I'm generally sympathetic to Rieff's grievances and to those who cite him for this sort of piece, but when I went to read The Triumph of the Therapeutic I was appalled at how deeply wrong it seemed to get Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, who I had prior interests in. (Neither man is a saint to me, but both seem to deserve more accurate criticism.) I've been recommended My Life Among the Deathworks as a superior work after saying so, but those recommenders didn't earn my trust, so I haven't made the time yet.
From my current partial ignorance, then, I worry that, on his own terms, Rieff's sloppy scholarship at Reich's and Jung's expenses was itself a different sort of deathwork and thus that he didn't understand his own production of ugliness and his own intransigent, destructive antagonism to other aesthetics of authority than his own. Do you think reading My Life Among the Deathworks would change my mind?
No idea if it would. As someone who’s passingly familiar with Reich and Jung—and not convinced by either—I might speculate that we’re starting from different metaphysical and even experiential priors. Honestly, I’m not totally in accord with everything I’ve read by Rieff either. No one has all the answers, which is why I try as best I can to at least admit that my interjections are, if not totally speculative, at least provisional. The thing about reading people from the past—who obviously had just as faulty crystal balls as we do—is not to validate or reject them wholesale, but trying to discern where, how, and why they got it right or wrong. In a sense, we are their 20/20 hindsight. And I agree with you that criticism, as far as is humanly possible, should be done in good faith and without misrepresentation. Rieff hit a tuning fork for me on this one thing, and I tried to buttress my argument (I admitted it was a rant) with Ellul, Lasch, and Bob Dylan. (-;
Entirely fair and I appreciated the rant sympathetically, so thank you!
Fwiw my disagreements with Rieff about Reich and Jung were on the level of mistaken biographical detail rather than my own agreement or disagreement with any of their respective metaphysics. I rarely compare my personal metaphysics directly to these writers' since mine is usually pretty far off the map for humanistic thinkers. I began my professional life in a highly mathematical field in the natural sciences, so I've had to learn and teach quantum mechanics and that tends to do... strange things... to one's metaphysics. (Assuming you don't just do a scientistic dodge of "denying metaphysics", which was never convincing to me.)
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
In other words, all the bling in the jewelry store, or the robes tailored for an emperor, or the most expensive offering from the latest show in Milan, or the most drastic artifice of body modification, can't match the natural beauty of a flower. For free.
The esthetic the elevates Transgression has no use for natural beauty, though. Remember Morticia of the Addams Family, snipping the blooms from her rosebushes in order to turn the spotlight to the thorns? That was intended as a joke. But in my observation, the Transgressors pursue the same goal with serious intent. It's a turf claim, a challenge. A Demand, to capture the attention of others with grotesquerie.
Some "skin art"- tattooing- can be defended as beautiful, even though it doesn't do much for me personally. (Especially on women.) Tattooing and body piercing can't simply be dismissed as an ephemeral fad, either; that sort of body adornment has been found all over the world- ancient Scotland, continental Europe, North Africa, New Zealand, Hokkaido, Malaysia, Amazonia, Mesoamerica, North America...
But the present-day race toward Maximum Transgression in tattooing and body modification that's depicted in the post isn't positing a relative esthetic of beauty; it's a forcefully emphatic denial of beauty, and an assertion of the predominance of the Extreme as an artistic value, per se, for its Power to elicit a strong reaction from those who view it. The Strong Reaction, in and of itself, becomes the measure of value. In a worldview without purpose or meaning, intensity of immediate sensation becomes an end in itself. Shock is a prime measure of intense sensation, and the ability to elicit it becomes a measure of "artistic power." As with aggression, violence, sensationalism, and clickbait. Signals of aggressive intent elicit neurochemical threat responses: heightened sensation: artistic success! Violence is fast and explosive: intensity, per se: artistic success! Sensationalism elicits disgust, or hopeless compassion, or voyeuristic prurience, or passive despair: artistic success! Face tattoos are clickbait- you can't look away: artistic success! The subtext being "you couldn't look away: you really want this!" And for those who choose to avert their eyes: "This is Reality, weakling!"
Sophistry loves two-valued choices, logical double-binds, the reduction of difference to an either/or that the sophist can define verbally, and therefore control. Because for those who exalt the primacy of the Transgressive and the Grotesque in a visual depiction, the Art game isn't really about Creative Expression; it's entirely about asserting the Power of the Artist (and their critical allies) over those who view the Works, the audience. Creativity and originality are not required; transgressive artistic depictions are invariably trite and cliched. (I challenge anyone to provide a single example of an exception, because I can't think of any.) Commonplace gimmicks like Travesty and Perversion practically require the preexistence of a sincere (or even devout) artwork, as inspiration for their mockery. The works are second-order and second-rate (if not lower) by design. The Artists couldn't care less about that criticism, either. Their intent isn't about Sincerity, or Innocence, or Creativity, or evoking Beauty, or invoking new horizons of Esthetics. It's to assert their Domination over all of those concepts. To demand that the audience submit to the Personal Vision of the artist, notwithstanding how trite, stale, and derivative the works might happen to be. Regardless of how much hatred and contempt the works express for their own artistic inspirations.
