Can we design better health?
BUSH AND THE LAW
The Bush 43 Administration may be considered criminally liable in the following areas:
1-MURDER Pursued an international war on false premises
2-GRAFT Supported a culture of bribery, spoils and profiteering
3-HARASSMENT Used public power to destroy political enemies
4-FRAUD Stolen and fixed elections
5-CORRUPTION Exploited public agencies, like Justice, for political interest
6-TYRANNY Trampled on the pursuit of science, the rights of citizens and the bodies of prisoners
7-SUBVERSION Disrupted the international community with a diplomacy of threat and blackmail
8-THEFT Diverted public money for private interest
9-VANDALISM Gave free reign to private enterprises that damage the environment
10-PERJURY Encouraged aides to lie under oath
11-CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS Encouraged aides to defy subpoenas
12-SLANDER Spread defamatory lies about opposition candidates
Excerpts:
Preface: A War and a Killing...............................................4
During the second half of March and until the middle of April, 2003, the American viewing public doubled in size as television cameras brought a live war into their living rooms. Attention flagged only slightly as Baghdad fell and the Coalition turned its attention to less important cities in the North, but when these too surrendered, it was clear to media executives that their newfound market share might be subject to serious erosion. Accordingly, decisions were made in high places, correspondents hopped on planes, and all of a sudden, completely new images danced on the daytime screen. These images were no longer of a war that killed thousands and changed international history. They were now of a woman named Laci Peterson, once young and pretty, whose headless body had been found in San Francisco Bay.
The switch from honorable reportage to yellow journalism was dumbfounding. Journalists missed no opportunity to pander to the baser instincts of their constituency: to the voyeurism that had been so gainfully exploited in the Simpson murder case, to the ghoulishness that makes millions of dollars for horror movies, to the zest for violence that draws large audiences to televised contact sports and crime dramas. Though it was never shown graphically, Ms. Peterson’s headless corpse became a national product, boosting ratings and selling ads. The TV channels made money. But they vulgarized their viewers in the process.
A far deeper national embarrassment is now apparent. As I write in 2006, the Iraqi war itself, billed as a defense of liberty in the face of mounting terrorism, has emerged as an arbitrary initiative, based on trumped-up allegations and advanced with inadequate intelligence. In late 2005, as American opposition to the war broke the surface on several fronts, George W. Bush and his aides compounded their lies by falsely asserting that before the war they had given Congress all the intelligence that they had received from their own classified sources. If distracting the public with murder and corpses amounts to vulgarization, what can we say about an administration that goes to war blindfolded and thrives on the public’s ignorance of its motives?
What follows is a meditation on American vulgarity: its components, its causes and its possible cures. I realize that Americans tend to be uneasy with the V-word, usually linking it to the snotty tastes of some ancien regime. My response to this is that only the word ‘vulgarity’ can describe the particular combination of gullibility, ignorance and self-indulgence that characterizes the American marketplace, and only the word ‘vulgarizing’ can describe the various hucksters who exploit it. I also believe that the real opposite of vulgarity is not some highbrow notion of Sophistication (a word already vulgarized by marketers), but rather consciousness, pure and simple. Consciousness, the ability to be alert to important things and literate in them, is a kind of mental oxygen: an element without which people lose track of their own lives, and societies cannot renew themselves. Consciousness, to be sure, has its liabilities. When we focus only on the vulgarity of others, and without self-scrutiny, our consciousness can be as dangerous as ignorance. Figures as well known as Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence have erred in this direction (see Chapter Nine). But consciousness is well worth the risk, especially in times like these, when essential liberties – including even our access to information – are threatened by corporate greed and political interest. And, as we will see from the experience of 19th century civil rights activist Frederick Douglass, the first subject of our consciousness should be the extent to which our own lives are being degraded.
PART ONE: Vulgarity and American Culture........................7
Chapter One: The Domains of Vulgarity....................................8
What is vulgarity? Synonyms like “grossness” or “baseness” only beg the question: what makes an action vulgar, gross or base? My working definition is as follows: an action is vulgar when it is at once ignorant, harmful and popular. And vulgarization is any process in which public awareness is stifled in the interests of state power or private profit.
I must add to this that the ignorance involved in vulgarity is compound. To act vulgarly we must be ignorant not only of other people but of ourselves, not only of the nature of our action, but of its ramifications in the world at large. To act vulgarly we must, with the aid of willing marketers, politicians and priests, indulge our own ignorance in large, mutually supportive groups. Vulgarity reaches full bloom when it becomes established practice and takes on the look of law. It then becomes something worse than ignorance: a kind of communal depression.
