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Notes -
Wynton Marsalis and Donald Trump
A couple of months ago, a poster whose username I won't attempt to spell published a post on Laufey and McManstions on the main site, which prompted a discussion on aesthetics, Kenny G, Thomas Kinkade, and other topics only peripherally related to the culture war that we don't discuss here much. Earlier still, I published a tongue-in-cheek post about John Coltrane and why you should vote for Cornel West that somehow got selected as an AAQC. For a while, now, I have wanted to present a more serious discussion on aesthetics and public policy, and Trump's reinstatement of his Beautiful Architecture EO has provided occasion for it. But first, we need a little context.
I. Modernism and the Death of Jazz
In the earlier post, I discuss how 1959 was a watershed year in music history. Like most watershed moments however, while it pointed toward the future, it was in other ways the beginning of the end. I mentioned albums by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. Saxophonists Coleman and Coltrane, along with pianist Cecil Taylor, were the three biggest figures in the development of Free Jazz. From its inception, Jazz had been about improvisational freedom, in contrast to the dictatorial prescriptions of Classical music, and over the decades, musicians sought to push the limits of that freedom. If Modal Jazz could soloists from the tyranny of chord progressions by embracing modes, Free Jazz could do away with harmony altogether, allowing soloists to be totally unconstrained. The three main progenitors of the movement, however, came from three very different backgrounds.
Coleman was from Texas, and came up on the Rhythm and Blues circuit in the 1950s. By the middle of the decade he had made his way to California and joined up with his own crew of like-minded oddballs and in 1959 released The Shape of Jazz to Come. The music was still relatively structured, but most of his contemporaries thought Coleman was completely unhinged. As an R&B player, he wasn't afraid to honk and squeak, and his music, though unusual, still showed a deep sense of the blues. He'd continue in a similar vein for a couple more albums until completely knocking the door down with the genre-defining Free Jazz in 1961 (Coleman was nothing if not literal).
The modernist sensibilities at play here were not subtle. Modernist art sought to free painting from the slavery of the representational form. Paintings didn't have to be evaluated on the basis of how closely they looked like the things they were supposed to look like; they could be reduced to mere elements. Color, shape, line, form, etc. could be appreciated for what they were. Painting as painting, not painting as narrative. For jazz, the sentiment was similar. The underlying essence of the music was still there; it was improvised, it swung, it was clearly based in the blues. But it didn't follow any established form. It only had jazz elements because that was the idiom with which the players were familiar; otherwise it was just sound for the sake of sound. The Jackson Pollock painting on the cover is no accident.
It would be several years, though, before Coleman's style took over jazz, though its influence would creep in in fits and starts. Cecil Taylor was Coleman's polar opposite. He was classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was familiar with the European Avant-Garde. As such, his music is much more deliberately modern than Coleman's. It actually sounds more deliberate in general, as if he knows what he wants to do before he actually does it. 1966's [Unit Structures] is his signature piece. And then there's Coltrane, the only one of the three to come from a conventional jazz background. After redefining harmony on Giant Steps he began to move more and more toward the avant-garde until finally reaching it on a plane of advanced consciousness us mere mortals can only dream of. Ascension, from 1965, was the watershed moment when he finally let go of his past and embraced the future.
IA. Populism and the Death of Jazz
Miles Davis never embraced Free Jazz. This wasn't because he was stubbornly clinging to the past, quite the contrary, he just wasn't ready to take that leap. Instead, he'd take the spirit of '59 and roll with it into the sixties. This wasn't a bold move; it's what most jazz musicians were doing prior to 1965, and what a few would continue to do after. One you've freed yourself from the yoke of traditional harmony, Free Jazz isn't the only place left to go. It turns out, the infinite vastness of the harmonic spectrum provides plenty of opportunity for innovation without burning the whole house down. So even in 1967, when Free Jazz had captured the imagination of every thinking man in the Jazz world, Davis could put out albums like [Sorcerer] that didn't challenge your patience and still get credit for being innovative.
The problem for Miles, though, was that mildly impressing a few white jazz critics and the dwindling number of people who bought his albums wasn't enough to convince him that he was still on the cutting edge of music. And Davis needed to be on the cutting edge. Most musicians are bad. Some are good. Some are great. A vanishingly small number are involved in revolutions, and even fewer are at the forefront of those revolutions. Davis, at this point in his career, was 42 years old, and had already caused three revolutions on his own and was heavily involved in two more. And he was ready to start the next one.
