have always been comedies, ranging from those starring Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers in the 50s and 60s to “Barney Miller,” “Black Adder,” “Fawlty Towers,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Bob Newhart,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Corner Gas” and “Frasier.”

Although I have already let the world know how I felt about art snobs, I will compound the cultural felony by saying that I would rather look out the window than at any painting that has ever been hung at the Tate or the Louvre.

I actually prefer wine snobs to art snobs because I always find it amusing when they go through the elaborate ritual which involves checking the date on the label, sniffing the cork and swishing around that first mouthful, pretending that the stuff inside the fancy bottle is anything more or less than fermented grape juice. If art connoisseurs, who can be as competitive as Green Bay Packer fans, want to take first place in the snobbery sweepstakes, I’m afraid they’ll simply have to start sniffing canvases.

A like-minded reader wrote to ask me why some people feel compelled to claim that looking at, say, the Mona Lisa changed their lives. I wrote back: “They pretend that seeing a famous work of art somehow changed them in some transcendental, but unexplainable, way because it costs a lot of money to shelp over to Paris or London or Rome to see it, and because people always feel the need to rationalize large expenditures for anything other than cars, homes, large screen TVs and trophy wives.”

I think I first noticed it back in the 60s and 70s when people I knew would spend a lot of money to sit through a weekend at EST, a faddish New Age con game concocted by Werner Erhard. The thing I remember best was that the gullible fools were made to sit through extremely long sessions without taking a bathroom break. I guess it was supposed to show discipline. But I suspect it ushered in the age of adult diapers.

The point of the program seemed to be that selfishness was a virtue and they should never feel guilty about anything they did or would ever do because they were great, and, besides, nobody else in the world mattered in the slightest because they were stupid, poor and had really tiny bladders.

In case you’re too young to have heard of EST or Erhard, he was born John Rosenberg. But when he got married for a second time in 1960, he signed the marriage certificate Curt Wilhelm von Savage. The little woman, whose real name was Celeste Radell, signed on as June Bryde . It seems something else the Baltimore city clerk neglected to notice was that the date was April First. Apparently, Ms. Radell also failed to realize it or she might have more appropriately assumed the alias, April Phool.

When I would ask these latent sociopaths what they had come away with from EST, aside from an aching bladder, they would struggle for words. After losing the struggle, they would say something condescending along the lines of “It was a very profound experience and you really wouldn’t understand.”

Consider travel, if you will. The truth is that people never want anyone to think that they have spent a great deal of money only to discover they should have just set fire to the dough and saved themselves a lot of aggravation that involved packing, rushing to catch planes, losing luggage and coming down with an exotic form of diarrhea.

Ask yourself: Do people ever come back from a trip to Europe or the Far East and admit they had a lousy time because the rooms were filthy, the scenery tedious, the food disgusting, the weather unbearable and the natives rude and foul-smelling? For that matter, have you ever heard someone from, say, Michigan return from Rome, Paris, London or Stockholm, and say, “If I had wanted to bump into an obnoxious Muslim every time I turned around, I could have driven over to Dearborn”?

Has anyone you know ever come back from an opera, a ballet or a classical music concert, and said it stunk to high heaven? Of course you haven’t. But people say it all the time about movies, which cost a lot more to make and take a lot longer to produce. What’s more, moviegoers don’t come home from a great film and carry on as if merely having sat there for two hours elevated them above the level of mere mortals.

Sometimes, you even come across this sort of caste system when it comes to books. When I confess that I much prefer novels to non-fiction, I can see it in the eyes of some people that they are subtracting points from what they had previously assumed my IQ might be. But, having read a great many of each type, I happen to have what I consider good reasons for preferring fiction.

Whether it’s history or biographies, I know I am only reading what the writer was ultimately able to research. Plus, in order to devote years to the project, he must have obviously had very strong feelings about the subject before he even got started. That means I have to make allowances for what he couldn’t possibly know or find out, and also take into account what his motivation was in taking on the project. In short, I have to read the work, aware of his limitations, but without knowing his particular biases.

In the case of auto-biographies, I’m all too aware of the author’s biases.

On the other hand, when it comes to fiction, the author is in a position to divulge everything about his or her protagonist: virtues and vices, fantasies and dreams, aspirations and heartbreaks. The author’s only motivation is to make the characters as vivid, as interesting and as three-dimensional, as his talent allows.

The way snobs carry on, whether it’s about wine, travel, opera, ballet or paintings, you have to figure that in their heads, they’re envisioning that series of natural history pictures depicting the development of man. You know the one. It shows a fish crawling out of the water onto land, moving along from monkey to Neanderthal, then down through the ages, the spine growing ever more erect, until it reaches us, modern man, the ultimate in good posture.

But on the evolutionary chart of snobs, there is one final figure: a slim, well-tailored, rather effete, fellow…sniffing a cork.