1. When much of the reason for the existence of modernist art is to shock the bourgeoisie, what do you do when the bourgeoisie are now basically shock-proof?
The average frustrated Yalie or Cambridge undergrad has seen transgressions that would horrify a de Sade or even the great whores of old.
I read on, and detected your stylistic signature. No AI could hope to match it.
I really found it dismaying when the Atlantic dumped comments within a week after Trump's inauguration. Such a failure of the principles that the magazine supposedly prizes so highly. I might have found it excusable, if they had maintained the archive for the articles during the era when they had comments. It certainly isn't as if the comment regulars there were a pack of right-wingers.
January 2017 was the advent of efforts by Google and Facebook to "de-platform Nazis". That always sounded like a cheap excuse to me. Even granting the fact that there were occasional gangswarms of, yes, Nazis, in Atlantic story comments. I found the Right Stuff Nazis much too obnoxious, simple-minded, and trite to be a serious draw as a political movement; 21st century Americans aren't particularly perspicacious, but very few of them are that stupid. I always preferred to dispute the Nazis with facts and logic, rather than running from them. Censoring them just gives naive people the impression that they might be in possession of Hidden Truth.
I suspect the real reason for the Atlantic comments shutdown was Trump. The so-called "liberals" of the Eastern Establishment lost their minds. Most of them still seem to exist in an academic bubble, where the Proteges know better than to correct their Mentors. Some of us could never quite get to do that. And the owners and editors, et. al., couldn't tolerate the backtalk. Maybe if they had listened in the years prior to November 2016, they might have found ways to head off the maverick challenge of Donald Trump at the pass. but no-o...
Would any AI architect *want* to emulate it? It's a lot like an unmediated stream of consciousness, using transitions as crutches to buy more thinking time without having to stop... :^)
But on to the post-Trump comments purges.
After Atlantic did away with their comments, the forum migrated to DISCUS and the old Atlantic volunteer moderators--who were like Auschwitz capos--became moderators at DISCUS and eventually banned me for asking questions. That's always, always a tip-off that an orthodoxy controls the discourse.
Similarly, I was bounced permanently from Reddit.
Then I witnessed a sort of contagion of online publications following the trend of dumping Comments sections. They tended to lamely use the excuse that it was taking too much time to moderate, so that offensive speech never appeared on their site--and of course they had very fluid and situational definitions of offensive speech.
AI has a lot of trouble with rambling tangents, impromptu metaphors, and the parts of the conversation game that keep it real. Plus, you don't have a stable, predictable "agenda." You actually take the task of parsing inferences from what you've read seriously before you reply, instead of dreary axe-grinding, like a bot does.
"After Atlantic did away with their comments, the forum migrated to DISCUS and the old Atlantic volunteer moderators--who were like Auschwitz capos--became moderators at DISCUS and eventually banned me for asking questions. That's always, always a tip-off that an orthodoxy controls the discourse."
Oh yeah, that's what happened- direct Atlantic story comments migrated to something on Disqus called "Atlantic Discussions." I saw where that was headed, so I bailed right away. Too much stuff I couldn't easily do, like excerpting story quotes. The decoupling seemed senseless to me. There was no longer a direct connection to each story, available to all Atlantic readers.
Many parts of this article resonated with my own observations and subsequent conclusions that it would be impossible to begin to address even 20% of the really, *really* important issues you raise here. I will limit myself to two, and be as brief as I can.
Art, in general, but let's stick with only non-linguistic media such as visual art and instrumental music, bypasses language to communicate an emotional, and subjective, non-verbal message. This message is almost always based in the emotion--although it might be argued that Escher visuals do not entirely fall into this category, but come closer to the visual impression of superbly crafted three dimensional objects--maybe even utilitarian objects, like an old Hasselblad camera or Campagnolo group set of the 70s.
If accurate, most art evokes an emotional response, is solely subjective, and hence is unifying only when the subjective response is similar among the majority of any social group. E.g., everyone thinks the same thing when viewing Goya's The Executions, but the same cannot be said for abstract art in general.
And instrumental music tends to be even more emotional and subjective. What do Satie's Gnossiennes *mean*, actually? I woke up to one of them and it really, really disoriented me for a while. They meant something to my subconscious, that's for sure, but would it be the same message to other listeners?
Too, such art is a one-way communication channel: the artist speaks, you listen, and s/he receives no direct response to the subject of his/her art. Critics and sales are an indirect response, but not really so much to the message conveyed by the piece.
Given that such art is emotional and subjective, is it any wonder that woke progressives, whom I'd characterize as unapologetically emotional and subjective, have greater facility for creating art the the contemporary Center-Right? And if that part is accurate, would it make sense to suppose that they'd create art that was more to the sensibilities of the Center-Right?
They're by nature just better at it, maybe, and thus it will always be...
It's a mistake to interpret all artistic offerings in Political terms! That's a Left-dogmatist thing, reading Political overtones into Everything.
Some art does carry political content, indisputably. In my observation, didacticism--overt political content--has provided an excuse for a lot of bad art. I can enumerate some exceptions, but I can list a lot more examples that are mediocre, or worse. Thankfully, most great art doesn't require fidelity to a given ideology.
