JOLLY DAYS

Jarrell: Art and Fashion

In a wonderful if gloomy essay called A Sad Heart at the Supermarket Randall Jarrell says of the “media”, meaning pop culture,

If you're so smart why aren't you rich? is the ground-bass of our society, a grumbling and quite unanswerable criticism… Celebrity turns into testimonials, lectures, directorships, presidencies, the capital gains of an autobiography…Our culture is essentially periodical: we believe that all that is deserves to perish and to have something else put in its place…We feel that the present is better and more interesting, more real, than the past, and that the future will be better and more interesting, more real, than the present; but…we do not hold against the present its prospective obsolescence. Our standards have become to an astonishing degree the standards of what is called the world of fashion, where mere timeliness…is the value to which all other values are reducible…

Jarrell goes on to say,

All this is…the opposite of the world of the arts… of Homer and Mozart and Donatello…An artist's work and life presuppose continuing standards, values extended over centuries or millennia, a future that is the continuation and modification of the past, not its contradiction or irrelevant replacement.

Jarrell reminds us of the dismal truth, “New products and fashions replace the old, and the fact that they replace them is proof enough of their superiority.”

So concludes this brief look at the criticism of Randall Jarrell.