The Fascism of Good Taste –the politics of art by Bogos Kalemkiar
The Fascism of
Good Taste…
Contrary to all
the brainwashing we have been subjected to, separating art from politics is the
demise of civilization.
Politics is
defined here as coming from the Greek politikos, “relating to citizens” and
“social relations involving authority or power.” In short, politics defines the
relationship between people and their environment...nothing here about
affiliations with political parties or ideologies. Art on the other hand is the re-presentation
or re-enactment of these very same definitions regarding the relations of
people to each other and their environment.
If we start with
the premise a priori, that technique and virtuosity are inseparable from Art,
then their co-existence and co-dependence is implicit. In this context, techne,
which brings being into form, is also synonymous with content. The domain where
tension between form and content is maintained in a Universal Language,
transcending time, space and culture - speaking to all, is called Art.
Ever since the
Revolution of 1917 we have been subjected to diatribes against the notion of
Art as a political tool. Not surprisingly this rhetoric against Art as a social
phenomenon has come exclusively from Capitalist elites and art critics of the so-called mainstream corporate
media monopolies owned by these very same Capitalist elites .
Since most
funding for the so-called High Arts in the West at the time was coming from the
moneyed classes, it is not surprising that their flunkies would make an
unceasing din of the horrors of propagandistic Art as represented by the Evil
Soviet Empire to the East or the horrors of emerging Fascism to the West. The
din entirely disappeared however when all the Arts were commandeered for the
WAR EFFORT by everyone, in brazen propaganda.
For all the
rhetorical/polemic diatribes of the scribes of the Rich, one would be led to
assume that
Socio-political
art (read any content oriented art) was merely the invention of Communist and Fascist
propaganda. Aesthetics, that sacrosanct domain of Art for Arts' Sake in its
most vulgar interpretation as merely an exercise in aesthetics or formalism was
supposedly the brainchild of the nobility, and later on, the bourgeoisie who
thought they alone were capable of appreciating high culture and so forth going
back to at least the Tyrants of classical Greece if not much before. It was
after all, Oscar Wilde who coined the phrase, “Art for Arts' Sake” in the
English language from the original French of l’art pour l’art of contentious
origin and far from meaning that Art should be merely a formal or aesthetically
oriented discipline devoid of content, it meant the opposite. It meant that Art
had the sacred duty to do whatever the hell it pleased and that no one but the
Artist had anything to say or do about it. If that wasn’t the intention behind
the phrase, I am giving it the proper intention now, despite Northrop Frye and
the rest.
We know that the
nobility and capitalist classes started without exception as brigands and
warlords who pillaged and plundered and only then pretended to some civility by
preening themselves with Art to cover the stench of their blood-letting. The
so-called feudal aristocracies, the mercantilists who followed them, the
religious zealots that followed them still all started the same way; preying on
their victims, from the brigands to the robber barons to the clerics who made a
religion out of avarice and whose despotism became hereditary and finally
reified itself as nobility and/or the bourgeoisie. It is safe to say that this
was the case without exception everywhere, be it Europe, Asia, Africa, the
Americas and throughout human history where power and wealth were consolidated.
Power could only be consolidated ruthlessly, and Art was exploited as a prop to
exalt and reify the power of brigands who enlisted the artist to paint and
sculpt homilies to their power and glory. A most beautiful example of this were
the Medici. If this was not the most
shameless and brazen form of self-adulation i.e. propaganda, I don't know what
else it could be. That it spawned some great Art is in no doubt, but that it
wasn't content oriented or socio-political or propagandistic is a shear brazen
faced lie of the first order. The rich didn't just want portraits of their
glory but also of their dogs, their possessions, their lands, their livestock,
their slaves and serfs, captives and servants, even their damned cutlery. They
also specially liked to be represented as saints and gods frolicking with
shepherds and so forth (see the work of Berger). Can we blame them? No.
Can we pretend
that artists were allowed to produce whatever fancied their imaginations and
didn't starve to death?