Davis had realized that the black youth of the 1960s weren't interested in what he was doing, or what Coltrane was doing, or what any other jazz musician was doing. They were interested in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone. So he did what any normal person in the 1960s would do if they were trying to appeal to a younger audience: He went electric. On paper this sounds like it was bound to be a disaster — an aging jazz musician trying to play rock and R&B in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. But Miles was no mere aging musician but an all-time genius. After a few tentative steps towards Jazz-Rock he'd release [Bitches Brew] in 1970 and prove that he was the one and only Prince of Darkness.
IB. Status Quo: The 1970s
The result of these twin revolutions of the 1960s was that, by 1975, anything that resembled what Miles Davis was doing in 1967 had ceased to be relevant. On the one hand you had the avant-garde. The new generation was able to combine Coltrane's jazz credentials, Coleman's weirdness, and Taylor's classical pretention to create bold new music that seemed optimized to alienate everyone except the five people who would show up for their concerts. The Davis wing fared better commercially, but whether or not this was a good thing is debatable. The main Davis strain drifted more in the direction of rock music before basically becoming indistinguishable from it. A funkier, more R&B oriented strain did fine for a while, but eventually suffered from its own artistic decline. Jazz-Rock became Jazz-Fusion, or fusion, and by the time Kenny G rolled around in the 80s it had devolved into Fuzak, a pejorative portmanteau of fusion and Muzak.
This is the point where a lot of traditional jazz histories get off the train. "Serious" jazz was dying a slow, lonely death. Fusion was being swallowed up by mainstream pop, and would culminate in Kenny G. Iconic jazz clubs were either closing due to lack of interest or converting into discos. The only people interested in playing straightahead 60s jazz were Woody Shaw and a few exiles in Europe. Most of the 60s holdovers had made the switch to fusion as soon as they saw how successful Davis was with it, for better or worse. But then, in the late 1970s, things slowly began to change. In 1976, Dexter Gordon returned from Europe, to wide acclaim. Herbie Hancock started playing acoustic jazz again in 1977, the same year Joe Henderson was back to playing acoustic hard bop. Ricky Ford already had a number of fine acoustic hard bop records under his belt, starting in 1977, as did several other younger players. Johnny Griffin's return to the US was in 1978. Steps (soon to be Steps Ahead) had already been jamming in New York to acclaim, and had recorded its debut in 1979. A nascent revival was beginning to take shape.
II. Wynton Marsalis
When he emerged in the 1980s, no one in jazz had ever seen a figure like Wynton Marsalis before. He came with impeccable credentials; born in a strong New Orleans musical family, he had gone to Julliard, Tanglewood, and a tour with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He was a jazz musician with an uncommonly beautiful sound and elegant ideas, as well as a classical musician of exceptional taste. But he also had the fire of a reformer in him: He was a defender of tradition with the will, energy, and intelligence to reaffirm the values associated with what he saw as a music (and a society) that had been corrupted by charlatans for the last forty years. Sometimes he seemed to be attempting to recreate another Harlem Renaissance; other times, he seemed to be like Matthew Arnold, calling for the best that had ever been played to be honored and savored. Or again, his task seemed to be the scholarly one of rewriting American cultural history, or evel the lay preacher's role of strengthening the country's moral fiber. In any event, once he was appointed artistic director of the new jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1988, he was in a unique position to shape the most powerful effort ever made to turn jazz into an institution.
By the 1980s, while fusion continued to prosper in certain circles, the more mainstream stuff was cast aside into the realm of the pop world. Two camps began to emerge. The first was that of the neotraditionalists. These were those raised in the free jazz avant garde, but who found it a stylistic dead end. While they were still jazz musicians at their cores, they rejected the idea that jazz history was a progression of sequential improvements. This may not seem like that big a deal, but it had the effect of liberating the music even further; rather than be forced to explore what little uncharted territory was left, they now had the entire history of jazz at their disposal. The music was still avant-garde, no doubt, but it could incorporate whatever influence it wanted. The watershed album here is Air Lore by the trio Air, because if you're going to embrace the history of jazz, why not go back to the very beginning? Jazz had become postmodern.
Countering this were the traditionalists, with Marsalis at the forefront. When he signed with Columbia and released his debut in 1982, it sold 100,000 copies, more than any traditional jazz album had in a long time. But from the outset, Marsalis was controversial. At one time or another he has suggested that jazz developed on a different plane than European music and that in its musical world, innovation is not a mark of progress, since the earliest jazz has never become dated; indeed, it may even be more modern than today's. He has claimed that jazz performances are so long that they bore audiences, that the highest of all jazz achievement's, the improvised solo, might need to yield to ensemble playing as it did in early jazz; he has said that there are no true jazz styles, but rather only master musicians whose individual developments show us the progress of the music; or that the seriousness of the jazz project must be reinforced to drive out the dehumanizing forces or popular culture (which long ago surrendered to base instincts and the avant-garde, the dark side of Europe).
