How NR defends our tradition

The online editor of America’s leading conservative magazine again demonstrates the remarkable intellectual acuity and the undaunted will to uphold the standards of our civilization that have made her a source of unceasing wonder to discriminating readers. As explained by an admiring Tom Piatak writing at Chronicles, Kathryn Jean Lopez, exerting the authority of a true cultural critic, objects to the fact that Google today is celebrating the 409th anniversary of the birth of the painter Velazquez, rather than certain more recent and more familiar events that Miss Lopez regards as more important.

In fact, I myself have honored one of those events—one of the most tremendous in history—in the blog entry immediately below this one. But it never occurred to me that it is obligatory on everyone to observe that particular event every single year, while ignoring everything that came before it. As Mr. Piatak points out, for Miss Lopez and modern conservatives like her, our civilization consists only of its most recent period, namely the period of American ascendancy, not of the multi-layered, many-staged tradition of the Christian West and its precursors going back three thousand years. Of such conservatives it might truly be said, borrowing from Philip Larkin:

Western civilization began rather late for me
Between the Omaha Beach landing
And the death of Robert Kennedy.

- end of initial entry -

Rachael S. writes:

It is certainly not bad that Google chooses to commemorate Velazquez’s birthday, but I did find it rather odd that so literal an interpretation was given to it, while Christmas 2007 was treated in a secular way for 2007, and Easter, the most important Christian holiday, was given no commemoration at all in 2008, and has received none since 2001.

In contrast, holidays such as Earth Day 2008 and MLK Day 2008 were treated with respectful, relatively literal and unfuzzy representations.

This leads me to believe that the point of Google’s logos is to emphasize multiculti-liberalism, and to downplay and marginalize traditional Western, Christian culture. Google is the main search engine that people use in America, so when I see nothing done for Easter but Earth Day “religiously” and studiously commemorated, it is easy to assume that Google is simply reflecting a mainstream belief structure. Hence Earth Day is assumed to have more importance than it does, and the Resurrection of Our Lord, less.

LA replies:

I have no doubt that Google has an agenda such as you describe. But still it strikes me as revealing the prejudices of modern “conservatives” for Lopez to single out the Velasquez commemoration with the implication that, in the absence of a D-Day and RFK commemoration, the Valasquez commeration is objectionable. I mean, must everyone remember D-Day every D-Day?

Further, I felt confident in saying this, since I usually do commemmorate D-Day and I had done so today.

Richard W. writes:

Two points:

Firstly, I’m sure this is hard for you to grasp from where you sit, but View from the Right is the leading American conservative magazine. National Review is “People” for neo-conservatives and beltway politicos.

Secondly—Velasquez? The wonderful thing about art history, particularly traditional art history, say, that which was taught in the leading academies before the deconstruction virus destroyed them, is that there is a huge degree of agreement on something that to the casual student seems completely subjective. And that is excellence.

(In fact most disciplines of study in the traditional Western education share this wonderful trait. We view Aristotle as a far more significant philosopher than Sartre, almost universally. A major program of the left has been to destroy our common understandings of greatness.)

From the art historians’ point of view, Velasquez is certainly not in the first rank among western painters. That is, he does not stand with Titian, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso as a giant. It is questionable if he even stands fully in the second rank with Brach, Vermeer, Rubens and Rothko.

Therefore I can only assume that Google’s commemorating him is yet another attempt to raise all things Hispanic above their traditional standing and importance.

By the way your key point is brilliant and important. I noticed raising two children to college age that their high school history teachers were obsessed with the 20th century, and not surprisingly with the 1960s above all other eras. Both of my 20-something girls can tell you chapter and verse what MLK did, but would look befuddled if asked to explain what phrases such as “gates of Vienna” or “I came, I saw, I conquered” mean.

I take it as axiomatic that Google is a force for evil in the battle to preserve our civilization, and I give them no benefit of the doubt. It is not because of some deeper understanding of our full history that they went reaching back. Rather it is certain that they used their own Google technology to find something, anything, to mention today rather than remember the sacrifices of our fathers.

As it happens I enjoyed a beer after work this evening with a good friend whose father participated in D-Day landing as part of the Canadian Army. It is hard to fathom the heroism of those men, to this day. Like you, I remain in awe.

So no, we don’t all of us need to remember D-Day every year, but neither should we replace it with an inconsequential date associated with a very talented but still ordinary Spanish painter.

Thanks for everything you do for us. This thread perfectly illustrates why VFR reigns supreme among conservative journals.

LA replies:

Extravagant praise produces a dilemma for the one receiving it. How does one respond? The natural impulse is to say, “No, no, this is undeserved, untrue, too kind.” But, as La Rochefoucauld tells us (forgive the absence of accent marks):

Le refus des louanges est un desir d’etre loue deux fois.

The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice.

So I’ll just say, thank you very much.

I gather from your and Rachael’s comments that while Tom Piatak and I may have been wrong about Lopez’s intentions in this instance, our larger point about the present-oriented, anti-civilizational perspective of National Review and modern conservatism is still correct.

