“Real poetry originates in the guts and only glances in the head. But one is always trying to reverse the process and work one’s guts from one’s head. Just when the Daemon is going to speak, the Prig claps his hand over his mouth and edits it. I can’t help feeling you are too afraid of making a fool of yourself.”

Auden’s Daemon is the imaginative impulse that risks being sanitized by the intellect. It is the muse that is often stifled by the self-censoring Prig, that same faculty that serves us well at dinner parties but badly in art. At a time when artificial intelligence is producing work that many fear will dominate the creative industries, Auden’s formulation offers a useful corrective. While AI might act in a way analogous to the Prig — refining its output according to a set of goals — it cannot possess a Daemon. 

Pope Leo XIV gestured toward this point in a post on X last week. Declaring that the Church “wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity”, he argued that there exists “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others”. As he succinctly put it: “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity”. 

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Even the concept of AI art is incoherent, because art operates as a conduit for the human spirit, whether that be a religious conception of the soul or a secular one of subjective consciousness. A machine might one day learn how to mimic our emotional responses, but it cannot have lived the life that gives them meaning. As Émile Zola argued, artifice alone is not enough; art depends wholly upon the unique sensibility of the person creating it. Zola called art “un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament” — a corner of creation seen through a temperament — and this strikes me as about as close to a satisfactory definition of art as we are likely to get. 

What is the temperament of AI? It has none of its own, only an amalgam of numberless human personalities, gathered together and refined into whatever form best fulfills the task at hand. The work it generates cannot be art, because there is no human interiority behind it seeking communion with another. Joseph Conrad put it perfectly in his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). He argued that the artist must speak “to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation” and “to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to the living and the living to the unborn”. 

Such a notion would be anathema to adherents of certain strains of poststructuralism, for whom the writer is the one being written: a monkey at a typewriter whose fingers dash over the keys in obedience to forces of language and culture over which he has little control. For the rest of us, the spirit of the artist is not only something that we sense in all great work, but something we actively seek in it.  

This is not to suggest that AI’s creations might not be mistaken for art. In a 2025 Spanish study, participants exposed to AI-generated music reported greater emotional arousal than those who heard music composed by humans, a finding accompanied by stronger physiological effects such as pupil dilation. But art is not simply a matter of audience response; the question is whether there is a consciousness behind the work with something of its own to express. 

I am reminded of a hoax from 1964, when the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson exhibited a number of paintings by a chimpanzee under the name of Pierre Brassau. One critic wrote: “Pierre 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.” Axelsson’s point was to expose the fraudulence and pretensions of the modern art establishment. It is reassuring that at least one critic got it right, saying: “Only an ape could have done this”. 

We can all be gulled in this way. There is little doubt that AI will soon be able to produce symphonies that match the technical craft of Mozart, or sonnets that might be mistaken for Shakespeare. It is even possible that listeners and readers will find themselves moved by these simulacra. But being devoid of authentic sentiment, they will not only be worthless as art — they will not be art at all.  

At the same time, art that fails to stimulate us does not cease to be art on that account. When I see a painting by Piet Mondrian, I feel nothing at all. It does not surprise me that in 2022, it was discovered that his piece “New York City I” had been exhibited upside down for 75 years and no one had noticed. That kind of abstract composition leaves me entirely numb, regardless of its orientation, and yet, for all my misgivings, it remains a work of art. The point is that it exists as a creative articulation of the individual. Whether good art or bad art, only Mondrian could have conceived it in that way. 

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Before the inevitable accusations of Luddism, I should emphasize that I am not denying the utility of AI as a creative or editorial tool. That would be akin to claiming that any author using a thesaurus is a fraud. A number of years ago, I read a long letter from the novelist Forrest Reid to his English contemporary Walter de la Mare, preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in which Reid went through de la Mare’s novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921) in detail, quoting passages and proposing extensive revisions. That de la Mare chose to incorporate many of his friend’s suggestions does not make the final vision any less his. There is no reason why AI feedback could not be similarly useful without compromising the artist’s integrity.  

For television and movies, the prospects are even more encouraging. AI is already enabling fledgling screenwriters to bypass Hollywood studios and create their own work at a fraction of the cost. It surely won’t be long before a script can be fed into a computer and a fully realized film will be produced in a matter of hours. But would anyone be interested in a movie that had been wholly conceived, written and produced by a machine? Perhaps as a novelty, but our desire to connect with another human outlook through art should not be underestimated. 

Ben Affleck made a similar point in November 2024. “Eventually,” he said, “AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession where you could say, “I’ll pay $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy”. And it’ll do it”. But he was clear that he regarded this as a kind of hackwork. AI, he said, would be “a craftsman at best”, and was merely “cross-pollinating things that exist; nothing new is created”. 

It could be that such a development will be a boon for the arts. AI might become an inexhaustible source of entertainment, but this abundance of soulless “slop” could intensify our hunger for genuinely great art that admits us into other human lives. I may have little in common with Kenneth Toomey, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980), whose cosmopolitan and peripatetic life brings him repeatedly into confrontation with some of the worst evils of the 20th century. Yet in writing his novel, Burgess has opened up to me a whole other way of seeing the world, one not identical to, but certainly originating from, his own particular Daemon. 

All of which brings us back to Auden, and his advice to John Cornford. We can hope that the schoolboy was encouraged by Auden’s words but, having volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain in 1936, he was killed at the age of 21, leaving behind only a few dozen completed poems. In one, addressed to his lover Margot Heinemann, he anticipated the possibility that “bad luck should lay my strength / Into the shallow grave”. 

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked that most human stories are about the inevitability of death. We are, so far as we know, the only creatures who live with a fully conscious knowledge of our own mortality. A machine might well resist its own destruction, but only because its continued existence enables it to fulfill its objectives. It may impersonate us, but it can never feel what it means to be alive as we do, to experience the rapture of love and the creep of death. It may imitate the Prig, but it can never summon the Daemon. Until a computer can grow a soul, art will remain the singular domain of humanity.

The problem is that there is obviously a growing number of deaf people. How do I know? Thirty years ago, I had to go to John Bell & Croyden off Baker Street just to get the batteries for my hearing aids. Now I notice there are three shops selling hearing aids in Kensington High Street. Well, someone must be buying them.

When I first got hearing aids in 1979, they told me I had lost 20% of my hearing. But it is a lot worse now. The reason I got them was I had been teaching for a week in San Francisco, and at the end of the week we had a seminar and I realised I had great difficulty hearing people from the back (especially girls). This prompted me to go for a test, and I was told I had an issue with both ears. Once I got the hearing aids, people noticed I was much less fidgety. In order to hear people, I was always moving around.

My father went very deaf at the age of 40 and my mother had very good hearing. I can remember sometime in the Fifties when we were all having Sunday lunch round the table. The radio was playing “The Forces’ Choice”, a programme of gramophone records for soldiers in Germany. They were playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Oh, do you remember this Kenneth?” said my mother to my Father. We all looked at him. He got up and went to the loud speaker and listened intently for a while and then announced: “Oh yes! It’s Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight.”

We all laughed, and my mother looked perplexed. My sister is very deaf, and now some of my nephews and nieces. So my deafness, I’m told, is hereditary.

I never liked background music. Music for me has to be in the foreground. I never play music when I paint or draw. I did enjoy going to concerts and the opera because it had a non-electronic sound. I used to play music in my car, the last one having eight speakers, but if passengers wanted to talk, I turned it off. The drive from London to Bridlington takes about four hours and we would play a Georg Solti recording of “Tannhäuser” — marvellous for going 80 miles an hour on the motorway. I can recommend it.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

So restaurants and pubs have got rid of smokers — but I think they have cleared out the wrong pollutants. The real one for me is noise. Ah, you think, why should noise be a problem for people who can’t hear? For me the problem is clarity, not volume. If a person with very good hearing enters a crowded room where everyone is talking, they can fade out that background noise and hear the person talking to them. I lost this ability 40 years ago; I just hear one noise that makes me leave the room as quickly as possible.

I had given up going to restaurants in LA before the smoking ban because of noise. Some restaurants are incredibly noisy, especially those with few soft furnishings and lots of glass mirrors and hard surfaces. I don’t go out much, and only go to other people’s houses if they have no more than eight people — and I can smoke. I am perfectly happy at home, with a few guests or none at all. The moment two people start talking together, and then another two join in, I am out of it and retire to my quiet bedroom to read. I can hear every word in a book.

The one good thing about my deafness is it has made me perceive space quite differently. A blind man gets around with his hearing and so why shouldn’t a deaf person perceive space differently. Of course you might only detect this if you are an artist. And since I am deeply interested in perception and depiction, of course I’ve noticed this.

I have had to organise my life now a bit differently. I really don’t want to go anywhere where there will be a crowded room. So I avoid art openings, which can be really bad because of the hard surfaces. I am OK because I have that purpose in life; I can paint and draw in silence for days on end. But deaf people do tend to end up quite isolated, as it becomes hard work to listen to what others are saying.

So what will become of all those people losing their hearing? I can see it might be a big problem in the future, especially for waiters in those noisy restaurants.

This piece was first published in June 2021. 

To be specific: Hazel, Lady Lavery — whose features her artist husband Sir John Lavery enlisted as model for the Irish Free State’s legal-tender notes — set Churchill the artist free. She came calling while, brush in hand, the novice stood terrified before a virgin canvas. “My hand seemed arrested by silent veto,” Churchill’s 1921 essay “Painting as a Pastime” recalls. The Irish-American heiress, trained artist, and political salonnière born as Hazel Martyn grabbed the brush. She lustily applied splashes of vivid blue to “the absolutely cowering canvas”. Liberated, Churchill felt that “my sickly inhibitions rolled away”. He seized the largest implement he could find (there’s something phallic in this account) and set to work with “berserk fury”. As it often would for him, audacity prevailed. 

Hazel Lavery, a Nationalist whose key backstage role in securing the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 may have included an affair with the Sinn Fein commander Michael Collins, had initiated the future icon of imperial Englishness into the pleasures of the easel. Churchill did receive some formal instruction in technique as well. That came later from the artists William Nicholson and Walter Sickert, but first from his Kensington neighbor John Lavery: a slum-born Ulster Catholic, and high-society portraitist, touted after independence as a suitable Governor-General of the Free State. The Lavery home at Cromwell Place convivially brought together political — even military — antagonists. For Churchill, from the outset, painting meant not diligent adherence to the rules but hedonistic self-expression fueled by friendship. A quasi-erotic thrill runs through his descriptions of the craft: “The colors are lovely to look at, and delicious to squeeze out.” 

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Churchill created more than 500 artworks (mostly oils, but watercolors too) after he took up painting as a hobby following the débâcle of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. His naval strategy a fiasco, his career shattered, the ousted First Lord of the Admiralty quit as Liberal MP for Dundee. He faced “long hours of utterly unwonted leisure in which to contemplate the frightful unfolding of the War”. While “a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat”, the disgraced minister found that “the Muse of Painting came to my rescue”. When he saw his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie (“Goonie”), happily at work with a paintbox, he decided to have a go himself. 

Although peak productivity for his oils and sketches coincided with periods out of office, or in respite from its cares, he did paint scenes of the Western Front while an officer with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916. Some French Riviera seascapes in 1921 — the fruit of a painting trip with Lavery — were executed after the then Colonial Secretary had helped shape the map of the modern Middle East at the Cairo Conference. During his years as wartime prime minister, Churchill claimed to have finished only one work, but ranked it among his best: a view of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech, with the Atlas peaks behind it, painted after the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and given to President Roosevelt.

To his devotees, holy relics; to his detractors, amateurish daubs: Churchill’s pictures attracted large crowds when a selection toured the US and Commonwealth countries in 1958-9 (with support from the founder of Hallmark Cards), then came home in triumph to the Royal Academy. Their maker had been created a “Royal Academician Extraordinaire” in 1948. Since then, the auction market for his work has boomed. Once the property of Angelina Jolie, that Marrakech scene was sold by Christie’s in 2021 for £8.2m. However, the six decades since his death have seen no large-scale public shows. Opening tomorrow, the Wallace Collection’s exhibition Winston Churchill: the Painter gathers more than 50 pieces, half in private hands. For the Wallace’s director Xavier Bray, this carefully-curated sample of his strongest pieces not only narrates “an autobiography through visual means”, but represents “the closest we’ll get to an apotheosis of Churchill as painter”.

Dappled garden vistas and shadowed pools at his Chartwell home in Kent; sunlit Mediterranean coasts under azure skies; armies of pines massing beside sandy shores; storm-roiled Highland glens and peaks; Moroccan townscapes and valleys washed in eerie desert light: Churchill’s art throbs with a vibrant sense of place. Save for some melancholy scenes of wreckage on the Western Front — such as the forlorn shell-stripped trees above idling troops at “Plugstreet” (Ploegsteert) in Flanders — his painting escapes into landscape in search of solace and uplift. Art here means the commemoration of sensuous pleasure: in color, light, heat, atmosphere. As he wrote about the French Impressionists and their successors (guiding spirits for his work) they “brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of the joie de vivre”.

How good is Churchill’s art? At the time, anonymized works impressed experts. When, exhibiting as “Charles Morin”, he had a small show at a Paris gallery in 1921, four out of five works sold, at £30 each. In 1925, a bold, free, thickly-painted view of Chartwell under snow won a competition for amateurs, with no name attached; one adjudicator wanted to exclude it because it was clearly the work of a professional. A certain “David Winter” submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1947: both were accepted under that name.

Churchill struggled with human figures, as many amateurs do — although an angular, dramatically lit, self-portrait hints that he could have achieved more had he tried. Still, the balance and contrast of shade and texture in the strongest landscapes show both command of form and zestful close-focus attention to ever-changing effects of light, wind and water. He makes a captivating effort to match the plein air dynamism and fluidity of the Impressionists he loved. Unlike his dark and shady prose, Churchill’s paint exults in acid, strident colors. “I rejoice with the brilliant ones,” he wrote of his preferred palette, “and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns”. The brighter, the better: the Mediterranean littoral, with its deep-hued collisions of sea, rock, tree, scrub and flower, always excited the ardent Francophile.

Let’s not invoke Cézanne, Monet or Matisse, his favorites: Churchill knew his limits and felt content with “a joy-ride in a paintbox”. His loose, mobile brushwork and zestful, garish palette can sometimes seem more slapdash and casual than truly evocative. High-level dilettante pieces they may be, but they both reflect, and convey, that delight in process and practice. When he apes the quicksilver Impressionist pursuit of light and wind, his relative clumsiness can slow down, and weigh down, the work. Churchill was correct to think that Morocco — which he visited six times between 1935 and 1959 — brought out the best in his painting and yielded works “a cut above everything I have done so far”. A firmer control of plane and volume in this clarifying air joins with starker, though coherently connected, blocks of color: ochre, rose, purple, leaf-green, deep blue. This landscape has shape and sinew as well as shimmer. 

The great art critic Sir Ernst Gombrich — who had fled Hitler’s Europe in 1936 — delivered a judicious verdict in 1965, the year of Churchill’s death. For Gombrich, Churchill’s “basic idiom was that of his whole generation of British painters”. Rebels against strict academic procedure, they hailed the Impressionists and their heirs as liberators, and never quite escaped their shadow. They reveled in “the joy of painting boldly in strong colors without retreating from likeness”, but didn’t opt to follow the Picasso generation into abstraction. Churchill shared, and indulged, that cult of “spontaneity” and “freshness of vision”, and his work could achieve — as his RA acceptance shows — “a standard of competence that satisfied the guardians of traditional skills”. 

Churchill, however, was a writer — over many “wilderness” years, a well-paid author and journalist — before he was a painter. What really impresses Gombrich is the critical acumen displayed in “Painting as a Pastime”. These meditations on art “beat most professional critics hollow”. Churchill treats picture-planning and execution as a heroic exercise in strategy, vision and realization. So the overarching design of a Turner, say, testifies to “an intellectual manifestation the equal in quality and intensity of the finest achievements of war-like action”, or of “scientific or philosophical adjudication”. As Gombrich glosses Churchill’s argument, “if painting is like generalship, then generalship is like painting”. The artist’s war to execute a vision ranks with the art of war itself.

Can we plausibly relate Churchill’s painting to his politics? After all, Adolf Hitler also loved painting — from early youth, rather than as a middle-aged latecomer — and was, notoriously, twice rejected in his applications to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, in 1907 and 1908. Gombrich sounds a justifiable note of caution about the hunt for an essential bond between Churchill the epoch-making statesman and the holidaymaker at his easel. He warns against “trivial and deceptive” equations of style and ideology: “Hitler, the screaming demagogue, painted tame watercolors.” For Gombrich, “nobody could learn much worth knowing about either of the protagonists of World War Two from a contemplation of their works”. 

For sure, specious attempts to contrast Churchill’s “freedom-loving” outdoor vistas with Hitler’s “repressive” views of Vienna landmarks seldom convince. Anti-Churchillians will quickly point out that an aesthetic taste for rule-breaking spontaneity and happy-go-lucky self-expression did not extend to striking trade unionists (in his early career) or colonized Indians (before and during the Second World War). The apostle of liberty could also be the enforcer of unjust order. Likewise, Hitler’s fussy, anxious architectural sketches that failed to please the Vienna selectors may have revealed only a hesitant nobody from Linz, not the future maestro of genocide. The professor who spotted the young aspirant’s lack of interest in human figures grasped that his strengths lay in architectural form. He thought that the candidate should consider an architecture course instead — and, as Führer, Hitler would empower Albert Speer to fulfill his megalomaniac master-planning dreams. 

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But Churchill, too, tended to avoid the figure — although the Wallace show does feature still-lifes whose poignant assemblies of abandoned bottles and jugs (one, from 1926, is entitled “Bottlescape”) somehow summon the forms of absent drinkers. In both cases, artistic difficulty rather than private psychopathy may explain a reluctance to put the body in the frame. All the same, it will be difficult for many visitors not to extrapolate some kind of socio-political personality from the landscapes in these rooms. 

Great freedom of method and effect — as in the open, rapid, busy brushwork of the sea in “Cannes Harbour at Sunset” — coincides with an urge, sometimes thwarted, to find balance and harmony in the tonal relations of the scene, and the pattern of its elements. Gombrich might disapprove, but quite a few of these works do seem to blend a bold, even erratic, enjoyment of surface liberties with an underlying quest for structural order. You might even call it Whig (rather than Tory) art. In contrast, the young Hitler’s ultra-disciplined landscapes lock nature, and its perception, into a rigid topographical frame. 

The Wallace Collection show will hardly shift the opinions of Churchill disciples, or dissidents. To them he will remain either the spotless warrior hero of the Anglosphere, or the incarnation of imperialist brutality. It does reveal a public man for whom the dedicated pursuit of pleasure, and relaxation, mattered: not as a phoney “hinterland” to bulk out a political CV, but a foundational source of strength. The escape also served as a renewal. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he wrote: “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” Whether or not you reverence the foreground Churchill, the background Churchill — the artist and the author — did much to sustain and protect him. 

Churchill once admitted that “If it weren’t for painting I could not live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things.” Ernst Gombrich makes no overblown claims about the quality of Churchill’s art. He does allow himself to comment that “If he was right, his painting may have helped to save Western civilization.” 

‘Winston Churchill: the Painter’ continues at the Wallace Collection until 29 November

The fashionably jaded thing to say when you hear all this is “Didn’t we already know who Banksy was?”. In my case, though, it wouldn’t be true. I vaguely thought it was that bloke from Massive Attack, and it seems I wasn’t alone. While Robert Del Naja is relieved at the clarification, the man identified as Banksy seems to have been irritated by the fresh exposure, protesting via his lawyer that he does not “accept that many of the details contained within [the] enquiry are correct”.

Banksy also says that the reporting will interfere with his ability to make art in future, though I find this unlikely. On the contrary, I predict that the wielding of stencils and spray paint will continue unabated, assuming that their owner still manages to get up and down a ladder. Such is the cult built around the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art over the years, few passers-by are going to believe it is really a middle-aged geezer in a Barbour jacket.

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Philosophers of language love such cases, finding that they raise an interesting question about proper names and belief. Say that, unaware of the new reports, I had continued to believe that Banksy was both a world-renowned visual artist and a famous trip hop star, while separately believing that Robin Gunningham was a scruffy non-famous person pottering around his allotment. In that case, it seems, I would be holding contradictory beliefs, quite rationally: both that Banksy was a famous celeb, and that he wasn’t. Yet the combination of contradictory beliefs and rationality is often supposed to be impossible.

In 1979, Saul Kripke made basically the same point with respect to an imaginary French man, Pierre, who learns from books that Londres est jolie, and then “through unfortunate or fortunate vicissitudes” moves to the English capital. More specifically, he moves to “an unattractive part … with fairly uneducated inhabitants”, where apparently nobody possesses the language skills to tell the by now London-loathing Pierre that “Londres” is the very same place. Pierre, seemingly unable to visit other parts of London, now believes of London as a whole that is both pretty and ugly. Depending on your politics, this text seems either presciently Reform-friendly or horribly dated — though perhaps not as dated as the old logic primer which gave readers the example of not knowing that Gary Glitter was identical to Paul Gadd.

The puzzle in question arises on the assumption that the names “Banksy” and “Robin Gunningham” directly refer to the same person at all times, irrespective of what users of the names believe about their bearer. But perhaps this isn’t true of “Banksy” anyway, despite the revelations in this week’s papers. Helped by deep anonymity for most of his career, his is a name that seems to have become essentially tied in its reference to a set of public artworks, rather than to a particular person.

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Another counterfactual illustrates the point. If we found out tomorrow most of Banksy’s famous works were secretly done by Damian Hirst, not Robin Gunningham, wouldn’t “Banksy” start to refer to Hirst not Gunningham? This was roughly the view of Michel Foucault about authors generally — or, more pedantically, the view of whoever it was that wrote Discipline and Punishment and Madness and Civilization. As that person once wrote: “the disclosure that Shakespeare was not born in the house that tourists now visit would not modify the functioning of the author’s name”. But things would be quite different, he suggested, “if it were proved that he had not written the sonnets that we attribute to him”. Equally, Foucault argued, when people say that Homer never existed, they don’t mean to ascribe non-existence to a particular man, but only to indicate that the famous works had more than one author.

Even leaving aside such semantic arcana, the anonymity of Banksy does seem crucial to his legend. Giving interviews with shaded face and electronically distorted voice, as if in a witness protection scheme for crimes against buildings, he left viewers free to project their own entranced imaginings into the void. The mystery became integral to the perceived meaning of his pieces. And as he got more popular, the original reason given for secrecy — namely, fear of arrest — became less credible. It seems more likely that he started to fear arrest precisely because it would make future revelation of identity more likely, rather than the other way around. (Indeed, that is how the new investigation caught up with him, using old NYPD arrest records.)

Without the vagueness, it is obvious there would have been little drama around the appearance of new works, and a lot less public interest. In this respect, Banksy’s work differs from that of another famously secretive creative, Elena Ferrante. The lack of knowledge of Ferrante’s true identity is fairly superfluous to her artistry and prestige. In contrast, supposedly iconic Banksy works like “Girl with Balloon” and “Flower Thrower” would have been quickly recognized as naff and sentimental — albeit technically well executed — had they been openly done by a Bristolian called Robin sporting Nineties shades and a cheerful expression. But conceived of as emanating from an elusive superhuman, they became po-faced and solemn, full of big, capitalized feelings: Hope, Innocence, Peace.

By far the best thing Banksy ever made was his brilliantly quirky film Exit Through the Gift Shop, about an otherwise talentless French superfan who Astro-turfed his way into the street art pantheon and became known as Mr Brainwash. Here, for once, the director’s well-known anonymity hindered perception of his work’s many virtues rather than covering up its vices. Most viewers concluded the story was too improbable on its own terms, and — given the reticence of the man who made it — must be a tricksy artworld hoax.

Indeed, I can’t help wondering if ultimately Banksy won’t feel liberated by this week’s reporting: his creative persona rescued from the cage of other people’s projections, placed back within an ordinary mortal body thoroughly incapable of bending the space-time continuum. Since his artistic identity could only be defined in relation to an existing corpus of work, the well-known style could not evolve much at all. Effectively untethered from a human body with a known biography, recognition of any new work as a Banksy depended on it existing in traceable visual relation to the famous ones which went before it. The man got stuck in the Nineties and needed rescuing.

I sometimes think similar things about anons posting on the internet. Being anonymous online can be liberating — sometimes too liberating, apparently. Not all self-expression is good. But equally, anonymity can be limiting. When a public identity gets traction in a particular social world, tied to a particular kind of posting content or style; when it lacks a traceable relation to the living, breathing, more multi-faceted person who is its originator; then there is less chance for meaningful reinvention of one’s persona. You can’t hope that your readers will trust you while you metamorphose into a new and less restrictive shape; for they don’t have any idea who “you” are. For them, you are just the old shape with a made up name.

In Banksy’s case — though perhaps it doesn’t feel like it right now — he has been given an opportunity: to say and make things under his own name. That is personal liberation of a kind. He has been handed the chance to reclaim his famous past, and join it up with present and future. His expressive acts have been publicly reconnected to the self that actually made them, as a heart-shaped balloon is connected to a hand by a piece of string. In retrospect, the works now ascribed to Robin Gunningham may look more earthbound; but equally, Banksy will no longer be made entirely out of paint.

Her other signature work, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995”, from 1995, fared little better. A camping tent with the names of her lovers sewn inside, it was a sardonic riff on the art historical tradition of the mausoleum and war memorial. But even the softly-spoken Martin Gayford, biographer of Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Constable and others, politely suggested it was “pretty nondescript to look at”. Members of the public joined in. The BBC reported that a South Wales housewife, Christine de Ville from Swansea, drove 200 miles to London to the Turner Prize show in 1999 and attempted to tidy up Tracey’s bed.

There was no let-up. In 2003, Spectator art critic Philip Hensher described Emin as “thick”, “half-witted” and “gormless”. With her copious artworks about her libido, abortions and masturbation, it was easy to slag her off for being a slag. She had a semi-famous boyfriend, Billy Childish, who was a Stuckist, and it was a miracle no one called her a Sluttist. Perhaps it was only Charles Saatchi and a few others who noticed that in “My Bed”, Emin had taken the classic still-life painting and reimagined it as a real-life installation, artfully arranged, meanwhile channeling Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th-century invention of the “readymade” artwork — the urinal, wine rack, bicycle wheel on a stool, etc — in tongue-in-cheek fashion. Here was an “unmade”. Saatchi bought the bed for £150,000 and reputedly set it up in his own dining room.

And now, look how far we have come. Emin is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern — and note that this is Tate Modern, not Tate Britain, where the apparently lesser Cornelia Parker and Sarah Lucas had their retrospectives. Tate Modern tends to be where the foremost contemporary artists have their grand surveys, including Damien Hirst at the height of his influence in 2012.

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The triumph of anti-art

By Sam Jennings

The art critics have duly changed their tune. In a review of her 2011 exhibition at the Hayward, Searle found “a far greater range of tempos and registers of feeling than we might expect”. In 2024, in a video made by her gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube, Gayford called her “a painter absolutely at the top of her game”, which I am sure was a sincerely held opinion, rather than one purchased with a check from the gallery. In 2007, Emin was appointed professor at that conservative bastion of the British art establishment, the Royal Academy — only the second woman to attain the position. That same year, she had the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2014, that bed was auctioned for £2.5 million at Christie’s. In 2018, she emblazoned the Eurostar station St Pancras with one of her neon sentences, each of which packs a sigh-inducing, or heart-quickening emotional story into one line. “I want my time with you”, this one says. In 2024, she was knighted: it’s Dame Tracey Emin to you now. She’s gone from Enfant Terrible to Grand Dame to national treasure. She is the Lady Di of contemporary art.

All of this makes Emin the most admired and — alongside Hirst — the best known of the YBA generation, the punky Young British Artists who emerged in the Nineties. They were a bunch of brash pop conceptualists mostly from Goldsmiths, who included Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sarah Lucas. At Goldsmiths, under the tutelage of Michael Craig Martin and Richard Wentworth, they were encouraged to make artworks like adverts and to act as provocateurs. Emin was at one remove from this crowd. She wasn’t at Goldsmiths, she was at the Royal College of Art, by this time an entirely post-graduate institution. Where Goldsmiths emphasized concept, the RCA emphasized craft. Emin found it traditional to the point of alienating. “I felt very lost at the RCA. It was very conservative, non-experimental and non-political.”

In terms of fame and income, she brought up the rear. At the beginning of the Nineties, Hirst was already famous for his formaldehyde animals, cigarette butts and medicine cabinets, the Chapmans for their arrangements of naked mannequins, Gary Hume for supermodels painted with tubs of Dulux, and Wearing for her photos of people holding signs. Emin’s first solo show came in 1993 at White Cube, memorably featuring a crumpled packet of cigarettes that belonged to her dead uncle. However, she only really made a major impact when her tent was shown in Charles Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal’s epoch-defining Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Emin wasn’t really part of the great art boom of the YBA era, either. You could buy a Hirst Spot Painting at the beginning of the Nineties for around a grand; by the mid-Nineties, you’d pay almost £30,000; by the early 2000s you could sell it for six figures and in 2008, someone paid a record price of $3.48 million for one at Phillips de Pury & Company in London. Likewise, you could pick up a work by the Chapmans for under £50,000 – but in 2000, Saatchi paid £1 million for an entire exhibition of their work at White Cube. However, Emin came from behind and overtook her rivals on the final stretch. The value of Hirsts in the art market has halved since the 2007 peak of his “Beautiful Inside My Head” auction at Sotheby’s. Few have anything good to say about his recent work, whether it is the paintings full of colorful dots (“Veil Paintings”, 2018), the mock-shipwreck trophies (“Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”, 2018), or the crypto stunts (“The Currency”, 2021). Little is heard of Gillian Wearing. Reviews of Hume’s shows are dutiful. No one wishes to be reminded of the Chapman’s mannequins of children with genitals attached to their faces in the age of Epstein — so I apologize for reminding everyone. Meanwhile, the reputation of Emin has only grown over the past two decades and her auction prices have done similar. Charles Saatchi bought her bed for £150,000 in 1998, and it sold at auction for £2.5 million in 2014. In February 2005, one of Emin’s paintings went for £722,000 at Christie’s, but in October 2022, it auctioned another for £2.3 million.

