Hello readers! This might be the most monstrous issue we’ve done yet. An election (open to all readers)! TWO podcasts! Three reviews, two selected from this month’s weeklies and one brand new! An Ed’s Corner on art! It’s so much, you’ll probably have to tell your email server to let you see the whole thing, just to see the Mithra pic!
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CONTENTS
Election
Nonfiction reading: Gay vs Poliakov vs Sabaseviciute
Podcast
Reading in the Time of Monsters 005: Kuang, “Babel” and the New Chosen One narrative
Reading in the Time of Monsters, 006: Surkov, “Almost Zero”, or, Russian Elites Write Dumb Books, Too
Reviews
Mantel, Wolf Hall novels
Branson, Into The Hills, Young Master
Hastings, I Lost My Love in Baghdad
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: The Value of Abstract Art & If Art Isn’t “For You,” Then Who Is It For?
PODCASTS
I said I’d do three podcasts this month, and right under the wire, I have! So there’s not one but TWO in this digest! And they’re BOTH about VERY BAD books! One is bad but is guaranteed to win awards. One is bad but is a curiosity, at least in the Anglosphere. One podcast has my first guest, the wonderful Kit! The other I’m doing because one of my Chieftain-level subscribers requested the book! If you want to request a book from me, go to your subscription options and click “Chieftain” to pay me a bunch more money… but much less money than it will cost any potential Chieftains after the next dozen or so, so get while the getting is good! One is a monster episode, two and a half hours long (I’m told it plays well at one and a quarter speed). The other is shorter. In any event… enjoy!
ELECTION
It’s once again time for a reading election! Vote on which nonfiction book I should read first. I will read books in order of votes received. Any ties will be broken by Roomie Ed. This election will last until about 24 hours after this email goes out. If you like voting on my reading, subscribe at the Citizen level! Along with getting much more content, you will also get to participate in all the elections!
THE CANDIDATES
Peter Gay, The Tender Passion (1986) - This is the second in cultural historian Peter Gay’s epic five volume series on the inner life of bourgeois Victorians. We seemingly can’t forget about these guys, so we better know what their deal was, and Gay is always enjoyable to read even when I don’t agree with his psychoanalysis-inflected takes.
Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (1971) - This is an early effort by one of the leading twentieth century historians of antisemitism to trace an intellectual history of the racist fury that overtook Europe in the century before he wrote. I picked this up when an old Brookline inhabitant dumped a bunch of his books about fascism at the local public library free pile.
Giedre Šabaseviciute, Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (2021) - I’ve wanted to know more about Qutb, one of the intellectual godfathers of contemporary Salafist thought, for a long time, but was always worried looking into it would get my name onto scarier lists than it’s currently on. But hell, I guess we’re far away enough from 9/11 to allow some intellectual history in, right? And that’s what this is.
REVIEWS
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall novels (2009-2020) - I spent a lot of time with these! For the most part, I read a few pages a day, usually towards bed, or anyway in the midst of other things. I like to read some books that way. Reading this series like that helped make Mantel’s vision of sixteenth century England a sort of climate I lived with for an extended period.
These three books – “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up The Bodies,” and “The Mirror and the Light” – tell the story of Thomas Cromwell, a real historical man who served as a sort of all-purpose fixer for Henry VIII, before “Big Hank” (as no one calls him, then or now), in his paranoia, turned on Cromwell and had him beheaded. He’s a good subject: he was from a common family, actually common- his father was a blacksmith in what would eventually become a London slum. Cromwell ran away to the continent to become a mercenary soldier, from there got in with textile merchants in Italy and Flanders, and came back to England as their agent. Getting into business himself, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey, who was a power behind the throne as Henry VIII was gearing up. Eventually, Big Hank had enough of the Cardinal and stripped him of his honors. Cromwell had to do some fancy footwork to both maintain a decent loyalty to his benefactor, and not go down with him- Henry saw something in him, something vital, and took him in. The rest, as they say, was history, and Mantel takes us through the whole darn shooting match.
