The substitute said something interesting in class today when we were talking about rap and hip hop. She said, and I paraphrase, that looking past the vulgar, sexist, or disrespectful lyrics of many rappers, there's no denying that they are poets, and there is an art to what they are doing. She said she tries to look at a rap song the same way she might look at a Mannerist painting, as a valid form of artistic expression.
I'm glad she mentioned that because I agree with her perspective, but beyond that, I think it's interesting that she brought up visual art because I see a lot of parallels between the music world and the art world—even between today's rap music and the European masters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
We go to museums, read textbooks, we see these paintings or sculptures there that we consider masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and we accept that this is great art because we're told they are—and, well, it's true, they are. But taking a deeper look at the work, we also see the implications of the subject matter and the imagery itself, and the social meaning behind them. Basically, most of that “great art” was made by sexists for sexists, and often depicted a very sexist worldview. Women were simply sex objects back then just as they are now—certainly with a slightly different spin on it, but it's essentially the same view. It was a male dominated field with a heavily male consumer base, just like the hip hop industry is today. It's interesting that although separated chronologically by centuries, both these worlds actually treat their women in quite similar ways—I guess humans haven't really changed that much in the last 500 years, have they? We tend to forget about that dark side when we look at art (maybe because it's work done mostly by a bunch of dead white males), so it's important to keep that in mind; but at the same time, sexist or not, the best work from that period is still art, it's still beautiful, still influential and important. Meanwhile, people who complain about how offensive rap music is should consider why they would accept Tintoretto's Susanna and the Elders or Titian's Venus of Urbino as art without question, but not Kanye West's Jesus Walks.
P.S. While I'm on the subject, if anyone else is an art nerd you might like to take a look at this link. It's an 8 minute episode of the 1970's BBC series Ways of Seeing with John Berger, about the depiction of women in classical European art.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72AIab-Gdc
thanks rosie! along that line, I studied in Italy for six weeks this summer and saw a crazy amount of art. One of the things that struck me was that no matter the time period or style of art, men make art about women and women make art about men. There's a pretty consistent archetype of women as objects of lust and childbearing and there's also a consistent sense of mystery from one gender to the other. In discussing the place for women in hip hop and their need to prove themselves, someone made the point that women and men are inherently different and I think we also inherently need to work to understand each other. Our fascination with each other is a universally driving force for creating art, and I think the question comes down to how do we express how we understand and feel about each other without being offensive? and hip hop is a pretty strong example of crossing that line.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. It seems to me that more women today make art about women. I think that's a by-product of feminism. Am I wrong?
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