I don't view transgressive art as having intrinsic political content. But I do find that it consistently pushes a philosophical purview of Nihilism. Nihilism can partake of all sorts of political ideological content, but it's never really about the politics. Politics is just another guise, for Nihilism. A gimmick, a device, an excuse. You can find depictions of Nihilism's prized features of transgression and decadence from either the Stalinist Left--the scenes featuring Walter Duranty in the film "Mr. Jones"--or the plutocratic Right--Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut".
I have problems with most transgressive art. Not just esthetically, although as a rule transgressive art seems to rely on the interpretive frame that any strong reaction is Success, whether positive or negative. By that measure, the dogshit I've had on my shoe is a greater masterpiece than the priciest "work" by Paul McCarthy. Another major problem I have with transgressive art is the dishonesty of so much of it. Its claim to actually be a comment on something in some innocuous or social redeeming way- when it so obviously is not, prima facie. (For example, that travesty of the Last Supper that was mocked up for the Olympics ceremony.)
I think it was Bakunin- one of the big names in 19th century Anarchism--who mantled Nihilism as if it were a political movement. But Bakunin's "anarchy" was never really about an enduring political vision. It was about Bakunin. He just knew how to write persuasively, that's all. People need to learn to be more wary of those who talk a good game. Look at what they actually DO, instead.
Hi Graham, nice post. I recently read a dissident fiction novel called "Incel" which I was impressed by about atomized young men with little social connections and who cannot find mates (as you point out, the dissident right generally wallows in negativity). The author, ARX-Han (who has his own Substack: https://www.decentralizedfiction.com/ ) spent a decade writing it and it shows. I wrote a review here if it seems interesting: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/inceldom-as-the-apex-of-nihilism . In a different age, with a different establishment, something like this would be more widely acclaimed and appreciated.
Speaking of the apex of nihilism it seems to me that the Orange haired leader of the MAGA cult is a culturally and religiously illiterate nihilistic barbarian. Apparently he has the speech patterns of a four year old!
At another level what is now promoted as US "culture" is essentially a combination of the dark death-saturated zombified scenarios described in both Huxley's Brave New World (and Revisited) plus Orwell's 1984.
The Trumpian Alt-Right makes the same accusations about the Woke Left, the Great Reset, etc. The exact same analogies. The only difference is that the Right views the Author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, as a Leftist Globalist Conspirator in a long-brewing plot for World Domination and the Enslavement of Humanity.
Speaking as someone who has just finished a recent biography of Aldous Huxley, he was nothing of the sort. He was a science fiction author, and an occasional advocate for some idealistic causes--most notably Pacifism--that have had approximately zero influence in the corridors of political power.
I think both sides need to calm down with the BNW comparisons. The rhetoric has gotten a little overheated. Granted, much more on the partisan Trump "right" than on the "left", in this case.
Nonfiction social criticism is much more on-point than any popular fiction. Like Neil Postman, Christopher Lasch, Lewis Lapham, Charles Bowden, and the author whose book cover appears as my avatar, Daniel Boorstin.
One of the problems intelligent novelists face today is that the gatekeepers to the publishing world (agents, editors, publishers) are all left-wing wokesters even when they say they want to hear a new voice with strong literary talent. I pitched my novel to at least 100 of these people (and a sociological book on the modern conundrum to the same plus supposedly right-wing publishers) and got not one positive response. I decided to publish the novel on my substack (schecter.substack.com) where I have been serializing it for over two weeks now, one chapter at a time, the way Dumas published his novels in newspapers in the 19th century. The novel is called Not All Stories Are True. You can put it on your reading list. As for the rest of your piece, I can only concur as usual. I recently reread War and Peace while suffering from an attack of neuralgia. How comforting it was even if I found it less appealing than when I first read it. Fortunately, there is always the great George Eliot, who never disappoints. How is the contemporary George Eliot ever to find a home?
Excellent essay. About art, music and literature: the increasing superficiality preventing long form and deep involvement (staying in front of a Chagall enough to perceive all the little things that make it beautiful and meaningful).
Always enjoy your erudite essays. What amazes me is how long the art establishment was able to keep postmodernism the reigning orthodoxy. It's now known that this was part of the Cold War strategy of the CIA to counter Soviet Realist art, as explained in books such as Joel Whitney's Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers. It also served the purpose of de-politicizing art, a useful goal for the Deep State in defusing sources of inspiration for rebellion. Poets abandoned clear speech for the opaque word games of postmodernism and thus lost their entire audience except for a few hip or academic insiders. So their role was taken over by the wonderful pop and rock music culture of the '60s and early '70s, much of which was overtly political.
A recent study showed that abstract art is literally repellent to people and prompts cognitive changes; they form a defensive reaction to it. Rather than drawing people, such art causes them to withdraw. Yet art has historically been a means of communication, not alienation. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/abstract-art-distance/#Echobox=1719871912
After the total shutdown of culture that happened under the "pandemic" lockdowns—surely a wet dream of the Deep Staters—local culture at least is rebounding. In my capacity as Arts & Culture Editor for a local independent newspaper I've never been so busy covering art openings, concerts, garden tours, book launches, etc. Here in the boonies of Western Canada, we now have not one but two summer Shakespeare productions, and they are sold out every single performance. (Of course, I still can't get more than 30 people out to a poetry reading, but that is another dying art.)
Finally, I object to the division of arts and culture into Left and Right political paradigms. This is just more divisive social engineering by the Deep State. Truly great art speaks to everyone, even if on different levels depending on their bias. Art is a fundamentally human act, one that should unite, not divide us.
