Modern architecture & progress in the arts
So I've been going around Vienna for a while & I've been thinking about a series of posts for PoMoCon about Europe's imperial city. How to introduce it, though? Well, here I am in the airport, getting ready to leave the past behind, if you will, reading a ridiculous post by an excessively innocent fellow, on the topic of architecture. In a list busy giving evidence that econo types have no idea what architecture is, this is the typical, mediocre statement:
As with all other art forms, the best architects have advanced to the point where average people can no longer appreciate their creations. (EconLib)
For this claim to be true, either average people would have to have become subhuman, or architects at their best transhuman. Architecture is the most emphatically political of the arts, because it is the shelter & the temple of political authority. The childish may not see this, or affect not to see it, but ordinary people are struck by the way a place looks & wonder what kind of people dwell there once they begin to grasp that look with their minds. So, no, architects at their best cannot be anything but servants of a way of life. The arts have been decadent for so long that it might not be obvious to people mutilated morally or intellectually by what we call higher education; more, the drama of the arts is European rather than American, so grasping it might be doubly difficult; but no architects are loved today the way they were centuries back, or at least some talent peddlers are today in pop music &c. From the mild madness of the silly college graduates to the full blown psychopathy of the votaries of decadence, however, this massive fact, unpopularity, is brushed aside: The artists are too avant-garde! This silly idea has been around for more than a century—that it's a lie is nothing against it, but it has also failed by persuasion to conjure the army it hints at. Instead, the arts are dead & some play at witchery…
These people who applaud 20th c. constructions & affect to judge their spirit are the dying breath of the superstitions about art that became democratic in the 20th c., after already losing purchase with intelligent observers at the end of the 19th c., in Europe. It's almost endearing to see how backward people are who claim to be modern, as well as how ignorant of history & talk of art. They seem like the imitations of mid-20th c. liberal intellectuals, who were themselves at least aware how far less sophisticated they were educationally & how far less sensitive aesthetically than the Europeans who had just completed their self-destruction in the world wars. In truth, what is now called architecture is the play of mad children who do not know they are playing, nor that they are children. The popular indifference & contempt they arouse rarely moves them because they are unable to conceive grand political ambitions or to participate in them, which is the way artists arise.
Architecture was the last of the arts to suffer the catastrophic breakdown of confidence in Progress, because throughout the 19th c. there was so much money to build images of whatever trouble haunted authority—consider the spirit of the neo-Gothic. Political revolution was building, so nostalgia thrived, too… As aristocracy turned into bourgeoisie, people also started talking of culture & this was the way to prove it. Beautifying cities & grounding modern, commercial politics in the past seemed to go hand in hand, at least to unserious people. Serious people instead asked themselves, if such a great project of education of the people is to be attempted, who are the astonishing men to do it? There were none; few tried, few had any plausibility, but ambitious mediocrities filled up Europe. So the delusion that artists would transform the people was itself institutionalized, since the people involved were themselves deluded about their abilities & tasks.
So because of all these good intentions, the breakdown of the belief in Progress came: Throughout the 20th c. we've seen how moral authority (let's say, democracy) & technical possibilities ("architects") diverged to the point that it became impossible to say, there's a way of life! There seemed to be an exception for skyscrapers, but this has since proved not to be of any importance to America or other modern countries. So architecture was over. We've been dealing with whatever we had to since. For the first time, wealth is making us miserable, though there is disagreement as to whether the problem is the source of our wealth or our education.
National or any other sources of pride in building have evaporated. It's now inconceivable that there be public debates about what should be built. It's unimaginable that demands or prohibitions would animate building. Strangely enough, because of these infernal children, the modest work of improving the situation we've inherited is also nearly unimaginable, although more practical than any other…
Architecture beautifies ordinary experience; talent in service of an idea of justice, a way of life, is what's at stake in what is now called art or aesthetic or creativity or expression or culture. Whether may be said for these other things, they lack evidence & plausibility. There are no great achievements or achievements thought to be great. Only by keeping this in mind & despising the ignorant is it possible to retrieve knowledge of greatness, which architecture was mostly tasked with in other regimes, whether democratic or not.