In Defense of Modernist Aesthetics

A response to the Prudentialist and Arthur Powell on modern art and the decline of the West

Last week I read Prudentialist’s article Everywhere at the End of the West, where he makes an extended analogy of the West’s degeneration to that of an Alzheimer’s patient, progressively forgetting all memory, becoming a creature of the moment, eventually losing touch with time itself. I also read the critical response by poet Arthur Powell—whom we will welcome as the newest Imperium Press author in a few weeks—and found much to agree with there too. As always, I am cursed to see all sides at once.

I myself have often described liberalism and the West as amnesiac. If you followed any of the (now three) defunct Imperium Press Twitter accounts, you may have seen me describe modernity as an “open-air amnesia ward” and so on. There is great truth to Prudentialist’s analogy. Later this year, you will get a book out of me, The Cultured Thug Handbook, where I explicate in short and punchy essays various concepts used in the radical right, from Spengler to the Kosher Sandwich. In one chapter, I elaborate on this analogy of liberalism as amnesiac—the upshot is that liberalism is the hatred of all that is fixed and unchosen, and the most fixed and unchosen thing of all is the past. Because the past can never be destroyed, liberalism settles for the next best thing: forgetting it. Liberalism is a form of amnesia, or put another way, it is presentism raised to the power of an ideology.

Our culture is shot through with this amnesia. Prudentialist points in his essay to a work called Everywhere At The End of Time, a six-hour cycle of pre-war ballroom music that degenerates as it goes until it resolves into disjointed samples and schizophrenic noise—the cycle is patterned after the stages of Alzheimer’s degeneration, with artwork mirroring the disfigurement of memory and identity as the cycle progresses. It is a challenging work.

Arthur Powell is not having a bar of it. In his response, he describes this work as “the exact opposite of a vitalist healthy art”, and one sees what he means. This is what he calls sorrow porn, wallowing in despair just to feel something, anything, even if that anything is simply disgust.¹ Powell also takes issue with the comparison of the West to an Alzheimer’s patient, that our cultural heritage is disappearing because we simply don’t remember it. Rather,

[it is] being deliberately buried by those opposed to the essence of the West. This is not some hand-wringing sorrowful condition sweeping through us like a plague. Many of us have witnessed the direct destruction and attack and attempted burial of our culture, art, literature and traditions. Our enemies control what is displayed in our art galleries and museums and the text that accompanies these pieces. There is no mystery here.

He makes a good point.² Cultural gatekeepers select manifestly inferior—usually ideological—art and artists. To take just one example, this inferiority is betokened by the fact that people care about new music less than ever. Music historian Ted Gioia explains:

It’s very interesting when you look at the numbers, because there’s a clear trend going on there. […] The data now shows that more than 70 percent of the songs streamed are old songs. Just a few months ago it was more like 65, 66 percent, and so it’s inching up.³

Music, unlike painting or sculpture, is a popular medium. It is less prone to top-down selection effects, so the presence of these effects is all the more striking. People demand older aesthetics, but the overall trend is toward gayer, weaker, and uglier, so eventually this is the shape music will take. Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, and Nirvana may dominate streaming lists, but they are still within living memory—they too will fade. Who listens to 1930s ballroom music anymore except Alzheimer’s patients?

But I myself take strong issue with the “trad art” sentiment that modernist art is uniformly weak and degenerate. This seems to me to be blind to the vitality all around us. We are thrown into the world, in this time, in this place, and it is out of the raw material of this time and place that we will reconstruct anything worth having. Something is trying to be reborn and has been for centuries. The alt right—like fascism before it, romanticism before that, and the renaissance before that—is the birth pangs of something truly archaic, and yet always new, struggling to come to life. And come to life it will. Modernism, the art movement, is part of that.