Wandering Between Two Artistic Worlds
The coda to a notable cultural episode hit the internet last fall when Oliver Anthony, singer of the viral anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” announced that he was leaving the music industry. “I don’t need a Nashville management company,” he declared, “I don’t even need to exist within the space of music.” Having proclaimed his defiance of managers who “just wanna have total control,” Anthony felt himself coming under the thumb of the “monopolies of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.” From the same forested nook where he recorded his hit, he denounced the “broken system” that tried to co-opt the innocent, populist candor of his musical vision.
Anthony had belatedly arrived at a truth that was evident to more thoughtful observers from the beginning: that his song drew on one of the most hackneyed tropes imaginable and represented anything but a genuine cultural challenge. There is no bigger cliché in the American cultural industry than Joe Sixpack bellyaching about busting his hump for the man: here is a figure who has been packaged, commodified, branded and rebranded for decades, without eliciting a tremble among the fat cats who dominate the “system.” “Rich Men North of Richmond” was an unremarkable update of a familiar product. The wooded background and full-grown neckbeard in the original video only served to underscore, in their studied primitiveness, the irony of the aesthetic conformity at the heart of this protest song.
All of this is worth discussing since it embodied a central, and maybe the central dynamic in popular American culture: the quest for authenticity. Ironically it is precisely this quest that generates so much banality and schlock. The form of the quest at the outset may vary, but the destination is always the same. Whether it is the sound of the urban street pitter-pattering in the background of potato chip commercials, or the stories of America’s down-trodden Rust Belt denizens premiering on Netflix, the power of American corporate culture to commodify any and all voices into neutered expressions of its standardized vision is ominous, if, in its own way, also immensely impressive.
The dominant pop culture pours out a torrent of cultural artifacts, but very few genuine artworks. We consume entertainment, rather than encountering new perspectives on the experience of our times. But in an oblivious age, the power to reveal new perspectives on experience is the power we need most. The prioritization of the “authentic” voice – and the conviction that the search for this voice is the core problem of art – dates back to Romanticism. The ballad revival of the 18th century, exemplified in the craze for the Ossian poems, hearkened back to a simpler time and a simpler people – a folk who instinctively expressed the healthy spirit of the land against the increasingly urban complexity of modernity.
The most influential articulation of this notion is found in Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, where Wordsworth declared his intention to narrate “incidents and situations from common life,” in “a selection of language really used by men,” for his own artistic purposes. What he had in mind was “humble and rustic life,” because, in such an agrarian condition, “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.”
In the pure habits and pure tongue of the farmer, Wordsworth argues, the poet finds the true substance of his craft. The key point was to turn the aesthetic intuitions of his contemporaries away from the sources of “depravity” prevalent in his age, chiefly the materialist paradigm of reason with its habit of “murder(ing) to dissect.” Wordsworth believed that poets had a duty to articulate a healthier conception of the mind’s relation to nature, and he appealed to the language of the rustic as an attempt to mobilize an idiom uncontaminated by the materialist language which he opposed.
Whatever else we might think of this strategy (Coleridge’s objections in the Biographia Literaria remain compelling), one can see it was a plausible thought at the time. But times have changed. There is no longer any uncorrupted population whose customs and language are untainted by the global corporate culture. Modern technology has imposed its paradigm across the globe. The same imagery flashes across screens from Patagonia to Paris. Men and women from Shanghai to Appalachia have all been affected by superhero movies and sneaker commercials and swallowed their perspectives and languages. The thoughts and words of the common man today arrive saturated with the preconceptions of the global corporate regime. Looking to the volk for vitality has been foreclosed forever.
So where can we look? One possibility is the timeless forms that have endured for centuries, generally gathered under the category of “high culture” or “high art.” But if the viability of pop culture for contemporary artists is problematic, the viability of high culture is a complete non-starter. Pop at least retains a real presence in our culture. But high art has all but abolished itself. As American art critic Arthur Danto argued in After the End of Art, modern art is primarily a story of increasing “self-consciousness,” as artists came to grasp the “philosophical question of the nature of art,” and the question of what a work of art even is. Beginning with the perspectival experiments of the Renaissance, when painters sought techniques that would facilitate the “progressive conquest of visual appearances” artists came to “press against boundary after boundary,” and found that “the boundaries all gave way.” Finally, they realized there were no essential features that made an object a work of art, so now “anything could be a work of art” and artists “were free to make art in whatever way they wished.”
This declaration of complete liberation at the end of art history makes it impossible for us to relate to the artifacts of the past in the same way as their original audiences. As a result, they cannot serve as models to contemporary artists, but only as points of reference alluded to “in the spirit of the joke.” “All forms are ours,” but we can no longer take any of them seriously. The trajectory of art history has revealed the emptiness of art, with every advance delivering an enhanced awareness of this fact. Recent periods are as implicated in this history of disenchantment as distant periods. We are as exiled from Dada as from the Baroque. No artist of our era can work authentically in historical artistic forms. All that remains is their ironic citation. The artist of our times is free to create anything so long as he doesn’t fully believe in what he’s creating.
