During the Catholic Counter-Reformation against Protestantism, the Catholic Church was searching deeply for something that gave the same sort of iconoclastic power and meaning as the Protestants had unearthed.
They found Caravaggio.
Caravaggio is a master. For the record, I like his paintings. I think he is a genius.
He was also a deeply disturbed man.
Wikipedia: Caravaggio –
“He gained attention in the art scene of Rome in 1600 with the success of his first public commissions, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and Calling of Saint Matthew. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success poorly. He was jailed on several occasions, vandalized his own apartment, and ultimately had a death sentence pronounced against him by the Pope after killing a young man, possibly unintentionally, on May 29, 1606.”
The only painting he ever signed his name to was the brilliant-but-horrific “Beheading of John the Baptist.”
Then there’s “Salome with the Head of John the Baptist” showing Herod’s daughter receiving the decapitated head.
And “David with the Head of Goliath” and – umm – you get the idea.
The thing is, there are probably always people with the raw talent of Caravaggio and the accompanying internal torment – the question is, does society bless and support and patronize this sort of thing?
During most times, no.
During crisis, often yes.
***
A BAD JOKE: THE NATURE OF ART AND THE ASCENT OF UGLINESS
Pablo Picasso is one of the most skilled and industrious artists of all-time. He was also deeply tormented and a hell of a mess as a human being.
I also, personally, think he’s incredibly overrated.
(A common rebuttal to that from open-minded people: “Picasso overrated? How can you say that? He might be the most talented artist of all-time… oh wait, I see what you mean.”)
Now, before getting into Picasso, I’ll throw my hat into the “What is art?” discussion. My definition is rather functional and broad –
Art is anything designed to invoke emotion.
We can judge art, then, on two primary factors –
1. How well is it succeeding at the type of emotion it’s intending to invoke?
2. Do we find worthwhile the emotions the art is invoking?
(We can also evaluate for something like raw technical skill, if we want to, though that will largely be covered by #1.)
Picasso, we must say, succeeds marvelously at #1 and in raw technical skill – he’s as skilled of an artist as you’ll ever come across. His less-ugly work is certainly very beautiful, and in a more sane age, he might have made a masterpiece more along the lines of the Sistine Chapel than what the type of thing he eventually put himself in the service of.
Picasso painted his first major ugly breakthrough work before World War I – “The Brothel of Avignon.” Wikipedia –
“The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force." […] [The painting] was revolutionary and controversial, and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke…”
An innovative artist – Picasso – making an ugly and, umm, “revolutionary” painting… this is not such a strange thing, historically speaking.
What is strange is how famous Picasso became. It was only in the aftermath of World War I that he became a celebrity in his own lifetime.
After tragedies along the lines of Passchendale, people were looking for something – anything – to get themselves past it and through it. The Burden of Proof on Organizing Systems lowers tremendously following a large-scale crisis.
In this era of confusion and after tragedy, people were open to something – anything – different than what got them into the mess.
And hence, the “bad joke” style of art rose to prominence.
***
TRUETT’S FOUR TYPOLOGICAL WORLDVIEWS
Wikipedia: Postmodernism –
“More recently, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one of four typological world views, which he identifies as either (a) Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, (b) Scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry, (c) Social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization, or (d) Neo-Romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.”
If you buy into Truett’s definition – I’m not sure I do, but it seems possibly insightful – then what he calls “postmodern-ironist” didn’t start in the 1970’s, but started in the very late 1800’s and really came to the forefront after World War I.
Which brings us to Picasso and Stalin.
The Soviet Union, for as hard as it worked to export and cultivate postmodernism as sort of a “cultural hand grenade” to throw into rival societies, ruthlessly suppressed the same sort of artwork in its own society.
The Soviet commissars worked to cultivate hyper-traditional “socialist realist” art – grand, big, traditional paintings of heroic deeds of individual peasants and workers, and of course, of Lenin and Stalin.
We can say of Picasso, to his credit, that he was at least not a hack.
