All Episodes
Previous Next
March 5, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:47
2925 What is Art? - Part 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is What is Art?
Part 2.
Modern art, which is a challenge to fit into the thesis.
So, the argument, very briefly put forward in the last one, was that art is an argument for focusing on something, or the value of focusing on something that is easy or tempting to overlook.
And as such, it is a Perspective infection.
Right?
So, if the artist...
Let's say that the artist spends a month creating a picture of sad animals being tortured for makeup.
That's the...
That's the picture.
Well, clearly that's an argument for it's easy to overlook how much suffering goes into the creation of vanity-based makeup, and we should really focus on it and so on.
Whether it's a photograph or...
A photograph's easier to take, of course, but let's say the picture, the painting, is done.
That's sort of an argument for that.
And...
They are trying to get what they focus on into your head and saying that you should focus on it as well.
So, there is a famous photograph that was taken during the Great Depression of a woman.
I think she's in Oklahoma with some kids around, and she's this steely-faced, hard-eyed, but sympathetic woman with the kids and all that.
And this is an argument that we really need to focus on the effects of this terrible depression on Women and children and so on, right?
This is a hard-living...
Sorry, a hard...
Not hard-living like a drunken or anything like that, but this is a strong woman who is unbowed by these tragic circumstances and she deserves our sympathy.
And in the realm of fiction, what you do if you want to create sympathy for the poor is you imbue the poor with noble qualities.
You know, the sort of the grapes of wrath approach, right?
That the poor people have noble qualities, and this is an argument that the system, the structural violence, right?
That the system is corrupt, because people with noble qualities can end up with Nothing.
And this, of course, has been the standard communist slash leftist slash welfare state approach to depictions of the poor, that they are noble and heroic, and it is circumstances beyond their control.
It's the system, you know, like some dedicated, hardworking guy In a factory, the mean boss comes along and just decides to go for making maximum money at all times and fires the guy and he can't find another job.
He walks around from town to town.
He works really hard to get the job, but he just can't, right?
And of course, that is an argument that his hard work, his virtue, through no fault of his own and through no, right, Through no deficiency in his character, he's doing badly.
And his kids are hungry, and he's crying with his wife late at night, but he wakes up in the morning, puts a smile on his face, puts on his best suit, and goes out and tries to get a job.
He's conscientious, he's hardworking.
And therefore, his tragedy...
It must be the system.
It cannot be any choices that he himself is making in particular.
And that is one argument that is made, which is to say that good men suffer through no fault of their own.
Therefore, the system must be changed, right?
So this is fundamentally...
I mean, we all see a problem.
We want to fix the problem, right?
We want to fix the problem.
And so when we see good people doing badly, then we...
We end up wanting to change the system so that it doesn't happen, right?
And that has become such a cliché that it really is.
It's pretty stunning.
I mean, that's real propaganda.
And look, that's not to say that the poor don't sometimes suffer through no fault of their own or people end up poor through no fault of their own.
I get all of that.
I get all of that.
That certainly can happen.
But there's no humanization of the poor, right?
The poor are generally used as pawns to advance political power, and in this case, there's no humanization of the poor.
In other words, if you can imagine a guy who...
A woman, like a single mom, who's mean to everyone and shows up late and is entitled and is just a bad worker and so on and gets fired and gets more angry and entitled and seduces men and tries to use the court system to bleed them dry of resources or something like that, which would be to say that some of the disasters in her life are the result of her meanness, of her bad choices.
That would be considered Hateful to the poor, as if there aren't poor people like that.
I don't know rich people like that, too, but there are poor people like that who are poor because they're mean and people don't want to work with them and they're entitled and they're selfish and they're incompetent and all this, that, and the other, right?
So poor equals virtue has just become the standard leftist trope of ours, and the idea that poor people In any way, the architects of their own misfortune is, of course, incomprehensible.
It would be considered hateful.
But what that means, of course, is that people don't want to see the full spread of personalities among the poor.
They don't want the poor to be humanized.
To portray a mean, poor person is perfectly valid.
Unless, like if you're interested in exploring the human condition and speaking about what is real.
And it certainly would be valid these days to make a movie about a mean poor person where their financial poverty is a reflection of their spiritual or moral ugliness.