Danto’s account places contemporary artists at the terminus of a history of high culture marked by increasing disharmony, dehumanization, disenchantment, and cynicism. Poetry becomes incoherent, music atonal, painting and sculpture jarring. Art becomes a medium of disillusion.
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Art is finished, popular culture has degenerated into an anti-culture of industrial distraction, and the contemporary artist finds himself – to paraphrase Matthew Arnold – wandering between two ghostly worlds. All this would be merely academic were it not for the fact that our civilization has arrived at a point in which a new relation to reality is needed. The role of the arts is to disclose that relation. Music, drama, myth, and architecture orient people towards being. One reason why the ideological discourse of our era is so strident is because it is haunted by a sense of our culture’s inability to do so. Lost contact with our heritage, uncontrolled mass migration, the dissolution of the family, and the ecological destruction of technology all result from, and exacerbate, a sense of disorientation.
For Danto, the central theme of art history is a philosophical problem concerning the question: “What is a work of art?” But for artists themselves, art is never a definitional problem but a problem of communication. An artist has an experience that discloses a meaningful perspective on being and looks for a form to convey that experience. The crucial criteria concern precision and power, not an attempt to determine the nature of art.
Danto’s idea of art history can be traced back to T.S. Eliot’s identification of insularity as the primary characteristic of an artistic tradition. Eliot described the history of art as an “ideal order […] which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” But to an artist, a tradition is meaningful only as a tool. An artist falls in love or surveys a stunning mountain view, or is suddenly struck by the contingency of human life. All the value of artistic tradition lies in its capacity to help the artist to convey his experience. All iterations of classicism ultimately rest on the conviction that the artist may channel his creative agency by drawing on the formal accomplishments of the past.
The first concern refers to something like Husserl’s slogan “Back to the things themselves.” The injunction serves artists as well as thinkers. Back to the reality of human life, to wonder, to the experience of love, to admire courage. This sense of experience starts from a withdrawal from a world of distraction in the name of something more deliberate and austere. The second concern involves a deeper command of tradition than prior generations of artists were forced to acquire to mitigate the contemporary shortfall in culture. One possible model is the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose poetry combined classicism and naturalism to oppose the disenchantment ensuing after what he called “the flight of the gods.”
Hölderlin’s poems are marked by the haunting sense that “we have come too late,” and that the dogmatic theologies of the past can no longer satisfy the skeptical and historically-conditioned mentality of modern man. Yet Hölderlin also recognized that the human mind still needed an overarching narrative to make sense of human existence, and the human heart still hungered for transcendence.
Hölderlin felt both historical loss and psychological continuity. To articulate this consciousness, he turned to the Greeks, and above all to Pindar, whose odes he translated, and whose style and language he came to appreciate in a uniquely intimate fashion. What Hölderlin took was the rhythm of praise, certain linguistic structures, and a sense of longing for transcendent meaning. By translating Pindar into German, Holderlin made a sincere appropriation of an ancient form, but in a manner that offered his own time something new.
In Holderlin’s poem “Bread and Wine,” an ecstatic idiom expresses the desire for “a wine-cup more full, a life more intense and more daring, / Holy remembrance too, keeping us wakeful at night,” and also captures the incapacity of the modern world to provide adequate objects for to realize this desire: “where are the temples, the vessels, / Where, to delight the gods, brim-full with nectar, the songs?” Incantatory rhythms carry the poet into the heart of a spiritual journey initiated by the “unperceived” appearance of the gods, at which “only the children surge towards them, too bright, dazzling, this joy enters in.” Finally, they reveal themselves “in Truth, in person,” their immediate presence “(satisfying) every desire.”
By its nature, this abiding with man can only be a momentary phenomenon: “Not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, / Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods.” It is now only “holy remembrance” in the midst of “night and distress” which preserves the lore of the gods’ dwelling among us. Who is the curator of remembrance? The poet, who is “like those holy ones, priests of the wine-god / Who in holy night roamed from one place to the next.”
Hölderlin’s poem is not merely a statement of a present crisis, but an act of cultural preservation that responds to that crisis through the form he deploys: a form adapted from a poet who wrote two millennia ago. By using that form to enact in the present, the rhythms of ritual devotion Holderlin shows a path forward for the contemporary artist.
Hölderlin exemplifies the courage needed to look squarely at the spiritual destitution of our age, a deep communion with the living meaning of traditional forms, and the confidence of the artist in his own vocation, his belief that he possesses membership in a brotherhood of “holy remembrance.” It is the confidence that grows from the knowledge that, whatever the trials the artist must face, or indifference he meets, his age will find renewal in his work, or it will not find it all.
Mark A. Signorelli is a writer and classical educator. He writes at cornerstonejournal.substack.com and can be followed at @Signorelli89.
Cover art by Nicola Samorì.
