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If you show a random group of teenage students that “Novus Angelus”, how could it possibly be good for them? I don’t see any rational path toward an argument that this would better their life or make them happy. The figure has an instinctively ugly face and form, and it’s evidently intended to humiliate the angels by depicting them as such. So it is the depiction of something normally glorious as pathetic. Okay. We can rationally see how it would make them worse: they are seeing an ugly and pathetic humanoid-like figure; they are being told it is “art”, which will confuse them; they are desacralizing something culturally important. If you wanted to increase unhappiness among humanity, you would show them this nonsense and say it is art, and they will infer, “hey, this is very important to look at”, so you’re biasing them to internalize filth, inhumanity, even evilness. Why?
Compare that antisocial filth to Tiepolo’s Annunciation. Even having almost no cultural understanding, you can see the good of the work. A student would see: a young woman reading is visited by an angel who points her to something mysterious and glorious above. If you show this to 100 students, all 100 of them would be benefitted. They would internalize a sense of something better, a sense of wonder and mystery, maybe a sense of the importance of reading. Or show a boy Salvatore Nobili’s Sant'Antonio in Campo Marzio and his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble.
The purpose of art is not to make people very opinionated about art or to try to trick them like an intellectual gypsy. The point is to greaten us. We evolved the ability to make art to display our health and signal our competence. We evolved the ability to appreciate that art because we appreciate health. We evolved the ability to think with complexity because it sustained our common health and civic health over generations. The art instinct would have never developed in humanity if we had the degeneracy of the art snob. The art snob does not understand the point of anything, they are sick and their soul is cut off from the Realm of the Living.
If you are not capable of evaluating anything outside your totalizing culture war impulses, your art criticism will look like this, verbose and childish. Naive but not in an unpretentious and innocent way. The opposite.
You hate Angelus Novus because of what you assume about the painter and his intent, not because of any intrinsic ugliness or "degeneracy" in the work.
If you had been told that Klee was a devout Christian who spent his life trying to understand God and His angels and show them to others in a particular symbolic way, resulting in a very idiosyncratic, arguably "ugly" art style? Your opinion would flip like a bit. Maybe you still wouldn't particularly enjoy his work, but you'd appreciate his intent and wouldn't be railing about degenerate filth corrupting the youth.
Which ironically makes the point of a lot of art appreciators (a point Scott tries to negate, not very successfully) that art has context, and no matter how much you try to "appreciate it on its own merits" you and it are not in a vacuum and your priors and the context of the piece influence your perception of it.
I do not like modern Catholic art or music. It has been aesthetically barren since halfway through the 20th century, at least, and terminal before. (This is hardly due to bias, because some of my favorite composers are Orthodox John Tavener and Arvo Part, recently dead and living, and I’m not an Estonian or British Eastern Orthodox). Even the new “traditional”ish style is mediocre-to-okay, and my God, I have no words for the new stuff. Neither is this just me liking old stuff, because I do not like Eastern Orthodox iconography, generally speaking. Traditional European art moves you with powerful social emotions, with everything working together to heighten to effect, and pieces were selected according to the taste of patrons who didn’t need to flex pretention, having nothing whatsoever to prove, being the highest status and occasionally sovereign. Also, it focused on perfecting a handful of scenes for a maximum social-emotional response, ie the crucifixion must have been painted 200 times a year in every city, and gradually the visual language of the scene evolved to become perfect through a centuries-long selection process, involving artists selecting the best micro-motif over hundreds of years, the wisdom transferred in studios with an imitative learning structure. But we want to discard all that today, because we are very foolish.
It moves you.
Do you think it possible that people who are not you are moved by things that do not move you, and are not moved by things that move you?
I'm not saying "Everything is subjective" so no one can say anything is good or bad. But when you make absolute statements about not just the artistic, but the social and moral value of art, as if your judgment is clearly true and everyone else is either pretending or being deceived by the devil, well, it's beyond the arrogance of someone saying "I don't like modern art" or "Twilight is a crappy book." It's presuming that you can define good art (according to your particular fixations) and see through the pretense of anyone who likes things you don't like.
