The idea that poetry, that art generally, should serve as a source — perhaps the primary source — of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully.
In What the Right Gets Wrong About Art (merci à Glenn Reynolds), Roger Kimball
writes about an era
in which ugliness has not only triumphed in our culture but is everywhere held up as something one must embrace as attractive? How many more fashion ads featuring hideous “fat positive” females do we need?
… Conservatives in the West long ago ceded culture to the Left.
… Back in 1973, Irving Kristol wrote an essay called “On Capitalism and the Democratic Idea.” In the course of that essay, Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote,
the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.
… one day [“the very important people” who manage the affairs of our society] woke up and found the art world, and even the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship. Their indifference mutated first into outrage. Then, as they took note of the prices fetched by the garbage, it mutated into capitulation.
This process did not take place in a vacuum. It was part and parcel of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going in earnest with the advent of modernism. In art, as the Australian philosopher David Stove observed,
Western Europe found that its anti-academy had become its academy ‘even in the twinkling of an eye.’ The galleries were suddenly full of the art of African societies formerly the most despised. Victorian architecture was all at once the object of a universal detestation, or rather horror. Black music began its long and excruciating revenge on the white man. The Jazz Age, in short, had arrived.
Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those “adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and that live a sort of posthumous existence now in the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary
… it is worth noting that great damage has been done — above all to artists, but also to public taste — by romanticizing the tribulations of the nineteenth-century avant-garde. Everyone is brought up on stories of how an obtuse public scorned Manet, censored Gauguin, and drove poor Van Gogh to madness and suicide. But the fact that these great talents went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the thought that, because one is unappreciated, one is therefore a genius. It has also made it extremely difficult to expose fraudulent work as such. For any frank dismissal of art — especially art that cloaks itself in the mantle of the avant-garde — is immediately met by the rejoinder: “Ah, but they made fun of Cézanne, too: they thought that Stravinsky was a charlatan.”
This is the easiest and also the most shallow response to criticism. It has been adopted as much by the Right as the Left. To quote David Stove again, it is yet another version of what he called “The ‘They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus’ Argument.” … If the Columbus Argument is puerile when applied to politics and morals, it is equally puerile when applied to art. In the first place, most artists whom we now associate with the nineteenth-century avant-garde did not set out to shock or “transgress” moral boundaries: they set out to make art that was a true articulation of the world. Today, the primary — often, it seems, the only — goal of many so-called “cutting edge” artists is to shock and transgress. The art is secondary, a license for bad behavior.
There is also the uncomfortable and inegalitarian truth that in any age most art is bad or failed art. And in our time, most art is not only bad but also dishonest: a form of therapy or political grumbling masquerading as art. Like everything important in human life, art must be judged on the basis of first-hand experience: no formula can be devised prescribing its assessment, including the formula that what is despised today will be championed as great work tomorrow. The art world today retains little of the idealism that permeated Romanticism, but it remains Romantic in its moralism and hubris about the salvific properties of art.
On second thought, though, I realized that I could give an abbreviated answer to the question implicit in my title in just three words: indifference, capitulation, kitsch.
[The] familiar but exemplary episodes from the annals of contemporary art [that Roger Kimball mentions regarding the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Pinoncelli, etc] illustrate the cynical truth of Andy Warhol’s observation that “Art is what you can get away with.” Warhol’s own career, and, indeed, a large part of the contemporary art world testify to the power — if not the truth — of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only put forward but also accepted and celebrated as a work of art.
How Did We Get Here?
What had to happen such that a bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde is accounted an important work of art? That is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word “beauty”: What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty. … But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.
But if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism — as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.
George Orwell gave classic expression to this point in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí.” Acknowledging the deficiency of the philistine response to Dalí’s work — categorical rejection along with denial that Dalí possessed any talent whatever — Orwell goes on to note that the response of the cultural elites was just as impoverished. Essentially, the elite response to Dalí was the response of l’art pour l’art, of extreme aestheticism. “The artist,” Orwell writes,
is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O. K.; kicking little girls in the head is O. K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows, among other things, detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.
A juror in the obscenity trial in Cincinnati in 1990 over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs of the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, the juror nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”
“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive, foolish, or corrosive it might be? Part of the answer has to do with the confusion of art with ‘free speech.’ Another part of the answer has to do with the evolution, and what we might call the institutionalization, of the avant-garde and its posture of defiance.
You know the drill: black-tie dinners at major museums, tout le monde in attendance, celebrating the latest art-world freak: maybe it’s the Chapman brothers with their pubescent female mannequins festooned with erect penises; maybe it’s Mike Kelley with his mutilated dolls, or Jeff Koons with his pornographic sculptures depicting him and his now-former wife having sex, or Cindy Sherman with her narcissistic feminism, or Jenny Holzer with her political slogans. The list is endless. And so is the tedium. Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens. As with any collusion of snobbery and artistic nullity, such spectacles have their amusing aspects, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has brilliantly shown. In the end, though, the aftermath of the avant-garde has been the opposite of amusing. It has been a cultural disaster. For one thing, by universalizing the spirit of opposition, it has threatened to transform the practice of art into a purely negative enterprise. In large precincts of the art world today, art is oppositional or it is nothing. Celebrity replaces aesthetic achievement as the goal of art.The right, especially the libertarian right, has been complicit in this development, first in its indifference, second in its capitulation, third by its embrace of kitsch.
… The novelist Milan Kundera … noted that “Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.” Kitsch is histrionic, self-dramatizing.
… it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.
But “beauty” is by no means an unambiguous term. In degenerate or diluted form, it can mean the merely pretty, and in this sense beauty really is an enemy of authentic artistic expression. But beauty is not always the “merely pretty” or agreeable. One thinks, for example, of Dostoyevsky’s observation, in The Brothers Karamazov, that “beauty is the battlefield on which God and the devil war for man’s soul.”
The point is that, in its highest sense, beauty speaks with such great immediacy because it touches something deep within us. Understood in this way, beauty is something that absorbs our attention and delivers us, if but momentarily, from the poverty and incompleteness of everyday life. At its most intense, beauty invites us to forget our subjection to time and imparts an intoxicating sense of self-sufficiency. Our art closes us to the experience of the beautiful.
… Art today is enlisted in all manner of extra-artistic projects, from gender politics to the grim linguistic leftism of neo-Marxists, post-structuralists, gender theorists, and all the other exotic fauna who are congregating in and about the art world and the academy. The subjugation of art — and of cultural life generally — to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age. Among much else, it has made it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. This situation has made it imperative for critics who care about art to champion its distinctively aesthetic qualities against attempts to reduce art to a species of propaganda.
… . By the nineteenth century, art had long been free from serving the ideological needs of religion; and yet the spiritual crisis of the age tended to invest art with ever greater existential burdens — burdens that continue, in various ways, to be felt down to this day. The poet Wallace Stevens articulated one important strand of this phenomenon when he observed that “after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The idea that poetry, that art generally, should serve as a source — perhaps the primary source — of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully. It helps to explain, for example, the special aura that attaches to art and artists, even now
… This much, I think, is clear: without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life. As I have put it elsewhere, the trivialization of outrage leads to a kind of moral and aesthetic anesthesia not the least of whose symptoms is the outrage of trivialization.
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