Aesthetically speaking, world culture appears to be steadily deteriorating. I have given numerous examples of this already. World literature has been in gross neglect for some time already, even more so recently, as reading books has now been supplanted by surfing the Internet. Good music is no longer in production, and the best performers of classical music are increasingly forced to pander to vulgar mass tastes. (Anyone who used to be, like myself, an admirer of the Metropolitan Opera, must share my feeling of sheer disgust with the more recent productions there.) Visual arts have all been dumbed down and have become a playground for greedy and talentless moneymakers. Or even worse, as epitomized by the infamous crucifix immersed in urine “work of art.” Talking about religion, even religious art, once a bastion of good taste, has deteriorated to the point of becoming aesthetically abhorrent. (I am not counting the Russian Orthodox Church in that category yet, and hopefully she will never succumb to the mass appeal of vulgarization. At least, unlike her Catholic and Protestant counterparts, she has been successful so far, with the most undemocratic support from the Russian government, in resisting the intrusion of the worst kinds of profanity and vulgarity always masquerading as free speech and uninhibited artistic expression.)
Fortunately for the aging paragons of good taste, they do not have to agree with Socrates in Plato’s Apology that the only way to rediscover Apollo is to descend into Hades with him, that is, to die. We can still enjoy and cherish the best musical recordings of great artists, we can still look at the reproductions of museum art, remembering how we used to see and spiritually bond with the ‘real things,’ when we visited these museums in our earlier lives. It is indeed our aesthetic memory, which is cheering up Apollo on his way down. There may still be hope for his return… or is there?
This hope for the return of good taste, is perhaps the most valuable component of world-historical wishful thinking, seeing that with Apollo’s return all other values will surely return with him. In this return, one can hardly count on a mass reawakening of aesthetic elitism, but look back with justified nostalgia at the Soviet era aesthetic experience in Russia. Soviet authorities did not wait for the public to dictate to them the kind of aesthetic manifesto which they would then follow as their law. Instead, they chose to impose good taste from above. The Bolshevik Revolution was not all about the proletariat and class struggle. It was about the perennial classics of world literature, arts, music. I have no love for the Bolshevik Revolution per se, but I do applaud it for what it had done to the nation’s religious spirit and aesthetic taste!
Is an aesthetic world revolution possible today? Pragmatically speaking, it cannot be born out of a universal spontaneous generation. It must start somewhere where the seeds are preserved. It is therefore logical for us to point our finger at Russia, the old repository of Western Civilization. But is today’s Russia, where there is a titanic struggle going on between good taste and bad taste, up to it?
I do hope so, and I also hope that a victory of good taste in Russia will infect the rest of the world with that splendid bacteria… somehow. Well, after all, this is still the section on wishful thinking, and let us hope that the next step from here will be made in the right direction, before the tragic figure of Apollo has been fully swallowed by the insatiable glutton of the kingdom of the dead.
Fortunately for the aging paragons of good taste, they do not have to agree with Socrates in Plato’s Apology that the only way to rediscover Apollo is to descend into Hades with him, that is, to die. We can still enjoy and cherish the best musical recordings of great artists, we can still look at the reproductions of museum art, remembering how we used to see and spiritually bond with the ‘real things,’ when we visited these museums in our earlier lives. It is indeed our aesthetic memory, which is cheering up Apollo on his way down. There may still be hope for his return… or is there?
This hope for the return of good taste, is perhaps the most valuable component of world-historical wishful thinking, seeing that with Apollo’s return all other values will surely return with him. In this return, one can hardly count on a mass reawakening of aesthetic elitism, but look back with justified nostalgia at the Soviet era aesthetic experience in Russia. Soviet authorities did not wait for the public to dictate to them the kind of aesthetic manifesto which they would then follow as their law. Instead, they chose to impose good taste from above. The Bolshevik Revolution was not all about the proletariat and class struggle. It was about the perennial classics of world literature, arts, music. I have no love for the Bolshevik Revolution per se, but I do applaud it for what it had done to the nation’s religious spirit and aesthetic taste!
Is an aesthetic world revolution possible today? Pragmatically speaking, it cannot be born out of a universal spontaneous generation. It must start somewhere where the seeds are preserved. It is therefore logical for us to point our finger at Russia, the old repository of Western Civilization. But is today’s Russia, where there is a titanic struggle going on between good taste and bad taste, up to it?
I do hope so, and I also hope that a victory of good taste in Russia will infect the rest of the world with that splendid bacteria… somehow. Well, after all, this is still the section on wishful thinking, and let us hope that the next step from here will be made in the right direction, before the tragic figure of Apollo has been fully swallowed by the insatiable glutton of the kingdom of the dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment