Deep Philosophical Confusions Among Artists and Critics

Soon after I wrote my last post on “why I’m done with the publishing industry for my fiction”, I came across a perfect example of the mass confusion that resides in the world of the arts. I just had to share it and analyze it. It’s the essay, “Analyst or Moralist?” by James Jackson, which was published in Quillette in mid-May.
 
Firstly, so we can know where this is coming from, James Jackson’s bio for the article says he is “a writer and academic interested in culture, the arts, and politics. He is currently completing a monograph on the French poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.”
 
Digging a little deeper, Cocteau “was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements.” Where surrealism “is an art and cultural movement …in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.” Avant-garde “identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.” And Dadaists “believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.”
 
We are not off to a good start.
 
As for the outlet, Quillette was “created in 2015 to focus on scientific topics, but has come to focus on coverage of political and cultural issues concerning freedom of speech and identity politics. It has been described as libertarian-leaning, ‘the right wing's highly influential answer to Slate’, as well as an ‘anti-PC soapbox’.”
 
This isn’t a news source that I am willing to pay money to subscribe to, but I do monitor it to see another perspective on things, and I have occasionally found some good articles or ideas there.
 
Okay, now that we understand the messenger, what about the message? The one-sentence lede does a good job of summarizing the focus of the essay:
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​The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.
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I could perhaps agree with this declaration if the emphasis were placed on the increasingly *poor* political nature of cultural criticism. But the article — which is itself a stridently political piece of cultural criticism — somehow manages to transgress its own prescriptions while mixing in lots of moral and aesthetic nonsense with a few interesting points. The author is clearly intelligent and speaking about the state of the artistic world with an informed intimacy that tells us something important about what is going on with artists, critics, and publishers / producers. And this gives us good evidence of the philosophically-tangled mess of beliefs that is driving all three of these vital populations. The entire article, therefore, deserves a close reading so that we may understand and solve many of the problems we observe in contemporary arts. As such, I’ll reproduce much of the article below, with my comments inserted along the way as a running critique. Off we go!
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“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when evaluating a work of art. A novel may contain unpleasant characters, but it does not follow that the novelist himself is immoral for creating those characters in the first place. The function of a flawed or immoral protagonist may be to remind us of our own corruptible natures, to introduce complexity to a story’s people and dilemmas, or simply to illuminate humanity in all its variety and peculiarity. A novel filled with moral goodness and clarity will not be not true to life.
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Right off the bat, this is wrong and confused. Wilde had his reasons for saying what he said (which I’ll get to below), but you can all pick your own examples to illustrate that books can obviously be moral or immoral. But Jackson immediately contradicts this opening pronouncement anyway, by telling us the functions that immoral characters and storylines can serve. When they “remind us about our corruptible nature”, that is a moral lesson!
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​“All art,” Wilde also remarked, “is quite useless.” This pithy aphorism reminds us that art is intended for aesthetic pleasure not practical utility—it is an end in itself and not an instrument of moral instruction or politics. The very worst art, Wilde believed, is that which kowtows to rigid orthodoxies and sacrifices the autonomy of the artist in order to deliver a helpful message of some kind.
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Ugh. Aesthetic pleasure is not so easily divorced from reality. It is either short-sighted, relativistic, or nihilistic to claim pleasure is an end in itself. And whichever way you go, this claim is a profoundly moral argument! So, to insist on art for art’s sake, and to revel in these kinds of amoral works, is actually the same type of moralizing messaging that Jackson denigrates. It’s just that his “useless” art conveys an unhelpful and destructive message. The fact that its hollowness is hidden behind a sweet-tasting veneer only makes it all the more pernicious. Kowtowing to rigid orthodoxies may be a more obvious wrong, but that is not the only alternative.
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​In Wilde’s time, moralistic objections to art usually emerged from the conservative and religious Right.
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Yes. And Wilde’s trials and imprisonment show exactly why he *had* to say what he said about art being useless and amoral. He was trying not to be prosecuted for his! But Wilde did not really believe this. His works provided strong counterpoints to the dominant and dangerous culture of the day that was persecuting him. And Wilde literally wrote, "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine." That is a description of a useful and moral art!
 
