The Place of the Artist at the Aesthetic Turn (Part III)

Read Part I here, Part II here.

Pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarising. It cannot help being so. The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable objects for Art.

Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

Blake’s Ancient of Days (Urizen), Tyrant of Reason, creator of right angles

The argument that the artist is not precisely interesting for his or her own identity will probably feel counterintuitive to many people immersed in the current system. It seems directly at odds with the new ethos of the creative industries, and their elite collegiate training ground—at least within the educational model that has come to dominate in the Postmodern period. Composers, poets, novelists, filmmakers, memoirists (let’s briefly consider the very real weirdness of MFA programs teaching twenty-somethings to write memoirs)—young artists, entering the current system of arts education, are frequently told some version of the idea that they are there to learn to “tell their story,” or something to that vague effect. Then their training comes, not in the consistent teaching of models and forms which have been proven to work for centuries, in diligently learning to shape those containers which could be filled with later worldly experience—not in tried and tested ways—but in the immediate enjoinment to self-reflection and the exploration of one’s identity (which, though I do not mean it pejoratively, is another myth). If the majority of contemporary artwork does seem shallow and solipsistic compared to the weightier accomplishments of history, no small part of this is because contemporary artistic education would make no sense to artists trained prior to the late twentieth century. Time was, mastery meant years working on established techniques and forms before one could begin to speak of something like an artistic Voice.

I recall a conversation with a composer friend of mine, in which we agreed that if composition departments throughout the world of Western classical music scuttled all their current curricula and directed their students to write counterpoint for the next ten or fifteen years, we might very well witness an entire generation of brilliant young composers, comparable to Beethoven’s Romantic followers, or Schoenberg’s twelve-tone devotees, erupt almost spontaneously, taking to the concert halls with entire new sounds, new schools of musical philosophy and harmony. It’s a slight exaggeration, sure. But true in principle. That is: I can think of no more Wildean thing to say than that art is what happens when the apprentices get properly bored.

Instead, however, countless young artists in all fields are told from the beginning of their studies to hone in on their particular “voice.” And almost without exception they become only very, very good at turning out work which sounds and feels like everybody else’s. Pick up a literary review, read a magazine, go to a gallery, watch any new prestige TV show, and you’ll find perfectly competent, perfectly passable work. All fine, all mediocre, all done in exactly the same uniform voice. The voice of our time. To recall that Emersonian line, of one nature both writing and reading, is to feel just how painfully our era has managed to make that possible sublimity into another turgid, dull fact.

This voice ought to be familiar to anyone. Prurient, nervous, hectoring (and even when trying to be brash, actually quite fragile)—it’s the voice of several generations of writers and thinkers brought up in an artistic climate addicted to concept over craft, resentful of the idea of aesthetic standards, and viciously competitive, even as they claim to contribute only greater and greater diversity to the arts. It has produced, over the last few decades, a regime of rigidly and myopically contemporary work, which proposes to challenge all values and continually asserts that only right now (always right now, but rolling forward indefinitely) can we conceive of the most complete and complex representations of ideas and identities. This regime has banked its success on the denial of any past canons or oppressive traditions, excused by the simplistic insistence that those were made by people who did not look or think like the new artists. It revels in transgression for its own sake, even as the majority of its productions are made by and for the same professionalized elite, who increasingly look like the same bourgeoisie which the avant garde once served to scandalize. Finally, it has turned away from belief in anything beyond purely subjective experience, leaving its audiences unmoored without historical context and generally without access to anything much older than a century.

It is also a regime which actively dreads its own demise. And nothing has better exemplified this than last year’s flood of millenarian worries over new advances in AI technology. Since that flood has mildly subsided (though no doubt ready to return in full force), what it left behind was genuine confusion over just how much was the pure hype of venture capital speculation, and how much the real promise of technological upheaval. More than a few people sensed that they were being duped into a false choice between apocalypticism and utopianism. I myself sometimes even doubt its ability to change much more than the infrastructure of careers in email-writing. But what can be positively stated is the sheer panic it caused among the professional classes, not least among artists.

But why? This is not to downplay the clear effects the technology will have, and is having. But in the arts? Many artists have become very concerned over the ability to use the technology to reproduce poems, essays, paintings, music. And certainly these algorithmic generators seem able to aggregate things which almost approximate the texture of human writing or image-making. But the most astonishing things have come from the mouths of people who apparently cannot tell how absolutely stiff, uncanny, and mediocre these procedural reproductions were and are. We witnessed their generated pictures, read their dull paragraphs, their mediocre poems. We heard the robotized pseudo-songs. Then many of us grew scared, though that was probably to be expected. Still, it was still a response of remarkably little faith. And I no longer think the fear was due only to the possibility that these technologies would take over artistic production, even if the people with all the money are salivating at the prospect. This fear was baser. It was the expanding anxiety of entire classes of professional creatives, discovering that our artistic output has been so lazy for so long, that a series of mathematical equations can do it just as well. 