Chapter Two: Waste and Wisdom..............28
In the economics of the human spirit, every activity creates some sort, or sorts, of product: sleep produces refreshment, stress produces fatigue, study produces skills, etc. The results of some actions are positive, while others result in loss. Considering American vulgarity along these lines, we find that its product is waste: a waste that is not only economic and tangible but also cultural and intellectual.
Chapter Three: Polite Vulgarity: American Complacency and its Suppliers.....38
...Appropriately, it [America] cast into the cold the thrice-tried George Bush in favor of a charming Southerner who spoke fluent Purse and Tummy. Clinton was reelected in 1996 partly for the same reasons, and partly because his Republican opponent, Sen. Bob Dole, ran a timid and unimaginative campaign.
Then the party began. While Africa seethed and Afghanistan festered, Americans turned to their dot.coms and their dim sum. While Osama bin Laden fine-tuned his detonative skills in New York, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Americans were into mutuals and microbrews. While the same bin Laden deconstructed the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, lit professors in the States taught deconstruction and other theories that denied all objectivity and all value. And if you grew tired of being a deadbeat yourself, you could turn on the most popular sitcom of the decade: Seinfeld, a series that dwelt, ad nauseam, with a group of deadbeats.
But such diversions were not enough. Americans needed some real action. And so, as Al Qaeda drew up its own list of exciting surprises, Americans headed to the box office to watch Clint Eastwood in A Perfect World and In the Line of Fire, Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory and Lethal Weapon: 3 and 4 and Arnold Schwartzenegger in True Lies and Last Action Hero. But even these thrilling movies, and the suspenseful novels of Stephen King, Anne Rice, John Grisham and Michael Crichton, the wonders of television, and the adrenalin rush of extreme sports, were not enough for a growing number of Yanks. Americans in greater and greater number complained to their doctors about depression. Many expressed the sense that they were not finding enough meaning in life. These complainers were duly medicated. Drug sales soared.
Chapter Four: Vulgarity, Inc.; Vulgarity.com..........53
Information Slavery. In 1993 I attended a seminar that included a senior executive from one of America’s top insurance companies. I happened to tell him that I sometimes wrote articles for another major insurer, in an in-house magazine that dealt with quality-of-life issues. He replied, with an air of seasoned wisdom and solid experience, that he could think of no reason why an insurance company should try to educate its clients.
Remind you of anybody? Distrust of communication is characteristic of executives. Some withhold information in the belief that this strategy will empower them (see Conservation of Power, below). Some have no conception of the positive influence of lucidly-conveyed information. Some are so congenitally secretive that they are phobic to talk and writing (it was said of a West Coast department head that “He kept secrets even from himself”). Most importantly, some – I fear more than some – are unable to handle information in the first place. They have reached their top positions by making sales or cutting deals or motivating staff, but nowhere along the line have they picked up legitimate analytic skills. When a considered decision is necessary, they rely on guesswork and impulse, and then dream up a plausible rationale.
Chapter Five: Vulgarity and Nature..............................68
Growth is not just a cultural obsession. Growth has become a theoretical model for economists, executives and even civil servants. The idea is that economic entities, be they towns or corporations, cannot remain robust unless they keep growing, and that this growth imperative has no chronological limit. The Growth People are no amateurs either. They can cite factors and crunch numbers. But what they cannot do, apparently, is confront the dangers implicit in their model and their imperative. They would do well to note the teaching of the forest. They would do well to remember that the most dramatic example of unimpeded growth in nature is cancer, which kills its host and, necessarily, itself. The most colossal and preposterous of all vulgarities would be a civilization that, in the course of its busy, growing ways, paved over its environment and destroyed its only source of sustenance.
RELEVANT LINKS:
http://www.themostamazingthing.com/
http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/vulgar.html
Why Thinking Matters, by Robert Grudin
GrudinCo
RGrudin CV: http://rgrudin.googlepages.com/grudincv
Recommended sites:
Photos by Ted Grudin, art by Alfred Kubin ("The Adoration")
ROBERT GRUDIN'S NEW DESIGN PROJECT
Design and Culture
The accompanying illustrations depict some of the topics and people discussed in the current project. They include Donato Bramante's plan for St. Peter's Cathedral (above), the Palazzo Te near Mantua, the Sala dei Giganti in the Palazzo Te, Berruguete's portrait of Federico and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a self-portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, landscapes by two artists to be named later, the author's design for a universal TV remote repair, Moderna's revision of the Bramante-Michelangelo plan for St. Peter's, a model of Albert Speer's "great hall," a 1954 Buick Century, a first baseman's glove ca. 1930, a Citroen Deux Chevaux ca. 1960, a 1957 Norton Dominator, a Mercury outboard motor, ca. 1954, and Thomas Jefferson's gravestone at Monticello.