(By the way, I believe Wilde’s argument is wrong because it goes too far towards individualism. Multilevel selection now shows us the need for *aligned* individuals and groups. Individual invisible hands will not a good market make.)
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In our own age, artists must contend with demands from the progressive Left that art bend the arc of history towards social justice. Activist critics insist upon purity of language and proportional representation of minority demographics in ways that undermine freedom of thought and expression. But the micromanagement of language and the misconception of life as a competition for recognition are not conducive to the creative process. How can the imagination flourish freely in such a climate?
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Okay, so that is wrong. But two wrongs don’t make it right to say that artists and critics should therefore strive for *amorality* rather than a Left or Right morality. As I already said, amorality is a moral choice. It would be far better to do art that is beautiful *and* good. It is up to the artist and critic to make their cases for aesthetics and ethics together. Despite the siloed nature of these subjects in academia, they cannot actually be divorced from one another in reality. The levels of beauty and goodness in the world are always affected by our objects and actions.
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Unfortunately, the people who seek to remake art in this way hold positions of power in precisely those institutions where creative freedom and the elevation of the individual voice ought to be abundant. The works of those who espouse an unambiguously progressive worldview are celebrated while an appreciation of our cultural inheritance is increasingly scarce or even scorned. This destructive ideology is radical, simplistic, and incoherent—a perversion of French Rationalism and German Idealism that attempts to impose a false teleology upon our shared culture. It overlooks the particular and the concrete in search of the abstract, which moves culture away from organic expression towards something closer to agitprop, unrooted in experience and the spontaneity of imagination. This development, well-meaning though it may be, misunderstands the true nature of artistic creation.
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My experience is that the people in positions of power do hold these varieties of philosophies — either insisting on Dadaist amorality or individual tales of intersectional woes. (See Footnote 3 from my last post for evidence of this in the NYT 100 notable books of 2023.) I have yet to find people in artistic power who are open to the kind of evolutionary ethics I argue for, or the kind of art that I find to be both beautiful and good.
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“Goethe’s garden,” George Steiner once noted, “is a few thousand yards from Buchenwald” and “Sartre regarded occupied Paris as perfect for literary and philosophic production.” To which he added, “When we invoke the ideals and practices of the humanities, there is no assurance that they humanize.” Kant, Euripides, and Chaucer do not necessarily make their readers better people, …
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Is this to be celebrated? Or mourned? Can we not do better? What if the best artists were also wise philosophers? The separation of these aesthetic and ethical endeavors does not help anyone. Including the artists themselves…
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​…nor does involvement in artistic production make a person more virtuous. Caravaggio murdered a man in a brawl and G.K. Chesterton was an antisemite. Their behavior does not diminish the beauty and profundity of the work they produced. To appreciate their creative talents does not require an endorsement of their personal politics or conduct. Caravaggio’s startling use of light and Chesterton’s sharp and lucid prose draw us into their work regardless of the creators’ moral shortcomings. 
 
Harold Bloom (who was Jewish) spoke of the ambivalence he felt reading Chesterton: 
 
Chesterton goes on puzzling me, because I find his critical sensibility far more congenial to me than that of T.S. Eliot and yet his anti-Semitism is at least as ugly as Eliot’s.
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Why settle for such cognitive ambivalence and puzzlement? Given these judgments, the behavior of an artist obviously does diminish the (so-called) beauty and profundity of their work.
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While Bloom had personal reservations about the man, he understood his obligations as a critic. Works of culture may move us in complex ways but they should not be asked to transform moral character. It would be quixotic for an artist to believe that he can convert the reader to a particular point of view on a whim. A novel by Dickens or Tolstoy may persuade us of the plight of their characters but they do so without resorting to didacticism. That is not to say that didactic culture is without value or somehow inherently inferior, but those works without any merit beyond the social or political message they wish to convey don’t really qualify as culture at all.
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So, which is it? Should the works not transform us or should they persuade us? Should they not resort to didacticism or should they provide valuable didactic culture? Jackson’s contradictory messages here are exactly the result of his confused philosophy.
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The critic underwrites the imaginative power that an artist brings to bear on what it means to be human. Rather than resorting to grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods, the critic’s job is to elucidate the work of the artist with care and sympathy. The task of the humanities, after all, is to transmit the achievements of humanity across generations. The critic should be a disinterested analyst, willing and able to suspend his own feelings, convictions, and beliefs when assessing art and culture.
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Once again, grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods are not the only possible tools for a critic or artist. Philosophy is part of the humanities too and no critic or artist should be disinterested in the best that that field has to offer. (Nor should they be disinterested in the sciences for that matter either!) It would take a hideous schizophrenia to carve out one’s “feelings, convictions, and beliefs” from one’s assessments of art and culture. I don’t actually think it’s even possible. And Jackson is clearly mixing his own beliefs and assessments here. He is just doing it poorly, illustrating how his beliefs in one area have crippled his ability to gain and express good beliefs in another. It would be far better to integrate all of what it means to be human into our humanities.
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But today, critics are preoccupied with “problematizing” the back-catalogues of artists and scrutinizing a work’s social or political message. These priorities have in turn affected the kind of work that gets produced. Charlie Higson’s series of Young Bond novels seem to have been designed to repudiate the moral complexities of Ian Fleming’s brutal womanizing protagonist. One of the books contains this passage, clumsily inserted to reassure the reader of the author’s left-liberal bona fides:
 
Birkett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for promoting covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements.
 