As I said, Angelus Novus doesn't move me. But clearly it moves some people. They aren't just degenerate angel-haters. Even I can see that while at first glance, sure, it looks like something I might put on the fridge because my kid drew it, ("Oh, it's an angel? Of course it is!") but further examination shows a level of intentionality, composition, color, and drafting that required artistry. Maybe not to my taste but there is meaning there. Even you evidently sense that since you so strongly react to its "degeneracy," which certainly could not be the case for some unskilled scribble.
People are moved by the placebo effect, authority bias, the desire to fit in, and ambient cues in the environment. Just as they were in 1924, four years after Novus Angelus, where this was proven:
…
https://time.com/archive/6656527/hoax/
I do not consider it art. I do think this is just rusing the tasteless and easily-influenced.
Perhaps some people really were moved by Yes, We Have No Bananas or "Jerdanowitsches's" other works. More likely it took in some critics who weren't really moved by it but were signaling, which is what Scott (and you) claim is all that people who say they like Klee's work are doing.
Certainly people can be hoaxed (Jordan-Smith isn't the first guy to put one over on a community of pretentious snobs). But people have in this thread have expressed why they find Angelus Novus worthwhile. You can disagree with their analysis, but all you've offered are personal expressions of disgust. There is a difference between "I don't like this" and "This is objectively bad and if you think it's good you're either lying or stupid." And as I said, bluntly, I don't believe your analysis is based on the art but on the artist.
One day I hope we find a TQ measurement similar to IQ. The low IQ do not realize why what they like to do is destructive. Similarly, I don’t think the low TQ realize why the art they like is destructive (to their own wellness and civilization). Until we have twin studies measuring the longterm impact of beholding works by different artists on wellbeing and prosocial behavior, we will just have to disagree.
If you just want to lob Dunning-Kruger Syndrome accusations at people who disagree with you, I could make up some Qs of my own, but again, it's not in any way a convincing argument.
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If I was told this, I would say "tried to and succeeded at are not the same thing". If I was also told that he had succeeded, I would say "that claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed".
Why would your reaction be meaningful to anyone who is not you? You're just saying "Yuck!" with more words.
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
When someone tells me "This is bad" or "This is good," I'd rather hear why they think that. Not just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" or "It disgusts me."
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended? So for example, I think Twilight largely fails in the first category (it's badly written, though not the worst written book I've ever read) but obviously succeeds in eliciting feelings in its (mostly teenage girl) audience that the author intended. Angelus Novus actually shows technical proficiency which is perhaps not obvious at first glance, and it elicits feelings and analysis that some random minimalist angel sketch wouldn't. I wouldn't claim it's great or even the best in its class, but when people just sneer at it because it's "ugly" or "degenerate," or claiming "it fails because I didn't like it," I don't see that as meaningful critique. And it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I disagree that "having failed" is more falsifiable than "it didn't fail." It implies you can objectively say it "fails" as art (because I didn't like it).
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
I think popularity has a loose, but certainly not precise, correlation to "good."
Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level? I wouldn't agree that popularity defines "goodness" but I'd be hard-pressed to think of something so universally beloved that just somehow snookered everyone and is bad, actually.
I am not familiar with Higurashi, but I've written about Rowling before. Her prose is not great (though she's improved quite a bit since Harry Potter), but it's also not the strong point of her work. I would not agree that she is "technically bad," though I would agree that there are other authors whose prose is objectively better.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
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I read this post with something close to physical revulsion. (It is the culture wars thread so perhaps that's par for the course.) Not because I dislike those older pictures, I love them. I don't even like Novus Angelus that much. But Klee is a for-real artist who devoted his life to his work and if you look across his oeuvre, you can't deny he was pursuing his interests and exploring interesting themes with craft and intensity and a deep aesthetic sense. To think that an example of his work would be corrupting to teenagers, 'evil' or 'filth' is offensive in its own right. He was great artist even if you don't like the work. And you certainly don't have to find it beautiful. But "filth"? "Evilness"? Absolutely, disqualifyingly, ridiculous.
