Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (61 page)

In art, as in politics, the beginnings of Modernism can be discerned as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But before the twentieth century, although the greatest artists nearly all achieved their success by striving against tradition and sometimes breaking the rules, there was a balance between the two forces: the goal of the upward-aiming aristocratic system was to achieve success by creating artworks that were as near to perfection as possible within the parameters of the traditional rules based on the natural order. The goal of the downward-aiming modern tendency was to achieve success by creating art works that effectively changed the traditional or previously followed rules. Because these two forces were in balance, the great artists of the past did not destroy the existing rules, they stretched them or otherwise modified them. But when the entire political and cultural system of the West shifted to Modernism by the early twentieth century, not only monarchy was rejected: thrown out along with it were the palaces and princesses and all other elements of the old culture, especially traditional intellectual and artistic ideals. The substitution of populist ideals for aristocratic ones necessarily eliminated the idea of cultural paragons—the great men who, as Yeats put it, “walk in a cloth of gold, and display their passionate hearts, that the groundlings may feel their souls wax the greater.”
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In all spheres of society there was no longer any higher model to aspire to. Money and power, which were attainable by anyone clever or ruthless enough, made the newly rich “robber barons” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a rough apparent substitute for the old aristocracy, but they and the new populist political leaders were mostly inspired by ordinary greed. They also did not have the aristocrats’ tradition of responsibility toward their subjects, which was one of the last, faded cultural memories of the courtly culture derived from feudalism and, in turn, from the comitatus relationship of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex. The aristocratic idea of the enlightened patron or cultural paragon was cast down like everything else that belonged to the old order, including the idea that there was, or should be, an accepted set of rules, based on the natural order, for determining the creation of works of art.
⁸⁰

The sociopolitical stripping of the elite aristocracy’s hierarchical position above ordinary “commoners” and the institution of populism was thus mirrored in intellectual and artistic life by the elimination of the dichotomy between the elite, which strived for perfection, and the ordinary, which strived for the commonplace. Modern poets stripped poetry of its elite status in relation to prose: free verse, a thinly disguised form of prose that anyone could write and was therefore accessible to anyone, replaced poetry. Painting called for little training or aesthetic taste (and, indeed, Modernism explicitly demanded its suppression); it required only the ability to splash paint on a canvas. In painting, poetry, and music, among other high arts, traditional forms were rejected and there was unrelenting pressure to abandon any new forms that arose to replace the old ones.
⁸¹
The result was literally the loss of the meaning of Art and even Beauty,
⁸²
and the mass rejection of contemporary arts by many of the elite, who turned instead to the preservation and cultivation of the art forms of earlier centuries. A new form of popular music, rock and roll, with simple melodies, simple harmonies, and simple rhythms that practically anyone could play or sing, replaced the music of the elite.
⁸³
Modernism spread through all the arts, leaving no survivors except in museums and universities, which entombed them and the dead elite culture.

Painters and other graphic artists, most of whom depended on the direct sale of the originals of their works, found that the easiest way to attract attention—in order to gain customers and thus succeed in the artistic marketplace—was to be more offensive in some way than other artists. In the beginning, this was accomplished most easily, and often quite unintentionally, by the artist’s abandonment of one or another pre-Modern artistic practice or convention. Soon it became necessary to be more offensive than previously, until shock value produced name recognition and, eventually, market value. It is not that representational art is good, and it is bad that painters rejected it. Representation per se has nothing whatever to do with the problem, which is that artists explicitly rejected the idea of Beauty conceived of as perfection (in some way, abstract or not) of the visual order of Nature.
⁸⁴
As the Modern aesthetician Adorno perceptively says, “Natural beauty … is now scarcely even a topic of [aesthetic] theory.” Yet, natural beauty and art beauty are bound together; “reflection on natural beauty is irrevocably requisite to the theory of art,” and even more so to its practice.
⁸⁵

Because Modernism, as permanent revolution, was “a phenomenon of reaction,”
⁸⁶
it was necessary for artists to change by rejecting what had already been done. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), generally considered to be the greatest Modern painter of the century, changed styles several times for the same reasons that Igor Stravinsky did in music: it was
necessary
for them to change, to be different from others, even from their earlier selves, in order to
remain
Modern and thus sell their output. The unforeseen effect of this process was the devaluing of older works of Modern art
as art
by comparison with works of pre-Modern periods. Picasso’s middle period works had great shock effect at the time, but by the end of the century perhaps the only ones that retained much
artistic
value, as against commercial
⁸⁷
or primarily historical value (such as
Guernica,
his most famous painting),
⁸⁸
were his earliest works, which though representational and essentially traditional did not make any overt attempt to succeed via shock value—an essentially nonartistic or anti-artistic approach. Only the domination of academics and museums over Modern artistic life have maintained awareness of works, famous in their time for their shock value, which would otherwise have been forgotten decades ago.