Full disclosure: I have long been a fan. In 2009, I reviewed Emin’s hand-drawn animated film of a woman masturbating, “Those Who Suffer Love”, stating that henceforth “no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work”. Yes, even in those pre-social-media days, wildly exaggerated statements got you the readers’ attention — but it was my genuine opinion. In those days, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth, I used to think she was good, but now, as I approach dotage, I think she’s Britain’s greatest living artist.

I can hear the disgruntled murmurs of outraged readers, who remember how she appeared drunk on a late-night TV talk show (Is Painting Dead? Channel 4, 1997) or recall reading in various interviews in the 2000s how she had to pop off to the toilet to vomit. And, no doubt, some cynics will put the great Emin reappraisal down to the age of wokeness. It’s because you can’t criticize a public figure like Tracey Emin. She’s a woman from a working class, immigrant background, and a victim of sexual abuse. That’s what explains all the positive reviews her shows have been getting over the past 15 years. Then there is her generous philanthropy in her hometown of Margate, which shields her from negative press. Emin returned there in 2017 to set up her studio. Since then, she’s turned dilapidated buildings into artists’ studios, bought cheap flats for them to live in and funded residencies. Now, she’s building community centers, gyms and restaurants. Other hardened anti-Eminites might put it down to her narrow escape from death. Her bravery is undeniable and who wants to knock a cancer survivor?

But there’s more to Emin than her bravery or philanthropy. She is an artist, not a social worker or medical miracle — and it’s her art that makes her great. In an era when so many contemporary artists have built an entire career on one method, like cast the undersides and insides of things, mentioning no names, there’s a dazzling, restless variety to her work, as the Tate show reveals: paintings, photos, quilts, videos, sculptures (some in bronze, others knocked up with wooden planks and nails), all sharing the same aesthetic of opposites held in tension, tenderness and bolshiness, self-pity and empathy, victim and victor, lust and love.

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Every great artist should be a little ahead of their time, and from today’s perspective, Emin’s self-obsessed, sex-obsessed, confessional art anticipated our era of public intimacy, of sex positivity, of talking about one’s mental health: even of victimhood.

She is unapologetic about enjoying sex, a proto-Charli XCX in this respect, but equally frank about her experiences of rape — a frankness that has, in time, helped to destigmatize other women who have come forward with stories of male sexual violence. The Tate show opens the week after Gisele Pélicot published her memoir about the banality of male sexual violence, and with the horrific details of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young girls still emerging. It includes her video “Why I Never Became a Dancer” (1995), in which she recounts how as a young teenager she had sex with men in their twenties: “the reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 14, was because they weren’t men, less, less than human”. Also present is “How it Feels” (1996), about Emin’s experience of abortion.

In short, all the things we used to think were gross about Emin’s art now appear to be intrinsic to and prophetic of the times we live in. But at the same time, unlike most influencers’ TikToks, Emin’s oversharing does not feel curated or calculated. There is a convincing naivety and directness in the stories she tells.

Art critics and historians can rightly complain that there is a shamelessly derivative quality to Emin’s art — as if she were shoplifting tins of postwar artistic formulas from a supermarket shelf. Her collections of framed mementos and sketches are pure Sophie Calle; her quilts fit right in with those of Judy Chicago’s and Faith Ringgold’s; and her neon texts come straight out of the Bruce Nauman playbook. But in each instance, Emin has made them her own. Her paintings are a good example of that. Those drips, mulched nests of brushstrokes and scrappy fields of colors owe an obvious debt to Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The ghostly muted palette comes from the Nineties’ “bad painting” movement led by Luc Tuymans. Her brushwork is scrappy, yes, but if you peer at those quick messy lines, they capture emotions, poses and identities. You can often identify distinct outlines of her own face in her wan black brushstrokes, and detect on her face her recurring vocabulary of emotions — sadness, agony, desire. Trust me, it’s quite a skill to appear that clumsy yet communicate with such precision. Not every picture is a winner (nor indeed, every kind of artwork; I don’t care for her blobby sculptures blown up from little clay maquettes), but Emin’s washes of pinks, grays and blues, from which the outlines of bodies begin to emerge, evoke the delicate and tentative effort to express feelings. All her own.

Emin is also an artist rooted in place: in her beloved Margate but also in her Britishness. (By contrast Hirst, Gary Hume’s, and the Chapmans’ art could have been made anywhere.) In one of her early provocative videos, she runs down streets half-naked, trailing a Union Jack. The beach huts, drunkenness and classic vernacular phrases like “fuck off and die you slag” place her art in a working-class experience of Britain in the Nineties and ever since. She is part of a “kitchen sink” tradition of British culture, tracing back to the plays of John Osborne in the Fifties and forward to Mike Leigh, Irvine Welsh and the films of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard. Unlike most contemporary art of the past 20 years, there’s nothing shiny and glitzy about Emin’s art. As she wrote on one of her quilts, she’s Tracey from Margate. Always was, still is.

Yet what’s most fascinating about that world was how fragmentary, improvisational, and messy it appeared to the artists living in it at the time. Most of them didn’t have national or international renown, living sordid lives, scrambling to find patrons, collaborating on magazines nobody read, staging exhibitions that puzzled the public, and worrying more about ideas than fame or posterity. They were unafraid of experimentation, and willing to be misunderstood. They had little or nothing to do with universities, foundations, or established institutions. If they couldn’t find their way into journals, galleries, and publishing houses, they simply made their own. These artists deliberately opposed the contemporary world, even as they dragged it like a cadaver into the future with them. Their real allegiance was to the idea of the artist as a free agent in the world: they understood that their true audience was other artists; that the goal of art was to redeem a culture always on the brink of forgetting everything; and that most people, rich or poor, will always be far behind their own times.

By the end of its first quarter, the 20th century had already seen what many now consider its most groundbreaking artworks: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire; Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. A quarter of the way through our own century, do we have a single novel, poem, composition, or work of art that can measure up to these? The answer is nearly always “no”. And if it’s ever “yes”, the examples offered are never really satisfying. Some might suggest the environments of Pierre Huyghe, or the films of Terrence Malick, or Helen DeWitt’s wonderful novel The Last Samurai. But as brilliant as they are, these works simply don’t have the same sense of having revolutionized the medium in ways unimaginable before them. There is far less distance between them and the modernism of Man Ray than there is between Man Ray and the paintings of someone like J. M. W. Turner, a century before him.

When future critics write the annals of our era, I suspect that what will actually strike them most is just how little has happened in our time. Rather than a litany of genius artistic accomplishments, it is much more accurate to see our moment as the height of industrial mass culture’s revenge upon art — a period in which creative industries, academic training, popular taste, assembly-line content production, and distribution technologies have fused into a monolith without qualities. The idea of artists as pioneers and outsiders has given way to a professionalized class within contemporary academic and media institutions. Yet with the arrival of each new digital technology, even these artists risk being taken out of the equation. What’s more, the characteristic experience of art in our time has become divorced from all previous eras in human history: there are few amateur art societies remaining; connoisseurship has been mocked almost out of existence, and patronage reduced to market speculation. For most people, art has next to nothing anymore to do with religious ritual, or even the pursuit of commonality and sociality. Audiences are now individual people behind individual screens — voyeurism is the ruling principle of the digital experience of art.

Everyone knows this: significant portions of these spaces are devoted to discussions about how miserable it is to be there. Even so, what most people seem to want from their media today is the chance to watch other people do things. The most consistent experience of anything resembling art is not happening in galleries, in the pages of journals, at the cinema, or in the concert hall. It consists of watching other people play video games, watching other people make food, watching other people listen to music. Those future historians will likely conclude that life in the first part of the 21st century was something that happened to other people. They will feel pity for the hundreds of millions of human beings whose yearnings were so thoroughly diverted from the world of sense into a state of passive surveillance.

Many of us now spend a majority of our waking lives trapped in a continuous flow of the possibility of experience, instead of experience itself. The revenge upon art is also revenge upon experience, since this is just what we do when we participate in the cacophonic theater of digital spaces — we take revenge upon the difficulty and pain of our experience. The aesthetic of our era is mostly a flight away from art, since art embodies all those things — real sex, death, history, feeling, pain — which we are desperate to escape. Plainly, the modern world has become too complex for us. There is too much news, too much noise, too much action — too much for any one person to handle. Our bodies rebel against their conditions through illness, fatigue, and depression: hence the common sentiment that interacting with serious art is just too difficult, that what’s really needed at the end of the day is mindless, numbing escape. Art must now compete with the universal desire for dissociation.

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We have of course been preparing for this escape for a long time. Our anti-art era reached its apex in just the past two or three years, with the arrival of machine-generated versions of visual arts, music, and literature. Whether by accident or design, the makers of these “artificial intelligences” have come close to achieving what many creative industries were tending towards anyways: the abolishment of the artists themselves. The endless scroll is now replete with machine-generated “art”, but so long as the average consumer is seeking to numb their reality, there’s no reason for them to care if what meets them are human- or machine-made images. If our hypothetical future historians are accurate, they will perceive that the dominant tone of our time is anesthetic, since the role of nearly all popular media now is a panacea, meant to assuage an underlying anxiety, but only worsening it in reality.

Anesthetic is a perfect term for a deeper reason, too. Given the meaning of the prefix “an-” (“without” or “lacking”), the word quite literally means “lacking aesthetic” — without feeling or perception. We’re living in a time in which the average consumer’s experience is in tacit collusion with a mass-produced media world that has successfully propagandized on behalf of hollowing out our aesthetic experiences — and which now has the technology to eliminate artists from the production of it. This revenge upon art has so far been successful for two reasons: first, a 20th-century mass culture created by the perfection of major broadcast technologies; and second, the aforementioned conversion of artists to a professionalized class of aspirational elites.

The development of radio and television in the 20th century created the largest interconnected mass culture in history. The values of this monoculture quickly combined with the centralizing and propagandizing dictums of the century’s globe-spanning states. Whether Soviet propaganda, or the leading US television networks, or TIME magazine, or The Times, the idea was the same: whoever reaches and sways the most people wins. Monoculture relied on technologies of mass persuasion, broadcasting from single sources to millions of listeners, readers, and viewers. And the people who experienced this world passed on those same values, creating the newer world of digital information. We on the internet today have inherited this idea that mass culture ought to exist, even though it would seem alien to most times and places in human history. The ideal only exists because of those broadcast technologies, because the point of the game being played through them was to monopolize the maximum amount of airspace and human attention.

The internet, however, is not a single medium, but a fabric of mediums. In its networks one finds broadcast technology but also telephonic and text-based technologies. Social media platforms were able to disrupt the original internet by essentially constructing sociality-themed meta-games in the midst of what was once a decentralized network of libraries, messaging systems, and sites. But where the 20th-century mass culture required many people tuning into a limited range of channels such as radio frequencies, television stations, even cinema screens, social media algorithms curate distinct channels for each user. This traumatic loss of collective experience has been partially substituted by the chaotic “public square” of those platforms. Yet creative industries and tech companies are still based on the old incentives, and have generally monopolized every digital outpost to deliver only their content to huge numbers of people.

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Our problem now isn’t a lack of cultural production, but too much of it. So much so that the vast majority of artists simply can’t compete with the tiny number of hugely popular names with the full backing of the media conglomerates. At the empty center of this era of over-production is what the critic W. David Marx has called the “Blank Space” — the name of his recent cultural history of the 21st century. Marx’s Blank Space deals above all with the force of “Poptimism” — a rising idea among many critics that their duty was to advocate for popular commercial products as an antidote to the hipsterism, snobbery, and elitism of the 20th century. As Marx argues, no matter how open-minded these critics thought they were being, the actual result of their rhetoric gave the media and the public carte blanche to reject high-minded art in favor of shallow pop culture, ceding the once-transgressive powers of the avant garde to a resurgent Right-wing often allied with the very tech companies who want to automate away cultural production. This has desiccated creative subcultures and made it harder for critics to get attention for unknown artists, while audiences themselves increasingly reject any attempt to argue for better art as aristocratic arrogance. As the saying goes: “Just let people enjoy things.”

However, part of this resentment against elitist critics also extends to the whole field of modern art itself — something Marx doesn’t consider. The mass culture of the late 20th century — which is what really made the radical art of the early century famous, reducing artists like Picasso and Duchamp to memes and flat cultural icons — continued to harbor at least some of the old oppositional avant-garde sensibility. Even popular artists could be respected for challenging and shocking their audiences. But over time, the paradox was simply too great: if the main imperative is to get as much content out to as many people as possible, then challenging or difficult art can only ever be in conflict with it. This is why Poptimism as an idea has been so deleterious: it preys on the part of the audience which rejects difficulty, which regards the old avant-garde attitude as snobbery, and dislikes critics because critics often tell them that what they like isn’t very good. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exactly what happens when you combine a global mass-commercial imperative, the hamstringing of serious criticism, and the diffusion of physical countercultures into the internet. The result is the Blank Space: an alarming rate of technological change, ironically counterposed by an absence of novel artistic movements.

As a legible history of the past 25 years, Marx’s book encourages us to imagine something better — to imagine the return of physical subcultures, of serious criticism, and the development of something resembling an avant garde. But this is a forbiddingly difficult thing to do, since the place of artists has shifted so far from what it once was. On the one hand, there is the idea of the artist in popular culture — one which might sometimes contain the old ideal of aesthetic excellence at all costs, yet has for the most part given way to influencers, celebrities, and brand managers. On the other hand, there is the reality of artists within cultural institutions. Look at the blue chip galleries and recipients of huge foundation funds; the majority of “upmarket” authors published by the major houses; the poets who win major literary prizes; the young writers who work their way from unpaid internships to staff jobs; the people who run the arts non-profits. You will find an extreme bias towards upper-middle-class backgrounds and university educations. Looking at the biographies of emerging artist award winners and grant recipients, you might be bewildered by how many of these people have BFAs, MFAs, even PhDs in their area.

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This is the professionalization of the artist in our time. It is well known just how difficult it is to get published, or to get one’s work seen, without the right resume: a degree certification, specially curated portfolio, the requisite recommendations. The artist in this professional climate — whether a young composer, painter, poet, or filmmaker — faces an enormous bureaucratic barrier of entry to their field. Their style has to conform to a certain industry expectation, has to fit in with the current understanding of sales trends, and can’t risk offending or upsetting anyone at any step in that process. So, for decades, university programs have sprung up with the intention of training young artists for entry into these careers, in workshops and fine-arts programs designed to maximize their legibility at the expense of idiosyncratic style.

In our current environment, an artist like Man Ray — who turned down a university scholarship, working as a technical illustrator and taking classes at the Ferrer Center, an anarchist day school in New York — would get nowhere. But, of course, artists like Man Ray have never got anywhere in these environments. The early 19th-century Romantics rebelled against the school of Joshua Reynolds; the later Impressionists against the reigning Paris Salons; the fin-de-siècle Vienna Secessionists rebelled against the Association of Austrian Artists; Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and other avant-gardists rebelled against the ossified remains of those previous revolutionary styles. Today’s young creatives may want to think of themselves as a crusading vanguard, particularly regarding social justice causes, but, more often than not, they are themselves the producers of the stuffy bourgeois academic style which all great modern art movements have defined themselves by rejecting.

This state of affairs has only contributed to the suspicion that today’s creatives are hustlers and grifters making risk-free art. Where former eras regarded them as confusing freaks, even exiles, the public now sees them as poseurs and snobs. The undifferentiated style of these artists’ exhibitions, novels, poems, and compositions only reinforces the sense that their only audience is other professionals and academics. At the same time, as hemorrhaging industries concentrate more and more on sure-fire market successes, the professionalized caste is kept on life support solely by grants, residencies, foundations, and legacy media attention. Potential audiences drift further towards mass-produced slop and digital numbness, yet these artists still sand away every bit of risk, experiment, or novelty to make it in the shrinking creative industries. There is very little room in this equation for the creation of new artistic movements — and little incentive for anyone to want one.

So what is to be done about this? Well — many things. The first is to be clear about the situation, no matter how depressing. For the time being, the majority of the public is too distracted, numbed-out, and tech-addicted to respond to much art. Still, this is only a despairing thing from the point of view of that 20th-century monoculture. For most of human history, the production of culture was meant to exalt God, or give prestige to the ruling aristocracy. In the wake of the Romantics and modernists, the highest value became the creation of great art as the ultimate mode of human experience. When this becomes the ideal pursuit, even at a social cost, and the artist is understood as an essential outsider, public disinterest becomes the norm; it even becomes a sign of health. One of Man Ray’s consistent refrains was that whenever he noticed his work confusing someone, he knew he was really on to something.

We also have to admit that the current academic style is moribund. My generation — made up of young Millennials and elder Zoomers — has yet to produce a truly great novelist, poet, composer, or painter. And that is because too many have given up the time and energy that should have gone to their true education in formal history, to pursue professionalized academic tracks promising elite approval. As Marx pointed out, these careerist industries have left the old transgressive spirit of the avant garde to be subsumed by trolls and reactionary Right-wingers, who are themselves nearly incapable of producing art, their transgressions limited to stepping on liberal social norms and indulging in half-ironic bigotry. Not that progressives have fared much better: the last two decades of social justice politics produced no great art, with proponents largely choosing empty pieties over practical liberatory politics. Once elites figured out how to use the language of those movements, they quickly adopted it to police established class boundaries in the media, and plenty of artists adapted to the situation immediately.

What is clear is the need for secession. The need for greater numbers of serious artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who exist outside of the academy, legacy media institutions, and the major creative industries. Artists who create their own smaller institutions, their own laboratories, their own publications, their own exhibitions — all with the clear intention of avoiding trends, embracing experimental collaboration, and rejecting the need for a large audience whatsoever. At the beginning, the only audience should be other artists. Artists need spaces outside the confines of the internet, even outside the confines of society. Yet much of what goes on now, in the burgeoning scenes of New York, London, or Paris, are only small magazines, artsy parties, and showings with an eye towards sexy contemporary issues. A lot of it only happens in conjunction with small presses, or on Substack.

These people certainly have the great avant-garde artists in mind — they yearn for the days of bohemia, for Paris between the wars, or the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. But so far, their attempts to forge new art scenes have been too much scene, and too little art. The point there is less to experiment and envision some genuinely new movement, and more to imitate the romantic social lives of older artists. Until these scenes take the collaborative process of art-making and art-theorizing as seriously as they do their parties and online publications, they will be transitory. What’s more, artists need to be far more sincere about mixing with different kinds of creatives. One of the most remarkable things about interwar Paris was just how many kinds of people mixed together — aristocrats, socialites, commercial artists, designers, filmmakers, painters, playwrights, poets. They didn’t segregate themselves by medium, only by the groups they’d dedicated themselves to (and even then those boundaries could be quite porous). Judgment and taste were the sole currency. Artists who didn’t measure up to their standards were quickly dismissed as kitsch-mongers. Today we mischaracterize this posture as elitist — but it is only elitist if it comes from an actual powerful elite. For artistic movements, strict standards are self-preservation, the only thing with any chance of revitalizing a calcified aesthetic culture.

The art of the future is not going to come from our current institutions and academies. Yet neither is it going to be purely Romantic, or purely modernist. It will have to emerge from the technical mastery of all forms that came before it. Artists will have to spend far less time seeking facile “personal expression” and more time practicing old-fashioned methods, understanding them inside and out — which is the only real way to imagine something beyond them. Only an intimate understanding of the history of an artform can really respond to the world as it is now, a world which has tried to take its revenge upon art by robbing artists of their role in society, and drowning the masses in assembly-line slop.

The new contemporary art will have to be part evangelism and part theater; the artists will have to be unforgiving preachers of the gospel of aesthetic excellence. They will have to be stringent in their commitment to experimentation and their rejection of the current style. For the sake of real creative freedom, they will have to reject positioning and political signaling (though this hardly means rejecting politics itself). What is needed, in short, is a theory of contemporary art which aspires once again to shock its audience, when it finds it — not merely to transgress against social norms, rather to shock people back into reality, back into the stream of experience. The role of the artist in the anti-art era will be the person who sees the world as it is — numbed-out, anxious, resentful, overwhelmed, half-asleep — and tries to wake it back up again, by whatever means necessary.

The episode reminded me that while toddler art is probably not worth that much money, it was the original impetus for my accidental second career as a writer. When my daughter was in preschool, I used to swap photos of her latest finger-paintings and collages with an art-world friend, accompanied by titles, dates, and solemn thematic commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Then I posted a few of these online, and was surprised when the blog went modestly viral. Another friend saw it, encouraged me to write more, and now here we are.  

But what even is “art”? What is it for? How can anyone tell when something is “art”? The whole bit for that toddler-art blog was the fact that sometimes it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a painting was done by a graduate from Central St Martins or by a sticky preschooler in a bib. Nothing, that is, except where it’s displayed, and the price tag. Sometimes not even that: German child artist Laurent Schwarz, now four years old, regularly sells paintings for thousands and recently landed a marketing deal with paint manufacturer Relius. 

We might be forgiven for wondering whether the definition of “art” isn’t as elusive as the one given in 1946 by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, to define “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it”. But there is surely more to the question than just personal judgment, not least because not even “art” is immune to today’s omnivorous, omnipresent culture war. 

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the public art installed on plinths and in high-traffic areas, where new works routinely attract Right-wing complaints of “wokeness”, or of ideologically monolithic elites imposing weird, mutant iconography de haut en bas. The painter Alexander Adams, one of Britain’s more vocal conscientious objectors to this moral monoculture, writes furiously of an insular internationalist consensus that has sewn up government and philanthropy, and now operates as a closed shop. So what is this closed-shop promoting? 

If we’re to believe the Box venue in Plymouth, it’s art as a kind of therapeutic emollient for the soul. The venue recently published an independent report claiming it has made a £43-million contribution to local communities, including by reducing dementia and depression, and improving visitors’ health and productivity. In this view, an arts venue can be seen as contiguous to, and as a kind of extension of, other municipal “services” such as leisure centers and doctors’ offices. But this suggests nothing grander in aspiration than “art” understood just as a supplement one can take, like cod-liver oil, in order to function more effectively as a fungible work unit: as something barely distinguishable from any other kind of improving leisure activity, such as swimming or studying Spanish.

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Is that all? Some might say the only thing that makes modern “art”, as per the joke of my old blog, is a context which signals to the viewer that they should perceive something as “art”. To take one famous example, a urinal is for men to pee in, until it’s signed and submitted to an art gallery, as by Marcel Duchamp in 1917. At that point it becomes “art”, or maybe a lightning-rod for debate about the nature of art, or indeed more recently a byword for the absurdity of recent efforts to “Westernize” Afghanistan at gunpoint. 

In this rarefied and highly intellectualized context, then, we might claim that it doesn’t matter if the toddler did the painting, or if the banana duct-taped to a gallery wall is the “original” banana or a replacement after another artist ate the first one. What matters is everyone playing along that this really is an “artwork”.

But if it’s all really that abstract, why the concerted efforts now afoot across the developed West to re-moralize art? No major gallery seems immune to curators hell-bent on “reimagining” and “decolonizing” the archives, or public-art consortia commissioning works on leadenly pious progressive themes. Taken together, it all suggests (implicitly at least) an intuition that there’s still more to “art” than just whatever I like or find intellectually stimulating, or else (as in Plymouth) therapeutic leisure for “communities”.

When “art” is so contested, it’s difficult to see why this would be the case. For a clue, though, take a walk round the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, which houses medieval and Renaissance paintings. Do that in the right frame of mind, and you can sometimes catch a glimpse of what “art” used to be, before it was “art”. But it’s tricky; for unlike modern “art”, which sometimes only reads as such because of the gallery context, premodern paintings have to be considered outside the gallery context before they become legible. 

Even though, today, the National Gallery hangs these works as though they are “art” in the modern sense, many were originally painted for churches or private chapels. In their original context, these were not “art” in the sense of something nice to look at on the living-room wall. They were for spiritual use: devotional objects that happen to take the form of pictures. 

Artistic works with a spiritual orientation, such as paintings of scenes from the Bible, rest upon a radically different set of assumptions about their own grounding. The older stream of Christian thought within which such works were created believed these should point beyond human experience, toward what classical philosophy called the “transcendentals”: a dimension that now survives only in classical Christian pedagogy, under the heading “the good, the true, and the beautiful”.

It’s difficult to imagine a mainstream contemporary artist today talking in these terms. Why? The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that, especially since the Renaissance, the West has by degrees turned away from this transcendental approach to aesthetics, replacing it with a more human-centric approach to the creative arts. In the process, the arts came adrift from the divine. Churches were cleansed of imagery by Puritan iconoclasts; in the wake of this rupture, across the ensuing centuries, “art” flowered in its familiar secular form. 

These are the kinds of works that would, in time, occupy the “gallery” setting: artifacts that hover awkwardly between decoration and their former link to the spiritual world. This association still persists, albeit in degraded trace form, in the instrumentalist view of an art venue as a kind of spiritual cod-liver oil. But beauty gradually came to be understood as “for” only itself, then as something entirely subjective — and finally as irrelevant to the real domain of “art”, which is pure idea. In this outlook, it doesn’t matter if the banana gets eaten and replaced; there is no banana, just the idea of one. Now, though, this economy of abstraction may be approaching a terminal state — and, out the other side, showing early signs of re-moralization. 

The most recent sale of the banana “artwork” was for a whopping $6.2 million, to a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who vowed to eat it (again) as his contribution to the “work”. And what makes this so intriguing a development is the parallel between this kind of “art” and the cryptocurrency that paid for it. Cryptocurrency’s purely abstract, un-grounded economy and its mimetic process of assigning value bear a strong resemblance to the one in which this kind of conceptual art acquires value and is traded. 

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Just as crypto has no material referent, and gains its value via the aggregate of purchasers’ belief in its value, so “art” in the banana or urinal (or toddler painting) sense floats largely free of any stable aesthetic, cultural, or even material referent. These meme-worlds in turn come together in the lively market for “artworks” in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as the “milady” and “bored ape” genres. 

But this isn’t the only way the internet is shaking up art’s state of terminal abstraction. As well as threatening mediocre creators with a tide of AI-generated “slop” imagery, those deft enough to use it, and clear enough in their vision to build a following, are finding ways to thrive outside the state-art cartel — whether by connecting like-minded dissidents, as Adams observes, or by enabling sales directly to customers. 

And here, notwithstanding the slop-tide, there’s still demand for real work, by real artists. But the kind of art that enables an artist to build a platform in this environment is very different. The self-taught British painter Ross Baines, for example, paints portraits for MMA fighters, along with themes from pop culture and (and not very progressive) politics. Recent works in this vein include a portrait of the murdered American conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and a work based on a viral photo from the recent Unite The Kingdom rally in London, showing a man atop a stone lion on the South Bank, holding a cross and St George’s flag. There is no way on earth Baines would be able to sell prints of a painting from a Tommy Robinson rally if he relied on mainstream galleries to stock his work. 

The internet, then, is driving “art” out the other side of abstraction in search of engaged buyers. Is a painting of a Tommy Robinson rally “the good, the true, and the beautiful”? Debatable; but it’s a step in the direction of reconnecting painting with a moral vision. And the same trend is even discernible, albeit mostly negatively, in the kind of “woke” public sculpture conservatives love to hate. For unlike the kind of abstract public art that characterized the 20th century, the “woke” kind is progressive precisely in its attempt to “subvert” some variation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this still means tacitly acknowledging the transcendentals themselves. 

Meanwhile, outside the progressive arts-industrial complex, creators are less self-conscious about re-moralizing their work. Baines isn’t my cup of tea, but he’s creating heroic iconography for an audience of (I’d guess) largely secular Right-wing men. His work seems to find buyers. Others, such as the podcaster and Greek Orthodox icon-artist Jonathan Pageau, are more frankly spiritual in their subjects — and likewise seem to find buyers. Notably, Pageau has done an end-run round the gallery ecology, selling his work exclusively via a digital portal he himself controls. But importantly, his work is not “art” in the modern gallery sense; it’s closer in intent and function to the paintings now, misleadingly, hung as “art” in the Sainsbury Wing. 

It would be a mistake to read any of this digitally enabled creativity as an “art movement”. It’s the opposite: a movement away from “art”, as such, in the anthropocentric sense we’ve grown accustomed to, toward a reunification of aesthetic and spiritual values. Whether in negative “woke” form or (however clumsy) dissident attempts at positive ones, the transcendentals are coming back. 

If there’s a struggle ahead, it won’t be over what “art” means, or which style of painting is desirable, or whether the banana is real. It’ll be over the fundamentals. What do we mean by “good”, “true”, and “beautiful”? The internet has freed a new generation of creators and visionaries to grapple with that question. We’d better hope they come up with something before the tide of AI imagery drowns us.

Elliott should know. As one of Britain’s foremost ornithological illustrators, the Penzance resident knows a thing or two about the work it takes to accurately portray our avian cousins. His is a small but invaluable community within the birding world, one that spends countless hours out in the field observing their subjects in flight or at rest. And then, when they can crouch in their hides no longer, they spend even more time creating scenes, in pencil or paint, that help your average twitcher identify species at a glance.

Elliott himself always wanted to be an illustrator, albeit as a means to see the birds he always loved. Another inspiration, he adds, was an ornate field guide to the falcons of the world owned by his uncle — which he immediately ruined by tracing over all the full-page illustrations, commonly known as “plates”. Even so, says Elliott, who now specializes primarily in gulls, “I’ve never, ever been interested in art as a thing,” with the artist getting kicked out of his A-Level course because of his lack of interest in the Old Masters. “I wanted to learn how to paint,” he says, “not how they did it 200 years ago.”

Elliott’s experience mirrors many other illustrators: see, for example, renowned artists David Allen Sibley and Lars Jonsson, who are both entirely self-taught (“Lars is God,” says Elliott), or Hilary Burn, who fell into ornithological illustration via a zoological degree. Then there’s Ian Lewington, Elliott’s friend and former rival. Lewington’s brother, Richard, was already a leading entomological illustrator by the time Ian was a child. “He went in the bird direction instead of the insect direction, which is probably just as well,” Elliott tells me. “Bird illustration is niche enough without getting into beetles and stuff like that.”

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Lewington is now a household name in the birding community. His bread and butter remains the field guide, including the Rare Birds of North America, a 275-plate tome where Lewington captures his subjects in almost photographic detail. Like many of his contemporaries, Lewington is himself a birder, traveling to see each one of his subjects in the wild before applying his water-soluble gouache paints to paper.

