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June 16, 2009
I heard John Armstrong, Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School, being interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson on Counterpoint yesterday as I drove to Victor Harbor. Armstrong had written a book on civilization--- Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea -- and my ears picked up when art was bought into the discussion.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Suzanne, B1, South Australia, 2009
What did the cultural conservatives have to say about contemporary art I wondered? Their standard account, as reported in the media, has been to reject most of it as vulgar trash whilst rubbishing postmodernism. Do they accept modernism, or is their position a pre-modernist one? What is their aesthetic theory? So I turned the radio up.
Conservatism's standard cultural meme holds that the rot set in (moral decline) around 1968 with the embrace of positive expressive freedom that challenged a deeply conservative culture and the rise of the grim leftism of neo-Marxists, poststructuralists who inhabit the art world and the academy. This cultural conservatism is little more than '60s backlash.
An analytic philosopher defending civilization as a concept would have to do better than engage in polemics in the cultural wars through playing a part in the The Australian's campaign against political correctness. Armstrong says:
A lot of the background to contemporary art excitement is the idea that we're trying to cast off some sort of burden of oppression and regimentation and we need this sort of dramatic freeing process. I think that would have been a very, very good project around about 1901. In fact that project, the project of liberation, has, at least in sophisticated parts of the west, actually been completed a long time ago. Our great tasks now, it seems to me, are to find stable and serious principles of order, harmony, depth, beauty, human dignity and so on. And I think that that really requires a very, very different take on what the role of art might be, and I'm hoping that artists will catch up with that a bit more.
After modernism, a return to classicism (ie., symmetry, proportion etc rather than the content of antiquity) is being advocated here in opposition to modernism. Armstrong goes to say that in relation to the ethos of the modernist avant-garde's project idea of the role of high culture being one to provoke and distress the ruling class:
The project that got a lot of people interested in the transformational power of art was really a 19th century one. It really got going in France in the second half of the 19th century where there seemed to be a very, very entrenched dominant class but also owned traditional art. There was a struggle against that, that struggle was completely successful. I think that by the end of WWII that project was completely finished, it was completely achieved. But for some reason that attitude to art has kind of survived and continues as a myth and so generates a very unhelpful sense of what art is for.
So cultural conservatism reconnects art to beauty without mentioning religion or Christianity.Hence we have beauty as a harmony of form reflected in the imagination. It is not obvious that after modernism we need to adopt a classicist aesthetic--we could, for instance, turn to the neo-baroque. Armstrong goes no further in saying why we should work to find stable and serious principles of order, harmony, depth, beauty. Nor did Paul Comrie-Thomson ask him. It was enough that the contrary position had been spelt out--- works of art are essentially beautiful objects.
To dig deeper into why this is so, we can turn to Roger Kimble's The End of Art at First Things, where he points out that cultural conservatism holds that traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. Beauty, as it were, affirms its place in an integrated ontological order; as the radiance of being. Art without beauty is, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, is at least a description of failed art, if not a perverted art. Kimble says:
Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
Beauty animates aesthetic experience? Aesthetic judgment is about the experience of beauty. Why not horror? Or unity? Secondly, is the beautiful woman central to an aesthetic experience? Glamour and beauty are used to sell products in the mass media or promote entertainment events. Think Hollywood, the modern fashion magazine with its directional and explicatory shots, and the sophistication and assurance of female imagery employed in advertising and commercial media.
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Kimble spells out what he means by a perverted art.
He does accept the emancipation of art from religion --as Armstrong does implicitly in the Counterpoint transcript.