• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Hegel thought that the movement of history is given its sensuous appearance by art. To put that in clearer language, when you hear Keith’s guitar sound, and you see Mick prancing down the runway, that “show” is the very clothes that history wears when it is rolling from one stage to the next. The geniuses are the ones who are a little bit ahead of the wave. They don’t really know or understand what they’re doing. They’re actually hitting a target no one else even sees, and they are showing us what the future looks like, even before it has to be filled in with politics and religion and all sorts of other slower moving innards. Art is out ahead, giving our senses what will be before it really is. But it doesn’t do that out of the pure blue, it uses all the materials that history has already made, and it taps into all the tensions that currently exist, and then it pulls off a reversal so that what was last is now first and what was on top is now dependent on what came later, up from the swamp.

The Stones used their fame and influence, both with the public and in the art world, to draw attention to the blues, the bottom rung of the cultural ladder. At the time the Rolling Stones were on the rise, pop art was also pulling down the barriers between fine art and commercial/popular imagery, the beat poets wrote seriously about how the other half lived, and all that messiness cleared the way for low culture to become an object of curiosity around the world. Eventually, “high culture” found itself begging at the banquet.

For whatever reason, American low culture seems to have fascinated everyone who had the opportunity to consider the matter. People had been writing about the plight of the poor and painting and sculpting ordinary life since the Romantic era, so it wasn’t the subject matter that was new. What had changed is that the sensibilities of the lower classes, their types of expression and even their aesthetic sense was coming to the center of things, slowly crowding out the old dominance of the earlier age (when the bourgeois tried to ape the aristocrats in taste). Suddenly it had become cool to affirm that the people’s art was good, nay better than the stuffy old crap we were told we should appreciate.

Art for Art’s Sake

Even in the midst of a move across the tracks, there is still a place for what philosophers call “aestheticism.” People whose moral and even religious values are drawn from the aesthetic realm are “aesthetes.” The pure bluesman is a kind of low culture aesthete, living the blues so he can play the blues, and not expecting anything more from life or from death. Hank Williams is an example of how that view plays out in country music, or see Townes Van Zandt, or Steve Earle. And The Stones are aesthetes in the rock’n’roll sense, but they came at a time of transition. The worlds of high and low culture were in a dialectical tango in the 1960s. Being a rock’n’roll version of the aesthete is not enough to conquer the world (and The Stones, and their aesthetic, most definitely did prevail). The bluesmen and the hillbilly aesthetes hadn’t conquered the world, they had been spit on by it. But The Stones were different.

It isn’t an accident that Mick and Keith both began to associate very early with visual artists like Andy Warhol, and with mavens of art world like Robert Fraser. Painting still represented the domain of high art, like ballet and opera did, but painting was changing. While The Stones were treating blues as something to be elevated, painters were becoming curious about how to take painting down a notch. That Keith was drawn to visual art from the first, and that Ronnie Wood, also a recognized painter, would be a natural fit, seems to confirm the idea that the collective lives of The Stones have been and remain a generalized artistic project. Andy Warhol would have been among the first to impress upon them that the lines between fine art and pop culture were being erased, and that to be an artist now was to embrace many art forms at