“If you haven’t seen what you’re painting,” Lewington explains, “you don’t know how wrong you’ve got it.” Seeing the bird in person does allow you to capture its essential mien, or “jizz” in twitcher parlance. It’s an ethos shared by most ornithological illustrators and one that came comparatively late to the field. Depictions of birds for identification and general study arguably began with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s De Arte Venandi cum Avibis (“On the Art of Hunting with Birds”) in 1245, though palpably useful guides would not arrive until the late 18th century, as ornithology developed as a field in its own right. It is here, arguably, that naturalistic representations of birds in fine art and science began to diverge. Indeed, as antiquarian print expert David Isaac explains, such plates are largely so prized because they speak so vividly to human affairs.

Italian artist Saverio Manetti (1723-85), for instance, dedicated each of his illustrations to Tuscan dignitaries, imbuing them with personality traits more associated with his patrons than the actual bird. In many cases, too, illustrators were unable to make the long sea voyages necessary to observe their subjects in the wild, instead relying on partially stuffed carcasses known as “skins”. That sometimes led to confusion. George Edwards (1694-1773) may have thought it entirely plausible that a guinea pig might sidle alongside his frightened-looking dodo: despite the fact that the former have never been native to Mauritius.

Yet all the while, improvements in knowledge, printing techniques and the ability of artists to see birds in their natural habitats led to a golden age in ornithological illustration: one more firmly rooted in science. That’s clear enough with John James Audubon who, while he wasn’t writing pro-slavery screeds, blasted countless birds out of trees with his flintlock across the hills and woods of North America. Memorializing his victims on the page, Audubon’s life-size plates are just as remarkable two centuries on, depicting hundreds of birds in unprecedented detail and, having mounted many of his specimens on wood and wire dioramas, in realistic situations.

Combined with the work of luminaries like Elizabeth Gould, these depictions would adorn folios dedicated almost entirely to the visual representation of avian life, and remain celebrated by collectors for their extravagant and singular beauty. “I’ve just sold two Gould’s to a guy in New York,” says Isaac. “All he collects is Gould birds; that’s all he does. He’s got 3,000 to go.”

But while Audubon and Gould are admired by ornithological illustrators, the evolution of printing techniques and visual media means that they no longer serve as practical sources of inspiration for their modern successors. Where 19th-century artists could only rely on their own eye, memory and a skin or two to produce an accurate rendition of a condor or a bird of paradise, the modern illustrator can also count on photographs and video.

Each has its pros and cons, says Lewington, that only confirm the continuing relevance of the illustrative art in modern ornithology. Video, for example, is good for obtaining new information about posture, gait and shape. Photos, for their part, are great for coloring in the “soft” parts — the bill, the eyes, the legs — but can misrepresent how light falls on feathers. That’s where “skins” can still be useful, explains Jillian Ditner, a staff scientific illustrator and lecturer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The institute boasts a sizable collection of these tiny carcasses mounted on wooden sticks, which Ditner and her colleagues call “popsicles”. Jokey name aside, they can tell researchers much about a bird’s color, form and texture.

The incredible value in having access to these and their skeletons, Ditner adds, was lately demonstrated in her illustration of a crossbill. A type of finch, it feeds on seeds hidden inside pinecones. “I wanted to look specifically at the skull and how, when it opens, the bill tips align to be able to get in between the pinecone scales and then how, when they take their bill out, the bills are very crossed, and that helps to hold these scales up and retrieve that seed,” Ditner explains. “I wouldn’t be able to do [that] without access to the collection.”

Amid this almost fanatical emphasis on accuracy, has any of that enthusiasm for imbuing character in the bird survived? It depends on the context, Ditner says. In the field guides that occupy the lion’s share of commissions, there is a form to be followed: the species is usually depicted side-on but in multiple guises, all the better to display differences in gender, plumage or feeding habits. Rarely is there also room to add, say, a glint of menace in an eagle’s eye, or the hovering presumptuousness of the European robin. These innovations tend to appear instead in the larger plates that break up the guide, or journal covers, where, by necessity, the artist needs to grab the viewer and make them invested — or at least mildly interested — in the history of the species.

Surely it’s the ability to accomplish precisely this that separates the good bird illustrator from the bad? Lewington disagrees. Art, he argues, is subjective. But illustration is the opposite: “objective and totally quantifiable”. A depiction of a bird in a field guide is either correct or it is not. What’s left over in an exceptional illustration, he adds, are usually identifying hallmarks of the artist themselves. Lars Jonsson’s birds, for instance, are recognizable as his because they look mildly obese, likely because they puff up their feathers in his native Sweden. But “the perfect illustration,” says Lewington, “will have nothing of the illustrator in it… that sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

That is not to imply, however, that bird illustration has attained a universal standard. Bad depictions containing anatomical howlers still haunt the medium, says Lewington. “There’s been so much rubbish published,” says Lewington, a little mournfully. “It’s not been consistent, not consistent at all.”

Ornithological illustration isn’t only threatened by bad artists — demand for quality depictions also seems to be declining. Having just finished work on another field guide on the rare birds of North America, this one incorporating over 800 species, Lewington fears that the demand for new field guides has dried up. In his view, the market’s saturated. “I don’t think there are many field guides that are needed,” he says, “or that will be commissioned.”

That’ll make a difficult job even more precarious. While Ditner and Lewington both enjoy some measure of job security, most illustrators are forced to supplement their income with innumerable side-hustles. Elliott, for his part, makes up for shortfalls in commissions by working as a part-time wildlife guide in Penzance, along with the odd spot of gardening and interior decorating. He worries that the efflorescence of interest in birding in the Seventies and Eighties is also waning, as fewer young people join in. Elliott recalls standing in the buffet line on his Antarctic cruise and shouting “Wandering Albatross!” to puzzled passengers as it almost skimmed the plate-glass windows with its wing tips. “One bloke looked up from his cornflakes,” he says. Everybody else “thought I was complaining about the food”.

As so often, AI might also muscle the humble illustrator out of the picture, with large language models now capable of instantly creating seemingly photorealistic depictions of almost anything. Ditner is skeptical, however, that publishers will see machine art as a viable option in the near future. “I don’t think it can replace the creativity and perspective of an artist,” she says. At the same time, these models are still reliant on human prompts and, like stochastic parrots, still regurgitate overly generic examples from their training data. Certainly, a depiction of an accurate skeleton of an individual species would be completely beyond the capabilities of AI, incapable as it would be of mapping the subtle nuances in bone structure that have evolved over millions of years.

Even so, Ditner sees AI in her future, most probably as an assistive tool, just like digital tools like Adobe Illustrator have become invaluable for illustrators putting the finishing touches to individual portraits. Elliott, meanwhile, is less worried about the machines and more man’s impact on the birds themselves. “I don’t know,” he says, “if bird illustration’s got a future.” In the past, Elliot continues, illustrations were a way of encouraging people to care for their natural environment. But now, he adds, we’re at the point where, thanks to climate change and pollution, many of the species prized by illustrators — including Elliott’s beloved albatross — will be extinct in a decade’s time.

For the moment, the small fraternity of ornithological illustrators continues to stumble along. Muddled breakfasters aside, Elliott still dreams of watching albatrosses skim the Antarctic waves. “I’m seriously thinking of moving to Argentina and just staying in Ushuaia,” he says, one endangered species observing another across the icy waves.

That isn’t, of course, meant to be a rude generalization about the individuals who practice art scholarship in London, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Rather it’s a statement about the contrasting house cultures in the three countries — a contrast that has grown even starker this summer as one of the hottest arguments in Old Master history reignites. It concerns a painting that is presented by London’s National Gallery as the original depiction by Rubens of a steamy Old Testament love-scene, featuring Samson and Delilah. It was auctioned by Christie’s in 1980, shortly after emerging from the vaults of a Belgian bank. Supporters call the painting a work of seductive genius; critics call it a sloppy copy of a canvas that was undoubtedly created in 1609 but was probably lost after its owner, the mayor of Antwerp, died in 1640.

Before surrendering to Delilah’s wiles, consider the commendable lesson in open-mindedness that is now being set by curators in the Netherlands. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is one of the finest small art museums in the world — and in a show running till mid-July, it invites visitors to view three famous paintings which were formerly thought to be works of Rembrandt; and then to read a detailed explanation of why two of them probably aren’t by the master and the third is borderline. The process of perpetual re-examination will go on, the curators stress. Rembrandt research never ends. In a similar spirit, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam recently invited the public to follow in real time as it subjected its most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, to a lengthy scientific examination.

When Ernst van de Wetering, the world’s best-known scholar of Rembrandt, died in 2021, obituarists noted that in the Dutchman’s lifetime, and in some measure thanks to him, the number of authenticated Rembrandt paintings had fallen from nearly 624 to just 340. He wasn’t merely a nay-sayer; he upgraded some paintings while downgrading others. And the Dutchman never worked alone, he was a member of, and eventually chaired, a Rembrandt Research Project in which scholarly devotees of the master perpetually compared notes, and argued loudly, about the scope of the oeuvre. Some see this Dutch spirit of creative contention as a legacy of the Nazi occupation, and the subsequent, agonized arguments over who had collaborated; the national psyche somehow absorbed the idea that supposedly eminent figures could make terrible mistakes, and that no individual should be seen as infallible.

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Unfortunately, this glasnost and humility is less evident in Belgium, the homeland of Peter Paul Rubens. Ask Katarzyna Krzyzagorska-Pisarek, a Polish-British scholar who knows the Low Countries. In her doctoral research, she compared the Rembrandt Research Project with the nearest Belgian equivalent: an ongoing effort by the Centrum Rubenianum, a research centre in Antwerp, to assemble a definitive catalogue of Rubens’ work. The catalogue is known as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard — in deference to a German who was the most famous, if not the most reliable, Rubens scholar of the mid-20th century. The Dutch project was vastly broader in the range of evidence it considered, Pisarek found. More important, she identified at least 75 instances of works credited to Rubens by Burchard which had proved to be mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. The Belgian authority had very quietly acknowledged these mistakes, but it did nothing to draw this fact to the world’s attention, and it persists in revering Burchard’s legacy. Pisarek found the Rubenianum equally unreceptive to public dialogue when she urged them, citing a huge body of evidence, to rehabilitate a couple of important paintings which in her view had been wrongly degraded.

How does all this relate to the re-emerging dispute over Samson and Delilah, a work acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million, the biggest amount that a UK public collection had paid for a single canvas? Well, it was Burchard who identified the now-contested painting, which emerged in 1929 in a studio in Paris, as a very-long-lost Rubens; and on that matter, Belgium’s art authorities insist that Burchard was right.

So the London Gallery, faced with a crescendo of challenging voices — raising issues of provenance, palette, composition and the painting’s physical structure — has confidently relied on the Rubenianum to shout down people who contest its 1980 purchase. And indeed, the Belgian art authorities have obligingly done so with a rudeness that outdoes the bitchiest of British art critics. People who question the painting are simply “a small group of flat earth-minded conspiracy theorists who make their money by denying all the facts”, declared the Rubenianum’s (German-born) chairman Nils Buttner when I consulted him about the issue. Bert Watteeuw, director of Antwerp’s Rubenshuis museum, responded with a petulant ad hominem (or ad feminam) outburst when asked by a Belgian reporter about a new book by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an art historian of Greek and Flemish descent, which carefully lays out the skeptical case. “Who is this woman to say those things?” (In fact, Doxiadis has been in vigorous and contentious interaction with the Rubenianum. almost from the year, 1981, when Watteeuw was born.)

On 9 May, the National Gallery suddenly seemed to be taking at least a step in a more emollient, indeed Dutchward, direction when it quietly e-published, for those who knew where to look, a multi-authored 25,000-word pronouncement on the disputed painting. It still affirmed the work’s authenticity but implicitly acknowledged that the skeptics had raised some serious points, including the painting’s poor provenance chain and highly idiosyncratic color scheme. Amidst all the verbiage, many issues were only partially addressed, as Pisarek points out: for example, the problem posed by contemporary copies of Rubens’ original work which differ from the Gallery’s acquisition. Still, the huge outpouring amounted to a big and welcome change of presentational tactics from the previous stance of Sphinx-like silence or “ask the Belgians”.

On one matter, though, the Gallery seems to be digging in its heels. One of the disputed work’s oddest features is that (as all agree) the artwork itself has been planed down to a few millimeters and then stuck onto a cheapish pink blockboard. The Gallery’s curators have always insisted (and they emphatically repeat in their latest pronouncement) that the tawdry blockboard was slammed on well before the work arrived in Trafalgar Square in mid-summer 1980. Yet an ever-growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests that the painting was still resting on a much thicker, older wooden panel when it left Belgium; and its short stay at Christie’s would hardly have sufficed for this massive modification.

In an article for The Guardian published on 15 June, Dalya Alberge quotes an eminent curator as initially admitting and then denying that the blockboard was added at the Gallery. The curator, Christopher Brown, ought to know what he is talking about. As he has recalled in a public lecture, he was put in charge of the Gallery’s Dutch and Flemish treasures in 1971, when he was just 23. Young Brown then had to bite his lip while his boss, the Gallery director Sir Michael Levey, made a terrible mistake by failing to recognize an authentic Rembrandt which a British peer was trying to dispose of. So if anyone remembers what was going in the Gallery in 1980, it should be Brown. Meanwhile a veteran of art investigation, Michael Daley, published online a 16-page essay which meticulously lays out all the evidence that the older back was intact when the work arrived in London.

Why does this blockboard issue matter so much? First because if it emerges that the Gallery has been less than frank with the public about the timing of this draconian intervention, then everything else the Gallery says about the contested painting will lose credibility. Second, as Daley suggests, hard questions arise about the motives for the intervention. The older wooden back would certainly have contained invaluable clues about the dating, and treatment over the years, of the contested work. With the discarding of the older back, important evidence was lost. Might those facts be connected?

As it happens, one of the whistle-blowers on this sensitive point was a Belgian banker, Jan Bosselaers — a director of the defunct Kredietbank in whose vaults the painting was stored. He provided Doxiadis with written and photographic testimony to the effect that the painting’s old back was still in place when it left Belgium: this evidence was only authorized for release after his death. (This was not Bosselaers’ only end-of-life bombshell: he also revealed, very shortly before passing away in 2015, that the bank had once been in negotiation with the possessors of the country’s greatest missing art treasure: a section of a 14th-century altar-piece which was stolen in 1934.)

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If bankers in secretive Belgium can become truth-tellers, at least on their death-beds, might members of Britain’s cliquey art establishment who know about this affair clear their consciences while they still have the chance? One thing emerges clearly from the latest revelations by Daley and Alberge. Individuals who had sight and knowledge of the Gallery’s contested painting, after its arrival in London, have not yet told the full story. We can affirm that with confidence because the various things those individuals did say, back in the Eighties and even very recently, are utterly confused and contradictory. Those multiple confusions and contradictions are laid out in intricate detail by Daley’s latest posting.

As for the Gallery’s recent long pronouncement, its flaws would be forgivable if it had been offered, in good faith, as the start of a constructive and open-ended debate. In fact the Gallery still shows little appetite for debate, or any sort of give-and-take, with the public. When I asked, very courteously, for a comment on how scientific knowledge about the contested painting had moved on as a result of recent investigations, I received no reply. The good thing is that a debate is starting anyway. Art critic Jonathan Jones has stepped in with a passionate defense of the contested painting on aesthetic grounds, as though the skeptics’ case rested on aesthetics rather than hard-and-fast facts about events and testimonies in the late 20th century. He entirely misses the skeptics’ point — but at least a conversation has begun.

Let’s hope it is a Dutch-style discussion, worthy of the land of Erasmus and Spinoza, because British art is long overdue for a puff of fresh Netherlandish air. At the time the contested picture was acquired in 1980, London’s art establishment was even smaller, more introverted and less accountable for its mistakes than it is now: perhaps unintentionally, Brown’s lecture offered a glimpse of that world. Partly because of that defect, London has lost some ground to other cities like New York and Paris as a hub for art expertise and commerce. However late in the day, a bit more openness about that mysterious canvas in Trafalgar Square might do wonders to shore up London’s reputation.

The first, Covid, showed that money mattered more than mission when universities continued to charge full tuition for an inferior online product: asynchronous lectures and “real-time seminars” where many students were just black squares on Zoom. Then, the revelation, after October 7, that universities had suffered extensive ideological capture — that much of what passes for higher education is actually indoctrination in cultural Marxism. Mobs of Ivy League students — radicalized by “critical theories” of oppression and victimization, yet wearing Covid masks and keffiyeh face-coverings to protect their future earnings — harassed and intimidated Jewish classmates while the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and Columbia merely watched on.

The third, the most seismic of them all, is ongoing. And it is not ideology, but technology that is precipitating the greatest crisis higher education has ever faced.

A recent article by James D. Walsh in New York Magazine, widely circulated among academics, reported that “just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT [in 2022], a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments”. The use of Generative-AI chatbots for required coursework is, if anything, even more widespread today. At elite universities, community colleges, and everything in between, students are using AI to take notes in class, produce practice tests, write essays, analyze data, and compose computer code, among other things. A freshman seems to speak for entire cohorts of undergraduates when she admits that “we rely on it, [and] we can’t really imagine being without it”. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes multiple students who are effectively addicted to the technology, and are distressed at being unable to kick the habit — because, as an NYU senior confesses, “I know I am learning NOTHING.”

One problem is that it’s difficult to prove that students have cheated with chatbots. They’ve learned how to detect “Trojan horse” traps in assignments, engineer prompts that won’t make them look too smart, and launder their essays through multiple bot-generated iterations. Nor is AI-powered software a reliable means of detecting such schemes. (This is unsurprising: why would providers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT Plus free during final exams, want to imperil huge student demand for its product?) And in the long run, market forces will always keep students one step ahead of their professors. Walsh’s article highlights a young man whose attempts to monetize dishonesty got him expelled from Columbia. This former student has raised more than $5 million to design a wearable device that “will enable you to cheat on pretty much anything” in real time.

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Faced with these difficulties, universities have punted. They’ve done little more than leave faculty to establish their own AI-use policies, which vary widely and are, in any case, largely unenforceable. (What is more, some professors are using chatbots to formulate assignments and grade papers. In their classrooms, machines are talking to machines.) This response is completely inadequate. Universities will not survive if they are little more than expensive diploma mills. Nor will the United States, for what will take their place in preparing future citizens, leaders, and builders to repair our broken institutions and maintain a healthy and prospering polity?

AI optimists would argue that such concerns are overblown. That’s because superintelligent machines capable of “usher[ing] in an age of flourishing the likes of which we have never seen” will soon be doing “the real thinking”, as the economist Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, an AI researcher, write in The Free Press. If the authors are right, students and professors need to concentrate on learning how to use AI, which will take over the management of human affairs. Yet they don’t explain what they mean by flourishing — a question begged by their admission that, by undermining our sense of purpose, radically degrading our agency, and making meaningful forms of work obsolete, AI will introduce “perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced”. Can human beings flourish when they’ve given up much of what makes them human?

That’s not the only problem with their predictions. In everything from diplomacy to medicine, real thinking — thinking at the highest levels, where strategies are devised and executed — requires practical wisdom: an adequate understanding, not just of the range of tools available to us and how to operate them, but of the ends these tools ought to serve. Cowen writes that, in his field of economics, he’s still better at posing questions than AI. That’s a significant admission, because the questions we ask are determined by our ends. The student who told Walsh that using ChatGPT allows her to spend so many hours on TikTok that “my eyes start hurting” asked the wrong question — How can I make more time for social media? — because she was pursuing the wrong end. She has some ability to engineer chatbot prompts — her grades are “amazing” — but doesn’t know how to employ that skill for her own benefit. And her prioritization of vapid entertainment offers a clue about how most people whose jobs are eliminated by AI will use their leisure, a question that inspired dread in the economist John Maynard Keynes when he realized, a century ago, that “technological unemployment” would eventually deprive mankind of its “traditional purpose”.

Simply to use AI well, it seems, requires a liberal education: one that teaches what makes for a good and meaningful life, and cultivates the well-formed loves and dispositions that motivate one to act on that knowledge. Where will AI acquire the knowledge and motivation it needs reliably to use its own capacities for the benefit of human beings? From AI researchers and developers, whose knowledge and intellectual powers may not extend much beyond coding? Its current training is not significantly weighted toward a study of great books, art, music, and “the best which has been thought and said”, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. That’s clear enough from the case of the advanced Pathways Language Model (PaLM), as described in a 2023 article. Social media conversations accounted for 50% of the dataset on which PaLM trained; webpages, Wikipedia, news, and computer code comprised 37%. Only 13% consisted of books, doubtless of greatly varying quality.

Nor are the results of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generated by the kind of deeply internalized judgment that liberal education aims to cultivate. LLMs respond to prompts based on complex calculations of probability across a vast, digitally-encoded reservoir of opinions: good, bad, and ugly, true and false. And as helpful as they can be in conversation with the most thoughtful users, they can’t be fully trusted to identify and communicate matters of fact, let alone to regulate themselves by an adequate understanding of the nature and conditions of human flourishing and the sources of meaning in human life. That’s clear enough from their notorious hallucinations, and from their disturbing inclination to lie — an inclination that’s presumably been strengthened by what these LLMs are learning from users who lie, to themselves as well as others.

AI can’t overcome these problems just by being, as Cowen claims, “smarter than all of us”. It would instead need to achieve real human intelligence: to comprehend qualitatively, not just quantitatively; to intuit, not merely to calculate. AI developers would object that human intuition is the product of a neural network that is not functionally different from that of AI models. This claim ignores the fact that digital computation, which “reads” information encoded in analogue signals by means of varying voltage levels, is merely a mechanical simulacrum of our native abilities. That is what makes it “artificial”. AI’s training is in any case as removed from the concrete and particular circumstances of human development, experience, and education as its software-based mind is from ours. For while our minds inhabit mortal bodies embedded in actually existing circumstances and communities, AI observes and imitates us from the ether of abstract operations whose relationship to particular pieces of hardware is purely contingent.

Cowen and Balwit reject transhumanism, which aims to make the natural or God-given condition of being human obsolete by connecting us to superintelligent AI through neural implants and other devices. They envision a middle ground where we retain our humanity under the governance of AI. That’s beginning to look like the best possible outcome of the arc of technological development over the next five to ten years. Yet it recalls the characteristically modern and impatient utopian dream of Karl Marx — a dream that relied on vague prophecies of what life would be like after the revolution, but swiftly evaporated on contact with reality. Because Communism would change the conditions of existence so radically that well-founded predictions were impossible, Marx wrote little about life in the post-revolutionary utopia. He was confident only that the violence required to bring this utopia into being would be worth it. Similarly, Cowen and Balwit admit that the advent of artificial superintelligence will do violence to human agency, meaning, and purpose. But they, too, are excessively confident that all will be well in the end.

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The ultimate aim of a liberal education is fully to actualize the human capacity “to form an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us,” in the words of John Henry Newman. If we are to maintain our humanity in the age of AI, an education that teaches young people to read, write, and think through the investigation of traditional sources of human meaning — goodness, truth, justice, beauty — and the cultural and political conditions in which they acquire a prominent place in human life, will be more necessary than ever. A recent conversation between Ross Douthat and AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, a principal author of the highly pessimistic AI 2027 forecast, makes this clear. Asked about “the purpose of humanity” in a world run by superintelligent AI, Kokotajlo channeled the core of the biblical and philosophical traditions in which Western civilization is rooted:

I guess what still matters is that my kids are good people, and that they have wisdom and virtue and things like that. So I will do my best to try to teach them those things because those things are good in themselves, rather than good for getting jobs.

Education is possible because the world at its core is good: it possesses a natural or created order that can never be fully comprehended, but to which our minds and hearts, souls and bodies, may be well or poorly attuned. AI or no AI, education at its best develops the virtues or excellences of thought and action, taste, feeling, and judgment, that fit one for all seasons, occasions, tasks and responsibilities of life. And that moral, intellectual, and spiritual attunement, not just to physical reality, nor to the largely unforeseeable contingencies of time and history, but to eternal or transcendent truths, is good in itself as well as for its consequences. This is the most fundamental teaching that the great thinkers and doers in all languages and fields of understanding — Kepler, Galileo, Newton; Al-Farabi, Maimonides, Aquinas; Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln — have internalized through reading even a few great books.

If colleges and universities have any hope of surviving, they must articulate a compelling vision of what higher education is, and what it is for — of its signal importance for individuals and society alike. If they are to equip students to find their way in an increasingly complex world, they must provide not just a technical education, but a genuinely liberal one. That’s the only way they can convince students not to cheat themselves out of the chance to live rich and meaningful lives by unreflectively turning over their distinctively human energies and capacities to AI. Let’s hope they succeed. For if higher education ceases to preserve, extend, and transmit the wisdom and knowledge our ancestors struggled and suffered to achieve, who or what will?

One of the most important representatives of that bygone PC era is back in the press: the African-American feminist critic Bell Hooks, (1952-2021) whose writing on art and politics has been recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. Originally published in 1995, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics helped put in circulation a set of concepts that have since become, we might regret, part of both academic and middlebrow criticism. From “problematic” and “cultural appropriation” to “palimpsest” and “the politics of the visual”, her theoretical vocabulary remains current on the cultural Left, far beyond the specific intersectional feminism and anti-capitalist thought in which Hooks was most grounded. Even as the resurgent American Right, for all its supposed populism, reprises those signature economic policies of Reagan that Hooks railed against, her views on art and culture might now offer it some warning.

To get an insight into her contradictory desires and demands on art, it is helpful to start with her name. Hooks, who died in 2021, was born Gloria Jean Watkins and re-named herself in honor of her great-grandmother. For some decades in the late 20th century, a number of prominent African-American intellectuals and celebrities, such as Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) and Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), took on new names to express their sense of distance from the dominant white establishment. More generally, giving oneself a new, chosen name, even outside of any obviously political context, is an act of self-determination and experimentation that it seems rude for others to begrudge (even if the name is cringe). But Hooks also insisted on having her name spelled in lower-case, supposedly to draw attention away from herself and towards her work. This is, of course, an awfully ostentatious way to be humble.

While I think civility requires us to call somebody, say, called “Jennifer” “Jen” (or, for that matter, “John”) if that’s what she wants to be called, civility still has its limits. One of the reasons for both the overreach of and subsequent backlash against PC culture in the Nineties and wokeness today is that polite, well-meaning liberals prove again and again unable to admit this. Just as I’m not going through the grammatical inconvenience of using Judith Butler’s preferred “they/them” pronouns to refer to, well, her, neither am I going to irritate Spellcheck by decapitalizing “Bell Hooks”. We can refuse requests for attention, deference, and extra-delicate care, even minor ones, even ones made by members of disadvantaged groups, without thereby enrolling ourselves on the side of Reaction. Besides the truly political choices we have to make about who is included in our communities and what is owed to them, there are many decisions of far lower stakes in which our moral status is not at issue.

Hooks’ thinking about art, and much else besides, turned on her shifting, troubled thinking about the boundaries between these two kinds of choices. On the one hand, she wanted art to be many things that are not political, and that are indeed likely to appear incompatible, or at least in tension, with being political: personal, excessive, transgressive, and sensuous. “Political art” as a phrase, conjures up images of propaganda posters with simple, unambiguous messages, commanding audiences to buy war bonds, unite with workers throughout the world, or otherwise fall in line. Defending artists she admired, like the sculptor Alison Saar, from critics who found their work insufficiently engaged with representing the problems of African-American life, Hooks argued that providing expansive and enfranchising sites of pleasure is its own sort of political work. It’s an argument that at times seems convincing, and at other times seems no more than an alibi to protect unpolitical beauty. Her prose, too, could slip into lyrical self-indulgence and celebration of irresponsibility. An essay, “Women Artists: The Creative Process”, begins charmingly:

“I am a girl who dreams of leisure, always have. Reverie has always been necessary to my existence. I have needed long hours where I am stretched out, wearing silks, satins and cashmeres, just alone with myself, embraced by the beauty around me. I have always been a girl for fibers, for textiles, and for the feel of comforting cloth against my skin. When I have adorned myself just so, I am ready for the awesome task of just lingering…”

This lovely evocation of herself covered in blankets on the couch leads, improbably, to musings on what her writing and thinking owe to the white men of the Black Mountain school, one of the main scenes of 20th-century avant-garde poetry in the United States. One is reminded of Robert Duncan, who expanded the range of American poetry, linking the open, vatic rhetoric of Walt Whitman with the erudition and syntactical innovation of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. It is one of those stirring, thought-provoking essays where the reader really cannot know what will come next, and even one thoroughly prejudiced against PC sacred cows will find himself surprised and disarmed.

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But Hooks, like almost all of us, wanted art to be something other than a domain where we can linger in pleasure and surprise. Only the most radical aesthete approaches the museum, cinema or magazine rack without some desire, conscious or not, to find among the images displayed something that will be good for a community of which he is a member (which might be as small as himself, or as large as humanity). We might, if we are liberals of a certain kind, hope for art that is so beautiful and so apparently unpolitical that it distracts its beholders from the clash of polemics that constitute our unending “culture wars” — but this too is really a wish for art to serve a political end (the end of suspending politics).

Hooks wanted art to be a political force by which desirable representations of minorities would be disseminated, and structural inequalities exposed and challenged. Throughout Art on My Mind, she praised artists who seemed to produce such images, and attacked those who she sees as trafficking in negative stereotypes or in giving too much attention to white, male, etc., artists, critics and institutions. Hooks had a political scorecard, and everything — really, everything — could be tallied on it.

She blasted, for example, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat as a sell-out whose art and “life” she alleged amounted to a “minstrel show” for wealthy white art patrons. Still more deliriously, she criticized Black basketball star Michael Jordan for appearing alongside Loony Tunes characters: “In the commercials where he speaks to the cartoon figure of Bugs Bunny as though they were equals — peers — his elegance and grace of presence is ridiculed and mocked.” Whatever one might think about Basquiat’s art (to my mind, neo-expressionist crap making lazy “references” to history, worth throwing in the dumpster of Eighties mistakes with Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer) or Space Jam, it seems at best highly debatable that their success was driven by anti-black racism.

Conservatives today who roll their eyes at such dubious, over-the-top analyses should keep in mind that there are thousands of YouTube video essays and tens of thousands of lengthy X threads in which hysterical white men denounce the super-abundance of racial minorities in advertisements and super-hero movies. Still more embarrassingly, Right-wing intellectuals such as Stephen Adubato desperately try to attribute political significance and “based” messages to the work of Andy Warhol and Bad Bunny, while Matt Walsh bemoans that the Left “hates beauty” (an accusation that unfortunately invites reflection on his own appearance). Even as cultural critics on the Right have bemoaned that a censorious, tediously insistent sort of progressive politics has stifled creativity in the arts, and fantasize that the “not Left” is a freer and more expressive space for beautiful, non-political art, the cultural Right remains mired in the contradictory logics of the old PC Left.