Excerpt:
From Chapter 8, "The Lady in the Picture"
Pedro Berruguete and the Design of Character
In or around 1480, the young Spanish painter Pedro Berruguete made the long journey to the Italian town of Urbino to help decorate the new palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. The invitation was not one to be taken lightly. Duke Federico was the talk of Europe. The most successful of the great condottieri, a general who never lost a single battle, he had all but single-handedly rescued Italy from Venetian domination. His leadership, a combination of wise strategy and spirited assaults, had won him the British Order of the Garter and hoards of wealth. At home, however, he was the gentlest and most peace-loving of men. Having cut his teeth at one of the first great Humanist schools, he was an avid student of the arts and sciences who astounded academic professionals with his uncanny memory and depth of understanding. He became learned in Aristotle under the tutelage of his close friend Maestro Lazzaro, whom he later made Bishop of Urbino. Young Berruguete had reason to be excited. He was on his way to meet a living legend.
Federico was also skilled in architecture, and his new palace was without doubt his greatest work of art. His work in this line compares favorably with that of Thomas Jefferson’s, for while Jefferson strove ably in the style of Palladio, Federico realized an original design that would become the architectural image of his own many-faceted character. Its gardens, courtyards and balconies of his palazzo mediate between art and nature, inner and outer space. The great building contains two chapels (one Christian, the other pagan), a set of elegant private chambers, enough spacious salons to entertain the entire town (as Federico sometimes did) and, to exercise the Duke’s military bent, an entire floor laid out as a horseback riding school. No building more eloquently expresses the conjoined oppositions that were at the heart of the Humanist project: art and nature, brain and body, prowess and piety, Christian and pagan, public and private. The palace was a philosophical manifesto.
Federico’s greatest love, and the source of his most impassioned aspirations, was books. He employed an army of 30 to 40 scribes who labored 14 years copying every important book he could lay hands on. Each completed manuscript was bound in scarlet and silver, except for his Bible, which merited gold. By the time of his death he had amassed the best library in Christendom, bar none. As international bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci put it,
A short time before the Duke went to Ferrara it chanced that I was in Urbino with his Lordship, and I had with me the catalogues of the principal Italian libraries: of the papal library, of those of S. Marco at Florence, of Pavia, and even of that of the University of Oxford, which I had procured from England. On comparing them with that of the Duke I remarked how they all failed in one respect; to wit, they possessed the same work in many examples, but lacked the other writings of the author; nor had they writers in all the faculties like this library.
The Duke put his magnificent books at the disposal of visiting scholars, to whom he extended every other courtesy.
It fell to Pedro Berruguete to paint Duke Federico’s portrait. From the painting (fig.?) it is clear that the commission was far from simple: Federico wanted not only his likeness but his unique character memorialized for the ages. How to do this in a single frame was Pedro’s challenge, and he met it as follows: The Duke sits reading with his son Guidobaldo by his side. Apparently Federico has been reading aloud, for the boy’s left hand is extended as though in query. Federico’s book, bound in scarlet, bears on its cover his family crest. His ceremonial apron rests serenely on a full coat of armor, which prominently displays the Order of the Garter. The battle helmet lies on the floor to the lower right, while on the lectern to the upper left surprisingly sits a bishop’s mitre.
Berruguete’s rendition of the Duke is a complex organization of ideas. Federico’s armor suggests his martial prowess. His ceremonial garments bespeak his public eminence, while his solitary position with his son symbolizes his private side. The bishop’s mitre betokens the Duke’s piety, probably with an in-house nod to his friend Lazzaro. But the message of Berruguete’s design does not stop there. The Spaniard organized his canvas into two intersecting planes: Guidobaldo>book>Federigo and mitre>book>helmet. Thus the opened book symbolically mediates between the older and younger generation and between the arts of war and those of peace. Berruguete thus realizes Federico’s idea of knowledge as the central sustaining and renewing force in culture. Thus he is able to portray not just the appearance but the philosophical character of the man.
