1

            Any form of expression - be it rhetoric, poetry, music, comedy, drama, et cetera - benefits from skill and mastery. When done clumsily, it is ineffective: it fails to engage and persuade the beholder. When done with ingenious craftsmanship and acute emotion, on the other hand, it is not gratifying and poignant - qualities valuable enough in themselves - but charismatic in the fullest sense of the word. It exercises control over people: its ingenuity elicits reverence if not fear; it grows to represent that mysterious, dreamlike beauty which people have always longed for; it carries the conviction, or hope, that is prophesying the next major stage in the evolution of mankind; and finally, its sensibility has become the new myth binding the entire human race.

2

            The short-lived sparkle of most popular culture is a radically different phenomenon. It is true that more CDs have been sold of Britney Spears than will ever be sold of Arnold Schoenburg or Igor Stavinsky (I wish I could learn who was the "Britney Spears" of their time, but unfotunately no one remembers); it is true that sentimental romance novels are far more widely read than T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Earnest Hemingway. Yet, there is no question which art has exerted the more profound influence on the modern aesthetic. It was nobody other than this handful of brilliant craftsmen who initiated the love for biting sarcasm, dry wit, nightmarish chaos, and maniacal sensuality which has become such a deep-rooted element of the modern sensibility. Though these craftsmen have been thoroughly inaccessible to all but a tiny portion of the intellectual elite, their sensibility is so powerful that is has permeated popular culture and filtered through to the general public; so that now, construction workers are equally likely to strive for slick cynical wit as are English professors. Compared to these existential geniuses, the long-term impact of yellow-back novels, stupid movies, and teenage pop stars is negligible. Such is the effectiveness of superbly-crafted works of art.

3

            The encouragement of bad art is healthy in some circumstances, such as when a child is beginning to develop a talent, or when friends are looking for an agreeable activity as the basis for a positive interaction. But when a culture is so laid-back as to be indifferent towards taste - and many Americans complain that their culture is not merely indifferent but downright scornful - the effect can only be depressing. Just as children become overweight who are taught to eat McDonald's food every day, just as a germ-infested factory leaves its workers diseased and meager, so an exposure to nothing but cultural trash stagnates people's minds and dampens their passions. So much has been written concerning the fulfillment, enrichment, and inspiration of beauty, one might think that adults would have realized the moral necessity of exposing children to it from an early age.

4

            Some say that art is meant to imitate human experience. For them, a painting of the sea is meant to reproduce the actual experience of the sea, a love poem is meant to reproduce the acutal experience of love, and so on. If this is the primary purpose to art, then art can't be very valuable, for an imitation always pales in comparison to the actual thing. For example, an erotic poem, no matter how evocative, never measures up to the actual romantic experience. I hold that art should not be used to simulate real life, but rather, to create a completely separate experience. Art offers types of excitement, terror, fascination, and warmth that cannot be found elsewhere. As Neitzsche writes, some artists "appease and heal only temporarily, only for the moment; they even prevent men from labouring towards a genuine improvement in their conditions, inasmuch as they remove and apply palliatives to precisely that passion of discontent that induces to action." These are the artists who, by offering false imitations of other better experiences, discourage people from seeking actual contentment. The artist who invents a unique type of experience, on the other hand, builds true fulfillment while spurring the beholder on to further struggle.

continue