If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right.
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
William Baziotes, Cyclops, 1947, oil on canvas, Chicago Art Institute
The last post brought up a lot of threads, so we'll begin with a visual recap of the hijacking and corruption of the Arts in the West. This is very general - just a rough reinterpretation of the standard globalist timeline that better reflects reality. The small pictures are just symbols - little cues to call the broader conceptual field to mind.
The math is clear:
That's the rough sketch, anyhow. But the reality is that this is just a new look at the old timeline. History has also been distorted by top-down ideologies - this is why the Band has to spend several posts breaking down the difference between history and historiography. (For links to the four, click the link: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, coda. These can stand alone but work best in sequence).
M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands, 1948, lithograph, 28.2 × 33.2 cm
If history is the narrative that we tell about the past, the available data is the raw material and historiography the assumptions and theoretical guidelines that put the history together. Artistic autonomy is a historiographic issue. We know factually that critics declared art autonomous, but do we take it at face value and write history with it as the telos, or do we treat it as the self-serving falsehood that is is? Same raw data, different historiography.
Historiography, like most theory in the humanities, serves a globalist agenda, and has promoted a sea of objectively absurd variations on the myth of Progress. This is probably due to modern academics originating in the fake rationalism of the Enlightenment. Modernist culture is particularly susceptible to this because it was also based on a false faith in Progress.
We've seen how technological progress becomes teleological through the Enlightenment bait and switch. Notice how the arrows in these things point endlessly up, despite the world being finite. Where do they go? Incidentally, how does 'moving information with manufactured equipment' follow 'improvements in making things'?
New Zealand Communist Party Poster, 1940s
Now think about Marxism, which was supposedly the reaction - the "antithesis", to use its own canard - to the inequities of industrial capitalism. And how do all the metastases of Marxism define themselves?
How many times have you read or heard some variation on the story that capitalism and communism in their varying forms were the diametrically opposed offshoots of the Industrial Revolution? But if you look beneath the false dichotomy, you see both are acts of faith in empirically false notions of universal progress.
When you think about it for a moment, this is obvious - it's just that the repetition of the fake binary opposition has an almost hypnotic effect. This is sort of like how contrasting Nazism and Communism enough times persuaded people to see them as opposites rather than nationalist and globalist takes on authoritarian collectivism. As for Marx, we've already seen that his teleological historiography is ontologically incoherent and empirically false, and his concept of social development boils down to a misreading of Industrial Revolution upheaval. This can't be overstated - Marx offers a misrepresentation of current events as the culminating stage of universal human Progress. His "thought" is intellectually stillborn.
Fortunately, this Progress can be summed in a sequence of clear and distinct stages that conform to Hegel's absurd dialectic.
So the social predation of the Industrial Revolution isn't the malevolence and indifference of self-obsessed, power-seeking elites, its evolution! Progress.
But there's magic too - the elites and masses will
Graphic from a site that drips with the weird blend of midwitted worship of "authorities" and fervor that is typical of Marxist followers. The Band provides a synopsis for anyone uninterested in wading through a morass of melodramatic talking points.
This explains the inevitable slaughter - how else do you freeze history? You don't. You just kill anyone who attempts to improve their dismal condition until your perverse tyranny collapses under its own incompetence and depravity. So Marxist Progress is movement towards something that can't exist. It's fake.
Now think about Capitalist Progress. This graph resembles the human progress one from earlier in the post, with the suggestion that this will continue indefinitely. It would if it were the expression of a mathematical function. It isn't.
The reality is that we inhabit a finite world. Not in the dyscivic "green" fragile earth sense - if that were an actual danger, those spreading these tales would be leading very different lives - but mathematically. What we have is another manifestation of same core problem that gave us secular transcendence: not grasping the absolute difference between the finite and infinite. This distinction is underrated because we use infinity as a metaphor all the time for things that are huge but finite.
Now consider Capitalist Progress, where land and resource "growth" must have an upper mathematical limit no matter how large the world, but the medium used to represent the growth curve - a Cartesian plane - does not. The axes extend to infinity.
This magazine isn't a parody. At least, not a conscious one.
The only way that graphing progress isn't self-contradictory is as a graphic visualization of something that already happened in the past. It may even suggest a trend that will carry into the near future. But the graph as a format is based on infinite, consistent axes with a line expressing pure mathematical relationships. When you see a Cartesian plane, this infinite extension is implied even when not consciously recognized, casting a particular rhetorical shade. Capitalist progress is terrestrial, and therefore mathematically finite. The infinite extension of an equation-driven line is logically and empirically inapplicable, but a graph adds that background shading inherently. It is a subtle reassurance that something that can't continue indefinitely can.
