Poetry and Art

Whose perspective do you more agree with, Sewell or Whitman? Why? While you will obviously need to discuss their arguments to make your own, the key here is to make a thesis around YOUR opinion, using the debate between Sewell and Whitman as a a starting point that kind of sets the terms of the debate...... How do you feel and why?
Your response papers should have a clear thesis and be at least 400 words long.
Don't call pop culture art - it's rubbish
By Stephen Sewell
February 10, 2010 — 1.00am
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Stravinsky famously noted that "most art is bad". He didn't go on to point out that this is the almost inescapable consequence of its genesis, for art - real art - is not about rehashing the tried and true, but rather of smashing the rules and creating something never seen before, most examples of which must inevitably fail.
The new new is not the last new improved. No painter today would be congratulated for painting an impressionist masterpiece. This is not to try to invert our sense of success. Failure is failure, and true artists are excruciatingly aware of their mistakes and miscalculations.
These same observations cannot be made of what is sometimes referred to as popular culture, the sort of thing you find when you turn on the television or radio, or turn up at the local leagues club. While art is the province of the unexpected and the challenging, and likely to provoke incredulity and even rage, popular culture is the domain of the familiar, the mawkish, the sentimental and the trite and bears the same relationship to culture in general as a McDonald's hamburger does to food.
You might think I'm trying to draw a distinction between high and low art, but I'm not, because there is no low art, there's just rubbish. Rubbish with its own stars and award ceremonies, rubbish with a sense of its own importance even, but rubbish nevertheless, being foisted on the rest of us in all the myriad ways people working for the great corporations of the world can come up with to flog us their crap.
Because popular culture is a business with an annual revenue estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion globally, and accounting for some of the largest corporations in the world.
The first rule of any business is, don't annoy the customer, so what we've seen as culture has become an increasingly commercialised trivialisation of some of our most important concerns - the kind of things that drove Homer and Tolstoy to evoke their worlds - in an effort to give a kind of ersatz experience of culture with the frightening, challenging or subversive elements removed.
The reason so much television says so little is not because scriptwriters have run out of ideas, but because producers don't want them frightening the horses. Entertainment, that much bandied about word, has become its own justification. The success of Seinfield making 138 episodes saying absolutely nothing is regarded as the gold standard of creativity.
All perfectly reasonable in a world where poverty, disease, war and starvation have been successfully eliminated, but perhaps not in ours, facing as it does an apocalyptic series of crises without the opportunity of reflecting on them artistically - because the means of doing so have been monopolised by a bunch of clowns who only want to make us forget so they can put their hands in our pockets and steal our wallets.
Must art be relevant? Topical? educative? Uncomfortable? Perhaps not, but when it cannot be any of those things because the sponsor won't like it, then we're in trouble. And we are in trouble. The dumbing down process we have been experiencing now for many decades has been successful, as is clear in everything from the inability of people to retain more than a couple of soundbites to guide them through the intricacies of democracy to the complete ignorance of the scientific process recently demonstrated in the so-called climategate scandal.
People read less, understand less and retain less than they did even 20 years ago. The mindless pap of undemanding popular culture is as responsible for this as the fast food industry is for the obesity epidemic. We are becoming a culture of fat, stupid know-nothings bombing the rest of the world into submission in wars we only understand in the comic book morality of Kiefer Sutherland's 24.