After marvellous beginnings, the twentieth century witnessed the gradual evisceration of the
arts. The dizzy, debauched decadence of the fin-de-siecle gave way to a hugely serious quest
for meaning as the new century opened. Expressionism, Cubism and Dada tried to purge the salon
excesses — the Bouguereau putti and Landseer’s deer. Artists joined an exploration
that revealed new layers of meaning, and the stifling atmosphere of European high culture
revitalized by every visiting culture. Civilized sophistication was challenged by the primal.
But all too soon, the optimistic aspirations of the most progressive and richly talented
artists — from Stravinsky to
Duchamp,
from Joyce to Kandinsky — were broken and wrecked by the
Great War.
Individualism was roped into the service of ideologies. The Italian Futurists joined up with
Mussolini. Out of Dada came Surrealism with its Marxist-Freudian agenda. The last aspirational
centre, the Bauhaus, was closed by the Nazis. Great art was made, but in technical execution and
breadth of meaning it was decline and deconstruction from then on.
Beyond the horrors of the Second World War, music, literature and the visual arts gradually
lost their energy in a sort of Kafkaesque listlessness. The explosion of fascination that had
begun the twentieth century had rigidified by its midpoint. Content collapsed in the search
for purity of form. Abstraction of content became abstraction of form: thought became art all
but divorced from objective reality. Architects designed machines that were unliveable in,
while Behaviorist Psychology slammed shut the doors of perception. Minimalism meanwhile
condensed Art into white squares upon white squares to a dazed infinity. The medium became
the message, and the message was simple: life is an appalling accident, devoid of meaning,
and only man is vile. This pallid reading of Existentialism coolly catastrophised all
technical expertise and reduced the innovations of the founders of Modernism to regurgitated
ratatouille. In truth, this was the most relevant critique possible in a world gone mad with
consumerist selfishness to the point of genocide. But however valid this observational art
was it failed to create change, to replenish the well-springs of compassion.
Beyond the first world, the totalitarian ‘communist’ states abolished
individuality, and with it art. In Russia, China and Cambodia, they stopped
the clock and then smashed it. Kitsch became the paradigm for the socialist
workers’ paradise. On the brighter side of the iron
curtain, the capitalist world abandoned itself to a burgeoning popular
culture. With the trickle-down of wealth — increasingly acquired by blithe
exploitation of the Third World
— the dominant forms were jazz, rock, rap, the movies, TV and eventually
MTV. Soon enough, even the culture vultures ignored Stockhausen, and
the general public fell asleep at Andy Warhol premieres. Only self-consuming
coke-heads could sustain such a wasteland of accidie.
Now deconstruction has reached its logical end: it has disappeared up its own analysis. A lost
generation is left with few teachers who still remember the idealistically-expunged skills
of yesteryear. Painting, sculpture, composition and poetry have all but shrivelled away for
lack of nourishment. The great developments in drama have happened where money has been
tricked out of the moguls of Hollywood or the blessed HBO. By the 1970’s, serious
music was barely alive. The triumphs of Sibelius and Shostakovich were deconstructed in the
conservatoires, rather than siring a new generation. The novel somehow embarrassedly
disappeared in the twenties, after Ulysses, and public interest in poetry at Eliot’s
elevated pastiche of Ulysses, The Waste Land.
And that very barren wasteland makes this the most exciting time for all artists. So much blank
space to fill! So many dreams to awaken! The Dadaist debunking of art ready at last to be
debunked. The old nonsense they ridiculed quite properly razed. New forms burgeoning and
beginning to trip across the stage. Popular culture now in some places so refined that it
readily equals the very highest of art, so providing bases for infinite recombining.
July 2005
