Many Artists Died Today

Yayoi Kusama had an exhibition back at the SF MOMA coincidentally during APEC

In the last day, a bunch of famous artists died and it made me reflect on what they are to me.

Dolly Parton and Conviction

First that I know of was Dolly Parton. She is quite a famous country music singer, and I actually was listening to her song Jolene and thinking it was such an unusual song in the way it portrayed the relationship between the three characters right before I came upstairs from the car and Julie told me that she'd died. I wonder if her enduring legacy will be that there are these books that little children (including Astra) get every so often from her Imagination Library. What a way to be remembered.

One thing that struck me about Dolly Parton was the fact that she's universally beloved. That's not a common thing for a celebrity - especially for someone in country music which is considered rural-coded and consequentially right-wing. The simplest technique here is to avoid it all. By simply shying away from all controversy until everything is settled, one dodges The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics and finds a path to vacuous virtue. The watchword of such people is the phrase "I am not political" in various forms. In an initial search, I was able to find her express this:

It’s all part of Parton’s famously apolitical stance. Why did she decide, early on, not to do politics? “Because you’re going to lose half your audience,” she says. “Even within my own family, especially the last few years since Trump and Biden, all that, it’s like we can’t even go to a family dinner any more. Especially if people are drinking – they get in a damn fight at the table.” She is dismayed at how polarised politics has become. “Don’t get so trapped where if you’re a Republican, you got to be this way, if you’re Democrat, you got to be that way. You’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling is that? I’ve got as many Democrats as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going to insult any of them because I care about all of them. I ain’t that good a Christian to think that I am so good that I can judge people. That’s God’s job, not mine. So as far as politics, I hate politics. Hate politics.”

— Dolly Parton on style, stardom and sexists; The Guardian

Her justification is quite reasonable. As an artist, losing half one's audience is catastrophic, so it is a prudent decision. This is a small fragment of a spoken sentence and it's easy to be misquoted, and though it is reasonable I wanted to verify it. I'd say the hot button issues of the last few decades are (from most-recent to oldest):

1. trans rights
2. gay rights
3. abortion
4. immigration
5. the Civil War

The last only because she is from The South.

Searching with ChatGPT I was able to find a few pretty good statements about these that point to an approach she takes that seems to deflect criticism: using her Christian faith to lean hard on the 'care' moral foundation. Overall, it lands in the territory where, if you were favourably disposed you'd claim as support, and if you were unfavourably disposed you might say it's a meaningless throwaway line. I suppose, as an entertainer, this is the path to bringing things to acceptance: reduce the sanctity of a thing, bring it into the range of normal things that people do, and then just offer kindness as acceptance.

In some sense, alleging cowardice of an entertainer for not speaking on some controversial issue has a flair of What Are Ja Rule's Thoughts On This Tragedy. Perhaps the best approach is to do this and keep your audience and reduce the chargedness of a topic. Below are the receipts:

Trans Rights

She sang a song on the soundtrack of the trans movie Transamerica. She's quite positive in an interview she gave

Larry King: Why have you been -- you've been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?

Dolly Parton: Well, I'm not interested in anything. I haven't made any efforts to do -- I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.

Larry King: That's what I mean.

Dolly Parton: Well yes, I'm very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we're all God's children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I'm certainly -- I'm not a judge and I'm certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.

That's a bit vague certainly. But I think she handles it more directly on the North Carolina's Bathroom Bill:

I think everybody should be treated with respect. I don’t judge people. I try not to get too caught up in all the controversy of things. I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are. I just know if I have to pee I’m gonna pee. I don’t care where it’s gonna be.

— CNN Interview, referenced in The Guardian

Here she treats a charged subject with irreverence, dropping it from "which sex gets to go to which bathroom" into a "I gotta pee" joke deflection.

Gay Rights

This one is pretty clear. In 2009, when she said this, it was just after Prop 8 had passed in California banning gay marriage. Not exactly a time of acceptance.

BEHAR: So then would you say that you are pro-gay marriage? I'm just curious because your background would say otherwise.

PARTON: Oh, I know that's true. I always say, well sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do.

Abortion

On an abortion ban in Tennessee, the Guardian quotes her like this:

“I do not speak to that,” she says when I bring it up. “I try to steer away from the things that I know I don’t need to be talking about. But I have my own views on everything, of course I do.” I can’t imagine that anyone as compassionate as Parton, or as feminist – she laughs at this – would support the ban. “Well, I’m not saying. That’s out of my league. I’m a singer, I’m an entertainer.”

— Dolly Parton on style, stardom and sexists; The Guardian

This is a sensitive subject, and I can see why she avoided it: her techniques of "God Loves Us All" or "Caring And Kindness Are Everything" do not suffice.

Immigration

The LA Times says she "stood up for undocumented immigrants when few others would" which primarily relies on her choosing to cover Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos). Fair enough. Apparently she never said anything about the subject after.

The Civil War

She apparently used to have a place called Dixie Stampede which is now renamed to Dolly Parton's Stampede.

Tim Curry and Space

Tim Curry also died yesterday, sadly. I couldn't shake the fact that he looked so familiar and that I must have seen him in some show or movie I liked. I pushed it aside and went about my day until I suddenly remembered where I'd seen him: Red Alert 3!

Yayoi Kusama and Art Criticism

Yayoi Kusama was the third that I heard about. Quite the number of notables for a day. Sadly, I never really got into her stuff. The polka dots etc. felt sort of like a novelty piece, neither thought-provoking nor moving in any way. But often with art, that's because I haven't really comprehended the influence. For instance, one particularly enjoyable moment from a Terry Pratchett book involved these fundamental particles called ideons floating through space until they caused an idea to form when they crashed into someone's brain. I think someone who has never encountered the idea of these particles or interaction might think "heh cool" but perhaps I found it delightful because of Physics.

I feel that way about Kusama, that there is some kind of picture I'm missing that makes it worthwhile, really only because she is so famed. I don't have that sensation about most of the masters because I've acquired over time an explanatory key for their works. I think Hopper does a good job of a semi-liminal view in Rooms by the Sea and Office in a Small City and I can appreciate Seurat's Pointillism or Vincent van Gogh's brush strokes and complementary colour. And Piet Mondrian's works could show up as the straight lines of Bauhaus design, and there's the easily comprehensible idea that they're about reduction of art from photorealism to impressionism to sheer shape to evoke sensation. I could perhaps even see this reduction to encoding movement into a fixed canvas in Pollock. This is all garden-variety art criticism and very accessible and easy to conclude.

I understand why art criticism is sometimes opaque and hard to comprehend. It's no different from a normal software engineer starting out with a Python program and finding their way to C which still makes sense and then into Clojure or Haskell which suddenly dispense with the notion of a "this happens, then that, and then a third thing". Certainly a Python program seems almost natural language so long as one encodes the notion of "RHS happens and gets put in LHS". There are quirks but perhaps a non-engineer could get somewhere. Perhaps a thread-as/thread-last macro from Clojure is actually more accessible to a layperson than to a newbie engineer, but I cannot imagine that a Haskell monadic formulation illustrates the isomorphism between List and Option.

Anyway, at this point, I wondered if there was someone out there doing art criticism and contextualization for the lay man. And while I could use an LLM to do this, I'd already established that I wasn't entirely able to ask a question that would answer in a reasonable way. But fortunately, someone has. I found this YouTube channel called GreatArtExplained and watched the video on Starry Night and it was just the thing I wanted. And guess what? A video on Kusama!

So accessible art criticism exists. Now I just have to go watch it!