22.

BABBLERS,
CYNICS,
CHARLATANS

Artist Salvador Dali once said that he had never ordered lobster in a restaurant and then been served a fried phone as a result. In other words, parts of life are fairly predictable – if you order lobster, that’s probably what you will get, just as next Wednesday will typically play out in a similar way to last Wednesday. However, there exists a minority of people who live in a world in which repetition is totally unacceptable - namely artists. In this profession, you are either innovative or you are nothing.

In 1990, a book with the intriguing title The Clockwork Muse: the predictability of Artistic Change was published. The author was psychology professor Colin Martindale, who for 20 years, had studied the history of art market. Based on advanced statistical methods he had shown that this followed a surprisingly predictable pattern, which he called The Law of Novelty.⁴⁸⁵ It goes like this: first, someone develops a new form of artistic expression. If this is successful, others develop variations of it. However, in order to attract attention, each new artist must find a somewhat more radical expression than the previous. Therefore, the new art form grows evermore strident, exaggerated or loud, and eventually it becomes so grotesque and decadent that the audience drops it and moves on to something entirely different, which will go through the same process.

Martindale mapped this phenomenon in the art world, and it also applies to other forms of creativity that do not serve a direct, measurable purpose such as philosophy, as we shall now see.

Social Text is a magazine published by Duke University Press which deals with social, cultural and philosophical topics. In 1996, its editorial committee received an article proposal submitted from physics professor Alan Sokal. This provided a long (35 pages when printed) philosophical investigation into the relationship between quantum physics and so-called postmodern philosophy.⁴⁸⁶ It contained many great flights of rhetoric, such as “the postmodern sciences deconstruct and transcend the Cartesian metaphysical distinctions between humankind and Nature, observer and observed, Subject and Object.”

The magazine’s editors really liked this article, so they decided to put it in a special issue of the magazine dedicated to the defence of postmodern philosophy and especially of “social constructivism”, which Sokal’s article exemplified so well.

They would later regret that, because as soon as the issue (and Sokal’s article) had been printed, Sokal announced, far and wide, that his article was actually designed to be a mere parody of postmodern philosophy - he had deliberately written the whole thing so it was totally meaningless babble. This was evidently rather funny, but it brought with it a lesson, which the critic Katha Pollit described rather well:

“The comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the post-modernists don’t really understand one another’s writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads.”⁴⁸⁷

Sokal was not the only one entering the murky pond. The philosophical superstar Ludwig Wittgenstein enchanted his fans with profundities such as” My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.”⁴⁸⁸

That was in 1922, and since then the fog has only thickened. Some modern philosophers have thus introduced a kind of non-realism, according to which experimental tests only tell us about the outcome of the relevant trial, but nothing about reality. For instance, the leading thinker of the social constructionist school Bruno Latour has told us that nature is a result of our own thoughts, which is why it would be meaningless to use its behaviour as a source of knowledge. In fact, one of his Seven Rules of Method sounds like this:

“Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome -- Nature -- to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.”

Perhaps we need to chew on that for a while, but once we are finished, we probably gather from it that experimental science doesn’t work. Enlightenment and science were illusions.

Many of the new philosophers have also rejected rationalism. For example, in his books Against Method and Farewell to Reason Paul Feuerabend argued against use of logic and science. Add to this “deconstruction “, which is popular among post-modern philosophers, and we realize we actually cannot know an objective reality. Everything is subjective, we learn here, and a statement is merely the results of language which, in turn, is a subjective social construct. Therefore, one cannot say, with certainty, that something is true.

Nor can one know whether something is good. To say, for instance, that freedom or love are positive values for all people, is called “totalizing” by deconstructionists and rejected in the strongest terms. So if you add all that up, it really isn’t easy to know anything much.

But we aren’t done yet. The so-called “relativists” tell us that any objective truth is culturally determined, which is why all cultures, in principle, may be equally worthy. Therefore, any given individual cannot really know anything about what is good or bad other than his own personal preferences.

All these anti-rational, anti-scientific theories are part of post-modern philosophy, which originated in France after World War II and has later spread throughout the West where it gained a significant foot-hold in many academic circles and beyond.

The philosophers’ strategy seem to be to serve meaningless twaddle as phrases and vocabulary so complex that even the keenest reader will hopefully give up and conclude that the writers are simply too clever to be understood. To make sure of this, the philosphers will often decorate their writing with seemingly learned references and analogies to, for example, Einstein, Gödel and Niels Bohr.

