After I
wrote Admit it - you really hate modern
art (January 30), many readers assured
me that I was quite mistaken about them.
Especially among the educated elites there are
many who will go to their graves proclaiming their
love for modern art, and I owe them an explanation
of sorts. At the cost of most of few remaining
friends, I will provide it.
You pretend to
like modern art because you want to be creative.
In fact, you are not creative, not in the least.
In all of human
history we know of only a few
hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens
me to break the news, but you aren't one of them.
By insisting that you are not creative, you think
I am saying that you are not important. I do not
mean that, but will have to return to the topic
later.
You have your heart set on being
creative because you want to worship yourself,
your children, or some pretentious impostor,
rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith
has not made you more rational. On the contrary,
it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of
clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is
yourself. G K Chesterton said that if you stop
believing in God, you will believe in anything.
For quite some time, conservative critics
have attacked the conceit that every
nursery-school child should be expected to be
creative. Professor Allan Bloom observed 20 years
ago in The Closing of the American Mind
that creativity until quite recently referred to
an attribute of God, not of humans. To demand the
attribute of creativity for every human being is
the same as saying that everyone should be a
little god.
But what should we mean by
creativity? In science and mathematics, it should
refer to discoveries that truly are singular, that
is, could not possibly be derived from any
preceding knowledge.
We might ask: In the
whole history of the arts and sciences, how many
contributors truly are indispensable, such that
history could not have been the same without their
contribution? There is room for argument, but it
is hard to come up with more than a few dozen
names. Europe had not progressed much beyond
Archimedes of Syracuse in mathematics until Isaac
Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented the
calculus. Until Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes
Kepler, Europe relied on the 1st-century work of
Ptolemy. After Kepler only Newton, and after
Newton only Albert Einstein fundamentally changed
our views on planetary motion. Scholars still
argue over whether someone else would have
discovered Special Relativity if Einstein had not,
but seem to agree that General Relativity had no
clear precedent.
How many composers, for
that matter, created Western classical music? If
only a dozen names are known to future
generations, they still will know what is
fundamental to this art form. [1]
We can
argue about the origin of scientific or artistic
genius, but we must agree that it is extremely
rare. Of the hundreds of composers employed as
court or ecclesiastical musicians during Johann
Sebastian Bach's lifetime, we hear the work of
only a handful today. Eighteenth-century musicians
did not strive for genius, but for solid
craftsmanship; how it came to be that a Bach would
emerge from this milieu has no consensus
explanation. As for the rest, we can say with
certainty that if a Georg Phillip Telemann (a more
successful contemporary of Bach) had not lived,
someone else could have done his job without great
loss to the art form.
If we use the term "creative"
to mean more or less the same thing as
"irreplaceable", then the number of truly creative
individuals appears very small indeed. It is very
unlikely that you are one of them. If you work
hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to
be able to follow what the best people in the
field are doing, and if
you are extremely good,
you might have the privilege of elaborating on
points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such
efforts might be, it is very unlikely that if you
did not do this, no one else would have done it.
On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of
research in any field, you take every possible
measure to publish your work as soon as possible,
so that you may get credit for it before someone
else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even
the very best minds in a field live in terror that
they will be made dispensable by others who
circulate their conclusions first.
Bach
inscribed each of his works with the motto, "Glory
belongs only to God," and insisted (wrongly) that
anyone who worked as hard as he did could have
achieved results just as good. He was content to
be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and
did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one.
That is the starting point of the man of faith.
One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to
be of service; extraordinary gifts are
responsibility to be borne with humility. The
search for genius began when the service of God no
longer interested the artists and scientists.
Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of
God, and the arrival of the artist as hero, taking
as his model Richard Wagner, about whose artistic
merits we can argue on a different equation.
Whether Wagner was a genius is debatable, but it
is beyond doubt that the devotees of Nietzsche
were no Wagners, let alone Bachs. To be free of
convention was to create one's own artistic world,
in Nietzsche's vision, but very few artists are
capable of creating their own artistic world. That
puts everyone else in an unpleasant position.
To accommodate the ambitions of the
artists, the 20th century turned the invention of
artistic worlds into a mass-manufacturing
business. In place of the humble craftsmanship of
Bach's world, the artistic world split into
movements. To be taken seriously during the 20th
century, artists had to invent their own style and
their own language. Critics heaped contempt on
artists who simply reproduced the sort of products
that had characterized the past, and praised the
founders of schools: Impressionism, Cubism,
Primitivism, Abstract Expressionism, and so forth.
Without drawing on the patronage of the
wealthy, modern art could not have succeeded; each
day we read of new record prices for 20th-century
paintings, for example the estimated US$140
million paid to media mogul David Geffen for a
Jackson Pollock. Very rich people like to flatter
themselves that they are geniuses, and that their
skill or luck at marketing music or computer code
qualifies them as arbiters of taste. Successful
business people typically are extremely clever,
but they tend to be idiot savants, with sharp
insight into some detail of industry that produces
great wealth, but no concept whatever of issues
outside their immediate field of expertise.
Because the world conspires to flatter the
wealthy, rich people are more prone to think of
themselves as little gods than ordinary people,
and far more susceptible to the cult of creativity
in art.
In his great novel Doktor
Faustus, Thomas Mann portrayed this as the
work of the devil. The new Faust who makes a pact
with Satan in this novel represents the composer
Arnold Schoenberg, who sells his soul in return
for a system for composing music.
A new
class of critics served as midwives at the birth
of these monsters. I marveled in the essay noted
above over the fact that museum-goers gush over
Pollock's random dribbles, but never would listen
to Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions at a
concert hall. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham
famously said that people don't like music; they
only like the way it sounds. In the case of
Pollock, people neither like his work nor the way
it looks; what they like is the idea that the
artist in his arrogance can redefine the world on
his own terms.
To be an important person
in this perverse scheme means to shake one's fist
at God and define one's own little world, however
dull, tawdry and pathetic it might be. To lack
creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of
the myriad ideological movements in art that gives
the despairing artists the illusion of creativity.
If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is
emulation of creation. But that is not quite true,
for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a
creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures.
In the world of faith there is quite a
different way to be indispensable, and that is
through acts of kindness and service. A mother is
indispensable to her child, as are husbands, wives
and friends to each other. If one dispenses with
the ambition to remake the world according one's
whim, and accepts rather that the world is God's
creation, then imitatio Dei consists of
acts of love.
In their urge toward
self-worship, the artists of the 20th century
descended to extreme levels of artlessness to
persuade themselves that they were in fact
creative. In their compulsion to worship
themselves in the absence of God, they produced
ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great
deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its
weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of
individual self-expression is a poor substitute
for the religion it strove to replace, and the
delusion of personal creativity an even worse
substitute for redemption.
Note 1. Josquin des Prez,
Claudio Monteverdi, Bach, Domenico Scarlatti,
George Frideric Haendel, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz
Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frederic Chopin,
Johannes Brahms.
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