The Aesthetics of Degradation by Adrian Nathan West

Author:Adrian Nathan West [West, Adrian Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Aesthetics of Degradation
ISBN: 9781910924198
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-04-25T23:00:00+00:00

7

In a nearly featureless banquet hall, in the second row of seats, between a woman of Teutonic aspect in a black pencil skirt and blazer and an artistic-looking teenager in an American army jacket covered in magic-marker scrawls in Catalan, the narrator listened to the trailing off of a speech given by a thin, quavering curator about The Volume of Being, an installation by the artist Enric Prades. Today, the man said, when the artist’s function in contemporary society has been reduced to a sorry mingling of the propensities of the bookmaker, the provocateur, and the social-climber, and the spiritual vocations invoked by the Romantics have been emptied of their substance and are only brought up meretriciously, as declarations of good conscience, in magazines and documentaries… I did not listen to the end of the phrase, the narrator writes, I can never pay attention to prepared remarks, I prefer the awry clarity of spontaneously uttered words, their involuntary self-evidence, to the occlusiveness of eloquence, just as I prefer minor literature to major. The artist stood afterwards and shuffled crabwise over to the lectern, took a sip, perhaps by mistake, or from nervousness, out of the plastic cup of water that had been left there by the speaker who preceded him, and began to read from a sheaf of notecards. There is something repulsive, he said, in the class of people who refer to themselves as artists, and in the idea of the artist as a special category of person. I do not exclude myself. There is not a day that passes that I do not ask myself if I would not be better served by some humbler employment, by sweeping up leaves or repairing engines. At times I imagine that, were the communist ideal once again to take hold, I would be thrown into a reeducation camp or simply shot. I don’t know, maybe that is what should happen. If we examine the contexts in which the word artist is used, we are forced to admit that art is more than anything a putrescent corpse on which a class of coddled and cynical opinion-fabricators feasts before secreting a series of specious judgments to be repeated by a succession of people for whom, for personal or professional reasons, the aura, but not the substance, of culture appears obligatory; beyond that, it is just one more investment vehicle for the rich and vulgar, like football clubs, real estate, or wine. I do not mind saying that these self-styled artists or art-world figures as the term goes are one of the most repellent features of our age, and I would be happy to see them destitute and forced to exercise some menial profession (at which they would most likely fail) and to justify their extravagancies to the so-called simple people fortunate enough not to have been mystified by the rhetoric of the sycophants and marketeers who attach themselves to art like lampreys and have turned art into a foul-smelling cadaver. Again, I include myself in this description.

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