Crowmanic

Following are excerpts from a lecture The future of art in an age of crisis by WSWS Arts Editor David Walsh

“Aleksandr Voronsky, the Soviet critic and opponent of Stalin, pointed out 70 years ago, in his essay “The Art of Seeing the World” (1928), that it was very difficult for the artist to discover and genuinely accept the world, to see the world as it is, independently of us, inherently complex and beautiful, “in all its freshness and immediacy.”

He pointed to the habits, prejudices, frustrations and the host of other pressures of everyday life that weigh us down, deadening “the sharpness and freshness of perception and attention” and lending reality “a peculiarly gray, doleful and wretched colouration.”

Against all this, the artist seeks out, Voronsky wrote, “unspoiled and genuine images of the world,” which he described as “the principal meaning and purpose of art.”

If Voronsky was correct, and I believe he was, telling the truth in art has always been a great struggle. It is a demanding mental and physical effort, not to be undertaken lightly.”

“Why does it seem there is such a chasm between artistic efforts and the character of present-day life, which for masses of the world’s population involves a daily struggle for survival? Why does art so often seem indifferent or blind to the crisis of human society, and to great historical and social questions in general?

We don’t agree that the central focus for art should be the artist and his or her impressions, but the independently existing world and its complexity, including its social complexity.”

“I want to emphasise at the outset that the artistic landscape has not been a barren one. The spark of human genius has obviously not gone out. Far from it. One can point to remarkable individual films (or scenes), novels (or passages), individual paintings and so forth that go against the grain, that confront life in a richer manner. In popular culture too, there are obviously enormously gifted, ingenious and energetic people at work. The ability to create dazzling and startling images and sounds has reached qualitatively new heights; nothing seems technically out of reach of contemporary artists. A variety of new media offer almost limitless possibilities for communication.”

“The artistic-cultural atmosphere will not be cleansed until some accounting is made of the social indifference, the commercialisation of art to the nth degree, the banality of so much of cultural life. How did it happen? Why did no one notice what was really going on in the world? Where was the elemental sympathy for the plight of others that ought to be integral to the artistic personality?”

”...what the artists need first and foremost at present are historical insight and honesty. The poverty-stricken character of present-day Hollywood, for example, is bound up, above all, with the falsity and shallowness of so many of its images and ideas. And even the more critical films or television programs tend to accept at crucial moments commonplace and conformist ideas (including the essential greatness and legitimacy of “American democracy”). They are only critical to a point. They generally succumb to the various ideological and financial pressures.

The filmmakers and others lack deep insight into the social process, their ideas have not been worked through. They either believe in the present system or resign themselves to it. ... It’s not possible to make an artistically convincing work that ignores or fails to address seriously the most burning human questions. Art depends upon utter sincerity.

There is a relationship between the commitment of the artist to work through his or her material, to reflect the world accurately and dynamically, on the one hand, and the final product and its impact on the spectator, reader or viewer, on the other. As Trotsky pointed out, the artist is not an empty machine for creating form and the spectator a machine for consuming it. They are both living beings with a psychology and outlook created by social conditions.”

“The attack on universalism has had terrible consequences for the artist. If everyone has his or her own narrative, all equally valid or invalid, if truth is entirely relative, if the representation of the world is an impossible undertaking, where does this leave the artist who wants to communicate his or her ideas and feelings and believes them to be important and universal? Art, like all cognition, is universalizing by its very nature.

The act of creating art is a presumptuous one: the artist assumes that he or she has something illuminating and original to convey. There are no half-measures in art, no half-victories. The attack by the postmodernists and others on the objectively truthful character of artistic representation reduces art to a game, a purely formal exercise, whatever you like, anything but a serious struggle for truth in which the artist is prepared to pay the highest cost, and in which the stakes are immense.

What are the consequences of postmodernism for art? Look around at much of contemporary visual art, for instance—cold, clever, “conceptual,” as unfeeling and uncommitted as stone. These moods and trends, including identity politics, have encouraged self-involvement, narcissism, social indifference, cynicism….”

~ Although the lecture is quite political and reflective historically, it is well written, comprehensive and pointed in its message. I found it more than just an interesting read. Full article here