[MD] Picasso vs Disney

[plattholden at gmail.com]

John C,

I'm not familiar with Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" but if the following 
comment about it in Amazon is half-way accurate, I'd say save your money:

"This is the kind of book that is either going to inspire or infuriate you, but 
it should provoke valuable discussion and thought in either case. Johnson's 
thesis is quite simple: the revolutionary thinkers whose ideas have shaped 
intellectual history over the past 250 years were, for the most part, lousy 
human beings. These were not not common or garden variety jerks but 
personalities whose flaws were so manifest that they must call into question 
the value of the theories they generated.

"This is an interesting proposition. Does it matter that Peter Sellers, the 
world's greatest comedic actor, was a vile neurotic, that Marilyn Monroe was a 
goddess on screen but a drug-addled manipulator in everyday life, that Winston 
Churchill, who saved civilization during World War II, was also an alcoholic 
egomaniac? Probably not. But Johnson asks a deeper question: if a thinker 
cannot live out his own principles, can these ideas have any real merit? His 
book convinces us that there is a real connection between the rancid lives 
lived by intellectuals and the disasters their ideas produced.

"For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is adored by educational theorists and his 
ideas are entrenched in the curricula of teachers' colleges, despite the fact 
that he serially abandoned every one of his children. Karl Marx was bourgeois 
to the core and seems to have exploited the only working-class woman he ever 
knew: paying her starvation wages, impregnating her and forcing her to abandon 
their child. Johnson lacerates the behaviour of these prominent figures but 
more importantly shows how their shabby personal values foreshadow the social 
harm their works engendered."

Sounds to me like the politics of personal destruction so prevalent in today's 
culture. No matter that Jane Candidate will vote to curtail government 
spending, she owns 150 pairs of shoes. Recall the defense loudly proclaimed for 
Clinton in the Lewinsky affair: "It's a private matter." Never mind that he 
lied to cover it up. Besides, ad hominem attacks are logic fallacies. 

Johnson's book about creativity appears a better value. I agree with your 
praise of the Bagehot quote. "In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is 
no match for genius." Priceless! 

Such my opinion for what it's worth. I'm flattered you asked. Thanks for that. 
And for making me aware of Johnson's books. 

Platt   




On 15 Oct 2010 at 16:19, John Carl wrote:

Platt,

What do you think?

I've got only so much money and time, with so many books beckoning from
Amazon's lusty arms, and 50 whole dollars to spend, I need help deciding.
 Are you familiar with Paul Johnson's *Intellectuals*?  It sounds right up
your alley  - The New York times review called it "an intellectual making
fun of intellectuals".  Sounds like a hoot to me, too.   But the one I'm
really interested in, his second book of his trilogy (the third will be *
Heroes*) called *Creators*.

review snippets:

Creators is a riveting collage of a book. Its ambitious scope is adumbrated
by its subtitle: "From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney."
Shakespeare, Bach, Jane Austen, Turner, and T. S. Eliot are here; so are
Wagner, Tiffany, Victor Hugo, and the dress designer Cristóbal Balenciaga.
(The chapter on Balenciaga and Christian Dior is a special delight.) Along
the way Johnson glances at figures as disparate as Imhotep, vizier or chief
minister to a succession of Egyptian pharaohs circa 2600 B.C., and Thomas
Telford, the great Scottish bridge-builder and engineer. Johnson has
prepared the widest possible canvas upon which to paint his tableau.
Creativity, he points out, is a fundamental God-given grace of human life,
inherent in all of us, as much in the humorist whose creative gift issues in
the transient if utterly absorbing phenomenon of laughter as in the
architect, painter, musician, or writer, whose creativity issues in more
lasting monuments.


---------
It is worth noting that the expression of creativity, even creativity at a
high level, does not require genius. Johnson devotes a chapter to Jane
Austen (along with some other women novelists), and though he greatly
admires Austen´s novels - what sane person does not? - he is probably right
that she "was not a genius." This is not to diminish Austen´s achievement
but rather to suggest that genius may not be the essential concomitant of
superlative artistic, intellectual, or cultural achievement. There are after
all plenty of geniuses about. Often, their productions are more curious than
substantial. Think only of Hegel: a man, as Kierkegaard said, who built an
intellectual palace but lived in the guard house. As the English essayist
Walter Bagehot observed in another context, "In the faculty of writing
nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.

---------

Hey! I like that.  Somebody else used my Kierkegaard quote.  Didn't know it
was of Hegel, but that sure does make sense.

I also like the bit about genius being more full of nonsense than stupidity,
for obvious reasons.