Because it would be to push back against this endless heroic poor situation Destitute through no fault of their own because of a terrible system.
This is the standard cliché grab for political power, which is to dehumanize the poor.
When you say the poor are never responsible for their own condition, then you are using them as pawns in a political tragedy.
And...
That is, I mean, it's horrible, and it dehumanizes the poor.
Yeah, some people are poor through no fault of their own, and some people are poor because they're lazy, they make bad choices, they're mean, they're entitled, they want something for nothing, they have all these get-rich-quick schemes, they don't want to do what's necessary, all that kind of stuff.
So, there is a prospective infection that happens.
So somebody who wants to further a political agenda knows that if he shows noble poor people suffering through no fault of their own, that you're going to want to change the system.
And given the current political system, I mean, more and more poor people are suffering through no fault of their own, right?
And middle class wages have stagnated since the 1970s, at least in America.
People are suffering through no fault of their own.
It is genuinely tragic.
But the solution that is put forward when you see poor people are suffering, they're noble, so we've got to give them money.
And we've got to give them opportunity.
We've got to give them advantages.
We've got to tax and redistribute, give them more money, and so on.
There's never any...
There's not a show about or a movie about...
And you could do it, and it would actually be very dramatic.
The Federal Reserve...
It's doing this, and this is the effects on the poor.
Like the movie Traffic, which talks about the wide variety of the problems in the drug war.
You could do rich people getting richer and poor people getting fewer opportunities.
That would be an argument for the elimination of the Federal Reserve and of central banking, and as such, the movie would never get made.
Because most art is about the expansion of political power.
It's from the left, right?
And if you were to make a movie which said that the problem is government, not the solution is government, it would never get made.
I've just mentioned the movie Traffic, and of course there is a...
An argument that this is about a diminishment of government power and that the drug war should end and so on.
And so that's perhaps an exception to the rule.
But that's government power that artists don't like.
Because a lot of some artists, not a lot, but some artists, of course, enjoy the herb and have the kind of lifestyles that, you know, getting up 6 o'clock in the morning and writing for 12 hours, have this kind of...
Lifestyle that doesn't exactly inhibit drug use, and drug use, of course, is used for inspiration by some artists and so on.
So to turn to the challenging topic of modern art.
Modern art is non-representational.
It does not generally try to accurately represent things in the world.
And sometimes it doesn't even try to inaccurately represent things in the world.
And before we get to my argument as to the reasons for modern art, let's briefly talk about personality reproduction.
I think it's important to look at personality structures the same way that we would look at DNA, that it strives to reproduce itself.
Personality structures strive to reproduce themselves.
Misery loves company, crazy people hang out with crazy people, and they try to make sane people crazy, and sane people try to make crazy people sane, which was the story of my childhood.
Everybody wishes the world were more like them.
Everybody wishes that people were more like themselves.
And the challenge is, how do you get people to be more like you?
Well, You can use rational argument, which, you know, you're listening, so it has some effect.
But how do you get people to be more like you?
Well, you get them to see the world in the way that you see it.
In a way that is entertaining enough that they'll imbibe your perspective without much skepticism or rebellion or opposition.
You disarm them with CGI. You disarm them with humor.
You disarm them with pretty people.
You disarm them with spectacle, excitement, tension, thrills, chase, gunfights, you name it.
But The artist is attempting to use art to reproduce his personality in other people.
Art is a giant soul sneeze across the planet to infect you with the perspective and the personality of the artist.
The artist feels that capitalism is systematically or systemically destructive to the poor And he wishes for you to have that same perspective.
And therefore, the poorer portrays sympathetically and the rich remain, and nothing can be fixed within the system.
So the system needs to be changed, hence communism.
The anti-Semitism of the National Socialists, the Nazis, Found its voice in arts and in the hook-nosed, grasping caricature of the greedy, mean Jew that was forever portrayed.
The conflicts in Rwanda between the various tribes referred to each other as cockroaches and the dehumanization.
When you tell people often enough that they're victims, you uncork their hatred.
Thank you.
This happened in Germany, where the German citizens, the Aryan citizens, were told that they were the victims of the Jews.
And if you tell people often enough and convincingly enough that they are victims, you will generate great rage at the victimizers.
So, if you tell women...
Often and long and compellingly enough that they're victims of the patriarchy, then you will see endless rage directed against men in popular culture, which of course is what's happened.