If there is one thing that is certain about Marsalis's traditionalism, though, it's that it is openly hostile towards free jazz and jazz-rock, the two styles that came out of the 1960s. And with his position at Lincoln Center secure, he would spend the 90s preaching it on PBS, NPR, and in high school band rooms all across the country. With respect to this latter point, pretty much every band director in America had a hard-on for Marsalis. This was partially because he spent a lot of his early career as America's Premiere Jazz Educator working with schools, whose jazz programs at the time seemed gear towards preparing students to play in white big bands run by the likes of Woody Herman and Buddy Rich. Marsalis focused on the rich history of New Orleans and the swing era. It also helped tremendously that he was an accomplished classical musician who made recordings of all the "Trumpet Player's Pieces" that we all have played for juries and auditions and the like but were impossible to find recordings of in the past. You couldn't just walk into borders and find Arban's ["Variations on the Carnival of Venice"] (watching that video was deeply nostalgic, as I've played that so many times the fingereings are coming back to me for every note).
But his ubiquity combined with his inherent conservatism led to a backlash. While he was heralded by the boomers who were paying for our music lessons as kids, the millennial generation who grew up with him has quite a different take. Throughout the 90s, he made occasional TV and radio appearances, released albums, and did master classes at schools, and if he limited himself to this, he'd be controversial, but wouldn't draw nearly the same amount of ire. But then Ken Burns' Jazz came out. Jazz isn't a bad documentary; it's excellent for the information it contains. The problem is that it's misrepresentative and woefully incomplete; in ten-parts and 1,140-minutes it dedicates one full episode to 1938 and 1939 alone, while dedicating another episode to the period from 1961 to the present. They spend very little time talking about free jazz, jazz fusion, or really anything that happened after 1965 save for Louis Armstrong dying, and what they do say about it essentially dismisses it. And as America's Premiere Jazz Educator, Marsalis was behind it all, guiding Burns' presentation from front to back, appearing in more recorded interview segments than anyone else and confidently describing how Buddy Bolden sounded even though Bolden died in 1931 and was never recorded. And behind Marsalis, acting as hatchet man, was Stanley Crouch, a jazz critic of similar bent, whose story is made all the more rich by the fact that he was a free jazz drummer who turned to writing when he couldn't hack it.
It was always possible to detect Marsalis's conservative undertones before, but after viewing a 19-hour-long exposition of his ethos, most of us were ready to get off the train. You play music because you want to be creative, you want to express yourself. You listen to people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis because you're impressed by their genius and you hope that one day, you too can create something as innovative and earth-shattering as they can. And then some guy who's barely even old enough to be your father tells you essentially that all that's finished and you'll never be half the trumpet player Louis Armstrong was and if you try to do anything new then it's just "self-indulgent bullshit" or "playing tennis without a net" so you better just spend your life paying tribute to the greats by making inferior copies of their music. And then you look at his recording career, and realize that that's exactly what he's done. His best album, *Black Codes (From the Underground) was hilariously (and accurately) described on Reddit as "a very good 1962 Miles Davis album".
Beyond that, though, Jazz reached an audience that had no particular love for or experience with the music, and was a golden opportunity to get the public to engage with it. Jazz has no social cachet. It's not likely to have succeeded, but Jazz could have changed the public's negative perception of the music by presenting it as a vibrant artistic force building on a rich history. Instead it was presented as a museum piece, something that happened and ended 40 years ago and the best we can do now is cherish the memory. Jazz music had become classical music.
III: Donald Trump and the Death of Architecture
So what about Trump's EO reasserting his preference for "traditional" architecture? I'm not going to make the argument that this is some low-key tribute to Albert Speer, or that it represents an overarching conservative aversion to change or desire to reclaim some kind of lost glory or to assert some sort of homegrown nationalism. As far as I can tell, there are only two things at play here:
Trump's aesthetic preferences
Trump's perception of the public's aesthetic preferences
"Beautiful public buildings"; it says it all right there. The real question is whether these preferences actually exist. I've seen the sentiment echoed regularly on here: Modern architecture is bad. Postmodern architecture is bad. Traditional styles are preferable. This isn't limited to here, or to conservatives, or to people outside the art world; there seems to be a general sentiment that buildings just looked better before 1945. But do people really feel this way, or do they just say they feel this way? I suspect this perception has become so widespread that people express this preference without stopping to think about the full implications.