Giulio Romano and the Deconstruction of Design
In 1524 the reading public of Rome was variously outraged, stunned and delighted by the worst scandal in the then-brief history of printed art. Poet Pietro Aretino and artist Giulio Romano had teamed up with engraver Marc Antonio Raimondi to produce I Modi (“The Ways [of doing it]"), a graphic catalogue of sexual positions, with each image accompanied by a naughty sonnet. I Modi became simultaneously a bestseller and a rare book, for the Vatican was destroying every copy it could get its hands on. Raimondi was duly clapped in jail. Aretino tried to shift the blame onto Giulio, who developed a sudden yen for points remote. Before year’s end he had moved to Mantua and entered the service of Marquis (later Duke) Federico Gonzaga, that city’s lord. Federico was not appalled by Giulio’s scandal. In fact, the Marquis would exploit precisely those foibles of genius which had gotten Giulio into hot water in the first place.
Over the next decade and a half, Giulio would work on a wide variety of projects for Federico: everything from urban renewal to the finest art. He was especially good at producing fantastic court entertainments. In the words of the eminent art historian Giorgio Vasari,
Nor was there ever anyone more fanciful in devising masquerades and designing extravagant costumes for jousts, festivities and tournaments, as was seen with stunned surprise by the Emperor Charles and all those who were present.
But Giulio’s greatest achievement was a blend of architecture and painting. By 1526 he began the work that would become Federico’s pride and joy: a massive pleasure palace outside the city where the ruler might indulge in fancies less decorous than those allowable in his urban residence. Graced with civic honors and in control of an army of artists, assistants and laborers, Giulio spent eight years creating the Palazzo Te, a brilliantly decorated architectural tribute to pagan antiquity and sensual indulgence (see http://rgrudin.googlepages.com/te). Because the entire building, which still stands intact today, was executed either by Giulio’s own hand or to his express intention, the Palazzo Te can be seen as one of the largest singly-authored works of art ever completed.
The Palazzo is also the world’s most capacious expression of the Renaissance artistic style known as Mannerism. Though the term Mannerism (from the Italian maniera, “style”) has been applied to artists as diverse as El Greco, Michelangelo, Cellini, Arcimboldo, Anguissola, Breugel, Perugino and Bronzino, it is Giulio himself who deserves pride of place for diverging from the more precise representations of his teacher Raphael to artistic performances that combine technical expertise with humor, self-consciousness, trickery, deliberate exaggeration, mixed genres and fanciful conceptions. Unlike earlier Renaissance art, which fixated on its relation to nature, Mannerist art could comment on itself, invade other disciplines and playfully enlarge on its relationship to the viewer.
Among the Mannerist extremes that characterize the palace – including painting pretending to be sculpture, stucco preteznding to be stone, extravagant eroticism and symbolic rustications – the most arresting is the Sala dei Giganti (“room of the giants”) a large chamber whose walls and ceiling double as a single panoramic painting. The painting relates, in epic style, a violent conflict between Heaven and Earth. From the ceiling Jupiter hurls thunderbolts down on a tribe of rebellious giants at eye-level, who are depicted as being crushed under the divinely-shattered roofs, walls and columns of their den. There is political allegory at work here: with Jupiter Giulio pays tribute to Emperor Charles V, who would be awed by his visit to Te and who would consequently promote Federico to Duke of Mantua. But the Sala functions on two deeper levels of meaning as well, and to understand these two levels is to appreciate the sophistication of Giulio’s design:
First, the Sala is psychologically destabilizing. Entering a room that seems to be in the process of collapse is something of a shock, especially to those viewers aware that the whole palace, situated in a marsh, is not built quite as solidly as it appears to be. Vasari, who had difficulty containing his rapture for the Sala, waxes eloquent on this point:
So let no one think ever to see any work of the brush more horrible and frightening, or more realistic, than this; and whoever enters that room and sees the windows, doors and so forth all distorted and apparently hurtling down, and the mountains and buildings falling, cannot but fear that everything will; crash down upon him,…
The Sala, in fact, functions as the inner sanctum of a variety of miscellaneous shocks and disorderings that make up the whole palace. The function of all these – the design goal of the Palazzo de Te in general – is a displacement of sensibility, a deliberate bewilderment that separates the observer from everyday common sense realities and relocates awareness in a new world of fantasy and license. Nowhere more profoundly than in Giulio’s palace can one sense an architecture of intoxication, a poetics of arousal.
