The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty by Dave Hickey

Author:Dave Hickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

The analogy I wish to draw here is blatant. The rhetoric of beauty tells the story of those beholders who, like Masoch’s victim, contract their own submission—having established, by free consent, a reciprocal, contractual alliance with the image. The signature of this contract, of course, is beauty. On the one hand, its rhetoric enfranchises the beholder; on the other hand, it seductively proposes a content that is, hopefully, outrageous and possible. In any case, this vertiginous bond of trust between the image and the beholder is private, voluntary, and a little scary. And, since the experience is not presumed to be an end in itself, it might, ultimately, have some consequence beyond the encounter.

The experience of art within the therapeutic institution, by contrast, is presumed to be an end in itself. Under its auspices, we play a minor role in the master’s narrative—the artist’s tale—and celebrate his autonomous acts even as we are offhandedly victimized by the work’s philosophical power and ruthless authority. Like princes within the domain of the institution, or jailhouse mafiosi, such works have no need of effeminate appeal. And we, poor beholders, like the silly demimondaines in Sade’s Philosophy of the Bedroom, are presumed to have wandered in, looking for a kiss. So Pow! Whatever we get, we deserve—and what we get most prominently is ignored, disenfranchised, and instructed. Then we are told that it is “good” for us.

Thus has the traditional, contractual alliance between the image and its beholder (of which beauty is the signature, and in which there is no presumption of received virtue) been supplanted by a hierarchical one between art, presumed virtuous, and a beholder presumed to be in need of it. This is the signature of the therapeutic institution. And although such an institution, as Barr conceived it, is scarcely imaginable under present conditions, it persists and even flourishes—usually in its original form but occasionally under the administration of right-thinking creatures who presume to have cleansed its instrumentality with the heat of their own righteous anger and to use its authority (as the Incredible Hulk used to say) as a “force of good.”

This is comic-book thinking for bureaucrats. In fact, nothing redeems but beauty, its generous permission, its gorgeous celebration of all that has previously been uncelebrated. If we entertain, even for a moment, the slightest presumption that an institution, suddenly and demonstrably bereft of its social and philosophical underpinnings, is liable to imminent collapse, we have committed what George Bernard Shaw considered the most suicidal error that a citizen can. As Shaw pointed out, institutions die from loss of funding, not lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning and of joy.

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