The only one I
know who brazenly painted the rich and powerful and represented them exactly
for what they were (in-breeds...the Spanish aristocracy of his time) and got
paid for it was Goya. Even he eventually had to make a run for it to save his
skin.
If Art as a tool
of the conqueror is one side to the coin, the other side would be Art as the propaganda
tool of the Church or the Temple to cow and frighten the masses into submission
and uniformity. Witness the churches and temples built throughout history. Did
their utilitarian value diminish one iota of their grandeur? The whole edifice of so-called civilization is
built on the foundations of Art and Science. Without them, there is no
“civilization.” But to say that these creations were not Art is the height of
hypocrisy. Is the Sistine Chapel not Art because it has a religious theme? Does
only its aesthetic value give it merit? Pope Urban the VII didn't think so. He
wanted to destroy the Sistine Chapel and only the intervention of the members
of the Academy of the 'Compagnia di San Luca' begging the Pope to spare the
fresco, saved it. Why? Because Michaelangelo wasn't just interested in painting
or sculpting 'beautiful' homilies but primarily wanted to express his deeply
held humanist beliefs, which were dark and foreboding. Do we think it is an
ugly and dark fresco fit only for labyrinthine archives of the Vatican? But to
add insult to injury, some contemporary western art critics who grudgingly
acknowledge the importance of western religious art in the Pantheon of the West now have their knives out for
“magical or shamanistic” art and will not confer the label of high art on such art
although the best art in all the museums in the western (in my opinion) world
just happens to be the nameless exhibitions of African, Oceanic and North and
South American tribals. Nevermind that the whole notion of the Modernism in
Western art was the succubus of these very traditions a la Picasso and company.
The coup de
grace must surely be Hitler and his obsession with Art. He was a mediocre
painter who was outcast by the Vienna Academy and some think that if he had
been accepted as a student, the
Holocaust and
the Second World War may have never taken place. Be that as it may, Hitler was
obsessed with
what he termed “decadent art.” He went to great lengths in appropriating the
great
European art
works, had annual exhibitions, built huge museums etc. He also went on a witch
hunt of the so-called decadents and exhibited their works in annual exhibitions
and subsequently destroyed them. He would show the works of the decadents,
mostly the German Expressionists alongside photographs of inmates of
psychiatric institutions and people with various deformities as examples of
what decadence was about. Hitler liked the so-called heroic arts, representing
the uberman, nudes of beautiful bodies, the family and edifying landscapes
“uplifting the soul.” Anything “dark” or with any content other than the heroic
or bucolic was designated decadent and summarily destroyed. He started his
extermination programs with the inmates of these institutions and these art
works and the artists if they were caught.
We have to “out”
the blatant hypocrisy of sycophants lauding the so-called objective view of a
world
denuded of
meaning for the purposes of serving the
Grand Dame of High Art so long as it served their purposes and didn’t stray
from the merely decorative or aesthetic. In Academia today, artists who have
anything of import to say, must hide it behind an incomprehensible facade of
gibberish that only the initiated can understand. They flunk otherwise.
We also forget
to our peril the sinister machinations by which these same people subvert the
so-called Popular Arts into stupefying the masses with all the blood and gore
by which they keep their subject masses opiated and brainwashed into a moronic
public that supposedly likes and demands all the shit it is being fed on a
daily bases in the mainstream media. Of course it is only the good guys who can
kill, maim and torture with impunity, because the good guys are always
identified as “us” and “we” can do no wrong.
Heaven help the
other guy if he commits an iota of the mayhem that we do. Who funds and
produces all those thousands of shit cop, war and vigilante hero worship
movies? Where does all the money for that crap come from? Next time someone
tells you, “Oh, I couldn't possibly live with that in my living room, it would
give me nightmares or just wouldn't match my sofa...” know that you are dealing
with a goddamn Fascist.
Bogos Kalemkiar
Toronto
