Financial Benefits
#576
Last May, an article in Rolling Stone reported on a letter to Donald Trump written on behalf of Victor Wills, the lead singer of the Village People, protesting against the unauthorised use of songs such as YMCA and Macho Man. Wills was particularly upset by the prospect of Trump ordering the US Military to fire on US citizens on home soil. He asked Trump to “cease and desist” using his music, and said he wanted no association with Trump’s campaign or him.
Backed by the threat of a lawsuit, that sounds pretty unequivocal. So how does one explain Trump finishing a speech at his inauguration, and being joined on stage by… the Village People! As these five fancy dress artistes belted out YMCA, Trump jiggled along, looking like the ultimate dag at the disco. Even his most fervent sycophants couldn’t pretend he was John Travolta.
If we wonder what caused this great turnaround - from “cease and desist” to Dancealong with Don - Wills gave a short answer on Facebook: “The financial benefits have been great.”
He later told the fans “we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics." In other words, we’ll forget about politics if the price is right.
Like me, your first thoughts may have been: “How old are the Village People anyway?” And: “Are there any original members left?” Just the one: Victor Wills, who at 73 years old, still dresses up as a motorcycle cop and goes through the motions on stage. He’s also taken to denying that YMCA was ever a “gay anthem” – the phrase used to describe the song since Roman times, or at least since it surfaced in 1978. That may sound like denying Liberace was gay, but if Trump loves the song so much it’s probably best to say it’s all good clean fun. Nothing suspicious about YMCA.
It might not seem surprising that the leader of a shamelessly commercial dance band is willing to contradict himself and sacrifice his principles for cash, but there will be many others previously opposed to Trump who are now willing to play along. Foremost is the American ABC Network, which paid out $15 million, settling a lawsuit it’s widely believed they could have won. As I write, CBS is on the verge of the doing the same
In America, those who have the courage of their convictions appear to be thin on the ground. Over the next four years of Trump, or however long the circus lasts, be prepared for a succession of unlikely conversions, as former enemies decide they have to get behind the President for the sake of ‘unity’. None of this is due to Trump becoming more reasonable or statesmanlike. On the contrary, days into his second term the orange menace gives every indication of being crazier, more vindictive and dictatorial than ever before. Last time he just wanted to build a wall, now he has imperial ambitions, eyeing off Greenland and Canada.
One of Trump’s greatest achievements must be his ability to wear people down to the point where they simply give up, deciding that resistance is useless and they may as well get a piece of the action. In brief, he uses his superpowers to reduce his opponents to his own level of base, transactional, moral depravity.
This brings us back to that endless argument about whether Trump is the wrecker of worlds, or merely a symptom of a radical decay in the way we think and live. I’m coming around to the ‘decay’ argument, although it’s culture rather than politics that concerns me most.
We know that people no longer seem to share a common culture, reading the same newspapers and watching the same TV channels. Instead we’re bunkered down with social media and partisan cable channels, only absorbing the news and opinions that flatter our existing predjudices.
The same narrowness applies to the cultural sphere, where people feel it’s enough to be ‘entertained’, like a seal balancing a ball on its nose. Not many of us want to put in the effort required to appreciate a complex work of art. Whatever fails to be instantly entertaining or “relaxing” is immediately written off. Too hard, too boring. Who could be bothered? What a wank. These attitudes are having a deleterious effect on the art that is being made and praised today.
I found myself jugglng such thoughts after reading an essay by William Deresiewicz, a writer whose elegaic approach to modern and contemporary culture appeals to my own sensibilities. Titled How Art Lost Its Way, the piece is chiefly concerned with the decline in dance criticism. Deresiewicz discusses a host of American dance critics and the prestigious publications for which they wrote, noting that today there is hardly a dedicated dance column to be found anywhere. He points out that Jennifer Homans in The New Yorker has published 13 reviews in the past six years. It’s not coincidental that the golden age of American dance was also the golden age of dance criticism.
I won’t go into detail, but Deresiewicz realises the decline is not limited to dance. The quality of writing about art, architecture, literature, cinema, classical music, jazz and rock, has diminished, as audiences and students have become less curious, less willing to take these things seriously. I’ve spoken with lecturers whose students think that being expected to read a handful of set texts is an infringement of their human rights.
Having always felt it’s colossally exciting to discover a great author, artist or composer, it’s depressing to discover how many people nowadays consider it nothing but a chore to read a book, spend time in a gallery or listen to a symphony. If it’s not immediately entertaining, (or if it’s not shopping) it’s a write-off. They dread the “work” entailed, which we survivors of the Jurassic era still wistfully believe to be pleasure. We might laugh at those earnest Greenwich Village coffee shop intellectuals in the 1950s, reading Kierkegaard and Camus, but they cared enough to take these things seriously and argue about them. Now we read potboilers and say: “I liked it” on Facebook.
Trump is the ultimate figurehead for an age when nobody reads a book or listens to anything more challenging than YMCA (which has recently returned to the top of the Billboard charts!). He’s also a product of this cultural void: vulgar, selfish, devoid of empathy or understanding, and he’s reshaping America, if not the planet, in his own image, as former foes embrace the path of least resistance.
I’d love to present a brave, optimistic vision of how we can re-ignite critical conversations and re-engage with art, but the signs are not promising. ‘Wokeness’ – that bizarre compound of guilt, high moralism and intellectual nullity – is a big part of the problem. As cultural institutions have immersed themselves in this ideological fairy floss, they’ve confirmed to the proudly ignorant that they were right to reject all that arty rubbish.
Art is of the spirit, but increasingly, it’s all down to dollars and cents – and bitcoin. Museums spend their days and nights fund-raising. Brilliant careers in art are engineered by the uber dealers and their wealthy clients. Second-rate music and literature is praised to the skies by ‘critics’ who are barely more than third-rate publicists. Movies are judged by their success at the box office. The papers publish endless lists telling us what to do, what to see, what to read, as if we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves. It's a parody of genuine criticism, which tells us whether something is worth experiencing, and why that might be so. Criticism was always a conversation between interested parties in which the writer usually knew a bit more than the reader. Today it’s more often the other way around.
One can only hope that audiences eventually get so bored by an overload of superficial entertainment that some of them go looking for the hard stuff. More likely they just flip over to the sports channel, where the “financial benefits” go to the genuine high achievers, not to those who trade their heartfelt convictions for something more spendable.
The art column for The Nightly is Peter Godwin’s survey show, Space, Light & Time, at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery. For the past two decades Godwin has built a dedicated following among private collectors, but – as happened with artists such as William Robinson and Cressida Campbell – the public galleries have been slow to come to the party. This exhibition, organised by Orange Regional Art Gallery shows what they’ve been missing.
The film under review is Jacques Audiard’s controversial Emilia Pérez, an English-Spanish-language musical by a French drector, about a Mexican crime boss who believes, with apologies to Monty Python, that it’s his right as a man to be a woman. People either loathe this movie or love it. I’m in the latter category, but I’ve tried to say a bit more than “I liked it”.