Hard Times and Great Art

Where's today's Dorothea Lange? Hard times have spawned great art — but not these hard times, it seems. (Los Angeles Times, 9/12/2011)

Excerpt: The pain and suffering has only been superficially covered by the news media, but it has surely not been addressed by our artists. In the 1930s, John Steinbeck chronicled the Depression as it played out in the lives of the Joads, his fictional Okies. He invented those memorable characters to vivify all the abstractions of the policymakers and to give literary voice to the suffering so many nonfictional Americans were experiencing.

There were a raft of other artists who also were telling the tale, making people see, hear and feel the pain as only the arts can do. There was Dorothea Lange taking photos and Woody Guthrie writing songs. Hollywood was doing its part too, and not only with a movie version of Steinbeck's novel. Unlike current audiences, moviegoers in the '30s were persistently reminded by what was on the screen of what awaited them when they resumed their lives outside the theater. Even "King Kong," generally conceded to be pioneering escapist fare, begins with Fay Wray in a bread line.







For sheer idiocy -- at least two of the commenters think that Dorothea Lange is the woman in the photo -- and fuzzy views of history -- photography as something exotic to the massess -- read the comments.