I don't mind de-politicizing art at all. And as far as CIA influence on getting the artistic novelty of the West into the Eastern bloc in the Cold War era, it might have been the Agency's most effective and least pernicious project. (Some other CIA-related brainstorms were outright ghastly, of course.) To the extent that there was a project- I don't view Western intelligence agencies as responsible for the 1960s youth rock culture, for example. Contrary to the LaRouchies, that began as an independent project, under the noses of the Parental Generation.
I think it's funny how it used to be the New Left that condemned even relatively garden-variety pro-Western CIA/VoA propaganda efforts like that one,, and now the Edgelord Right has taken up the same narrative in the post-Cold War era. Only with a spin that's much more paranoid and conspiratorial.
The conspiracy I notice is the conspiracy to get it all twisted, with hyperbole and insinuations of ultimate Evil. To really get meta about it, I wouldn't discount Russian GRU support for that line of jive. Russian intelligence agencies know skullduggery inside and out. You know the reflexive cynicism of the Bevis & Butthead All-American Alt-Right? The Russians play that game as pros, not dropouts. They only lose when the milieu stops being paranoid.
It really says something about the espionage game that while the CIA was making their big bad play with a support role as an arts patron in European cultural exchange projects, the KGB was flipping Robert Hanssen in the FBI, the Walkers in ONI, and Aldrich Ames in CIA. Check where those guys were located in their respective agencies. Whoo-ooh.
Are you familiar with Spenser Klavan’s father, Andrew? He is mostly a satirist on the Daily Wire but is also a fantastic author. I recently read at least ten of his novels and found them interesting, humorous, thoughtful with characters searching for truth, virtues and integrity within themselves and the world around them. I was always left feeling good and in a way inspired by his turn of his words and his storytelling.
I have a somewhat different view of literature than you. I find the left books and films filled with zombies, witches, suffering, horror or social justice bloviating. Whereas conservative books lean toward corny.
I used to buy best sellers off the bargain aisle in Barnes and nobles. I stopped over ten years ago. I found too many bestsellers unreadable. The last one was the first book I could not finish and I only had maybe ten pages left. I threw it across the room. At the time Amazon had started their self publishing operation, they were affordable so I took a few chances. Some were okay others were horrendous. I found a couple of authors I really enjoyed. In fact I now prefer self published books now. They can be incredibly authentic as opposed to publisher approved socially and politically approved pablum.
I think perhaps the last twenty years have been incredibly gloomy for all of us but especially for more conservative people. We have taken a very harsh and often cruel browbeaten from wokesters. Censorship with public ridicule along with being driven out of libraries and bookstores has done much to stifle our voices. Unfortunately for now we see a dystopian future and I would assume that perspective would be reflected in current offerings of creativity if they even allowed a public face.
We need some hope that the future is brighter than what the WEF has described. Their vision is frightening.
Thank you Deidre....I'll check out Andrew Klavan next time I go book buying. One good thing about the novel as an art form is that it is vibrant in the sense that so many are being written. And as I said in the essay it is hard work producing that much copy so it can never get as degenerate as - say - 'conceptual art'. The difficult thing is that there's no easy way to find the good stuff from the bad. I am fortunate in that my wife has the patience to read the blurbs on the back of books (which I don't) so she's my filter. The biggest thing that would put me off a book is 'bestseller', And then there's always the classics....for example I've just read all of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels.....brilliant every one of them!
quote from this article - 'a Dostoevsky-esque eight hundred page manuscript of depression and nihilism. If anyone wants that, they can just go read Dostoevsky...' this person has never read dostoevsky or if they did, they totally missed it!!
I don't think the intention was to disparage Dostoevsky's writing. The reverse in fact. What was meant was that modern conservative Substack writers need to concentrate more on the positive.....be more upbeat about life's possibilities.
Another great essay! Your writing is superb. I really enjoy the way you put into words, what I cannot. You are a gifted author, and I appreciate all you do!
For many years, beginging in the late 1950s and continuing through the 90, I was enamored of modern art. Then one day, I realized that I didn't really like much of it. Some, Miro for example, I still enjoy and Chagall still moves me, but the abstract expressionists no longer touch me. I don't mind othe people enjoying paintings that I don't like and can't think of any reason to condemn them for it. Re: the politically right and the arts, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Floridas has just eliminated funding for the arts. All the arts. No visual art, no music, no theatre. This is one reason why the politically right is despised. Interestingly, all my visual artist friends are Conservatives. The musical freinds are evernly split left and right, all the dancers are left and mostly homosexual and lesbian.
Art is of course always co-incident with cultural zeitgeist of the times.
The very best art is always produced by those who were especially sensitive to the tempo of the times, including sensitivity to the emerging cultural under-currents.
This reference written by a brain surgeon teaching professor provides
http://www.artandphysics.com a unique understanding of the emergence of late 19th and early 20th century visual art which was (perhaps) unconsciously inspired by the then emerging quantum understanding of Reality culminating in the famous E=MC2 equation.
The all-the-way-down-the-line cultural consequences of this equation have barely/hardly even been comprehended by our cultural gate-keepers, especially those on the right side of the culture wars. who, in my opinion are still very much stuck in the old left-brained world-view of scientism. The all-the-way-down-the-line reductionist spirit killing limitations of such left-brained thinking are described in the book by Iain McGilchrist titled The Master & His Emissary - The Left Brain and the Making of The Modern West
There is no correlation between left brained thinking and left wing politics. On the contrary left-brained thinking is intrinsically reductionist and about power and control, even total power and control.