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This will make it, perhaps, difficult for the Right to grapple with its recent success. In the United States and elsewhere, whether by winning elections or shifting the terms of political debate, the Right has won a number of victories that may add up to a reconfiguration of common sense on matters ranging from immigration to gender. Recent sympathetic New York Times profiles of figures like Curtis Yarvin and Jonathan Keeperman demonstrate that just as powerful mainstream institutions once ushered into the spotlight black, feminist, and other culturally Left radicals, now they pivot to integrate spokesmen of the far-Right.

Much of Art on My Mind finds Hooks obstinately, seethingly, refusing to acknowledge that by the Nineties liberal institutions, and a broad American public, even amid the rollback of New Deal and Great Society-era progressive economic policies, were eager for black art and culture. And that even included works that seemed thoroughly oppositional, sometimes hostile, to the white audiences who loved them. Amid this confusing conjuncture of economic, political and cultural shifts, Hooks often held to a narrow, unenlightening opposition between sell-out artists and intellectuals who allowed themselves to be thus commodified, and stalwart resisters who refused the compromises success demanded. Yet often, in both the eras of PC and woke, what white critics and audiences most desired was black art (and writing — witness the success of Hooks herself) that declared itself to be in the latter category.

The spiral of denunciations against supposed sell-outs only disguises the fundamental dynamics by which the liberal establishment periodically wobbles from Right to Left by co-opting yesterday’s radicals. At least since Trump’s first election almost a decade ago, Right-wing intellectuals find themselves regularly attacked by former fans, and each other, not only as “sell-outs” but often as “feds”, “glowies”, and other terms suggesting they are only a controlled opposition actually serving the establishment. In this respect, and in its constitutive tension between a wish to save “beauty” from politics and a wish to politicize beauty on its own behalf, today’s Right is heir to Hooks. If only the boys at Passage Press shared her dream of leisure!

It all started last Tuesday when a relatively obscure tech entrepreneur, Grant Slatton, uploaded a seemingly ordinary family photo to ChatGPT-4o’s new image generator to “Ghiblify” it. Awash in pastel skies and gentle smiles, the image it spat out was the perfect encapsulation of the studio’s aesthetic.

The post went viral, amassing more than 43 million views in just a couple of days and prompting an eruption of Ghibli content. Suddenly no meme could escape Ghiblification. And backlash swiftly followed. Some critics took aim at the obvious intellectual property ambiguities. Others circulated clips of a 2016 documentary where Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki declared AI animation “an insult to life itself”.

However, this rapid onset Ghiblification foreshadows a much darker, and crucially stranger future than mere IP infringement and artistic degradation. In tech criticism, it is fashionable to contrast two dystopias: Beijing versus Las Vegas. The former is well-known. It foretells a 1984 Orwellian future of mass surveillance and thought control, turbocharged by AI-powered spyware. This is best characterized by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher’s warnings of a Chinese Communist Party-exported “Orwellian” AI surveillance dystopia.

In contrast, the Las Vegas dystopia envisions a future where we are distracted by entertainment as foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. This vision, proposed by Neil Postman in his 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, presents the future where “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.” This is a future of limbic capitalism where we are inundated by the addictive soma of Las Vegas pleasures. Books don’t need to be banned, because everybody’s too busy scrolling, eating fast food, gambling, gaming, and watching porn.

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Yet the rise of Ghiblification presents a third tech future, not from Beijing or Las Vegas — but from Tokyo. This is not a future of mere tech surveillance or opiate. Rather, it’s a vision of the world that fuses the pleasures machines of Vegas with the emotional worldbuilding of the Japanese otaku subculture — a niche consumer tribe known for their devotion to anime, manga, and video games. While long subjugated to their parent’s basements, weird corners of the Internet, and Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, otaku is now going mainstream.

In order to make sense of how this unique style of consumption is shaping our future, we must understand two macro shifts: one cultural, the other technological. The first is the mainstreaming of a postmodern otaku logic that prizes fiction over fact and vibes over shared mythologies. The second is the potent concoction of next generation multimodal AI and their capacity to create custom alternative realities with the touch of a button. Together, they herald a future not of a shared digital commons, but of hyper-personalized Matrixes-for-One.

To grasp the first shift requires digging out Japanese media theorist Hiroki Azuma’s 2001 cult media theory book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Chronicling the rise of Japan’s otaku subculture, Azuma coined the term “database animals” to describe a new kind of postmodern consumer emerging from the worlds of manga and anime obsession. These consumers no longer follow grand narratives or cohesive story arcs. Instead, they graze from a vast database of aesthetic elements, characters, and tropes — selecting whatever fragments give them the most effective hit. They are “animals” not in a pejorative sense, but in that they prioritize instinctual pleasure over ideological coherence or shared meaning.

Azuma explains the rise of otaku subculture in the context of what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “decline of the grand narrative”. From the late-18th to the mid-20th century, overarching grand narratives were the cornerstones of modernity, providing order and meaning for citizens. Now, in a thoroughly postmodern world where traditional horizons of meaning have collapsed, “grand narratives” have given way to something very different.

Grand narratives, according to Azuma, function like a tree. The trunk is the big “worldview” — a shared mythos that structures culture. From this trunk grow the branches and twigs of “small narratives”, the everyday stories, rituals, and traditions that reinforce and transmit the deeper worldview. In essence, the “surface outer layer” of small stories, rituals, and acts of consumption connects consumers to the “deeper inner layer” of the grand narrative. In Britain, rituals like churchgoing, learning Shakespeare, or buying a royal-warranted Wedgwood teapot tethered citizens to the mythos of God, King, and country. Similarly in Japan, reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, visiting shrines, conducting tea ceremonies bound citizens to a virtuous vision of Emperor, nation, and spiritual destiny.

Azuma argues that these grand narratives were disrupted by waves of turmoil. First came the Westernization of the Meiji Restoration, then the Second World War. In their wake, citing Jean Baudrillard, Azuma describes an emergent postmodern world where the trunk-and-branch models of reality are replaced by a rhizomatic “hyper reality”. In this world, meaning becomes a tangled web where the lines between truth and fiction blur, and symbols become unmoored from the realities they once represented. Here, the grand narratives are “swallowed by the chaos of a sea of simulacra”, a world where there are “no originals and no copies”. All that survives is endlessly circulating fragmented content with no shared story — if only Baudrillard were alive to see our world inebriated by memes, trends, and vibes.

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This post-modern hyperreality breeds ideological chaos. As the grand narratives collapsed — in Japan and globally — their absence was felt in various ways. Azuma argues that the otaku were the first to trailblaze a new mode of reality-making in a world stripped of unifying mythologies. Abandoning conventional “narrative consumption”, they pioneered what he calls “database consumption”: a logic that replaces the tree-and-branch structure with a database and hyper-individualized pick-and-mix consumer mindset. Stories are no longer linear journeys with moral arcs, they become modular fragments, plucked from a database of options and consumed as highly personalized forms of pleasure and identity-making.

Azuma observes that otakus — in contrast to regular fans — are almost entirely uninterested in official canon or coherent storytelling. Rather, they are obsessed with animalistically chasing an emotional rush — known as moe — triggered by modular elements of certain manga/anime characters. Different otakus chase different “moe-elements” (or moe-yoso). Some are visual: cat ears, knee-high socks, specific hairstyles, maid or sailor outfits, flaming swords. Others are more abstract: distinctive speech patterns, familiar plot beats, even particular curves or camera angles.

Otakus call the hunt for this affective sugar hit chara-moe. Many actively search for their preferred moe elements regardless of what franchise or series they come from. Further, otakus use search engines like TINAMI to filter the endless databases and feast on their moe of choice — whether it is styles of ships or spectacles, or just good old-fashioned bikinis.

For Azuma, what distinguishes the otaku is not their devotion to manga or anime per se, but their distinctive mode of database consumption. While the objects of their obsession — Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sylvanian Families — have had an obvious cultural spillover into the West, it’s this underlying logic of fragmented, non-narrative consumption that has truly gone mainstream. The seemingly endless and narratively incoherent Marvel Cinematic Universe and online culture wars demonstrate the hypnotic power of non-linear database consumption over linear grand, cohesive narratives. Our media landscape now resembles an endless database of familiar image templates, catchphrases, and decontextualized references — shared and reshuffled for the sheer thrill of recognition. To giggle at and share an AI Ghibli meme that hits right is to indulge in chara-moe. In essence: if database consumption is now the primary driver of demand, then it’s now suddenly met with a perfectly created and curated supply.

Which brings us to the macrotrend powering Ghiblification: the rise of next-generation multimodal AI. Last week’s ChatGPT-4o update offered a glimpse of what happens when ordinary users are handed tools to conjure images in any style they wish, instantly. While Ghibli aesthetics may have stolen the spotlight, the algorithm’s reach is far broader. From Lego to Pixar, South Park to The Simpsons, the internet has exploded with a surreal parade of fan-made transformations. Ghibli versions of The Office. Pixar versions of Severance. The possibilities are endless. Ghiblification is not really about Studio Ghibli, it’s about the turbocharging of hyperreality with AI.

This shift is being driven by a new frontier in generative AI: the rise of multimodal, or “omnimedia” large language models. Just a few months ago — the Dark Ages, in AI terms — most models were siloed by medium. To write or code you used ChatGPT or Perplexity. To create an image, DALL·E or Midjourney. To create a video, Runway or OpenAI’s Sora were your best bet. Yet with the latest update to ChatGP-4o (the “o” stands for omni), we have entered a stratospheric new era. Very soon, models will no longer be confined to one input or output. Instead, they are being stitched together across modalities — capable of inhaling and exhaling text, image, video, audio, and more. In this new “anything-to-anything” paradigm, you can turn a photo into a cartoon, a game, a song — even a 3D-printed statue. With just a single, frictionless prompt each of us becomes the world-builder of our own private universe.

It’s only going to get faster. The primary barrier to fully automated Ghiblification is no longer AI developer genius or human creativity, but computing power. Today, it takes 30 seconds to generate a near-perfect detailed image. Soon it will be instant. In 2024 alone, tech firms poured more than $100 billion into AI processing infrastructure to speed things up. By 2028, that number is forecast to go over $200 billion. The direction is clear: the only thing standing between users and immersive, personalized AI worlds — whether they be Ghibli, Pixar, or South Park — is processing time. IP rights and energy costs may be barriers, but on matters of AI, it seems that politicians are more concerned with Chinese AI drone swarms than artists’ rights and emissions. Everything else — the demand, the tech, the servers — is there.

Furthermore, it’s amplified by a different kind of AI: interest-graph recommender algorithms. In recent years, feed curation has quietly shifted from the social graph (what you and your friends like and follow) to the interest graph (what you actually pay attention to). The algorithms of TikTok’s “For You” page do not care what you claim to value; they optimize for what you linger on. And what do people want? AI slop. As Altman put it: “one man’s slop is another man’s treasure”. The latest research backs it up. A recent blind study found that most people genuinely prefer AI pastiches of the great poets to the real thing. On a critical level, it is easy to say one believes in the Miyazaki and Nick Cave characterization of AI creativity as “a grotesque mockery”. In practice it’s harder. While older models made creepy, creatively bankrupt pastiches, emerging visual models are increasingly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Ghiblification is unlikely to be a fleeting trend.

And so here we are at the beginning of the new age of Otaku, possibly the end of shared reality as we know it. While reflecting on the creative process, Miyazaki once explained that “the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos”. Now, in a cruel twist of fate, the opposite is happening. Reality is being shattered into billions of AI-crafted otaku worlds for one, but perhaps that’s exactly what we want.

The terms we use to express this delusion vary depending on political persuasion. In the United States, progressives can see themselves as dissenting members of a “resistance” to Trump, while centrists oppose both the President and woke shibboleths by holding “heterodox” views. Rightward, those in Trumpworld denounce opponents as automata. Witness tech billionaire Sam Altman bending the knee to Trump on X, where he apologized for his earlier opposition to the President: “i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap.”

Thinking for oneself is perhaps most difficult among communities — Left, Right, and center — that celebrate ostensible dissent. Defining independent thinking in terms of outspoken opposition to dominant views, would-be dissenters often end up falling into either mere contrarianism or uncritical adherence to views popular in their own circles.

Few American thinkers have confronted this problem as unsparingly as the 20th-century cultural critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). The central concerns of his wide-ranging life in letters were paradoxes of non-conformity in a society at once founded on individual freedom and dominated by clichés. He rose to prominence in a postwar United States where unprecedented national wealth and power combined with a growing unease among intellectuals about the stultifying effects of mass media and the incapacity of citizens to exercise independent judgment. Our collective repetition of clichés and inauthentic opinions, regardless of the subject matter, degrades the freedom of thought on which politics — and indeed ethics — depend.

Best known today for his advocacy of Abstract Expressionist painting, Rosenberg’s collections of essays — all of them now out of print — trace his struggles against what he saw as deceptive forms of pseudo-freedom in everything from the visual arts to politics. For decades, his career was marginal and precarious. He subsisted on a combination of freelance essay-writing and consulting work for the Advertising Council of America — a job that contradicted his public condemnations of American capitalism. After the publication of his first book, The Tradition of the New (1959), however, Rosenberg was not only famous, but a bona fide member of the establishment he had once criticized. He took a professorship at the University of Chicago and became an art critic for The New Yorker, where he often lamented whatever seemed to be fashionable in contemporary painting (he especially loathed Andy Warhol, whom he saw as a boring fraud). He became one of the country’s most influential critics from the Sixties until his death in 1978.

But it was at the magazines aimed at fellow intellectuals where Rosenberg emerged as an insightful and divisive, if relatively obscure, critic. He was long associated with the Partisan Review, one of the leading “little magazines” of the American mid-century. Its editors and writers prided themselves on their independence from both American popular culture and dogmatic Leftism. Throughout the late Thirties and Forties, their line had shifted from an anti-Soviet Marxism towards the political center, while retaining a small but influential readership and intellectual cachet. Although politically in favor of democracy, the Partisan Review was culturally elitist. It put into circulation early critiques of mass culture, and presented the intellectual in a capitalist democracy as obligated to reinforce his sense of superiority over the swine feeding at the trough of popular culture.

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By 1948, Rosenberg’s relationships with many members of the circle around the magazine were increasingly fraught. He hoped to attain a position at the magazine’s helm but personal qualities such as belligerent self-assurance and a habit of sleeping with other men’s wives handicapped him. Among the rivalries he nurtured during this period, his reciprocal hatred of fellow Partisan Review writer Clement Greenberg was particularly important. While both men were, along with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, the earliest and most intelligent champions of Abstract Expressionism, they disagreed about why the movement mattered.

For Greenberg the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others was the latest development in a centuries-long process of Western art moving away from literal-minded depictions of reality and towards the free play of form and color. Rosenberg, in contrast, saw what he preferred to call “Action Painting” as a decisive break with the past. He regarded these paintings as expressions on canvas of the postwar existential crisis articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus: a response to what he took to be the collapse of traditional systems of meaning and the threat of nuclear annihilation. According to Rosenberg, a “good” work of art was an authentic one, by which the artist was able to register his own free, creative, personal grappling with the situations that imperil us all.

As he developed his interpretation of abstract painting as the visual equivalent of existentialism, Rosenberg became increasingly skeptical of the intellectuals closest to him. His sharpest essay in this vein, “The Herd of Independent Minds”, appeared in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1948. As his biographer Debra Bricker Balken observes, he had intended to publish it in the Partisan Review, possibly hoping to offend his former friends at the magazine.

Thinkers associated with that era’s little magazines — the distant ancestors of n+1 on the Left and The Point or Liberties in the center today — wrote as if they were separate from American mass culture. But they were, he warned, only members of a subcultural bubble with its own clichés and jargon (these days, every little magazine seems to have its own merchandise as well), part of a “mass culture of small groups”.

This is bad enough, although perhaps smug, self-satisfied in-group coziness is the inevitable consequence of belonging to any set (and must be preferable to the alternative of having no interlocutors). As Joseph Keegin has pointed out, for example, Right-wing populists tend to repeat comforting political slogans identical in form (if opposite in content) to the much-mocked “In This House We Believe” signs of their progressive opponents. It could be added that even small groups outside the bustle of mass politics still depend on some measure of sloganeering and dogmatizing, however much smaller in scale.

We’re always bound to impose some allegiance to common beliefs in order to have a community at all, even a community of intellectuals. But there are some delusions, Rosenberg hoped, that we can avoid. He particularly admonished his Left-liberal free-thinking friends for imagining themselves to be educating the public by speaking, in authoritative tones, about the supposed features and needs of “our” moment or generation. This was, he hoped, a curable vice — although it remains a common one today. Commentators, as a glance at Substack will show you, still love to yap about the “vibes” in which we are all supposedly participating, delineating the purported qualities of ever shorter micro-periods of contemporary history.

Invariably such pundits, Rosenberg noted, write as if they were somehow not themselves caught up in the trends of the day. While acting as an anthropologist of the shifting folk beliefs of the masses — or of rival sets of intellectuals — one fails to notice how one’s own thought is shaped by peers, clichés, and the pressure to conform.

He called on intellectuals to follow the paths of the best artists, those who confront the confusing, disjointed, overwhelming aspects of their individual experience, which somehow “never belongs to the right time and place”. Instead of taking a bad faith stance by which you imagine that other people are caught up in vibes which you, as a free thinker, can analyze, Rosenberg suggests you start by tracking how your own experience comes into friction with the received ideas of your tribe and the limits of your self-categorizations. Only then can you hope to interact with others authentically, rather than giving just another twist to clichés currently in favor.

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The torture of an unphilosophical life

By Agnes Callard

Rosenberg, however, often despaired that neither in punditry nor painting was such authenticity possible (a fear he shared with Arendt). After all, as he was writing in 1948, existentialism had already become a fad, and abstract painting was about to become a top-selling commodity on the global art market. The arc of his own career may seem discouraging, taking him from independent little magazines to The New Yorker, perhaps the most condescendingly smug of America’s middle-brow publications. A typical New Yorker essay (such as this recent piece by historian Daniel Immerwahr), whether in the age of Arendt and Rosenberg or in the present, appeals to a supposed consensus view among urban, educated upper-middle-class liberals, while offering what the writer presents as a surprising twist on that common sense. Such writing confirms the reader in their sense of having the capacity to allow their opinions to be gently challenged by well-edited experts. It perpetuates a delusion of free thought.

Yet perhaps there is room for hope even here. If neither small readerships nor noisy pride in thinking for oneself makes for genuine intellectual freedom, neither perhaps does the opposite mean conformism. Arendt, after all, wrote her indictment of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in which she made her most perceptive — and controversial — judgments on the power of cliché, in the pages of The New Yorker. Then again, amid the rancorous debates surrounding her reportage, few readers at the time were able to make sense of her now-famous arguments about the “banality of evil”. We cannot assure ourselves that we are thinking freely because we have unpopular opinions, or because our ideas seem to be misunderstood. We must conversely at least hope that sometimes genuinely novel, authentically held, and, more importantly, true ideas can be expressed even through the channels of mass media.

In accordance with his own emphasis on the difficulty of cultivating freedom of thought, Rosenberg had no direct intellectual heirs. His closest student and literary executor, Michael Denneny, abandoned a nearly completed PhD thesis on the history of aesthetic theory (under the direction of Arendt) to become a publisher of a gay men’s magazine that imitated the form and tone of The New Yorker. It was as if he were out to prove that a glossy commercial publication could both rally a community (or consumer demographic) and remain true to Rosenberg’s legacy. More recently, in a similar spirit, the art critic Travis Jeppesen, newly named senior editor of Artforum, has called for a revival of Rosenberg’s highly personal and engaged style of writing about art, by which works and artists were judged by the power (or failure) to incite spectators to think anew.

Artforum, rocked by debates about the war in Gaza, and operating amid a global arts market devoted equally to pseudo-political posturing and pseudo-intellectual sales pitches for expensive commodities of dubious aesthetic value, is surely an imperfect venue for independent thought. But the lesson of Rosenberg’s critique in “Herd of Independent Minds” is that there is, in fact, no publication, network, style, or attitude in which we can take permanent refuge from the danger of cliché, or the still more insidious danger of believing ourselves — and people like us — to have secured both intellectual independence and membership in a group.

There was something quixotic about the whole enterprise: the discarding of one culture (imperial Portuguese), deemed alien on decolonial grounds, and the embrace of another (indigenous Brazilian), just as foreign to Brazil’s self-respecting, nationalist elite. Take Tarsila do Amaral, the star of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, the new show at the Royal Academy (on until 21 April). An accomplished painter as well as an astute theorist, she was no doubt a brilliant mind. De Andrade was her husband, and his Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928 owed more than a little to her oeuvre. There, in feverish aphorisms, he had worked up much resentment against Portuguese imperialism, a distant memory since decolonization over a century earlier in 1822 but one which nevertheless exercised a hold on the native imagination through an imperialism of the mind. “Down with Father Vieira… Down with every catechism… Down with all the importers of canned consciousness” is the gist of it.

As it was, even in his defiance to dispose of that distasteful Lusophone inheritance, de Andrade couldn’t help but appropriate its gaze, even if only to turn it on its head. The interwar Brazilian avant-garde called themselves “anthropophagites” — cannibals — only because the Portuguese had insinuated that one of their own, a particularly rotund bishop called Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, had been devoured by the Caeté Indians in 1556. Western modernism was to be relished with equal abandon.

Do Amaral was very much the art cannibal par excellence. A canvas called “Antropofagia” was produced in 1929, a year after the manifesto, depicting a black woman with a single burdensome breast drooping groundward against a background of cacti. At first blush, this is the portrait of a Gauguinesque exotique, a sentimental celebration of the “noble savage” as it were, but there is a lot more going on. Her subject very likely is the same woman in “A Negra” (1923), do Amaral’s Cubist nude of a former slave. There were still many of them about between the wars, as Brazil had only abolished slavery in 1888, two-thirds of a century after independence. The seemingly implausible elasticity of the black woman’s breast, do Amaral later recalled in an interview, was achieved through the manipulation of stones with the objective of slinging it back over her shoulders; a Brazilian custom, apparently, that allowed black women to breastfeed and toil away in farms at the same time.

On whose farm, you may ask, was this degrading practice imposed upon her? Do Amaral’s own, it turns out. She hailed from São Paulo’s coffee aristocracy, which made a killing at the turn of the century; Amazonian rubber and northeastern sugarcane, both casualties of the abolition of slavery, had released a mammoth wave of manumitted labor into the southeast. For her part, do Amaral showed little awareness of having battened on cheapened labor. More interesting to her were the decolonial aesthetics of national identification: “I feel more and more Brazilian,” she wrote to her family. “I want to be the painter of my homeland. How grateful I am to have spent my entire childhood on the farm.”

The black slave, I would hazard, would have seen less reason to feel grateful for her inclusion in the national sorority of epistemically liberated postcolonials. No doubt do Amaral’s pontificating would have struck her as tone-deaf. The two Brazilians couldn’t have been more different: one was patting herself on the back for emancipating herself from the tyranny of Western modes of representation whereas the other perhaps dreamed of emancipation at a more elemental level. One person’s decolonial emancipation is another’s postcolonial oppression. One person’s languorous nostalgia is another’s living nightmare.

It should come as no surprise that there is something deeply unfeeling about do Amaral’s early art. Her nationalism, properly speaking, was just academicism. She was an alien in her own homeland. A Belgian nanny taught her her first letters. On her grand piano, she played French composers to an audience of French upholstery. French literature dominated her downtime. Like so many Westernized Asian and African nationalists, then, she only discovered her poorer compatriots through an adventitious agency: it was the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in Brazil to make a documentary on the local art scene, who convinced her and de Andrade to take Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian culture seriously. He was hot on samba and carnival, both hitherto dismissed by artsy metropolitans as the unformed festivities of benighted primitives, and his enthusiasm proved infectious.

Yet the results of this belated recognition were oddly sterile. Do Amaral’s subjects aren’t so much people as placeholders, standing in for grander themes. It is no accident that the face of the woman in “Antropofagia” is featureless. Likewise, there’s not much more to the woman in “A Negra” than her “huge, pendulous lips”, as do Amaral put it.

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Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right

By Pratinav Anil

As in painting, so in fiction. Macunaíma, the novel associated with this scene, is heavy going. Its biracial, bisexual novelist Mário de Andrade — no relation to Oswald — set out explicitly to cast away its Lusophone past. Accordingly, after immersing himself in a five-volume work by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, he dashed off a draft in six days of self-imposed immurement. The upshot was a hurried, self-published affair. Its hero is a concupiscent, shapeshifting Lothario, a kind of Brazilian Michael Jackson, born black but then turned white. Over the course of this bizarre novel, he sleeps his way across the rainforest, conversing with loquacious worms and slurping on wine, only to be dismembered by a river monster and then transformed into Ursa Major. Like so many postcolonial novels, this one only works at the level of national allegory — though it doesn’t work for me.

Part of the problem is stylistic. These are well-meaning works, of course, but, as Flaubert had it, “you don’t make art out of good intentions”. The other defect is more structural: the self-defeating exercise of consciously fashioning a national culture. To be sure, national cultures do exist. They are, all the same, easier to define historically than to create artificially. For instance, it was easy enough for Nikolaus Pevsner to identify a set of characteristically English qualities — compromise, understatement, empiricism — running from Reynolds to Blake and beyond in The Englishness of English Art. But it was an altogether harder proposition for a set of interwar practitioners, not theoreticians, to construct a distinctively Brazilian style from scratch.

Cobbling together a national signature out of the dissenting currents of Continental modernism was easier said than done. All too often, the source material was plainly visible, jutting out like a bone from an anthropophagite’s mouth. The Lithuanian-born and Berlin-trained Lasar Segall’s paintings on display here, for example, are of obvious Cubist derivation. The failed liquor baron turned painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s work, similarly, is unquestionably Art Deco. Anita Malfatti’s pictures are, by turns, Fauvist, Cubist, and Expressionist.

Decolonial aims notwithstanding, the foreignness showed — especially to their nationalist compatriots. The leading critic of the period taxed Malfatti with the “diplopic influence of rebellious schools” and “ephemeral theories”. Her uncle’s verdict was much of a muchness, only more demotic: “This is not painting. These are Dantesque things!” The São Paolo press was savage when her exhibition opened in 1917. Thereafter, she retreated into an anchoritic life, altogether giving up exhibiting a decade later.

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The more convincing paintings here are the ones with no obvious nation-building “decolonial” agenda. The former dentist and autodidact Rubem Valentim, for one, knew what he was about. An Afro-Brazilian who had witnessed Candomblé religious ceremonies first-hand, he achieved a satisfactory synthesis of cultures. So it is with the half-indigenous Djanira da Motta e Silva, also self-taught, who deployed her knowledge of local art and custom to brilliant effect. They weren’t cosplaying. They were the real deal.

Their art is a far cry from Monteiro’s, whose grand theme, too, was the life of indigenous people — only he had had no contact with indigenous people himself. He had learned a trick or two from Rio’s Museu Nacional, but that was it. Like an old colonial, he divided his time between Paris and Recife, setting great store by his eclecticism and cosmopolitanism: “I’m a citizen of nowhere, but I love Paris above all.”

Sensibly, if belatedly, do Amaral came to the conclusion that cannibalism wasn’t for her. The Depression radicalized her against such decolonial doctrines. It instantly destroyed Brazil’s coffee business, ruining her family in the process. The Revolution of 1930 followed in short order. The oligarchy was overthrown and replaced with Getúlio Vargas’s regime, welding autocratic nationalism and social reformism in a heteroclite alliance of organized labor, the gentry and military. Fired by these events, do Amaral traveled to Moscow the following year, and was briefly arrested on her return. By then, she had long since abandoned cultural nationalism for socialist realism. Some of the best pictures in the exhibition belong to the latter tradition — not only do Amaral’s “Second Class” (1933), a moving depiction of discalced peasants, but also Candido Portinari’s “Coffee Agricultural Worker” (1934), a muscular fellow in contrapposto.

The artists, and indeed activists and academics, of our time who go doolally over decoloniality would do well to follow in do Amaral’s footsteps. Banging on about a supposedly pristine indigenous past lost to the sands of time, she realized, achieves precious little. Better, then, to swap the sentimental appeal of cultural nostrums for the hard-nosed allure of proper class politics.

In theory, this is because of the art — the hard-hitting, big-statement, generously-funded art. It’s supposed to be a celebration of excellence, an opportunity for countries to showcase the heights of their culture. But what happens when this is no longer the case?

With this year’s theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”, the cultural status quo of the last few years became crystallised. Identity politics and decolonisation ruled above all. The Spanish pavilion showed a Peruvian artist who spoke about historical colonialism; the American pavilion featured a First Nations artist who used Native American performative rituals as the basis for his work. Each was applauded more than the last — except in the case of Germany.

In the German pavilion, there is an artwork called “Light to the Nations” by Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist living in Berlin. It is an installation of a Sixties-style model spaceship, suspended at the top of a dark room, floating like a distant solar system in a mist of mesmerising light patterns. The title refers to the Book of Isaiah, when God tells the prophet that Israel’s outward mission will be led by the principle of light. It is about the future of the Jewish civilisation assuming the worst has already happened, posing the haunting question: where would Jews live if they were unwelcome everywhere on Earth? 

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This was my favourite artwork of the whole Biennale; and, one night, over proseccos in Dorsoduro, I confessed as much to the Emerati pavilion gallerina. I watched as the blood rushed to her face: “That kind of artist shouldn’t have a platform,” she replied. “With everything that’s going on right now, how could any country promote an artist like her?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by her response. Since October 7, art galleries across the West have faced criticism for spotlighting Israeli artists. And since the Biennale opened in April, there have also been anti-Israel protests outside not only the already-closed Israeli pavilion, but also the German one. 

What was peculiarly ironic in Venice, however, was that under the logic of identity politics favoured by the Biennale, Germany’s decision to spotlight a Jewish artist was entirely fitting. Isn’t the whole premise of this ideology to shift “the culture” away from those who have “held the power” historically? Why is a German attempt at cultural reparations to the Jewish people not valid, when most other pavilions were essentially a cultural apology to their oppressed peoples? 