First, there's Trump himself. I am assuming that Trump does not harbor any sort of categorical dislike of modern architecture, insofar as he understands what the term actually means, considering the property with which he is most closely associated, Trump Tower, is unabashedly modern. Ditto for Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York, the building of the same name in Las Vegas, the one in Chicago, Trump Plaza Residences in Jersey City, Trump Tower in Mumbai, and at this point I'm sick of looking. I find it highly unusual that, considering that the guy is known as a real estate developer, no one has pointed that for his supposed contempt for modern architecture he sure is responsible for a lot of it. And the public must like it as well, or else Trump would be indulging in his personal preferences at the risk of his business. In any event, while I could be wrong, I couldn't find any evidence of Trump erecting a new building in any of the traditional styles he implies are prerequisite to beauty.
Second, there is the perception of the public, which isn't nearly as hostile to modern architecture as is made out to be. I live in Pittsburgh, and the most beloved building is PPG Place. Okay, it's technically postmodern, but this isn't a distinction I hear too many people making. The US Steel Tower is probably number two. In fact, most of the downtown skyline dates from 1950 or later, and I don't hear too much hate for any of the buildings, even if there are a few I could personally do without. So when I look at a new Federal building done in a more modern style, like the 2016 Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles I wonder "Do people really find this objectionable?", and, if so, what do they find so objectionable about it? Why is it that Trump will happily sign off on whatever the architect presents to him when it comes to his personal properties but suddenly finds religion when it comes to public buildings?
The argument can be made that public architecture is different and that government buildings should be constructed in a distinctive, unified style, but that doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. First, that horse has already left the barn, so any attempt at uniformity will be ad hoc at best. Second, a uniform style would suggest more detailed guidance than what the EO suggests we'll end up getting. The original 2020 EO emphasized "traditional" styles, citing Greek Revival, Federal, and Gothic Revival as examples. Well, those are three very different styles; so much for a distinctive look. And even if we were to settle on an official national style, does it make sense to do so? One of the things that makes buildings bad is that they don't fit with their surroundings. Some discontinuity is acceptable, but the building better be an absolute banger. Building an otherwise unobjectionable but unspectacular building where it doesn't belong will make it an eyesore. I don't have the confidence that every post office and visitor's center built between now and whenever the EO is rescinded will be of that kind of quality. Even the surrounding landscape is important. Mary Colter's buildings at Grand Canyon National Park are national treasures, but they wouldn't be had they been built in an incongruous Greek Revival style.
IIIA. That Which Is Left Unmentioned
First, we need to dispense with the myth that there's something inherent to prewar styles that makes them more aesthetically pleasing on some base level. There isn't. Every day I drive past hundreds if not thousands of prewar buildings that everyone agrees are ugly. As I said in the introductory post to my Pittsburgh series, one of the common house types in the area is what I refer to as a Mill House; these were frame houses built for industrial workers beginning around the 1870s and into the first couple decades of the 20th Century. In the city of Pittsburgh itself these tend to predominate in hilly areas, with rowhouses predominating in flatter areas, but in outlying areas and throughout the Rust Belt these are the norm in neighborhoods that were built out in that era. In a similar vein is the Patch House, company housing for coal miners in the isolated company towns that popped up near mines in the region. Neither of these styles is desirable to own. When suburbs began to surround the old coal patches in the 1950s, the patches remained the poorest, least desirable areas, and continue to do so to this day. Almost every Pittsburgh suburb, no matter how prosperous, contains one or two of these; they exist like backwaters that the municipal government likes to pretend don't exist. One of the things that will become apparent as my Pittsburgh series continues (I know it's been a while but more is on the way soon, I promise) is that housing stock like this is often an impediment to gentrification — it's easy to blame the ugliness of these buildings on the inability of the owners to invest in them, but they simply aren't attractive to people who do have money to invest.
Of course, that's just houses, and in particular, it's houses built for working class people that was never meant to be beautiful. What about civic and commercial buildings? I will admit that yes, the median prewar commercial structure tends to look better than the median postwar commercial structure. But does that really tell us anything? Years ago I worked in this building, as the firm on the nameplate leased space to the firm I worked for. It was built in 1905 and renovated in 1984 in the yuppie loft chic style with exposed brickwork that was popular at the time. Then the firm we were leasing off of built a new, larger building and we followed them there. In the months leading up to the move, everyone knew it was coming eventually, but we didn't know when, and it wasn't made out to be a big deal. No one was passing renderings around the office or driving out to look at the construction site; on the appointed day we just showed up at a different address. And everyone was impressed. One of the partners in my division was taking pictures and sending them to friends and family, even despite the fact that her new office was significantly smaller and didn't have the stunning view of Downtown that her old one did. While most people were more reserved, they did agree that it was a big improvement.
