A couple of recent articles seem to resonate with each other for me. There's this one:
This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics. In our acquiescence in this, we can discern the influence of Thomas Hobbes in forming our spiritual horizon.
And then this one:
Instead, over the last 20 years the museums and galleries, universities, media, agencies, and foundations moved to shore themselves up as the rightful experts on art by asserting that an artwork is not a site of numerous meanings but that which contains a single blunt message. One receives such a message publicly, not in private. It is delivered with the expectation of being acquired whole, and of being understood quite as the artist intended. This is utilitarian art: Its value lies not in itself but in its moral or political content. The majority of artists supported and promoted by the private foundations and government agencies, universities, and galleries today produce work of this kind.
Our age, especially in the last couple of years, does seem to have been possessed by a Hobbesian gloom. A sense that the people must be guided by their betters, lest their minds be full of folly and their lives be nasty, brutish, and short. Hence the forced curtailing of social and commercial activities, the obsession with controlling information and labeling some of it "misinformation, etc.
Under these circumstances it's tempting to attempt to build a priestly class that can speak to an for the rest, especially if you could be in that class. Honestly it's no surprise at al art has fallen.
2 comments:
I can understand how it was that you found these two articles bore a certain relationship to one another. Matthew Crawford makes some very good points, particularly why it is the establishment treats its citizens like idiots. The legal and political order in which we believed to have been living has completely changed in the past twenty years. Whereas once we knew what was lawful and what wasn't, now we're all living in a state of semi-illegality where depending on what emergency is being promoted what you can and cannot do changes daily. The idea that we can't fly anywhere is a prime example.
But both Hobbes and Locke viewed their societies from the viewpoint of Christianity - they were deeply religious men and we happen to live in a decidedly non-religious atmosphere. We need to understand that the world is about something larger than us; that our actions have real cosmic significance.
Also true is that contemporary art is largely message driven and the message is pre-ordained by experts in 'art'. I recall reading some time ago that the CIA began promoting modern artists like deKooning, Rothko, and Pollock. In the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, the new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Sheesh - it turned out to be true.
I agree with Alice Gribben's judgement about art being subjected to institutional moral messanging. The following passage was most illuminating about this tendency.
Hogarth and Europe, on the Georgian era English painter and printmaker William Hogarth and his contemporaries, ran from November 2021 through this spring at London’s Tate Britain. According to its introductory wall text, greeting audiences as they enter, the exhibition “confronts the complexity and violence that were features of eighteenth-century culture. Works shown here often express a critical view of society, but they also reveal the entrenchment of racist, sexist, and xenophobic stereotypes.”
Damn, I read through the rest of the article being glad that my journeys through some of the great European museums were by myself. The impressions I got of the paintings and sculptures I saw were my own and no one elses. Preserve us from experts.
For a long time we lived in a world where citizens had rights and those rights, if anything, were expanding. Now some of those rights have been squeezed out of existence, but it goes further than that. Entire cultural traditions of encouraging free inquiry and respect for the individual have ended. Someone wanted that change, sure. But how strong were those rights, anyway? Or temporary privileges, as Mr. Carlin would have it.
As individuals Hobbes and Locke were both dedicated Christians, it's true. Their works have been part of the humanist canon for centuries, though. They're Christians who even atheists can respect. Our steady march to secularism has had an effect, certainly. Without a sense of transcendence we tend to fall apart over minutiae. Hence identity politics.
There is an upside to a museum using the wall text that you excerpt. Hogarth's pictures frequently feature one or more figure laughing. That gobbledygook gives them something to be laughing at.
You almost certainly got more out of your experience of the museums than any expert could have given you.
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