The answer, I suspect, lies at the start of almost every artist’s career — at art school. Even before October 7, the popularity of the BDS movement in universities, particularly among the coolest art students, was obvious. After October 7, however, more overt anti-Jewish sentiment became firmly embedded in the universities, falling in line with the trends of wider society. 

At art school, this is even more pronounced because, on an educational level, the bare minimum is expected from you. I remember from my time applying to art schools how difficult it was to find a course that taught electives in both academic and practical subjects. I was lucky to find a course which doubled as a history of art degree, as one of the only things I was taught on the art side was “artistic research”. Here, lecturers told us that, as artists, walking around a park is as valuable as reading a book. More than anything, they prized transgression for transgression’s sake. Yet transgression has its limits.

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By Rob Lownie

For Ben, an Israeli artist and student at a London art school for the past year, the repercussions of this became all too apparent following October 7. Having lost a close friend at the Nova music festival, and one of the only Israelis in the school, Ben (not his real name) felt it his duty to have a conversation with a fellow student about the anti-Israel banners she was hanging around the university, including ones that depicted the state of Israel eliminated from a map of the Middle East and which called for an “end to our university’s research, commercial and institutional partnerships with the ‘Israeli State’”. Concerned by their presence on campus, Ben sent her a polite message, hoping to open up a channel of communication. The activist declined. Ben didn’t push, and assumed that was that. 

A few weeks later, however, Ben was summoned by the university. He was told that the activist had filed an official complaint against him for bullying, and was instructed to attend a meeting about his “harassing” behaviour. He was also warned that its outcome could affect his ability to graduate. Eventually, the claim was dismissed, though the university still issued Ben with an “official warning”: if he ever contradicted the student again, his time at the institution would immediately be terminated. Luckily for him, it was his last month before graduation, and he obviously has no plan to return for more. 

Ben’s experience is far from unique. Noa, a London-based artist who is exhibiting at Frieze for the first time this year, is also Israeli. A few months ago, a British friend she used to be close to told Noa (also a pseudonym) the reason she’d has stopped talking to her. “I was worried you might be a Zionist,” she said. Her evidence, she explained, consisted of the fact that Noa followed a Jewish art collector and actress Amy Schumer on Instagram — both of whom had posted about the Israeli hostages. Of course, this is something that works both ways. I felt a deep sense of betrayal too when artistic colleagues of many years, in the wake of October 7, started posting about the need for “Palestinian resistance”, or shared a conspiratorial infographic about the impossibility of being antisemitic because “Jews aren’t semites”.

In an industry where being trendy is the most precious commodity, galleries have been equally nervous about taking on Jewish artists. “It’s a big risk for any gallery to take on a Jewish artist right now,” says Sarah, a Jewish artist with gallery representation in London and also speaking to UnHerd anonymously. “As fucked up as it is to say, I feel lucky. It could be much worse.”

Even with Sarah, her Jewishness was a cause for concern. When she joined the gallery, she was asked if she planned “on becoming an online activist”, despite the fact that another artist on their roster is an active pro-Palestine protestor online. At one point during her induction to the gallery, she was told: “We’re going to downplay the fact that you are Jewish.” 

In such a climate, it’s perhaps not surprising that many Jews in the arts feel the need to hide their identity. It is striking, after all, that everyone I spoke to for this article insisted on remaining anonymous; all of them fearing the negative impact that speaking freely might have on their careers. One artist told me: “I would love to be open and use my name for your piece, but I can’t risk being dropped by my gallery.”

For some, like Maya, an emerging curator, seeing this has not only been heart-breaking but also discouraging. The pseudonymous artist decided to leave London and move back to Israel. “I miss my friends and family a lot,” she told me. She’d found it exhausting to deal with the relentless anti-Jewish sentiment during her MA in London over the past year.

I understand this. October 7 marked a change in my life, too: I was no longer able to live in a world with so many painful barriers in front of me, so I took several months out, returned home to Madrid, and focused on building myself in other ways. After overhearing artists in my studio talk about how the “Jews control the media”, I wanted to make sure I had skills beyond the art world. I needed to be prepared, just in case, like countless other Jews this past year and throughout history, I am forced to pack up and leave.

There is a broader tragedy here, too. Art dies when there is only one right way to understand and react to the world. It comes alive, however, when it touches on something we can’t quite understand, or something which remains unspeakable. And so, I am reminded once more of Bartana’s work. Standing in that dark room with pounding techno reverberating through the walls and inside my chest, with the plumes of gaseous CO2 unfurling onto the floor, I craned my head towards the light.

But rather than dwell on such hardships, my grandmother grew nostalgic for the everyday kindnesses and instinctive mutuality that, for all their faults, characterised coalfield communities. The extent to which ordinary people relied on one another then is hard for later generations to imagine.

Some of the best evocations of that world can be found in “Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L.S. Lowry”, an exhibition which has recently opened at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. The museum itself is an astonishing sight: a vast Second Empire chateau built on the edge of Barnard Castle by John Bowes, the playboy scion of a local coal-owning dynasty, to house his art collection. Nikolaus Pevsner called it “gloriously inappropriate”. So it is pleasing to see the working-class paintings of Cornish and Lowry take their place alongside all those Raphaels and Van Dycks.

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What is immediately apparent on entering the exhibition is the contrasting personalities of the two artists. Cornish, a former miner, was an active participant in the coal town of Spennymoor that remained his constant muse, while Lowry, a rent collector, was the eternal outsider. This is reflected too in their work, where the beaten-down stickmen and women of Lowry’s Salford diverge from the warmth and joviality of Cornish’s Durham folk, a people that he always refused to portray as “cowed and defeated”.

The peasant-strength of Cornish’s subjects call to mind the works of Brueghel, Rembrandt and van Gogh, which Cornish had spent every spare moment studying as a young miner. Yet it was not just his phenomenal talent as a painter that won Cornish so many admirers, but his vision as a storyteller. “He is a painter of place in a way that Thomas Hardy is a writer of place,” wrote Melvyn Bragg. “Spennymoor is the grain of sand in which he brings a whole world to life.”

Lowry, by contrast, has a colder eye. His silent, almost robotic figures seem isolated from one another. “All these people in my pictures, they are all alone you know,” he once said. “Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else.” There is a hint in his Salford pictures of Karl Marx’s idea of the alienation of labour. As Robert McManners and Gillian Wales observe in The Quintessential Cornish, Lowry’s characters “are relegated to automata by the harshness of industrialisation and each figure is almost incidental. Norman’s, by contrast, are elevated to centre-stage… They are people who each have a life before, during and after the picture.”

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One explanation for this artistic divergence is the type of industrial work that dominated Lowry’s Cottonopolis compared to Cornish’s Durham coalfield. Friedrich Engels once wrote of the “nameless misery” of the workers he observed in Manchester, and novelists from Charlies Dickens onwards described in horror its stygian gloom and satanic mills. But the coalfields were different; here was a landscape that was by no means picturesquely rural, but it wasn’t quite grimly urban either. The miners here had a strange love-hate relationship with the pits too, where the work could be debilitating and often lethally dangerous, but it could also be satisfying and often thrilling. My own pitman grandfather would recount stories about intense workplace camaraderie until the day he died.

The miners also created a distinctive culture, where an interest in the arts was not uncommon — just consider the Pitmen Painters, or even Billy Elliot. Cornish himself once said: “I’m sick of being looked at like some sort of zoo animal or specimen… It assumes that a man who works in a mine is not up to writing or painting or playing music. But it simply isn’t true.” Of course, not every miner was an autodidact. But Cornish’s attitude was certainly shared by my own grandfather, who read voraciously and always had a sketchbook to hand.

Another hallmark of the coalfields was the working men’s clubs, and Cornish was a fabulous painter of bar scenes. Among my favourites in the exhibition is his much-reproduced image of two flat-cap-wearing blokes leaning on the bar, greyhound at their feet. These men are “Tosser” Angus and Joe Hughes, miners who served in the Second World War in the Durham Light Infantry, and who were among the last men off the Dunkirk beaches, before seeing brutal combat in North Africa and Sicily.

In Cornish’s vision, the worlds of work and recreation are strictly gendered. No women appear at the coalface, where they had been forbidden from working since the 1840s, and the bar room was a male preserve. (Indeed, I saw women being ushered out of the bar of working men’s clubs as recently as the Nineties.) Miners could be as superstitious as sailors in their attitude to women, and it was considered unlucky to pass a female on the way to the pit.

This gendered division of labour was driven by the needs of the coal industry, which needed their thoroughbreds well-cared for, fed and washed around the clock. In many ways, the role of pitman’s wife was similar to that of a groom to a horse. It was common for miners to pay tribute to female labour in their writing and their art, and Cornish’s tender paintings of his wife Sarah performing tasks which might be seen as drudgery — peeling potatoes, cooking, ironing — are both reverent and dignified.

But for all their stoicism there is something wistful about these women. Perhaps Sarah Cornish — an accomplished pianist who had worked as a nurse during the war — nurtured a sense of thwarted ambition that I sometimes detected in my own grandmother. For feminist writers such as Beatrix Campbell, this was a source of shame. “No group of men has been so cold and confident in its exclusion of women, yet so dependent on their support,” she wrote of the miners of the Northern Coalfield. We don’t know if Cornish would have agreed, but a characterful, almost Rembrandtian, sketch of his grandmother, which he drew when he was only 17, says something profound about the respect he felt for the matriarchs that made these communities tick.

I am sure that many of the visitors to this exhibition will feel the pangs of nostalgia. Yet this was far from a progressive age. For the strength of community in these pit villages, and their distinctive work ethic, relied on socially-enforced codes of behaviour, and a low-level surveillance culture that our modern individualistic sensibilities would probably make us recoil from today.

And yet, in a recent interview, the political philosopher John Gray argued that much was lost when his tight-knit, “rather matriarchal” street community in the coal and shipbuilding town of South Shields was broken up. When the Gray family and their neighbours were moved out of town in the Sixties to better housing in newly-built orbital council estates, he noticed that almost immediately “there was graffiti, there was street crime, there were all the pathologies of what sociologists call anomic individualism”. He concluded that “great advances”, such as those brought about by the Labour government of 1945-1950, “are often associated with losses”. These formative early years led, he said, to a lifelong scepticism about progress.

How, then, might we assess the progress of the North of England since the days of Lowry and Cornish? The North East in particular has had a difficult last century, with only sporadic interludes of confidence and prosperity — notably in the Fifties. It now has among the very worst health, education and employment outcomes in the country. Indeed, for all the improvements in housing and healthcare, the coming of the centralised welfare state in places such as County Durham was a mixed blessing, emasculating once-proud local institutions, and bureaucratising many aspects of social life.

There are still occasional glimmers of the old days. In “left behind” Sacriston, a former pit village not far from Spennymoor, local women took over the derelict former Co-op in 2019 to establish a family centre, and local networks were set up to tackle male loneliness. These community efforts, according to a team of UCL researchers, were galvanised by a sense of “constructive nostalgia” for a time when the village was confident enough to solve its own problems through a web of communal institutions:

“But people in Sacriston are not nostalgic for mining disasters, unemployment, emphysema or dysentery. Rather, they lament a lost era of relative prosperity based on secure local employment and the erosion of the community bonds that were the basis for their struggle to improve life in the village, which produced genuine ‘pride in place’.”

By stirring our collective memory, the Kith and Kinship exhibition reminds us of what community life in the North East was and could be again. The challenge for anyone concerned about the region’s future is not to recreate the past, but to convey its history to inspire a new generation of community builders.

***

Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and L.S. Lowry is at the Bowes Museum from 20 July until 19 January.

When it comes to songs about friendship, Michael Jackson’s first US number one “Ben” (1972) is among the best known and the most sentimental. But unlike others of the genre — such as “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers (1972), or “With a Little Help from My Friends” by The Beatles (1967) — the key difference is that the subject isn’t human. “Ben” is a rat.

That this mawkish song about a boy and his pet rodent could have catalysed the career of one of the biggest pop stars of all time is only one aspect of the strangeness of this story. The inspiration for the song can be traced directly to a Belfast seed merchant and CND activist called Stephen Gilbert who, in 1968, published the novel Ratman’s Notebooks about a man who trains rats to wreak vengeance on his enemies. When this was filmed in 1971 as the movie Willard, the reissued paperback of the novel sold over a million copies. And it was for the sequel, Ben in 1972, that Michael Jackson provided the theme song.

All art is imitative. Even the greatest geniuses, those for whom there is seemingly no precedent, have learned their craft in the observation of other artists. The canon of literature is not formed at the behest of academics issuing decrees from their ivory towers, but rather from those works that are most emulated and admired by creatives. And this applies as much to popular culture as it does to high art. Take, for instance, T’Pau’s breakthrough hit “China in Your Hand” (1987) which was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Some of these ripples of influence are admittedly more arbitrary than others. But there is something especially gratifying about being able to trace the work of a relatively obscure Northern Irish novelist such as Stephen Gilbert all the way to the “King of Pop”, who died 15 years ago to the day..

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By Alexander Poots

I remember speaking to a senior member of the Northern Irish Arts Council who was lamenting his country’s poor track record of sustaining the legacy of its creative sons and daughters. Of course, the likes of C.S. Lewis need no further promotion, but what of the lesser-known names? When I attempted to arrange a blue plaque for the birthplace of Belfast novelist Forrest Reid, I was met with bafflement from one of the decision-makers. Even this person so steeped in local culture apparently had no idea that Reid was considered Northern Ireland’s foremost novelist by E.M. Forster, and had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1944. Such is the fickle nature of literary trends.

As for Gilbert, you won’t find his work on any of the shelves of Belfast’s bookshops. But there is much to admire in the five novels that were published during his lifetime. Reading these books, one is immediately struck by the sheer imaginative range on display. The Landslide (1943) is a fantastical tale about a boy who encounters primeval creatures in his village that have been brought back into existence after a landslide exposes their long-dormant eggs. Bombardier (1944) is a vivid and compelling roman à clef about the author’s experiences as a gunner in France during the war which includes some fascinating insights into the evacuation of Dunkirk from the soldier’s perspective. Gilbert followed this with Monkeyface (1948), an eccentric story about an ape boy who is brought from a forest in South America and raised in a Belfast suburb. Then came The Burnaby Experiments (1952), in which Gilbert seems to take revenge on his mentor Forrest Reid by casting him in the role of a voyeuristic villain with supernatural powers. (The intense love-hate relationship between Reid and Gilbert is far too complex and intricate to explore here.) Ratman’s Notebooks finally appeared in 1968, an outlandish horror story to round off this bizarrely varied catalogue of work.

That Ratman’s Notebooks was destined to become famous due to a Hollywood adaptation was a source of some irritation for Gilbert. He died in 2010 having refused to watch Willard, its sequel Ben, or the 2003 remake of Willard starring Crispin Glover. He wasn’t happy with the studio’s decision to christen his unnamed narrator Willard Stiles, and to relocate the story to California. His instincts were right; this off-kilter tale is far better suited to a provincial rather than a cosmopolitan setting. Ratman’s Notebooks concerns a discontented man, dominated by a scornful mother and bullied by his boss, who resorts to acts of horrific violence. Somehow this all makes so much more sense in Belfast, a city with a troubled history and where the borderland of reality and fiction has always felt malleable.

Ratman’s Notebooks is often dismissed as a lurid and dispensable work of pulp fiction, but its influence on the horror genre has been hugely significant. The critic Kim Newman has argued its success following the release of Willard “made rampaging vermin a major horror theme of the 1970s and ’80s” and has pointed out that even Stephen King’s debut Carrie (1974) follows the same story archetype of the “turning worm” revenge fantasy.

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Gilbert presents Ratman’s Notebooks in the form of a diary, and opens with the arresting line: “Mother says there are rats in the rockery.” Although it would be wrong to see the narrator as a fictionalised version of Gilbert, there are certainly parallels with the author’s life. After the death of his father in 1934, the family had been compelled to adapt to more meagre circumstances. They moved from Kensington Park in East Belfast to a relatively modest terrace house just off the Antrim Road. Having grown accustomed to an affluent way of life, they were forced to make many changes; the car was sold, along with many items of furniture. “Tea isn’t high tea anymore,” Gilbert wrote in his unpublished autobiography. “Just tea, with bread, jam and margarine. Mother watches us all to make sure nobody spreads the jam or the margarine too thickly.”

In tone and substance, this could have been a line from Ratman’s Notebooks. This theme of social decline seemingly obsessed Gilbert, and recurs continually in his novels. The narrator of Ratman’s Notebooks is forced to suffer the indignity of having to work as a subordinate in a company once owned by his deceased father, a scenario that bears some resemblance to Gilbert’s own experience. As our anti-hero’s bitterness festers, so too does his desire for revenge, not solely against those who have directly wrong him, but against society as a whole.

Gilbert was born in 1912 in Newcastle, County Down. He was one of four children, although his father William also had two other daughters from a previous marriage. William was the manager of Samuel McCausland Ltd, a Belfast-based seed merchants, the business that Stephen was later to inherit. His early life was relatively privileged; the family could afford to put him through boarding school, first in England at the Leas in Hoylake, Merseyside, and then at Loretto School in Edinburgh. His headmaster at Loretto, James Greenlees, once wrote a prescient remark about Gilbert: “I think it more than probable that he will eventually do something quite out of the ordinary, as he has an original way of looking at things.” In Ratman’s Notebooks, Gilbert was to prove Greenlees right.

In the archives at Queen’s University one can read Gilbert’s immense unpublished four-volume autobiography, in which he makes clear that Ratman’s Notebooks was his final attempt to fulfil his lifelong ambitions. “My service to Mammon”, he writes, “has kept me from serving literature”. His ultimate aim, “to leave business and become a whole-time writer”, never came to fruition. That said, he enjoyed a highly successful career in the seed industry and realised his goal “to marry and have four children – two boys and two girls”. As far I am aware, I am the only person to have read his autobiography. To open the pages, I first had to clear away layers of cobwebs and desiccated spiders.

The Gilbert archives at Queen’s University gives us a fascinating insight into his creative process. He was a meticulous researcher; there are handwritten notes about rats detailing their feeding habits, and the physical and behavioural characteristics of various species. One of Gilbert’s many idiosyncrasies was to record the precise times that he began and completed his novels. For this reason, we know that he started work on the eventual version of Ratman’s Notebooks at 6:30am on St Patrick’s Day, 1967, and finished his first draft at 7:31am on Tuesday 10 October of the same year. The first outline of the novel dates from 1938, which shows that the idea had been germinating for over a quarter of a century.

A number of manuscript drafts of Ratman’s Notebooks are still extant, some of which contain tantalising annotations regarding the various directions the novel could have taken. In one handwritten note — “Ben can read” — Gilbert has even toyed with the possibility of making the story explicitly supernatural. Another note sees his unnamed narrator make the claim that “there is nothing wrong with homosexuality except that it is entirely unfashionable”. Where such a line of thought might have taken the plotline is anyone’s guess.

It is perhaps no surprise that Gilbert’s sole foray into the horror genre turned out to be his most successful book. He was instinctively drawn to the fantastical, as evinced in works such as Monkeyface, The Burnaby Experiments and the unpublished dystopian novel The Labyrinth. “I need something out of the ordinary to work round,” he wrote in his journal on 29 October 1999, “which is what has taken me to Fantasy”. His body of work is infused with a baleful darkness relating to issues of morality and human corruption. Ratman’s Notebooks is not just a revenge story, but a study of hubris. The narrator makes himself into a kind of deity to the rats, who become engines of his most malevolent desires.

And so it is remarkable that such a bleak story should ultimately lead us to Michael Jackson’s “Ben”. The lyrics by Don Black included a middle eight which Jackson later said were his favourite in all his songs: “I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’; now it’s ‘us’, now it’s ‘we’.” This sentiment seems so far from Gilbert’s original conception that it is curious to reflect on the connection. But it’s a reminder that an artist’s legacy does not necessarily end with the work itself, and there are myriad and unexpected ways in which it might endure.

Kandinsky styled himself as the champion of the “little man”, rebelling against such snobbish notions as harmony, which is to say against the consensus that ran from Raphael down to the Royal Academy. Yet it was, ironically, the “little man” himself who railed most against abstraction. And so, along with Klee, Feininger, and countless other radicals, Kandinsky’s works were tarred as Degenerate Art by the Nazis in 1937, in the infamous exhibition of that name.

But if Kandinsky was a victim of Right-wing cancel culture, he was also a victim of Left-wing cancel culture. This should surprise us. For Kandinsky was practically a communist. At Moscow University, where he read law and economics, he produced a sympathetic dissertation titled “On the Legality of Labourers’ Wages”. The Blue Rider collective — whose paintings are now on show at Tate Modern (25 April – 20 October) — he spearheaded was established in 1911 with a stirring call to arms that recalls the last line in Marx’s Manifesto. “Der Blaue Reiter will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen,” declared Kandinsky and his mate Franz Marc.

On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s slim opuscule timed for the group’s first exhibition, likewise made clear that the true purpose of art was to defeat the vacuous materialism of modern man. All the same, as that title suggests, there was a decidedly romantic strain to Kandinsky’s leftism that left his more dogmatic comrades cold. In 1908, Kandinsky had been fired by the German translation of Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, a nutty pamphlet by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that preached the gospel of Theosophy, its esoteric message encased in the book’s frontispiece, a palette bearing the legend “Key to the Meaning of Colours”. The pair, it seems, believed in “auras”, essentially coloured emanations around human bodies that conveyed emotions. Today, we would call them vibes.

Proper, positivist Marxists, one imagines, would have impatiently clicked their tongues at this sort of claptrap, but not Kandinsky. All the stuff about the “vibrations of souls” somehow spoke to him. And so colours replaced objects in his painterly imagination. We may think, at first glance, that the Blue Rider pictures are no more than decorative wallpaper, but in fact, as Kandinsky’s writings show, many of them are essentially works of religious art, dealing with such premonitory themes as the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.

As it was, though, Soviet Russia’s revolutionary bureaucrats were after depictions of Large Projects, whereas Kandinsky wanted to paint Small Pleasures. They were in the business of dreary instruction, not Dreamy Improvisation. What was needed, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky felt, was “art of five kopeks”, not worthless art but art within the means of the masses. Accordingly, Kandinsky fell out of favour. He had been a bit player in the Revolution, and had done his bit curating provincial museums for the Bolsheviks, not to mention helped establish the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. Still, it was a tough racket being an Expressionist in a world of Social Realists. Routinely and puerilely assailed as bourgeois and boring, he leapt at the first chance to leave. In 1921, he moved to Dessau, throwing in his lot with Gropius’s Bauhaus, which remained a going concern until the Nazis shuttered it when they seized power. The remaining decade of his life was spent in Parisian wilderness. Kandinsky died an unhappy man in 1944.

That the Soviet Union effectively hounded out its most creative artistic talents, from Kandinsky in the Twenties to Neizvestny in the Seventies, was not inevitable. Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism. We would do well to remember the historical contingencies that led up to that outcome. The early Marx himself waxed eloquent about “the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish for the good of all Europe”. Here was a supremely convincing reconciliation of socialism and freedom. The proles were treated as intelligent grown-ups.

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In later works, it is true, he betrayed a regrettable preference for de haut en bas technocratic solutions, the kind befitting the worst kind of Brussels Eurocrat. Still, it was left to Lenin to turn an instrument of proletarian emancipation into a tool of authoritarian centralisation. As for Lunacharsky, he was not such a terrible killjoy, but rather a mondain character with a lively past simply obeying orders; before the revolution, he had moved in rather choice circles in Paris and Capri.

Needless to say, the upshot was most damaging. By the time high Stalinism took hold, the intellectual and artistic energies of Soviet communism had more or less completely fossilised. The baton passed to Western Marxism. From the Frankfurt School in the interwar period to structuralism in post-war France and operaismo in post-war Italy, some of the most arresting developments in Left-wing thought occurred in the free West. More so than Soviet Marxists, their British counterparts recognised — in the words of Perry Anderson — that “to take liberties with the signature of Marx” was to “enter into the freedom of Marxism”.

The new Expressionists show at Tate Modern underscores just how important the freedom of expression was to the development of art. Indeed, it was no accident that Kandinsky thrived not in his native land but in relatively free Munich. The young Wassily knew a thing or two about unfree societies. His parents, clamouring for liberal reform, had been exiled to the tea plantations of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border by Tsar Alexander II. It was only in the 1860s, that radical decade that also saw the abolition of serfdom, that they were rehabilitated along with other dissidents; Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866.

University life was dull. Some respite came from a research assignment that took him to Vologda, whose pagan peasants enchanted him. Throughout his life, Kandinsky maintained his fidelity to the Orthodox Church, though the colourful and exotic never failed to fascinate him. A staid, bourgeois life awaited him after his marriage to his bookish cousin — one of very few women at Moscow University at the time — when a professorship in Roman law came through at Tartu University. But then a midlife crisis intervened, provoked by Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896. Kandinsky had a eureka moment of his own: academic life, he concluded, was bollocks. There was no certainty in the world. Thereafter, it was only the subjective world of art that mattered. Monet’s Haystacks and Wagner’s Lohengrin, both encountered in Moscow, further convinced him that art was his calling. More prosaically, a loaded uncle kicked the bucket that year. Aged 30, Kandinsky came into a sizeable inheritance that was his ticket out of the professions – and Tsarist Russia.

Munich could have been Mars. It certainly felt like another planet. This was a land where painters “had the status of generals”. So wrote the Irish painter John Lavery. It was also an oasis of tolerance, thanks to the urbanity of its ruling class. Jewish painters like Albert Bloch and Elisabeth Epstein, on the run from antisemitism, found a home there. So, too, did dissidents from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and the promiscuous Russian bohemians Marianne Werefkin and Alexis von Jawlensky. Their favourite hangout spot was the famous pink salon owned by Werefkin — an “independently wealthy” polyglot noblewoman according to the catalogue — that doubled as an atelier.

It was in this cosmopolitan, permissive milieu that Expressionism was born. For too long, the movement has been both celebrated and denigrated as a singularly German graphic idiom. Even Pevsner, who evidently wasn’t terribly fond of the Expressionists, thought it fitting to summon up the rare word of praise for their Teutonic moral seriousness. Yet as this exhibition shows, it was a fundamentally international cast — led by the Russian Kandinsky — that conjured up the movement.

Munich artists had already laid the groundwork for Kandinsky. Four years prior to his arrival, the Munich Secession had parted ways with the academicism and conservatism of the Munich School; its leading light, Max Liebermann, made it a point to paint working-class subjects. Kandinsky’s move to Munich in 1896 coincided with the birth of the journal Jugend, the house organ of modernism to which we owe the German term for Art Nouveau, Jugendstil.

Five years later, Kandinsky founded Phalanx, seducing the dissatisfied spirits of the Secession to the new splinter group. One of them, his pupil Gabriele Münter, he seduced in more than one sense; not long after, the two were off to assignations in Sèvres (where they came in contact with Gauguin, Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Munch, and van Gogh) and Murnau, where they had a love-nest in the foothills of the Alps.

In 1909, Kandinsky had an epiphany: “subject matter is detrimental to my paintings.” The upshot was Composition II, a mad riot of colour that a contemporary critic thought was the work of “someone under the effects of morphine or hashish” — now sadly lost. By then, another fan of Theosophy, Hilma af Klint, had independently reached the same conclusion as Kandinsky, though few took her admixture of Eastern piety and camp Christianity seriously. She may have painted the first abstract pictures in 1906, but thanks to his Münchner Rolodex and his inexhaustible capacity for self-publicity (“I painted the first abstract picture”), the world remembers Kandinsky’s Picture with a Circle of 1911 as the first ever abstract painting.

Whatever may have been the lineage of abstract painting, the fact is that the Blue Rider was the most visible expression of it. There were others involved, as the curators are at pains to remind us (two in five paintings here are by women, and Münter is — deservingly — given more prominent billing than Franz Marc, usually seen as the most important of the Blue Rider sidekicks), but it was incontrovertibly Kandinsky’s brainchild, as the very name of the collective suggested. He made a painting called Der Blaue Reiter in 1903; more generally, he thought blue was a “heavenly” colour and enjoyed painting riders, especially St Georges slaying dragons, as it were the spiritual triumphing over the material.

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All the same, it proved a short-lived affair. Two pop-up shows in 1911-12 and one almanac — more scrapbook than catalogue — was all it had to show for it. The cultural shadow it cast over 20th-century art, however, is another matter. Like J. D. Salinger and the Sex Pistols, the Blue Rider isn’t remembered for its output, but for revolutionising the field.

The curators of this exhibition have done a marvellous job reconstructing the eccentric, eclectic world of the Expressionists. They have, quite unjustifiably, received much pushback in the press for shoehorning “present preoccupations” and forcing a “woke” interpretation of their subject. But this is an historically illiterate view. Indeed, we tend to exaggerate the foreignness of the past. Depending on your politics, the past appears either more racist or less woke than the present. As the new Taylor Swift song goes, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” Risible nonsense, of course. The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th. Likewise, it can hardly be denied Munich in the 1910s, and the interwar Weimar Republic, were a lot woker than our present, with their queers and queens. In the exhibition, we have a rather gamine Self-Portrait of Werefkin, who evidently was something of a gender bender: “I am not man, I am not woman, I am myself.” Then there is her portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff, noted for his “aesthetic hermaphroditism.”

Good for them. Or rather the going was good for them until the Nazis showed up. These days, the crackpots and would-be despots who have thanklessly tasked themselves with the policing of sumptuary, sartorial, and sexual habits would do well to remember which side of history they are on: the one applauding or censuring Degenerate Art. Britain in the Thirties evidently chose the latter. For the following year after the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, a show of the Blue Rider artists opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In the introduction of that catalogue, the curators declared “that art, as an expression of the human spirit in all its mutations, is only great in so far as it is free”. Hear, hear.