In terms of Celebrated (i.e., high-dollar) Modern Art, this is where I draw a distinction between the works of Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy. Koons is undeniably derivative- he's doing put-ons, ham-handedly obvious ones. It's vital to his work. But Koons seems to really have a sincere affection not only for his own creations, but for the kitsch that has inspired so much of it. It's parody, but in a way, he's offering a whimsical commentary on what makes the mass-market esthetic of kitsch attractive to so many people in the first place. Koons doesn't view the simple surfaces of kitsch and the homiletic messaging of it as prima facie happy-face camouflage for fascism. His works can be considered as ironic, but I don't notice any sneering. Balloon animals rendered in all of their daffiness as metal sculptures, 10x life size? Sure.
There's a whimsical sense of fun there that beats the terminally ironic detachment of looking at someone's deadpan painting of a soup can any day, to me. Yes, I think Jeff Koons delivers what Andy Warhol only promised. But that's the way it often is with explorers, and we all know who got there first. And while both artists have been known to partake of some amount of transgressiveness in some of their works, I've never gotten the impression that either Koons or Warhol were just out to force audiences to submit to the dominance and supremacy of Transgression- "Uberttretung Ist Alle." Unlike, say, Paul McCarthy. Don't feel obligated to waste too much time on the following gallery of images: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=paul+mccarthy+sculpture&iax=images&ia=images
Paul McCarthy and his ilk are where I draw the line. But more than any of the images in that last link, the real indictment of the decadence and esthetic bankruptcy of the contemporary elite art scene is that there are some wealthy (and hence Influential) people out there willing to pay big money for that shit, and curators willing to install it in museums and public spaces supposedly reserved only for the most profoundly important works of our time.
I'm generally sympathetic to Rieff's grievances and to those who cite him for this sort of piece, but when I went to read The Triumph of the Therapeutic I was appalled at how deeply wrong it seemed to get Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, who I had prior interests in. (Neither man is a saint to me, but both seem to deserve more accurate criticism.) I've been recommended My Life Among the Deathworks as a superior work after saying so, but those recommenders didn't earn my trust, so I haven't made the time yet.
From my current partial ignorance, then, I worry that, on his own terms, Rieff's sloppy scholarship at Reich's and Jung's expenses was itself a different sort of deathwork and thus that he didn't understand his own production of ugliness and his own intransigent, destructive antagonism to other aesthetics of authority than his own. Do you think reading My Life Among the Deathworks would change my mind?
No idea if it would. As someone who’s passingly familiar with Reich and Jung—and not convinced by either—I might speculate that we’re starting from different metaphysical and even experiential priors. Honestly, I’m not totally in accord with everything I’ve read by Rieff either. No one has all the answers, which is why I try as best I can to at least admit that my interjections are, if not totally speculative, at least provisional. The thing about reading people from the past—who obviously had just as faulty crystal balls as we do—is not to validate or reject them wholesale, but trying to discern where, how, and why they got it right or wrong. In a sense, we are their 20/20 hindsight. And I agree with you that criticism, as far as is humanly possible, should be done in good faith and without misrepresentation. Rieff hit a tuning fork for me on this one thing, and I tried to buttress my argument (I admitted it was a rant) with Ellul, Lasch, and Bob Dylan. (-;
Entirely fair and I appreciated the rant sympathetically, so thank you!
Fwiw my disagreements with Rieff about Reich and Jung were on the level of mistaken biographical detail rather than my own agreement or disagreement with any of their respective metaphysics. I rarely compare my personal metaphysics directly to these writers' since mine is usually pretty far off the map for humanistic thinkers. I began my professional life in a highly mathematical field in the natural sciences, so I've had to learn and teach quantum mechanics and that tends to do... strange things... to one's metaphysics. (Assuming you don't just do a scientistic dodge of "denying metaphysics", which was never convincing to me.)
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
In other words, all the bling in the jewelry store, or the robes tailored for an emperor, or the most expensive offering from the latest show in Milan, or the most drastic artifice of body modification, can't match the natural beauty of a flower. For free.