This is not the first fictional depiction of Thomas Cromwell. Probably the most famous is the way he’s depicted in the play and movie “A Man For All Seasons,” based on the life of Saint Thomas More. There, Cromwell is a thug, a sort of proto-Chekist who betrays his friend into the hands of a tyrant. Minus some of the sympathy for a “papist,” this is how English history has by and large seen Thomas Cromwell, an up-jumped goon who got where he did through the application of violence and a declasse willingness to do things better men – read, those with noble blood – would not. A pretty Arendtian liberal reading of Henrician tyranny, the totalitarian overlord breaking down class distinctions and raising up the trash (read, those who won’t play their appointed role) of all classes…
Well, Mantel takes us into the life and the mind of this villain. It’s both too much and not enough to say she makes him a hero. Obviously, we have the bias of the camera- we are in his head the whole time, more or less, nearly two thousand pages. She doesn’t sugar-coat what Cromwell does in those pages. She does present some of the historical figures we’ve been trained to have sympathy for – Thomas More, Anne Boleyn – as being human and flawed, in similar degrees to Cromwell, and Henry, and those around them. There aren’t any pure heroes, or pure villains- just real, flawed people with ambitions, desires, loves, hatreds.
That said- Cromwell is the star, and Mantel presents him in a way appealing to contemporary mores. He is, for lack of a better term, more modern that those around him. He rose through his own merits. He works for the good of the crown because he sees that as best for England, whereas all the noblemen around him are working for the good of their families, the same families that tore England apart last century during the War of the Roses. Cromwell has a sense of humor about himself, and doesn’t turn to rank or violence to solve disputes as a first resort, even as he gains high rank, and is personally tougher than most of the people giving him problems. One aspect of Cromwell’s character, real enough but made prominent enough in Mantel’s telling to gain some criticism, was his thoroughgoing Protestantism, his belief that everyone should have access to the Bible (one of his ongoing efforts is to bring about an English translation of the Bible and have it officially adopted) and that England should have a simple, sincere faith that, among other things, doesn’t dump heinous amounts of money to support monks and nuns.
Well, Catholicism and Protestantism! I know we’re just supposed to pick one, even if we don’t believe in God, but I dunno, it kind of seems that when Cromwell was around, it was before Protestantism became the tribal religion of the Orange Ascendancy, and when it was the Catholics doing more or less all of the religious persecution in Europe? True, Mantel does make Protestantism seem like the house religion of nascent capitalism, but when it’s nascent capitalism versus regnant feudalism… and anyway, Mantel does not partake of any “black myths” - the monasteries might be somewhat inefficient and fraudulent, but Catholics, including Mantel’s frenemy Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor, are as human as anyone else in the story. Thomas More is human- that is, not a saint. He may be a brilliant scholar, but he also has no problem hounding, torturing, and killing supposed “heretics.” Cromwell got him for refusing to sign off on Henry’s divorce, but felt justified by the way his martinet frenemy sent friends of his to burn at the stake.
Boleyn is another case. By the time he’s disposing of Henry’s second wife at the end of the second book, Cromwell’s justifications are growing thin. Sure, Boleyn might have had some contact with emissaries of France- but so does everyone, Cromwell included, it’s considered normal back then for foreign powers to deposit some coin on influential people. She was probably fooling around with somebody behind Henry’s (increasingly paranoid, self-aggrandizing, and just physically large) back, if not necessarily her brother. Cromwell uses Henry’s rage at Boleyn to sneak in his own agenda- doing in those who did in his first patron, Wolsey, by accusing them of being Boleyn’s lovers. It’s true that infidelity towards the King is, technically, a capital offense, and what else are you going to do when Henry needs an heir – when England, supposedly, needs Henry to have an heir, a male one, to stop the noble families from restarting the War of the Roses – and the lady’s not giving him one? Still. Cromwell knows what he’s done, in the name of his principle: “you pick your prince, and you know what he is,” and you do what needs to be done.