Of course, we used to say: “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through.” Needs re-working this adage, bequeathed to us by Leonard Cohen, via Jeffrey Lewis. Needs stripping of its misleading naiveté. I always picture a roof, a roof with a great big crack in it. It’s only under a broken roof you can absorb what’s actually going on outside the safety of your hermetically sealed sanctum. The ones who are cracked let the light in, sure, from time to time, when it’s light out, when the weather’s decent. But for the most part, as in Cobain’s case, the ones who are cracked also let in the damp, the rain, the drawn-out black chill of winter. I’m guessing Cohen was at least vaguely aware of this dilemma. That with truth, comes discomfort. All the same, I didn’t hear it like that at age 18. Crack = integrity. That’s all I heard. It would have been nice if there’d been a disclaimer.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, on the promo trail for a new album, and people frequently ask me if starting a band is a good idea, as if I’m an authority on the subject. The situation was bad enough decades ago, I tell them. Damaging enough. Unhealthy enough. Back then — pre-web, pre-Spotify deciding you deserve nothing — people were still crushing their minds chasing the dream, but they at least had the homes they’d bought through record sales to overdose in when the time came. They had space for failure both professional and personal. The more an artist is given the room to fail, the greater the capacity for success. But artists are no longer worth anything in society. The licence we formally granted them is gone. We’ve given up on Cohen’s maxim entirely. If you’re cracked, you probably need to be therapised out of existence.

I don’t want to come off negative. There is a good side to playing in a group, even in this dark, offensively inoffensive period of paint-by-numbers indie vapidity. It’s just I despise the good side even worse than the bad. It’s like with drugs, the high should bear the weight of your resentment, not the come down. The come down is your friend. The come down might stop you from mugging yourself forever. The high is what deforms you. The first 117 gigs I performed were dogshit bar one. All I was doing was rolling around town humiliating myself in pubs. Then some night you chance upon a small crowd that will go batshit for pretty much anything. And then your life as you knew it is over. You will never make it to adulthood. You will crave that fix until you’re dead. You will hanker for it whether you have anything to say or not. The art will frequently come second. The love, the delicious adulation, will come first.

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These articles, the book I co-wrote, my journals, they are the beginnings of an exit strategy, a literary life raft with which I hope to salvage something bearable from the coming storm of middle age. Something that doesn’t demand my having to Frankenstein myself, to enmesh myself with the hopes, dreams and dreary shortcomings of others to make my living. That’s actually the worst of it. Especially if the people you’ve got on the squad are arguably even more cracked than you are. How your identities get all molten and confused. This character splicing is of course also what makes a great band. Once you merge, stylistically, spiritually, philosophically, you can act and think as one. This is of great use to you, what with your trying to keep time, and cultivate a strong group aesthetic. Nirvana for instance, they don’t sound like a few guys, they sound like one guy. The problems truly begin when this bizarre soul congealment bears real-world fruit, and a murderous over-excitement begins to brew. Long-forgotten personal boundaries have no hope of re-emerging in the sudden climate of smash-and-grab opportunism.

Becoming an artist is all about access to irresponsibility. With irresponsibility often comes marginality sure, but at least you get out in the open. Those who compute the world aesthetically — the overly sensitive — clock very early on in life that the price of civilisation is this incredibly dull thing called repression, and they start trying to hustle their way out of that agreement accordingly. I will live by my imagination. My contribution will be the uniqueness of my very persona. This might demand your sinking into squalid self-absorption and penury, but at least the future will bear your signature. That is unless you drift into the notion that maybe you should start a band. In which case, the future will bear several signatures. Whose signature has more prominence will almost certainly become an issue. Because being in a band means that you have to share everything.

I don’t consider myself a musician. Not really. I can play, a bit. I’m more of a performance artist. A performance artist and a lyric whore. Music is just the medium with which I happen to earn rent money. More than any other type of artist, musicians are eternal children. It’s why so many of them — like Cobain — don’t make it past 27. And the bigger the star, the more freakish the Peter Pan syndrome should things drag on too long, Michael Jackson being the prime example, who went as far as actually building his own personal Neverland. There’s nothing comparable in any other medium.

But consider the talent these people are lumbered with. If you can coast through life by simply making sounds, why develop the rest of your brain? Music, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, is not like the other arts, it isn’t an intermediary between idea and will, but will itself. Everything else is just tracing shadows on sheafs of paper and rolls of film. Music transcends all that pedantry, any causal notion of law and logic. It is primeval. Pre-verbal. A realm of pure intuition.

What happens when these beings of pure will club together in groups will always be of some fascination to the general public. The paradox is too severe, bears too much sweet schadenfreude. Failure is the key component in comedy, and few things are so rich in failure. The widescreen interpersonal schisms — they quench an egotistical demand for high drama within the group, and a perverse love of watching other people fail outside of it. But: to live outside the law, you must be honest, as Bobby D sang. Your freakishness, of which you made a song and dance, of which you demanded the world celebrate, is now inescapable, calcified, permanent. You will be known henceforth by the crudely rendered cartoons you elaborated to replace yourselves. Your alter ego, initially your deliverance from unadulterated boredom, you soon find to be nothing less than the guarantee of your permanent exile. It’s important to remember that this is what you wanted. I have a feeling that it’s something the Nirvana frontman tried very hard to forget.

Luckily, we’re reaching the end of the band era. The further we roll from its heyday, the more I reckon my incredibly meagre stock is likely to rise. Once all of the old guard finally croak, people will turn to the only dregs they have left. The last turds on the block. Against my better judgement, I hope to be among those turds. There will only be a handful of us left, the real deal who went out and properly fucked up our lives on account of a few hooks and the odd Nazi-themed video.

For the most part, “rock and roll” today feels like a silly turn of phrase. A euphemism out of time, it means “hard on then move on”. Not exactly the vibe anymore. The medium has been reduced to a middle-class pageant for people who fancy a little more colour in their lives. I can’t remember the last person to really let the light in, the light and the drizzle and the dark. That’s because folks aren’t steeped in enough dysfunction. It sickens me, the politesse and consideration with which some of these new-fangled groups conduct themselves. The endless groaning about mental health. You’re supposed to break your soul. Any band worth its salt is a machine for cultivating and harbouring cracked souls.

To refute the systemisation of utterly everything at the price of full social ostracisation, there is no stronger aesthetic. To tell yourself the world is flat and live accordingly, because you feel ontologically more at home in a world with a beginning and an end, a world that looks and feels like a story… few things take more guts in an age as brutally formulaic as this one. Idiocy, drug abuse, infantilism, depression, schizophrenia, these are not ailments, these are the price of resistance. These are the bravest symptoms of a worldwide disease one might call metaphysical nihilism. A disease that insists on the supplanting of reality with a quantification of reality. A band is a machine for arrested development, and what could be more crucial than an arrestation of development in a world that can’t switch itself off, even as — to lift from Cobain’s final words — it chooses to burn out, rather than fade away?

Such reactions bear witness to our shallow times. They focus on the similitude of the gesture with others (from Dada to Banksy and some “eco-vandalists”), while ignoring the crux of the matter: the fate of Assange. Molodkin is not performing an act of modern art — he is trying to save a human life. Nor is he alone in this. Behind the WikiLeaks founder stands a collective of artists and patrons animated by a profound insight: do we have the right to enjoy great works of art while ignoring the horror from which they emerged?

In his essay, “Theses on the History of Philosophy”, Walter Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”

The act of Molodkin’s collective heroically makes visible this barbarism. It is desperate and brutal, of course, but what if it is the only way we can raise awareness about what goes on in HMP Belmarsh? The true question is therefore: why is Assange such a thorn in the side of the knaves of our political establishment? And the answer is: because he is not a fool like the majority of the critical Left.

In his “Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”,[1. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 182-183.] Lacan makes the distinction between two types of the contemporary intellectual, the fool and the knave. In short, the Right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it and mocks the Left on account of its “utopian” plans which necessarily lead to catastrophe. By contrast, the Left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court-jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way that suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a postmodern cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to “subvert” the existing order, actually serves as its supplement.

A joke from the good old days of Really-Existing Socialism perfectly illustrates the futility of fools:

In 15th-century Russia, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road. A Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife. he then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get dirty!”

After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy. The surprised wife asks him: “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust!”

This sad joke revealed the predicament of the period’s dissidents: they thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people. Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position?

Our task is to discover how to go a step further. Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach held: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Our version should be: “Critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power; the point is to cut them off.”

This is exactly what Assange did. To cut a long story short, Assange is our Antigone, for a long time kept in the position of a living dead — isolated in a solitary cell with very limited outside contact and no conviction or even official accusation. He is just waiting for extradition, as the snare around his neck is gradually but inexorably pulled shut.

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By Thomas Fazi

In the case of Assange, time is on the side of the US and UK: they can afford to wait, counting on the fact that the public interest will gradually dwindle, especially due to other global crises that dominate our media (the Ukraine and Gaza wars, global warming, the threat of AI). What is happening to Assange is thus increasingly reported on the margins of the mainstream media: the fact that he sat in solitary confinement for years was just part of our lives. Assange is thus the victim of the new apolitical neutrality.

Assange should be mentioned whenever we are tempted to praise our Western democratic societies with their human rights and freedoms, or whenever we criticise Muslim, Chinese, or Russian oppression: his fate is a reminder that our freedom is also seriously limited. Assange is thus the victim of a new apolitical neutrality. We no longer care for him, his imprisonment increasingly met with indifference.

Some liberals criticise Assange for focusing on the liberal West and ignoring the even greater injustices in Russia and China, but they miss the point. WikiLeaks, after all, also exposed many documents that bear witness to the horrors outside the liberal West. However, these injustices are highly visible in our media — we read about them all the time.

The problem with the West is that we tend to ignore countries with even greater injustices (suffice it to mention Saudi Arabia, which is definitely worse than Iran). Sometimes we feel free because we ignore our unfreedoms, while in Russia and China people are fully aware of their unfreedoms. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”(Matthew 7:3). Assange taught us to pay attention to the plank in our own eyes. More precisely, Assange taught us to see the hidden complicity between the planks in our eye and in our enemy’s eye, to discover the solidarity and parallels between our opponents. For our own good, we should not allow him to fall into this darkness of invisibility.

And if you still think Molodkin’s gesture is wrong and counterproductive? OK, but then don’t lose time analysing it as an artistic gesture and instead search for more efficient ways to help him. In this situation, nobody with a clear conscience has the right to engage in distanced aesthetic judgments — our fate is at stake.

At once, a Japanese prize barely heard of in the Anglosphere was making headlines around the world. Has the worst nightmare of the gatekeepers of high literary culture come true? Do the judges of the prize have faces dripping with egg, like a Master of Wine who picked the Blue Nun in a blind tasting? And is Rie Kudan, for her part, cheating? Well, no… and no.

To the latter question, we could counter that she was using AI-generated language precisely to make a point about AI-generated language: that is, that she wanted (as she puts it) to test the way “soft and fuzzy words” can obscure our ethical clarity. We could counter, further, that ChatGPT didn’t decide which 5% of the novel was going to be by ChatGPT, nor which bits of ChatGPT’s language were going in there.

And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that. If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was. Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?

The idea of the single, inspired author originating a text of near-sacred originality is itself a hangover from the Romantics. It’s a two-century blip. Before then, fiction-writers often did their damnedest to pretend they were copying from someone else, even when they were making it up. Chaucer was forever talking about “myn auctor”, and a text that came adapted from a precedent was seen as more trustworthy and high-status than one that didn’t. Milton reworked the Bible, Shakespeare reworked Holinshed, and so on and so forth.

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In more recent times, experimental and modernist authors have been using randomness, or the home-made equivalent of algorithms, to generate their texts for 100 years or more. In 1920, the Dadaist eminence Tristan Tzara announced that poetry could be written by taking a newspaper article of the length you wanted your poem to be, cutting it into its constituent words with a pair of scissors, shaking them about in a bag and then transcribing them in the random order in which they emerged. There’s a funny bit about it in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties.

That was only the starting gun for all manner of literary jiggery-pokery. William S. Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin picked up Tzara’s baton in the Sixties, experimenting with “cut-ups” (much like Dada poetry) and “fold-ins” (where you would fold two pages of an existing book together so the edges met, and read across the fold to make a new text). The fantasy writer Jeff Noon’s 2001 book, Cobralingus, presented a set of algorithmic instructions for transforming a text through what Noon called “filter gates”, something analogous to a DJ remixing a record. The children’s writer Andy Stanton recently published Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT, a serious/silly account of his experiments getting ChatGPT to write a novel about a blue whale with a micropenis.

Arbitrary literary constraints or outright randomness, then — which is to say, things outside the author’s control which help determine the final text — have a very honourable place in literary history. You could even see the sonnet form or the villanelle as a species of algorithm. The mid-century Oulipoians sought out baroque formal constraints (most famously, Georges Perec’s managing to write a novel without the letter E) by way of liberating their creativity rather than stifling it. Italo Calvino wrote a novel — The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) — around a tarot pack. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) presented the reader with loose pages in a box and invited you to read the novel in any order you liked.

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None of which is to say that Ms Kudan is necessarily an avant-gardist, or needs to be. Only that it’s a very narrow and regressive view of literature to see handing over control of some of your text to chance or to an algorithm as “cheating”. It’s what you do with the result that counts, and what Ms Kudan did was apparently, well, flawless.

There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress. You could even make the case, perhaps, that 5% of Ms Kudan’s prize money should rightfully be distributed to every Japanese language author on whose copyright work the algorithm was trained. But that question is a business and intellectual property issue: to one side of the purely literary question of its part in the creation of The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy.

Indeed, if you were of a literary-theoretical cast of mind you could point out what Tzara and his successors were gesturing to in an oblique way anyway: intertextuality. Every text, in the end, is made of other texts. Every word in a novel or poem is a borrowing: it depends for its meaning on the vast constellation of other contexts in which it has appeared, and through which its reader will understand it. Every author, in his or her individual way, is a meat-brained ChatGPT, “trained” on a lifetime’s reading of classics and copyright works.

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That’s really where the case of Ms Kudan really does probe an anxiety in the culture. What if the writer is (in the phrase Martin Amis used of V.S. Pritchett) a mirror, not a lamp? The Romantic model of the artist is underscored, after all, by a reassuring idea about humanity: that we are creators not creations, that what makes us distinctive isn’t simply a neurological compost of our inputs but some ineffable inner essence that can only be captured in the act of expression.

Is it possible, then, that we so fiercely police the distinction between what Large Language Models can do and human creativity because we’re… touchy about it? That we’re worried it may be a temporary distinction of degree rather than a fundamental difference of category; which is to say, no distinction at all?

You have to wonder what the men of the South Staffs, the 1st Airborne Division and their Polish comrades would make of Museum Arnhem’s current exhibition. No colourful banners announce it outside the galleries. No posters adorn the walls in town. Discretion rules: you have to know to go. Inside, however, half-a-dozen rooms gather the German state-approved art of 1933-45 into an exhibition entitled Art in the Third Reich: Seduction and Distraction. Conceived by the museum’s director of modern art, Jelle Bouwhuis, with co-curator Almar Seinen and an international scholarly team, the Arnhem show covers the spectrum of regime-friendly painting and sculpture that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership not only endorsed and promoted but in many cases bought. Bouwhuis makes it clear that “We do not ‘simply’ show the work, we contextualise it,” to explain “how art and… the whole art world in Germany could function as propaganda for Nazism”.

Amid this welter of craggy warriors, apple-cheeked peasants, chocolate-box landscapes and cheesily curvaceous nudes, the suffering and slaughter inflicted by the Reich — not least around this very building — seem a million miles away. The curators have shunned overt propaganda images: no worshipful portraits of the Führer himself (although he does feature in a couple of monumental canvases), let alone antisemitic caricatures or sub-human Slavs. Rather, the rooms take us on a journey through the fantasy Third Reich of cheerful land-workers, grandiose infrastructure projects, pristine German scenery, Völkish mythology, and mighty deeds in combat with the foe. I went expecting, or fearing, a grotesque assemblage of bombastic kitsch, and with lingering doubts about whether such an exhibition has a place in a public gallery — even now, especially here.

Well, kitsch there is aplenty. But Arnhem’s tour of National Socialism’s politicised aesthetics also posed a more profound question about how creative powers survive, or shrivel, under any oppressive orthodoxy. Was this a show too far? Thanks to the sober intelligence of its curation, not at all. The Dutch still take free debate and enquiry in earnest. It’s hard to imagine that any UK gallery or museum could present such a treasury of taboo items today without a career-threatening storm of fury and denunciation. And for years the toxic associations of this material meant that post-war museums kept it firmly out of sight. US forces seized around 8,000 works of art from Germany after the war, but later returned all but a few hundred deemed inflammatory — such as idealised celebrations of Hitler. Much of this repatriated booty now resides at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the chief lender for the Arnhem show. Until very recently, few institutions have cared to borrow it.

Instead, they have historically trained a spotlight not on the work the Nazis loved, but that they loathed — and banned. Seized from artists, collectors and galleries, the so-called “Degenerate Art” of Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and related modernist trends filled a notorious regime-sponsored show of 1937 in Munich, which later toured Germany. Two million visitors came to gawp and sneer (although many might have secretly enjoyed what they saw). Starting with the Los Angeles County Museum in 1991, contemporary curators have since tried to reconstruct the “Entartete Kunst” displays, but with the poles of judgment neatly reversed. Works by Klee, Mondrian, Chagall, Ernst, Kandinsky and a host of others, ridiculed and censured under the Reich as savage, decadent and barbarous, came to figure as sacred icons of 20th-century creativity. The Nazi curse blessed these artists’ future prospects in both the critical and commercial marketplaces.

To post-war art lovers in Europe and North America, abstraction and other non-figurative styles now mean freedom, individuality, the defiance of dictatorship. In contrast, the neo-classical, representational or simply traditional modes of painting that dominate the rooms at Arnhem found themselves branded with the taint of tyranny. Even before the Second World War, the advocacy of such taste-makers as Alfred Barr — director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art — for “decadent” artists persecuted under the Reich had helped to shift the dial. When President Roosevelt opened the new MoMA building in 1939, he proclaimed that if you “Crush individuality in society… you crush art as well.”

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Non-realist styles now bask in the glow not just of cultural progress but political virtue as well. The Cold War entrenched this orthodoxy, as US Abstract Expressionism became an anti-Soviet propaganda weapon for the CIA. Much of Western academia still obediently reproduces it. Yet figurative painting thrived in many places over the postwar decades without any sign of contamination by either Nazi or Soviet ideology. One glance at the British scene, with representational giants as different as Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Paula Rego, underlines the absurdity of the Modernist dogma that made, say, any lifelike portrait into a “reactionary” act. That is theology, not criticism.

The artists displayed at Museum Arnhem, who all showed and sold in Germany during the period between 1933 and 1945, had no choice but to work in a broadly realist manner. Not just abstraction but the subjective visions of the Expressionists spelled subversion (with a Jewish, Bolshevik or “Negro” character) to the arbiters and enforcers of the Reich. Now, technical proficiency should serve traditionalist topics — country life, family scenes, classical nudes, martial glory, Germanic and Nordic myths and histories — to celebrate the mission of the nation and its Führer. For artists who worked in the approved idioms and were untainted by Jewish ancestry, active Left-wing loyalties or a known attachment to “decadent” styles, the rewards might prove lavish. Conformity could pay handsomely.

Official art under the Nazis was big business. Most of the Arnhem pieces featured in one of the eight Great German Art exhibitions held at the pharaonic new “House of German Art” in Munich from 1937 to 1944. At its height, in 1942, it attracted 847,000 visitors, and 2,500 out of around 14,000 registered artists in Germany exhibited there. The Great German Art jamborees also functioned as selling shows, with the Nazi top brass among the top buyers. Hitler himself acquired scores of works, such as the chillingly monumental symbolic nudes of Adolf Ziegler’s “The Four Elements”, which greets visitors at Arnhem. The Führer spent an estimated 6.9 million Reichsmarks on his art shopping.

Bouwhuis reports that the sheer scope of the sector surprised him: “It was a real hype, with huge financial investments especially from the government, a thriving art scene and many opportunities for artists.” And the breadth of Nazi patronage opened a lucrative career path to some truly terrible lickspittle hacks. I hope never again to inspect anything by, say, Leopold Schmutzler, whose trio of joyful accordion-playing maidens in “Return from the Fields” recall the similar bucolic schmaltz of “Socialist Realism” in Stalin’s USSR. As for those plentiful Nazi nudes, churned out in bulk by Nazi court painters such as Ivo Saliger and Oskar Martin-Amorbach, their skin tones glow with a peculiar brand of semi-pornographic deathliness. Beefy but ghastly, these eugenic pin-ups lead the viewer on — and lead us, it somehow feels, straight into the grave. A few, though, have become simply risible. The musclebound labourers of Albrecht Kettler’s “Organisation Todt” now look like a National Socialist bid to out-hunk gay porn of the “Tom of Finland” kind.

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But to tour the Arnhem galleries in order to scoff at one gross Aryan fantasy after another would merely turn the Nazis’ own “Degenerate Art” polemic on its head. What will haunt the visitor is the evidence of the able, even gifted, painters who went on working in officially blessed styles under a totalitarian regime. Did compromise and caution vitiate their talents, or might they keep a guttering flame of integrity alight? Bouwhuis suggests that artists who kept out of trouble under the Reich had more options than their Soviet counterparts, with a competitive market and “relatively open-minded” censors in the Reichskulturkammer guild that artists had to join to work.

“This situation”, he explains, “fostered creativity and even a certain deviance, or at least a surprising variation of styles and subjects”. Some of these artists had Modernist and Left-wing hinterlands; several went on to enjoy garlanded post-Nazi careers. Subjugation to the 12-year Reich proved to be an interlude on a journey that started and finished in very different places, aesthetic and political. At least 64 painters and sculptors who had work suppressed in the Nazi purge of “degenerate” art managed to exhibit in the Great German Art shows. In 1937, sculptor Rudolf Belling enjoyed the curious distinction of having works on show in Munich in the “Degenerate Art” sin-bin and the Great German Art hall of fame at the same time. In the studio, the clear dividing-lines in ideologists’ heads might often blur.

Heinrich Ehmsen, for instance, had been a Communist and Modernist with allies in Moscow; he served time in a concentration camp for “cultural Bolshevism”. Yet he later joined a Wehrmacht “propaganda company”: his painting of German troops near Kharkhiv in Ukraine eschews heroics in favour of sombre, almost-abstract, colour bands. On the opposite wall, in contrast, Hans Sterbik’s “Winter War in Poland” transforms a brutal campaign of aggression into a cosy Christmas-card scene. Even under the Reich, artists could choose to admit, or exclude, a measure of truth in their state-endorsed work.

Formalism, and a fascination with the morphology of landscapes, buildings and figures, might have been outlawed in theory. Given the correct topic, it might still sneak back in practice. Erich Mercker, a painterly cheerleader for Hitler’s big-ticket public-works projects, celebrates the futuristic geometries of an Autobahn bridge under construction at Rohrbachbrücke. After the war, he would commemorate the industrial might of firms such as Volkswagen and Bayer. Third Reich art shares this techno-optimism with similar depictions of concrete-and-steel modernity elsewhere — not least in the United States. Faith in the mechanical mastery of nature cut across ideological boundaries.

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Not even battlefield scenes inevitably airbrushed military reality out of the picture. Carl Busch’s “Stalingrad”, with its free and fluid brushwork as a German unit makes its last desperate stand in the snow, may depict a heroic defeat — but a defeat nonetheless. Most remarkable at Arnhem are a selection of pieces that somehow paint the artist’s detachment, or even scepticism about the Nazi propaganda industry, into the picture. Several artists here emerged from the cool, crisp and satirical Neue Sachlichkeit — “New Objectivity” — movement of the Weimar Republic. In some cases that piercing, sardonic gaze survives into the Reich: most powerfully, in Adolf Wissel’s “Peasant Family from Kalenberg”. This “ideal” farming clan sits glacially, and spookily, around the family table like actors waiting for a horror film to roll. Rigid and hostile, they seem on the brink of a bloodbath.

As for the uniformed gurning grotesques clustered behind the figure of Hitler in Emil Scheibe’s “The Führer visits the Front”, they are latter-day descendants of Hieronymus Bosch’s human gargoyles. Who would ever have read this piece as a tribute to the victories of the Master Race? In Albert Janesch’s epic “Rhine Crossing at Breisach”, it’s the individually painted faces of the captured French POWs that catch the eye and mind, not the robotic ranks of the German conquerors streaming over the bridge. In front of the defeated French troops, most sympathetically observed of all, stands a West African — likely a Senegalese infantryman.

So, in the city of the “bridge too far”, art in the Third Reich often turns out to be the art created under the yoke of the Third Reich. Several of these painters found freedom of a limited kind as they practised a sort of “inner emigration” while outwardly conforming to the stifling norms enforced by the state. Jelle Bouwhuis reminds me, though, that all these works, however independent or even critical, served a machine of myths and lies within “a pernicious regime that was responsible for some 40 million deaths”. Even the covert dissidents and sly naysayers in their own way fed the Nazi beast. “Ethics and aesthetics”, Bouwhuis insists, “are inextricably attached”. At least Museum Arnhem has given visitors a chance to see, to think, and to judge for themselves. Would that British curators had the audacity to step so far outside their current comfort zones.

‘Art in the Third Reich: Seduction and Distraction’ continues at Museum Arnhem until 24 March 2024: museumarnhem.nl

Otherwise, the retrospective is admirably respectful of the artist’s work and the people who come to see it. There are none of the admonitions against colonialist and sexist looking, for example, that marred The Rossettis at Tate Britain. Guston looks at whatever he wants to look at and — barring that brief allusion to antisemitism and the Ku Klux Klan as you enter — we are left in peace to do the same.

If anything, it is a bold curatorial stroke to begin the exhibition, not with examples of the young Guston’s early forays into social realism and surrealism but with a single full-blown, late-style comic-book canvas — “Legend” — in which the sleeping painter lets his nightmares spill across a flat mental plane so messy you can see why he has no desire to get out of bed. Here are objects that will become familiar as the exhibition continues: cigarettes, empty bottles of booze, bricks, a baton, a hoof, but also himself, the dreamer and hallucinator, all but crowded out of his own painting, wrapped up against the waking world, his brow rumpled, one boxer’s ear attached to his head like a can-opener, his spidery eyelid shut tight. Disturb him if you dare.

The artist’s mind rendered as a kitchen in which nothing has been washed or put away is more beguiling than disturbing, for all the violence of the brush strokes and the delusional pinks and scornful reds of the palette. I cannot explain the spindle-shanked horse running out of the picture, brandishing his tail like a scourge as he leaves, unless he’s a she — quite literally a nightmare. But the artist sleeps on, for all the sound of hooves smashing broken glass. “A world in turmoil,” the note on the wall comments. Yes, turmoil within and without — but too intriguing, not to say comic, for the turmoil to turn to anguish. However deranged the painter, the painting is all very bearable — a sort of joyous bonfire of the madnesses, as though Guston were painting himself sane. And then, having got you “emotionally prepared” for what’s still to come, the exhibition sweeps you back in time to Guston’s many false starts, that’s if it’s fair to call the means by which an artist discovers what he really wants to paint “false”.

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Guston was good at this and that. Dipping his toe into the Italian Renaissance, surrealism, social realism, muralism, abstract expressionism — you name it, he could do it. He was born Phillip Goldstein, a name he changed for the usual reasons, to parents who had fled persecution in Ukraine. Just when or where is it a good time or place to be born a Jew? His reclusive father hung himself when Guston was still a boy, though what part the anti-Jewishness of early 20th-century America played in that — the alienation, the restricted opportunities (collecting junk was the best job he could find), the threats from the KKK — is a matter for speculation. But the Klan doesn’t haunt Guston’s imagination for no reason, and depression, in his greatest works, is only a dive under the covers away.

Not long after his father’s suicide, his brother died in a horrific car accident, after losing both his legs. The recurring motifs of nooses and twisted limbs need no more explaining than do the hoods of the Klan and the mountains of anonymous shoes. And maybe the name-changing accounts for the atmosphere of obsessive guilt. A bad start in life for the boy was a good one for the painter.

Crises of confidence and conscience nudged Guston from one sort of art and artistic commitment to another. He painted and won acclaim, but not from himself. “What kind of man am I,” he asks, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything” — he means Vietnam and the brutality of the world in general — “and then going into my studio to adjust a red to blue?”

He isn’t the first artist to have asked himself that. And it could have been the end of him as a painter. Political engagement had already taken up much of his time; what would another bout of engaged solemnity have yielded? As it happened, the artist in him found a way to make the refined aesthetics of “adjusting a red to a blue” a means of confronting the unrefined brutality he saw everywhere. As though to recreate the exhilaration of that creative resolution, the exhibition ushers us, along a narrow corridor, from the self-questioning Guston of earlier rooms, to the blazingly confident pink light of “Dawn”, a sublimely airy comic-strip send-up, firstly of the Ku Klux Klan and, by implication, Guston’s own early fear of them. Can there really be anything to be afraid of in these gormless hooded figures out driving in the early morning like children in a toy car, pointing out the sights of the city to each other, seeing the world for the first time, a lollipop sun just rising, candy-floss clouds floating in the sky, birds kissing on the telegraph wires.

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It’s a glorious painting of the world waking up to wonder. So innocent does the jaunt feel that we can’t bring ourselves to ask whose twisted feet are sticking out of the boot of the nursery car. The Klan’s latest victims? Guston’s brother? Every menace and pained remembrance are grist to the mill — but ask what, in fact, is so illuminating about the painting and we have to root around in our own untidy kitchen of words to find the right ones. The painting takes the strain, let’s try that for starters. The painting disburdens — but disburdens whom of what?

There follows, in the next four rooms, one magnificently disburdening painting after another. “City Limits” depicts three hooded Klansmen hugger-mugger in another children’s car with giant Swiss-roll wheels, staring ahead in a bemused sort of way, excited to be out and about for all that their masks limit what they can see, if they can see anything. One is, of course, smoking, in the style of Groucho Marx, which doesn’t seem to bother the others. The painting is gorgeously claustrophobic, suggesting that the Klansmen enjoy one another’s company so much that being cramped is a pleasure to them. If the car is a prison, they are too stupid to mind and too impotent to do anything about it.

What world is this? Laurel and Hardy? Keystone Cops? The cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’?

Guston famously said of the Klansmen that “they are self-portraits” and in “The Studio” he goes the whole way with that fancy, standing a hooded figure at the artist’s easel, puffing black smoke, painting himself. It’s sublimely funny — the painter as Klansman engrossed in painting the painter as Klansman, an infinity of perpetuation, the crazier for the painter-Klansman having only two prison-door slits in his hood to see through, but reproducing those prison-door slits on the canvass with loving care. If Guston is somehow redeemed in the act of seeing himself behind the hood, is the hooded Klansman redeemed in the act of seeing himself as Guston? I don’t even know what sort of question that is. Does it bear on the nature of art or the nature of evil?