The esthetic the elevates Transgression has no use for natural beauty, though. Remember Morticia of the Addams Family, snipping the blooms from her rosebushes in order to turn the spotlight to the thorns? That was intended as a joke. But in my observation, the Transgressors pursue the same goal with serious intent. It's a turf claim, a challenge. A Demand, to capture the attention of others with grotesquerie.
Some "skin art"- tattooing- can be defended as beautiful, even though it doesn't do much for me personally. (Especially on women.) Tattooing and body piercing can't simply be dismissed as an ephemeral fad, either; that sort of body adornment has been found all over the world- ancient Scotland, continental Europe, North Africa, New Zealand, Hokkaido, Malaysia, Amazonia, Mesoamerica, North America...
But the present-day race toward Maximum Transgression in tattooing and body modification that's depicted in the post isn't positing a relative esthetic of beauty; it's a forcefully emphatic denial of beauty, and an assertion of the predominance of the Extreme as an artistic value, per se, for its Power to elicit a strong reaction from those who view it. The Strong Reaction, in and of itself, becomes the measure of value. In a worldview without purpose or meaning, intensity of immediate sensation becomes an end in itself. Shock is a prime measure of intense sensation, and the ability to elicit it becomes a measure of "artistic power." As with aggression, violence, sensationalism, and clickbait. Signals of aggressive intent elicit neurochemical threat responses: heightened sensation: artistic success! Violence is fast and explosive: intensity, per se: artistic success! Sensationalism elicits disgust, or hopeless compassion, or voyeuristic prurience, or passive despair: artistic success! Face tattoos are clickbait- you can't look away: artistic success! The subtext being "you couldn't look away: you really want this!" And for those who choose to avert their eyes: "This is Reality, weakling!"
Sophistry loves two-valued choices, logical double-binds, the reduction of difference to an either/or that the sophist can define verbally, and therefore control. Because for those who exalt the primacy of the Transgressive and the Grotesque in a visual depiction, the Art game isn't really about Creative Expression; it's entirely about asserting the Power of the Artist (and their critical allies) over those who view the Works, the audience. Creativity and originality are not required; transgressive artistic depictions are invariably trite and cliched. (I challenge anyone to provide a single example of an exception, because I can't think of any.) Commonplace gimmicks like Travesty and Perversion practically require the preexistence of a sincere (or even devout) artwork, as inspiration for their mockery. The works are second-order and second-rate (if not lower) by design. The Artists couldn't care less about that criticism, either. Their intent isn't about Sincerity, or Innocence, or Creativity, or evoking Beauty, or invoking new horizons of Esthetics. It's to assert their Domination over all of those concepts. To demand that the audience submit to the Personal Vision of the artist, notwithstanding how trite, stale, and derivative the works might happen to be. Regardless of how much hatred and contempt the works express for their own artistic inspirations.
In terms of Celebrated (i.e., high-dollar) Modern Art, this is where I draw a distinction between the works of Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy. Koons is undeniably derivative- he's doing put-ons, ham-handedly obvious ones. It's vital to his work. But Koons seems to really have a sincere affection not only for his own creations, but for the kitsch that has inspired so much of it. It's parody, but in a way, he's offering a whimsical commentary on what makes the mass-market esthetic of kitsch attractive to so many people in the first place. Koons doesn't view the simple surfaces of kitsch and the homiletic messaging of it as prima facie happy-face camouflage for fascism. His works can be considered as ironic, but I don't notice any sneering. Balloon animals rendered in all of their daffiness as metal sculptures, 10x life size? Sure.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jeff+koons&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.standard.co.uk%2Fs3fs-public%2Fthumbnails%2Fimage%2F2016%2F05%2F19%2F13%2Fjeff-koons-2.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1200&pn=3
There's a whimsical sense of fun there that beats the terminally ironic detachment of looking at someone's deadpan painting of a soup can any day, to me. Yes, I think Jeff Koons delivers what Andy Warhol only promised. But that's the way it often is with explorers, and we all know who got there first. And while both artists have been known to partake of some amount of transgressiveness in some of their works, I've never gotten the impression that either Koons or Warhol were just out to force audiences to submit to the dominance and supremacy of Transgression- "Uberttretung Ist Alle." Unlike, say, Paul McCarthy. Don't feel obligated to waste too much time on the following gallery of images: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=paul+mccarthy+sculpture&iax=images&ia=images
Paul McCarthy and his ilk are where I draw the line. But more than any of the images in that last link, the real indictment of the decadence and esthetic bankruptcy of the contemporary elite art scene is that there are some wealthy (and hence Influential) people out there willing to pay big money for that shit, and curators willing to install it in museums and public spaces supposedly reserved only for the most profoundly important works of our time.