How will a teenager be benefited from Novus Angelus? Klee may have been a great artist, but did he use his talents to create something helpful or harmful to his fellow man in this case? Fritz Haber was a brilliant and accomplished scientist, but that doesn’t mean his work creating chemical weapons wasn’t evil.
I saw it as a teenager in reproduction. I was very interested in how someone who was really into making drawings, philosophy and music and ceaselessly inventing new styles was villified by the Nazis as creating 'degenerate art' despite the inquisitiveness and sometimes humour of his overall project.
Did I gain from viewing that individual image by itself? Not really. It's not my favourite or anything. I'm arguing against the position it is harmful.
I'm sure that when the Nazis made lists of degenerate art they lumped in actual trash with good but ideologically inconvenient art. The art could easily both be bad and be on the list.
Lots of it may not have been good but probably none of it was degenerate, and probably degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Child porn. Snuff films, like "funky town". The cartoons of A Wyatt Mann. If these media had broad and growing audiences and were publicly celebrated by influential people, would you take that as a sign of broad social improvement?
Suppose the following statement is true: A major driver of the BLM movement was "art" that caused Blues to vastly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed by police, thus spurring a social movement that attacked policing as a concept, leading to acute changes in how policing was conducted. The immediate result was a massive crime wave that killed many thousands of additional black people. If this be the case, would you agree that such art was bad for society?
Are you familiar with the youtube channels where people stream themselves scratching off lotto tickets and winning big? If you discovered that a young family member was a huge fan of such videos, and was also making a habit of dumping their free cash into lotto tickets, would you suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship there? Would you consider this development good, bad, or neutral?
Do you recognize that art can be bad for society, that art can have a bad or immoral message or effect on the viewer? If not, why not? If so, what is your term for such art, and how is it fundamentally different from "degenerate"?
Art is powerful; this seems undeniable. If art is powerful, why would you presume that it is only powerful in good ways, and not in bad ones? Is that how you observe power working in any other context, ever?
I grant you that your examples are degenerate and at least some of them are kinds of art. But they aren't what the Nazis called "degnerate art", which was, broadly, all modern and abstract art, as well as art done by Jews, people with mental illnesses, Communists etc. This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I realise I should have used my words more here instead of saying degenerate art wasn't a thing, as I have caused you to write quite a lot of stuff I fully agree with. Art is vitally important and has moral valence. It can be powerful in bad ways as well as good. That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
On the one hand, I do not consider Nazis to be intellectual authorities. On the other hand, I'm informed that Hitler drank water.
I am moderately confident that art can't be bad simply because of who made it, but note that "who made it" and "what they made" correlate very, very strongly. I find it difficult to separate Russian or Chinese "soviet realist" art from my knowledge of the regimes that produced it. I also observe that a whole lot of people don't like "Triumph of the Will" or "Birth of a Nation", not because these works are badly made, but because of who made them and why. I would agree that mere identity is a very poor place to start one's critique of an art piece, and generally says more about the critic than the piece.
I'm skeptical that even the Nazis didn't care about the intention of the art and only who made it; can you point to some examples of art the Nazis considered "degenerate" that was obviously intended for and effectively executed on glorification of the Nazi state, but which was rejected due to the identity or chosen style of the maker?
I am not confident that "degenerate art" involves an elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad. I think one could claim aesthetically pleasing art as morally bad, and thus "degenerate". "aesthetically pleasing" is a very broad category; I would imagine that there are a lot of people who do or easily could view detailed depictions of their perceived enemies being tortured to death as "aesthetically pleasing."
I observe that Communists do not appear to "claim" concepts or terms the way you argue Nazis "claim" "Degenerate Art", so I don't really buy this idea that terms ought to be considered polluted in this way in a general sense. Perhaps we should consider it a term of art, and that we are in apparent agreement that who made a piece of art isn't a good place to start critiquing it from. We need a term for "bad art", this one seems reasonably straightforward and understandable. On the other hand, I'm not super attached to the word either; "anti-social" or "corrosive" seem reasonable synonyms.