If you want to see that left brained thinking has in store for all living-breathing-feeling beings on this planet check out this project http://www.project2025.org
The Heritage Foundation is the absolute epitome of left-brained thinking, as indeed do most/all right-wing think tanks. Does anyone remember Newt Gingrich's infamous Contract With America? In my opinion the 2025 project is more of the same but turbo-charged on steroids.
"There is no correlation between left brained thinking and left wing politics."
No, you're way off-base with that. Command economy socialism- Cuba, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, the DPRK- is all about the imposition of rationalist technocratic dictates. The hard-left states are more rigidly left-brained than any other regime. The Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward...
(The post-Mao PRC of Xi is leavened by having an appreciation of the Tao that Mao lacked. They're still a command economy in the most important ways, but they've made allowances for independent enterprises. I don't like totalitarian surveillance states, but economically, the CCP isn't the ideology-driven disaster that they once were. Meanwhile, while Hitler's Germany partook of some left-brained 2nd Reich command economy features in the 1930s, Hitler was a right-brained Romantic, with a mystical Vision. His right-brained Utopianism led to the greatest horror in world history. And it would have been even worse if he had succeeded.)
Furthermore, I think "left-brain thinking" is absolutely vital for successful governance. I say this as someone who's naturally inclined to be "right-brained", and who began my political journey from that holistic-idealistic standpoint. But vision alone is not enough. The effort to save the natural world has failed for 40 years, and much of the problem is on our side; it's been led by people who don't know how to do simple math. They only know how to stop projects, not how to carry them out at the scale required to be effective. Executive decision-making is ruinous without practicality, and the will to move the ball to the goalposts instead of going 3 and out. I say this as someone who never could stand the politics of Newt Gingrich, and has already noticed some obvious dealbreakers in Project 2025. But Rousseauean Romanticism is not a plan, okay?
I see that the term "atomised" is gaining traction. It's interesting to note that the 1998 novel "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houllebecq, is also known as "Atomised".
Much of Houllebecq's work deals with social atomisation.
We all have our own truth, and egregious wrong we would like to correct, but reality is the only thing that matters.
Since our government officials and talking heads taut our system as a civilized democracy, voting to change government policy is the only means we have to redress our grievances.
Since the Congress and Legislatures openly admit they do not examine the laws they vote on, as they typically vote on one hundred - 2,000 page laws per day, reality dictates that we, The Citizens, must develop a way to evaluate 200 Thousand pages of law speak per day. And we must clarify who gets to vote and how the vote is counted and what specific impact the sacred vote has at the business end of government.
Right now, the first question is:
# 1. Who gets to vote in the: general election?
a. citizens only - Yes No
b. natural born citizens only - Yes No
c. natural born citizens with four natural born grandparents - Yes No
d. naturalized citizens (legal immigrants) - Yes No
e. legal immigrants not yet naturalized - Yes No
f. anyone with a drivers license – Yes - No
# 2.1 Ages of Voter
g. minimum18 years
h. minimum 21 years
i. minimum 25 years
j. minimum 30 years
k. minimum 33 years
l. minimum 35 years
# 2.2 Sex of Voter
a. Male – Yes - No
b. Female – Yes - No
c. Non – Binanry - Yes - No
d. Transgender - Yes - No
# 2.3 Competence of Voter
e. property owners net value over $50,000 - Yes - No
f. property owners net value over $250,000 - Yes - No
g. tax exempt persons – Yes - No
h. those receiving welfare / food stamps – Yes - No
i. those with unpaid child support obligations - Yes - No
j. those receiving WIC – Yes - No
k. those receiving Section 8 – Yes - No
l. those working for government bureaucracies – Yes - No
m. those that will pay a $5000 poll tax - Yes - No
n. those that have paid a minimum of $5000 per year of tax for their combined jurisdictions in excess of any received via SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ATFWDC - Yes - No
# 2.4 Genetic presence of Voter
a. Male without children – Yes - No
b. Male with children – Yes - No
c. Male with children plural vote – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Female with children plural vote – Yes - No
g. Only married males with children, never divorced can vote. – Yes - No
# 3.0 Who should be trusted with the responsibility and power of Public Office?
a. Only those authorized to vote in the general election - Yes No
b. Male without children – Yes - No
c. Male with children – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Only married males with children, never divorced can hold public office – Yes - No
1. When much of the reason for the existence of modernist art is to shock the bourgeoisie, what do you do when the bourgeoisie are now basically shock-proof?
The average frustrated Yalie or Cambridge undergrad has seen transgressions that would horrify a de Sade or even the great whores of old.
2. Nostalgia is a refuge for those without power.
The way you shock the bourgeoisie these days is by dissenting from their opinions. THAT gets their juices flowing.
"...has seen transgressions that would horrify a de Sade or even the great whores of old."
This is great! One of my favorite one is:
"...has seen transgressions that would cause Caligula to run to the window, throw it open, and call for the police."
I presume this is THE Hairyhanded Gent, from back when the Atlantic still hosted comments on Disqus?
Yep.
I *thought* your handle was familiar!
I read on, and detected your stylistic signature. No AI could hope to match it.