People may bemoan the newer building as having a bland corporate aesthetic that seems to be redecorating our cities with glass and prefabricated exterior paneling, but what are they bemoaning, exactly? Consider it's neighbors: A better prewar building (the Warhol Museum, 1913), a worse, newer building (One North Shore Center, 1982)], and a better, newer building (Alcoa headquarters, 1999). What is it about my old office that makes it inherently better? The use of brick? The 1982 building has plenty of brick. Ornamentation? There's very little ornamentation on the 1905 building, especially compared to the Warhol. the biggest complaint I'd anticipate against the 2017 building is that it's homogenized corporate crap, replete with plenty of glass and prefabricated panels, indistinguishable from hundreds of other commercial buildings foisted on us by developers trying to convince the public that cheap is beautiful, its own neighbors not excepted. But the same argument could be made of my old office back in 1905. It was just another unexceptional building without so much as a congruent architectural style and little ornamentation built to fit in with its surroundings. It wasn't built the way it was because it fulfilled the architect's vision (the architect has been lost to history), it was built that way because in 1905 that was the default option in an era without a lot of options to begin with.
But even still, aesthetic preferences are personal taste. Couldn't the firm have achieved the same effect by simply renovating the existing building? After all, what my coworkers and I were reacting to probably wasn't so much the outside of the building but the inside, going from a deteriorated 30-year-old renovation to a new construction. Yes, this was probably 90% of it. But that leads me to my main point, which no one seems to ever bring up: Our aesthetic appreciation of old architecture is almost always limited to exteriors. At first, there seems to be something ironic about this, as it flies in the face of traditional critiques of modernist architecture that still pop up from time to time: "Yeah, the building may look cool, but you don't have to live or work there. It's easy to admire something aesthetically you don't have to use." This was largely a response to the fact that the works of Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier were designed based on a theory of living that did not work out in real life. Le Corbusier's towers in the park led to the development of massive public housing projects that quickly turned into hell on earth, leading architectural critics to spend the next several decades explaining why they were a bad idea to begin with.
But this is merely a red herring. I've spent significant parts of my life in buildings of all styles, and I can't say that there is anything about the exterior facade that greatly affects what goes on inside. It certainly could be this way, but it usually isn't because all buildings are renovated to have the same interiors. For as much energy people spend railing against the bland, corporate architectural aesthetic, they seem quite content to ignore the fact that once inside, they all look like [this] (https://www.cbre.com/properties/properties-for-lease/office/details/US-SMPL-19904/koppers-building-436-seventh-avenue-pittsburgh-pa-15219). These pictures are from the Koppers Building, a 1929 Art Deco structure (technically modern, but prewar, so it apparently doesn't count). Except, once you get out of the lobby, there's nothing Art deco about it at all; the actual office space you're renting isn't going to be that different than what you'd find in a newer building. It would be easy to blame this on property developers and their desires to institute Globohomo, but when you look at people's houses, they do exactly the same thing. In the past ten years, I can't tell you how many people I've know who have bought older homes and told me how great the architecture was. If they mention doing any kind of renovation or redecorating, I usually jokingly ask them if they've looked at wallpaper yet, at which point they make a face like I asked them to ingest cod liver oil. Because, let's face it, no one born after 1980 wants a house with wallpaper, or wall-to-wall carpeting, or metal kitchen cabinets, or floral upholstery, or wingback chairs, or wood paneling, or any of the other design choices that might make a house period correct. They want the interior to conform to the latest design trends, whether that be grey walls, hardwood floors, quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances, or any of the other things that make people say "this is really nice" when they walk into a house.
No one thinks to consider that this could have ever applied to exteriors.
IIIB. The Inevitability
So what will come of any presidential dictat to return to traditional styles? Tradition? Or the facade of tradition? As an argument in favor of the latter, I'd like to point out the rise of what I refer to as "Neoneoclassical Architecture". Neoneoclassical architecture is a good citizen of the neighborhoods it inhabits. It fits well with its neighbors, but is free from the embarrassing ornamentation that is anathema to modern tastes. It's also significantly cheaper as a result. Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood has two buildings from the past couple decades that fit this style. One is Nordenberg Hall, a University of Pittsburgh dormitory that was constructed in 2011. The other is the Oaklander Hotel, from 2017. Outside of Pittsburgh, the Ole Miss School of Law fits the style, too, though it is accented by a rather plain collonaded portico. Down the road at Mississippi State, we have the new [Azalea Residence Hall], set to open this fall. I'm not a big fan of neoneoclassical architecture. I don't particularly hate it, either. It does what it needs to do, unobjectionably. It says "Don't look at me, nothing to see here. Look at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association next door. Interestingly enough, the building Nordenberg Hall replaced, the 1924 University Place Office Building, in its sparse detailing almost anticipated the Neoneoclassical style.
