Art is an Unalloyed Good, Right?

The following is an excerpt of a 5 December 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.

"Norsemen Landing in Iceland" by Oscar Wergeland - Guerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline) (1909). Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas. London : Harrap. This illustration is the frontispiece. Digitized by the Internet Archive and available from http://www.archive.org/details/mythsofthenorsem00gueruoft Some simple image processing by User:Haukurth.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Art:

I like the lyrics of your song! Let me know if you finish it. It goes along with the Nativity-type elements in "Why Would I Bow to His Majesty?" 

I probably will want to move on from this topic soon, for Yeatsian reasons, but I do think we need to remain as conscious as possible of racial elements that we ourselves have built into this saga. Rock 'n' roll itself--and especially Detroit rock 'n' roll--is fraught with race-related issues by its very DNA. 

I really like the idea ("like" might be the wrong word) of Iceland as a kind of "Heart of Whiteness," a photo negative of Heart of Darkness, but raising similar issues. 

I appreciate the Mad Men approach to race as well. Too many shows set in that time period have tried to sanitize the way characters would have acted. So awkward. Maybe I allowed myself to get too topical. Broke character. Did what I wrote derail things too much? (And were we ever on anything as straight and parallel as rails?) 

But then again, in one sense, it's just another interpretation, another layer of sediment. Certainly got a lot of page views. Maybe our artistic endeavors aren't quite as complicit as I made them out to be. I don't think I'll ever know. As usual, yours seems like the more balanced view. 

Plus, art is an unalloyed good, right?

Will:

With the photo negative idea, is the idea that Carlton Farthington is Kurtz, and that he uses the superstition of the Icelandic natives (they believe in elves and fairies, apparently) to stage the concert on some Icelandic island and is worshiped as a pagan god despite the fact or because of the fact that his methods have become unsound? 

Are Arthur White and Will Witkowski then Marlowes? 

Achebe's No Longer at Ease is my favorite of his books, and it deals with the generation of Nigerians who were Oxford educated so that they could assist the white oppressors in modernizing Nigeria. The irony, historically speaking, is that the Nigerians who were educated ended up getting multiple PhD's while their white employers were usually mediocre students who couldn't make it in England and rarely even had bachelor's degrees, so England abandoned that policy. So there is something Achebean in the notion of Farthington using his Oxford education to hoodwink white people, and something Conradian in that notion of all of Europe going into the formation of Kurtz, or in this case, all of European colonialism fueling Farthington's cult leader status. 

At the same time, I don't think Farthington is motivated by revenge or personal insecurity, as we see with most cult leaders, especially white male American cult leaders. He seems a little more like an Elegba figure: he enjoys messing with people, which I think makes him a little elven or spritely, too. 

Also, I still see the concert, or at least the original concert, as being set in the 70's, à la the Concert for Bangladesh. We're just not living in an era of mega fundraiser concerts.