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When artists glorified war

Brainiac

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 19, 2012|By Joshua Rothman

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But there are turning points, too. The invention of gunpowder, Rabb argues, made war more expensive, destructive, impersonal, and bureaucratized; artists, discovering a new role as “critics of society,” began to turn against it. By the 1930s, “the one-time ally of the warrior, the artist,” had turned to “skepticism, and even antagonism.” European artists were “united in condemnation” of war.

In the fine arts, Rabb writes, that unanimity continues today: Visit an exhibition of contemporary art, and you’re unlikely to see a thrilling, patriotic painting of an American military maneuver in Afghanistan. It’s now only on film, Rabb argues, that you’ll witness artists trying to evoke the stirring battlefield emotions “that have long been tapped by their predecessors in stone, metal, ceramic, cloth, paper, and paint.”

Is the American dream naive?

We tend to think of the United States as an exceptionally mobile society — a society in which your future isn’t limited by your parents’ socioeconomic status. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah looks at the best data on economic mobility and finds that, in reality, America isn’t an especially mobile place, and hasn’t been for almost a century. In fact, a 2007 study showed that, today, “income heritability” is greater in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France; newer studies have added “Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan to the list of societies that are more mobile than the United States.”

If the United States isn’t really that mobile, then why do we make such a big deal about how mobile we are? The idea of the “American dream,” Noah points out, dates from the late 19th century, when agrarian society was giving way to industrialization, “wreaking maximum creative destruction.” It was, he writes, “an era when the loftiest rhetoric about the United States as the land of opportunity rang true.” Not so much nowadays. In fact, America hasn’t been particularly mobile among advanced countries since the early 20th century — something worth remembering next time you hear a politician wax poetic about the American dream.