Hello, I’m Harold Duckett. I’m delighted to be writing for KnoxTNToday. Most of what I write will be specifically about the arts, in its many forms. There will be stories, observations and reviews across the spectrum of architecture; the visual arts of painting and sculpture in the museums and galleries; the range of classical music; art music like the Big Ears Festival and the culture heritage music of our region, and theater. The scope of things that matter in the arts, because the arts do matter. We have five orchestras and three opera companies within our MSA, along with a lot of other musical culture, including the Big Ears Festival and jazz concerts and gatherings, as well as the full calendar at UT.
We are living during a period when the arts have become a kind of intellectual jewelry, pretty, but detached from real life; something we put on and take off from time to time; but not an important part of our daily get-up-and-go-to-work world.
The arts have become something, during our moment, that we make use of only when we want to be entertained, or participate briefly in cultural enrichment, maybe to “better ourselves.”
It hasn’t always been this way. Historically, it was the arts, not business or sports, that was the blood and guts of societies. The arts were the visual definition of who they were. Decorated surfaces told the cultural narratives, played out in painted or carved bas reliefs, or full 3-D sculptures, or written on parchment or papyrus pounded into flat sheets, or later printed on presses.
The arts mattered because they were the visual reality of the culture. The role of artists was to observe, record and comment. In the theaters, playwrights told allegorical stories that everyone understood to be about something other than just a story, but saved the author’s neck if authorities didn’t take to it. The power base used theater too. Despots treated theater as propaganda, none more effectively that Mao Zedong to indoctrinate the masses during the Cultural Revolution in China. In Eastern Europe powerful posters could, and still do, hit public consciousness like sledgehammers.
There’s a widely circulated quote that during WW II Winston Churchill was asked if money couldn’t be put to better use if arts funding was redirected to the war effort, to which Churchill supposedly responded “then what are we fighting for.”
There’s no record of Churchill actually saying that, but he did say “The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them….Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.”
In our world, fake news isn’t the only culturally rotten thing in our social refrigerator. Clothing designers have crawled in too. We wear fake clothes, the cost of which would cause our grandparents to roll over in their graves. I’m not talking about knock-off designer garb with fake labels in them.
We pay big bucks for fake jeans that the manufacturer paid some minimum wage employee to trash by ripping, gouging, cutting, splattering bleach on, all to create a fake impression that the wearer had been places, gone through things, experienced stuff that wore their clothes out.
Dolly Parton wore a coat of many colors that her mama made out of scraps because they didn’t have enough money for new stuff. Now we pay small fortunes for fake-worn-out jeans that Dolly wouldn’t have been caught dead in when she was a young girl hoping to impress her friends.
How we dress matters. Yesterday afternoon, my wife, Beverly, and I joined a lot of other people in Knoxville Sunday afternoon at the Asian Festival downtown. We have a lot of festivals. We ought to have a lot more of them because they give us a chance to see the wonderful mixture of who we collectively are as “Knoxvillians,” and open group that everyone is invited to join.
The great thing about cultural festivals like the Asian Festival is beyond tasting new foods. We get to see different people’s pride in their heritage.
This beautiful lady was tall and elegant, dressed in ethnic pride. She was smiling and laughing with her friends, a big gulp, iced soft drink in one hand and a white leather purse in the other.
When I asked if I could take her picture, she became all seriousness. Her drink and purse were passed off and her big smile took on a kind of pleased fierceness. She stopped being just a person and became a proud symbol of her people and ethnic heritage. She understood that she was, until I pushed the shutter button, more than just herself. I started to ask her name, then decided I didn’t need to. She knew she was an cultural icon and was proud to be exactly that.
It struck me that there was something important in this brief moment that has a parallel in the recent social upheaval in Virginia and elsewhere, including Knoxville, connected to the back and forth surrounding Confederate monuments.
There is always some people who show up at these kinds of things because they are the social macarena of the moment. Everybody is doing it, so why not.
But when people appear in public, in the context of a cultural/social event, like the Asian Festival, or the multiple sides of Confederate Memorial protests, for example, they take on a role that is bigger and more important than their private individual selves. They should act like it.