The politics is heavy-handed, the syntax is convoluted, and the combination is only likely to be appreciated by someone who wants to have their own left-liberal sympathies flattered. The condescending and paternalistic language resembles an editorial written for the purposes of political education rather than a thoughtful exploration of the human condition.
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That is on the way to being fair criticism of both the ethics of today’s critics as well as the aesthetics of Higson’s novels. Why deny that each are important? Lean in and discuss them both!
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In Amazon Prime’s film Red, White, and Royal Blue, the message often suffocates the drama. The story deals with a homosexual romance between a spare to the British throne named Henry and Alex, the Hispanic son of the president of the United States. The two men love one another but their relationship is undermined by the stuffy conservatism of backward institutions. In addition to being gay, Henry and Alex both feel victimized in other ways. Henry feels like an outsider who can never play a full role in the institution into which he was born. Alex’s Hispanic surname and ethnicity, meanwhile, lead him to believe that he is unfairly treated by American society, the advantages of his social position notwithstanding. Alex complains that Henry will never understand his grievances because Henry is rich, white, and male. The scene is unedifying, subordinating the emotional drama to a contest of intersectional oneupmanship between two indisputably privileged people. This kind of sermonizing occurs throughout the film, including one character’s lofty description of the senior staff at Buckingham Palace as “wrinkled white men.”
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How is this “unedifying”? These beliefs and conversations are clearly happening in the world today. Why can’t our fictional characters have them? Jackson’s usage of the words “victimized”, “intersectional”, and “privileged” are clearly dog-whistles to the Quillette readers who need their “anti-PC soapbox”. And so, Jackson is therefore engaging in exactly the kind of ethical judgment that he purports to be against. But why dodge this at all?? Just make the strong case (if you have one) that Red, White, and Royal Blue’s intended message is a poor one.
 
(By the way, I watched this movie after reading this and found it simply to be an awfully written and acted rom-com. The potentially sweet story of hidden gay and bi love was outlandishly unbelievable, bouncing back and forth between the White House AND Buckingham Palace. All the character development and meet-cute moments were rushed through in some kind of site location bingo montage. It felt like the product of an AI collage rather than a real and sensitive imagination. I found the politics, however, to be so minor (hardly “suffocating”) that it makes me think Jackson must just have allergic reactions to cameos by Rachel Maddow.)
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Emerald Fennel’s film Saltburn, on the other hand, offers a more irreverent and complex indictment of class privilege that seems to have been inspired by a combination of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem. It is not exactly apolitical, but nor does it lecture us with the instructive sanctimony that Red, White, and Royal Blue employs. The film’s message—that the rich are spoiled, vapid, arrogant, and vain—is subordinate to the amorality of the psychodrama and the demands of its twisty narrative. Fennel does not have to spell out the fact that the characters are morally inept—she just lets us watch how they behave.
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Again, confusion reigns in Jackson’s arguments not matching his actions. He praises Saltburn’s supposedly ethical underlying message, while claiming its morally inept characters make the message more aesthetically pleasing by somehow hiding the didacticism. But this is not “irreverent and complex.” It is attention-seeking and deeply confused. I hated Saltburn because the indictment of class privilege was completely undermined by the glorification of the settings and the shocking depravity of the scenes that were chosen. My judgments were pretty much borne out by the fact that “'Ignorant' rich people use Saltburn TikTok trend to show off their huge houses.”
 
Much of the rest of Jackson’s article is a random mash-up of perspectives that ultimately amounts to intellectual name-dropping (e.g. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School, F.R. Leavis, Marxism, Wordsworth, Cultural Studies, Terry Eagleton, Martin Scorsese, and Pierre Bourdieu) without any sort of coherent argument to tie them all together. He continually judges the judgments of other while failing to admit his own judgments are just unargued for judgments of a different flavor. You can skim the article to judge for yourself, but then it ends with this:
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“Persons of genius,” John Stuart Mill argued, “are always likely to be a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Even for authors who produce work under tyranny and oppression, the best and most enduring art will be true to our shared condition and not consumed by the noise and folly of the moment. The sympathetic critic should recognize that while an artist lives and works within a particular social and political structure, this is not the same as destiny. It is his solemn task to understand and describe the relationship between the artist, the art, and the experience of being human.
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​Yes. But since ethics and aesthetics (and politics!) all affect that human experience, they must all be considered together. To argue otherwise is to advocate for the willful blindness of a blinkered suppression. Therefore, for Jackson’s headline question of “analyst of moralist?”, the answer should really be both.