The Neoneoclassical style is the polar opposite of what I call the "Fuck You School of Architecture". The canonical exaple of this is when there's a nice, picturesque tourist town on whose edge a developer erected a giant concrete behemoth with "Radisson" written on the top, sticking out like a giant middle finger to the community. Which brings me to what I think is the reason modern architecture has so little purchase with the general public: Poor execution. When working in traditional forms, there's only so much you can do to make a building terrible. Frank Gehry once said that 98% of architecture was shit, and while I may personally believe that most of his own work is included in that 98%, he had a point. 98% of what we see are structures designed to be functional structures, and nothing else. I don't know who designed this building, but I doubt they were trying to make a statement; they were trying to make a building that could house a few businesses. People may bemoan strip malls and urban sprawl in general, but nobody finds the buildings particularly objectionable, because there's nothing to object to. No one pays attention to the architecture of a gas station.
The buildings that people actually do pay attention to are limited to big public projects: Skyscrapers, stadiums, government buildings, airport terminals, schools, museums, large apartment complexes, and the like. Of these, there are two options. The safe option is to pick a designer that designs boring buildings and have them design something so unobjectionable that no one would even think to object to it, build it without incident, and allow it to blend into its surroundings. In 75 years when somebody wants to tear it down, nobody will bat an eye. The other option is to hire a designer who will run wild with a bold design that draws attention to itself. Here you run the risk of designing something hideous that everyone hates, but it's also your only chance of building something that will be beloved and cherished for generations. The problem with modern architecture was that its practitioners combined the desire for bold statements with the Fuck You sensibility, which resulted not only in several bad buildings but several otherwise good buildings forced into places where they didn't belong.
IV. McMansions, Thomas Kincade, and Kenny G I first heard the term "McMansion" circa 2005 in a 60 Minutes segment about a phenomenon that was sweeping suburban fringes all across the country. In typical newsmagazine fashion, Morley Safer spent half the segment interviewing the owners of these monstrosities and the other half interviewing architectural critics who talked about how terrible they were. As I recall, the only arguments they gave were that they were too big for the small families that inhabited them, and that they weren't Good Architecture™. My thoughts at the time were those of apathy. "If someone wants a house like that and is willing to pay for it, who cares?" A decade later, Kate Wagner launched McMansion Hell.
The laziest form of criticism is looking at something that's obviously bad and describing why it's obviously bad. The genius of McMansion Hell is that, rather than low effort sneers at rich people, the blog makes wry sneers based on an implied understanding of architectural principles. The idea that someone would dedicate a blog to complaining about McMansions in 2015 was like someone today dedicating a blog to complaining about washed up rock musicians recording albums full of standards, so getting people to care at all was a tough sell. But it works because it takes something that everyone hated for three years and then promptly forgot about and uses it as a springboard for architectural education. I haven't met many people below a certain age who aren't familiar with it.
McMansions create a problem because they don't fit into any coherent narrative about architectural history. On the one hand, they appear to be a naive yearning for the architecture of old, the purest representation of contemporary mass taste. On the other hand, they completely reject all the traditional principles of good architecture. They're intended as ostentatious displays of wealth, but are built as cheaply as possible. One wonders what could have been done, had the same money been spent on a stylistically coherent house following good architectural principles built with high-quality materials. Well, you'd probably get something like this, i.e., a normal suburban house, but bigger. Nothing to give that wow factor.
McMansions appeal to our sense of traditionalism the way a Thomas Kinkade painting appeals to our sense of sentimentalism: We don't so much yearn for the past as we yearn for the idea of the past. Nothing built before 1945 resembled anything close to a McMansion, in the same way that nothing painted before 1900 much resembled a Kinkade painting. But nobody is calling either of them modern. What McMansions and Kinkade both do is incorporate elements of old work in haphazard ways that are intended to make an immediate impact. McMansions have so many masses you can't tell what's supposed to be primary, in much the same way that Kinkade's paintings have so many subjects you're not sure what you're supposed to look at. Neither Kinkade nor the McMansion much care for proportion. They both draw from innumerable influence yet nonetheless manage to look the same. Tom Wolfe criticized modern art and architecture from being too obsessed with theory, but this is what you get without it.
Kenny G represents the opposite problem. As I mentioned earlier, mainstream jazz produced jazz-rock in the early 1970s, which in turn produced fusion in the middle of the decade, which finally led to fuzak in the 1980s. Kenny G started out as a fusion musician in the late 1970s; if you hadn't noticed, the link I included above to a Jeff Lorber recording had him on saxophone. the amazing thing about Kenny G is that he demonstrated that, if jazz could be deconstructed by the avant-garde forces for their own ends, it could also be deconstructed by populist forces for their own ends.