In any case, if art can be "degenerate", that does not imply that all art labeled "degenerate" is accurately labeled; humans can be mistaken or lie, and I think we would agree that the Nazis did plenty of both. The Nazis labelling Klee's art "degenerate" does not make it so, but it doesn't make it not so either. I've written elsewhere in the thread describing the non-marginal value I'm able to glean from Klee's work; on the other hand, I think there's a pretty strong argument that the art world as a sociopolitical cluster has been strongly net-degenerate/anti-social/corrosive for at least the century, and as a prominent builder of that sociopolitical cluster, one can reasonably assess Klee for his contributions to that trend.
It seems to me that a lot of defenses of Klee are going to involve arguments that appear to me, at this point, to be special pleading. I think we are well past the point where naked appeals to diversity of thought and free expression can be maintained; values-incoherence is too obviously a serious problem, and values-policing is too endemic for these old arguments to hold up.
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It's an old tradition in Christianity to make people face the off-putting and shocking. Initially it was scandalous to depict Christ on the cross and his passion, but over time it became integrated and accepted and in a way sanitized and defanged. One could also say, and indeed Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories and victors and sing self-celebratory songs that uplift people to move forward to even more winning.
I'm not sure that Angelus Novus is intended to "demoralize", but even those things that are intended so are understood by their creators to actually point at some deeper morality. (I'm sure there are also some that are simply perverted and enjoy the destruction of all that is good and want everything to rot and decay and die and suffer and squirm and so on - but I don't think the entire art world was like this). Instead they saw their role as warning society and awakening in them a desire for change and to realize that what they were sold previously, packaged in superficial beauty, was in fact rotten and corrupt in the core, that ornament and beauty was used to hide crimes and oppression. These kinds of impulses are not unprecedented and they are similar to iconoclasm (whether the Protestant Christian or the Muslim kind) and other cases of new movements destroying the icons and totems of the old one, which they deem broken and false prophecy packaged in deceptively appealing packaging.
For one or another reason, around the turn of the century artists got saturated with all the straightforward beauty, and they longed for something fresh and not stale. The old aesthetic values felt disconnected from the modern world, dishonest even, just an anachronistic show. Instead they looked for motifs from other cultures, from the east in Art Nouveau, or from other untainted sources, such as several then-rediscovered ancient cultures, or from natural childish innocent instinct. This is also connected to accurate representation being devalued due to photography. In Angelus Novus I mainly see this celebration of childish innocence and clumsiness and honesty, as well as an echo of cave paintings or other primitive art from non-Western cultures, along the lines of Le Taureau by Picasso.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church. This is not an impossible task. But you have to actually do it. You can't shortcut to it by saying that the paintings look better aesthetically, hence they should be the moral examples. What exactly is this part: "his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble"? This is where the crux of the thing lies. Go on with social reality and values as it was in the late 1800s? You can defend that. But you have to actually do it.
Beauty is hard to fake. Ugliness is easy to fake. (Well, it's easy to do for real, but you know what I mean.) Because of this, I'm going to have some heightened level of skepticism about claims of "this art is ugly for a reason".
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Everything in traditional Western art served a Point, a Good, which promoted individual and collective health (or wellbeing). They portrayed the horrors of the crucifixion because this is necessary for your ultimate felicity and beatitude. Art featuring the aversive stimuli of the Cross was made and consumed exclusively by people who understood the image within a cohesive and strict narrative involving a combination of dogmas:
that the pains and horrors shown are the consequence of your own bad behavior (sin), which led to this event;
that Jesus, innocent and blameless, suffered and died in order to redeem you from these evils and their consequence, out of an interest in your wellbeing and desire to see you in paradise
that Jesus, as an example for the whole human race, endured all injury and injustice with righteousness, obedience, faith, virtue, compassion, and obtained the ultimate reward in doing so
that you are in a lifelong and eternal bond with Jesus, and thus have a perfect moral influence exerted upon you continually
The off-putting and shocking nature of it is instrumental according to a complicated list of givens. There would be no point in expressing it otherwise. And importantly, an angel would never be depicted as so weak, miserable, and ugly. Either they are awe-inspiring and powerful, or they are innocent and beautiful. That’s also part of the cultural package of traditional western art.
