Monthly Archives: February 2024

By Michael F. Duggan

The nineteenth-century American painter that I most admire is Winslow Homer.  Perhaps more than any other visual artist, he marks the arrival of a mature and distinctive American aesthetic after a protracted and derivative adolescence.  His seascapes are especially powerfully—nobody captures the amoral fury of the sea like Homer.

There is one painting of his however, that I had not cared for but which I now see as a powerful metaphor, a metaphor for a future Homer could have not have foreseen.  This is his The Gulf Stream from 1899.  To me it always seemed too busy, an overly dramatic piling-on of threatening elements—like the drawing of a child trying to include too much into one scene.  The painting is of a black man stripped to the waist reclining on the deck of a de-masted, heavily listing sloop, apparently resigned to his fate.  

Recently I saw the painting again, and it spoke to me as a powerfully realized set of symbols, a prophecy come true for the current human predicament: the man’s artificial environment—the derelict vessel—is a barely floating wreck, subject to the chaos and caprice, the whims of the ocean. It is a temporal speck of flotsam, of human artifice, about to be reclaimed and assimilated back into nature (as with all of the human extended phenotype, the boat is not “artifice” but “human-altered nature”).  Nature threatens in other ways ways: circling sharks in the foreground, attracted to blood in the water.  On the horizon is a waterspout.  And then there is the encroaching sea itself.  The title of the painting provides another element: the Gulf Stream, a current—a river in the ocean—that is controlling the course of the sinking sloop, further denying humankind agency over its own fate.   

Also in the distance is a faint and fleeting chance of salvation by human hands, a fully-rigged sailing ship on the far horizon heading past the unseen boat and apparently toward the storm, as the man on the boat looks unaware or uncaringly away in the opposite direction. This is where we stand, or rather, recline, today. 

            Of course the metaphor is not a perfect one. No metaphor is. Nature is not depicted as degraded or altered, as it is in our time, only primal and threatening, and unlike the man in the painting, so many of us today are either unaware or in denial of our predicament.  Where the man looks away from the possibility of salvation, we look away from the threat itself either in ignorance or apathy rather than in hopelessness of our situation.  By contrast, much of civilization superficially seems to be going strong, whereas the boat is little more than a hulk awash in the shark-swarming brine. 

The relevant questions framed by the painting are: are things too far gone for the man and his situation, and are things too far gone for us and ours?  Is there still hope for us and our world?     

By Michael F. Duggan

Okay, so I am not a part of Taylor Swift’s target audience, and I would be surprised if I have listened to more than a dozen of her songs. But like her or not, pop music’s billion-dollar woman is impossible to ignore.

I have noting against Swift. She is clearly talented and protects energy and a positive image for her legions (armies, really) of young fans, or Swifties. The fact that she has tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of enthusiastic followers who are willing to shell-out big bucks for albums and sold-out concerts corroborates this. They, and in some cases their parents, love her and her music, and there is no reason to think that they are faking it. But does she warrant such acclaim and pecuniary reward?

Right after Swift’s Eras tour broke the billion-dollar mark, a friend of mine called me and asked me what I thought of her. In truth I think about her fairly little, other than during the occasional news story. Of her relationship with what’s-his-name, the football player, I couldn’t care less. To be fair, at 34, she is now a veteran in a cutthroat business that makes extreme demands on touring musicians, and her first album, released in 2006, is now older than many of her fans.

But my friend’s point was that, taken on her artistic merits, she seems to be a kind of patron saint for the mediocrity that characterizes so much of the music of our time. I listened to some of her songs and they struck me as unobjectionable, if unexceptional, and possessing verve and confidence. Her lyrics occasionally rose to the level of moderate (if unexceptional) inspiration. She also has a nice voice, but her songs sound overly processed to me in a technological sense (like some of Beyonce’s songs). But is the whole package worthy of a clean billion for a single (albeit long) tour? I suppose a free trader would argue that anybody who can make that kind of money legally in a free market deserves it. Perhaps. But as regards aesthetics, I disagree.

It is pointless to argue over taste and preferences, but I think that we can make meaningful qualitative statements about art and entertainment. For instance, do Swift’s songs, which speak so powerfully to her fans, rise to the level of the nearly universal appeal of the better songs by the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Schubert, Simon and Garfunkel, or Fats Waller? Are her lyrics as fresh and original as those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the better acts of the British Invasion during the early and mid 1960s? Does her musical virtuosity push the limits to the same degree as the young Louis Armstrong, Big Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Jordan, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, or The Who? Does her voice, although good, carry the depth of feeling of a Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, or Hank Williams? Is her voice as fine as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, as distinctive as Sinatra’s or Crosby’s, or as big as those of Aretha Franklin or Linda Ronstadt?

From what I have listened to so far, she does not rise to the level of any of these apples and oranges in these respective categories, and yet none of them ever made anything like a billion dollars in a single tour. During their first U.S. tour, The Beatles made an impressive minimum of $50,000 per concert (a little under half a million dollars when adjusted for inflation). By contrast, Swift makes between $10 and $13 million per concert. Is she really 20-26 times better than all four Beatles?

Where entertainment is powerful and singular, art is more subtle and multifarious, leading to innumerable interpretations and reactions. There is of course a huge grey zone between the two. Using this distinction, it seems to me that Taylor Swift has both feet in the entertainment category as a runaway pop sensation, although possibly not as an entertainer (much less and artist) for the ages. Time will tell, and I may be wrong. But then, even all these years later, I still don’t understand the unwaning appeal of Boy George, Madonna, or Britney Spears among their fans.