Ep. 40: Truth and Beauty
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2021
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why is Game of Thrones better than WAP? Or is it? This kind of question is always flying around on Twitter, especially among conservatives. But it has an ancient pedigree: from Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Poetics," on through Philip Sidney and Camille Paglia, the critics and philosophers of the West have puzzled over what it means to enjoy depictions of weird or even ugly things. In this episode of "Young Heretics," Spencer Klavan digs into that history to help resolve our modern controversies.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So do you remember how a little while back I said that we were never gonna do an episode about WOP? |
| 0:06.5 | So I kind of lied. |
| 0:12.7 | But I also didn't totally lie. This is not like a hundred percent episode about WOP, |
| 0:16.4 | but it's a little bit about WOP. If you don't know what I'm talking about, WOP is just really |
| 0:22.8 | a vulgar song by Cardi B that got a lot of play recently because I guess Ben Shapiro just read |
| 0:31.9 | the lyrics without any music or intonation just like read them out loud. The point being this is |
| 0:38.8 | degraded, like singing openly about your like most sort of excessive sexual desires is like |
| 0:46.9 | not good art and it kind of sucks. And they're followed this weird little firefight between like Ben |
| 0:53.2 | Shapiro and Cardi B, which like you know that is not a timeline that any one of us expected to find |
| 0:59.0 | ourselves on, but there we are. It did happen and it was, I found it actually kind of revealing of |
| 1:06.2 | a set of issues that are underlying a lot of our conversations about culture that we don't really |
| 1:12.4 | have great equipment to handle. Because on the one hand, conservatives and even just people |
| 1:19.9 | who want to kind of live decent lives, I think all have this intuition that like our pop art a |
| 1:27.5 | lot of it is really degraded. Like never mind WOP, like if you've watched like any of Katy Perry's |
| 1:33.2 | videos recently, especially if you watch the video for like Bon Appetit, which is just like the |
| 1:38.4 | premise of that song is like my body is meat, you know, it's literally that's literally the premise. |
| 1:42.8 | And so I don't know, I feel on the one hand that people, most people sort of react to that and |
| 1:49.2 | realize that there's something missing from that about what art ought to be. And yet at the same time, |
| 1:55.7 | you know, you also don't want to be that guy who's like, well, her ump, like no art should ever |
| 2:00.7 | have nudity in it, you know. And I don't mean to mock like obviously parents have concerns about |
| 2:05.2 | what they show their kids and we're going to get into that today. And I don't mean to mock people |
| 2:09.1 | who have concerns about nudity, but there is a certain tight-lipped approach to art that also feels |
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