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Insights from Quadrant
Hellbent on ugliness
Modern Age is a site well worth bookmarking for regular visits. In analysing Prince Charles’ new portrait, editor Daniel McCarthy shows why:
….Cultural scholars of a free-market bent have ventured an explanation for the primitive, ugly, offensive, and kitschy character of so much modern art. In an age when any consumer can own the symphonies of Beethoven or take a cheap flight to see the Mona Lisa firsthand, tastemakers whose own tastes were shaped by anti-capitalist intellectuals came to see the enjoyment of beauty as dreadfully vulgar. Something had to distinguish persons of enlightened sensibility from the vile bourgeoisie. But what could the great and good buy that the public couldn’t copy?
The answer wasn’t something that the masses couldn’t afford but something that they wouldn’t want—unbeautiful and unpopular things, the less appealing or more transgressive the better. On this account, elite anxiety is the root of modernism at its worst. Off-putting works are to be cherished precisely for their power to repel the right sort of person…
Insights from Quadrant
Some recent Quadrant book releases with direct links to our online store.
The Burden of Culture
Gary Johns
Aboriginal politics are now dominated by demands for reconciliation, self-determination, and acknowledgment of culture. But these concepts – defined and promoted by an urban elite of educated Aboriginal activists – hide the bigger truth that most people of Aboriginal descent today are already integrated. Order here
Romancing the Primitive
by William J. Lines
This book is about civilisation’s discontents, those who have idealised people outside of civilisation, imagining they lead happy, fulfilling lives at peace with one another and in harmony with the world around them. Order here
Beating France to Botany Bay
by Margaret Cameron-Ash
The reason French isn’t Australia’s native tongue? Well, it was a close run thing, as Margaret Cameron-Ash details in her page-turning account of the race between superpowers that would determine if the Union Jack or Tricoleur claimed the Great South Land. Order here
_________________
The Persecution of George Pell
by Keith Windschuttle
Had it not been for the High Court, an innocent man might still be in prison for a ‘crime’ that simply could not have been committed as VicPol’s stitch-up of an investigation insisted. Windschuttle lays bare the travesty of Pell’s persecution in a forensic examination of what may well be the most appalling legal and media lynching in living memory. Order here
_________________
Bitter Harvest
by Peter O’Brien
Fauxborigine Bruce Pascoe was pocketing awards and prizes all over when O’Brien picked up his Dark Emu ‘truer history’ and realised within a few pages that it was not merely a work of slipshod scholarship but, far worse than that, a brazen confection written in the ink of bare-faced gall. Order here
_________________
And for a final treat, why not<br> become a Quadrant subscriber?
Insights from Quadrant
Hellbent on ugliness
Modern Age is a site well worth bookmarking for regular visits. In analysing Prince Charles’ new portrait, editor Daniel McCarthy shows why:
….Cultural scholars of a free-market bent have ventured an explanation for the primitive, ugly, offensive, and kitschy character of so much modern art. In an age when any consumer can own the symphonies of Beethoven or take a cheap flight to see the Mona Lisa firsthand, tastemakers whose own tastes were shaped by anti-capitalist intellectuals came to see the enjoyment of beauty as dreadfully vulgar. Something had to distinguish persons of enlightened sensibility from the vile bourgeoisie. But what could the great and good buy that the public couldn’t copy?
The answer wasn’t something that the masses couldn’t afford but something that they wouldn’t want—unbeautiful and unpopular things, the less appealing or more transgressive the better. On this account, elite anxiety is the root of modernism at its worst. Off-putting works are to be cherished precisely for their power to repel the right sort of person…
Insights from Quadrant
Some recent Quadrant book releases with direct links to our online store.
The Burden of Culture
Gary Johns
Aboriginal politics are now dominated by demands for reconciliation, self-determination, and acknowledgment of culture. But these concepts – defined and promoted by an urban elite of educated Aboriginal activists – hide the bigger truth that most people of Aboriginal descent today are already integrated. Order here
Romancing the Primitive
by William J. Lines
This book is about civilisation’s discontents, those who have idealised people outside of civilisation, imagining they lead happy, fulfilling lives at peace with one another and in harmony with the world around them. Order here
Beating France to Botany Bay
by Margaret Cameron-Ash
The reason French isn’t Australia’s native tongue? Well, it was a close run thing, as Margaret Cameron-Ash details in her page-turning account of the race between superpowers that would determine if the Union Jack or Tricoleur claimed the Great South Land. Order here
_________________
The Persecution of George Pell
by Keith Windschuttle
Had it not been for the High Court, an innocent man might still be in prison for a ‘crime’ that simply could not have been committed as VicPol’s stitch-up of an investigation insisted. Windschuttle lays bare the travesty of Pell’s persecution in a forensic examination of what may well be the most appalling legal and media lynching in living memory. Order here
_________________
Bitter Harvest
by Peter O’Brien
Fauxborigine Bruce Pascoe was pocketing awards and prizes all over when O’Brien picked up his Dark Emu ‘truer history’ and realised within a few pages that it was not merely a work of slipshod scholarship but, far worse than that, a brazen confection written in the ink of bare-faced gall. Order here
_________________
And for a final treat, why not<br> become a Quadrant subscriber?