When you repeatedly tell people that they're victims, you are summoning a violent mob.
That's the goal.
And, of course, some people are very keen to believe that they're victims, particularly if they've made poor choices.
Then they like to think, well, it wasn't my choices, it's the system, which is why I failed.
So, if we look at art as personality reproduction, the attempt to implant a personality or perspective in the mind of another, Then art is the transmission mechanism by which personalities spread around the world.
And of course, if you view religion as a kind of art, then it is nationalism as a kind of art.
And of course, both employ mythos, narratives, stories, rituals, places of worship, sacrifices.
And both command and demand income.
If you view religion and nationalism as a kind of artistic endeavor, then it is in some ways the most effective way of transmitting personality structures and power structures across the generations and around the world. then it is in some ways the most effective way
So morality is the most effective way of transmitting personality structures around the world.
Um.
Parents don't say, I want you to be like me.
They say, I want you to be good.
I am good.
And I want you to obey this third-party objective structure or set of principles called virtue.
But if...
If virtue is simply the best way to transmit a dysfunctional personality structure, then virtue is being used as the most efficient means of transmitting the personality structure.
Virtue is not.
Like, the personality structure of the parent is not in conformity with virtue, and therefore the child should be in conformity with virtue, not in conformity with the parent.
But the best way to transmit the parent's personality structure to the child, which is called culture, is to use ethics, which is why both religion and the state use ethics and virtue as their transmission mechanisms, threats and rewards.
Freedom, jail, heaven, hell.
You get the picture.
Now there are some arguments, of course, and they're not without merit in my humble opinion, that says that non-representational art Came after the invention of photography and movies because you couldn't compete.
you could not compete with representational art.
You know, you have to sit for days for a great portrait, but it takes a second or two for a picture.
I think there's some merit or value or truth in that.
But that would only be to make the argument that, after the invention of the camera, that art could not compete very easily with strictly representational photography.
But there's no reason why it couldn't have become stylized or it couldn't have become, you know, heavy metal, otherworldly fantasy stuff.
There's no reason why it couldn't have become science fiction-y.
There's no reason why it could have been doing stuff that cameras couldn't do.
And, of course, it certainly did, or was able to compete with grainy black-and-white photos.
So I don't think that saying, well, the camera came along and therefore art went completely non-representational, I think is not the full story.
It's not irrelevant, but it's not the core.
Because all it does is say where art has a challenge to compete with, which is the fidelity of representation represented by the camera, But it doesn't say where art should go.
It just says, here's a place where art is challenged significantly.
But it doesn't mean that it can't go elsewhere.
So, I would argue that there are other reasons as to why art went entirely non-representational, which is in a sense to say anti-representational.
And that is...
That a lot of Western culture is encapsulated by the loss of religion in the 19th century without the failure to gain a competing structure.
So, religion is an exceedingly powerful and compelling worldview.
It organizes one's life.
It gives one perspective and scope and sense in the cosmos.
It gives one a place in the hierarchy, and most importantly, it tells people what the meaning of their life is, what they should do to be a good person.
Now, some people who gave up religion decided to become nationalistic, that politics became the new religion and political leaders became the new deities.
please.
And you can see this in the endless messianistic descriptions of Barack Obama, which were never applied to, say, Nixon, or like even before his fall, or even Reagan, and so on.
There are some people who, in their need to subjugate themselves to authority, manifest itself in slavish devotion and worship of The state, and you can see this, of course, in totalitarian regimes and in the oaths of loyalty required to be sworn by German soldiers to the state, to Hitler, and so on.
So where religion was the world structure, religious art proliferated.
When nationalism becomes the world structure, then nationalistic art, propagandistic art, tends to proliferate.
Where communism is the structure, In a communist country, it follows a totalitarian model of propaganda.
In a country which somebody wishes to become communist, it follows particular patterns around encouragement of immigration and hostility towards the traditional two-parent family structure, which is the greatest bulwark against the state that has yet ever been invented.
It...
It promotes consequence-free sexual license, free love, because that generates chaos and destruction and creates single bombs, which are a huge driving demand for the expansion of state power.
And it forever hides fiat currency, and it focuses on shopkeepers as the cause of problems rather than central banking.