Second, the Sala functions as a designer’s declaration of independence. You would think at first that the giants’ crumbling edifice is an ironic joke at the designer’s own expense, implying the ultimate frailty of his or any other human handiwork. But it can also be seen as quite the contrary: a manifesto of artistic prowess so refined and self-conscious that it can dialogue with its own destruction. This second interpretation is far more conformable to the wit, will and excess of Giulio’s vision as a whole. If Pedro Berruguete’s Urbino portrait is art in the service of philosophy, Giulio’s Sala dei Giganti is art that overreaches philosophy in its quest for self-knowledge and expansive consciousness.
Sofonisba Anguissola and the Eye of the Beholder
The power of art to destabilize sensibility and to transfigure awareness is nowhere more evident than in a work by Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1530-1625), the first notable woman painter of the modern world. Anguissola’s illustrious career gives testimony to the sweeping cultural renewal of the high Renaissance. Her father, though himself prosperous, took the revolutionary step of having each of his daughters trained as an artist. Sofonisba he put in the care of the Bernardino Campi, a noted painter who had begun his career under the influence of Giulio Romano. From early on Sofinisba showed signs of a talent so remarkable that it impressed Michelangelo himself. During the 1560’s she achieved international fame as court painter to Philip II of Spain, and she spent the rest of her long life enjoying affluence and renown.
The painting in question is a stunning example of Mannerism at its most evocative. It is also one of the most exotic self-portraits ever realized. Sofonisba portrays herself as an image on a canvas that is being painted by none other than her own teacher, Bernardino. The teacher’s face is darker, with more finely worked detail, while the face on the “canvas” is sunnier and more sanguine: a distinction that suggests that Sofonisba is imitating Bernardino’s style of portraiture for the former and expressing her own style with the latter. Bernardino is captured in the process of detailing the brocade on his model’s dress. In his left hand he holds a mahlstick pressed against the canvas to steady his right hand for this delicate work.
One more introductory note: Bernardino is looking out at where you or I, as viewers, would be standing to look at the painting, and also at where the subject of his art would be sitting. Sofonisba is looking at us too, as though to show that she appreciates this visual joke. What she has done is put the viewer precisely in her shoes.
This joke, however, is also a uniquely expressive device. By putting me in the exact position where she as model would have had to sit, Sofonisba is warping my personal space, destabilizing my own subjective paradigm and requiring me to identify with hers. Why should she want this? Look at the quiet radiance of her face! Sofonisba wants me to join her in celebrating her unprecedented arrival as a female art master in a world of men. In painting herself as a painted image, she is demonstrating both her personal beauty and her professional clout, and in the bargain showing the kind of apparently effortless wit that, for her generation, was supposed to accompany even the most serious of achievements (more on this later).
Sofonisba’s use of color, moreover, carries a special message of its own. The way in which her face seems to cast out a light of its own in comparison to Bernardino’s rather shadowy figure suggests the view, already implicit in Giulio’s work, that art can generate a strange and brilliant new reality: that artistic poesis can compete with creating nature. This view and its many ramifications will reach their apogee in the next century with Shakespeare’s Prospero as artist/magus in The Tempest and the living statue in The Winter’s Tale, attributed by the playwright to Giulio himself:
that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. (V.ii.104-08)
Two other oddities in the painting deserve our attention. Why would Bernardino need to look out at his subject in order to realize the minute and abstract shapes of her brocade? Much more fittingly to artistic technique, he ought to be focusing directly on his canvas. Has he turned his head to respond to a comment she has made or simply to appreciate her beauty? Possibly; but more likely Sofonisba has turned Bernardino’s face outwards and fixed his eyes on the viewer in order to reinforce the viewer’s identification with her.
Finally, please follow the line of the painter’s mahlstick out towards the imaginary canvas. As it crosses Sofonisba’s left arm, it appears to create a shadow, as though it were pressing against real fabric. This is Sofonisba’s parting shot, an irrepressible play of cleverness that simultaneously destabilizes us anew and reasserts the artist’s capacity to subvert or reinvent our reality where and when she pleases.
Robert Grudin has published in various fields--philosophy (Time and the Art of Living, The Grace of Great Things, On Dialogue), fiction (Book, a novel), and scholarship (Mighty Opposites). His second novel, The Most Amazing Thing, was a finalist for the Franklin Award in fiction. He travels widely as a speaker and consultant.