martyrs of beauty

by guest contributor Stanley Bast

“Art today? [...] Art today is spelled with an f.” 

– William Gaddis, The Recognitions. 

The golden age of content is disastrous for art. From this position, it’s easy to slip into an elitism in which high- and low-artforms (kitsch) exist as distinct cultural markers which reinvigorate arcane forms of representation – just ask any MFA. After all, if we accept the idea that there can be no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art, that art is subject to the mere gaze of the spectator, then, frankly, everything and anything advances art. We do not, after all, wish to be reactionaries. As the adage goes, we should let people enjoy things; we should purge the hermetic Modernist ghost and widen art’s categories. To reiterate: we do not wish to be reactionaries. 

No one better articulated this position than Joseph Beuys who, in 1973, declared that ‘every man is an artist’. While I don’t care too much for Beuys’ action-oriented approach to art, I think the general sentiment is quite interesting, perhaps an early precursor to today’s cultural libertinism. Every man is an artist, every scrap heap a work of art, every act creative: 

“Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. This most modern art discipline [...] will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.”¹ 

Wishful thinking. Beuys is the spiritual MFA student par excellence paralyzed by the fear of sounding like, well, a reactionary. The 60s and 70s were rife with these lines of thinking, emphasizing the ‘democratization of art’ – the implications being the banalisation of the aesthetic, in which art and the everyday commingle. Here, the distinctions between high- and low-artforms wither, to such an extent that we are forced to accept the false, egalitarian notion that every human is an artist. The conditions have worsened today, with a cultural logic emphasizing a tolerance of ‘enjoyment’ at the expense of criticism. Our lenience, our fear of being r-words (reactionaries), is perhaps a gross misinterpretation of the necessity of art. Widening the categories of the aesthetic, being generally permissive, is self-fellating. 

Art and the everyday cannot be reconciled. Nor can we proceed as sacerdotal libertines in our belief that all aesthetic creations and valuations are equal. Paglia says as much: 

“Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind, or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel [...] Particularly in modern times, when high art has been shoved to the periphery of culture, is it evident that art is aggressive and compulsive.” 

Yet we arrive at a point where our words begin to anxiously falter. Paglia’s emphasis on hierarchy and order owes much to Sade; as far as we are aware Sade is anathema to our liberal graduate tutelage. Simultaneously, the gray waves of excess-as-content, which blur our vision, leave us incapacitated in our attempts at distinguishing good taste from bad. It comes about that we do not wish to embarrassingly reveal ourselves as smug disciples of Spengler, lamenting the suicide of the Faustian spirit. But we owe as much in our discernment, whenever we recoil at the hideous, enjoyable dingueries passed off as ‘art’ today, that it would be worthwhile to recall Spengler’s own vision: 

In any Culture, that element is “popular” [...] which a man understands from childhood without having to master by effort any really novel method or standpoint–and, generally, that which is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which is merely hinted at and has to be discovered [...] by the few, and sometimes the very, very few.

On the one hand, it is worthwhile to ask whether enjoyment of excess and discerning criticism can coexist. Yet on the other hand, our incapacities become blatantly obvious in the face of the deluge. As D’annunzio wrote, we are drowning “beneath today’s gray democratic flood, which wretchedly submerges so many beautiful and rare things.” Can our senses recover, can we martyr ourselves for beauty? Or must we continue living in the wasteland? 

Stanley Bast is a net art propagandist. @camillepawglia

originally published in cracks in pomo: the zine

Check out Stanley’s appearance on Cracks in PoMo the pod here

Graphic by Patrick Keohane (Revolving Style) @revolvingstyle