In the end, the same logic took Cromwell’s own life. We watch, over the course of hundreds of pages, Henry go from an arrogant (though not outside of princely bounds) reform-minded king to an increasingly deranged man lashing out at all around him. More could only smirk from smug Catholic heaven, one assumes, at the way they cut down the particularly tall poppy that was Thomas Cromwell. And in the end, it was all for nothing- Henry did not get his male heir. The closest he came was one sickly-ass son who actually seemed pretty smart before he died while still under a regent. The throne would up going to daughters anyway: Mary, who, despite her fervent Catholicism, Cromwell saved from almost certain death at the hands of her father when she refused to recognize her assorted stepmoms, and Elizabeth, the piggy-looking little ginger baby Boleyn had who wound up setting England on something like the track Cromwell had in mind… maybe. Cromwell would be dead for seventy years by the time the King James Bible was published. A distant relative of his would oversee the beheading of said King’s son.
All that, and that’s just the bare bones of the plot! This is an intensely “lived in” series of books. We see Cromwell’s boyhood in Putney, terrified of his father- blacksmith, minor moneylender, drunk, local bully-boy. This was Cromwell’s first lesson in power, in a backwards way- he saw what power was, but also the ways it could be used differently than how his father did it, more subtle, more efficient, but always ready to put the boot in where necessary. We don’t see much of Cromwell’s time on the continent except in flashback. Then, we see Cromwell travel the length and breadth of England- he’s a very “hands-on manager” type. While he spends a lot of time negotiating with the high-born – cantankerous Norfolk, haughty Suffolk, on and on – he meets people from all the orders of society. Many of them he hires- as his wealth, fame, and power grow, so does his London estate, Austin Friars, and he hires ambitious young people from all over to help him out. Sometimes it’s with cooking, sometimes it’s with accounting, sometimes it’s with spying. All in a day’s work! So by the end there’s dozens of characters running around. This can sometimes be a little confusing, but it helps that they're all arrayed around Cromwell and his schemes.
His retainers become a kind of substitute family for Cromwell- he has a nephew and son by the end, but he loses two wives and two daughters to sickness early in the books. Mantel doesn’t rub our nose in the shit of the early modern period, but she does not stint from its dangers, including unsexy ones likes disease. Because we live in Cromwell’s head, and Mantel reconstructs his thought process complete with ruminations and dreams, none of these characters, those Cromwell loved, those he despised and crushed, or anyone in between every truly leaves the stage. By the end, Cromwell is truly haunted.
A lot of historical fiction, and, in a related way, fantasy fiction these days eschews trying to make the characters sound like they’re from the past. It’d be too much work and/or incomprehensible to modern readers, anyway, is the logic, and they know it’s a fiction, yadda yadda let me use my anachronisms. Mantel isn’t pedantically attached to period dialogue, but it feels both authentic, and perfectly comprehensible, all at once- especially because the characters involved are so strongly and deftly drawn that you’re seldom left in any kind of a muddle as to what’s going on. To me, this is among the true signs of a properly immersive book- you inhabit it fully, you feel the difference of the world, without the sheer mass (or pedantry) of detail involved weighing down the reading experience. Mantel mastered this like few others, here.
