In his latest column, the mysterious Spengler changes his usual subject of international politics and religion and offers an interesting point about modern art. According to him, abstract art and atonal music grew from the same movement, but while hardly anybody listens to atonal music, lots of people flock to see the latest Damien Hirst bullshit conserved in formaldehyde. Why?

Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract impressionists, most famously Clement Greenberg’s sponsorship of Jackson Pollock in The Partisan Review. It is not supposed to “please” the senses on first glance, after the manner of a Raphael or an Ingres, but to challenge the viewer to think and consider.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but reluctant to live under communism.

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist’s chair. You cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow, rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

That is why at least some modern artists come into very serious money, but not a single one of the abstract composers can earn a living from his music.

The same reasoning applies to other forms of art: experimental books and films, for instance, are hardly successful (well, in the case of books, they can always be put on the shelf or on the coffee table to impress guests). But visual arts somehow has created a public that is not only avid to consume such nonsense, but also seems to expect it. I suppose it has to do with the fact that most “admirers” of contemporary art are not interested in the “art” per se, but in the way they will be seen by the others. To aesthetically appreciate dead animals in tanks is to be “in the know”, and most people either want to impress others or simply do not want to appear ignorant or uninformed.

The last exhibition of contemporary art I went to had everything that one would expect in such displays – horrible photographies of dead omutilated corpses; sculptures made with blood, urine and other “unorthodox” materials; religious blasphemy (for some curious reason, only images from Christianity were used); personal objects of the so-called artist exposed as “art”, etc etc etc.

I remembered then my trip to Pompeii, and thought that, if 1500 years from now, some archeologist tried to understand our current world by means of the artworks that he found, he would think that ours was a strange civilization, bent on self-destruction and self-disgust (and he wouldn’t be very far from the truth). Just try to compare anything in recent output with a painting by Velazquez or Boticelli.

I suppose we would have to blame mostly Duchamp and his urinal for what contemporary art has become. Yet, Duchamp’s tricks, at the time, were witty and ingenious. Seventy-plus years later, thought, with the same variation repeated over and over by all kinds of artists, the joke isn’t funny anymore. Yet there is one work of contemporary art that I, like Spengler, would be very happy to see at an exhibition:

By inflicting sufficient ugliness upon us, the modern artists believe, they will wear down our capacity to see beauty. That, I think, is the point of putting dead animals into glass cases, or tanks of formaldehyde. But I am open-minded; there might be some value to this artistic technique after all. If Damien Hirst were to undertake a self-portrait in formaldehyde, I would be the first to subscribe to a commission.

Since nobody reads this blog anyway, I tought I might stop writing about politics, international news and other boring stuff and just post a few notes about a poem by Yeats hat I like:

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Now, the poem is apocalyptic in tone and pessimistic in its message, so in a sense it has not lost its power. Written in 1920, inbetween two World Wars, it seems however more apt to the times we live in.

Its theme, of course, is the decay of Western civilization. All the first stanza provides images of discontrol, loss, despair. “The falconer cannot hear the falconer”. “Things fall apart”, and of course, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Indeed, even now the worst murderers and sonofabitches – islamic terrorists, neocommunists, murdering dictators armed with nuclear bombs – are full of passionate intensity while the best… Waver. Falter. Or are not really sure of what to do to stop the tide of insanity. Perhaps there’s nothing to do. Perhaps Yeats is right and we have reached the end of a 2000 year cicle. A beast slouces towards Bettlehem, and the world will plunge into the New Dark Age…

Sleep well, folks.

Found it, oddly enough, through Samizdata.

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