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The cover of What is Art?

Stanely Mushava Literature Today

Perfection of means and confusion of ends, the tragedy of modernity identified by Albert Einstein, is fermenting across contemporary art

The mainstream art of our time is provoking more reception than ever, thanks to wide-scale streaming protocols, but it is alarmingly bankrupt of ethical value.

Its mojo inheres not so much in matters of universal significance as it does in artificial allurements which are detached from the essence of life.

Purposelessness, eroticism and despondency are staking their claim as the dominant expressions in this contagion of decadence where sensuality assails every sensibility.

It is pertinent to underscore the influence of art as a cultural vehicle before we can understand the dangers portended by its perversion.
Art has a dual bearing on society as a portrait and a precipitant of cultural patterns in a set dispensation, transferable across space and time.

Mankind responds to art to an extent whereby endeavours to bend society to a particular course are often futile unless the conceived ideal is transmitted to others through the agency of art.

“Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them,” Leo Tolstoy explains in “What is Art?”
The story of art is the story of mankind in as much as art is a defining instrument in social engineering.

The problem which stares us in the face right now, however, is that art is in crisis. It is fast mutating from a conveyor of sincere emotions and positive values to a conduit of base instincts.

Art is now a burst sewer which inundates society with more decadence than can be moderated.
Whether the trends are informed by commercial angles or infectious memes replicating themselves from one text to another, it is clear that art is radically changing for the worse.

It is an open secret that nudity is the most important branding template for many empty artists.
Art is being configured to appeal to the lower nature instead of cultivating virtue and facilitating a better world.

When violence is flaunted instead of courage and sex is glorified instead of love, the governing memes falter out of touch with the spiritual needs of mankind.

If sex was the deepest essence of love, prostitutes would certainly rank higher than priests as examples of piety.
Yet artists slave around the “sex sells” mantra without considering that Midas’s touch of gold is also a touch of death.

In feeding the base instincts instead of awakening the spiritual verities of mankind, the art of our day fares far inferior to the creations of earlier generations, a fact universally certifiable.

The exclusively carnal depictions of mankind in the trending art may instantly flare viral and radiant but they always fade out with the ephemerality of cardboard flames.

Nobel laureate William Faulkner’s acceptance speech lashes out at the modern writer for writing “not of the heart but of the glands.”
Faulkner’s words carry greater relevance today than they did on original delivery not least because his fears have been realised hundredfold.

““Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” Faulkner faults a cosmic loss of purpose as the undoing of art.

“There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
“Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

“Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars,” Faulkner says.

A casual look at the sidewalk where erotically-themed pirated books, films and music are staple fare attest to the validity of Faulkner’s impassioned call.

The ethical deficit is appalling. What is more shocking is the starburst effect of the rotten fibre on society, especially the youths who often lack judgement.

Several times I have heard partying infants in my neighbourhood singing along to popular “tunes” which border on lurid sexual detail and deify drugs.

It needs not come as a surprise when the children act on these messages in real life because they will be merely withdrawing what art would have accumulated in their subconscious. A case in point is the arrest of hundreds of students for possession of marijuana — the holy weed idolised in their tunes.

Tolstoy’s translator, Aylmer Maude, recounts visiting a Muscovite art gallery and coming across a collection of pictures which represented scenes from the private cabinets of a lodge.

“Sexual indulgence was the chief subject of each picture . . . I could not let my attention dwell on them without ill effects . . . I ventured to suggest that the subject-matter of the pictures was objectionable.

“But my companion (who prided herself on being an artist) remarked with conscious superiority, that from an artist’s point of view the subject was of no consequence . . . Morality had nothing to do with art,” Maude recounts.

Maude points out a problem whereby the fear of being sidelined as narrow, ascetic or inartistic and losing artistic pleasures which those around us esteem demobilises the conscience and justifies compromise in the reception of art.

Desensitising art permeates our culture. Defenses for conservatism not only sound stoical but outdated notwithstanding their ethical merits.
Most writers now feel that their job is less than half-done if they do not unsettle readers with overtly sexual descriptions even if they do not add value to the narrative.

I am emboldened to reaffirm Tolstoy’s unequivocal warning in “What is Art?” in spite of the weight of resistance it elicited even back then.
“The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength,” Tolstoy remarks.

“And this is what people of our day and of our circle should understand in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art with which we are deluged…

“The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is it is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous,” Tolstoy points out.

To get around the problem, he suggests the rejection of that art which “transmits feelings incompatible with the religious perception of our time, feelings which do not but divide men” arguing that this insignificant and exclusive art does not merit the importance assigned to it.

W.B Yeats articulates the fatal detachment of the modern arena from matters that count in “Three Movements” where he characterises modern writers as fish on a dry shore.

Stanely Mushava blogs at afrospection.blogspot.com.