“The comical appearance of the youthful Stalin, with a bushy peasant-style moustache and thick, raised eyebrows which gave him a look of surprise, infuriated the leaders of the French Communist Party. They announced that they ‘categorically disapproved’ of the drawing, which was rebuked for failing to adhere to the heroic ideals of Socialist Realism.”
Indeed.
***
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
John Tolkien was born only nine years after Pablo Picasso; they both died the same year in 1973.
Similar culture forces and backdrops shaped their lives – Tolkien joined the British Expeditionary Force in 1916 to fight the Germans at The Somme.
He came down with trench fever quickly, and was hospitalized – the serious illness probably saving his life, as most of the members of his battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers were killed in action.
Later, when critics were looking for parallels in his famous work between Mordor and Nazi Germany, he’d write that this was not true; that the First World War was far more of a formative experience for him –
“One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
But after the Great War, he went in the opposite direction of Picasso – diving into scholarly work for the Oxford English Encyclopedia, and studying, translating, and giving commentary on the ancient epic poem Beowulf.
In the coming decades, while Picasso is enjoying celebrity in the celebration of ugliness, Tolkien creates some of the most beautiful writing of the last hundred years – the children’s story, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again and, of course, The Lord of the Rings.
Famously, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Picasso’s horrific Guernica were released in the same year – 1937.
It’s striking that there can be two such radically different ways to synthesize and respond to tragedy and evil – Picasso revels in it, highlights it, perhaps quite literally drowns i
n it – whereas Tolkien overcomes it.
Picasso, of course, was the harbinger of that postmodern-ironist school, and Tolkien, perhaps the finest elaborator of the traditional and romantic ways of thinking and feeling.
***
GUIDANCE
Which brings us to guidance. Again, in the Dubious Battle series, there are less right and wrong answers – and more tradeoffs.
Here a few statements that I believe are true –
1. Organizing principles of society are robust, do not get questioned, and do not change often in normal times. In order to change organizing principles in normal times, another set of organizing principles must be much better – perhaps 10x better – which is almost impossible to achieve, given the natural sets of tradeoffs between organizing principles.
2. Organizing principles are further reinforced by confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and the emotional switching costs of changing them.
3. During a crisis, or after a great tragedy, the landscape opens to new and different forms of organizing principles.
Guidance, then –
Every set of organizing principles has tradeoffs associated with them. The Tolkien-esque “good can overcome” philosophy might be naive or might not allow for enough questioning and forwards movement.
The sheer ugliness and brutality of a Picasso-type philosophy has obvious disadvantages associated with them; need we even list them?
But on the other side of the equation, a Guernica-style philosophy can lead to a constant questioning and reinforcement. To Picasso’s credit, he applied his irascible and hostile-interrogation style of painting to his own side; he was no hack.
The real value as an individual, then, is to study the genealogy and the tradeoffs of the organizing principles you inherited.
To emphasize – you inherited most of your organizing principles, the same way that most people of the Philippines inherited Catholicism, and most people in Indonesia inherited Islam.
Likewise, there are certain blindspots and disadvantages in the inherited thinking of an average modern American, just the same as there were certain blindspots and disadvantages in thinking for an early 1900’s Brit; the same as there were for a mid-1900’s Russian or Frenchman.
These are all different tradeoffs, but the natural inclination is to repeatedly reinforce and voice aggressively for the ones you already have – such is the way that cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias work.
That’s even before even getting into the incredibly painful switching costs of changing how you see the world – it is, I assure you, no fun at all to think very differently from your core social circle, at least until you’re able to cultivate your own philosophy to a level of maturity and consistency that it outputs superior results, and becomes attractive to other people of good character.
So as an exercise, if you think you like Picasso, I might challenge you to stop and ask yourself: is that really true? If you evaluated Picasso from scratch, with neutral eyes, would you like his work?
I do not like it so much; I think Picasso is overrated, his work is ugly, and most of what he stands for is ugly. I admire some of his technical skill, and certainly admire his industriousness; I simply wish he’d put it better ends than he did.
But that is just my opinion on the great Spanish artist. You ought to form your own.
