Art, Artist, History, and the Eternity of the Work

What about the opposite case: a great artist who is privately a very kind and generous person, but his art is full of unspeakable evil? What makes Lydia such an interesting person is that she is a lesbian but anti-cancel culture. If she were a pro-cancel-culture lesbian, it would have been much more difficult to see her as a monster. The implication of those critical of her is that, although a lesbian, she acts like the oppressive and aggressive patriarchal men whom she admires (from Bach to Mahler). But defenders of the position that art cannot be separated from personal identity because it expresses this identity strangely ignore the fact that she is a lesbian: There are lesbian academic figures who are very manipulative and exploitative like Lydia.

As for the relation between art and an artist’s life, the movie mentions Gustav Mahler, who was not supportive of his wife Alma’s compositions—even claiming that one composer was enough for a family. However, after her depression and affair with Gropius, Mahler apologized and started to encourage Alma’s composing, even helping her prepare some compositions for publication. Alma had her own problems—although married to a Jew, she was virulently anti-Semitic. As for composers, Richard Wagner, yes, he was openly anti-Semitic, a lying hypocrite, and an opportunist, but a close analysis shows that in his work—which is one of

The “eternity” of a work of art does not mean it should be not related to history, it means that it triumphantly survives being transposed from one cultural and historical context to another, where such a transposition often brings out dimensions absent in the original. Shakespeare is the exemplary case: Each epoch invents its own Hamlet. Recall the best cinema version of the play: Only Bad People Can Sleep Well, the 1962 film by Akira Kurosawa set in contemporary Japan. Even more, to understand Shakespeare, we don’t need to know the details of the Elizabethan era, whereas the best way to understand the Elizabethan era is to read and watch Shakespeare. Back to Tár. Lydia is depicted as a full artist dedicated to her work and in touch with its “eternal” dimension. She simply is not fully present in our everyday terrestrial reality, so no wonder, when measured by the standards of this reality, her acts often appear unacceptable. I don’t see the film’s progress as a decline from narcissistic self-infatuation, which makes Lydia blind to her manipulation and exploitation of the people around her, to her gradual confrontation with the consequences of her actions, which leads to her cancellation and exclusion from the Western high art society. I see, in Lydia’s commitment to her art, the exact opposite of narcissism: an authentic dedication to her Cause. Yes, she exploits and manipulates her collaborators and partners, but this is part of her ruthless pursuit for her Cause. Plus, the others around her are not as clean as they appear. Why should Sebastian not be replaced as the assistant conductor? Does Francesca really deserve the position promised to her? Lydia’s rejection of cancel culture in the debate with a student about Bach is absolutely justified, and the way the recording of this debate is used in a very manipulative and censored way makes it pure slander. Is all this not proven by the end of the film, when while conducting a cheap orchestra for the music of a video game, Lydia retains the same artistic integrity? She is not broken; she still has a Cause. After being canceled, Lydia is shown at her Staten Island childhood home watching a tape of Leonard Bernstein’s first episode of Young People’s Concerts, “What Does Music Mean?” Like Bernstein over his career as a conductor, Lydia is also focused on recording all of Mahler’s symphonies. So, to conclude, let’s imagine Lydia conducting one of Bernstein’s lesser-known masterpieces, a concerto for violin, Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (each of the five movements corresponding to one of the main speakers in Symposium: Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Eryximachus, Agathon, and Socrates). If Lydia were to perform this white dead man’s concerto dedicated to another long-dead white man’s classic text on love, I see absolutely no reason for politically correct suspicions: We should enjoy it without constraints.