Sound familiar?
Same fake god, different fake faces
True clarity is beyond our reach, but we can see more clearly if we avoid being distracted by superficial appearances. This is a point the Band hammers in the occult posts. There is a baseless metaphysics of Progress baked into the whole Modern socio-political spectrum. There are thinkers and critics that don't presume things are always getting better, but they are attacked or ignored in the culture institutions. This means that to untangle Modernist culture, we have to look on several levels: what was happening, what was claimed, and what was presented by ideologically-skewed historians.
This brings us to one of the most repulsive, inhuman, mindless, and pretentious developments in the history of the West - the avant-garde, or, more accurately, Dunning-Kruger in sub-culture form.
Cut through the fog of solipsism, wine and cats, and you will notice that the gushing source of this picture doesn't actually talk about any actually artistry. It's all emotional reaction to one interpretation of historical events triggered by an crude object. It's ideological, and promotes masturbatory virtue signaling, but doesn't correspond to any historical concept of Art.
Like most Modernist idiocies, the definition of avant-garde is blurry and can describe a general principle or a historical movement. The core idea is that it is the role of art to be on the vanguard or the cutting edge of the new, and bring about novelty by tearing down traditions. But the meaning is complicated by later interpretations.
Henri Matisse, The Young Sailor II, 1906, oil on canvas, 101.3 x 82.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The reality is that generations of artists did tear down the Western tradition, but a unified avant-garde movement was only identified after the fact. As we know from thinking about historiography, the assumptions that direct the writing of history have to be considered, since even the most responsible historians and critics are products of their circumstances.
Skewed historiography is worst when the there is an overt agenda. Then we are in the realm of rationalism, where human ideologies masquadering as universals override what evidence of material reality that is available. So first, we have to consider the historiography of the avant-garde. How do historians fit them into the larger narrative? This brings us back to the idea of the Arts as autonomous entities, because the avant-garde plays a role in that fiction that is a little different from what actually happened.
This is not surprising, because the idea of autonomous arts is an absurd anachronism that had systematically destroyed its metaphysical and traditional reason to exist. Read that sentence again. Fictional categories can be meaningful, but without grounding in reality, there is nothing to anchor them. They can be defined and redefined as whatever you want them to be. If Art had any external meaning, how could it be transformed into something utterly different in a generation or two?
It is incredibly important to distinguish between what happened and the stories historians tell. History is like any abstraction that simplifies and organizes to make sense of a complex data field. We have to deal with the facts as known and how these have been packaged and sold afterwards.
First, we have the typical bait and switch where something conditional is offered up as a universal. The "Modernism" in Art peddled by the historians is actually a localized Parisian phenomenon that took different forms as it metastasized through the the globalist controlled networks of "Western culture". Remember that fake categories can take any form that the inventors want, and the 20th century historians writing cultural histories all start with an assumption of Progress. We have to get to Modernism as the telos of the historical development, so period styles are cast on steps on the way.
Michelangelo, Pieta, 1498-99, St. Peter's, Vatican City
But Art was also contained a notion of genius in order to account for those beauties and profundities that are beyond the application of rules.
Michelangelo was seen as pushing forward because he achieved sublime beauty in a traditional medium of a sort that hadn't been seen. He accomplished something that was perceived as bringing uplifting nobility to the human spirit.
In other words, he accomplished something.
In order to be Progress, artistic development needs to be moving in a particular direction, which means someone has to be leading it. The role of historians and critics is to look back and pick or look around and anoint those leaders. Likewise, certain places are tapped as centers where evolutionary leaps took place. According to this story, Paris was the center of the autonomous Modern art world in the 19th century, so the things that happened there automatically become evolutionary stages of progress in the arts.
Édouard Joseph Dantan, A Corner of the Salon in 1880, 1880, oil on canvas, 97.2 x 130.2 cm, Private collection
The French Academy of the late 1800s is "the mainstream" while the individual rebellions against its authority are given evolutionary status. But how can something as particularly socially determined as the Academy's Salon exhibit be extrapolated to a universal notion of Art?
