P. T. Barnum and Martha Nussbaum
Went to see the elephants last night. They were walking across Manhattan in the cold, starting at the Midtown Tunnel at midnight and ending at Madison Square Garden. (They had to get to the Garden to perform in the circus and, as my friend put it, “How else are they gonna get there?”)
It all sounded like a great idea around 9:00 pm. When someone asks you if you want to go see the elephants, it seems that yes is the only right answer. But by the time it was 11:30 and time to go, I was having doubts. Then after an hour underground, the Q train lurching, then stopping, the whole time wondering whether I was missing the parade, I picked a mental fight with Del Close: You can’t always say yes!
Off the train and above ground: We had not missed the elephants. We were just in time. The crowd was pressed up against the barricades, brimming with a kind of self-conscious, self-fulfilling enthusiasm. (The logic seemed to be: “This is a childish thing to do, so I will do it with a childlike sense of wonder.”) We were shivering, but every few minutes someone would yell “Whooo! Elephants!” and we would all break into a cheer. The elephants were not here just yet, but they were coming, goddammit.
This is the amazing thing about New York: whatever crazy, self-destructive thing you decide to do, you can take comfort in the fact that hundreds of people will be stupid enough to do it with you.
When the elephants did walk by, they were indeed very huge and very cute. They really do link up, trunks grasping tails, and that is pretty great.
But all the excitement wasn’t about them, per se. One can imagine living in a very different part of the world, where elephants would be old news and people would instead line up to see a car whizz by. What’s exciting is what’s anomalous.
We returned to the Herald Square subway, only to find another surprise: a sound installation on the southbound track. A green pipe mounted above eye-level, reticulated with little holes, and the holes produce music when you place your hand over them. Like a flute made out of an air duct, except the sound is not produced by air rushing through the tube; the sounds are pre-recorded, and triggered when a light beam is interrupted.
Again, this installation, taken on its own, was not the best I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t shape the music in any way (duration, timbre, volume). At Burning Man, it would have been fair at best. But again, it’s about context: on the subway platform, it made my night.
All of which made me think about some pretty dry and lofty things, because I am a big dork.
One: We have to do away with eternal, context-independent judgments about art (or about anything, really). In the university, we stopped searching for capital-T Truth long ago. Everything is historically contingent. God is dead. Yet within even the most pomo art critic’s soul lurks the vestigial assumption that a piece of art is either Good or Bad, essentially, platonically. Perhaps art critics cling to this idea, though they claim to disagree with it, because art criticism is still structured as a priesthood. Without her singular power to sling labels (Brilliant, Tacky, Genius, Poseur) like thunderbolts, the art critic would be out of a job.
Two: What do we lose in a recession? We all have to make sacrifices, and the first thing to go, one would think, would be luxuries. What, then, is a luxury? What is superfluous? Some examples are obvious: AIG executives should not get a handout, but veterans should. It gets trickier when we talk about things like public sound installations and circus elephants. I won’t go too deeply into it here, but I think the dilemma is clear. I am sincerely glad that a bunch of corporations decided to fund an air-duct-flute in the subway. My night was better because of it, and, arguably, the polis at large is better because of it. (That is, if you believe that public art serves a deeply important function, which I do.) But I would be hard-pressed to make that case to a homeless person, who might say, with good reason, “I’m glad you had fun making those sounds, but I could have used that money to keep warm.”
Contast Maslow’s pyramid with Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. There are many differences between them — for one, the former claimed to be descriptive and the latter prescriptive. But here’s what I want to point out: Maslow’s is a hierarchy, while Nussbaum’s is a web. According to Nussbaum, each human right is equally, crucially important. Some are more basic, of course — without life, you can’t have any of the other ones — but that doesn’t mean that life is more important than, say, play. A life without play, Nussbaum is saying, is an incomplete life. A strict utilitarian might say, “No one gets an air-duct-flute until everyone has a place to sleep,” and there is certainly merit to that argument. But Nussbaum would disagree.
