Cf. Poe on the independence of Beauty: "With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth."
Qtd. in this piece, in response to one by Erik Hoel (beauty seems to be on people's mind these days):
I wonder if the reason artists are more likely to become the vanguard in radical movements is because of the personality traits that made them pursue art in the first place. My guess is that they score high on openness and neuroticism, which would probably align well with revolutionaries. Add in their precarious financial position, which means there isn't much to lose from burning everything down. By contrast, I bet these radical movements attracted fewer engineers, who tend to be not only more conscientious, but also more employable.
Over time, I've come to appreciate folk art more as a result of the trends you describe. It has an earnestness that I think post modernists would find embarrassing. At least most of it aims to be beautiful or expertly crafted, using whatever materials and skills are available. It's certainly expressing a nobler sentiment than a banana taped to a wall.
I think the discussion of postmodern artists being divorced from the process of making art, to the point that Damien Hirst is dismissive of the idea that he could or should learn how to sculpt, is extremely significant given the current atmosphere of AI Art hype. Using artificial intelligence to create art makes perfect sense if you're just an idea man who's either unwilling or unable to undergo the technical training to make the image you want. But then, that's the irony. You want art yet think the process of creating it is irrelevant. This is a naturally distorted perspective. In any decent art, an idea that seems to work in your head may well not work at all once you start trying to reproduce it in a form that other people can understand and will require significant modification.
Or to put it another way, this is a perspective that makes no sense to someone who genuinely enjoys the act of creation and sees no purpose to art without that process. What people who like AI Art even see in it is a complete mystery to me from that perspective. What is art without context, and what does it mean for art to be procedurally generated save for the fact that it's a conscious effort to remove context?
This is a very thoughtful and richly researched piece. Thank you.
In support of the Frankl position I’d like to draw attention also to the music composed by Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann and others within Theresienstadt.
You began your essay with references to True Believers and the nature of mass movements. You also referred to genius's. And of course the bug-bear of identity politics too.
Meanwhile Trumpty Dumpty a self-described "very stable genius" has created a mass movement which is quite literally a cult of very enthusiastic true believers. I am of course referring to the MAGA or Make America Grotesque Again) cult.
Trumpty Dumpty comes out of the "there is a sucker born every minute" Showbiz Tradition of P T Barnum. Barnum was of course wrong. There are thousands of suckers born every minute and Trumpty Dumpty is an expert and manipulating, and exploiting them too.
He is also playing a very toxic "game" of identity politics in describing most/all of those on the left-side of the culture wars divide as traitors or enemies of the people.
That having been said please check out an essay by Theodor Adorno titled
Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda .
Among other things he writes about the seductive appeal of the "great man" who is going to save everyone from the traitors within and the enemies at the gate
I was having a discussion elsewhere about our modern marriage or symbiotic sisterhood between European postmodernism and American Crit Theory/Social Justice (this was in the context of the difference bw Simone de Beauvoir's sophisticated irony and Judith Butler's dour obscurantist jargon prose) and I think that while this toxic stew has been poisonous everywhere (social relations, sex relations, the transmission of culture and the love of learning etc), I don't think it's been more destructive than in the arts.
Sometime in the 1980s (when Parisian theory was imported in bulk) two streams crossed and created a new orthodoxy that seems now to be the water we're all doomed to swim in till death. First was the tres Francais idea that this thing called "Art" could be anything or by anyone, that mostly because of Europe's pointless fratricidal wars all of existence was shit and since it was shit why not make a god out of shit? Thus we go from Duchamp's urinal to the total triumph of the theorist class (all eunuchs in a harem when it comes to creativity), where what defined art was not talent or vision but how much political and ideological baggage it could carry.
But when imported to America, this very arch and jaded school of infinite posing was repurposed for a very different people with a very different history: art became another product much like Warhol's Brillo pads and another way for our post-60s children of affluence (the first children born at the top of Maslow's hierarchy who could dedicate their lives to "self-actualization") to "express themselves", and as most of us, esp when young, don't have much that's original to express, this quickly became ossified into our most popular modern ritual: performing your opposition to the old traditional world and its beliefs and norms, no matter how long it's been dead and buried.
But this transformation of art, where beauty is mocked and replaced by either barcodes or empty Oprahisms or pseudo-trangressive performances (usually all 3), has been a bonanza for theorists, profs, curators, PhDs and MFAs and all the places that employ them, which I think was the point all along. "Art" now is just another wing of the new Church of Western Liberalism, which is founded on a weird combo of narcissism and empty altruism, and while the ideas and products are all stillborn and quickly forgotten, the sinecures are juicy and the status remains high.
This is just my long-winded way of saying that anything created today of lasting beauty will have to be done far far away from our academies or museums or any of the people who employ them. Art aint dead, but the theorist class sure is, even if they still walk among us.
Cf. Poe on the independence of Beauty: "With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth."