Once you accept this perspective, every circumstantial reaction to French Academic art can be interpreted as avant-garde. But let's look closer at this "progression". Remember the historiography of Progress is based on maintaining the fiction of endless "improvement" - historical trends on a Cartesian plane. By this account, the avant-garde is the leading edge of continual cultural change. Often reviled in their time, they are the unappreciated heralds of the new.
Think about that for a moment. Do you ever tire of the endless, mindless obsession with novelty in the West today? The next big thing? Disposable plastic crap? This is the logical outcome of materialist capitalist Progress. Since there is no goal - Progress doesn't exist - the movement is endless directionless churn that eventually consumes itself. Globalist culture is now at the point were novelty is nothing more than "new" spins on fluff. Empty pomp.
Paris Fashion Week and some cinematic "next" big things.
Collectivist Progress is also impossible and the outcome even worse - the destruction of peoples through privation and slaughter rather than the more gentle creation of Ideocracy through the lure of trinkets and moving pictures.
The Holodomor. That "the left" still exists is a strong argument for the existence of evil.
But why choose? The avant-garde spanned the whole destructive Progress spectrum, starting with "capitalist" Revolution Modernism then descending into Marxist barbarity. Let's have a look:
Édouard Manet, The Spanish Singer, 1860, oil on canvas, 147.3 x 114.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rough style and humble subject matter leads the charge against Academic standards. Manet isn't a bad painter, but his realism is disenchanted. Academic art had become stagnant and maudlin in some ways, but why couldn't the alternative be inspiring?
This is the Progress of Industrial Revolution Modernism: contemporary life as the only acceptable subject.
Claude Monet, Poplars on the Epte, 1891, oil on canvas, 81.8 x 81.3 cm, Scottish National Gallery
Impressionists lead the charge against Academies in general, organizing their own shows and developing a new way of painting. But they still painted the world and supported themselves through popular appeal.
Their realism was a fleeting impression of a scene - hence the name. But the implication became there is no "reality" - in the sense of timeless Academic forms. Just ignore the irony of freezing the "impression" in a physical painting worth hundreds of millions. Logic isn't the strong suit.
Paul Cézanne, Bay of Marseille, view from L'Estaque, circa 1885, oil on canvas, 80 x 99.6, Art Institute of Chicago
Post-Impression leads the charge against reality, making subjectivity and technique ends in themselves. For Cezanne, a "picture" is a collection of colored patches. The act of painting as painting is more important then creating beauty, inspiration,or insight.
The Essence of painting is just around the corner...
Pablo Picasso, 1911, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, oil on canvas, 61.3 x 50.5 cm (24 1/8 x 19 7/8 in.), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
There it is. We've now progressively destroyed the institutions, meaning, and appeal of art. In their place - fragments of color and line on a dingy surface.
The avant-garde is leading the way!
Also note how the Basque Picasso has suddenly become a leading French painter.
This story only makes sense within the context of an autonomous art world that mimics Modern Progress in other areas. Note how innovations that were specifically French precipitate an international Modernism that is detached from the nations of its practitioners. Note the parallel with international economics - the elites serve their interests over their nations'.
The first critics to theorize the existence of the avant-garde as an identifiable movement were Marxists. Their fake historiography let them notice something the fake autonomous Art World missed - an international art world is easy to weaponize against national cultures. What started as an attack on content restrictions within traditional cultural institutions morphed into an attack on culture altogether. In a couple of generations you devolve from the idea that the Academy should show some realistic subjects to critics praising odd marks on a surface.
This repugnant creature is Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential critics ever and, like Philip Johnson, a mortal enemy of Western culture.
Centralization of the art world is key. The public never chose, liked, or valued this art. The success is institutional - buoyed first by collector then government money and driven by "taste-makers" and gatekeepers - critics, academics, media, etc. When you see how art was so utterly co-opted and destroyed, you get a better insight into the situation with our culture today
Greenberg wrote an article called "Avant-garde and Kitsch" in 1939 that has become one of the seminal pillars of Modernism as presented to generations of readers and students by the well-funded institutions of culture and education. Without Greenberg, there is no Abstract Expressionism, but his example is more relevant as an illustration of how globalist subversion works. People always wonder how Modernism took over - why people's taste changed so radically that the "top" painter in France went from this to this in a few decades.
The answer is that it didn't. Monet became legitimately popular, and his enduring appeal has stood the test of time. The Modernists that followed were not. Picasso became wealthy and famous, but was a creation of elite money. The historiographic narrative controllers declared him an evolutionary step, the big collectors respond by bidding up his prices, and generations of authors and academics present this "what happened in art in modernity".
