development of technical vocabularies and scientific methods of linguistic observation – these things all make much overtly representational art look feeble and foolish. That we are not more aware of this is probably due to the fact that historically this representational art is of great value to us, and we still have not shaken off the habit of using it, even though far better means are now at hand.
27 If for example we really want to honour an eminent man it would surely be better to have good photographs or films of him taken, or to publish linguistic accounts of his eminence; anything rather than having his portrait painted by some ‘academic’ hack. No one supposes such portraits have any intrinsic biographical or artistic merit; they merely satisfy a traditional social convention about the rewards of eminence.
28 The second reason for the triumph of inner-feeling art is the rise of the importance of self in the existence of each as a result of those nemo-creating conditions I have already mentioned. It is not coincidence that the Romantic Movement, whose influence is still so powerful, was a result of the machine-orientated Industrial Revolution; and many of our contemporary artistic problems spring from a similar hostile polarity.
29 The result of this has inevitably been the emergence of style as the principal gauge of artistic worth. Content has never seemed less important; and we may see the history of the arts since the Renaissance (the last period in which content was at least conceded equal status) as the slow but now almost total triumph of the means of expression over the thing expressed.
30 A symptom of this triumph is the attitude of artists to the signing of artefacts. It is with the Greeks that signing becomes frequent, and as one would expect, it is in the most self-conscious art, literature, that it was commonest. But as late as the Renaissance many artists felt no great need to sign; and even today there is a tradition of anonymity in those craft arts, like pottery and furniture-making, that are least susceptible of exploitation by the artist’s self.
31 The artist’s main need today seems to him to be the expression of his signed feelings about himself and his world; and as our need for representational art has dwindled, so have arisen all those modes and styles, like abstractionism and atonalism and dadaism, that put a very low value on exact representation of the outer world (craft qualities) and on past conventions about the artist’s duty to that world; but that conversely allow the widest possible field for the expression of an unmistakably unique self. The enormous ‘liberation’ in style and technique and instrumentation (use of materials) that has taken place in our century is strictly caused by the need artists have felt for creative
32 But if the main concern of art becomes to express individuality, the audience must seem to the artist less important; and the slighted audience will in turn reject this doubly selfish art, especially when all other artistic purposes are so excluded that the artefacts must appear hermetic to anyone without special information about the artist’s intentions.
33 Two characteristic camps will emerge, and have emerged: one of artists who pursue their own feelings and their own self-satisfaction and who expect their audiences to come to them out of a sense of duty toward ‘pure’ or ‘sincere’ art; and the other of artists who exploit the desire of the audience to be wooed, amused and entertained. There is nothing new in this situation. But the camps have never been so clearly defined and so antagonistic.
34 All inner-feeling art thus becomes a disguised form of the self-portrait. Everywhere the artist sees himself as in a mirror. The craft of the art suffers; craftsmanship even becomes ‘insincere’ and ‘commercial’. Even worse, in order to conceal the triviality, banality or illogic of his inner self, the artist may introduce deliberately hermetic and ambiguous elements into his art. This is more easily done in painting and music than in literature, because the word is a more precise symbol and false ambiguity and hermeticism are in general more easily detectable in literature than in the other arts.
ART AND SOCIETY
35 But the tyranny of self-expresion is not the only factor the modern artist has to contend with. One of the most striking characteristics of our age has been the ubiquitous use of the poles of violence, cruelty, evil, insecurity, perversion, confusion, ambiguity, iconoclasm and anarchy in popular and intellectual entertainment and art. The happy end becomes ‘sentimental’; the open or tragic ends become ‘real’. It is often said that art movements do no more than reflect those of history. Our century is evidently violent, cruel, and all the rest: so what else should its arts be if not black?
36 But this suggests that the artist is incapable of any higher aspiration than that of presenting a mirror to the world around him. This is not to deny that a great deal of the ‘black’ art of our time is, alas, historically justifiable; but it is very often a result of the pressures unfairly put upon art by society. The artist creates blackly because society expects him to; not because he essentially wants to.
37 Black art may bring us a certain kind of pleasure, not only because we are secretly violent, cruel and nihilistically chaotic ourselves, and not only because the emotions such art arouses afford a vivid contrast to our day-by-day lives in a safe society, but because those grey-fearing lives gain a reality, colour and validity they lack if they have no such contrast easily accessible to them. This violent death is my safe life; this distorted shape is my symmetry; this meaningless poem is my clear meaning.
38 One of the deepest pleasures of tragedy is simply that we survive it; the tragedy might have, but has not, happened to us. We not only experience the tragedy empathetically; we have the subsequent survival.
39 There is thus a very deep-rooted sense in which the public never takes ‘black’ art at its face value. It is indeed a frequent defence of pornography that whatever its apparent intentions, its final effects are often highly moral. The spectacle of Vice’ and perversion serves to remind people of their own virtues and their normality. Sadism is far more likely to provoke increased respect for others than further sadism; and so on. But whichever view one takes – that such art corrupts society or that it secretly benefits it – the effect on the artist must be bad.
40 Art has to provide today what ignorance and social and physical conditions provided in the past: insecurity, violence and hazard. This is a perversion of its true function.
41 It is this unnatural role that accounts for a partiallarly common manifestation of guilty conscience among many so-called avant-garde artists; the attempt to suppress the creator from the creation, to reduce the artefact to the status of a game with as few rules as possible. Paintings where the colours and the shapes and the textures are a matter of hazard; music where the amount of improvisation demanded of the players reduces the composer to a cipher; novels and poems where the arrangement of words or pages is purely fortuitous. The scientific basis for this aleatory art is perhaps the famous, and famously misunderstood, principle of mdeterminacy; and it also springs from a totally mistaken notion that the absence of an intervening, in our everyday sense of intervening, God means that existence is meaningless. Such art is, though apparently self-effacing, absurdly arrogant.*
42 An artist can choose not to be an artist, but he cannot be an artist who has chosen not to be an artist.
ARTISTS AND NON-ARTISTS
43 The artistic experience, from the late eighteenth century onwards, usurps the religious experience. Just as the medieval church was full of priests who should have been artists, so our age is filled with artists who would once have been priests.
44 Many modern artists would no doubt dispute that they are priests manques. That is because they have substituted the pursuit of artistic ‘truth’ for the pursuit of good. There was so much injustice on every doorstep, once; it was easy to know what good meant in terms of action. But now even in – didactic art the pursuit is much more of the right aesthetic or artistic expression of the moral than of the moral itself.
45 It is true that the best right expression of the moral best serves the moral; the style is the thought. But an excessive pre-occupation with the style of the thought tends to produce a devaluation of the thought: just as many priests became so pre-occupied with ritual and the presentation of doctrine that they forgot the true nature of
