A Response To An Earnest Exception

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 3:03 PM Eastern on 4 Dec. See below.]

Professional opera singer (he wittily designates himself a "Bassus Canadensis") and blogger Campbell Vertesi of the eponymous blog (which blog has just been added to our exclusive list of Culture Blogs on the left sidebar) has taken earnest exception here, and here, to my call for a return to hierarchal sobriety here. I've responded very briefly to Mr. Vertesi's above linked first volley in the attached comments section of his post. The following is a response to his above linked second volley which, in the interests of symmetry with Mr. Vertesi, I post here rather than in the comments section of his post.

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Hello again, Mr. Vertesi.

As I tried to point out to you previously (in the comments section of your previous post on this), you've built your entire argument on a total misreading and misunderstanding of the core argument of my article; a misreading and misunderstanding once again betrayed and epitomized in high relief in this graf of your new post:

Mr. Douglas' high culture and pop culture distinction allows no comparison between the [artifacts of the] two - they are apples and oranges. This division however, rests on the generalization that [the artifacts of] high culture [are] distinct from [the artifacts of] pop culture only in terms of [their] intent to transcend (or lack thereof). I contend that this generalization is not only false, but the consequence (that popular and high cultural artifacts cannot be compared and are therefore of equal value) is at best contradictory, and at worst detrimental to any concept of great art.

Bypassing for the nonce your confused distinction between high and popular culture and the artifacts of the two which I've unconfused by use of bracketed editorial insertions, and your indefensibly in error statement that "[if] popular and high cultural artifacts cannot be compared [they] are therefore of equal value," nowhere in my argument did I even so much as hint at, much less use the word "intent" except to disavow it. Intent has no place in my argument, and has nothing to do with anything I had to say. What I wrote was,

Metaphorically speaking (and once one gets past technical considerations of craft, one can speak of the core matters of aesthetics in no other way), the singular principal hallmark of all artifacts of the realm of high culture is their perceived aspiration to transcendence; transcendence of the quotidian world of experience, of the culture within which they were produced, and even of their very selves as works of art. And that singular hallmark is what's singularly lacking in all the artifacts of the realm of popular culture, their singular principal hallmark being a perceived aspiration to the widely accessible here-and-now entertaining.

Please note, I did not say all the artifacts of the realm of high culture are transcendent. Clearly, only the greatest are. Rather, I said that, in themselves (as distinct from the conscious intentions of their creators), their hallmark characteristic is their perceived quality of aspiring to transcendence.

Far from being "so dense as to be cryptic," as you characterized the language of my article, the above is stated in plain, straightforward English — or as plain and straightforward as English can be when discussing such slippery concepts; a slipperiness acknowledged by me right from the get-go.

As I can hardly be expected to defend a position not taken by me, I respectfully suggest that before making any further response to my article you first go back and reread that article — carefully, this time — and then respond to what I actually wrote, not to what you imagine I wrote.

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Update (3:03 PM Eastern on 4 Dec): Mr. Vertesi responds:

So, the work itself ASPIRES to transcendance [sic], no matter what the creator intended? I'm afraid this concept eludes me. A work of art is inanimate in every sense but the metaphoric. It's only aspiration or intention is that of the artist, or that of the viewer imposed thereupon.

The metaphor of the aspiration to transcendence of the artwork itself. Now he's got it. That's exactly correct. And, indeed, metaphor is exactly what I explicitly declared it to be; metaphor as is absolutely necessary when talking about aesthetics beyond questions of craft as I also explicitly declared (and despite postmodern idiocies to the contrary, in matters of art aesthetics is the alpha and omega; nothing else matters — nothing; and most particularly, not the social and political). If the metaphoric concept at the core of the piece in question eludes Mr. Vertesi as he asserts it does, then I'm afraid the sense of what I wrote will forever be closed to him.