The contemporary voice, which has been so carefully hewed down into the least beautiful, most mundane forms of expression possible, in a stroke of perfectly divine irony, has turned out to be essentially the same voice which a machine might replicate. This says nothing much about the “quality” of AI-generated art—it says everything about the general sham that is contemporary cultural production. If people cannot understand why these technologies will never (truly—never) be capable of anything of the same stature as Shakespeare or Bach or Manet or Jane Austen or Charlie Parker, then it can only be that too many people have lost the discretion which once enabled us to grasp why these artists were so profound. And I suspect that anyone who would quibble with this contention would only do so because they do not actually love art, or understand it, but are embarrassed by it, because it reveals their lack of faith. This sounds harsh, yet the terms of all arguments are necessarily not the same as the terms of belief, or of faith. These possess their own terms, which lie out at far wavelengths our impoverished materialism has no use for. And if we are still not prepared to accept the importance of those terms as artists moving beyond this contemporary impasse—well, what else, then? I can only say that the refusal of such a belief or faith would horrify the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived on this planet. Seen from the point of view of history—indeed, from the point of view of that great ancient Voice—we are the real anomalies.

Koehler’s The Strike (1886) - Industry, Industry, Industry

Some part of the trouble with moving past this embarrassment stems from a particularly thorny problem: the effect of what is sometimes called scientism. One of the most difficult things facing the arts today is a rabid faith in science (and it is a faith like any other) which—as any non-polemical scientist will point out—exactly misconstrues what empirical science properly does. Only a society which is tyrannized by statistics believes it can replace wisdom with science. And that is exactly what science has been routinely called up to do. The erosion of wisdom—first in Marxian, or Freudian, or Nietzschean terms, later in our own kinds of narcissism (our nullibism)—has left the abandoned to cling desperately onto their chosen scientific theories as a stop-gap against the sense of that loss. Concerns over AI (and the alternating dreams of apocalypse and utopia they engender) come so easily to us because we share in the enormous technological successes of an industrial age which has proven the incredible powers of scientific discovery. But people undergoing the wholesale loss of belief in anything beyond the subjective will interpret scientific discovery very strangely.

Science measures the world, that is all it ultimately does. It observes what can be repeated and draws conclusions about how to implement these observations, and those implementations may become our technology. Nowhere in the midst of that process can anyone claim to have alighted on Meaning, or on the kinds of knowing and living we once called Wisdom. This is a perfectly reasonable state of affairs, because it is not the scientist’s job to worry about those things. In fact, the scientist is free precisely because she doesn’t have to assign overarching meanings to her chains of observations. Gravity is observed, its effect is revealed in sequences of mathematical solutions, these solutions lead towards experiments in engineering, enormous rockets are built, and with merely the Calculus elaborated by a mind like Newton’s, we can send human beings to the moon.

Yet even at the end of this process, no one is any closer to expressing what gravity really is, or why it exists. We do not know whether it has always existed, or whether it exists the same everywhere in the universe. We know it is here, we know it works, that we can name it and take advantage of it. But that is the end of our knowledge. If we could somehow obtain the ear of a poet from a world without gravity, sit her down and tell her about it, at the end of it all she would still ask: “But why do these objects falling through a vacuum exert a pull on each other?” And she would be doing exactly her job, as poet, while we would be right back to the first and foundational stage of human thought, which is myth. Not myth the way people mean it these days, as a proto-scientific explanation of phenomena, but as that pure symbol—as that metonym for the whole, for the entire Mystery, for the sense of unity we have lost.

Scientism (I repeat: not science itself) begins at the most basic, important questions of existence and then confidently declares: “These are no longer relevant questions.” So entire generations of liberal-minded people have stopped there, too, because they believed they had to. In the twentieth century, the frantic (often destructive) advance of science seemed to reveal the only proper consensus. “Truth” and “Knowledge” changed their characteristics somewhat, growing less and less associated with established and tested modes of living or working, becoming increasingly synonymous with the greatest aggregate of findings. We’ve learned to associate knowledge (and wisdom) with something which, rather than being borne out by survival through time, is reducible to whatever statement seems best corroborated by the findings of the largest number of people.

This sense has built for us a fragile illusion, that there is such a thing as a rational consensus (though now the tension between this consensus illusion and our simultaneous desire for total subjective relativism is one of the paradoxes of the age). Religious belief, political radicalism, perhaps even faith in the human imagination, or in the freedom of art, seem to this worldview like confusing accidents in what ought to be a frictionless slide toward true globalism, or mass liberalism, or managerial technocracy, or the End of History. But however extraordinary these systems are, we have still built them on sand at the edge of a fault line. When it turns out the nightmare of history is not over and these systems are not so stable, then we may find ourselves in the aftershocks of earthquakes, remembering that for all their invisible enormity, the tectonic plates still move.

To be continued in the final part IV, coming next week.