Philip Curtiss

Name: The Mucker Pose
Author: Philip Curtiss

The Mucker Pose (1921)

Summary

“The Mucker Pose”, published in 1921, is a work by Philip Curtiss. It explores elements such as mucker, popular viewpoint and movies.

Quotes from The Mucker Pose (Philip Curtiss)

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ There are enough people in the world who really do enjoy bad music, bad art, and bad literature, without people who should know better studiedly affecting to enjoy them. Yet that is what happens to-day. I, personally, do not enjoy jazz—the incessant, nerve-racking rhythms which make up a typical restaurant concert. I have no wish to abolish them. I do not object to others enjoying them. I simply do not like them myself and cannot pretend that I do, yet that is what the mucker pose requires that I must do. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ If a gentleman or a man of sensitive habits of thought were introduced as the hero it must be only to show how, at the climax of the story, he "found himself" by winning a street fight or by "making good" as a commercial traveler.
"Give the public what it wants, and let us want it too," is the artistic slogan of the mucker pose, but on his own ground the amateur mucker is no match for the genuine mucker. In life as in art no one is quicker to spot the amateur mucker than the genuine mucker and for no one has he more contempt. He has far more respect for the genuine highbrow. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ As a social manner, the mucker pose is not in itself alarming. If a man wishes to give, superficially, the impression that he is a tout or a bookmaker, or if a woman actually wishes to have people believe that she finds herself more at home among illiterates than among educated persons, that is his or her own affair. What is more insidious and more reprehensible is the manner in which the mucker pose has become a popular viewpoint in American art and intellectual life. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ If I say that I do not like jazz I am, according to the popular pose, displaying an affectation. I am "just saying that in order to be 'different.' " The vilest manifestation of the mucker pose is that, in music as in the other arts, renegade critics, seeing that the mucker pose is the popular pose, debase their own erudition to support it. They pretend to see "the folk element" or the "spontaneous note" in music which is merely trite or, more often, stolen. They pretend to see "brilliant technique" in plays which are merely perfect in their conventional inanity. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ There is no objection to satisfying a popular demand, but it is a rank case of the mucker pose to call it art with a straight face.
I believe that motion pictures can become a great art, but they are not at present. They will not be so long as it is more profitable for them to be a very bad art and especially so long as superior intelligence appears to pat them on the back and tell them that they are perfectly lovely. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ There have been certain writers who were surely gentle, courteous people in their private lives, but who have seemed to believe that they would commit professional suicide if they should put a rich man or a well-bred man into a story except as a butt for some mucker. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ The intellectual writer, or painter, or musician who courts popularity by deliberately debasing his artistic standards is only too apt to make an appearance very much like that of my poor old lady who tried so hard to be frivolous. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ In American literature, happily, the mucker pose seems to be burning itself out, but only because, in every grade of fiction except the highest, it has been, for two full decades, the popular tone, not merely in style, but in subject. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ The mucker pose exercises its greatest tyranny in its attitude toward "the movies." According to the present popular viewpoint, it is heresy for any one, no matter what his training or natural tastes, to say that he does not enjoy "the movies." That is affectation according to the practitioners of the mucker pose. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Philip Curtiss, The Mucker Pose (1921)

“ Again I do not refer to people who really do think that the movies are gripping. I refer to that mean and hypnotized state of mind which allows persons of superior intellect to say, in private or in print, that the motion pictures in their present state are "a great art," when they know perfectly well that they have never seen a motion picture which dis =played one atom of art except good photography or possibly an honest intent to reproduce grandeur by prodigious pains and unlimited expense. ”

Philip Curtiss

Summary

Quotes from The Mucker Pose (Philip Curtiss)

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