March 4, 2024
The Collapse of Criteria and the Prostitution of Art
In an interview in 1991 (I will share the relevant excerpt translated/transcribed in this post), the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out a sobering fact: We live in an era characterized by the collapse of criteria and the prostitution of art.
That is to say, Castoriadis argued, we live in an era with no criteria by which to gauge art. As a result, art prostitutes itself and loses its true meaning. It becomes industrialized.
There are two important elements in this very short excerpt I will discuss in this post:
- Castoriadis naturally spoke before the internet and – especially – social media. I wonder what he would think about them.
- Importantly, Castoriadis argues that art should create its own criteria.
If art should create its own criteria, and we observe a collapse of criteria today, what does that tell us?
Cornelius Castoriadis on Criteria and the Prostitution of Art
Before we discuss this more, here’s the short video. It’s in Greek, taken from an art installation setup (which I consider delightfully meta-). I include it because I find it interesting in its own right, as art. My translation/transcription below.
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
What is this pornography dominating every field?
The pornography dominating politics…
The pornography dominating intellectual life…
All these impostors going around and being displayed all the time, what is it but the collapse of criteria.
If the audience had criteria, or if there were critics with criteria, there wouldn’t exist this general prostitution where dunces present themselves as philosophers or impostors present themselves as painters; or as politicians.
It is the same issue.
Creation simultaneously entails the formulation, the social… how to say… enforcement of criteria, old or new – each era creates its own criteria – but which are criteria of substance.
Today, what are the criteria of substance?
Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack here. But it’s particularly these last couple of sentences I’m interested in.
The Collapse of Criteria is the Collapse of Art
I think everything until the last two sentences is more-or-less unsurprising. It’s of course still absolutely true. I mean, if you don’t agree that “pornography” (that is, selling your soul to the highest bidder) dominates every aspect of our current era, art included, you must’ve been living under a rock since at least the 80s.
I also find particularly telling the reference to dunces who present themselves as philosophers. This was obvious (to those who could see, like Castoriadis) already in the 80s – I remind you that the original interview on which the video excerpt is based was shot in 1991.
The situation is far worse today, with all the YouTube cretins worshiped by millions of people as philosophers and social critics, whereas they lack the very basics. Hell, some of those cretins even have university degrees! To me this isn’t particularly surprising, as my academic experience has exposed me to unfathomable idiocy and mediocrity in the academia.
Often this incompetence is also paired with malice, which makes the whole thing even more volatile and insidious.
However, the truly interesting part in Castoriadis’s words is his suggestion that creation entails the formulation of criteria. That is to say, there is a cyclical process, a self-feeding mechanism at play, where audiences are taught by the art they ingest what art is worth ingesting.
Here’s where things fall apart.
The Criteria Have Collapsed because the Bar Is Low
As I have mentioned before – for example, take a look at this post on mediocre fiction or this post on skills in art – nowadays it’s much easier to produce (most) art technically. That is, one longer needs to spend money on painting equipment or have the appropriate space to create paintings. We can do it on the same computer we use to… write novels.
Writing, in particular, has always been relatively easy to do by comparison – that is, the only technical requirement was pen and paper. It’s even easier nowadays, because we can cut & paste whole blocks of text effortlessly and cleanly.
Music is similarly much easier. There is still a technical threshold – at least for some kinds of music – but it’s generally much lower than before.
What better example than yours truly. With no formal education in either drawing or music, and with minimal expensesDrawing is entirely free thanks to the awesome Krita open-source program – though to be fair, I did have a drawing tablet to begin with; the cheapest ones cost less than $50. For music, I use equipment whose total value is less than $500 – including guitar, bass, amps, pedal boards, and audio interface. I also use free software. Note that it’s only because I make postrock/postmetal that I need guitar/bass equipment. It’s perfectly feasible to only use a free and open-source DAW like LMMS and produce stunning music., I’m able to create my own digital drawings and my own music. I can share all these creations with an international audience.
What if I had no criteria? That is, no integrity, no self-respect, no ethical barriers?
Artistic Integrity, Self-Respect, the Ethos of Creation
If I were driven purely by money, I would probably not waste time drawing – or I would learn how to draw pornography. I would probably not make music either, because it’s not very “monetizable”, but if I did it’d certainly not be postmetal/postrock, because that’s not very marketable.
Overall, if I had no self-respect, no integrity, no shame, I’d be a “content creator”. I’d have several social media channels where I’d post short, inane, pointless, but money-making crap – pick your poison, from pornographic nudes (that is, nudes without any art involved; objectified, fetishized bodies) to dogs eating sausages to silly dances. I would also probably make reaction videos.
Needless to say, I would also display ads and allow sponsored posts. Overall, I would prostitute myself and my content.
The thing is, none of these activities reflect the ethos of creation. Although they emulate – cargo-cult-like – artistic creation, they are not accompanied by criteria of substance.
The Collapse of the Criteria As an Echo Chamber
The problem with collapsed criteria in art is that they precisely prevent the audience from even understanding the collapse of the criteria. Dunning-Kruger-like, audiences at large are too enamored with mediocrity – with the 10-second silly dance on TikTok or the endless scrolling of overprocessed Instagram photos – to even realize what it is they’re missing.
Of course, this only makes it much more likely they, too, will propagate inane “art” without realizing they are contributing in lowering the bar a little bit more each time.
In my post on AI not being able to produce art but being able to write I said the following:
We emulate each other constantly. Indeed, most of the novels (films, songs, etc.) surrounding us are emulations to begin with. And the more constrained they are – likely as a result of genre or marketability – the likelier they are to be both mediocre as art and a result of emulation. Indeed, a writing AI would do a better job at writing, because it would be better at emulating – as a result of its much higher ability to access source texts and shuffle things.
The collapse of the criteria disturbed Castoriadis in the early 1990s. I wonder what he’d make out of TikTok challenges or Instagram accounts copying each other.
I think this is what separates us from previous great thinkers of art, such as Benjamin and Adorno. Never previously has humanity been able to put so much media material/information out in the world. Thus, we have stuffed our senses with mediocre overstimulation, rendering our sensibilities exhausted and incapable of recognizing great feats (precisely due to the exhaustion). The artist must become extremely selective, lest one drowns in mediocrity and emulates it blindly.
The artist must indeed become selective (which requires an ocean’s worth of personal convictions and morality), but I think the problem is the audience. As long as the audience do not demand more from themselves (often because, as I explained, they don’t know any better), the artist’s choices are immaterial.
To put it bluntly, to uneducated audiences an artist with criteria appears weird; they seek similarity, reinforcement, validation.
Of course, then, we should speak of education – which is an entirely different can of worms.
This abeyance of criteria in arts applies to science too. I was watching a youtube video of some “Eminent Oxford professor” discussing the idea that the universe has a soul. She was really convinced.
It reminded me of Russell’s discussion on Parmenides. He thought that God gave everything, stars, planets and so on a soul. “Whether or not the stars and planets would agree with this proposition is not known” was his empirical conclusion.
Yes, it reminds that even professors are remarkably lacking in the basics
As someone who’s spent over a decade in the academia, I can absolutely assure anyone that academics are among the most narrow-minded, mediocre, uninspiring people out there!
Indeed, the higher up the hierarchy – and the rigidity of this hierarchy can only be compared to the Army or the Church – the greater the dinosaurification of their thought.