And it forever talks about political solutions, which always involve the expansion of state power, almost always.
And it's just off the top of my head.
There's many, many more.
But that's where art goes when somebody is a communist and wishes to expand or extend the reach of communism in the host country.
It portrays the poor as victims and rich people as bad and, you know, stokes class resentment and all the usual stuff.
And promotes dysfunctional choices among people to the point where bad behavior proliferates to the point where you need more and more government transfer of power to the government, transfer of wealth from one section of the population to another.
And you also, if you are interested in promoting a leftist agenda, you You portray all older people as buffoons, men in general as buffoons, and younger people as hip and wise.
And of course, by promoting The, quote, wisdom of young people, you are almost de facto promoting a leftist agenda, because young people are bonded to the state through school, they're compliant upon the state and its supported institutions through academia, and they don't pay taxes in general.
At least not much, not many.
And it's what Churchill said, if you are not a socialist when you're 20, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head.
So, in promoting the, quote, wisdom of the young and the foolishness and idiocy of the aged, you are promoting socialism by default.
These are all just, I mean, standard operating procedure for the spread of leftist propaganda.
And the reason that you have to do all of this is you have no good arguments, right?
So the reason that leftists focus so much on art is their arguments are terrible and very easy to demolish, so they can't take open combat in the field of ideas, so they have to do endless manipulations and all that.
So there are those, though, who lost religion.
But who did not gain a replacement ideology.
These are the cynics.
And when taken to its logical conclusion, these are the nihilists.
There is no truth.
There is no reason.
There is no virtue.
There is no goodness.
There is no badness.
There is no falsehood.
There is nothing.
And because there is nothing, say the nihilists, there is nothing to paint.
There is nothing to focus on.
There is nothing to reproduce.
There is nothing to communicate.
There's no argument to be made.
There's nothing that I want to bring your attention to.
And so how do the nihilists get you To understand that there's nothing to bring your attention to.
Well, they create paintings with no focus.
So, if you look at someone like Jackson Pollock's Spatterfests, the blood spray from where art itself was murdered, what he's saying is, there is nothing to focus on.
I want to bring your attention to the fact that there's nothing to bring your attention to.
I want you to focus on the fact that there's nothing to focus on.
There's nothing in the middle of my paintings.
It's paint spatters all around.
And for his fellow nihilists, this resonates deeply emotionally and powerfully.
I wish you to see that there is nothing in particular to see.
And you see this in stories without a protagonist.
You see this in meandering movies.
And you see this in extreme realism, kitchen sink dramas.
And you see this...
In painting.
And I think in painting is where it shows up the most.
Because when you have a painting where there is no focus, you're saying, I want you to pay attention to the fact that there's nothing to pay attention to.
I want you to focus on this painting, but in the painting there is nothing to focus on.
And this, there is nothing, there is nothing to focus on, there is no higher or lower value, this nihilism.
There is no truth, there is no falsehood, there is no good, there is no evil.
It's not even hedonism.
There is no pleasure.
There is no pain.
There is nothing.
And so they are driven to, because personalities are driven to reproduce, they wish to reproduce the nihilism of there is nothing to focus on, there is nothing more important than anything else, by creating an even spatter or an even set of lines wherein one cannot find anything that one is supposed to look at.
The painting draws your attention, and within the painting there is nothing to draw your attention to.
That is how nihilism reproduces itself.
That is how the argument for nothingness transmits itself into your mind through art which has no focus, no center, no argument.
So if you look at, what is it called, Voices of Fire or Pillars of Fire or something like that, which is a famous Canadian painting that went on sale for a couple of million bucks and people are like, yeah, 20 minutes, a couple of paint rollers and buckets of paint, I've got that done too.
I think they're, you know, I get that there's, but it's sort of missing the point.
The point is that there is no point.
I mean, I know that sounds annoying and zen-like and all that, but literally the point is that there is no point.
The focus is that there is no focus.
In these three stripes of paint there's nothing to look at.
There's nothing to look at.
And in a spatter canvas there's nothing to look at.
There's nothing to focus on.
When you look at a spatter canvas, asking what is this a painting of is to answer everything and nothing.
Everything is equal.
Nothing is higher or lower.
Nothing is special.
There's no hierarchy of values.
That is nihilism.
That is the driver of modern art.
