The recent unveiling of the “embrace” MLK sculpture in Boston raises the awful question of Modern Art. What is its problem?
Quillette had a long think piece on the embrace sculpture, including this word salad from Embrace America, the outfit that commissioned the piece.
Activate arts and culture to reimagine and recast cultural representations of language, images, narratives, and cognitive cues to interrupt and reimagine the public’s conventional wisdom about race in which White privilege and racial disparities are perceived as normal and disconnected from history and institutions. [emphasis in original]
You and I know where the wokey word salad comes from. It comes from the management consultant notion of Vision Statement and Mission Statement. Reading between the lines, I reckon that the idea was a cunning way for the consultants to force corporate bureaucrats to think about what they were there for, other than to pick up their paychecks.
But in an arts organization? Gotta be something wrong.
The “something wrong,” I think, is the cult of “creativity.” Our educated class prides itself on its difference from the ruck of humankind, that it does not just follow the rules but makes the rules. If you like, it is the arts version of the business “startup” culture, creating something new and different that changes the world.
Of course, the great business startups are the ones that took a good idea and made it into something that really transformed people’s lives, like the mechanical textile inventions that created affordable clothing for the multitude.
But in the arts world the measure of creative transformation seems to be whether it will offend the booboisie. I understand, of course, that our modern artists are competing with an astonishing record of accomplishment, and nobody wants to be “derivative” and just recycling art that has already been seen and heard.
My suggestion to artists: stop trying to be “creative.” When you try to be creative you tend to kill your creativity.
And I also realize that artists — like architects! — live in a community of artists, and really cannot think outside the box of what other people like them are thinking and feeling.
I suppose that the dullness of art today is a “tell” that we are in a fin de siècle, the end of an age. And As Nietzsche says, when the old God is Dead, there is no avoiding the decadence, the nihilism, the eternal recurrence until the revaluation of all values shows up, courtesy of the Übermensch.
And, I would say, the new art needs to resonate with our basic humanity, as encapsulated by Jung in his notion of archetypes and the unconscious, individual and collective. And it would resonate at all levels of understanding, kinda like the old Looney Tunes cartoons, that could be appreciated by kids and by their parents.
Mind you, I get that art down the ages has been tightly linked to the ruling-class agenda, both political and religious. And so today’s art, as art usually does, reflects the rulers’ beliefs and ambitions and conceits.
So maybe if art starts to improve it will be a sign that the New Era is dawning and the Woke is dying off.
Wouldn’t that be something.