A HEDONIST MANIFESTO THE POWER TO EXIST MICHEL
O N F R AY
ELEVEN
A Psychopathology of Art
Nihilist Negativity Contemporary art galleries often complacently exhibit nothing but the defects of our time. Why are we obligated to admire something on a pedestal that we would despise outside of the limited context of the artistic world (confines considered sacred these days, just as religious spaces were for so long)? How can we explain this kind of schizophrenia? We condemn liberal capitalism, criticize the domination of the market, and fight against American imperialism, while simultaneously adoring symbols, icons, and emblems produced by that very world we supposedly execrate. Following the old Aristotelian principle of catharsis, we try to distance ourselves from all the negativity through contemporary art, but we continue to harp on our century’s negativity without offering the slightest clues as to how we might extricate ourselves from it. Thus, official exhibition venues often serve as arenas for delighting in neuroses, psychoses, and other sad passions that shape
our civilization even as they torment the individual who experiences them. Our nihilist modernity, which is both commercial and liberal (these epithets being synonymous), is foolish in its use of objects, words, things, bodies, everything both immaterial and material. Nothing escapes the total domination of negativity: we hate the self, others, the flesh, the world, the real, images, and life. We celebrate hurt, feces, filth, autism, degradation, waste, infamy, blood, death, screaming, and the like. Very often, to hide the obvious brutality of these symptoms, the theoretical discourse on art appeals to arguments from authority as well as intimidating citations that encase the symptoms within a discourse. To do this, many preapproved philosophers and thinkers must legitimize the indigence of their intellectual ramblings, or even their complete lack of substantive content. It doesn’t matter if we end up taking interest in a piece of worthless plastic, so long as it is justified by a quotation from Deleuze, a phrase of Guattari, a reference to Baudrillard, an anecdote by Virilio, or, more common these days, a footnote by Sloterdijk. Take an aesthetic proposition that is hollow yet molded into the form of a body without organs, dressed with an old wet blanket embroidered with a disembodied flux, shod with the simulacrum’s clogs, and capped with the hat of empty angels; how could we fail to see it for what it is—a complete fraud? The king is naked, but the small tribe that constructs contemporary art—gallerists, journalists, specialists, paid chroniclers, affiliated pen-pushers, and the like—extols his genius and swoons over him. Despite his nudity, they wax on about the beauty of his array. Often, two or three passersby are contaminated and join the choir of abused abusers. Added to this terrorist application of legitimizing citations is the trope of personal pathologies transformed into crude objects of exhibition, without the burden of any kind of sublimation. The proposition of the artist’s pure and simple pathology as a self-sufficient object is worthless unless it is paradoxically preserved by an overcoming, which creates an object that is invested in by a third par-
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ty. Without aesthetic sublimation, neuroses are clinical symptoms, nothing more. Hysterical exhibitionism is not sufficient for creating an artistic moment. We know that craziness and schizophrenia can become paradigms in an ill era, but we cannot accept a new norm that turns the resident of a mental hospital into the apotheosis of contemporary reason. Hölderlin’s, Nietzsche’s, and Artaud’s insanity interrupted their work. It required much of their biographies to be bracketed. However, it does not constitute their final word, method, or truth. Egotism, autism (egautism), narcissistic solipsism, glossolalia, verbigeration, deliberate refusal to communicate with others, not taking care of our bodies—we are deluded to take these as positive models.
Platonism’s Permanence Oddly, Duchamp’s revolution did not slough off the Platonic tropes of the Idea, the Concept, and the Intelligible. It actually recycled them. How so? One would think that such a revolution of artistic media would cause a rematerialization of art by not celebrating the transcendent, but that was not the case. The Concept is still king, and not just of the realm of conceptual art. Far too often, we consider the body to be something that impedes us on the path to truth, rather than considering it to be something that helps us make sense of things. In almost every kind of aesthetic product, the Idea takes precedence over its sensible incarnation, its concrete aspect. Kitsch is born from this situation and is the quintessential expression of its perversion. Kitsch sublimates an object that is trivial, banal, common, and vulgar, under the banner of some message that it is supposed to deliver. A porcelain menagerie from a discount store, varnished and colored with pigments of the primary spectrum, becomes, through the power of intellectual anointment, one of our era’s modalities of aesthetic truth. In fact, it betrays, like a mirror, the nihilism of this surgeon of contemporary art who recycles Duchamp’s merchandise.
