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Notes -
Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise
Scott just published Contra Everyone On Taste:
This post is a followup to the earlier Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste. It seems that the track of the discussion went roughly as follows: Scott was reflecting on how the tastes of art connoisseurs (either self-proclaimed or credentialed) tend to a) differ sharply from the tastes of the much larger mass of non-experts, and b) show a preference for art that the majority of people consider to be ugly or incomprehensible. He essentially argued that the opinions of the "experts" are grounded in bullshit status games, political power struggles, arbitrary fashion trends, etc, while normal people are free to enter into a more natural relationship with artworks that are actually beautiful and pleasant:
When people responded to the post and argued that people with more "elitist" tastes actually are responding to features of artworks that are both objectively real and deserving of attention, like the artwork's historical and social context, philosophical content, etc, it eventually prompted Scott to respond with his latest post.
He argues that many of the proposed features of artworks that are allegedly worth appreciating, like the art's historical context or its position in an ongoing artistic dialogue, are essentially extraneous, and will only serve to hinder one's natural and immediate appreciation of the art's "sensory pleasures" (or lack thereof). He really seems to be pushing this idea of a pure and natural response above all else, abstracted away from any possible considerations of context. I think this dialectical maneuver of his is ultimately grounded in his incredulity that anyone could actually, really enjoy the types of "weird" artworks that art elitists claim to enjoy. I think he thinks that if he can just cut off all of the "escape avenues" for the mustached hipster -- "no, you're not allowed to talk about the history of this or that movement, or the artist's biography, or the dumb pseudo-philosophical artist's statement, you have to just look at the thing itself and tell me what it actually looks like" -- then the snob would be forced to admit defeat and admit that, yes, when you remove all possible external variables and immerse yourself in the pure visual experience (or aural experience or whatever), it actually is just a dumb ugly looking thing. At which point Scott could claim victory and his assertion that the snobs were never worth listening to in the first place would be vindicated.
His incredulity is on display, for example, when he discusses Benjamin's essay on Angelus Novus:
I've actually brought up this painting once or twice before on TheMotte in the context of other art discussions, always to the same perplexed reactions. I'm quite fond of this painting, and I couldn't just let Scott dis it like that, which is part of what compelled me to respond to this post in the first place.
Scott raises a number of interesting points and arguments throughout the post; I'd be happy to discuss any of them individually, but, I don't think that a point-by-point breakdown of the post would actually be persuasive in getting anyone on either side of the fence in this debate to change their minds. So for now I'll settle for the more modest goal of trying to dispel some of the incredulity. Yes, I am a real living breathing human who thinks that Angelus Novus is authentically beautiful. Not for any particularly "intellectual" or "contextual" reasons either. This is, as far as I can tell, simply my "natural" response to the painting (as "natural" as one can get anyway, seeing as one's "natural" response is always already impacted by one's life history, cultural upbringing, background philosophical assumptions, etc). Similarly, my "natural" response to the Chesterton poems that Scott loves so much is that they're, well, I have to break out the word he dreads here: kitschy. I'm not even saying that to be mean! Either to Scott or to Chesterton. I have no agenda here (or at least, whatever agenda I have, there's a pretty large chasm between it and the agenda of the modal blue-haired MFA student). I'm just calling it like I see it. (Full disclosure, I only sampled a small selection of Chesterton's poems, and I'm not much of a poetry fan in general to begin with.)
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signalling. Scott would of course be the first to acknowledge that "taste is subjective", but I'm not sure if he really feels it in his bones. He's still looking for the angle, looking for something that would explain why all these ivory tower types have seemingly conspired to convince everyone that these obviously-ugly artworks are actually good, because surely no one could just simply believe that. Of course it would be utterly naive to suggest that politics and fashion play no role in "high art" trends. Of course they play a prominent role. But at the same time, they're not the only factor. It shouldn't be surprising that the types of people who dedicate their lives to becoming artists or art critics would also tend to converge on certain idiosyncratic aesthetic tastes, naturally and of their own accord, due to whatever shared underlying psychological factors drove them into art in the first place.
One of these "underlying psychological factors" might simply be the desire to grapple with the complexities of aesthetic experience as such, and a willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by that experience in radical ways. Scott treats "sensory pleasure" as essentially an unexamined, irreducible primitive, the bedrock of certainty that would be left over once one has abstracted away everything "extraneous": as though it were simply obvious to oneself when one finds an artwork to be "pleasant" or "beautiful" in the first place, as though it would be impossible or undesirable to call these modes of experience into question, to become unsure of and estranged from one's own perceptual experience. Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
For understandable reasons, non-leftists get anxious whenever anyone brings up words like "historical" or "transformative" in relation to art and culture; any call to be mindful of "context", especially "political context", is seen as somewhat threatening. For decades in the West, these concepts have all been associated with the forceful imposition of leftist political strictures and leftist assaults on traditional (especially religious) culture. "You're asking me to 'be open to' being 'transformed' by art; so you're asking me to allow myself to be transformed by these people? The ones who run our universities and art galleries today? Really?" I'm not saying that your concerns are entirely unfounded. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way. Recognizing that art is ineluctably embedded in its social and political context is intrinsically neither left nor right; a more holistic way of appreciating art that goes beyond simplistic notions of "art for art's sake" can and should be reclaimed.
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.
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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".
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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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