I see there’s been an impressive swelling of traffic to this site during the last few days. I’d like to think this sudden interest was a result of posts on PC bigotry or unhinged postmodern scholarship, or our high-minded discussion of the arts. I notice, however, that quite a few people are finding themselves here after Googling the word “blowjob.” (The phrase “Superhero Pornface” is also being Googled with surprising frequency.) Well, however you got here, welcome aboard.

With the artistic feats of Mr Delvoye and Ms Hines still fresh in our minds, I thought I’d share an extract from an essay by Stephen Hicks, titled Why Art Became Ugly. The essay is an examination of postmodern art, its origins, and its aesthetic and ideological shortcomings. In the following extract, Hicks notes the anhedonic tendency of many artists and their professed aversion to capitalism and any successful products of it. The relevance to recent posts is, I think, fairly obvious:

“There is the long-standing rule in modern art that one should never say anything kind about capitalism… German artist Hans Haacke’s Freedom is Now Simply Going to be Sponsored – Out of Petty Cash (1991) is [a] monumental example. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of brutality behind the Iron Curtain, Haacke erected a huge Mercedes-Benz logo atop a former East German guard tower. Men with guns previously occupied that tower – but Haacke suggests that all we are doing is replacing the rule of the Soviets with the equally heartless rule of the corporations…

We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets. We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and international Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated.

And entering even more exotic territory, if we knew only the contemporary art world we would never get a glimmer of the excitement in evolutionary psychology, Big Bang cosmology, genetic engineering, the beauty of fractal mathematics – and the awesome fact that humans are the kind of being that can do all those exciting things.” 

If the subject is of interest, I’d recommend making time to read the whole thing. Hicks’ book, Explaining Postmodernism, is also recommended. Feel free to rummage through the archive and browse the Greatest Hits. If you like what you find, approval can be expressed with the button below.