Greenberg's article was published in The Partisan Review, a Communist journal founded in New York in 1934, and a small-scale template for our current Neocon filth. It took a brief hiatus in 1936 before returning a year later with a new anti-Stalinist line. Sound familiar? The trick is to present "Communism" as monolithic, so that opposing the contemporary USSR is confused with being anti-Communist. This obscures the internal split between the internationalist Trotsky and the relatively more nationalistic Stalin that ended with the ruthless purging of the former. The Western Marxists are the internationalist diaspora - Trotsky was expunged in Mexico! - which is explains their pursuit of globalist totalitarianism and the erasure of peoples. Greenberg's screed is a template for cultural destruction, and the fact that hardly anyone read The Partisan Review is irrelevant. The right people did.
Don't think of Greenberg as caring about art as you instinctively understand it. Think of him as a content creator for the narrative controllers in the Art World to spin into History.
There is an element of internal coherence if you can suspend epistemological disbelief. He takes up a problem most famously formulated by Walter Benjamin, a human skidmark adored by the left and a central pillar of fake globalist culture history, who needs a few words for context. Benjamin gifted us with a proto-Postmodern historiography that viewed tradition as shattered, inaccessible fragments that can be repurposed however the historian sees fit. In an earlier post the Band pointed out how this is a prefiguration of the deconstructive canard that anything less then perfect clarity of knowledge the same as no knowledge at all. An edited bit on his political leanings is presented here.
His world view was Marxist class struggle as the universal substructure of reality. While critical of Marx' rigid teleological history, he retained the notion of moral historical progress in Marxist terms. This excerpt from On the Concept of History (1940, unpublished in his lifetime) captures Benjamin's irritating blend of poetic allusiveness over Marxist cant. Here, he asserts the spiritual in the material in universal terms (the sky of history), while crediting his fellow deceivers with a "secret" heliotropism.
That this poseur is a darling of the left says as much about their intellectual and moral character as his.
History is not unique. All our knowledge is provisional and subjectively filtered. We are working with incomplete understandings from the moment we become conscious. Fragmented information is the human condition. We navigate uncertainty to build communities and launch undertakings - the same applies when continually refining history to align with the existing evidence. Can we ever reach a perfect representation of what happened? Of course not - we weren't there. The point is that Benjamin's historiography authorizes rewriting the past at will, and his orientation was deeply anti-Western.
Benjamin identified photography as a key development in picture-making, but immediately drew the incorrect if self-serving conclusion that has become a central pillar of leftist culture theory. It is true that photos pretty much spelled the death-knell for genres of painting based on capturing accurate visual date, but Benjamin used it to claim that the fundamental nature of Art - which, we remember, doesn't actually exist - "changed". Original works of art have something called an "aura" based on their uniqueness, though this is never clearly defined because it does doesn't exist either.
Apologies to Benjamin Moore. It appears to be a good paint.
To put it more coherently than Benjamin, by producing perfect mechanical copies, photos reduce artworks to commodities by stripping them of their aura. But the entire argument is contingent on photos being indistinguishable from originals. The only way anyone can parrot this is if they are legitimately dim or sufficiently self-deluding that they will spew obvious nonsense to gain entry into some culture institution. But it did provide a way to infect culture with Marxism. The dreaded mechanical reproduction is an industrial process, if we take "industrial" as intoned with meaningful vacuity by Postmodern grad students.
"Profound" wallpaper. Ben's point is that seeing reproductions and originals are different, and if reproductions take over the people miss out. It's the faux poetic phrasing that's catnip to leftists, who make it "theory". The option to see reproductions somehow means that the experience of original artworks - that the copy was differentiated against categorically - can't exist.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503–06, oil on poplar, 77 × 53 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Reality - or more specifically the over 9 million annual visitors to the Louvre - would disagree.
This is how control works.
Step 1: False observation about auras by Philosopher's name
Step 2: Narrative creators transform into "history" and "theory" as needed - Auras become Discourse!
Step 3: Summaries of Discourse! uploaded to NPCs through culture and educational vectors as "the Arts".