I’ve said before that the boundaries of “historical fiction” confuse me some, even more than those of “speculative fiction.” Mantel’s nearly-universally praised trilogy might not be considered “historical fiction” for the oldest, most pertinent genre-classification reason of all: sheer acclaim. Can’t put her in the genre box when people agree that these are some of the best books published recently! It could also be said that this trilogy is historical fiction in the truest sense, in that immersion in the past is one of its main selling points. Who’s to say! I didn’t read this series to sharpen genre distinctions. I read it for enjoyment, and it definitely delivered on that score. I was sad to find Mantel died just before I started reading these. Still, what a legacy to leave. *****
Alex Branson, “Into The Hills, Young Master” (2017) - I knew about Alex Branson from my first stint of podcast listening. This was during the boom in “weird twitter”/lefty podcasting that started circa 2015. He was part of a podcast called E1 that people on other podcasts I listened to would rave about and guest star on. The premise of E1 was that Branson and his colleagues ran a sort of archive of failed podcasts, and they would play the first episodes (hence E1) of these podcasts that generally didn’t make it past these first episodes (they’d bring back some popular numbers for an “E2” sometimes). These episodes would then be the hosts and guests pretending to be various kinds of pedants and oddballs going on at length about various fixations of theirs. Sometimes there’d be recurring themes, like a tiny man who caused chaos or the image of “an orc in bootcut jeans.” When I listened to it, it was clear I was listening to a unique comic talent, and sometimes it made me laugh a lot, but it was ultimately too abstract for me to keep up with in the long run. I probably wasn’t the right type of “online,” the type that day in, day out gazes into the asshole of the world that is twitter, youtube comments, and so on. Arguably, I am the sort of “bird brain” E1 claims to be simulating, blathering at length about nothing much to a tiny audience, persisting in the face of all logic… I find, on Al Gore’s internet, it’s a good idea to at least put the idea out there that you’re the fool in any given situation, as prophylaxis if nothing else.
A reader of my substack recommended Alex Branson’s first novel to me, I believe in the context of talking about the contemporary-online-awful space that takes up the literary attention of a lot of people who fancy themselves avant-garde, like Patricia Lockwood. So, I found a copy online and read it. This is the record of a few months or maybe a year in the life of an unnamed young man, painfully ordinary in most respects but convinced of his superior intelligence and attendant destiny for greatness. The narrator sets down his thoughts in pursuit of “the perfect opinion.” This, in particular, reminded me of Lockwood’s depiction of the internet, especially her proclamation that “perfect politics will manifest in the world as a raccoon with a scab for a face.” Signifiers detached from all significance save what can make the world that little bit uglier and more absurd, etc.
Like in “No One Is Talking About This,” the online reverie of our subject – in his case, playing video games, arguing on fora dedicated to “rationality,” on and on – gets interrupted by offline reality, the proverbial “touching grass.” But whereas reality crashes in on Lockwood’s unnamed narrator through a family crisis, Branson’s narrator decides to enter reality after graduating college, on the idea that a hermit-like existence in the country where he works out a lot will somehow result in greater philosophical insights. He’s a Missourian (I understand Branson himself might be from there, or from the Midwest elsewhere), and the young man leaves his suburban home with his sympathetic but largely absent parents (no siblings, it seems) to live with a ne’er do well uncle and go running in the woods, while still fitting in time for looking at the internet and gaming. He also decides, at various points, that he needs to sleep with women, and is forced to get a job.
The same archaeology-of-online-stupidity approach Branson brings to E1 is present in spades here, and is one of the things that distinguishes it and elevates it relative to “No One Is Talking About This” or “Fake Accounts” - his internet-bound anonymous person feels considerably realer than those presented in other “internet novels.” It probably helps that the narrator here is more of a loser- no speeches in London or off-the-cuff months-long trips to Berlin for him. His sense of meaninglessness comes with a wounded effort to wrap himself in various mantles of achievement culture, masculinity, contrarianism, and so on. He consoles himself with the fantasy that he’s a genius destined for greater things, and that the pettifogging objections he encounters to his ideas and behaviors are just proof of his superiority. In a way, for all their self-professed faults, Lockwood’s narrator, and Oyler’s, still have the superiority of self-consciousness, the last refuge for the contemporary subject: yeah, I’m an asshole in a world of shit, but at least I know that about myself. Not so for Branson’s boy.
For all that it came out of “weird Twitter” at the height of its political engagement around the Sanders presidential campaigns, neither E1 nor this novel gets particularly finely-grained about the ideology or formal thought processes at work in the mind of the internet pedant, the thing they’re supposed to know well. On the negative side, you can say this comes from the shallowness of the politics of that crowd, that beyond a vague social democracy and a disdain for neoliberalism (defined way overly broadly and too often as a cultural tone rather than as a political concept) they just didn’t have that much in the intellectual tank. I think at this late date we have to accept there’s some truth there.