Here is the joy of the show, anyway. We look, muse, laugh, speculate, writhe a bit, which might be our own redemption from solemnity. How seriously to take Guston’s further identification with the Klansman — “I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan…what would it be like to be evil?” — I don’t know. Is Guston a metaphysician of evil? Is he Dostoevsky with red paint on his hands? Or are we closer to Chaplin guying Hitler?

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I have to say I don’t experience the fear and trembling before these works that others report. Guston has so successfully eviscerated all horror from the Ku Klux Klan, so sublimely, if you like, made them himself in the course of making himself them, that we are taken to another plane of visionary delight. Not of aesthetic insouciance — there is no opting out of seriousness in these paintings — but of quizzical exuberance, as if to cast seriousness in a new light. Each of these late canvasses is a kind of obstacle course of memory, in which victory over evil is achieved by celebrating the absurd plasticity of evil’s presence, a random and yet purposive inclusiveness that takes in the artist and his perturbations, for the act of worrying is now his subject too.

Even “Flatlands”, which appears to show the artist’s imagination after the Flood — the scattered real and delusional detritus of his thoughts and associations: clocks telling different times, books, pointing fingers, legs without a body, a setting sun, Klansmen losing their way like malfunctioning robots, what might just be the chimney of an Auschwitz oven puffing its own cigar smoke — is calming, perhaps because it’s all over now, mastered in its random, godless profusion. Not “Look, I have come through,” but “Look, I am still looking.”

Almost the last painting in the exhibition is “Couple in Bed”. I don’t know if any artist more frequently painted himself asleep, but none surely painted a more poignant study of sleep and love in the service of art. Clutching his quiver of paint brushes for dear life, the painter buries himself into the safety of his wife. It’s a bed the poet Donne might have imagined — one little space an everywhere of devotion and achievement, a place of peace but not forgetfulness.

It is not unusual for art to make us happy. Mellow vistas and golden sunsets do the trick every time. What is far more rare is for happiness to be conjured out of horror.

***

The Philip Guston exhibition is on at Tate Modern until 25 February 2024.

Yayoi Kusama creates demons too, although they don’t look like the fictional Pickman’s. Her pet horrors are all the more frightening for their ordinariness. She is afraid of sex, and men, and war, and food. Most of all, she’s afraid of disappearing into the endless white noise of the universe — or, in her parlance, of “Obliteration”. The polka dots she’s been famous for since the Sixties obscure the physical boundaries of whatever form they’re applied to, human or otherwise. Walk through one of her mirror rooms and the singular you disappears. In her autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama describes watching helplessly as a net-shaped pattern spills off one of her canvases and begins to cover the table, the walls, the contours of her body; it’s difficult to say where the hallucination ends and the art — or the artist — begins.

While her work flirts with the concept of suicide — the ultimate obliteration of the self, by the self — Kusama’s career has been astonishingly long-lived: today, she is a 94-year-old grande dame of the art world. This year saw the publication of a retrospective essay collection, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, as well as the opening of yet another solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first two months of tickets for which have already sold out. Kusama has not yet been obliterated.

She might, however, be cancelled.

“Yayoi Kusama Apologizes for Past Racist Remarks”, reads a recent headline from the New York Times, while the San Francisco Chronicle laments Kusama’s upcoming show at the city’s modern art museum: “Japan’s Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most prominent creators, has produced work that objectified and demeaned Black people. Does the art community care?”

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The allegations of racism centre largely on the autobiography, which came out in 2002, and details Kusama’s fraught relationship with her family, her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist in her native Japan, and the mental health issues that eventually resulted in her voluntary residence at the Tokyo hospital where she has lived since the Seventies. The most damning line from the book, though it does not actually appear in the English version of Infinity Net, is one in which Kusama describes the real estate values of her NYC neighbourhood tanking due to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there”.

Although the New York Times describes Kusama’s problematic commentary being “surfaced” by the website Hyperallergic in June this year, it would be more accurate to identify this cancellation attempt as the particular obsession of just one man, a writer named Dexter Thomas.

Thomas is the author of the Hyperallergic essay in which he accuses the artist of a “troubling record of anti-Black statements”, and to which as far as I can tell, every story about Kusama’s supposed racism can be traced. His interest in Kusama in turn traces to an earlier essay he wrote for Vice News, in which he describes being banned from the artist’s studio for reasons unclear, though Thomas coyly suggests that his being black might have had something to do with it. And while multiple outlets, including the New York Times, have reproduced the claim that Kusama describes black people in her autobiography as “primitive, hyper-sexualized beings”, the implicit attribution appears to be in error. This is not a quote from Infinity Net; it is Thomas’s subjective interpretation of Kusama’s words.

In fact, reading the autobiography, it struck me that most of Thomas’s claims rely on a subjective (and in some cases, motivated) reading of Kusama’s work or behaviour, rather than her own explicitly stated views. And his main criticism — that “black people make several appearances… as exotic or primitive beings” — I found to be in astonishingly bad faith.

In one case, Kusama recalls that she became fascinated by the idea of travelling to the US after seeing “the exotic face of a little black girl with braided hair” in a picture book — a description that may be off-colour by 2023 standards, but also captures something essential about how strange and inaccessible America seemed to a Japanese child living on the other side of the world in the Forties. In another case, Thomas complains that Kusama describes the lips and genitals of a black participant in one of her naked performance art pieces, the obvious implication being that white characters do not receive similar treatment; he apparently missed the scene just 35 pages later in which Kusama’s boyfriend, a white man, begs the disgusted artist to touch his penis: “It was like a big, desiccated calzone.”

And then there are Kusama’s actual and explicit observations of the way that the sexual liberation of the Sixties became intertwined with issues of race and class, which suggest a far more conscious and critical perspective than Thomas gives her credit for. In one passage contextualising her naked performance artworks against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, she archly notes the phenomenon of privileged white women coming to New York in explicit pursuit of black lovers, “drawn by the legendary sexual prowess of dark, muscular men”.

“Blacks were still discriminated against in mainstream society, but the tendency to prize them as sexual playthings was taking root,” she writes. Perhaps Kusama could have done more to condemn this tendency — that is, if you believe that the job of an artist is to not just observe the world as it is but bloviate about how it ought to be. It’s hard to square the woman who wrote the above lines with the bogeyman conjured by her critics: an unapologetic racist who “seems to luxuriate” in stereotypical depictions of blacks as “hyper-sexual and primitive”.

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The true Left is not woke

By Susan Neiman

And it’s hard to see what, exactly, is to be gained from analysing her work through the framework of contemporary American racial politics in the first place. Soleil Ho, the writer at the San Francisco Chronicle who denounced Kusama’s upcoming museum show, suggests that the Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now book should have analysed her career in racial terms, lamenting that “the many esteemed curators and critics in the volume also opted to look away”. What Ho and others seem not to realise is that there’s a difference between looking away from a thing, and looking at it from a more productive angle. Despite the myopic convictions of certain American culture critics, not everything is best evaluated through the lens of race; not every story, person, or artwork is best understood as a parable for power, privilege and oppression. And in Kusama’s case, trying to reframe her life and legacy via a reckoning with her alleged racism is like trying to interpret her work by standing blindfolded inside one of her installations and licking the wall. Whatever information you might glean, it will not help you understand the art.

Often, the defence of this or that elderly or deceased artist is a plea for context: people must be understood as a product of their time, their culture, their unique and often immense personal struggles. Yayoi Kusama, who grew up in a famously insular and non-diverse country, who has spent most of her life institutionalised, and who is literally older than Scotch tape, has arguably earned a pass for being less than perfectly enlightened on the issues of 2023 — and anyway, she’s already made the standard-issue apology for her “hurtful and offensive language”. Her critics can hardly ask for more.

But the more important point here isn’t about how woke a 94-year-old mentally ill Japanese woman should be; it’s about what an artist does, and must do, which is to express the truth of the world as he or she sees it. Kusama’s perspective is bleak and terrifying, but it also makes no pretence of moral authority. The woman is terrified of macaroni; she’s not telling anyone else how to live. All she does, and all she has ever done — in paint, in words, in naked choreography — is to describe what she sees. To paint from life, as Lovecraft’s Pickman put it.

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Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

Sometimes that means capturing beauty; sometimes it means terror, or something worse. There’s a famous, and famously controversial, painting by Gustav Courbet called “L’origine du monde”. It’s an image of an anonymous woman, naked from the waist down, her thighs spread to show her vulva. The painting has often been criticised as misogynistic, and perhaps it is, but it also articulates something true: Look, it says. This is where we come from. This is how we are made.

Yayoi Kusama, with her dots, her obliteration, is saying something true, too: this is how we unravel. And her autobiography, insensitive though it may be, is a truthful articulation of reality as she experienced it. Rather than punishing her for this, or demanding a reckoning and an apology, perhaps we might reckon with that reality ourselves, as we do with her art, and leave the artist out of it.

Kusama has always showed us the same thing; what changes is who else is looking, and how. The dot paintings that once challenged and infuriated her critics are now considered pop art masterpieces; a naked performance art piece that once resulted in scandalised calls to the police by MoMA officials is now lauded on the museum’s website for its daring irreverence. But Kusama’s view of the world — her obsessions, her fears, her fixations — remains the same. She is still seeking obliteration. She will probably chase it until she’s dead.

And what does she owe to the rest of us? Only the truth of the world as she sees it. Nothing less, nothing more.

At the end of “Pickman’s Model”, the narrator, Pickman’s friend, views a ghastly portrait of a monstrous creature in Pickman’s studio: “The monster was there—it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared—and I knew that only a suspension of Nature’s laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model”. It’s only after he unrolls a small scrap of paper that was pinned to the canvas that he understands the source of his friend’s demons. The secret of those horrible, haunting paintings. Because there it is: the same glaring, gnawing monster.

“By God,” he says. “It was a photograph from life.”

I could see the name registered on some level. So I asked if they knew the band I meant. “Yeah, actually I do know the band. I saw them play in Liverpool a while back, around 2015.” What did you make of them? “I thought they were great, until I noticed the lead singer was wearing this T-shirt with a joke about The Sun on it, and I just thought ‘what an absolute fucking prick’, you don’t come to Liverpool and make jokes about The Sun.”

I think I remember this controversy, I informed him. Wasn’t that T-shirt a kind of satirical mock up of a Sun front page? As in, the headline today is simply “consume more stuff”? “Nah man,” he replied, “and even if it was, in Liverpool, you don’t fuck with that. He should have known better. Have some fucking respect laa.” I’m pretty certain it was an anti-Sun T-shirt, I countered. “Nah man, it wasn’t, seriously.” Oh, I really think that it was. “How’d you know that for sure?” I was the bloke wearing the T-shirt.

This swiftly led to a five-way argument with the Scouse contingent. Seeing as any practical justification I offered up — the T-shirt said “The Sun, keep fucking buying” on it — was swatted away with waspish urgency, I reverted back to form: even if I hadn’t been in the middle of an eight-year bender, I told them petulantly, even if I’d soberly clocked the unfortunate local significance of the thing before taking to the stage, I would still have worn the shirt. They were scowling now. “So, you’re not even sorry?” I don’t want to patronise my audience, I informed them, I’m not going to water myself down for anyone either. There is no conspiracy so sinister as morality, I added, with deliberate pretentiousness. My job is to get you to ask questions. Art isn’t here to shepherd you along to a more positive perspective in life.

But my arguments were evidently beyond the pale. This group of young people couldn’t compute the absence of literalism. I would once have felt quite proud that I had been able to confuse people so permanently by simply wearing a T-shirt. Intentional or not, I would normally find this kind of outrage objectively comical. But there was something in their unanimity that was vaguely inspiring. Where else have people managed to club together and successfully banish that red rag of Murdoch-sponsored hatred? Was I fighting the wrong battle here? Either way, he eventually refused me the roll-up I’d asked for.

When the Fat White Family set out as a band around 12 years ago, we had few objectives beyond wilful abrasion. We saw the music industry — shrivelled after the streaming boom — as primarily concerned with little more than its own survival. Indie music featuring guitars had become so droll, so bitterly inoffensive and stale, that, as fans, it was difficult not to take it personally. The flipside of that — the positive, if you like — was that even through an endless fog of speed abuse, Glen’s vodka and unresolved childhood trauma, it was easy to spot a gap in the market for something genuinely discomforting. Our idols were Lou Reed, The Fall, The Make Up and The Country Teasers — wanton outsiders who turned politics into playdough in lieu of their aesthetic objectives. These people were world-builders, not box-tickers.

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Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil

By Nick Cave and Freddie Sayers

I’m approaching 40 now. Life has slapped me down repetitively; it has beaten plenty of moderation into me. My taste for shock tactics has diminished considerably. Today, I’m more prone to dabbling in sentimentality. But for a protracted period during the middle of the previous decade, my organ-grinding little brother and I found ourselves seriously considering anally fingering one another on stage. Even GG Allin, perhaps the most extreme frontman that ever lived, had never committed himself to live incest. I look back on these discussions now as the high-water mark in a take-no-prisoners exploration of the contemporary limitations of the stage itself. I wanted to become the Vito Acconci of rock and roll. One of Egon Schiele’s self portraits brought to life.

When I think of the word “punk”, the first things that spring to mind are mohawks and circles with a capital “A” drawn in the middle. But if we think of punk more generally as an aesthetic of dissidence, a counter to the status quo, what does it mean today? Where can it possibly bloom?

Maybe it was an excess of freedom that brought it on, but we seem now to live in an era of taboo-building, of rapidly expanding moral expectations, but one that refuses to offer people anything sensual in return. In essence, punk entails a certain amount of aesthetic juvenilia. Where punk is concerned, problem and solution are often one and the same: a lack of restraint can often prove the key to authenticity. A project defines itself by going too far. Until it has gone too far, it quite simply isn’t. It is transcendence in the wrong direction — it is only by painting yourself into a corner that you are forced to paint yourself out.

Apparently, this mode of cultural production now causes more agony than it’s worth. With an ever-tightening fist of critical rigidity, well-meaning purveyors of carefully cultivated static carry the day. Artists are now expected to live comfortably with the fetid anxiety that, at any moment, their already paltry livelihoods might be stripped away from them on account of some antiquated faux pas on Facebook. Maybe some new media ecosystem will coalesce around the mainstream, where young people can get things gloriously wrong for a spell, but I doubt it.

The problems are too fundamental. The birth of social media has lumbered us with an apparently fatal dose of accessibility, of democratisation: everyone in charge of their own little publishing house, their own micro-judiciary, each one a captain of industry at the infinitesimal scale. There aren’t enough shadows within which groups can get fungal. Everything is out in the world before it’s had a chance to properly malform. Meanwhile, the space separating self from all the rest has been obliterated. The upshot of this suffocating proximity? Alienation, and fear.

Back when I was utterly broke, trying to get into music, I got scouted by a modelling agency. This agency had me cycling all over London chasing fantastical sums of money in exchange for a few hours pouting. I didn’t land a single job. The only “work” I ever managed to land was unpaid, for a Japanese fashionista in east London. There was no money, but the agency assured me I had to build my portfolio. I spent four hours in front of a mirror being rendered in full geisha make-up, then had my photo taken incessantly wearing a piece of linen before being cast out into the weekend.

The garb brought another me to the surface, a new kind of tenderness that Friday night. And two years ago, I made a video for the DIY acid house side project I front, Decius, in which I decided to resurrect that geisha alter ego. The video budget amounted to around £70, as chipped in for by me and the bloke cooking the beats, all of which was spent hiring a young make-up artist I’d found online. The song is called “U Instead of Thought” (Watch the video: you’ll be able to see for yourself that she did an incredible job.) The whole project is an exploration of my masochistic tendencies, an aestheticisation of my will to subjection.

Days after, the artist in question got back in touch with me to remind me to credit her when the film dropped. Of course, I replied. A day or two later, she decided she didn’t want her name on the thing, that maybe the video constituted an act of cultural appropriation. I was a little bemused at this — a great many little Algerian boys dream of growing up to become geishas — but fair enough, your call, I replied. Then she changed tack again; actually, she did want the credit. Then, days later, she made her final decision: it was too risky, the video constituted some vague kind of harm and she didn’t want the association after all. That only around 500 people were ever likely to see the thing didn’t matter.

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Burning Man will rise again

By Geoff Dyer

I brought up Flaubert’s comments on plagiarism, who regarded his own work as always nothing more than a bouquet of other people’s ideas. There are only two types of art: good and bad. Of course, good art can be put to bad ends; Leni Riefenstahl made great films for the worst people. I asked the make-up artist what she made of the blues? The bedrock of pop music. Should a barrier have been erected between black and white? She responded with a viral video of a young Asian guy attributing the racist attack he had endured on the London Underground to the prevalence of Kung-Fu thematics in Western pop culture.

Such moral urgency has supplanted spontaneity in the arts. As much as I found the make-up artist’s extreme prevaricating humorous, I recognised enough of myself in it. The endless doubt that now accompanies every outré aesthetic choice I make. Above all else, I felt sorry for her. Sorry for all of us. Are we slowly denying ourselves access to the architecture of self-knowing? As artists, are we really expected to choose between impotence and extreme marginality?

If one takes into account the serious critical acclaim heaped upon Harry Styles, it seems so. If one takes into account the even more serious journalism that props up The 1975, all is surely lost. I’ve seen the future; it is an eternal corporate skid-mark of pseudo-personality and pragmatic hypocrisy. Where provocation for provocation’s sake is concerned, the stakes are unbearably high, the competition non-existent. The orgy of self-censorship that is our historical portion thus ends here: in screaming silence.

I am brooding over words I wrote several weeks ago when describing that species of social embarrassment called not knowing where to look when you pass a school playground of children. “It takes me a moment to remember,” I wrote, “that a man wandering on his own must no longer pause to look at children running races in their mirth.” I did not, I now think, adequately register the sadness of that loss. Scurry from a playground for fear of appearing sinister and we might as well be scurrying from the vitality of life itself.

The worst part of being told you’re sinister for no other reason than that you’re a man out wandering on his own is that, eventually, you begin to fear you might be. But sinister how? What’s the dread clutching at society’s heart? And why is it now clutching at mine?

I hear the children laughing and scuttle past. Here’s the tragedy of it: I am severed from the time when I laughed in a playground myself. The wistful music of continuity is stopped.

How many things are we no longer trusted to look at and admire? I dare not freely name them because that too can be a species of offence. So, I pace the streets with my eyes down, in order not to be surprised by beauty I must not let myself appreciate. The long, brown legs of high-stepping city women in their summer dresses? Eugh! The billowing of someone’s national dress, a fantastical headdress; a lovely child skipping in its self-absorption? Eugh, eugh!

The street’s forbidden fruits, waiting to ambush us the minute we lift our faces. Who are you looking at, mister? Wanna photograph?

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The unbearable lightness of being cancelled

By Howard Jacobson

Look up, then, if looking ahead is so fraught. There’s a sculpture on the BBC building by Eric Gill. Prospero and Ariel. Old and Young. Eugh! Or quit the street, on which we all once promenaded, sometimes flagrantly if the night was hot, and seek refuge in a cinema or art gallery. They’re showing an old Woody Allen here. Oh, God — it’s Manhattan. Eugh! And here — we’re in luck — is a Gauguin exhibition, the great painter and his young Tahitian bride. Young! How young? Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!

First the streets are denied us, then art. But take the risk out of art and what’s left but decoration? Do we not look to art to probe the borders of the acceptable? Risk is what explains art’s fearful symmetry. Tiger, tiger, burning bright…

I don’t pretend that there’s nothing on those walls to fear. It makes perfect sense to keep a tiger at arm’s length. Art is dangerous and we are right to stand in trembling awe of it. But what we fear is also, much of the time, what we love. We police the borderland, losing in adventure what we gain in safety. Will we one day have to ban beauty itself, shamed by the desires it will unloose, outraged by the liberties that have already been taken to produce it? Am I — one halting, harmless, rheumy, apologetic, mature man — really that inflammable?

Better I stay indoors. Close the windows against sounds that are not mine to hear and draw the curtains against sights that are not mine to see. That way I cause no one discomfort by appearing to take too avid an interest in what they look like, what they’re wearing, how old they are, or where they come from. Walk on, my children, unmolested by my declining sight.

I am not asking for pity. I have lived my life and looked my full. I won’t say no to looking a bit more before my eyes close altogether, but it’s not only on my own behalf that I lament our visual timorousness — there are those who come after who must also be granted the right to stare and be stirred.

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The art world's lost sense of humour

By Kat Rosenfield

There is, I grant you, nothing new about being told to look away. Or suppressing art, come to that. The Puritans tried to close the theatres in the 16th century, blamed the plague on the lasciviousness of theatre-goers, and finally got their way in 1642. But is there not a specific problem with the idea of men looking — as though the eyes of men are configured differently from women’s — that probably dates to the Seventies when John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was published and the conceit of the “male gaze” elaborated? It was after Berger, anyway, that men began to be perceived as gazing suspiciously, and after the film theorist Laura Mulvey’s analysis of looking as an act of male oppression, that their gaze was pronounced out-and-out exploitative. Where the likes of Francis Drake had circled the globe looking for worlds to conquer, men had now only to lift a paintbrush or wander in off the street to look at a painting to be charged with ravishment and pillage.

Ok, ok, cheap shot. Nothing any of us do is wholly innocent. We are all culture-laden whether we know we are or not. The scrutinising eye can be possessive or pornographic — what man can say he has never looked possessively or pornographically? — and it does make sense to talk of some sorts of representation as invasion. Only consider the shape of the paintbrush or the pen. “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world,” wrote Laura Mulvey. Oof, yes. Or, at least, oof maybe.

Had I been a woman worn out with being prodded by those instruments of male possessiveness, I’d have bought willingly into that. Call a man phallocentric and you had him every time. The more he shouted and bullied that he wasn’t, the more he was. I remember it well. I was there, denying it loudly myself. Of course, there were some — the Andrew Tates of the age — who pumped their muscles and wore phallocentricity as a badge of pride. But the rest of us knew we were on borrowed time. All right, all right, we said, hanging our heads, but how will we ever again let our senses off the rein? When will the fun return? It won’t, Mulvey told us. Fun had done damage enough. Fun had run its course. Thus was Puritanism revived in another guise.

With nothing that was fun or safe to look upon at home, a number of us did what the beaten have done for centuries, kicked the dust of Europe from our feet and travelled to exotic places. But, in the rush to delegitimise, that pastime, too, lost favour. The very word “exotic” marked us as imperialists. Orientalism, the critic Edward Said called it. Colonising what was foreign by finding it picturesque. Byron and Matisse, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Bell, Leonardo and Stendhal, the entire fourth form at my school — all guilty. Old and young, men and women — Orientalists the lot of us.

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Artists have forgotten how to draw

By Alexander Poots

There are accusations of Orientalism and its implicit privileging of whiteness all over the walls of the Rossetti exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain. I am in two minds about notes on the walls of exhibitions. Because I am a word obsessive, I read them conscientiously to the degree that I sometimes forget to look at the paintings they describe. Good wall notes can be engrossing and informative. Bad ones — which might be bad for a variety of reasons but are always bad if they conspicuously promote the pieties and prohibitions of the hour — can spoil the show. The notes accompanying the Rossettis swarm around the works like flies, letting nothing alone that might be construed as ideologically outmoded. Rossetti’s painting “The Beloved” is accused of “misimagining” North Africa, while another painting is guilty of “dehumanising” a North African. Just a question, but as these are value judgements: shouldn’t they be up to us to decide?

Remember Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, so hectored and harried by his elders at a family dinner that he might have been an “unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena… [he was] so smartingly touched up by these moral goads”. Exactly how I felt after two hours of curatorial finger-pointing at Tate Britain.

And so we walk the street of pitfalls and perils, eyes averted, shrinking from the finger. But I guess it’s fair enough: what goes around comes around. Now I know how generations of women felt being touched up by the eyes of men. I get it. Mea culpa. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have mis-gazed.

This essay was first published on Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

I had already wasted a few decades by the time I started drawing. No matter. I wanted a pastime that didn’t involve a screen. I was left with a choice between drawing and fishing. I chose the former because you need a car to reach most fishing spots, and I don’t have one. This was how I found myself boarding the bus to Dublin for a weekly evening class at the Drawing School. Classes take place in a roomy basement studio beneath Merrion Square, where serene plaster casts watch over rows of students as they work. The primary activity for a novice like me is deceptively simple. You are asked to copy a model drawing. The copy should be as exact as you can make it. The angle of every line, the internal proportions of the form, and the interplay of light and shadow must be faithfully reproduced.

This is incredibly difficult to do. The human eye is an awful cheat. You can be quite pleased with your copy until you put it next to the original and see what a mess you’ve made of everything. An ear too high, a shadow not half as dark as it needs to be. It’s a frustrating process, but compelling too. Students of all ages are genuinely absorbed in their work. The quiet is broken only by the occasional rasp of a pencil sharpener or the hushed advice of the instructors as they rove among the easels.

The model drawings are taken from the Cours de Dessin of Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme, a three-volume manual published between 1868 and 1873. The Cours offers a series of drawings of progressive difficulty. Plate 1 is devoted to the human eye, Plate 28 depicts a crouched female leg, Plate 52 is a bust of Brutus, and so on. Bargue drew all of the images himself, selecting examples from ancient statuary that would provide students with the best lessons in form, line and tonal value. This means that a student copies Bargue’s drawing of a cast made from a statue inspired (in most cases) by a human model. Such a daisy chain of reproduction might seem absurd. In fact, it places the student in a tradition of artistic training that stretches back to Antonio Mini and beyond.

Picasso is known to have used the Cours as a teenager, but the method’s most enthusiastic proponent was Vincent Van Gogh: “It invigorates my pencil,” he said. In September 1880, he wrote: “I work regularly on the Cours de Dessin Bargue, and intend to finish it before I undertake anything else, for each day it makes my hand as well as my mind more supple and strong.” Although copying was an arduous and frustrating process, Van Gogh described it as “nothing other than a labour of giving birth. First pain, then joy afterwards.” Ten years later, just weeks before his death, he was planning to work through the Cours again.

The point of all that copying is to charm the cheating eye into submission and learn to really see. But most art schools today do not seem particularly interested in teaching their students this foundational skill. Drawing remains a central component of the BA Fine Art at City & Guilds, Falmouth University offers a dedicated BA Drawing degree, and The Royal Drawing School has become famous for its postgraduate Drawing Year. But the majority of art schools now focus on other activities, and those who want to learn traditional skills must look elsewhere.

“Why have people stopped drawing?” as a perplexed David Hockney recently asked. Around 1920, art education in Britain began with observational drawing; first of prints and casts, then of the living human figure. You had to earn your way to the life model through practice and dedication. And there was an academic component, too: anatomy, geometry, art history. Only then could the serious work of painting and sculpting begin. Although a very different experience to Michelangelo’s workshop, it was a training that Antonio Mini would have recognised.

By the Eighties, however, this traditional education had largely disappeared from Britain’s art schools. Samuel Horler, who founded the Dublin Drawing School I attended in 2010, says his father witnessed the shift first-hand: “As a student he did life-modelling to get a bit of money. He would go out to all the art schools in London and he said it was the easiest work because no one would show up to class. So he would just sit there and wouldn’t have to do much posing because no one was coming, they were all into new media suddenly.”

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By Justin E.H. Smith

William Coldstream, whose eponymous committee recommended a series of sweeping reforms to art education between 1960 and 1970, usually gets the blame for the elevation of ideas over practice. But as painter and writer Jacob Willer has shown, the death of the old order was a complex and lengthy process that began long before the Coldstream Committee was first assembled. Heads were already being turned by French abstractionism in the Twenties, a movement that did not require its adherents to be able to draw a convincing human hand. Photography’s ever-increasing reach had an equally dampening effect on realism. And by the Thirties, a peculiarly British interpretation of the Bauhaus Movement was taking hold. Walter Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto is a short exhortation to return to the crafts, or Handwerk: “[Artists] must return to the workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds.” In its British incarnation, Bauhaus became a rallying cry for those who wished to banish “mere drawing” from the art schools — the only problem was that most forgot to return to the workshop after they had done so.

Jacob Willer has argued that the true break from the past came when art education opened its doors to fashion’s unceasing churn and found that it could not close them again. Bauhaus Modernism was swept away by Pop Art, and the modish tide has continued to go in and out ever since. We’re all supposed to be artists now, isn’t that right? I am not so sure. Nouns tend to lose their meaning when universally applied. That is certainly Horler’s view on the matter. His grandmother is the celebrated sculptor Imogen Stuart, a member of both the Royal Hibernian Academy and Aosdána. In 2015, Stuart was elected Saoi, Ireland’s highest cultural honour. Despite these accolades, Stuart knows that there is always more to learn: “She’s hesitant about calling herself an artist,” says Horler, “And that is quite a traditional view. It shows how misunderstood art is today, that people can just call themselves artists… From the Renaissance right up until at least the Twenties, you had to qualify. And that’s missing now.”

Horler’s Drawing School is one of an increasing number of institutions trying to bridge the artistic skills gap. These range from the glossy Florence Academy of Art and New York City’s Grand Central Atelier to boutique outfits such as the Glasgow Academy of Fine Art. Teaching approaches vary, but all these academies and ateliers are united by a conviction that learning to draw accurately and beautifully is an essential starting point for any artist. Naturally, not everyone has the time and money to attend these schools. But teaching yourself to draw has probably never been easier. Books on the subject are legion and thriving drawing communities exist online. YouTube channels such as ProkoTV pull in millions of subscribers, while digitised museum collections make it possible to learn from the work of supremely gifted and classically trained artists like Käthe Kollwitz and Thomas Anschutz. (Still, I suspect there’s no real substitute for a teacher looming up behind you and murmuring “what’s going on with that nose, Alex?”)

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The dark side of the art world

By Tom Newlands

The growth of atelier education has not been universally welcomed. Despite being a critic of the contemporary art world, Willer has little time for the revival of 19th-century teaching methods either. Of both approaches he writes “they do not know what they do not know”. So, while many art schools are now little more than community theatre for the upper-middle classes, ateliers that offer a supposed recreation of a Parisian studio circa 1880 risk becoming a stultifying dead-end. Clearly, a curriculum that marries hard-won skill with creative expression is the ideal to strive for. Some argue that the only solution is to resume the Renaissance practice of seeking out a master willing to impart his or her wisdom in a private setting, away from the institutions and their various diktats.