Strp 4: NPCs internalize message even when queuing up at the Louvre
Read this paragraph with an eye for the sheer amount of absurdity that piles up here. Standardized industrial products had already been derided as inauthentic by Ruskin and his followers in the Arts and Crafts movement, since they were mass produced and not made by human hands. Marxism adds a pseudo-economic veneer by describing this relationship in terms of commodification. As an autonomous space, Art is theoretically resistant, but the loss of aura brings that to an end. Cultural Marxism - which Cultural Marxists claim doesn't exist - applies the notion of commodity relations to culture as a whole. It is economic, in that Marx' ravings are the heuristic, but the actual focus is in other areas like education, arts, and media.
Carol Isaak, Layers of Illusion, 2014
The strategy seems to be to layer the b.s. so deeply and on so many operant levels that there is no obvious point of attack. But it becomes the core narrative in culture and education institutions. Postmodernism uses a similar strategy - it's what necessitated the free-ranging empiricism of the Band as a counter.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, oil on canvas, 300 x 218 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris; The Little Shepherdess, 1889, oil on canvas, 158 x 89 cm, Private collection
Bouguereau, the most popular painter in 19th century France, was read out of history after Modernism. His pictures of "poor" young girls with come hither looks are creepy, given what we know about the treatment of children in "artistic" circles, but this isn't the reason for Modernist hostility. By painting pictures with a high degree of skill, he epitomized a traditional idea of what art should be.
It is easy to forget when looking at what you are told, but the Modernists were hated by the public. Their prominence today is entirely an artifact of globalist narrative control through centralized culture after the fact. Clement Greenberg writing in the tiny Partizan Review isn't the issue - it's Clement Greenberg as the darling of the New York collectors' scene and declared one of the most important critical voices of the 20th century in every book or class on the history of art.
Clement Greenberg speaking in 1961
Clem staring profoundly at some circles on a white rectangle.
The top picture just radiates the structured authoritarianism of the culture industries. The bottom one shows how absurdity is a key part of Modernist rhetoric. By the time you reach the point where this is "important" you've in too deep. You've invested too much personal credibility to call bullshit without feeling like an idiot, and that is akin to death for the sort of individual drawn to the secret truths of Modern art.
Remember, Greenberg was writing for a Trotskyite paper that magically became "anti-Soviet" - an earlier version of Neoconservatism - so he isn't likely to name-drop Marx or the like. His Marxism is in the structure. It's literally cultural in that it applies the principle of Marxist revolution to the realm of culture through commodification. Here, he's basically peddling reification, an idea pushed by Georg Lukács and developed by Theodor Adorno, a central figure in the Frankfurt School and a contagion vector for America. In simplest form, society is defined as the Capitalist principle of exchange reified, or made "real" in the many ways that a culture can be said to be real.
This is as good a summary as any of a key work in cultural Marxist canon. They aren't wrong to point out that modern commercial culture is hypnotic swill, but their model of social relations far to simple and their conclusions monstrous.
Stated plainly, this makes no sense, but is seems profound to second tier minds when hidden in clouds of opaque prose. After some hand waving, it is concluded that because all the things in our life are just reified empty commodities, people who find meaning in some aspect of "captitalist" societies are commodity fetishists. Your cherished memories are a false illusion - you're just fetishizing a transaction.
Collage inspired by Richard Hamilton. There is truth in Adorno's diagnisis that our environment is mediated. It's that the rest doesn't follow.
But see how it works? By declaring everything reified commodification, it all has to go. The avant-garde weren't barbarous atavists, they were fulfilling a moral purpose in attacking the false veneer of reification to set people free.
Greenberg's particular slime trail was bit of Satanic inversion with way more immediate influence than Benjamin. He weaves commodity fetishism, artistic autonomy, and authenticity together into a new concept of Art. He assumes Progress, and leaning Marxist, sets up a false dichotomy between kitch, or commodified mass culture, and avant-garde art led by Modernists into pure, self-referential abstraction. Only he cleverly flips the value system - for Marxists, the bourgouis Capitalists were the elites and the proletatiat the oppressed underclass. But Greenburg, like other Marxist critics, was a snob. For him, bourgois culture is empty commodified kitsch - a sugar high for the rubes to quickly forget. The avant-garde are the culture elite, visionaries that only the most discerning can appreciate.
Details of Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 and Fyodor Savvich Shurpin's Morning of Our Motherland, 1946-48
Political art is also kitsch. This somehow becomes an argument to destroy any vestige of cultural expression because of Stalinist painting and the existence of mass-produced ornaments. There is no argument.
This should have been impossible. The avant-garde werefringe. For this to take over culture, some unimaginable event would be needed to rock the Modern world to its core.
It may not be what you think...
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