The New Philistines How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts
A review of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts by Sohrab Ahmari. Biteback Publishing (2016), 144 pages.
"Today's art world isn't fifty-fifty contemptuous of sometime standards — it is wholly indifferent to them," writes Sohrab Ahmari in this timely polemic, in which he writes passionately in defence of humane art and the critical standards once thought to be of supreme importance and permanence: "sincerity, formal rigour and cohesion, the quest for truth, the sacred and the transcendent."
Editorialist for the Wall Street Periodical, correspondent to Commentary magazine, author and editor of works analyzing the Arab Spring and its aftermath, and a recent convert to Catholicism, Ahmari makes his ain position clear. His volume is aimed at readers who want to engage with fine art only detect too footling of information technology that speaks to them. He is not concerned with winning over the art world insider or academic skilful, but rather wishes to aid the dislocated and disgruntled arts lover.
Ahmari was raised in Iran while the "cultural revolution" busied itself purging the academy and cultural institutions of anyone who might "create the incorrect kind of art, or hold the wrong opinion about [it]." The revolutionary vanguard spent its fourth dimension in libraries blacking out images of nudes. "That a theocratic police state could be this afraid of Renaissance nudes in books taught me early on on about the power of great art and its connection to human freedom," writes Ahmari.
Merely what has that to do with the fine art of the West, where artists are free to create equally they delight, and critics to write what they want? For well over a hundred years the slap-up of traditional forms has get business organisation as usual in the world of high art and, as for subject area matter, anything goes. Only of late has a retraction of freedoms been promulgated, and – setting bated reactionary religious forces such as Islamism – this urge to conscience and restrict has come up from inside the art community itself, which consistently seeks to impose a worldview that aligns with prevailing theories of social justice.
Information technology is this kind of self-imposed limitation that Ahmari's book explores. For despite the contemporary art scene's superficial freedoms, experimentation, and efforts to shock, the writer finds a deeply conventional world governed past trendy doctrinaire politics. The art scene exhibits a narrowly circumscribed earth view that restricts itself to anticipated subject field matter and seems more interested in what has become known as 'virtue signaling' than in aesthetics. Artists who deviate from this narrow set of values and practices won't find themselves in jail, of grade, but they are apt to find themselves without institutional patronage, media attention, or the support of their contemporaries. Information technology is a state of affairs that recalls Orwell'southward complaint about "evil-smelling lilliputian orthodoxies."
To run into what is going on for himself, Ahmari surveys the art scene in London, sampling a diverseness of artistic media. He too makes a sincere try to understand this world in its own terms, generously quoting from the in-crowd'due south own explanations of their goals. While the examples mostly come from London, readers fifty-fifty modestly acquainted with the arts will recognize a scene familiar to many Western cities in which identity politics holds sway among the bien pensant and creative classes.
He calls the adherents of this postmodern dogma "identitarians," and these cocky-styled moral entrepreneurs are manifestly non noted for their humility in the face of the large man questions once explored past art. Instead, they "recall they already have the answers: a set of all-purpose formulas almost race, gender, form and sexuality, on the one hand, and power and privilege, on the other." The art globe, it seems, has passed into the hands of hectoring sociologists.
The author's field trips include attendance at a 5-day film festival held at the London Constitute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The festival's written programme confirms his thesis, forthrightly setting down that, "Themes of social and political identity permeate the content and subjects explored. These themes underpin moving image's relevance in 2016." The exhibited films, the festival talks, and the accompanying special presentations are all monomaniacally identitarian. Ahmari concludes that "It is almost inconceivable that then many filmmakers could recollect of nothing – be inspired past nothing – nothing, nothing, nothing – only the politics of representation, 'performativity,' gender, race, queer theory etc. There must be other subjects, in the world outside or in their inner lives, which vest on the screen."
American readers who take listened to National Public Radio on 1 of the e'er-more than-frequent days when story after story is devoted to these same topics will identify with Ahmari's exasperation. How much more depressing, then, when the identitarians' obsessively narrowed weltanschauung permeates non only the news room, but the arts, once conceived to be the cathedral of centre, soul and mind, devoted to humanity'south capacity to explore.
Ahmari is also in melody with the mangling of language that accompanies – nay, propels – the contemporary art globe. It is motivated by careerism, one gathers, and produced from heads and hearts unburdened with deeper cultural content. He captures the artists' ain musings in several long passages of verbatim quotation taken from various venues, including post-screening discussions at the ICA. Here pretension combines with inarticulacy in a 'Pseuds Corner' version of artspeak gobbledygook.
Inarticulate artists wouldn't matter much, of course, if the fine art works they produced were profound or moving. Only Ahmari astutely makes the proper connection: "If their English grammar sounds broken, information technology is considering their creative grammer is besides, and the source of the brokenness is the aforementioned."
A slightly different sort of exact/artistic corruption is of even greater significance. This comes from the jargon-cluttered pages of the postmodern publication, Fine art Forum. Reading this cloth is similar chewing tinfoil, but Ahmari has soldiered through the periodical's abstruse pages extolling "radical feminism, racial grievance, anti-commercialism and queer theory" to extract several cardinal identitarian concepts that he elucidates in order "to expose [their] illiberalism." Readers unfamiliar with the identitarian use of the words intersectionality, visibility, individualism, and legibility volition be served with a lucid primer to these au courant terms. Those already familiar with the deformations that these terms represent may have note of the supercilious attitude that permeates the turgid passages in which they appear.
I took particular involvement in Ahmari'south notations on "legibility," a term which substantially means that a work of art "appeals to a broad audience, or that the mainstream culture can appreciate . . . it." For the new philistines this is not a desirable quality in a work of fine art. The concept takes me back to a visit to the Tate Modernistic when it was all the same fairly new. Not all the art so on display was driven past identity politics, but a significant corporeality of it was, and some of it would take qualified for the "grievance Olympics" that the author finds then often displayed in today's galleries. About all of the items at the Tate would take registered low enough on the legibility calibration to laissez passer fifty-fifty the most exacting standards of obscurantism.
Unsurprisingly the works themselves seemed to hold the involvement of very few of those who thronged the halls (and let u.s.a. note that the people who chose to come to the Tate were surely a self-selecting grouping motivated by a want to meet fine art). But for all the self-proclaimed daring of low-legibility works of art, they were usually accompanied by lengthy explanations of what the viewer was supposed to take away from the "provocative" installations. Hither, then, was an credible betrayal of the very principle of illegibility and what amounted to an obvious vote of no confidence in the work itself.
Hundreds of people appeared unmoved by what they beheld, and barely glancing at the art itself, could exist seen gazing (if they stopped at all) at the same sort of pleasureless circumlocution to exist establish in the pages of Art Forum: an admixture of promotional hype, art-crit obfuscation, and self-congratulation for the supposed accomplishment of the correct mix of "transgression" and social-justice bona fides.
That was some fifteen years ago. In this lucid, heartfelt and intelligent work of criticism, Sohrab Ahmari demonstrates that the art world is still playing the same games, only higher and harder, with an increasingly narrow range of interests and an ever-more vehement insistence on its own moral rectitude.
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Source: https://quillette.com/2017/02/23/review-the-new-philistines/
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