The Review: Art vs. Politics; Therapeutic Moralism; Sheila Heti

Every document of Weird Al is at the same time a document of barbarism. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. In the last few years, a growing literature of antimoralistic critique has emerged, prompted by a sense that both art-making and criticism are tilting discreditably into “propaganda, or magic, or medicine,” as David Bromwich put it [recently]( in The Nation. Bromwich and other antimoralists, like Nicolas Langlitz [on “moral hyperthermia”]( or Becca Rothfeld on “[sanctimony literature,]( are repelled by what they construe as fashionable bad habits: art contorting itself into bien-pensant platitudes or agitprop at the expense of every other kind of expression, and criticism taking as its major task the appraisal of aesthetic objects for conformity to left-liberal political orthodoxy. For the moralists as seen by their opponents, the most important test of a critic’s ingenuity is whether they can sniff out a moral relation, anywhere from symptom to cause, between even the most ephemeral bits of pop culture and the gravest social pathologies. It’s not hard to find examples that confirm that the diagnosis is at least sometimes correct. Here’s a crude and hilarious one. Of a Weird Al Yankovic concert, a writer recently [observed]( “Last night, as I was sitting in the audience with the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and Highland Park all within the last two months, I kept noticing how many times a Weird Al song centers on the extreme anger and resentment of a young man.” If Weird Al bears some responsibility for the bloody catastrophe of American gun violence, then how much more damaging must real art be? Perhaps, for instance, as one Shakespeare scholar [insists]( The Merchant of Venice ought not to be taught in high school, for fear that it will engender anti-Semitism. Against such sensitivities, whether valid or contrived, the antimoralists have tried to remind readers that art and criticism can involve other goods than doing good. The most recent contribution to this literature is Jon Baskin’s [essay]( in Liberties on the novelist Sheila Heti’s “fight for art.” Baskin reads Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour, as in part an allegory about the competition between an aesthetic criticism that resists political prescription on the one hand and an encroaching “therapeutic moralism” on the other. The first is represented by Mira, a would-be art critic. Mira is a variation on earlier Heti heroines, though apparently less directly autobiographical than the protagonists of Heti’s previous novels. The second is represented by Mira’s friend, Annie, who is what Mira calls a “fixer,” “meddling in the structure that had been given to humans.” Toward the end of the novel, Annie seems to have become some sort of group therapist. Baskin traces the competition between these types across all three of Heti’s novels, each of which, he says, is “in conversation with the moralization of culture that her critics and commentators have more often fallen victim to than managed to identify as one of her main targets.” “In each of her novels,” Baskin writes, Heti “constructs a coliseum wherein the bearers of different strong evaluations do battle ... and in each the winner is art.” SPONSOR CONTENT | London Metropolitan University [The hidden costs of recruiting international students]( Pure Colour was the first novel I read this summer. More recently, I happened to read Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936), which, in a very different idiom, dramatizes many of the same conflicts — between the aesthetic and the political, between ideals of disinterest and social commitment, and so on. In that novel, it’s not clear that anyone wins. The elderly Croyland, who made his fortune as an art dealer, speaks for art, but ridiculously: “the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini’s Transfiguration, and those Raphael portraits at the Pitti. Buttresses to shore up the soul ... One would be lost without them. Lost!” Croyland’s antagonist, Mark Staithes, demurs: “Isn’t there anything more? Anything further?” He finds it by joining a Central American revolution, where he loses his leg, not heroically in battle but falling off a donkey. Eyeless’s main character, Anthony Beavis, is a sociologist by trade, and he takes comfort in what he imagines is the Olympian distance his profession interposes between himself and other people. But a disappointment suffered by his aging father, a philologist, inadvertently gives Anthony a disturbing insight into the low motives behind high ideals. “Anthony had never see him [so] agitated before, hurt, indignant, bitterly resentful. The presidency of the Philological Society which ought, without any question, to have gone to him, had gone instead to Jenkins. Jenkins, if you please! A mere ignorant popularizer, the very antithesis of a real scholar. A charlatan, a philological confidence trickster, positively ... a ‘crook.’” His father’s pathetic outburst brings home to Anthony the fragility of his own sense of superiority. “At any moment a Jenkins might be elected to some presidency or another, and then, defenceless in one’s burrow of thought ... one would be at the mercy of any childish passion that might arise.” The life of the mind, it turns out, is just a squalid affair of prestige-grubbing and professional envy. So Anthony joins Staithes, throwing himself into a violent political movement he scarcely understands. He keeps both legs, though. Read Jon Baskin’s “Sheila Heti and the Fight for Art” [here]( David Bromwich’s “The Rise of Bad Art and the Decline of Political Candor” [here]( and Becca Rothfeld’s “Sanctimony Literature” [here](. ADVERTISEMENT REGISTER NOW [Join us August 2-19]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot now](. Space is limited. Registration closes July 27. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Law Schools Flattered the Court’s Power. Now They’re Caught in Its Rightward Tilt.]( By Aziz Z. Huq and Jon D. Michaels [STORY IMAGE]( Legal academe has a Supreme Court problem. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [A Smaller Share of College-Goers Are Male. So What?]( By Carine M. Feyten [STORY IMAGE]( The boys are doing just fine. Recommended - “A small problem in Ghosh is that he doesn’t acknowledge the lurking presence of climate where it does exist in the literary record; a larger problem in Puchner is that he sees it everywhere.” In the NYRB, Aaron Matz [on some mixed efforts]( by Amitav Ghosh and Martin Puchner to get a handle on the Anthropocene. And in the same issue, Helon Habila draws on Ghosh in [reviewing]( Imbolo Mbue’s new work of “petrofiction,” How Beautiful We Were. For more on Ghosh, check out Priya Satia’s Chronicle Review [essay]( about The Nutmeg’s Curse. - “Younger puts the Greek lion’s disappearance from the wild sometime around 1200 B.C., when artistic depictions of lions become less ferocious, less accurate, and more like ‘really trim deer.’” In Sapiens, Katarina Zimmer on why archaeologists are pretty sure [that wild lions used to roam]( parts of Europe. (From January.) - “Leach ... also corrects another element in the documentary record: although sentenced to execution, Tretyakov broke free from his guards and threw himself down a stairwell at Moscow’s Butyrka prison, killing himself before the sentence could be carried out.” In the LARB, Edward Tyerman [writes about]( Robert Leach’s new biography of the Soviet avant-gardist Sergei Tretyakov. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | Florida International University [Beyond Category 5 Hurricanes?]( Florida International University leads a team designing the world’s most powerful windstorm simulator. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( Community colleges and the students they serve were disproportionately hit during the pandemic. 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