If jazz is the blues at its most sophisticated and cerebral, R&B is the blues at its most populist. Sometimes this means that it's more primal and raw, but it also means that it's more susceptible to influence from mainstream pop. The two began to diverge in the 1940s, and by the 1960s the gap was growing larger and some sought to bridge it. Jimmy Smith pioneered soul jazz, a movement that wasn't critically admired but was able to sell a lot of records. As the 60s became the 70s, this task was taken up by jazz-rock and later fusion. The biggest difference between the two is that fusion strips away most of the rock elements in favor of contemporary R&B elements. And in the late 1970s, R&B was becoming smoother, and in the 1980s it was becoming increasingly indistinguishable from Adult Contemporary.
Like free jazz and the modal jazz that preceded it, Kenny G's music simplified harmony to place a greater emphasis on melody. But rather than develop alternative harmonic structures, or eliminate them entirely, it simply stripped out anything that was harmonically interesting or distinctive. Jazz and all of its tritone substitutions, II-V-Is, chord extensions, suspensions, and secondary dominants were replaced with the simple, diatonic harmonies common in the blandest pop music. He sold 75 million records. Take a song like "Forever in Love", nobody is listening to this because it's harmonically interesting; its appeal lies in the fact that it isn't harmonically interesting.
Beyond music, the Kenny G phenomenon is difficult to get a handle on. If a teenager were to ask me who Kenny G was, the obvious answer would be that he was a saxophone player who was popular during the 80s and 90s. But that doesn't begin to tell the story, nor does inserting lazy adjectives like "hugely" or "massively" in front of "popular". It's not so much that Kenny G was big as it was the way in which he was big, which is something that I doubt will happen again in American history. His music was everywhere; you couldn't enter a mall without hearing it. Any function that required dinner music played it. The entire "smooth jazz" radio format revolved around his music, which radio format led several markets because it was played in offices where you were forced to listed whether you liked it or not. And it's not like he was an anonymous studio musician who accidentally became ubiquitous (like the guy who wrote all the free YouTube library music); people knew who he was. He was a household name, and everyone could identify anything he did based on a few notes, even if they hadn't heard it before. His claimed sales of 75 million units put him in the same league as Nirvana and Tupac, but he doesn't have the same level of continued relevance as either of those. Hell, he doesn't have the same level of cultural relevance as one-hit wonders like Snow (1.9 million) and Right Said Fred (1.5 million). Despite having a career that is extraordinarily successful by any conventional metric, and a decade of unprecedented ubiquity, he's mostly forgotten. Not forgotten in the sense that no one remembers him, but forgotten in the sense that no one thinks of him. If you were to ask people to name popular musicians of the '80s and '90s, his name would not be among the first mentioned, if it is even mentioned at all. Radio stations dedicated to hits of the era don't play him, and he's not going to appear in any listicle involving 90s nostalgia.
IVA. Trouble in Paradise
In their heydays, Thomas Kinkade and Kenny G were massively popular, and while McMansions were beyond the budget of most Americans, they were at least aspirational. All three were also among the most hated cultural products of their times. McMansions were ugly, Kenny G was insipid, and Thomas Kinkade was both. If Americans could criticize the cultural elites for being too critical, they could criticize others for not being critical enough. Thomas Kinkade was art for the person who was so unadventurous he didn't even want to attempt to challenge himself. Kenny G was music for the kind of person who viewed his stereo as an appliance and what it produced as wallpaper. McMansions were housing for the nouveau riche asshole who got what he wanted, when he wanted it, and didn't need anyone's advice.
The interesting thing isn't merely that these hugely popular things were criticized, it was the nature of the criticism. The New Kids on the Block were peaked around the same time as Kenny G and weren't exactly critical darlings, yet they don't receive nearly the same amount of derision, even if no one is trying to justify them as artistically underrated. NKOB's music was marketed to teenage girls, who aren't expected to be arbiters of taste. But Kenny G was popular among adults, and adults are supposed to know better. A few years before the McMansion piece, 60 Minutes ran a piece on Kinkade, and I remember him telling Morley Safer that people found art galleries intimidating. That his stores were so popular because people didn't want to go into echoey galleries with white walls where some overeducated snob would describe the work to you in terms of people you'd never heard of and expect that to mean something to you. The embarrassment of it all! His stores, though, were warm and inviting, where there was a big fire and a salesman who liked art but doggone it if he knew anything about it. Saying you liked Kenny G or Thomas Kinkade or McMansions was like saying that you had no aspiration toward cultural literacy and you didn't care. The general public may not be the most sophisticated consumers of art, but they at least pretend to care.