That said, there’s a more charitable reading that could see what they were doing, when they delved into the mind of the internet, often through a sort of ventriloquism, as a sort of phenomenology. How much does the ideology really matter, they would argue, beyond how it inflected the emotional and experiential elements of living the life of the sort of person Branson depicts? Or, again less charitably- the internet pedant, whether from the altright or the tumblr left or somewhere in between, doesn’t actually know their shit, either. On top of that, critique on the internet so often turns into checking artifacts against a list of favored and/or suspect facets and tropes and classifying the artifact from there, you can see why one would want to resist taking part. Especially if your goal is artistic, like a comedy podcast or a novel!
So, I do think Branson is getting at something with his bird-brain-ventriloquism here. I’m not an expert on the culture(s) but it also seems he has a good ear, another thing all too rare in contemporary fiction reading. This asshole sounds right, sounds like the kind of person who, if I met him on the wrong day, might have talked himself onto the other side of a barricade. If nothing else, the repetitiveness, circularity, and glibness of the narrator’s writing and ideas feels real, too. Being who I am, what most struck me was how well Branson captured the ways in which online pedants make use of the dross, discarded stage dressing and props, of once vital (or still vital!) complexes of ideas that they haven’t got the beginnings of a meaningful context for to buttress homebrew ideological mixes that are closer to the characteristics of a playable race in a poorly-written role playing game than they are meaningful ways to make sense of and act in the world. That’s a long sentence! What I mean is, the internet has so flattened out previously-accepted hierarchies not just of the relevance of given ideas, but of their accessibility — at one point, it wasn’t easy to even learn what Radical Traditionalism, or Posadism, or accelerationism, even were, let alone swan around like these foolish ideas are your life guide — that if you’re used to how ideology functioned at any previous period, it can be hard to process how internet pedants and younger people use it now. The narrator writes with the pomp, maddening imprecision, poor word choice, galling attempts at style, that go along with a period where for a lot of people, the relationship between reality, idea, and expression has frayed to the point where they present little guidance to how to think, act, or communicate. This grates, but seeing it in a fictional depiction, this controlled space, is almost encouraging- someone gets it.
So, our guy swings across various ideological poles, going from right to left to just despair, but because he’s seeking something nonexistent — a “perfect opinion” and some sort of fulfillment from outside — it all winds up pretty meaningless, at best a strategy to alienate people with outre and inopportunely expressed opinions. I’ve talked about the suffocating feeling of other internet novels. This has some of that, though I’d say a little more earned because of the narrator’s real loser status. You do see some of the outside- his interactions with his uncle, various women, the people at his job. In particular, you see his interactions with “simple” rural folk, men like his uncle who live cheaply, not quite low lives but adjacent to low lives, who drink and aren’t entirely unused to the sort of minor disasters middle class people usually insulate themselves from. These, too, were a topic of E1 episodes, I remember- some of the episodes were just the podcast hosts taking on the roles of minor small town ne’er do wells, recounting the pointless happenings of their lives.
Beyond any specific political opinions or cultural “takes,” I suppose this perspective on contemporary life left me cold at the end of the day because it seems to take for granted not just the pointlessness of life — I actually agree with that — but the pointlessness of trying to make a point. At the end of the day, human expression is just so many diaries of young men philosophizing their trouble getting laid, or lonely pedants fixating on the minutiae of made-up lineups for mediocre pro basketball teams. Truth be told, I can actually sympathize with this stance, as well — the paths of glory lead naught but to the grave, etc etc — except that it gets boring. There is a big world out there, including a long history of people who have tried to develop sophisticated modes of thought and expression. Was it pointless? Maybe in the face of inevitable death and decline, it was. It all brought us here, didn’t it? But, say, trying out more than two mental operations — “ok, we’re either doing trope-checking ideology critique, or we’re rhapsodizing on existential pointlessness, if you can’t choose, flip a coin” — when confronted with a given set of questions seems like it might produce more interesting results with which to divert oneself on the road to the grave. If nothing else, the mental operation of “how was this different in other times and places, and how might it be different again?” I find that sometimes starts us down useful roads, if pursued rigorously.
