Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (66 page)
The critical literature on Modernism only confirms that above all else what needs to be done is to
create
true art— graphic art, music, poetry, and the other arts. True high art has not been created for a very long time, and is still not being created. Until artists, musicians, and poets realize this and decide to focus their minds on the creation of a new high art tradition, the world will continue to depend on the artists of the past, including now the recent past of Modernism, sanctified by academics, preserved in the formaldehyde of museums, concert halls, and libraries, studied and intellectualized and made the point of departure for still more intellectualized, dead, academic anti-art.
25
It has been argued that Modernism was a necessary stage in the development of the arts, a “cleaning of the slate” to allow something new to develop. Whether necessary or not, it succeeded. The explicit rejection of the ideal of Beauty, of natural order, and other principles that underlie all great art, and their substitution over the period of an entire century with the ideal of the plain and the ugly, has finally eliminated any legitimacy—
among professional artists
—for the pre-Modern arts, which have become museum artifacts, connoisseurs’ treasures, and financial investments.
Nevertheless, while the self-destruction of the arts by professional artists under the spell of Modernism (including its political message, which often was more important than the art for many) did indeed clean the slate, no new order was ever created by the Modern avant-garde. They could not stop cleaning the slate, but have kept on doing it over and over down to the present day.
26
Modernism, which has eliminated all hierarchies and replaced them with the idea of “equality,” has given birth to an age of “unartists” with the inability to understand the concept of Beauty and the inability to judge between Art and trash. This pernicious movement thus continues to afflict the arts in most of the world, and continues to make most “art” not worth experiencing. Until artists and others realize that their lives have been dominated by Modernists who have been dedicated, literally and explicitly, to depriving the world of beauty, there will be no more new beauty except by chance. That is a sad prospect.
27
However, the absence of satisfying new elite art has had a perhaps unexpected result. New art forms have arisen to replace the old ones. In addition to wholly new art forms introduced as a result of technical innovations, such as photography and the cinema, new forms of old arts have appeared, most remarkably in the realm of music, where a unique new form of popular music, rock and roll, made its sudden, explosive appearance in the United States half a century ago. Within a single decade it took most of the world by storm.
By the end of the century, in Mongolia, Tibet, and other Central Eurasian countries, as in the rest of the world, local rock or “pop rock” bands were performing essentially the same music. It has strongly influenced folk music and to a large extent supplanted it in everyday life in the cities of Central Eurasia. Although it is not yet possible to call it “high” art, at least it really is music; perhaps one day it will develop into an elite art.
28
The hope for the arts now lies in the largely untutored popular new arts developed in the absence of guidance from the professionally trained, academicized, avant-garde elite, who have continued to be mesmerized by Modernism and its mutations. It is necessary to recognize and understand the still primitive new arts and begin to develop them from the inside, to create new art with them without destroying the Art in them. It may be that trained artists will themselves adopt the new arts and pioneer a new fine arts themselves. But it must be stressed that the word “new” here is an adjective. It should not obscure the primacy of the noun “arts.” That is, the new arts cannot follow totally new rules constructed ex nihilo by academic “artists,” with no regard to the natural world or existing traditions. Great artists produce art, but they need some basis for it. No one can create art out of a vacuum. The slate has already been scraped clean. It is not necessary to scrape it anymore.
It is time for artists to reject the death grip of Modernism and again embrace the art forms that they love and strive to achieve greatness with art itself. Will it happen in Central Eurasia, amid a new flourishing of culture there, as it flourished once before? That would be a true revolution. If it happens, maybe the world will enjoy a flourishing, satisfying artistic life once more.
The earliest of the great civilizations known from archaeology—the Nile, Mesopotamian, Indus, and Yellow River valley cultures—were born in the fertile, agricultural periphery of Eurasia. But modern world culture does not derive from them. It comes from the challenging marginal lands of Central Eurasia.
The dynamic, restless Proto-Indo-Europeans whose culture was born there migrated across and “discovered” the Old World, mixing with the local peoples and founding the Classical civilizations of the Greeks and Romans, Iranians, Indians, and Chinese. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance their descendants and other Central Eurasian peoples conquered, discovered, investigated, and explored some more, creating new world systems, the high arts, and the advanced sciences. Central Eurasians—not the Egyptians, Sumerians, and so on—are our ancestors. Central Eurasia is our homeland, the place where our civilization started.
At the start of the twenty-first century, and the third millennium, Eurasia is poised at the beginning of what could be a great new era of prosperity and intellectual and artistic growth. There are many grave problems, but also a few bright lights, the most promising politically being the European Union, and technologically the Internet, which has had a powerful enlightening influence.
Will the peoples of Central Eurasia—and of Europe, Russia, the Middle East, India, and China—learn from the past, or will they continue to repeat its mistakes? Can they recover from the disasters wrought by Modernism, fundamentalism, and nationalist racism without destroying themselves and the rest of the world? And will the Europeans, Russians, Iranians, and Chinese who now dominate Central Eurasia, our common heartland, finally allow that font of creativity the freedom to flourish once again?
It depends on whether they can restore the rule of Reason, reject the Modernist legacy of populist demagoguery, and make a firm commitment to join the rest of the world not as fanatics or tyrants but as partners.