V. The End of the Road
Art exists on a continuum. At one extreme there is the stuff that smart people say you're supposed to like, but that few people actually like. This is mostly artifacts of the 20th century avant-garde: Free jazz, modern architecture, abstract expressionism. On the other end you have the crass popular stuff that doesn't even try to be artistic: Kenny G, McMansions, Thomas Kinkade. But there's a middle ground here, and it's the obvious target for anyone who is too practical to be seduced by the avant-garde and too proud to stoop to populism. This is the world of Wynton Marsalis, and this is the world of Donald Trump.
As much as Donald Trump's own architectural tastes might tend toward the garish populism of McMansions, even he knows that they are no template for an acceptable public architecture. To my knowledge there have been no public buildings built using such a template, so I don't know what they would look like, but one can assume they would become immediate objects of ridicule. A poorly-proportioned Federal courthouse that combined the Federal Style with Tudor half-timbering and and a separate Gothic wing would not go over well in my estimation. The solution is to go back in time to when art was free of corruption from either force, proclaim its purity, and set the appropriate boundaries. This is exactly what Wynton Marsalis has done with jazz, and exactly what Donald Trump intends to to with architecture.
I fear that such a move would be disastrous. When Jazz came out in 2001, the music was not popular. There was no cultural cachet to be had from liking jazz; rock and roll had effectively made the complex harmonic structures that give jazz its shape the music of an older generation.Big band was music for elderly people Kenny G was elevator music, and everything else was a combination of the two. Decades of neglect from the press didn't help, a hostile fanbase in the early 70s that wasn't willing to accept change didn't help, boomer associations of anything made before 1964 with squareness and conservatism didn't help, and America's Classical Music was a niche product that was only appreciated by people whose relationship with music went beyond mere listening. Marsalis had the opportunity to at least partly undo that perception. He had the biggest megaphone that any jazz proponent could hope to have. He could have presented jazz as a vibrant force that was still relevant in the new millennium. But instead he merely confirmed what everyone had already suspected: That jazz died 50 years ago, and all we were doing was preserving its memory.
It's tempting to think that such a thing couldn't possibly happen to architecture, as we can do without jazz but we can't do without buildings. That may be true, but remember: 98% of buildings aren't architecture. When we stop caring what buildings look like provided they hold up the ceiling, architecture will be dead. Jazz will have morphed into Kenny G. But insisting on traditional styles because we don't always like the modern ones only hastens that process. If 98% of what is built has no thought put into it, then that gives a special importance to the remaining 2%, and that 2% includes civic architecture. If we limit civic architecture to a set limit of prewar styles, we send the same message to young architects as Marsalis did to young jazz musicians: This discipline has ended as an active art form, and it was over well before you were born. The best you can do is imitate the styles of the past; there is no room for your own artistic vision. Banning modernism might prevent some ugliness. But it might also prevent the kind of bold work that propels the art forward. We'll be condemned to a world of neoneoclassical sludge. Having beautiful buildings is pointless if no one cares that they're beautiful.
As far as I can tell, the dearth of innovation across contemporary music, architecture, literature, etc. is symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise and applying palliative care to any one area, whether through documentaries or executive orders, is unlikely to do much to slow the decay until something more fundamental changes. There can be plenty of disagreement over what exactly has gone wrong or when (if you quizzed a group of online reactionaries, you'd get answers ranging from 1965 to 0 AD), but reaching a consensus is neither sufficient nor likely even necessary to build something new and beautiful for its own sake.
Of course when we look back on history, we see a punctuated equilibrium where short periods of years or decades can outshine the centuries surrounding them in terms of art, architecture, music, poetry, and other measures of cultural achievement, leaving a long trail of decaying imitations in their wake. Is this an artifact of chance historical preservation and the biases of those who recorded the works of their contemporaries, or do whole societies really just suddenly stop producing anything interesting or worthy of remembrance? Our own example seems like evidence for the latter, but I remain unsure.
Getting back to buildings, I recall once looking for any example of a contemporary style of architecture whose designs I liked, and all I found was the Neo-Andean of Bolivia. Some mixture of that, Art Deco, and whatever you call the supertrees in Singapore (solarpunk, I suppose), is what I'd like to see more of if I had a say in such things, though I would value having regional or climatic differentiation above all else. When I read Albion's Seed years ago, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which people's homes in colonial America (and basically every society ever except the one we live in now) were designed to either take advantage of or mitigate local factors such as snowfall, wind direction, humidity, and so on, rather than simply copying and pasting the same suburban floorplan, adding air conditioning or heating as needed, and calling it a day. There is something profoundly wrong with the fact that apartment buildings in Chicago look the same as ones in Miami.
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