If you think it’s all pointless, though, then likely, you won’t bother. Especially because the flip-side of the context collapse that frames this whole thing is that no one really teaches how to apply a wider range of techniques of thought than anyone has to use to get a job, and no one comes across them themselves unless it will help them “own” someone online. And… in this case, not asking why, not trying to point to a wider world and depicting most strategies of learning or growth as prima facie laughable, paid off in a reasonably good novel. It’s no good dismissing the pointlessness school because you don’t like it’s implications. That’s not one of the mental operations that might be helpful. The point is to gain perspective, and cutting parts off usually doesn’t help. I think the perspective here is worth keeping in mind. ****
Michael Hastings, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008) (read aloud by the author) - A car accident – some said a suspicious one, but it’s worth noting Hastings frankly discussed his own appetite for risky, self-destructive behavior, and driving sports cars too fast is one – cut short the career of one of the best journalists to come out of the “Forever War” period of American history. You might recall Michael Hastings for his reporting on Stanley McChrystal, one of a line of tough-talking-but-smart-(supposedly) heroes the US military manufactured as front men for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In typical fashion of the time, people put much more emphasis on McChrystal’s rude words about Obama, his C-in-C (as though soldiers throughout history haven’t griped about whoever was in charge) than on the real meat of the story: the sheer disregard for civilian leadership shown by a military establishment increasingly detached from the society it purports to protect. Especially as our military campaigns increasingly entail secret assassinations by unaccountable actors – whether drone operators or the gun-thugs we honor as “special forces” – this gap grows more and more worrying. Stick it on the bill!
This is Hastings’ memoirs of his time in Iraq, and of his falling in love with another media person who, as the title indicates, was killed in Baghdad. Hastings tells of how he always wanted to be a war correspondent, and Iraq gave him his chance. He met Andi while doing less-interesting journalism in New York, and they have what I hope isn’t rude to say is a fairly standard romance between two smart, career-oriented Gen Xers. That’s not to say their feelings were insincere. Quite the opposite, their feelings appeared to be more sincere than they were often comfortable really laying out to each other. Things were made more complicated by Hastings being in Iraq for much of their time in a relationship.
The general impression Hastings conveys from Iraq under US and allied occupation is familiar to us now, in part because of the journalism Hastings and others undertook. Confusion, fear, waste. Barely-meant bromides about freedom applied on the ground as though anyone meant them. The troops, depicted as “good kids” put in an impossible situation… some day, we will need to examine this trope, if not to disprove it than to consider what work it does. Most of all, a sense of violent pointlessness. Hastings depicts it better than most. He also does the gonzo thing of taking us inside the journalism process, which was especially messed up in Iraq, where journalists relied on embeds with the military and on Iraqi guides and fixers, generally being exploited by the former and exploiting the latter. Plenty of journalists did their work by phone from the Green Zone, but Hastings scorned that type.
Andi came to Iraq to work with a democracy-promotion NGO. She did it for her own reasons, a desire to help and gain foreign policy experience, but she also did it to be closer to her fiance, Hastings. So, needless to say, he was pretty fucked up about it when she was killed in an ambush when visiting the Baghdad headquarters of one of the Sunni Islamist political parties the Americans were trying to bribe into the Iraqi parliamentary system. He followed his journalistic impulses, after her killing, and tried to nail the story, but what he found was depressingly typical for Iraq. There was no way her NGO should have let her go on that trip- the military went into that neighborhood in force, not in a few armored cars with lightly armed mercenary guards. Everyone, from that NGO to the security people, half-assed their job, it seems, and was more concerned with covering their ass than for taking any accountability for getting a woman killed. In this way, the most fundamental aspect of the Iraq War – acts of violence undertaken with no meaningful purpose and with an utter lack of accountability, leading to derangement of any structure that touches it which might require some accountability to function – reached into Hastings life and took someone he loved. And in the end, there wasn’t much the journalist-hero could do about it, either, other than get NGO hacks to utter meaningless cover-your-ass terminology and accompany his fiance’s body home on a bureaucratically-prolonged flight back to the States. No Woodward-Bernstein happy ending.