Qtd. in this piece, in response to one by Erik Hoel (beauty seems to be on people's mind these days):
https://logosandliberty.substack.com/p/sing-o-muse-of-the-insights-of-einstein
Great, thought-provoking article.
I wonder if the reason artists are more likely to become the vanguard in radical movements is because of the personality traits that made them pursue art in the first place. My guess is that they score high on openness and neuroticism, which would probably align well with revolutionaries. Add in their precarious financial position, which means there isn't much to lose from burning everything down. By contrast, I bet these radical movements attracted fewer engineers, who tend to be not only more conscientious, but also more employable.
Over time, I've come to appreciate folk art more as a result of the trends you describe. It has an earnestness that I think post modernists would find embarrassing. At least most of it aims to be beautiful or expertly crafted, using whatever materials and skills are available. It's certainly expressing a nobler sentiment than a banana taped to a wall.
I think the discussion of postmodern artists being divorced from the process of making art, to the point that Damien Hirst is dismissive of the idea that he could or should learn how to sculpt, is extremely significant given the current atmosphere of AI Art hype. Using artificial intelligence to create art makes perfect sense if you're just an idea man who's either unwilling or unable to undergo the technical training to make the image you want. But then, that's the irony. You want art yet think the process of creating it is irrelevant. This is a naturally distorted perspective. In any decent art, an idea that seems to work in your head may well not work at all once you start trying to reproduce it in a form that other people can understand and will require significant modification.
Or to put it another way, this is a perspective that makes no sense to someone who genuinely enjoys the act of creation and sees no purpose to art without that process. What people who like AI Art even see in it is a complete mystery to me from that perspective. What is art without context, and what does it mean for art to be procedurally generated save for the fact that it's a conscious effort to remove context?
This is a very thoughtful and richly researched piece. Thank you.
In support of the Frankl position I’d like to draw attention also to the music composed by Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann and others within Theresienstadt.
You began your essay with references to True Believers and the nature of mass movements. You also referred to genius's. And of course the bug-bear of identity politics too.
Meanwhile Trumpty Dumpty a self-described "very stable genius" has created a mass movement which is quite literally a cult of very enthusiastic true believers. I am of course referring to the MAGA or Make America Grotesque Again) cult.
Trumpty Dumpty comes out of the "there is a sucker born every minute" Showbiz Tradition of P T Barnum. Barnum was of course wrong. There are thousands of suckers born every minute and Trumpty Dumpty is an expert and manipulating, and exploiting them too.
He is also playing a very toxic "game" of identity politics in describing most/all of those on the left-side of the culture wars divide as traitors or enemies of the people.
That having been said please check out an essay by Theodor Adorno titled
Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda .
Among other things he writes about the seductive appeal of the "great man" who is going to save everyone from the traitors within and the enemies at the gate
I was having a discussion elsewhere about our modern marriage or symbiotic sisterhood between European postmodernism and American Crit Theory/Social Justice (this was in the context of the difference bw Simone de Beauvoir's sophisticated irony and Judith Butler's dour obscurantist jargon prose) and I think that while this toxic stew has been poisonous everywhere (social relations, sex relations, the transmission of culture and the love of learning etc), I don't think it's been more destructive than in the arts.
Sometime in the 1980s (when Parisian theory was imported in bulk) two streams crossed and created a new orthodoxy that seems now to be the water we're all doomed to swim in till death. First was the tres Francais idea that this thing called "Art" could be anything or by anyone, that mostly because of Europe's pointless fratricidal wars all of existence was shit and since it was shit why not make a god out of shit? Thus we go from Duchamp's urinal to the total triumph of the theorist class (all eunuchs in a harem when it comes to creativity), where what defined art was not talent or vision but how much political and ideological baggage it could carry.
But when imported to America, this very arch and jaded school of infinite posing was repurposed for a very different people with a very different history: art became another product much like Warhol's Brillo pads and another way for our post-60s children of affluence (the first children born at the top of Maslow's hierarchy who could dedicate their lives to "self-actualization") to "express themselves", and as most of us, esp when young, don't have much that's original to express, this quickly became ossified into our most popular modern ritual: performing your opposition to the old traditional world and its beliefs and norms, no matter how long it's been dead and buried.
But this transformation of art, where beauty is mocked and replaced by either barcodes or empty Oprahisms or pseudo-trangressive performances (usually all 3), has been a bonanza for theorists, profs, curators, PhDs and MFAs and all the places that employ them, which I think was the point all along. "Art" now is just another wing of the new Church of Western Liberalism, which is founded on a weird combo of narcissism and empty altruism, and while the ideas and products are all stillborn and quickly forgotten, the sinecures are juicy and the status remains high.
This is just my long-winded way of saying that anything created today of lasting beauty will have to be done far far away from our academies or museums or any of the people who employ them. Art aint dead, but the theorist class sure is, even if they still walk among us.
Great piece, thanks!