Modernism in the arts thus developed during the twentieth century into the establishment of a kind of superficial permanent revolution parallel to the superficial permanent revolution of the republican form of government (theoretically achieved through the election system). In both cases the result was, and remains, permanent mediocrity.
⁸⁹
In the arts, the Modernists did not really react to the ideas or practices of their predecessors;
⁹⁰
they simply overthrew them and replaced them with entirely new ones—they wanted to clean the slate and start over again. The inevitable result of thus constantly expelling “the preestablished” was “complete impoverishment: the scream of the destitute, powerless gesture.”
⁹¹
Once the slate was cleaned and traditional practices in the arts were gone, the only practice left that was identifiable as artistic was the dunce’s job of cleaning the slate. As a result, artists necessarily rejected other artists’ previous work, as well as their own previous creations, and attempted to replace them with totally different fashions. The logical extreme to which many artists succumbed was to break the slate and throw it away: they rejected Art itself under any known or imaginable definitions. The result of the loss of the meaning of Art could only be the meaninglessness of the artifacts produced by “artists.”
⁹²

Poets abandoned the traditional elements that defined literature as poetry and embraced free verse, poetry lacking the defining characteristics of what had been poetry (as distinct from prose) throughout history in most of the world: regular rhythms based on meter or stress patterns, various types of rhyme (in some languages mainly consonance and assonance), and other musical elements. This shift was facilitated and encouraged in European cultures by the earlier loss of the tradition of chanting or singing poetry, so that, even before Modernism struck, it was read, like prose. Most Modern poets in the West had never heard poetry sung or chanted in the traditional fashion; they grew up with little or no understanding of the fact that poetry—both lyric and epic—had once been
defined
as language written to be sung or chanted. Free verse was different from prose only in the odd punctuation, vocabulary, and grammar used by Modern poets to mark their productions as “poetic.” Poets recited their works aloud in an odd form of diction peculiar to them.
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It is thus not surprising that Modern poets found it difficult to write poetry that was not, by all known definitions, essentially prose. The American-British writer generally considered to be the greatest English-ianguage Modern poet of the century, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), was unable to produce his masterpiece
The Waste Land
(1922) without radical editorial help from another Modern poet, his friend Ezra Pound (1885–1972); nevertheless, it remains seriously flawed at best as art.
⁹⁴
Eliot’s work in general is surpassed by the work of twentieth-century poets writing in other languages, and even by a few writing in English, such as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), yet Eliot received more attention than any other twentieth-century English poet.
⁹⁵
This was not because his work is better as Art but because in the beginning, when he made his reputation, it was more shocking and offensive, and thus more Modern,
⁹⁶
and was canonized very early in the Modern movement.

Although Modern composers’ “atonal” compositions often had a compelling extramusical intellectual component—typically mathematical, graphical, textual, or philosophical in essence rather than auditory
⁹⁷
—the “music” they produced was devoid of precisely those elements that defined music in virtually every world culture: rhythm, melody (especially a full tune), and natural harmony.
⁹⁸
In particular, musicians rebelled against the dominance of the harmonies and melodic lines built on the overtone system—which is based on nature’s own acoustics, including the acoustics of human language—and also rejected natural rhythms. It is not surprising that Modern composers killed off the audience for new Western art music along with the classical tradition itself: because of the structure of the human auditory faculty, sounds of any kind that conflict too extremely with the natural overtone system are physically painful. In an age when it was necessary for an artist to acquire a popular following in order to survive, Modern musicians’ compositions sent audiences, including other Modern composers, running from the concert halls.
⁹⁹
Their compositions represented the opposite of the unintellectual or even openly anti-intellectual “popular music,” which was appropriately so called in contradistinction to the extremely
un
popular Modern art music. By the First World War, popular music had begun to acquire a following even among classes of people who would never have admitted listening to it in the nineteenth century. It soon became more Modern and sophisticated to listen to jazz—and it certainly was more enjoyable than putting up with the boredom and aural torture of the “arcane surface” of most Modern composers’ works.
¹⁰⁰

The man widely considered to be the greatest Modern composer of the century, the Russian Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), several times during his long life adopted new styles that had been innovated by other Modern composers. His repeated attempts to achieve the shock effect he had attained with his early ballet
The Rite of Spring,
¹⁰¹
which caused a riot at its premiere in Paris in 1913, eventually succeeded in alienating practically everyone except other Modern composers, for most of whom Stravinsky could do no wrong. By the end of the twentieth century, the works of Stravinsky that had become by far the most widely accepted in the repertoire were his early ballets, including
The Rite of Spring,
¹⁰²
which are still essentially tonal in the broad sense. The eventual, very long-lived fashion among professional composers for Serialism, which explicitly rejected harmony based on the natural overtone system, resulted in the loss of the traditional concert audience for new art music.

The vapidity and deliberate anti-aestheticism of Modern art was a direct result of the intellectual barrenness of the entire age. Because man must be a natural creature, the doomed rebellion of Man against Nature, with the accompanying worship of human products (particularly machines), was guaranteed to result in contradiction and destruction. Although Modernism began in the Enlightenment, a period characterized by the ideal of Reason, as Modernism increasingly merged with populism, the rule of the intellect and rationality—not something characteristic of the common man—became identified with the traditional order. Because that was in turn equated with the aristocratic elite, the ideal of Reason was rejected along with that of the traditional artistic ideals of order and beauty. Perhaps this is the source of the Postmodern mutation of Modernism in scholarship.

Although it proved to be impossible to create new styles wholly uninfluenced by the natural order, or by older works that had been based on it, Modernism forced artists to overtly deny any such relationship with their own works. As a result, they were unable to establish what exactly it was they did that was “artistic,” what it is artists were supposed to do, and why. They were utterly incapable of defining the meaning of the words art,
music,
and
poetry.