M. Mason writes:

Though academics will argue about his exact place among the pantheon of illustrious names in the history of art, I think it’s a mistake to refer to Velazquez in the casually dismissive way that your previous correspondent did. Leaving aside, for the moment, any opinion about what other motivations Google may have had for prominently celebrating his birthday on their webpage, we should get one thing clear. Diego da Silva Velazquez most assuredly was not some mere second or third-rate talent. He was one of the most outstanding European artists of his century. When the world’s greatest painters of the human figure are ranked—and not just by art historians, but especially among working artists today who ply their trade for a living (and I am one of them)—he is invariably regarded as one of the absolute masters and often placed at or near the very top of the list for the remarkable clarity of his artistic vision and disciplined sureness of hand.

His painting of Pope Innocent the X housed in the Galleria Doria Pamphili in Rome and the smaller study of his own endentured servant Juan de Pereja (owned by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York) that he executed as a sort of preliminary exercise before beginning work on his challenging papal subject are universally hailed as two of the greatest portraits ever painted. If you’ve ever seen these paintings in person the uncanny realism of Velasquez’s work is incredible, an effect he achieved with a painterly directness which continues to astonish after four hundred years. In both examples one can also see the illuminating power of portraiture to portray the human essence of an individual. Such work has an undeniable, inherent dignity, and is the exact opposite of the superficial, the trendy and the tasteless that we are bombarded with from practically every side in the modern art world.

The visual representation of real human beings at this highest level of artistic achievement in portraiture is obviously every bit a part of “the multi-layered, many-staged tradition of the Christian West” that you referred to as any of the other subjects routinely covered here at VFR. As a near-fatality of the aforementioned “deconstruction virus” of the early 20th century, however, it was a tradition that was becoming almost as extinct as gun-blueing or powdered wig-making. Fortunately, though, here and there the knowledge continued to be passed on, and now a new generations of artists closely study the work of outstanding master realist painters of the past like Diego da Silva Velazquez for inspiration. Whether it comes to painting great pictures, writing great poems or composing great music, without the preservation and handing down of this kind of specific knowledge and craft the human race is going to eventually come to the point where it will have forgotten how to do these things.

Mencius Moldbug writes:

Ha. Google is indeed from what I hear populated almost entirely by Obamabots.

But on the other hand, by putting most of the pre-1922 literature online at Google Books (though there are many frustrating exceptions), our dear, sweet young Burning Man progressives have basically canceled out all the campaign contributions that they’ve ever made, all the Memorial Days they’ve forgotten to remember, and all the carbon taxes they’ve shilled for. Times a hundred. It’s basically like building a death star and taping a big sign that says “Torpedo Entrance” to its exhaust port.

Because while it can’t really be located in present terms, on many if not most issues the political center of 1922 was far the right of VFR. It takes a little effort to become acclimatized to the pre-copyright world. But after you spend a little time browsing, you realize just how devastating their judgment of the 2008 edition of America would be. And worse, you realize that pretty much any time the conservatives and progressives predicted political causes and effects, the conservatives were right and the progressives were wrong.

We are, of course, in a war of ideas. And Google has dug up a gigantic arsenal of ancient killing machines, all marked “Reactionaries Only,” and given them to us with a happy progressive smile. How nice of them! Sometimes when I’m browsing around in there I expect to see a button marked “Flag This Book.” But no. I simply can’t imagine anyone in Mountain View censoring this collection, and I have to at least respect them for that.

LA replies:

Very amusing and hopeful. What Mencius says about conservative content hidden inside fashionable leftist packaging reminds me of an experience I’ve repeatedly had.

For example, about ten years ago, the Brooklyn Museum had an exhibit called something like “Multicultural Spanish America,” or “Colonial South America—the Multicutural Experience,” suggesting that early Spanish American art was “multicultural,” mixing the indigenous and the Spanish. Though I and a friend were put off by the multicultural theme, we were interested enough in the paintings to go see it anyway. The show had some very fine paintings and sculptures of a type we had never seen before, from Peru in particular. They were not dark and gloomy and death-obsessed, like Spanish and Mexican art, which I’ve never liked, but cheerful and friendly. For example, there was a big painting of Joseph’s work room with a boy Jesus there helping his father. The warm and wholesome family atmosphere made the painting totally unlike any Mexican Catholic painting I had seen. There was a sculpture of the Virgin of Quito that was magnificent. She was standing, as I remember, on the dragon, in her undaunted purity, conquering evil.

The exhibit represented a type of European, Catholic, Spanish art, transplanted to the New World, made by Spanish Catholic artists who had adopted a new and distinct style in their new land. There was nothing multicultural or Indian about these works. We realized the museum had given the exhibit the multicultural title because we live in an ideological society and all cultural events must reflect the prevailing multicultural ideology and be seen through a multicultural filter, regardless of their actual, non-multicultural content. If the exhibit had been called “Catholic Art of Colonial Spanish South America,” which was what it actually was, that would have been completely uncool, and perhaps opened the museum to charges of thoughtcrime.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2008 07:05 PM | Send