I must be experiencing a major shift to the left because I find myself agreeing with the late Susan Sontag. In an interview republished in May's issue of PAJ: Performing Arts Journal, Sontag is quoted in the following exchange.
You have written in one essay that "the history of art is a series of succesful transgressions." If, as you say, the ante of shock and surprise is always being upped, what is left to transgress?
The idea of trangression, perhaps. . . . Trangression presupposes successful notions of order. But transgressions have been so successful that the idea of transgression has become normative for the arts--which is a self-contradiction. Modern art wished to be--maybe even was, for a brief time--in an intractable, adversary relation to the established high culture. Now it is identical with high culture, supported by a vast bureaucracy of museums, universities, and state and private foundations. And the reason for this success story is that there is a close fit between many of the values promoted by modernism and the larger values of our capitalist consumer society. This makes it difficult, to say the least, to continue thinking of modernist art as adversary art. And that's part of what lies behind the disenchantment with modernism I spoke of earlier.
You seem discouraged by this situation.
Yes and no. Rebellion does not seem to me a value in itself, as--say--truth is. There's no inherent value in transgression, as there is no inherent value to being interesting. My loyalty is not to the transgression but to the truth behind it. That the forms of life in this society, having become increasingly permissive, corrupt, vulgar, and disgusting, thereby deprive artists of the taboos against which they can, comfortably, heroically, rebel--that seems far less dismaying than the fact that this society itself is based on lies, on untruths, on hallucination.
What should artists do now?
In a society that works and enriches itself by means of organized hallucination, be less devoted to creating new forms of hallucination and more devoted to piercing through the hallucinations that nowadays pass for reality. (9)
Susan Sontag; artistic transgression; modernity; authenticity.
I agree with the late Susan Sontag. Contemporary art has created this strange situation for itself where transgression has now become normative and institutionalised.
ReplyDeleteYou might also agree with this from Sontag. Just before she died, she claimed the readers of _Readers Digest_ had more insight into the true nature of communism than the readers of the _New York Times_.
Dare I make a third agreement?! That Susan Sontag would make this obvious statement when so many others of the left can't see past the tips of their noses does make one think.
ReplyDeleteMore important, however, is the fact that artist's role historically has not been one of rebellion. Calling attention to the important aspects of life, culture, and belief have been the domain of the artist. The artist as activist is a recent contstruct of the western mind. The current delusion of self-importance that assails many in our artistic community today is merely a crutch for feelings of artistic inadequacy, or a latent misunderstnding of the way that the world works. Those who understand their legitimate claim within a historical context do not need to rage against the establishment. While these artists may not agree with established thought, they realize their opinion and philosphy need not be stridently put forward to be considered.