It is the giant canyon wherein have fallen the soulless people.
Who have lost religion and gained no structural ideology to match it.
Without structure, without focus, without values, without philosophy, without truth, without virtue, they attempt to replicate the empty focuslessness of their mind by creating pictures where there's nothing to focus on.
You know, if you have a portrait...
You don't want them hanging in a space of blackness.
That's kind of weird, right?
So you'll do a little bit in the background, a bookshelf or a window or something like that.
But in the foreground, in the Flemish paintings, you can see this.
They do this with this wonderful yellow that was discovered, I think, in the 17th century.
They're drawing your focus and saying, well, it's the man in the front that's important.
It is the ship in the storm that is important.
And there's other stuff which is for context.
But what's important is the stuff in the middle, what you're supposed to look at.
at.
You can look at the other stuff in peripheral vision, which is why they don't tend to make it too detailed.
But where there is no focus, no foreground, no background, nothing to draw your eye, everything's chaos.
Thank you.
Even in Where's Waldo, there's a focus called Find Waldo.
But, of course, the point is that he's hard to find, right?
If he was front and center in a typical portrait, it would not be the most challenging game in the world, right?
So these...
This is my...
I mean, I have a visceral hostility and revulsion towards this kind of art because it is...
An argument for no argument.
It is a perspective of no perspective.
It is a focus of no focus.
Everything is equal.
Nothing is better.
And it is...
Nihilism is really the opposite of philosophy.
In many ways.
It's a negation.
I've sort of argued elsewhere that sophistry is the opposite because it uses philosophy to undermine philosophy.
But nihilism is the negation of philosophy.
It's saying it's not even worth using sophistry to overturn philosophical principles.
There is no such thing.
And it is, to me, fundamentally alienated and depressed.
So I did say I was going to talk about, through the looking glass, Which I've always found a terrifying, terrifying book.
Lewis Carroll, the author, was a pedophile, by all reports.
And what he's doing in his book is he is saying that there is no truth, there is no reality, there is no focus, there is no validity, there's no hierarchy, there's no good, there's no evil.
As Alice says, how can I believe impossible things?
Well, you just have to try harder.
I myself regularly believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Well, but of course, a pedophile would wish to create a universe wherein pedophilia was not wrong.
And the best way to do that is to erase reality, to erase hierarchy, to erase values, to erase truth, and to make everything chaos and irrationality and the scene terrifying.
And the only people who have values are those who are deluded, right?
So the rabbit who's, I'm late, I'm late for a very important date, but he doesn't know where he's going.
So the only person who has, well, one of the few people who have a driver, who have a focus, who have a need, who has a preference, has no idea why he has that preference and is ridiculous and foolish.
And that is, it's a terrifying, it's a terrifying world.
But it is a world wherein human predators can thrive because there's no such thing as good and evil and therefore a pedophile would like for people to believe that.
So, to me, Through the Looking Glass, is one of these stories that is a camouflage for a particularly vicious kind of immorality.
A personal predation.
It is the grooming of the population to accept pedophilia.
And, you know, to a much smaller degree, of course, I would argue that the same could be said of something like Fifty Shades of Grey.
But these are all very important things to remember.
Art has a massively powerful effect on the world.
I think it was Shelley who said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
And there's a real truth in that.
Now, I may do an art part three.
I want to see what is art part three.
I'm curious what you think of what I've done so far, if you think there's value in it.
I have no doubt that you have significant suggestions and corrections to what it is that I've said.
So I really look forward to your feedback.
I would like to do what is Art Part 3, which is to talk about my own art, what I have created.
So if there's interest in that, it's sort of like the Ayn Rand Part 4, and if there's interest in it, I'll do it, but so far it is not.
I found its traction, but I would be interested in taking some of my own art and bringing it to people's attention.
I think I've got some good stuff, and I can tell you, obviously with more detail, what I was trying to do with a piece of art, a novel, a poem, or a play that I was creating.
Thank you, as always, so much for listening.
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about the wide range of hopefully vaguely competent interests that I have.
And it is a real pleasure to talk about art and what it means, what it's for, and the degree to which it is the most efficient vehicle for transmitting personality memes.
So, if you find this stuff valuable, of course, please, please, please help us out.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening.
▲
Export Selection