Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese by Paul Lopes (2019)

Strongly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts, author Paul Lopes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University, starts an unusual examination of roughly three post war decades. A period he calls “The Heroic Age of American Art” and that, in his opinion, was extremely important in terms of new developments in the arts, here especially film and America’s most exclusive experimental music, jazz.

For him, avant-garde and independent artists only began to exist after WWII (with a few exceptions in the 1920s). With special attention on two outstanding domestic artists from the fields of jazz, Miles Davies, and film, Martin Scorsese, the book is devoted to their workings, creative energy, motivations and the massive changes they initiated in their relevant disciplines and American culture.
“I chose Davis and Scorsese not only because they were highly celebrated icons of their respective rebellions, but also because no other artists from their generation of rebels remained as independent, outspoken, and successful over their extend careers.”

However, comparing two artists from different disciplines can be difficult. As not all concepts or theories of one art form easily apply to the other one, not to speak of two very distinctive personalities. And not all of their features and deeds can be analyzed or explained with a liberal catalog of tools and shifting gender images.

American culture emerged changed after the introduction of New Hollywood film and modern jazz; now even the cultural mainstream was changed and included other points of view (like those of minorities); as related to the common ways of listening to music or experiencing views on (American) life as provided by film.
Emphasis in the study here is given on their “public stories,” i.e. Lopez almost exclusively uses information on the Davies and Scosere found in the media; an approach that both limits a complete experience of the person but then highlights an impression that was being projected and in part continuously repeated. By omitting personal impressions, interviews and autobiographical information, the public image appears likewise as “creative act.” With two male creative personalities, one middle-class African-American, the other working-class Italian-American, Lopes concludes that their respective products mirror many key elements of their upbringing, experience and nature.

For him “… these artists provide compelling accounts not only over the conflicts of autonomy, creativity, and status in American art since the mid-twentieth century, but also compelling accounts of the powerful and dynamic forces of race, ethnicity, and gender in American art and society during this period.” Simultaneously, Lopes asks how their respective public stories, their biographical legends, inform the Heroic Age of American Art. Another aspect of the study is the acceptability/economic state of the independent artists of those times.
“I purposely chose these genre communities [of modern jazz and independent film] because of how their liminal ‘in-between’ state – the constant balancing between the tendencies of the high art avant-garde and the mass-appeal popular – brings to focus important distinctions that shaped the structured meaningful activity of rebellion and innovation during the Heroic Age. … The public stories of these genre communities, and of Davis and Scorsese, reveal the contradictions faced in these rebellions in terms of questions and conflicts dealing with aesthetics, autonomy, innovation, authenticity, and commercialism.”

After long discourses into the public images of Davis and Scorsese, their true genius is affirmed. That is, these two individuals were fantastic and innovative artists who took many risks and put their (economic) survival at stake, in order to proceed with their work.
At that point, some readers would probably say that they did accomplish their works and reached that standing without ever considering either “hypermasculinity,” questions of gender, Jim Crow rules or over exaggeration of a certain class background. However, these are theories and explanations Lopes offers. That there always were prejudiced views on jazz musicians, no matter to what drugs there were addicted to (if they were) is part of the story of jazz and has been documented in many forms. And that one filmmaker of Italian-American heritage would choose a familiar local and ethnic environment and place some of his fictional characters right there is probably not too unusual.

And that Miles Davis would break down artistic and social barriers in his way was not only part of his African-American background, but result of the sheer creative energy that probably also was at work with other inventors for the last centuries. (Again, one would not expect a quiet and introverted musician in some Symphony Orchestra to change the direction of jazz.)

Future readers then possibly will want to experience the works of Davis and Scorsese first and maybe without a load of theories.
As we have here, unfortunately, several stories, or rather, a number of mostly unconnected parts.
This is somehow disappointing, as Art Rebels presents many correct conclusions about a changing American appreciation of art in the post-war years; this part is exemplary, so is Lopes’s introduction to Scorsese. (The chapter on Miles Davis is very good and sums up the major developments in jazz history until the 1980s; Lopes demonstrated excellent knowledge of jazz in his The Rise of a Jazz Art World from 2002).
The author also gives a good analysis of the different markets for film, music and popular culture that were enlarged by the many small independent and fringe film and record producers. Their independent distribution and airtime organization caused the development of a new popular culture; Lopes explains this market in a nutshell, even though this is not exactly fresh information.
The main challenge of the new independent artists (and their simultaneous small rebellions during the Heroic Age) then, was to establish themselves within a certain distance from the mainstream culture, but still within the tastes of the popular culture. Lopes exemplifies this with countless links to literature, pop culture, rock and roll culture, other experimental music or exploitation cinema.

But after all, the two artists who are at the center of the book have actually rather little in common; besides living and producing during roughly the same decades, while Scorsese is still making movies at this moment (and even though Lopes very early identifies their main commonality, namely artistic autonomy).
His conclusions about the two geniuses at the end then may be a bit unsatisfactory, as it also may not persuade the reader of their shared experience. There simply was not enough of it, neither in the previous chapters. By re-constructing public biographies or reevaluating this or that decision of the one artist and looking at it from the position of either a gender-specialist, a critic, or color-blind ideology or giving attention to their class background unfortunately does not really convince here.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2019

Paul Lopes. Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese. Princeton University Press, 2019, 248 p.