I really found it dismaying when the Atlantic dumped comments within a week after Trump's inauguration. Such a failure of the principles that the magazine supposedly prizes so highly. I might have found it excusable, if they had maintained the archive for the articles during the era when they had comments. It certainly isn't as if the comment regulars there were a pack of right-wingers.
January 2017 was the advent of efforts by Google and Facebook to "de-platform Nazis". That always sounded like a cheap excuse to me. Even granting the fact that there were occasional gangswarms of, yes, Nazis, in Atlantic story comments. I found the Right Stuff Nazis much too obnoxious, simple-minded, and trite to be a serious draw as a political movement; 21st century Americans aren't particularly perspicacious, but very few of them are that stupid. I always preferred to dispute the Nazis with facts and logic, rather than running from them. Censoring them just gives naive people the impression that they might be in possession of Hidden Truth.
I suspect the real reason for the Atlantic comments shutdown was Trump. The so-called "liberals" of the Eastern Establishment lost their minds. Most of them still seem to exist in an academic bubble, where the Proteges know better than to correct their Mentors. Some of us could never quite get to do that. And the owners and editors, et. al., couldn't tolerate the backtalk. Maybe if they had listened in the years prior to November 2016, they might have found ways to head off the maverick challenge of Donald Trump at the pass. but no-o...
"No AI could hope to match it."
Would any AI architect *want* to emulate it? It's a lot like an unmediated stream of consciousness, using transitions as crutches to buy more thinking time without having to stop... :^)
But on to the post-Trump comments purges.
After Atlantic did away with their comments, the forum migrated to DISCUS and the old Atlantic volunteer moderators--who were like Auschwitz capos--became moderators at DISCUS and eventually banned me for asking questions. That's always, always a tip-off that an orthodoxy controls the discourse.
Similarly, I was bounced permanently from Reddit.
Then I witnessed a sort of contagion of online publications following the trend of dumping Comments sections. They tended to lamely use the excuse that it was taking too much time to moderate, so that offensive speech never appeared on their site--and of course they had very fluid and situational definitions of offensive speech.
I'm glad that for now there is Substack.
AI has a lot of trouble with rambling tangents, impromptu metaphors, and the parts of the conversation game that keep it real. Plus, you don't have a stable, predictable "agenda." You actually take the task of parsing inferences from what you've read seriously before you reply, instead of dreary axe-grinding, like a bot does.
"After Atlantic did away with their comments, the forum migrated to DISCUS and the old Atlantic volunteer moderators--who were like Auschwitz capos--became moderators at DISCUS and eventually banned me for asking questions. That's always, always a tip-off that an orthodoxy controls the discourse."
Oh yeah, that's what happened- direct Atlantic story comments migrated to something on Disqus called "Atlantic Discussions." I saw where that was headed, so I bailed right away. Too much stuff I couldn't easily do, like excerpting story quotes. The decoupling seemed senseless to me. There was no longer a direct connection to each story, available to all Atlantic readers.
Noice....
Many parts of this article resonated with my own observations and subsequent conclusions that it would be impossible to begin to address even 20% of the really, *really* important issues you raise here. I will limit myself to two, and be as brief as I can.
Art, in general, but let's stick with only non-linguistic media such as visual art and instrumental music, bypasses language to communicate an emotional, and subjective, non-verbal message. This message is almost always based in the emotion--although it might be argued that Escher visuals do not entirely fall into this category, but come closer to the visual impression of superbly crafted three dimensional objects--maybe even utilitarian objects, like an old Hasselblad camera or Campagnolo group set of the 70s.
If accurate, most art evokes an emotional response, is solely subjective, and hence is unifying only when the subjective response is similar among the majority of any social group. E.g., everyone thinks the same thing when viewing Goya's The Executions, but the same cannot be said for abstract art in general.
And instrumental music tends to be even more emotional and subjective. What do Satie's Gnossiennes *mean*, actually? I woke up to one of them and it really, really disoriented me for a while. They meant something to my subconscious, that's for sure, but would it be the same message to other listeners?
Too, such art is a one-way communication channel: the artist speaks, you listen, and s/he receives no direct response to the subject of his/her art. Critics and sales are an indirect response, but not really so much to the message conveyed by the piece.
Given that such art is emotional and subjective, is it any wonder that woke progressives, whom I'd characterize as unapologetically emotional and subjective, have greater facility for creating art the the contemporary Center-Right? And if that part is accurate, would it make sense to suppose that they'd create art that was more to the sensibilities of the Center-Right?
They're by nature just better at it, maybe, and thus it will always be...
It's a mistake to interpret all artistic offerings in Political terms! That's a Left-dogmatist thing, reading Political overtones into Everything.
Some art does carry political content, indisputably. In my observation, didacticism--overt political content--has provided an excuse for a lot of bad art. I can enumerate some exceptions, but I can list a lot more examples that are mediocre, or worse. Thankfully, most great art doesn't require fidelity to a given ideology.
I don't view transgressive art as having intrinsic political content. But I do find that it consistently pushes a philosophical purview of Nihilism. Nihilism can partake of all sorts of political ideological content, but it's never really about the politics. Politics is just another guise, for Nihilism. A gimmick, a device, an excuse. You can find depictions of Nihilism's prized features of transgression and decadence from either the Stalinist Left--the scenes featuring Walter Duranty in the film "Mr. Jones"--or the plutocratic Right--Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut".