For Sokal, the record-holder for academic nonsense - at least within the single-sentence category - may be celebrated cultural theorist Paul Virillio. In his book L’Espace Critique, he delivered a sentence comprising193 French words, which when (with some difficulty) translated to English, starts like this:

“When depth of time replaces depths of sensible space; when the commutation of interface supplants the delimitation of surfaces; when transparency re-establishes appearances; then we begin to wonder whether that which we insist on calling space isn’t actually light, a subliminary, para-optical light of which sunlight is only one phase or reflection…”

Much, much later it ends with these words of wisdom:

”… transferred into the eternal present of a relativity whose topological and teleological thickness and depth belong to this final measuring instrument, this speed of light possesses one direction, which is both its size and dimension and which propagates itself at the same speed in all radial directions that measure the universe.”

“Universe”, it must be said, is pompous enough to be a quite popular word among post-modernist thinkers, together with incomprehensible stuff such as “fallogocentric, “multimodalities”, ““post-colonial others”, “intertextual” “hyper-contemporaneity” “spatialities”, “teletopic” , “derrideanism”, “commutation” and so on.

They don’t make things easy, and the general clouding and inherent contradictions of the postmodernist arguments are such that it gets really hard to define what it is, if you believe in it. Indeed, when Jacques Derrida, who is credited with developing “deconstructionism”, was once asked how he defined it, he answered:”I have no simple and formalisable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question”.⁴⁸⁹

Perhaps his problem was that the language you would need to use in order to explain it would be deconstructed by it, which is akin to the impossible concept of eating oneself. Among the most radical post-modern postulations are claims that we cannot be sure that there is a reality at all. Of course, if that claim is true, then we do not really exist, so perhaps we shouldn’t worry.

If “philosophers who can help us solve the world’s problem”s can be considered to be “the lobster the world’s citizens have ordered”, then one might argue that they were served “a fried phone” when the post-modernist philosophers turned up instead.

This doesn’t mean that all philosophers have been negative. In fact, the world has had many great philosophers such as the aforementioned Montesquieu, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Aquinas, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright and many others, all of whom had something important to say, tried to speak clearly and managed to change people’s minds for the better. As an excellent example of the latter (speaking clearly) we should include writer Hans Christian Andersen, who even managed to get his messages across in the form of entertaining fairy tales, such as the ever relevant story about The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Speaking of which: in September 2007, the English restaurant reviewer AA Gill of The Sunday Times visited an office of auction house Christie’s to ask if they would sell a portrait of Stalin for him, which he had previously bought for £200. They would not do this. However, Gill then asked if they would have sold the Stalin painting had it been by the post-modern artists Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst. They said they would have done. He then called Hirst, whom he knew, and asked if he would paint a red nose on the Stalin painting, to which Hirst agreed. The painting was subsequently sold for £140,000.

Evidently, Damien Hirst is a big name in the art business, which he had partly earned by creating installation art such as a series of 12 medicine cabinets and dead animals preserved in formaldehyde. The latter started when he bought a tiger shark for some £8,000 (approximately $12,000), after which he prepared it with formaldehyde, put it on display in a tank and called this “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. He then sold it to collector Charles Saatchi for £50,000, who later re-sold it to a hedge-fund manager for an amount rumoured to be $12 million.

Soon after, the shark began to rot. Hirst agreed to replace it, which, however, raised the question of whether this would still constitue the original work of art worth 12 million dollars worth, or would merely be a copy, which would make it worth closer to 12 thousand dollars worth - a dilemma that wasn’t reduced by Hirst also producing replica of the first work.

Such dilemmas were, in fact, common, because Hirst had an art factory, where, for instance, paint was poured onto a twisting spinning wheel over a canvas, which he would then sign. This raised a problem: had he been in the room when the wheel was spinning, or not? If not; could one still call the art work “Hirst”? Because if you couldn’t; what was it worth? Millions or thousands?

The value of such things are all in the eyes of the beholder, as a post-modern philosopher might have said, and this was illustrated by a simple experiment conducted in 1964 by Åke “Dacke” Axelsson, a journalist from Sweden’s Göteborgs-Tidningen. Axelsson exhibited some abstract paintings in an art gallery, claiming that they were by avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. These soon generated great acclaim, and a critic wrote:

“Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”⁴⁹⁰

Little did this critic know that the paintings were actually made by a four-year chimpanzee from Borås Zoo called Peter.

A similar incident occurred when the director of the National Arts Foundation Museum in Moritzburg was shown an abstract painting and thought was by the famous and award-winning painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay. In this case, the painter was the chimpanzee Gambhi.

