...Many - most? - of the canonical works of Western literature and music from the first half of this century aren't a walk in the woods, understanding-wise, whether we're talking about Stevens or Schonberg. Why is that? Certainly an element of it is trying to distance the work from what Alex Cockburn once called the garbage factory...''
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I'll try to answer the implicit question, which is why is so much of early to late modern art apparently opaque. This range would include say Picassco to de Kooning, and from say Richard Strauss to Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Weber. In lit it would cover say Andre Gide or Thomas Mann through Beckette and Robbe-Grillet.
The answer is that all the arts of the 19thC found themselves in exile from their aristocratic and monarchical state patrons. In short they were thrown back on the rise of the bouregoisie, and even in this context, certainly not all the bourgeoisie were interested. As a consequence, most arts developed a limited audience and a limited patronage, and there was a very sizable contraction along with a division between between the so-called low, middle and high brow versions.
With the arrival of mass production or at least mass reproduction methods, the handmade arts contracted even further. By the middle to late 19thC for example it was possible to produce photographs and by the end of the century it was possible to reproduce photographs in books. With the rise of the industrial middle class, as opposed to the bourgeoisie who were now transformed into something like the wannabe capitains of industry, the market for mass produced arts of all sorts blossomed and were produced specifically for this new middle class.
Meanwhile only the rich and near rich could afford paintings, high end crafts, interior decor, custom domestic architecture, or going to the opera, the ballet, the symphony, or the theater. These became the marker of high brow class privilage, especially in the neurotic east coast with such exemplars as Rockefeller, Morgan, Guggenheim, Carngie, and out here in the west coast with Leland Stanford or Wm R. Hearst. On the other hand, just about anybody could get into a bar, dance hall, burlesque, vaudeville, or staged musical---all the low to middle brow arts of the masses from the late 19thC to the say mid-30's.
A new class took center stage in the same period, the industrial prolitariat. Their arts were drinking, dancing, telling stories, and playing music of their own that transformed the now `high' arts into a even more remote, privilaged, and isolated position with an even more gated community of patrons, their artists, and whatever subsidities could be extracted from the by now secular state.
>From the artists perspective, the competition for patrons, the
isolation, and the intensity of demand for one-off custom production
took center stage. In particular, the patron class in the upper
reaches of the social register were quite advanced in their tastes,
their demands, and in their long acquainence with the arts of their
choice. They wanted to be awed and they were. (One could go off on the
erotic needs of art matrons, but that leads elsewhere.) Various
efforts like the 1913 Armory show in the US that presented the
avant-guard of Europe to America, blew the underwear off the stoggie old
biddies of the East Coast haute bourgeoisie who were used to having
their fingers licked as their outrageously engraciating portraits were
done by such gentleman as John Singer Sargent and others.
The advanced arts were in a war with their own patron class, abusing their patron's delicate sensibilities with the same savage dismissal as the artist felt they themselves had been dismissed.
This war became the signiture of all the advanced arts, right on down to the absurdities of today.
On the other hand, the arts like the advanced physical sciences and certainly mathematics of that period all moved far beyond their commonly understood positions, roles, and accessibility or need to fill more practical demands---that they all once fullfilled and were once upon a time restricted to. That all these fields underwent a hyper-specialization is certainly not news. However, all of these moves into the realms of abstraction in thought and practice followed what could be loosely be called an internal dynamic arising from their own vastly expanded formalization and in their hyper-self-conscience examination of their foundations.
It is very interesting and revealing to me that even the most accessible of all arts at one point, the dance hall jazz band, eventually evolved into the musical experimentations and spiritual explorations of musicians like John Coltrain, Miles Davis and others. Even Duke Ellington was involved in this kind of trip, although he managed a much more civil, accessible and pleasing version, not unlike Matisse or Debussy.
In a different age and time, it is a little astonishing to realize that Coltrain's My Flavorite Things was on the Top Ten music charts in LA in the early 60s or that his Love Supreme was played continuously on the local jazz station during the Watts Riots.
It seems to me that the Mexican Muralist, particularly Orozco had it about right. Expressionism is the direct link between the so-called high brow arts of the elite and the impassioned outrage that always simmers in the vast legions of the working poor. It is that intuitive link that (at least to me) explains the great popularity of rap, or rage incarnate.
Yet, however convienent such a path is to take to find a merger between the artists of the elite and the masses, there is also a completely unexpected dimension to this move, which also forms the media/cultural foundation of fascism. Why this is so, I have no idea. It has yet to be explained to me. But almost all the artists who took this leap, had to step back and see their own populism---the desire to motivate a mass audience---as deeply linked to facist movements of all sorts---almost literally from the Clan to the drug dealing motorcyle gangs of the 50s and 60s. Or the stylistic similarties between the German expressionism and its Nazis transformation, and the Russian expressionists and their transformationI into socialist realism. It turns out that the arts are also a dangerous business.
For the visually clueless, I could cite Wagner and Nietzsche as the German examples, but I am not as familiar with the Russians to give names. However this latter group were contemporaries with Malevich and others and did the early Soviet abstraction-expressionist posters for the revolution.
I think I leave off here.
There is also a much more difficult answer, which is the arts are always performed in the present as a reproduction, a recitation, a resuscitation, and yet they are always, also time bound and can not escape their moment of creation. They are not universal in that particular sense of the word, so they appear opaque in the here and now. In order to bring them back to life, they require theiir audience undergo its own resuscitation, which most people are not willing to do, just for the sake of an experience. Unless you are willing to undergo that transformation, then the vast history of the arts will always seem opaque.
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