The Relativity of the "Scarlet D" (Decadence)

The longer I'm able to hang around to see how things work, the more convinced I become that the whole of human experience is on a fractal-like loop, repeating locally every 30-40 years, and then on a larger scale every 100 years or so, and perhaps world-wide every few millenia. Lessons learned by one generation are essentially lost on those 2 generations away, lessons learned by one empire are lost on those a century away, and so on, and the cycle from optimism to dominance to decline to desperation to revolution to rebirth of optimism is repeated, ad infinitum, not because there's no record of having "been here, done that" but, I'm beginning to suspect, because we're hard-wired to travel that journey, as a species. Of course, it's not as linear as I'm suggesting here, fractals of the sequence overlap, with one segment rising as another is falling, and even within defined societies both happening at once in different realms.

But taking it as linear for the sake of clarity, I believe, we travel this journey because, like the simple beasts we are, we're hard-wired to destroy what other beasts build, feeling that its very existence challenges our desire for supremacy in our own time. This theory corresponds nicely to the pattern we see in art history, with the 20th Century being a textbook example of what I consider the "kill the monarch to supplant with the heir apparent" sequence of manifestos and "-isms."

Which brings me to Donald Kuspit's latest installment of his monumental series on artnet.com: A Critical History of 20th Century Art (Chapter 10: The Decadence of Advanced Art and the Return of Tradition and Beauty: The New as Tower of Conceptual Babel: The Tenth Decade.) If you haven't read all of these carefully considered but incredibly dense chapters (as I haven't due to lack of time), you might want to at least read this one.

It's stuffed with food for thought. There's so much to discuss in it, in fact, that I'll limit this post to one idea in particular: that the conventional wisdom about what in contemporary art is "decadent" is not only debatably backwards, but perhaps irrelevant, as "decadence" itself is relative.

The argument I hear most often about this is that contemporary art has abandoned the everyday concerns of the public at large and entered a cocoon of self-absorbed obsession with decadence. Kuspit suggests that's backwards (or at least it's nowhere near that simple):

There has been a slow but steady erosion of the esthetic in art -- its organic element, the factor that brings it alive as art -- climaxing in the devaluation and finally destruction of the esthetic itself. Ironically, this destruction occurs in the name of artistic progress -- the myth of artistic advance, which has dominated the 20th-century idea of artistic value. It has been reified in late avant-gardism, becoming a hollow cliché, however much it inspired the early avant-garde, when it seemed a liberating truth. It is the decadent, self-destructive aspect of avant-gardism, the hidden canker in its creative blossoming, the worm ironically lurking in its fruit from its beginning. In stripping art of the esthetic, the so-called left wing of avant-garde art, represented by Duchamp and Kosuth, undoes art’s inner connection to the organic and existential. "Leftist" art argues that it is "advancing" art by purging it of the esthetic, presumably making it a strictly "intellectual expression," to use Duchamp’s term, but this "conceptualization" of art puts it in the hands of the everyday, as Duchamp’s readymades and the many so-called conceptual works that follow in its wake indicate. If art’s whole point -- to the extent that it is art -- is to imaginatively transcend the everyday (non-artistic), esthetically disclosing the organic and existential horizons that subsume it, then the regression to the everyday is decadent and dehumanizing. There is a "right wing" of avant-garde art, represented by Monet and Matisse -- all those whom Duchamp dismissed as "sensual" painters guilty of "animal expression" ("the more sensual appeal a painting provided. . . the more animal it became") -- who advocate and refine the esthetic to a perceptual extreme, but they have increasingly lost ground to facile Duchampianism, with its pretensions to intellectual superiority. They have been labeled decadent by the Duchampians because of their unremitting sensuousness, but it is just that organic sensuousness that is the core of art as art, and as such more existentially purposeful than the conceptual pseudo-art that trivializes it as the "physical side of painting."

I have to side with that last idea actually (but then I am one of those most dreaded creatures, the aspiring aesthete). Despite appreciating the contributions of the strict conceptualists to the broadening of the scope of exploration, I do wish they had seen that the intellectual visual message is always more compelling (and therefore accessible and therefore on some level irresistible) with at least some consideration for the sensuality inherent in everyday objects. Ignoring or downplaying that is to lie to the viewer, in my opinion.

But back to decadence. Given that there are dueling definitions of it (and it's hard to see where they might be reconciled), I'm inclined to view them as projections by folks in the stream of one fractal of the loop onto those on another overlapping loop. In other words, what one sees as "decadence" is often only a frustration that others are not moving in the same direction at the same time. Those falling from optimism into decline see those progressing into dominance as "decadent" because they're eschewing the status quo, pushing the boundaries of acceptable thought and behavior, rejecting conservative values. On the other hand, those on the tail end of revolution, heading toward a constructive new optimism, see those conserving the old ways as "decadent" because they're complacent and self-absorbed.

Kuspit explains why this POV problem matters (from his POV admittedly, but mine as well) as we're bombarded with current populist efforts to label "art as art" with the Big Scarlet D:

The tearing down of the esthetic wall between non-artistic and artistic reality -- between social life and artistic reflection, or, more basically, between blind attachment to everyday life and insightful detachment from it -- seems to inaugurate an advanced new esthetics. But this supposedly unfamiliar, radical esthetics is the familiar quasi-esthetics of everyday life in artistic disguise -- a sort of artistic Emperor’s New Clothing on ironically naked banal objects and materials.

Anyone who's been reading here a while will know that I side with those who feel Art is the product of "insightful detachment" from social life. Not that I can't see the benefits of considering the aesthetic value of everyday objects and materials, but elevating that to a level parallel with the consideration of Art leads to a place I'd rather not go. As Kuspit explains:

They are asserted for themselves even as they are superficially transformed by being "considered" as art, suggesting the artist’s double identification, and perhaps above all, the impossibility of complete artistic transformation in modernity, with its all-encompassing secular everydayness, that is, its resecularization of reality, which is its real revolution: the banalization of perception. Instead of imaginatively distilling the esthetic juice of the ordinary so that its inner extraordinariness becomes evident, its ordinariness comes to matter more than its esthetic revelation through sanctified sensation, which is all but meaningless in a secular world.

Why, though, I can hear some people saying...why won't you believe in the social transformation the populists seek to bring? Because I believe in the loop and the relativity of "decadence." Yes, progress is made over the course of the centuries (and yes, we must fight to protect it once it's made), but that progress is regularly undone again too, as the tide turns and what was built is destroyed by the ambitions of the newest generation of barbarians who come to power. What tends to survive their pillaging, however, are the sensuous, mysterious objects they simply can't bring themselves to destroy. I like to believe that there's magic in such creations that transcends the consequences of the inescapable loop.

That's my theory anyway, and (for now) I'm sticking with it.