THE POSTMODERN ARTIST PETER; ALSO CALLED PIERRE BRASSAU, AT WORK.⁴⁹¹

In 2011, scientists at Boston University asked 72 students of art or psychology to evaluate 30 pairs of abstract paintings in order to choose 1) which they preferred and 2) which they thought was technically better. In each comparison, one painting was by a very famous abstract painter such as Rothko or de Kooning and the other by a toddler, monkey, elephant, chimp or gorilla. Among art students, 37% of stated preferences were for the paintings by toddlers and animals, and among psychology students, works by animals and toddlers were preferred in 44 % of the cases. Works of toddlers and animals were given highest technical ratings in approx. 1/3rd of the pairings.⁴⁹²

People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for works by On Kawara, which are simply paintings of dates on a canvas, which the artist says never take more than two hours to paint. Or they pay $456,000 for a pile of blue and white candy by Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

The art world’s “new emperors” can apparently sell anything – and often for a fortune, such as $690,000 for a work by Jim Hofges, constituting a leather jacket thrown into a corner. The emperor’s new clothes really do spring to mind here, quite literally.

“They will buy what you fucking give them”, Hirst once explained, but it helps an artist’s reputation to be provocative. In 1997, the Royal Academy of Arts in London held an exhibition called “Sensation”, in which one of the main attractions was a giant portrait of a woman named Myra Hindley, an infamous murderess, sentenced to life imprisonment for helping her boyfriend, Ian Brady, kidnap and torture children in northwest England in the 1960s. Outside the exhibition, the desperate parents of the murdered children took part in demonstrations in an attempt to have the painting removed, which presumably just added to the artistic sensation. Inside the rooms, you could see various sliced-up animals exhibited in a formaldehyde solutions, portraits of people with rectums as mouths, a close-up of a bullet hole in a head and paintings with titles such as “Beautiful, kiss my fucking ass” or “Space Shit”, where the latter was decorated with faeces from an elephant. The award-winning artist behind the this (Chris Ofili) often sold these stool-images in so-called “Shit Sales”, and among his greatest hits was a depiction of The Madonna mixed with pornographic pictures and elephant faeces.

According to Martindale’s aforementioned Law of Novelty, this should continue until it cannot become any more ludicrous, although Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who sold his own faeces in cans to private collectors and public museums for staggering prices, already seem to have achieved this.

This is a world in which the brand matters infinitely more than the content, and where a vacuum cleaner or a urinal on a pedestal is considered as expressive as a Picasso or Rembrandt. Talking of urinals, there was actually an artist by the name of Duchamp, who exhibited just such a thing entitled “Fountain”, for which he won many awards and honours. However, this made the world’s most famous art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich to comment in an interview that:

“This century has been more influenced by scientific progress than artistic. In art, there is no parallel to the discovery of chromosomes. If you think of the deciphering of the genes and compares that to the enthusiasm for Duchamp, when he exhibited a urinal, the contrast becomes all too clear.”⁴⁹³

Many of the philosophers tell us that we cannot test anything, cannot know anything, should reject rationality and science, should never judge or compare anything, and for good measure also add that it is doubtful whether anything (including themselves) exist. Many of the post-modern artists and their followers tell us that what really counts is obscurity and a brand.

The commonality of both forms of post-modernism is rejection of the West for the fun of it - it is deliberate contempt of the Renaissance, enlightenment, science, rationality, logics, aesthetics and ethics. If people do not buy art for the actual emotional experience it brings, but instead for being seen as avant-garde, then we open the floodgate to charlatans and, yes, the emperor’s new clothes. And if we join the new philosophers in thinking that nothing can be known, nothing exists, and expression does not matter, everything is equally good, and our civilization is of no particular value.

With such attitudes, progress becomes impossible or undesirable. Scientists who have worked tirelessly around the clock to seek truth are no better than mystics and visionaries. Michelangelo, Newton and Niels Bohr were nothing. People, who gave their lives so that we may live in peace and freedom, were no better than others. Everything disappears in the anti-realist and anti-rational murky waters flanked by urinals on pedestals and faeces in cans. Eternally blinded by the newest fad, we try to dig our own graves. But it is all extremely modern, and that’s what counts.

The ancient Greeks had their cynics who rejected much of what was the greatest culture the world had ever seen. The medieval age saw an initial decline in the quality of its art that has been mirrored elsewhere through history, and the medieval church insisted for long that the Bible should deliberately be written in Latin only so that common people could not read it. It is safe to say that neither culture nor enlightenment always advances, and we should thus be prepared to question if what we hear or see really advances anything or not.