It's About Truth and Beauty, Stupid
by James Howard Kunstler
Note: this is the author's version of a article published in the January 2002 edition of The American Enterprise Magazine. I wasn't too pleased with their edit, so here it is unaltered.
A few years ago, when I was married to a charming, wealthy woman, we went around our town shopping for a house. Virtually all of the houses that the realtors shlepped us through were large, expensive, even historic ones, owned by doctors, lawyers, executives and their upper-income brethren. I was shocked, though, to see what they had on their walls: mostly nothing except, by order of frequency, airbrushed yearbook photos of their kids, copper wall "pieces" of sailboats, fabric "landscapes," and similar banalities, various "folk" art objects constructed twenty minutes before sale, and last, the desultory museum poster. I don't remember seeing a single real painting.
As someone who is pretty serious about painting, I was dismayed at the sheer lack of interest in "art" as such. But the social critic in me was fascinated by the many other possible meanings that might apply. One was tempted to reflect, for instance, that so many serious, capable professional people dwelt in a sort of domestic squalor, despite the market value of their homes. Or that there was a central vacancy to their personal lives. Or that the absence of art seemed to occur in a direct proportion with the dissolution of families -- since a lot of these houses were on the market due to divorce. Or the obvious fact that all the discretionary spending money went into cars, electronic gadgetry, computer crapola, and other toys.
In any case, one had to conclude that in our time art resides elsewhere than the upper middle class household. Where else? Corporate boardrooms, though it is ironic that the executives who toil for these corporations often live in those expensive homes devoid of art. In museums and in the art departments of the universities who train those who will serve and manage the museums (and, in the hermetic system it has become, the university faculties themselves). This isn't really news because art as a vocational entity has been marching off into the metaphysical ether for a whole century. And anyway, of course, it would be stupid to regard art as comprising solely or even mainly painting.
To expect the people of one time to behave like people of another time may be silly, too. The American industrial plutocrats who bought Old Masters by the shipload hung paintings of the anguished Christ on the walls of their mansions for reasons far different than the artists of 1573, or their patrons, may have had in mind. My own benchmark for thinking of the uses of painting derives unabashedly from 19th Century bourgeois life, as a somewhat elevated form of decor, one-of-a-kind works, executed within certain technical conventions, for invoking beauty and truth in small discrete doses. I am not being facetious about this, either. Truth and beauty are powerful forces and middle-class people busy operating on spleens and probating estates can only be expected to take so much of them in their leisure.
But there is a general complaint over recent decades that art has forsaken altogether the invocation of beauty and truth as its governing objective. In the train wreck of culture and authority that the twentieth century represented, all the previous sortings of human meaning were left smoking in the ditch of history, and what we have been left with is a trade in debris. That a lot of the artifacts look like debris is therefore relevant -- I am thinking specifically now of a Whitney biennial of the 1990s, which included one "piece" that was a gigantic blob of fabricated plastic vomit, of the kind that used to be sold in Times Square joke shops when I was kid, only ten times bigger. It was an exceedingly political show, with the angry women rampant and anathematizing all other modes of expression except their polemic.
The twentieth century represents many things to me. The fact that we actually survived it may increase its nostalgia value now, especially after such New Age shocks as the September 11th Terrorist Attacks, but I can still see how easily it induced the kind of nausea symbolized by that giant blob of vomit in the Whitney Museum. The twentieth century was also a kind of nervous breakdown for western civilization as well as a train wreck. We got the great buildup of hope, aspiration, and a conviction in the inevitable progress of mankind during the period 1870 - 1914, with tremendous technological innovation in everything from Aviation to Zippers, adding up to the idea that the new century would be a golden age -- which died in the trench-bound slaughter of World War One. It's right around this time that painting took flight up its own rear end, perhaps in a desperate search for security.
The result, though, abstraction, is precisely the same thing that is most characteristic of mental illness in individual human beings: the tendency to replace conscious awareness with strictly personal symbolism. And I propose that this process can only be understood if one accepts the idea that consciousness is largely a product of consensus among sentient beings about what truly constitutes reality -- with plenty of room for interpretation and originality within that consensus, which in the best of cultures is necessarily broad and cosmopolitan, admitting and successfully integrating many points-of-view. The consensus about truth and beauty themselves was self-evidently very robust in the years preceding World War One, and hence many beautiful paintings and sculptures were produced using the artistic conventions of the era -- technical art conventions also being a product of consensus among those who practice.
Per corollary one might say that a return to mental health in persons usually entails a reconnection of the individual to the consensus about what reality consists of, and permits that individual to function socially. Art never made that return trip in our time. There were too many serial traumas. World War One was followed by the crisis of modernity known as the Great Depression, which called into question another phenomenon of western culture, the maturing industrial revolution and where it was taking us. People of that era were profoundly concerned that it was approaching a perhaps terminal stage, especially its operating system: capitalism. It may seem quaint now, but in 1933, a lot of people thought the game was really up, and their despair was reflected collectively in the artifacts of culture. The Depression, of course, was followed in turn by the Second World War, a convulsion that left all the advanced nations of the world in smoldering wreckage -- except the United States.
I have described in my last book, "Home From Nowhere," the "victory disease" which overcame the US in the aftermath of our unequivocal triumph over the forces of manifest evil in World War Two. This disease has been one of the stories behind the last fifty years of US history and its culmination now in a nation of overfed clowns whose response to catastrophe is the herding-together of teddy bears -- an operation that, in recent decades, could easily have been proposed as and accepted to be "an art installation."
With abstraction established as "normative" in the art practicum and academia after World War Two, another distorting element entered the scene: extreme narcissism of the kind that the late Christopher Lasch identified as a defining characteristic of contemporary American culture, an excessive preoccupation with the self, in the case of the art world and its denizens, a malady of extreme grandiosity that went miles beyond garden variety narcissism, which was reserved for the audience. Add to this problem the cognitive dissonance arising from Americans' diminishing capacity to tell the boundary between show biz and reality, between celebrity and achievement. This, after all was the chief subject matter of Andy Warhol, a not inconsiderable technician in his own right, but an artist saddled with subject matter of implacable futility, fame for fame's sake.
Tom Wolfe's contributions to our understanding of the intellectual racketeering involved in the post-Pop maelstrom, summarized in "The Painted Word," was the ultimate colonoscopy, getting right to the deep dark source of the problem, where art's head was at, so to speak. Since the mid-eighties, the art world has been running mostly on cloacal vapors, with heroic apostates like Eric Fischel turning up now and then to herald a real fresh breeze amid all the otherwise stale flatulence and political logorrhea.
My personal sense is that the Modernist racket is utterly played out. It's funeral took place last week in the collapse of those twin banal megaliths at the World Trade Center. We are entering an age of global strife and national austerity in which truth and beauty will be necessary survival tools. We've had enough cultural pranks and party tricks to last ten generations, anyway. Only a nation as culturally obese as America was in the second half of the 20th century could afford to discount truth and beauty down to practically zero, and soon their value will once again be manifest as we struggle to invest with meaning lives lived much closer to the bone.
In other words, I expect a stark reaction to all the deliberate nonsense of recent times. For one thing, we will have less money to spend on junk, including high-toned junk. The end of the cheap oil age is going to make things rigorous, especially the consensus about what constitutes reality, and don't believe the wish-mongers who would persuade you that we are about to segue neatly into a hydrogen-based utopia, or some other miracle fuel to replace oil. It ain't so. Things are darkening up here in western civ. Get used to it and get serious.