I have problems with most transgressive art. Not just esthetically, although as a rule transgressive art seems to rely on the interpretive frame that any strong reaction is Success, whether positive or negative. By that measure, the dogshit I've had on my shoe is a greater masterpiece than the priciest "work" by Paul McCarthy. Another major problem I have with transgressive art is the dishonesty of so much of it. Its claim to actually be a comment on something in some innocuous or social redeeming way- when it so obviously is not, prima facie. (For example, that travesty of the Last Supper that was mocked up for the Olympics ceremony.)
I think it was Bakunin- one of the big names in 19th century Anarchism--who mantled Nihilism as if it were a political movement. But Bakunin's "anarchy" was never really about an enduring political vision. It was about Bakunin. He just knew how to write persuasively, that's all. People need to learn to be more wary of those who talk a good game. Look at what they actually DO, instead.
Hi Graham, nice post. I recently read a dissident fiction novel called "Incel" which I was impressed by about atomized young men with little social connections and who cannot find mates (as you point out, the dissident right generally wallows in negativity). The author, ARX-Han (who has his own Substack: https://www.decentralizedfiction.com/ ) spent a decade writing it and it shows. I wrote a review here if it seems interesting: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/inceldom-as-the-apex-of-nihilism . In a different age, with a different establishment, something like this would be more widely acclaimed and appreciated.
Thanks. Yes I'll add it to my reading list.
Speaking of the apex of nihilism it seems to me that the Orange haired leader of the MAGA cult is a culturally and religiously illiterate nihilistic barbarian. Apparently he has the speech patterns of a four year old!
At another level what is now promoted as US "culture" is essentially a combination of the dark death-saturated zombified scenarios described in both Huxley's Brave New World (and Revisited) plus Orwell's 1984.
http://www.truthdig.com/articles/2011-a-brave-new-dystopia
The Trumpian Alt-Right makes the same accusations about the Woke Left, the Great Reset, etc. The exact same analogies. The only difference is that the Right views the Author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, as a Leftist Globalist Conspirator in a long-brewing plot for World Domination and the Enslavement of Humanity.
Speaking as someone who has just finished a recent biography of Aldous Huxley, he was nothing of the sort. He was a science fiction author, and an occasional advocate for some idealistic causes--most notably Pacifism--that have had approximately zero influence in the corridors of political power.
I think both sides need to calm down with the BNW comparisons. The rhetoric has gotten a little overheated. Granted, much more on the partisan Trump "right" than on the "left", in this case.
Nonfiction social criticism is much more on-point than any popular fiction. Like Neil Postman, Christopher Lasch, Lewis Lapham, Charles Bowden, and the author whose book cover appears as my avatar, Daniel Boorstin.
One of the problems intelligent novelists face today is that the gatekeepers to the publishing world (agents, editors, publishers) are all left-wing wokesters even when they say they want to hear a new voice with strong literary talent. I pitched my novel to at least 100 of these people (and a sociological book on the modern conundrum to the same plus supposedly right-wing publishers) and got not one positive response. I decided to publish the novel on my substack (schecter.substack.com) where I have been serializing it for over two weeks now, one chapter at a time, the way Dumas published his novels in newspapers in the 19th century. The novel is called Not All Stories Are True. You can put it on your reading list. As for the rest of your piece, I can only concur as usual. I recently reread War and Peace while suffering from an attack of neuralgia. How comforting it was even if I found it less appealing than when I first read it. Fortunately, there is always the great George Eliot, who never disappoints. How is the contemporary George Eliot ever to find a home?
Excellent essay. About art, music and literature: the increasing superficiality preventing long form and deep involvement (staying in front of a Chagall enough to perceive all the little things that make it beautiful and meaningful).
Always enjoy your erudite essays. What amazes me is how long the art establishment was able to keep postmodernism the reigning orthodoxy. It's now known that this was part of the Cold War strategy of the CIA to counter Soviet Realist art, as explained in books such as Joel Whitney's Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers. It also served the purpose of de-politicizing art, a useful goal for the Deep State in defusing sources of inspiration for rebellion. Poets abandoned clear speech for the opaque word games of postmodernism and thus lost their entire audience except for a few hip or academic insiders. So their role was taken over by the wonderful pop and rock music culture of the '60s and early '70s, much of which was overtly political.
A recent study showed that abstract art is literally repellent to people and prompts cognitive changes; they form a defensive reaction to it. Rather than drawing people, such art causes them to withdraw. Yet art has historically been a means of communication, not alienation. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/abstract-art-distance/#Echobox=1719871912
After the total shutdown of culture that happened under the "pandemic" lockdowns—surely a wet dream of the Deep Staters—local culture at least is rebounding. In my capacity as Arts & Culture Editor for a local independent newspaper I've never been so busy covering art openings, concerts, garden tours, book launches, etc. Here in the boonies of Western Canada, we now have not one but two summer Shakespeare productions, and they are sold out every single performance. (Of course, I still can't get more than 30 people out to a poetry reading, but that is another dying art.)
Finally, I object to the division of arts and culture into Left and Right political paradigms. This is just more divisive social engineering by the Deep State. Truly great art speaks to everyone, even if on different levels depending on their bias. Art is a fundamentally human act, one that should unite, not divide us.
