Mortal Remains
Art & Effrontery
by S. M. Hutchens
Discussing certain trends in modern art, I observed to a friend that we live in an age when effrontery is regularly mistaken for creativity—and will add that I'm pretty sure the effronters, having discovered the secret of profitable celebrity, both know it and are aware at some level that they haven't done much creating. Heidegger said authentic existence was "Being towards death," and so far as this may be taken to mean, "Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return," he was quite right. But there are many who seem to want to define themselves toward the Times obituary that praises them for advancing art by disruption, which is another thing entirely.
Art as effrontery is as old as the Fall, for its essence is (public) transgression of law—law, that is, in its broadest Psalmic sense as the expression in creation of the mind and will of the Creator, or as contemplated among the Greeks in terms of the transcendent or immanent forms. When the artistic eros is turned outward toward the mind of God, or toward the Ideal (wherever it is to be found), and its praxis is an honest mimetic attempt to honor what it sees there "in its own words," then it both gives and promises. Whenever the desire and its poiesis become separated from the extravertent theoria and turn inward, becoming ars gratia artis (as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promises its films to be), it loses procreative vision and departs into increasingly pointless and unfruitful self-stimulation. It becomes bad and boring at the
same time.
The call to express oneself in art is suspect as an invitation to the artificial limitation of horizons, to a kind of captivity to which a great many artists have committed themselves, and which ends only in service of the aridity, absurdity, and ennui that lie at the end of every isolate's self-reference, which fills so many museums of modern art, and which predictably appears as the unlovely thing next to last on the orchestral program. Paradoxically, it is conservatism about finding the rules and sticking to them in which all truly creative discoveries, all that can be reckoned to be in any way new, lie, rather than in the attempt to break the rules, for all that is left in that wake is something broken, and if interesting at all, interesting only as a wreck, something that no longer possesses order, form, and measure, to which, again paradoxically, the transgressional artist must devote himself—must always keep in mind—as the logos behind his work of demolition. I have heard it said, and think it very likely, that certain Nazis used to attend church, not to participate in the services, but to orient themselves toward the Straight and Normal to remind themselves of what they were attempting to destroy. In the same way, the artists of effrontery are committed to the Rule they make their living by breaking.
This does not necessarily mean that art which irritates a certain kind of traditionalist is bad art, but it does mean that there is such a thing as bad art, that the criteria exist to identify and criticize it, that these criteria are "classical" in nature, and that art intended to bother people is not justified in the appeal to freedom of expression common in sociopaths, exhibitionists, university art departments, and Regietheater, but only in re-presenting lost or undiscovered goodness, truth, and beauty. All true art is derivative, and all good art is classical, because all a rational man can desire as beautiful is in-formed by what is higher than, and outside of, himself.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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