***
NEVERTHELESS, SOME VALUE IN EVERYTHING
And even if you don’t love Picasso, or indeed any specific type of organizing principles and philosophy, it’s worth studying the times they are effective and the tradeoffs associated with them. Switching from blind partisan love-and-hate of one particular philosophy to another seems to miss some of the point, at least.
Wikipedia: Guernica –
“A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica was displayed on the wall of the United Nations Building in New York City at the entrance to the Security Council room from 1985 to 2009. […] On 5 February 2003 a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work at the UN, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Some diplomats, however, in talks with journalists claimed that the Bush Administration pressured UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq. In a critique of the covering, columnist Alejandro Escalona hypothesized that Guernica's "unappealing ménage of mutilated bodies and distorted faces proved to be too strong for articulating to the world why the US was going to war in Iraq", while referring to the work as "an inconvenient masterpiece.””
Yeah, that’s legitimately hilarious – which, I suppose, was Pablo’s point after all.
Dubious Battle #4: Rank
EQUALITY IN RANK: A COMMUNIST PERSPECTIVE
In 1903, even the most wildly optimistic attendees of Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party could not have possibly imagined how much of the world they would control in 1953.
There was no hint at all that this ramshackle affair would eventually become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The Congress, with its 51 attendees, started in Brussels on 30 July 1903. A week into discussions, deliberations, and voting, the Belgium police threatened arrests, and they moved across the English Channel to the more tolerant London.
The settings bore no resemblance to the later grandeur and splendor of future Congresses after the establishment of the Soviet Union. No, indeed not –
“Their sessions were held in an angling club with fishing trophies on the walls and in rooms in pubs and cafes. The meetings were extremely fractious, with much violent argument, barracking and interminable hair-splitting as every tiny point was dissected and analysed.”
The most charismatic and forceful personalities at the Second Congress were Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov.
You no doubt have heard of Lenin; Martov, perhaps not.
Though the significance of it wasn’t recognized at the time, the largest thing to come out of the Second Congress was the split between Lenin and Martov over whether the RSDLP should be more inclusive or exclusive.
Here, let’s quote Lenin’s own recap of the event so it doesn’t seem like we’re mis-summarizing –
“The Congress was marked at the beginning by the peaceful and harmonious co-operation of all the [attendees]; there had always been different shades of opinion among them, of course, but they had never manifested themselves as political differences. Incidentally, let us state in advance that the split among the [Congress attendees] was one of the major political results of the Congress, and anyone who wants to acquaint himself with the matter should therefore pay special attention to all episodes even remotely connected with that split.
“One rather important event at the very beginning of the Congress was the election of the Bureau, or Presidium. Martov was for electing nine persons, who would select three from their number to act as the Bureau at each sitting, and he even suggested a Bundist as one of the nine. I [Lenin] was for electing only three persons for the whole duration of the Congress, and three, moreover, who would “keep order”.”
This minor trivial thing seems a harbinger of what’s to come. Lenin –
“We [Lenin and allies] argued that the concept Party member must be narrowed so as to separate those who worked from those who merely talked, to eliminate organisational chaos, to eliminate the monstrous and absurd possibility of there being organisations which consisted of Party members but which were not Party organisations, and so on. Martov stood for broadening the Party and spoke of a broad class movement needing a broad—i.e., diffuse— organisation, and so forth.”
Martov’s position was that anyone broadly under the “contro
l and direction” of any of the RSDLP should be included in deliberations and votes.
Lenin –
““Under the control and direction”, I [Lenin] said, would in practice mean nothing more nor less than without any control or direction.””
Originally, Lenin’s camp was in the minority – and the Congress attendees voted as such. But eventually, on somewhat unrelated questions, a number of delegates grew discontent and left the Congress. Eventually, Lenin called for a re-vote, and this time his side carried the day – the official line, according to those voting, would be for a more professionalized and exclusive revolutionary core.
Lenin’s camp named themselves the “Bolsheviks” – it literally translates to “one of the majority” in Russian. Martov’s camp came to be called the “Mensheviks” – “one of the minority” – despite being actually the majority most of the time.
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