1
The text is taken from the beginning of Ötkur’s novel,
Iz
(1985/1986), where the poem was originally published; it differs slightly from the later popular version reproduced in Rudelson (1997: 174). Ötkur (1923–1995) was one of the greatest Uighur writers, as the original of this poem well demonstrates.
2
The Evenkis are very often mistakenly called “Evenks” in English, even in linguistic works (whose authors should know better), due to the popular Russian misanalysis of their name as a Russian plural.
3
See
chapter 10
.
4
The collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted by the courageous Soviet writer Andrei Amalrik (1938–1980), who in 1969 published his essay,
Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
Nevertheless, most Western Sovietologists ignored Amalrik and his prediction and even insisted, right down to the actual declaration of its dissolution, that the Soviet Union was doing well economically. This stubbornness is incredible in the face of the economic barrenness that was obvious to any visitor (certainly in 1972, when I was there). Amalrik was imprisoned and then forced into exile in 1976. He died before his negative prediction came true only seven years after the ironic date in his book’s title.
5
He resigned as president on December 25, 1991.
6
See note 4 above.
7
See note 69 in
chapter 11
on the term populism.
8
See especially Bovingdon (2004).
9
On June 12, 1991, the people of Leningrad voted to restore the city’s name to St. Petersburg. It had been renamed in honor of Lenin in 1924.
10
Also Ukraine. Traditionally in English it was called
the
Ukraine. Here I use the native name,
Ukraina,
to refer specifically to the newly independent country.
11
This is the traditional English form of the name. It is now usually transliterated Russian-style from Kirghiz Cyrillic script (K
aH) as ‘Kyrgyzstan’.
12
Nichols (2004).
13
Formerly the European Community (from 1967), in 1994 its name was changed to the Europe an Union.
14
Berlin was made the capital of reunited Germany in 1991.
15
McGeveran (2006).
16
McGeveran (2006).
17
The Chinese communist regime has been spreading a new myth of China’s historical domination of Central Eurasia as justification for its domination of the foreign territories occupied by its armies. The opposite view, that because the Mongols once conquered China they can claim that Chinese territory should “belong to” Mongolia (and the same for other peoples who once ruled part of what is now China), seems not to have been remarked in China. The government line is obviously propaganda, but its absolute control of the compulsory Modern education system ensures that few Chinese citizens, secure in their indoctrination, will think about or question those policies, let alone oppose them. Cf. Bovingdon and Tursun (2004).
18
Much of the city’s old architecture was destroyed in a powerful earthquake in 1966. When the city was rebuilt, most of the damaged old buildings were replaced by Modern ones built according to the severe anti-artistic dictates of Modern architecture.
19
See the photograph dated 1996 in Shakya (1999: plate 17); since the photograph was taken, the situation has become even worse.
20
Lewis (1954: 40). His book, aptly titled
The Demon of Progress in the Arts,
has had absolutely no impact on the arts, which remain firmly under the control of the demon more than half a century later. Despite all the change dictated by Modernism, nothing at all has changed.
21
Lewis (1954: 40).
22
Lewis (1954: 37).
23
What it “really” is should perhaps be of no major concern to anyone except philosophers, but it could hardly hurt anything at this point if artists were to at least begin asking some questions along these lines.
24
Lewis (1954: 27).
25
The overintellectualization of art by academics and academy-trained artists is obvious on nearly every page of Adorno’s classic Modern work on aesthetics, but my perception of this is clearly different from Adorno’s own; see endnote
102
.
26
Because Modernism was openly proclaimed to be new and a replacement for what preceded, because it succeeded in its efforts to replace the old, and because it lasted so long, Modernism itself inevitably became old in turn. Although Modernism had not yet ended, artists and art historians began to look on Modern
styles
as old-fashioned and in need of replacement. Some of them accordingly proclaimed that they rejected Modern style, and announced Post-Modernism. But this hyper-Modernism is of course simply another mutation of Modernism. It has been most successful as a fashion in architecture and fields ancillary to the arts such as literary criticism and intellectual history, not in the fine arts proper. Professionally trained artists today are educated in universities or university-like institutes, where Modernism (and Post-Modernism) has been canonized and drummed into their heads uncritically.
27
The extension of Modernist theories to art history, and the consequent projection of their spurious ideas onto the art of the past, has forced art historians to turn to the discussion of the sociology of the artists’ world, psychology, mathematics, whatever—
anything except art per se,
which remains unexamined and unexaminable from the Modernist viewpoint, while Modernism itself, as a phenomenon, also remains largely unexamined. For discussion of the scholarly tension between Modernists and anti-Modernists in recent times, see endnote
103
.
28
In fact, people all around the world from all walks of life, including artists and intellectuals as well as businessmen and laborers, listen to this music every day. However, until musicians realize what has happened to music, decide to be artists rather than anti-artists, and take the new world language of popular music that has grown out of rock music and develop it—gradually and carefully—into art, there will be no new, genuine art music in the world, but only new varieties of primitive popular sounds substituting for it. On attempts by some musicians to do this, and on the Renaissance model of
how
to do it, see endnote
104
.