That’s it! He doesn’t pretty it up. He doesn’t make himself, or Andi, or anyone, seem better or nobler than they were. He clearly loves Andi but doesn’t stint from making her annoying sometimes- or showing where he messed up, in his relationship and in life in general. But there’s fuck-ups and there’s fuck-ups, and the Iraq War… well, you already know. In all, a solid installment in the literature of the wars of our time. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: The Value of Abstract Art & If Art Isn’t “For You,” Then Who Is It For?
I feel that all too often I start an Ed’s Corner by looking at an opinion held by the mainstream and critiquing it from a safely distanced position as somebody on the left, safely away from this general position held by society. I think I’m going to switch things up a bit and engage with a criticism that I hear from time to time in leftist circles, and explain why I think it’s incorrect. Sometimes, when a leftist needs to define “decadent bourgeois culture,” they’ll point to the world of art, often to modern art.
“Abstract art, these basic shapes of color on canvas that don’t really represent anything in particular, is all aesthetic, is merely a gesture towards art. The rich phonies who trade these paintings back and forth don’t see any truth or beauty in their forms, it’s just an arbitrary token used to move around large sums of money by taking something essentially valueless and assigning an arbitrary value to it to facilitate the movement of capital around,” seems to be the argument. They’ll go so far as to point out that many of the big names of abstract and pop art were underwritten in some capacity by U.S.intelligence agencies looking for something to combat cultural products coming out of the communist east during the Cold War. While there is good and valuable art, such leftists say, these abstract, non-representational pieces are fake art, part of a phony “art business” that has no aesthetic value.
I grant that the general argument here about non-representational art doesn’t belong to the realm of the left exclusively. We hear something like it on the right, too. The old canard of “my kid could paint that!” comes to mind. In fact it’s often conservative groups, or lone wolf types that vandalize or deface works of non-representational art, the Krazy Glue antics of Extinction Rebellion notwithstanding. I do, however, want to start with the critiques on the left as a way to examine the terrain of the art scene. I’ll then make a sharp pivot into addressing the main concern of the idea that just about anybody could make abstract art, and that it doesn’t really have much meaning.
To give credit where it is due, there is plenty of overvalued modern art. The ultra rich do indeed use art objects as tax dodges, hard assets, or convenient means of exchange in possibly less-than-legal transactions. I doubt the top art spenders who really move the market, like the Sackler family, really have any appreciation for whatever art they can squirrel away into their private collection, besides the security that a commodity of stable valuation brings them. Much of the current art scene is big spenders throwing around funny money with little regard for any aesthetic quality. This is beyond doubt. However, you’d be hard pressed to find any aspect of society that the 1% and their financial wranglers don’t treat in the exact same manner: stocks for retail companies, the mortgage on the house your parents live in, the intellectual property rights for some life saving drug. If we’re to say that these abstract forms of art never had any value to begin with because some hyper-rich idiots buy and sell them at highly inflated prices as a way of protecting their money, does that mean the proprietary drug that treats auto-immune disorders that they sell at hiked up prices also has no inherent utility? Of course not! Just because the forces of capitalism have caused many, if not most, commodities to have an incorrect valuation, doesn’t mean that they have no value.
