Future Luvr: Preliminary Notes for a Renewed Cultural Pessimism
by Stanley Bast
“If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.”
– Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
“The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” – Jim Morrison
Whatever happened to the end of art? Proclaiming art’s demise would make for a compelling – if not totally blasé – rhetorical exercise that has already been better articulated, at various junctures in art history, by Hegel, Spengler, Arthur Danto, and more recently in Harper’s Magazine. It seems we can never escape the perpetual destruction and reinvention of art, repetitively eulogising and offering condolences at a purgatorial wake. And there is a nagging belief that the conditions for purified artistic experiences are increasingly impossible, which is to say, there is always a restrictive element closing off total enjoyment: whether markets and commercialisation, politics, or technology.
In any case, art appears to be something that must be killed off by its adherents, like the mythic divine king in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, for the necessary continuation of the world. This divine sacrifice is precipitated by spectacles of excess and a disruption of the universal order – things cannot be permitted to go too far; the dictates of economic Protestantism endeavour to curb excess which is tantamount to sin. And perhaps in this sumptuary execution we find an explanation for art’s stubborn resistance to absolute death (as theorised in end-of-art narratives): that its perpetuation hinges on sacrifice and demise, which is to once again consider art’s religiosity (in our secular times of age and death, what would this mean anyway?)