A Comment on Romanticism in Art

…We’ve lost the sense that expressing emotions in art is radical, due in part to attacks by modernist 20th century founders. For example, like attacks on Victorian taste and style by masters like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Certainly, there’s a lot to attack if the object of aesthetic wrath is mediocre, rather than the work of the greatest figures of an era.

But I wonder if a laudable distaste for the substandard is really all that’s going on here. I’m beginning to suspect that what’s also involved is an unwillingness to allow certain types of feelings and ideas to be expressed at all. A hatred of the radical masked as a distain for bad taste.

If that’s the case, then let’s have more bad taste please. But I think we should be complex enough to be bicameral in the arts. Let’s have more control and restrictions, for the sake of the art. And let’s have more disciplined abandon also.

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