I don't mind de-politicizing art at all. And as far as CIA influence on getting the artistic novelty of the West into the Eastern bloc in the Cold War era, it might have been the Agency's most effective and least pernicious project. (Some other CIA-related brainstorms were outright ghastly, of course.) To the extent that there was a project- I don't view Western intelligence agencies as responsible for the 1960s youth rock culture, for example. Contrary to the LaRouchies, that began as an independent project, under the noses of the Parental Generation.
I think it's funny how it used to be the New Left that condemned even relatively garden-variety pro-Western CIA/VoA propaganda efforts like that one,, and now the Edgelord Right has taken up the same narrative in the post-Cold War era. Only with a spin that's much more paranoid and conspiratorial.
The conspiracy I notice is the conspiracy to get it all twisted, with hyperbole and insinuations of ultimate Evil. To really get meta about it, I wouldn't discount Russian GRU support for that line of jive. Russian intelligence agencies know skullduggery inside and out. You know the reflexive cynicism of the Bevis & Butthead All-American Alt-Right? The Russians play that game as pros, not dropouts. They only lose when the milieu stops being paranoid.
It really says something about the espionage game that while the CIA was making their big bad play with a support role as an arts patron in European cultural exchange projects, the KGB was flipping Robert Hanssen in the FBI, the Walkers in ONI, and Aldrich Ames in CIA. Check where those guys were located in their respective agencies. Whoo-ooh.
Not that I dismiss naturalistic realism, or Russian painters! Presenting Ivan Aiavasosky
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ivan+aivazovsky+paintings&iax=images&ia=images
"The Waves", is one of the best paintings in the world history of painting. More surreal than any Surrealism, naturally
https://external-preview.redd.it/_N0XN9SOrK-jld7CtmvjlHdy2SNWkiUcdATs0NIqQ0U.jpg?auto=webp&s=8c0a28c74c5bd1580aeeb0104554ccfbf1cdd3a9
Great article Graham.
Are you familiar with Spenser Klavan’s father, Andrew? He is mostly a satirist on the Daily Wire but is also a fantastic author. I recently read at least ten of his novels and found them interesting, humorous, thoughtful with characters searching for truth, virtues and integrity within themselves and the world around them. I was always left feeling good and in a way inspired by his turn of his words and his storytelling.
I have a somewhat different view of literature than you. I find the left books and films filled with zombies, witches, suffering, horror or social justice bloviating. Whereas conservative books lean toward corny.
I used to buy best sellers off the bargain aisle in Barnes and nobles. I stopped over ten years ago. I found too many bestsellers unreadable. The last one was the first book I could not finish and I only had maybe ten pages left. I threw it across the room. At the time Amazon had started their self publishing operation, they were affordable so I took a few chances. Some were okay others were horrendous. I found a couple of authors I really enjoyed. In fact I now prefer self published books now. They can be incredibly authentic as opposed to publisher approved socially and politically approved pablum.
I think perhaps the last twenty years have been incredibly gloomy for all of us but especially for more conservative people. We have taken a very harsh and often cruel browbeaten from wokesters. Censorship with public ridicule along with being driven out of libraries and bookstores has done much to stifle our voices. Unfortunately for now we see a dystopian future and I would assume that perspective would be reflected in current offerings of creativity if they even allowed a public face.
We need some hope that the future is brighter than what the WEF has described. Their vision is frightening.
Thank you Deidre....I'll check out Andrew Klavan next time I go book buying. One good thing about the novel as an art form is that it is vibrant in the sense that so many are being written. And as I said in the essay it is hard work producing that much copy so it can never get as degenerate as - say - 'conceptual art'. The difficult thing is that there's no easy way to find the good stuff from the bad. I am fortunate in that my wife has the patience to read the blurbs on the back of books (which I don't) so she's my filter. The biggest thing that would put me off a book is 'bestseller', And then there's always the classics....for example I've just read all of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels.....brilliant every one of them!
quote from this article - 'a Dostoevsky-esque eight hundred page manuscript of depression and nihilism. If anyone wants that, they can just go read Dostoevsky...' this person has never read dostoevsky or if they did, they totally missed it!!
I don't think the intention was to disparage Dostoevsky's writing. The reverse in fact. What was meant was that modern conservative Substack writers need to concentrate more on the positive.....be more upbeat about life's possibilities.
i sort of got that.. i know language is a tricky thing...
Another great essay! Your writing is superb. I really enjoy the way you put into words, what I cannot. You are a gifted author, and I appreciate all you do!
Wow. Thank you so much for that Mary....makes it all worthwhile.
For many years, beginging in the late 1950s and continuing through the 90, I was enamored of modern art. Then one day, I realized that I didn't really like much of it. Some, Miro for example, I still enjoy and Chagall still moves me, but the abstract expressionists no longer touch me. I don't mind othe people enjoying paintings that I don't like and can't think of any reason to condemn them for it. Re: the politically right and the arts, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Floridas has just eliminated funding for the arts. All the arts. No visual art, no music, no theatre. This is one reason why the politically right is despised. Interestingly, all my visual artist friends are Conservatives. The musical freinds are evernly split left and right, all the dancers are left and mostly homosexual and lesbian.
The irresistible force paradox becomes destruction.
Thank you and here's a pearl for you.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cIKYhpZ4a2M&pp=ygUhUm9iZXJ0IHNoYXcgY2hvcmFsZSBiYXJiZXIgYWRhZ2lv
Yes ....love it!
Art is of course always co-incident with cultural zeitgeist of the times.
