hagiography ..... writings about readings ..... assignments

It's a fine manifesto, but not about art.

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A brief list of things about this essay that make me angry.

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Personal Attacks on Richard Wagner

• Wagner can't seem to make up his mind. He says that art is what differentiates us from nature, but it is also what makes us one with that same nature.

• Wagner really seems to dislike arbitrariness and caprice.

• He professes communist ideals, and yet delivers his argument to the upper classes. He claims that it is because the “folk” have no need to be told what he is saying. Maybe the folk just don't care.

• Seems to have very different ideas than are common about need and want. He thinks that want is necessary in the motivation of true need. I would argue that need is what legitimizes want, not the other way around.

• He is very Wagner-centric. The man sees opera as the most perfect of all arts. And this from a man who promotes ego death.

• Much too wordy. Uses ten words where one would be quite enough.

• Obsessed with the Greeks. Literally views their art as nature's gift to man.

• Inefficient. Believes that doing things quickly ruins the nuance. Perhaps this explains his wordiness.

• Has a very bad case of run-on-sentence. Or his translator does.

• Uses gratuitous capitals.

• Seems confused about units of measure, believing multiples to be the true oneness.

• Keeps piling conditions onto art. First, it has to be true, then it has to be non-capricious, then it has to be a manifestation of nature, then it has to reflect man, then it has to have love in it. A very tall order for art, indeed.

• Has good ideas about interconnectivity (ie: “the inner are first possible by virtue of the outer”), but buries those good ideas in seventy-odd pages of posturing about dance, and self-congratulatory talk of opera as the purest art.

• Seems to hate blind people. And deaf people. Believes that all other senses are subordinate to vision and hearing. Get this man some fun fur.

• Obsessed with the “Folk.” But is it mutual, or is he just needlessly infatuated? And do the folk know that Richard Wagner thinks that they are the most perfect creators and manifestors of art?

• Believes that dance is a whore and a deserter for separating herself from her sisters.

• Relies too heavily on metaphor and simile.

• Is painfully and inexcusably boring.

• He seriously plays fast and loose with punctuation. Oh! the shame of it. Although this may, again, be the fault of the translator.

• Wagner is very traditional (or alternately, he may be a man from the 1800s), and uses creepy, verging on pervy imagery to make his points.

• He also goes a little overboard in the personification department.

• Very very eurocentric, although again, this could be due to who he was and when he lived.

• Seems to equate “lonely” with “selfish.” Interesting.

• Seems to predict Post Modernism about a hundred years early, although seems curiously PoMo, himself.