David and Art - Now and Then

I’m often asked how it happened that academic historian wound up doing a show about the arts. It’s a fair question. One of my answers (beyond just loving art) is that how we interact with art is similar to how we interact with history itself. It’s a similarity that helps us process both what we think of art and what we think of as traditional history—if we let it. In both, you have a past and a present that you have to deal with. And you really can’t understand the present without understanding the past. History, whether in art or politics, is what gets us to this point. It’s how we got to what we see and hear and try to understand in the present.

The proper relationship of the present to the past is one of the great questions with which we as a culture wrestle. Most of the time in today’s America the present not only wins, but runs the past entirely off the field. I mentioned to you earlier this year how it always mildly annoys me that every time I log onto Hulu to watch something it gives me the message “Please wait while we gather what’s new.” My reply is always “But I’m not here for what’s new.”

At least superficially, mainstream culture, as it’s so heavily influenced by marketing—since everything now is something to buy—highlights the New because you can’t possibly have bought it yet. Theres such a dismissive attitude toward the past that many people today are totally unfamiliar with things like movies that were made before they were born. And more broadly it seems like a near total public ignorance of the past, particularly its complexities, is assumed to be not one little bit harmful to our society. Gore Vidal (there’s a name that’s certainly a casualty of this attitude) would occasionally refer to the country as the “United States of Amnesia” where if something didn’t happen this morning you can’t convince some people that it really happened at all.

This corrosive interaction affects how we experience art too, in even more complex and sometimes contradictory ways. It sort of depends on the art form. It some avenues it can often take the form of being an unbalanced focus on the new. But just as easily, and maybe more often in this field unlike much of the rest of culture, it can become a prejudice against the new.

Let’s get together and unpack this a little more next week.

PREVIOUS EPISODES OF DAVID AND ART

David & Art - The Glasgow Boys

Host David Smith introduces us to an under-the-radar group of 19th-century painters who challenged the artistic norms of their time and pushed back against the gatekeepers of the art world.

David and Art - The Surrealist and the Celebrity, Part 2

This week on David and Art, host David Smith Smith looks at how celebrity can cloud our view of real achievement—especially when the artist becomes more famous than the art.

David and Art - The Surrealist and the Celebrity

From a creative youth and the influence of dreams to showmanship and celebrity, on this weeks David and Art, host David Smith digs into the fascinating trajectory of an iconic Spanish painter.

David and Art - Taking Care of the Public's Art

In this week's edition of David and Art, host David Smith dives into the fascinating story of how New Deal art—some of the most significant cultural creations of the 20th century—disappeared, and the ongoing efforts to track it down and return it to the public.

David and Art - Caravaggio

In this week’s episode of David and Art, host David Smith takes a closer look at a painter whose life was as dramatic as his art. From gripping realism to a life marked by violence and mystery, his story continues to intrigue centuries later.

David and Art - Culture and Place, Part 2

In this week's edition of David and Art, we continue to explore how culture shapes the identity of place, in particular the social value and impact of public art. Here's your host, David Smith

David and Art - Culture and Place

In this week's edition of David and Art, we’ll explore how culture shapes the very identity of a place—from the highways of Texas to a pub in Scotland—and how art fits into all of it. Here's your host, David Smith.

David and Art - A Space for Contemplation

What if a painting didn’t just capture a moment of action—but instead asked you to slow down and simply be? With this week's edition of David and Art on 103.3, Waco Public Radio, here's David Smith.

David and Art - Public Support

In this week's edition of David and Art, we hear a story that is a reminder that public arts funding has a lasting impact—one that might be shaping the next great artist right now. Host David Smith takes a look at the latest round of NEA grants and the communities they’re helping to inspire.

David and Art - David Hockney and His iPad

An English artist has always pushed the boundaries of art, and now, at 88, he's doing it with something you might not expect. In this week's edition of David and Art, host David Smith explores the artist's latest work and how technology is changing the way he creates.