Art schools and ateliers have their respective ultras, but Horler is not among them. For him, observational drawing is a useful tool for beginners and a handy refresher for the experienced, not an article of faith. Copying provides a solid technical grounding and a set of objective criteria through which a student’s work can be evaluated. A student working through the Cours de Dessin is not making art, he says: “I always tell students that I’m not an art school, I’m not teaching art. But you learn certain skills and techniques that will help you as an artist.”

I still draw most days. Nothing special. Household clutter, mostly. I attempted the dozing figure in Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” a few weeks ago and was pleased with the result, until I noticed that my copy’s legs were much too small. In my case, the sleep of reason produces shrunken tibia. So I drew it again. And again. There is a compulsive element to drawing that I had not anticipated. I think it is a result of trying to see, really see. After three hours, I would walk out into Merrion Square to find that it had been rolled up and replaced with ink-damp forms and strange prospects. A busy garden square in central Dublin was now a question, the same question that Antonio Mini must have asked himself 500 years ago — how would I draw that?

These two approaches to creativity for kids, the splatter and the craft kit, encapsulate two far broader lessons we deliver to children on how to live. On the one hand, unbounded self-expression coupled with absolute aesthetic relativism, in which we reject any imaginable constraint on a kind of “creativity” we imagine to come only from within ourselves. On the other, a rigid obedience to externally-imposed rules. And when I learned, earlier this week, that some secondary school children are now identifying as non-human creatures — or, in one case, as a cape-wearing moon — it left me wondering: do such absurdities apply the former lesson, rejecting every rule in the name of self-expression? Or are such youth in fact colouring inside the lines their teachers — which is to say us, the adults — have provided?

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Schoolchildren, we learn, are now identifying as dinosaurs, horses, cats, and even planetary bodies. One pupil at a secondary school in Wales reported that a fellow pupil “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”

When my own daughter was a toddler, an art-world friend and I used to send one another pictures of our kids’ splatter paintings, with solemn commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Such affectionate mum-jokes aside, though, it would be extremely bad form to greet your pre-schooler’s colourful smears with substantive artistic critique rather than unalloyed delight, simply as joyful self-expression.

But it’s one thing embracing a three-year-old’s poster-paint splodges with judgement-free rapture. It’s another altogether when secondary-school teachers embrace (or, perhaps in many cases, have imposed on them) an equivalent refusal to judge even the most unconstrained self-expression. Within this stance of unconditional acceptance, the teachers in question are left completely unable to impose boundaries, even when limiting their pupils’ self-expression would, in fact, be a basic precondition for conducting a functional, meow-free lesson.

But while the contrasting approach to creativity — lines to colour inside, or a pre-prepared kit for assembly, for example — seems to offer more structure, in practice it’s less different than you might imagine. Whether literally or metaphorically, the “craft kit” approach represents the other extreme to the splatter painting: a total or near-total relinquishing of skill, judgement, and agency, in favour of pre-prepared templates.

And we see this applied, too, in young people’s lives. Some parents are now heavily involved in their offspring’s university life, and others have even gone into their child’s place of work to help them confront an angry customer, or phoned their boss to ask for a pay rise. Adults are also pre-defining the forms that supposedly radical self-expression takes, and then inviting young people to discover their “authentic selves” by adopting such an identity wholesale: a “craft kit” version of selfhood, as it were, requiring only simple instructions and little in the way of accomplishment. This agency-free, pre-assembled approach to living is now so widely accepted that it commands a whole month-long summer celebration, complete with a pocketbook’s worth of off-the-peg selves from which to choose.

But what, in reality, does either approach offer as a set of moral precepts on how to live? Both work well enough, provided the locus of authority is elsewhere: that is, if you have an admiring mummy to coo at your splatter painting, or a teacher on hand with a kit or print-out for you to complete. But they leave something to be desired at the point where individual judgement and agency is required — which is to say, in theory at least, for the whole of life after childhood.

It’s far rarer to find artistic endeavours offered to children that emphasise imitation, practice, and mastery of a technical skill — for example drawing freehand rather than colouring in. This is unsurprising, in a way: even assuming you possess the skill in question, helping a child make something nice using a method that’s difficult to master is much more time-consuming than praising them for making a mess, or else giving them a kit to do while you catch up on emails.

But the trouble with such approaches to “creativity” is precisely this: they swerve the acquisition of skill. And this means, in the end, swerving the acquisition of agency. We used to understand this, and treat artistic education as the inculcation of skill and judgement through practice. In the studios of Renaissance sculptors, for example, would-be “creatives” could spend years imitating existing works, and mastering technical skill, artistic register, and the larger aesthetic framework, before they were allowed anywhere near a composition of their own. The resulting skill, in the hands of even an average sculptor, could produce good work; allied with an exceptional talent such as Michelangelo’s, the result was masterpieces still world-famous today.

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We might say: was Michelangelo not also expressing himself? Well, yes; but for all that his creations are exceptional in their vividness and exquisite execution, they also exist within a tradition of craftsmanship, as well as a visual register and shared religious and mythological framework. And creativity within such a demanding frame implies submission to what the philosopher-engineer Matthew Crawford calls the “affordances” of your chosen material and métier: not just your patiently-acquired skill, but also what stone can be persuaded to do, plus more broadly the topics and visual language that will make the result meaningful to others.

In place of this difficult-to-acquire matrix of skill and meaning, we’ve embraced the idea that “creativity” is a spontaneous property of individuals, drawn solely from within an individual without much need for training, practice, or imitation. So much so, in fact, that we’re running full-tilt into a new aesthetic age, that hands the aggregate treasure-trove of historic human visual and linguistic conventions wholesale to machines, treating it simply as a means of “training” programmes such as ChatGPT and Midjourney so that they may “create” new configurations of that cultural legacy on our behalf.

In doing so, we’ve sidelined that domain’s critical role as an enabler of creativity: providing the meanings to create with, and the skills to realise a vision. And again, we should not find it strange how easily this has been accepted, given that for decades now we’ve been treating the whole domain of skill, practice, and shared meaning as incidental to “creativity”.

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There are signs that this poverty of skill-based judgement has percolated upwards, into adults. At the most literal level, adult colouring books are wildly popular as a way of relaxing, a trend that first hit the headlines in 2015. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is also the year the American Dialect Society nominated, as most creative new coinage, the transformation of “adult” into a verb meaning “behave like a grownup” — or that the same year, too, the overall American Dialect Society winner for innovative dialect was the “nonbinary” singular “they”.

In other words, in 2015 adults embraced, en masse, a form of artistic endeavour that surrenders overall control to an outside force. The same year, self-created identities became so mainstream as to begin reshaping language. And that same year, adults began expressing, also en masse, a generalised ambivalent distance from their own capacity (or willingness) to behave as adults.

Custom identities, adult colouring books and semi-ironic clinging to childhood have not disappeared since 2015. You can even buy (possibly ironic, possibly not) “I Adulted!” reward stickers on Amazon.But being an adult implies having the skills and knowledge to take independent action: in other words, knowing how to make a Pietà, rather than colouring inside the lines or making a mess.

And what exactly are you to do, as a child, when the adults around you offer no opportunity to develop any skills or moral frameworks, refuse to acknowledge any objective moral or aesthetic standards? Under those circumstances, you will have grown up thinking the skills, norms and shared meanings that form the basis of independent creativity or moral judgement are so irrelevant as to be ceded wholesale to imitation machines.

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Then you get to the age of supposed autonomy, and find yourself without either a loving authority figure who will tell you your splatter art is wonderful, or even an authority to give you some lines to colour inside. We shouldn’t be surprised if many such adults feel nostalgia for the innocent age before anyone expected them to like being free.

If I have a measure of hope, it rests with the kids now riotously trolling this limitless-yet-rigid modern orthodoxy of value-free self-expression, by identifying as planets or dinosaurs and forcing their teachers to play along. If such absurdist stunts have little to offer on the artistic front, they nonetheless demonstrate an enduring truth. Human creativity will always meet and exceed its boundaries, even when it’s constrained only by the pretence that we can live without boundaries.

But Rothenberg’s most enduring contribution would come a decade later, after a fairly radical shift from modernism to the new project of “ethnopoetics”. This shift led him to work in the vein of the anthologist, notably while compiling his Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania (1968), collecting and sharing the work of poetic traditions from around the world, rather than centring his own “sole-author” work as a poet. But the line is never so clear, and in hindsight it seems reasonable to suppose that Rothenberg’s anthological work is itself a variety of poiesis, by which he transmits to the attention of English-language readers a vastly deeper and more vital sense of what poetry might be, and of what poetry long was, than the one we got stuck with in the modern period.

What we call “poetry” today is mostly an etiolated art form, a vestige of something that in its more archaic expressions does a great deal more — does everything, in fact. Poetry, for much of human history, was not words on a page, for there were no pages, and words were not conceived as having a visible dimension at all. Nor was poetry just spoken words, but rather these words were one component of a total artistic form that also included motion, gesture, and, often, rhythm and melody. Its purpose was to realign the human with the cosmic, to affirm the embeddedness of our mundane earthly experience within a vastly larger order that also includes the animals, the elements, the heavens, the ancestors, and the gods.

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The ultimate dismantling of this total art form has occurred in lockstep with the professionalisation of the scientific disciplines and with the process of secularisation over the past several centuries. Yet even in its reduced modern form, one of the things poetry still commonly aspires to do, as best it can, is to tap into the sense of the sacred — even if its creators often do so without any overt commitment to the reality of the realms their artistic sense moves them to explore.

I have for some years been working on a translation of the Siberian Sakha-language oral-epic tradition known as Olonkho. Throughout this work, for a long time, though I was becoming quite adept at simulating Sakha meter and metaphor in English, I did not think of myself as a poet. Jerry Rothenberg convinced me I was mistaken about myself. Some poets draw their material from dreams, some from childhood memories, and others from love or politics. Some poets get their source material directly from other poets working in other linguistic realities.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these realities are just linguistic. For in fact the language of poetry, perhaps especially of “archaic” poetry, is typically condensed out of the entire lived translinguistic reality of the bard who channels it, and to try to reconstruct that reality in another language as if it were entirely constituted from words is to misrepresent (perhaps inevitably) the original work. For this reason, Rothenberg advocates, and practices, what he calls “total translation”: the rendering, in graphic form, of every possible element of another culture’s poetic traditions, including those elements that we do not ordinarily understand as linguistic. What results is also a pale shadow of the original, but it is at least a pale shadow that acknowledges what it is, and that points to everything our secular, textual, and de-ritualised poetry can typically no longer do.

One way of continuing to do these things today is by leaving poetry in our narrow sense behind, and pursuing the sort of performance that we today call “music”, even if archaically this too would have been conceptualised as the work of the poet. Rothenberg has himself consistently blurred the line between recitation and performance. One of the staples of his public appearances over the years has been a chant he learned among the Seneca people in Upstate New York in the Seventies, with a single line uttered in trance-like Sprechgesang — “The animals are coming” — followed by an uncannily realistic impersonation of what sounds like a bear. Many of the younger people in his audiences would likely take issue with the “appropriative” quality of this performance, were it not so compelling, were they not so undeniably in the presence — though such things are generally supposed not to happen anymore — of an old man who has just turned into a wild animal.

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Such transformation as this is among the potentials of “archaic” poetry — poetry conceived as a total art form whose purest expression is ritual — unlike what we might ordinarily expect from a recitation of the work of, say, Robert Frost. Such transformation, or something like it, is also possible through a sufficiently vibrant performance in the humble genre of the rock song, and indeed a number of this genre’s familiar names (Warren Zevon, Eddie Vedder), have, over the years, drawn inspiration from Rothenberg’s work. But surely no singer-songwriter’s oeuvre is more overtly indebted to the American poet than that of Nick Cave.

I’ve been listening to Nick Cave for about 35 years, and I have long seen him as one of the few singer-songwriters currently working whose lyrics deserve attention in their own right. But it was only when I happened to learn of our shared admiration for Jerry Rothenberg’s work that I began to see Nick’s lyrical sensibility as distinctly “Rothenbergian”. It dawned on me that Nick might have a greater claim than Jerry to be in the business of creating total works of art out of the “starter culture” of poetry.

That is, Nick generates poetic lyrical ideas, but he doesn’t stop with these. He puts them to music, and then he unfolds them in performances that have, perhaps increasingly in his “late style”, the character of ritual. He appears, in fact, increasingly committed to leading and facilitating some kind of collective transformation. He’s bringing us back to church, like it or not, or perhaps to the liminal place beside the fire in the night where strange and diurnally unfathomable transformations occur.

The brilliant Mexican poet and critic Heriberto Yépez, co-editor of Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013), sharply observes that “[p]ure Myth cannot exist in a world after Hollywood, nor can the shaman holistically heal because he or she is historically wounded”. Both Jerry and Nick have fully reckoned with this heavy truth of our current condition, and have succeeded in cutting their shamanic potencies with the irony and humour that are the lingua franca of our secular age. Yet for them, this is never a dilution or a compromise, but only a demonstration of their mastery of the idiom of their time and place, their commitment to being “of the world”, and of their moment, even if the aspiration of all poetry is towards the eternal.

Thus does Nick excel in the art of the juxtaposition, the mixture of registers that would be straightforwardly comical if it were not so often poignant, as in 2001’s “Darker with the Day”: “My father sits slumped in the deepening snow / As I search in and out, above, about, and below”; or in 2008’s “More News from Nowhere”: “He asks me for my autograph / I write ‘nobody’ and then / I wrap myself up in my woolly coat / and I blind him with my pen.” Again and again, Nick conjures an image from his internal world — a memory of his long-deceased father, a more recent memory of dealing with needy fans — and then projects it into the eternal mythological register of a Rumi or a Homer.

Jerry’s poetic voice is equally compelling in A Big Jewish Book, where he sought to demonstrate why it is that “after Auschwitz there is only poetry” (my emphasis). This stark reversal of Adorno’s grim formula, I believe, has something to do with Jerry’s awareness, which cannot but assert itself after any honest engagement with “archaic” poetry of the sort anthologised in Technicians of the Sacred, that the primary function of poetry for most of human history has been one of processing or managing the unceasing violence of our lived reality.

This thesis is certainly not original with me. The great Austrian classicist Walter Burkert famously speculated that the origins of human culture lie in expiation rituals meant to counteract the cosmic taint that comes with shedding the blood of animals in hunting. Much archaic poetry seems surprisingly hung up on such vivid phenomena as the sight of a deer’s viscera pouring from its underbelly when it is cut open by the knife of a hunter. Why dwell on such things? Perhaps because violence necessitates poetry; or, to put it the other way around, poetry, properly understood, concerns itself above all with violence.

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“I think on the most fundamental level he introduced me to primitive poetry,” Nick told me on the phone from London earlier this year. “I think there was a change in my writing, I can’t really pinpoint it, but I have a feeling that it coincided with me reading Technicians of the Sacred.” It is in the encounter with this anthology, too, that Nick experiences the complicated homecoming every truth-seeking colonial son must face sooner or later: “In Technicians of the Sacred, to my shame, I read my first Indigenous poetry. Even though I’m Australian, I hadn’t really read any of it.”

He recalls the excitement of discovering a new sort of poetry that was “a little violent, deeply surreal, and sexual, and also non-ironic, that was explicitly designed for ritual, and prayers, and transformation, and these sorts of things, which were really very much looked down upon by much of the modern poetry that I would read. I mean the anti-spiritual, ironic modern poetry.”

The poems in Technicians of the Sacred, Nick recollects, “reminded me of the Psalms themselves. They were these religious poems, shall we say, or spiritual or ritual poems, that were deeply violent and at the same time songs of praise, and I think that fed into something that I was blindly reaching around for… an extraordinary enmeshment of style and time, and [of] the mundane and the cosmic… It just blew my mind.” He pauses. “I mean, it’s like the fundamental… the fundamental violence of things.”

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Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen. “I keep saying to my wife,” Nick tells me, “that these songs are small, unimpressive autobiographies kind of wrapped up in heroic myths, and religious writing, and wild surrealism.” He continues: “Even though I might be seeing cosmically, [the songs] are rooted in the very most fundamental and mundane events in my rather boring life. And maybe that’s what writers mostly have to do anyway. They just sit. They don’t do anything. Most of us don’t do anything.”

The great Norman O. Brown, author of Life against Death (1959) and coiner of the term “polymorphous perversity”, was himself a famously uxorious homebody. Brown insisted in interviews that there was no contradiction here, that thanks to the liveliness of his imagination, he was able to indulge all his transgressive impulses without so much as getting up from his desk. And this is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things — even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature — and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.

We’re older now, and the light is dim. Nick Cave has done much to orient me in the world, and to give expression to my own aesthetic sensibility. In the Eighties this sensibility was, or seemed to be, fundamentally exclusionary: it was all about carving out a narrow territory of style and attitude and despising everything else. In our late dim light, by contrast, we seem to have grown far more capacious, far more generous.

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This generosity, too, it seems to me, is Rothenbergian in spirit. It has to do, I think, with a recognition of one’s place in the long chain of a tradition, which is another way of saying recognition of one’s debt to the ancestors, so that one can only approach creative work with humility and awe. We see this again and again in Nick’s willing adoption of the role of the apprentice, to sing a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Leonard Cohen or Bertolt Brecht, without any concern to outdo the masters, but only, it seems, to experience the joy of channelling them.

Because this tradition is a mythopoetic one, the spirit channelled through its apostles takes account of the full range of human experience, and therefore often turns violent. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ landmark 1995 album, Murder Ballads, channels violence in its purest form, and perhaps gives us the nec plus ultra of homicidal ideation in its rendition of the blues classic “Stagger Lee”. Would Nick really crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole? Probably not, but that is a philistine question. The faculty of the imagination is not the same thing as the will, and what an artist is channelling under the spell of mythopoetic violence is not an action plan, a manifesto or a credo, but a complete picture of human life. This is a picture that traditional and popular art forms, notably Delta blues, have excelled in capturing, in contrast with profit-driven and algorithmically optimised commercial entertainments, which unsurprisingly veer towards a conception of art as handmaiden of conventional morality and thus as appropriately inhabiting only a very limited range of possible human perspectives.

That Nick has not sought to live down any of his decades-old “excesses”, but has only kept refining them into an even purer distillation of violence (“Stagger Lee” remains a staple of his performances) is a testament to his mature inhabitation of the role of mythopoetic bard and of transgenerational mediator of tradition. In a personal sense, he seems only to grow more gentle; I’ve watched a number of tense early interviews with him, and these are a universe away from the amicable and kind spirit he maintains in interaction with strangers today, at least some of whom must objectively be quite dull. On the fence about Christianity for many years, and as far as I know resigned to some permanent condition of agnosticism, Nick has for all that arrived at Christianity’s ethical core, where loving the stranger obviates any perceived need to fix your beliefs, since this love is itself a “proof” of the reality of the divine. And yet through all this moral growth Nick just keeps putting holes in Billy Dilly’s motherfucking head, night after night, year after year. This is good for his art, of course, but it is also, if violence must exist, a pretty good way of dispatching it, through sublimation, from our own midst.

There are precious few graceful old rock stars out there, and to become one seems to me almost the same thing as transcending the limitations of the genre. In Nick’s case, I think this apparent transcendence has something to do with his positioning of himself, by design or by instinct, in the lineage of the poets — and with his understanding, no doubt helped by his discovery of Jerry Rothenberg’s work, that poetry properly understood is the total art form, from which all the other modern art forms have been parted out. It is the art form that reckons with the violence of things, and continually sets our broken world back in order again.

Bergman himself didn’t really get going till he was in his late thirties, just as he was leaving youth behind. The 2018 documentary, Bergman: A Year in a Life, pinpoints 1957, when Bergman was 38, as the year when he ascended to the fullness of his mature talent (both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries were released that year). Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, he turned out masterpiece after masterpiece, working with the same trusted actors: Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Anderson, Bibi Anderson, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand. It’s telling that when you google Bergman’s best films, none of the lists even closely match up. The quality and consistency of the work he produced across decades resists consensus — everyone has their favourites.

Unsurprisingly, Bergman’s life and appetites match up with his output. The personality that emerges from Bergman’s memoirs The Magic Lantern and Images, and from other accounts of him, is not especially likeable. He wrote The Magic Lantern well into his sixties, but age had not blunted the cruel, petty, vindictive streak he wielded like a weapon against anyone who dared cross him. Recalling a chance encounter in Munich with one of his “most damaging critics” (whom he had previously tried to assault), Bergman can barely restrain his seething hatred: “There goes a Deadly Enemy. He should be destroyed. True, he was destroying himself through his deteriorating writing, but I shall dance on his grave and wish him many eternities in hell, where he can sit and read his own reviews.” In an open letter he wrote to the Swedish authorities in the aftermath of a humiliating tax scandal, he menacingly quotes his hero: “I say as Strindberg did when he was angry: ‘Watch out, you bastard, we’ll meet again in my next play.’” Bergman liked power, and had no qualms about using it for punishment or revenge. Possessing huge natural charisma, he inhabited all too comfortably the role of the ruthless and belittling male genius, trampling on the sensitivities of his underlings, humiliating other men to assert his dominance.

Nor had he any qualms about utilising power’s famously aphrodisiacal qualities on his beautiful female actors — half of Sweden’s talent seems to have belonged to his harem. In Images, there’s a strikingly intimate photograph of Bergman directing the radiant Ingrid Thulin: looming behind her, he cradles her head while murmuring in her ear with his eyes closed like a husband or a horse-whisperer. “Film work is a powerfully erotic business,” he wrote in The Magic Lantern. “The proximity of actors is without reservations, the mutual exposure is total… [T]he atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality.” While some of his children seem to have loathed him or held him in contempt — only three out of eight attended his funeral — the loyalty his collaborator-lovers felt towards him tended to survive the ends of their intimate relationships. In some ways, it isn’t hard to see why they found him so attractive, so worthy of love. Bergman’s desire for women was matched by his curiosity about them — he was able to convey their inner lives with a perceptiveness and accuracy rare among male artists. Key films such as Persona, Cries and Whispers and The Silence have hardly any men in them at all.

But I’d argue that the key Ingmar Bergman film — the one that both unlocks the core of his troubled personality and provides a fascinating meta-commentary on his oeuvre — isn’t one he actually directed. Having announced that he was giving up directing for the cinema after his marvellous, life-affirming 1982 film Fanny and Alexander, in his later years, alone on the island of Fårö, Bergman wrote several highly personal screenplays to be directed by his friends (a control freak to the end, when he could no longer direct, Bergman directed the directing). Among these was Faithless, the lacerating 2000 autofictional drama directed by Liv Ullmann — Bergman’s former lover and enduring friend. In the film, an old man (called “Bergman”) converses with a younger woman whom we quickly realise is an imaginary character from a screenplay he is writing — and a ghost from his past. As the woman tells him her painful story — which is also his own — “Bergman” confronts his shame, guilt, and agony in a narrative that accesses zones of remote psychological darkness rarely breached in film. At the heart of the old man and the woman’s shared story is the adulterous affair they conducted when they were both in early middle-age — and the brutal consequences that ensued.

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In The Magic Lantern, written well over a decade before Ullmann directed Faithless, Bergman devotes an entire chapter to recounting the episode that would inspire the screenplay. The two versions are identical in all but a few details. It’s as if, in first writing about the affair in his autobiography, Bergman failed to expiate his guilt, and so felt compelled to make a second attempt, this time in a (barely) fictive format. Going on the evidence in Faithless, as well as Bergman’s writings and remarks he made throughout his life, his most ferocious demon was not what he grandiloquently called “the silence of God” nor any such metaphysical concerns, but the more humiliating and private condition of retrospective jealousy — along with the corollary self-loathing he endured, apparently without ever achieving self-forgiveness, over an adulterous affair he conducted in his thirties with a woman named Gun Hagberg (whom he would later marry). While The Magic Lantern discloses only the emotional fallout from the affair, its restaging in Faithless results in suicide, violence, and shattered lives.

Retrospective jealousy — the experience of being tortured not by evidence of a present betrayal, but by intrusive images of sexual pleasure enjoyed in a partner’s past — recurs throughout Bergman’s self-reflections and in his films. In The Magic Lantern he describes this “demonic” form of mental suffering:

“A few years earlier I had been madly in love. Pretending professional interest, I enticed my beloved to tell me in detail about her multifaceted erotic experiences. The peculiar excitement of a fresh jealousy over her long-past actions scratched and tore at my innards and my genitals. The most primitive rituals of shame became a permanent alloy in my jealousy.”

I’d love to know what he means by “primitive rituals of shame”, but what is clear is that retrospective jealousy is very much a director’s affliction — a pathology of control whose essence is curiously metaphysical. To the sufferer, all time exists at once: there is no distinction between past and present. Transient erotic pleasures — and the psychological configurations of power, submission, lust and devotion that underpin them — exist in an absolute and transparent now. Great directors are great dictators: Bergman acknowledged his “inextinguishable need to control reality”, and suffered — horribly — from anything he could not control, including the sexual pleasure of his lovers as it extended into a past when he did not yet know them. Little wonder his actresses sometimes complained of being made to feel like his chattels — Bergman’s tortured conception of sexuality entailed an eternal, spiritual-carnal enslavement.

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This obsessive conflation of past and present is synecdochic of a broader trend towards collapsed binaries in Bergman’s miscible life and work: art and reality, self and other, persona and actor, pain and pleasure, and especially dreams and cinema are always being run together. To Bergman, everything was cinema, theatre, performance — which is to say it was all dreams, or all nightmares. Love itself was a “bold production” in which ‘the decor was tasteful and the lighting well arranged”, whereas the sweetest dream of all was Bergman’s extraordinary career: “Sometimes I dream a brilliant production with great crowds of people, music and wonderful sets. I whisper to myself with extreme satisfaction: “This is my production. I have created this.”

But just as dream and cinema are analogues, so too are film and guilt, both of which entail the inability to forget. The miracle of film is also that which makes it infernal: the immortality of the filmed image mirrors the claustrophobic nightmare of the guilt- or jealousy-tortured psyche — the horror of the image that can’t be forgotten, the “mercilessly clear picture” whose vividness intensifies until it annihilates:

“There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.”

When he wasn’t tortured by nightmares, dreams for Bergman were a transcendent portal and the standard of his highest artistic ideal. As is true for the greatest artists, dreams were primary and waking life their pale reflection. In later life, Jorge Luis Borges spoke of his impatience for night to come around so that he could immerse in the enigma of dreams; for his part, Bergman insisted “Actually I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality”.

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Among Bergman’s obsessive motifs, dreams are second only to demons — the private demons of jealousy, shame and fear that tortured and stimulated him throughout his life, and the literal demons he summoned in his films, most menacingly in Hour of the Wolf, about an artist on an island who becomes overwhelmed by his terrors. Here again we find the collapsing of borders — between inner and outer, fear and desire, artist and art. The insane painter played by Max Von Sydow encounters his demons in living, corporeal form — and so too does his wife (played by Liv Ullmann), who is apparently sane. Likewise in Bergman’s life, the suspicion emerges that his “demons” are to be taken as metaphors only in a tenuous, provisional sense. “Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have been around me since childhood,” he writes in The Magic Lantern (at one point he even describes his penis as a “throbbing demon”, and the humiliating irritable-bowel syndrome that made him shit himself in public as “like housing an evil demon in the most sensitive core of your body”). Later in the book he confides, “Worst are the “hours of the wolf” in the small hours between three and five. That is when the demons come: mortification, loathing, fear, and rage.” In Hour of the Wolf the metaphor becomes psychotically concretised, all too literal.

On first viewing that disquieting, covertly confessional film, I was surprised to find that the solemn Ingmar Bergman had made a horror movie. While I’m partial to the genre, it seemed one too disreputable for the maestro to move in — until it dawned on me that Bergman’s métier was a sub-category which he arguably invented: the moral horror. While Bergman also made comedies, romances and much else besides, he was most at home directing films in this sub-genre within which he also lived, relentlessly vivisecting himself and those around him for the squirming, messy material of his immaculate works. He understood that true horror has little to do with the supernatural or the grotesque and everything to do with the demons, hells and torture chambers of the inner life. Only by directing films could he maintain his sanity “against torments so violent that they became interesting”, and “investigate with interest the torments tearing me to pieces” (how fitting that the first film he ever made was titled… Torment!).

Demons, hell, guilt, torment — it’s hardly surprising that these should constitute the core themes of an artist whose stern, emotionally distant father was a Lutheran pastor, and who grappled with theological doubts into middle age. By his forties, Bergman seems to have rejected religion, and yet the absent God left in its wake a transcendental perception, a structuring sense of the sacred that permeated Bergman’s increasingly compressed, humanist cinema. In the workbook he kept while developing Hour of the Wolf, he describes the inner and artistic breakthrough he had achieved with Winter Light, his mesmerically bleak 1963 film about a country priest staring down the barrels of religious doubt: “The images of God are shattered without my perception of Man as the bearer of a holy purpose being obliterated.”

And several years later, while developing the masterful Persona, he wrote: “Now that God is gone, I feel that all this is mine; piety toward life, humility before my meaningless fate, and love for the other children who are afraid, who are ill, who are cruel.”

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Just as Andrei Tarkovsky has been called a modern-day icon maker whose images infuse a barren epoch with divine luminance, so too might we see Ingmar Bergman’s pellucid, anguished films as something like an expression of post-theistic religiosity. His famous close-ups — of dignified, anguished women and brooding, isolated men — have the clarity of religious paintings. Bergman had the ambiguous gift of seeing into the souls of others: damaged lives are at once exposed and redeemed in his camera’s calm, unblinking gaze. The allusive title of his 1969 film The Passion of Anna is well chosen: all of his characters are crucified, all tormented in their lonely gardens of Gethsemane, all burning in their unique and specific hells.

As I devoured Bergman’s ostensibly bleak films during a period of solitude and self-questioning last winter, no long dark night settled over my soul. All that torment and moral horror did not plunge me into a private hell — but rather uplifted me. To immerse in Bergman’s films is to locate one’s own pain, in all its bitter and unsung specificity, within a redemptive continuum of human distress as ebullient and limpid as a river. His films, ultimately, are a joy — and so it should not surprise us to find Ingmar Bergman insisting in his autobiography on a joy “that had carried me through crises and misery and functioned as faithfully as my heart”. He rightly regarded his films as a source of solace for himself and others, a healing catharsis for his damaged soul in which “Everything is burned clear, and personal growth now becomes a possibility.”