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Towards a new art: part 2
Towards a new art: return to part 1Culture at risk
The death of the idea of beauty as a core value in art is a symptom of the near death of culture itself. Culture is the form, the myth and the style in which we live our lives. If it be ugly, our lives will be ugly, if barbaric, we shall be barbaric, and if dead, then we shall be reduced to the level of animals, and not particularly well-organised animals at that. (Animals have tradition born in them; they are 'hard-wired.')
A strong culture, confident in its core values, will produce an art to match, while a culture in decline produces decadent forms. What, then, should we make of a culture that deliberately produces art designed to cause revulsion?
At present our officially sponsored art usually merely echoes the cultural slide around it. Ironic is a term often used, and is almost compulsory when anyone produces something with any beauty or craftsmanship in it. To defend aesthetic values is called bourgeois, elitist, or out-of-touch. In fact our culture now has almost no values (other than greed), and its voice is that of someone dying ignobly.
It is perhaps no accident that this is also an age of strident and violent certainty. Our rudderless liberalism is opposed by political and religious fundamentalists of all kinds. It is understandable, in an age in which any real sense of the existence of objective truth is lost, that there should be people who cling to simple beliefs, no matter how irrational, and no matter how intolerant. Their desperation is proportional to their fear of having nothing to cling to at all.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
We are at a crossroads. Art can continue to follow the rest of our culture into its ungraceful senescence, but we must try to find, if we can, another way. Can art lead, rather than follow, create, rather than ape?
Objective art
We have an art that reflects our society as it is, and this is at the root of the problem. For art to flourish in former times it was sufficient for it to express the dominant culture, but today art that does this is ugly and shallow. This essay is addressed to those who want something more than an art that merely echoes the barbarism around it.
In a dark age, art can aspire to a higher purpose: the preservation of knowledge, and the preparation for an age to come. Thus, to create art today requires a double approach. The artist must first of all be a craftsman, learning and preserving the techniques of the past. Secondly, the artist needs to try to live well, so that she or he actually has something to say. And what the artist says needs to connect more and more deeply with whatever is objective and real, rather than with opinion, gimmicks or self-aggrandisement.
Only when there are no clever tricks at all is true talent seen.
Luo Hongxian - Confucian, Ming Dynasty
Having an aim
Underlying the discussion above is the assumption that there exist objective standards in art. I would now qualify that. There can only be objective standards in relation to an aim. This is where, as argued, we part company with those who merely wish to echo the society around them, or to make a sensation. We need not argue with them, since according to their own aims, they succeed. What I propose, on the contrary, is an art that makes its aim the expression of reality, rather than of the strange half-world we have learned to inhabit, in which our dreams and nightmares continue during the day, and are even reproduced for us in the media.
Waking from the dream
It is not within the scope of this essay to argue that reality is different from our usual daydream. This was known in all ages before ours, and pointed to by Parmenides, Plato, Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed and many others. For present puposes I merely assert this. It seems clear, however, that to understand this requires work. This will not be given to the artist in a book, but they, and we, need to struggle for it.
Objectivity in art is hard, perhaps impossible to define, because it must be experienced rather than said. That which is objective in art is that which brings a person closer to the present moment, the moment in which the whole of reality is contained. It is a question, not of logical analysis, but of what a work of art does.
Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosopicus 6.4311
Being a beginner
Since most of our beliefs about reality are mere opinions, we need to doubt all our beliefs and become beginners. Mere destructive criticism of the ideas of others will not take us very far, and indeed, as I have argued above, people with other goals and other projects can mostly be left alone. The real struggle is the internal struggle, and the real victory is the internal one. If we can begin to see the world with presence, like a beginner, then we are seeing the world with an artist's eyes. Then the only thing that could hold us back would be a limitation of technical skill.
Si l'Ange daigne venir, ce sera parce que vous l'aurez convaincu non pas avec des pleurs mais par votre humble décision de comencer toujours; ein Anfänger zu sein!
Rainer Maria Rilke
Conclusion
This essay is no more than a sketch. Partly it is an outline of a theory of art which makes no claim to originality, and which owes everything to Plato and other thinkers who have gone before. I merely restate what was once accepted, and is now almost forgotten. Partly also it is a polemic against the dead hand of current mainstream and state-sponsored art, which actively promotes idiocy, desolation, ugliness and despair.
I have argued for an objective world, the real world which science and mathematics still believes in, but which for some reason has been forgotten in much of the supposedly cutting edge art of today. I argue that art could once again fill the role of helping to bring us back to reality, back to the present moment, and back to ourselves. I argue that it is time to abandon the art of personality, ego and gimmick.
If we can both live like beginners and craft like professionals, then we have a chance of producing something fresh and beautiful that people will want to see. We shall not have to try to be original, nor to express ourselves: these things will happen by themselves, and will not in any case concern us. We shall, however, have to work.
The fruit of our work is that we shall be filled with the desire to show to others the beauty that we have seen, and that we shall be able to do it: to raise others to the same understanding that we have for a moment come to. To raise others to the understanding that the Muse, because of our desire and our patient efforts, has granted us.
- END -
30 October 2004
© Martin Dace, all rights reserved
Towards a new art: part 1