I’m also skeptical of a claim I sometimes hear that modern non-representational art was a scheme cooked up by the US Intelligence community as part of some grand culture war against the cultural output of communism during the Cold War. I don’t doubt that the likes of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock got some cash from the State Department somewhere, but the Pentagon slings so much cash around that some of it is liable to end up anywhere. For every hundred million dollars they spend “liberating” the lithium mines of some South American country, they lose two or three hundred million on just pure waste for programs that don’t really go anywhere and nobody remembers what exactly they were trying to accomplish anyways. I’m sure the shadowy cabal of the US deep state had bad intentions in acting as patron of modern art, but it’s unclear that they achieved bad ends by doing so. Besides, non-representational art in the same tradition of modern abstract art already existed as a form before anybody had ever heard of Domino Theory. Just because some Department of Defense budget had excess funds it needed to ditch in the late sixties doesn’t mean the modern art of Warhol or Pollock is effective propaganda for US global hegemony.
Well, if these red squares on white canvases aren’t nefarious plots by the capital class, what are they? They’re just shapes on canvas, weird installation pieces, uninterpretable conglomerations of shape and color. How can you even engage with these pieces? Some of them are just rectangles with a color in it. How can you call any given yellow rectangle more aesthetically pleasing than any other? Are you supposed to feel something about these shapes and colors? What are you supposed to get out of these abstractions? What if you feel nothing? What if it doesn’t provoke thought? If I don’t get it, then who is this for?
Obviously all art is subjective, but what I personally get out of abstract art is slightly different than what I get out of representational art. Any painting of representational art, a still life, landscape or portrait, I can engage with mentally. I can interpret the meaning of the items laid out in a still life, I can imagine myself walking around in a landscape, or having a conversation with the subject of a portrait. The works engage your understanding of the world around you, and your sense of imagination, you could come up with a story in your head about whatever is depicted in the painting, you can relate it to your life. Just random colors and paint spatters though, how does that relate to my life?
Well, they don’t. In fact, in my understanding of abstract art, it is intentionally evading these relations. If you’re looking for a piece of art that will spark your imagination, or attempt to relate to something in your life, then these sorts of pieces aren’t really for you. By rejecting representation of other objects that exist outside the realm of art, that are something that could exist in the world beyond the canvas they’re presented on, or installation they inhabit, non-representational art draws attention to the artifice of art itself. By artifice, I don’t mean the artificiality of it, but rather the labor and techniques that went into making the piece. Yes,in its most basic terms a piece of abstract art might just be a rectangle of one color painted onto a canvas. But as soon as you stop looking at the rectangle as a representation of a rectangle, and start seeing it as something that was created by the act of painting, that it’s composed of brushstrokes, and mixed paints, shades and hues all evoked by application of artistic discipline, you get a glimpse of the very basic elements of art, the actual mechanics of working within the artistic medium. The rectangle isn’t what’s supposed to spark your imagination, the fundamental mechanics of the artistic form are. The curtain has been pulled back and you can see, in the most basic forms, what any painting or sculpture or other art piece is composed of. This sparks your imagination not by inviting you to picture how you could interact with the items, locations or people represented within the picture frame, but how you could interact with art as a medium, if only you could learn how to mix your own paints and develop the proper technique with the brush, and prepare the canvas properly, etc.
Not everyone is an artist, and honestly not every artistic technique on display in abstract art is going to engage every potential artist. You’re not stupid or uncultured just because you can’t really engage with a given piece of abstract art. It’s not for you because it’s not really in conversation with you, it’s addressing an artist, specifically one who might make use of the techniques on display in their own work. These pieces are saying, “hey, here’s a very basic concept in the actual craft of art shown in great detail. Do you think you could use this in your own art?” For some people the answer will be no, but maybe someone will say yes, that’s a technique they want to use themselves, and they can make a study of the work and incorporate the technical skills on display in the piece into their own art. That’s where the value lies. Abstract art is a rejection of meaning in order to foreground the mechanics of making art. Don’t look at the rectangles to tell you what they mean, look deeper, beyond that into the things that compose the rectangles. That’s where the real art is, in the labor of making it.
Dang! What a digest! Even Mithra is sneaking a peek.