Tim Worstall

Zoe Williams: Confused

Please Sir, may I have a job spouting utter nonsense?

Beautiful musicians would be incapable of denying the Holocaust, they
simply wouldn’t possess that kind of cruel stupidity. This is all an
updating of the Elizabethan contention that it was impossible (or at
least outlandish) for a physically beautiful person to be morally ugly.
While that is clearly nonsense, it remains impossible for a person
capable of musical transcendence to be ideologically base or crass.

It’s nonsense but true? Anyway, the answer to this puzzle is Wagner.

In

6 responses

  1. The Remittance Man Avatar
    The Remittance Man

    Come now Tim, since when could anyone expect logic or common sense in the Guardian? And since Zoe writes for the arts section such expectations are even more pointless.
    RM

    Reply
  2. Andrew Ian Dodge Avatar
    Andrew Ian Dodge

    One has to wonder what drug she was on when she wrote that tripe. I have written some dodgy reviews but yeesh that takes the biscuit.

    Reply
  3. The Remittance Man Avatar
    The Remittance Man

    “This is all an updating of the Elizabethan contention that it was impossible (or at least outlandish) for a physically beautiful person to be morally ugly. While that is clearly nonsense…”
    It may be clearly nonsense until one seems a photo of Cherry Blair under a headline accusing her of donating a signed copy of the Hutton Report to a Labour fundraising auction.
    Suddenly the counter-contention that swamp donkeys can never do anything beautiful becomes all to believable.
    RM

    Reply
  4. Harry Powell Avatar
    Harry Powell

    That doesn’t seem to me an obviously Elizabethan point of view, there’s plenty of squalour in Donne. Keats and the Romantics maybe; Pater, Wilde and the Aesthetes certainly.

    Reply
  5. ajay Avatar
    ajay

    Wagner doesn’t (or rather didn’t) write beautiful music, Tim. He wrote awful, bombastic music, immense puddles of dissonant porridge. So he isn’t relevant to the question…

    Reply
  6. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    Then there’s moral cripple Karlheinz Stockhausen calling 9/11 a ‘work of art’. A case could be made for a piece of avant-garde performance art titled ‘Kicking Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Balls Until He Says He Is Very Very Sorry’.

    Reply

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