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity. I agree with his critique of a hypothetical strawman Christianity believed by a hypothetical race of strawpeople.
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
Not sure if this should be the criterion though. If the art students are correctly disillusioned about seeing reality as it is, and the Catholics are just placated and blindfolded to the injustices and whatnot.. Just trying to be devil's advocate. Monks self-flagellating and extreme ascetism also doesn't seem to be the most wholesome and conducive to well-being, but it's also derived from the same source.
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How so?
He failed to grasp that the Cross is a superior path to Selbst-Überwindung (self-overcoming) than what he describes, in that it more accurately models the phenomenological experience of struggle and suffering in pursuit of a superhuman aim. Nietzsche hazardly circumambulates around an idol of someone who overcomes his social values to achieve a greater value, while missing that this has been painted better within the Christian story. Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it. What is the Zarathustra model? To yap in self-pity about how pity is bad. His whole heroic description is woefully cloudy and nonsensical.
The thing is that the Cross Model already proved itself successful for the things Nietzsche claims to love: glory, creativity, greatness, nobility, experimentation, science. The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue). He sired 20 children. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a knife fight or harshly rebuking his students. He synthesized a new style. This is the musical ubermensch! His music expresses glory better than anyone before or after him.
Yet Bach, the ubermensch of note, did this while writing “Jesus, help” at the start of every work, and ending with “To God alone the Glory”. This is because He internalized a better social model. The suffering of Bach’s mind at work was a crown of thorns, not a Zarathustrian self-obsession. His doubts were the leers of the crowd. His obstacles were the heavy beam of the Cross. His work, a taste of the heavenly banquet. It’s all there, Nietzsche missed it and ruined a generation of men. To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans. And even the demise and humiliation of Germany in world history was influenced by the social model of Nietzsche! (While, ironically, the “slave morality” Mennonites will continue hymning in Low German until they become half of North America). It is not Zarathustra who successfully “sweetens the dregs and the bitter shame of suffering”.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
But Nietzsche is the one who provides the subjectively-created value schema here. His advice is to create your own values and be autonomously self-governed, and to feel the most “power” which he defines circularly as successfully overcoming a subjectively-defined “resistance”. At no point does one actually have to measure against some objective standard. If someone is simply placing an arbitrary resistance in their week, so that they can feel the pleasure of dominance or “power” over their own devised lifestyle, then there is no self-overcoming. At least in Christianity, there are objective standards to measure against, and actual fears and fixations which require a man overcome himself, plus the external role model to enable this activity.
If Christianity were already the most adaptive system for a man to overcome himself, then why would we depart from the system that works and trust Frederich Nietzsche to guide us on our journey? Where is the proof in the form of successful Nietzschean households and organizations? I can at least drive to a monastery and witness a boomer living in a cell owning nothing, and without complaint (a miracle unto itself).
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Ironically, you've done what the critic from Scott's article has done, only in the opposite direction. From your commentary, I expected something monumentally blasphemous, a new Piss Christ. Instead, what I saw was some unremarkable picassoesque scribble.
I can immediately see how this picture could benefit a group of random teenage students. First, you tell them they're about to see an example of evil, horrible anti-human degeneracy. Then, you show them this. They'll be walking out of the gallery with a much better calibrated sense of what evil is, as opposed to what people say it is. And also that if that is what degeneracy is, it is in the end unremarkable and boring, not worth engaging in even for rebellion.
The most dangerous evil is the one that can successfully trick you! In real life it looks like someone politely asking you to construct value and goodness with yourself as sole authority, gently nudging your intuitions in the wrong direction and coaxing you with enticing status gains.
In real life, you say, as you quote fiction.
If it is fiction, fiction can still make true statements about the nature of reality:
"Professor Zalzabraz the Neptunian said: 'water is made of one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms.'"
"Then, professor Qartherage the Uranusian responded, 'You fool. You absolute buffoon. You got that backwards. Water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.'"
in case you're wondering, this is what it looks like to roll a nat-1 on your knowledge check.
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