The Crisis in Modern Aesthetics

The Crisis in Modern Aesthetics Frederick Turner The last one hundred years have witnessed a wholesale attack on all the traditional artistic genres. The history of musical composition has been the history of an assault on the fundamental structures and preconditions of music-harmony, counterpoint, melody, the scale, tonality, rhythmic regularity and variation, the intentionality of the composer and performer, musical virtuosity, even the idea of performance itself. In theatre the elements of dramatic development, tripartite beginning-middle-end structure , script, actor, and audience were abolished or subverted. The poets, meanwhile, were busy eradicating poetic meter, theme, rhetoric, characterization , argument, story, fiction, the past and the future. In the visual arts the double abandonment of visual signification and decoration led eventually to the disappearance of the visual object altogether in conceptual art, and the near-disappearance in architecture of any distinction between blueprint and building. The narrative genres underwent a similar holocaust. The rise of the novel as a serious art form in the nineteenth century was itself an implicit attack on earlier forms of storytelling, such as the myth, the tale, the satire, the fantasy , the romance, the pastoral, and the epic poem. The iconoclastic impulse that was partially implicated in the birth of the novel would not, as we shall see, be exhausted by it; and in the end it would turn and begin to consume the elements of the novel itself: plot, characterization, even-in the work of the critical theorists and postmodern novelists-temporal sequence , the author, reader, and text. The process of root-cutting in the arts is obviously more complex than I have sketched it here. Without some understanding of those complexities 7 we will not see the reasons for what, to an intelligent alien, would appear like a wanton process of cultural suicide: the vandalism of a John Knox, who smashed the stained glass of the cathedrals, or a Savonarola, who burnt the paintings of Botticelli. Indeed, when we put it this way there is a kind of dark splendor in the magnitude of our destructiveness. Considering how easy it is to destroy, as opposed to create, it is impressive that it took our best and most ingenious efforts so many decades to eradicate the last green shoots of tradition. What a wealth we disposed of to have such freedom and scope in our devastations! But why did we embark on them at all? Somehow originality became identified with the destruction of some previously unrecognized form of organization. In the country of the avant-garde scarcely one stone was left standing upon another; each new artistic genius could only "bounce the rubble," as they say of the last theoretical phase of spasm nuclear warfare. Another metaphor, which may be suggestive, is that the artistic economy of the modernist period ran on fossil fuel: it burned traditional artistic genres and structures to power its engines, and its fundamental ethos was thus one of combustion. Or again, we might say that its psychology was oedipal; to assert its existence it must eliminate its fathers and appropriate their cultural possessions. Oedipal, and thus masculine: nurture was stifling. Dada, to use the iconoclastic language of the belittling pun, took over MOMA. Perhaps we can summarize these themes under three ideas: a powerful but erroneous theory of the scientific nature of freedom; a correspondence with a natural-resource exploitation model of economic activity; and a demographic and social tendency towards male, adolescent, and political values, and away from female, adult, and reproductive values. Freedom had become for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the most interesting problem for philosophers and ordinary people alike. It was problematic for one main reason: the sciences of physics and mathematics were capable at that time of observing and recording only one kind of process-that is, the deterministic and predictable kind. And no other science was advanced, sophisticated, or convincing enough to offer alternative models of the world. The fierce intellectual probity of the eighteenth century demanded that we submit ourselves to the essentially counter-intuitive notion that all events, including human actions, can be fully explained by the ineluctable interactions of matter in motion. Today, of course, there are elegant...