The very best art is always produced by those who were especially sensitive to the tempo of the times, including sensitivity to the emerging cultural under-currents.
This reference written by a brain surgeon teaching professor provides
http://www.artandphysics.com a unique understanding of the emergence of late 19th and early 20th century visual art which was (perhaps) unconsciously inspired by the then emerging quantum understanding of Reality culminating in the famous E=MC2 equation.
The all-the-way-down-the-line cultural consequences of this equation have barely/hardly even been comprehended by our cultural gate-keepers, especially those on the right side of the culture wars. who, in my opinion are still very much stuck in the old left-brained world-view of scientism. The all-the-way-down-the-line reductionist spirit killing limitations of such left-brained thinking are described in the book by Iain McGilchrist titled The Master & His Emissary - The Left Brain and the Making of The Modern West
There is no correlation between left brained thinking and left wing politics. On the contrary left-brained thinking is intrinsically reductionist and about power and control, even total power and control.
If you want to see that left brained thinking has in store for all living-breathing-feeling beings on this planet check out this project http://www.project2025.org
The Heritage Foundation is the absolute epitome of left-brained thinking, as indeed do most/all right-wing think tanks. Does anyone remember Newt Gingrich's infamous Contract With America? In my opinion the 2025 project is more of the same but turbo-charged on steroids.
"There is no correlation between left brained thinking and left wing politics."
No, you're way off-base with that. Command economy socialism- Cuba, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, the DPRK- is all about the imposition of rationalist technocratic dictates. The hard-left states are more rigidly left-brained than any other regime. The Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward...
(The post-Mao PRC of Xi is leavened by having an appreciation of the Tao that Mao lacked. They're still a command economy in the most important ways, but they've made allowances for independent enterprises. I don't like totalitarian surveillance states, but economically, the CCP isn't the ideology-driven disaster that they once were. Meanwhile, while Hitler's Germany partook of some left-brained 2nd Reich command economy features in the 1930s, Hitler was a right-brained Romantic, with a mystical Vision. His right-brained Utopianism led to the greatest horror in world history. And it would have been even worse if he had succeeded.)
Furthermore, I think "left-brain thinking" is absolutely vital for successful governance. I say this as someone who's naturally inclined to be "right-brained", and who began my political journey from that holistic-idealistic standpoint. But vision alone is not enough. The effort to save the natural world has failed for 40 years, and much of the problem is on our side; it's been led by people who don't know how to do simple math. They only know how to stop projects, not how to carry them out at the scale required to be effective. Executive decision-making is ruinous without practicality, and the will to move the ball to the goalposts instead of going 3 and out. I say this as someone who never could stand the politics of Newt Gingrich, and has already noticed some obvious dealbreakers in Project 2025. But Rousseauean Romanticism is not a plan, okay?
I see that the term "atomised" is gaining traction. It's interesting to note that the 1998 novel "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houllebecq, is also known as "Atomised".
Much of Houllebecq's work deals with social atomisation.
Much of Houellebecq’s work deals with demoralization, which may be a consequence of atomization, but not only.
We all have our own truth, and egregious wrong we would like to correct, but reality is the only thing that matters.
Since our government officials and talking heads taut our system as a civilized democracy, voting to change government policy is the only means we have to redress our grievances.
Since the Congress and Legislatures openly admit they do not examine the laws they vote on, as they typically vote on one hundred - 2,000 page laws per day, reality dictates that we, The Citizens, must develop a way to evaluate 200 Thousand pages of law speak per day. And we must clarify who gets to vote and how the vote is counted and what specific impact the sacred vote has at the business end of government.
Right now, the first question is:
# 1. Who gets to vote in the: general election?
a. citizens only - Yes No
b. natural born citizens only - Yes No
c. natural born citizens with four natural born grandparents - Yes No
d. naturalized citizens (legal immigrants) - Yes No
e. legal immigrants not yet naturalized - Yes No
f. anyone with a drivers license – Yes - No
# 2.1 Ages of Voter
g. minimum18 years
h. minimum 21 years
i. minimum 25 years
j. minimum 30 years
k. minimum 33 years
l. minimum 35 years
# 2.2 Sex of Voter
a. Male – Yes - No
b. Female – Yes - No
c. Non – Binanry - Yes - No
d. Transgender - Yes - No
# 2.3 Competence of Voter
e. property owners net value over $50,000 - Yes - No
f. property owners net value over $250,000 - Yes - No
g. tax exempt persons – Yes - No
h. those receiving welfare / food stamps – Yes - No
i. those with unpaid child support obligations - Yes - No
j. those receiving WIC – Yes - No
k. those receiving Section 8 – Yes - No
l. those working for government bureaucracies – Yes - No
m. those that will pay a $5000 poll tax - Yes - No
n. those that have paid a minimum of $5000 per year of tax for their combined jurisdictions in excess of any received via SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ATFWDC - Yes - No
# 2.4 Genetic presence of Voter
a. Male without children – Yes - No
b. Male with children – Yes - No
c. Male with children plural vote – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Female with children plural vote – Yes - No
g. Only married males with children, never divorced can vote. – Yes - No
# 3.0 Who should be trusted with the responsibility and power of Public Office?
a. Only those authorized to vote in the general election - Yes No
b. Male without children – Yes - No
c. Male with children – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Only married males with children, never divorced can hold public office – Yes - No
g. Depends on the office - Yes - No