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Intention takes priority over execution. The Concept is much more important than the percept; the virtual is more valuable than the real; and fiction is better than the material. To clarify Platonism’s permanence even more, just look at the way the Judeo-Christian model discredits the sensible body. It is a continuation of the religion of the Idea. It is troubled and embarrassed by the host of passions, impulses, desires, and vitalistic possibilities. The body’s pride must be beaten back. As an alternative, let’s celebrate the dreadful Passion, the blood of Christ, the swollen, fouled, corrupted, injured, and tortured flesh. Then the cadaver is displayed, exhibited, scrutinized, photographed, painted, and eaten. Scatological bodily waste (urine, excrement); physiological residual waste (pubic hair, locks, nails, blood); Pure Reason’s waste (glossolalia, screams, backslides, trances, neurotic scenes, psychotic theatrics); waste of living beings (decay, feces, corpses, guts, bones, human fat, limbs, garbage, dust); waste of the iconic real (interference, static, shattering, defiling, crumpling): all of these are the emblems of the nihilism of our time, visible for a long time now in all of our events, performances, photographs, and videos.
A Market-Religion On the long list of philosophies used for intellectual intimidation, we can include that of Guy Debord. His concept of the society of the spectacle was hijacked and adapted for all kinds of purposes. It allows people within the trading system to control criticism of the trading system. This discourse gives them legitimacy and good conscience while they collaborate with the market. By using this philosophical magic, they dismiss their activity as an epiphenomenon of market capitalism, which they clearly denounce and inveigh against, agreeing with the situationist1 in their cult book. Thus, the field of art often stages events that are subsequently appropriated by the advertising industry. This relationship begins with Andy Warhol’s Factory, which contributed to the aura America
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enjoyed during his era: Campbell’s soup cans, portraits of JFK or Nixon, Coca-Cola and electric chairs, the dollar, Elvis and Marilyn, and, of course, the American flag. This is the same way that Kings and Princes, Doges and Condottieres, Virgins and Christ encumber the history of art in order to please their sponsors.2 Nihilism and its plebiscite merchants reflect their time. Dialectically, these artists help shape the very era that constructs them. Their neuroses neuroticize the world. The world, in turn, neuroticizes them. What remain are the proofs, the testimonies, the results of this exchange. So many contemporary art installations resemble nothing more than supermarket products. The only difference is the section of the store: garden accessories, baby toys, do-it-yourself items, decorations, furniture, plastic dishes, clothes, and so on. The very consumer items that alienate people earning a minimum wage become icons worthy of our aesthetic prayers and genuflections. Just as with ancient subjects such as Kings, Christ, and so on, which many find alienating, but which we slavishly adore when treated aesthetically, we discover the ritual mysteries of this religion of merchandise. Today’s consumer item plays a role previously held by primitive religions’ statues, church paintings, and portraits of monarchs in castles. We organize idol cults around them, and they rule us. We venerate the very things that make life impossible for us; we give thanks to the ironhanded masters that control our bodies and souls. It is not surprising, then, that there is a clergy responsible for this religion of merchandise. These are gallerists, auction buyers, private collectors, specialized journalists, curators, collaborationist prescribers (authors of monographs, prefaces, directors of art collections), institution and foundation directors, and so on. The cult organizes itself with the helpful blessings and militant activity of this handful of people, all of whom know one another and set themselves up to maintain control over the field. The collective actions of this incestuous group consist in producing ratings and reputations, positioning this or that person into a dominant market position, and displacing someone once their profitability wanes. Value depends on confidence, faith—its etymology
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reflects its fiduciary value. And there is nothing better for creating faith than to declare one’s dogmas ex nihilo, capriciously, through fiat. This shows their performative power: the prescriber says something, and it is not because he speaks, but because he is a prescriber that what he says is true. Magic! How did this person, one fine day, become a prescriber? By publicly, visibly, and ostentatiously adopting the codes, practices, ways, and customs of this tiny world that embraces them after measuring their level of servility and verifying their usefulness to the smooth running of the commercial machine. In other words, by adhering to ritual, that is, by laughing when those in the field laugh, by vituperating with the same gregarious energy, by doubting when they doubt, by agreeing when those who are already in place agree. Of course, art has always come from a world outside of itself: the world of the prehistoric shaman; the world of powerful public figures (the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Persian King, Greek bouletai and prytanea, the Roman emperor, the popes of Western Christianity);3 and also the world of rich private property owners (Flemish capitalists, Venetian merchants, the Industrial Revolution’s bourgeoisie, and the fortunes generated today by multinational corporations). Each of these strove to celebrate their own values, the dominant values of their time. Thus, it is not surprising that a large part of contemporary art mirrors our broken era.
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