Only elitism can save the high arts
Those working hardest to save civilization are destroying it fastest
I have a close friend whose life’s work has been a failure.
She is an accomplished art historian and a liberal. Her great project has been, for decades, to get minorities interested in the old masters of European painting.
She’s a leading expert in the field, deeply passionate, and has raised significant funding from well-known benefactors. And yet her project has accomplished nothing.
She has failed because she understands pieces of art without understanding art itself.
Individual pieces of art can be beautiful, and one can understand the skill of the artist, and explore their history, beliefs, motivations, and context. It can take a lifetime of study to recognize these details.
But art itself - fully encountered - cannot be appreciated in this distant and intellectual mode. A raw encounter with great art is a personal initiation into belief; a direct flow of beliefs too subtle and complex to be written on the page. It is to be pulled into a torrent of culture and history, faith and emotion. This is intimate and intense, and possible only when there is a deep resonance between the soul of the artist and observer.
Accomplishing this resonance is no trivial thing. It is not a numbers game (‘get as many schoolchildren in front of the art as possible and hope that it affects some of them’). It is not possible to make art arresting by quickly pointing out a few appreciable details to those for whom the wider history and identity is alien. They will look at the art - they might even enjoy it - but then they will forget it. All of them.
A communion with art - one that is profound enough to cause the viewer to spend a lifetime supporting the arts - is a single point on a longer, deeper journey. There must be a natural gravity to this communion, causing the initiate to fall ever deeper into the relationship.
The parallels between the art and the initiate’s life experience must be layered, clear but mysterious, intimate but distant. The initiate must live and breathe the life expression that the artist has sought to capture.
All art is expression-language… Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. Every live religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body “here” and the world-around “there” which, vibrating as one, become one.
As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the sound of march-music… that creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a “we”. A “successful” picture of a man or a landscape requires the executant to be an adept who can reveal the idea, the soul, of life in the play of its surface. In certain unreserved moments we are all adepts of this sort, and in such moments, as we follow in an imperceptible rhythm the music and the play of facial expression, we suddenly look over the precipice and see great secrets.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Allow me to illustrate this with reference to an art form that I am deeply passionate about: ballet.
Classical ballet has always been an art of belief.
— Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
Ballet is a microcosm of the Western soul. Emerging out of the Renaissance and the rediscovery of ancient texts, it represents a desperate struggle to reconcile contradictions in our heritage and instincts: pagan and Christian, peasant and noble, physicality and spirit, folklore and scripture.
The dancer holds all these tensions in their person, becoming a living vessel for the expression of the Apollonian ideals of the body and the angelic ideals of the spirit.
Apollo holds a special place in the story… His noble physique and perfect proportions represent an ideal: he is moderation and beauty, man as the measure of all things…
For dancers, moreover, Apollo is more than an ideal. He is a concrete physical presence, and they work daily, consciously or not, to remake themselves in his image: not only through imitation or the good fortune of natural endowment, but from the inside. All dancers carry in their mind’s eye some Apollonian image or feeling of the grace, proportion, and ease they strive to achieve. And as any good dancer knows, it is not enough to assume Apollonian poses or appear as he does in art and statuary: for the positions to be truly convincing the dancer must, somehow, become civilized.
— Homans
Spengler would recognize this Apollonian ideal as the animating aesthetic of the Greek world-conception. We see it represented in their statues: the perfect physical bodies taking their stand under the vault of the heavens. The beautiful, solid, tragic forms “immediately present in time and place.”
But to become comprehensible to modern man this Apollonian drive must be reconciled with the animating ideal of the West: the yearning for the infinite, the spirit, for motion, for the rending of the veil between the physical and the transcendent.
A purely Apollonian ballet is self-contradictory: ballet requires motion and weightlessness. And so Apollo is integrated with one of the great form-symbols of Western civilization: the angel.
What of angels? Ballet has also always been of two worlds, the classical and the pagan-Christian. It is inhabited by countless weightless and insubstantial creatures, winged spirits, sprites, sylphs, and fairies who dwell in the air, trees, and other natural realms. Like ballet itself, they are ephemeral and fleeting, the dream world of the Western imaginary…
If Apollo is physical perfection, human civilization, and the arts, the angels are the dancers’ desire to fly, but above all to ascend: to elevate themselves above the material world and toward God.
— Homans
These ideals crystalized into a distinct form in the courts of European nobility. For the French aristocracy, ballet emerged as ceremony, etiquette, and political event; a dramatic affirmation of the self-image of the courtly hierarchy and their mandate of heaven.
The dances were not conducted by performers but by nobles themselves. More than a mere show of opulence or a performance to be enjoyed, the routines were a language unto themselves, expressing place, worth, and meaning - all revolving around the body of the King, in which the human and divine met, in which man and the State were one.
As the centuries passed, and ballet proliferated outwards from this foundational point, the centrality of these aristocratic values remained. Ballet was not a cultural curiosity or mere ‘work of art’, it was an invitation to participate in a value system that sat at the heart of the Western project.
Classical ballet thus came to Russia as etiquette and not as art. This mattered: ballet was not initially a theatrical “show” but a standard of physical comportment to be emulated and internalized — an idealized way of behaving. And even when it did become a dramatic art, the desire to imitate and absorb, to acquire the grace and elegance and cultural forms of the French aristocracy, remained a fundamental aspiration.
— Homans
The further ballet is pulled from the heart of the Western image-conception, or the fainter that heartbeat grows, the less tenable ballet is as a form. Attempts to popularize ballet inevitably diminish it - in place of austere transcendent yearnings, audiences are be presented with aspects that they can more readily appreciate: crass sexualization, bawdy comedic elements, on-the-nose politics, and brute gymnastics (‘huffing and sweating’).
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Ballet - with its aristocratic identity, upward striving, and quest for perfection - is incompatible with the moral assertions of modern culture. Even the most faithful preservation of ballet as a form is worth nothing if it has been severed from the cultural context needed to sustain and understand it.
It will die a slow death of irrelevancy and be consigned to the museum bin of cultural artifacts, there to be half-understood by our progeny and entirely uncomprehended by those from without.
At the last… great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists – in every Culture – in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation… In the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste.
- Spengler
Ultimately ballet must be saved from without. The form is meaningless without the life-conception to house it.
Institutions like the Royal Opera House should not invest in trips for schoolchildren, they should host grand debutant balls, exclusively available to European aristocracy.
They should not make themselves more amenable to modern values, but aggressively more alien - becoming distant, a near-mystical, aspirational target for people to strive towards. They must embrace and nurture the inequality that their form demands.
Perhaps I will organize some Becoming Noble trips to various European ballets for subscribers and myself - comment if this would be of interest!
False optimists who wish to continue on the current path will insist that ballet has faded, changed, and revived many times before, and will change again - but the well of interested European nobility whose various iterations have sustained the art has run dry.
The dance is slowing. Soon it will end.
What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
I appreciate the audio is imperfect in this one. Will get a proper microphone. However: in the interests of pushing this out in a timely manager I decided rough-and-ready was better than nothing. Hope you can enjoy!
Great post. I think many of the same remarks can be applied to opera. It's an art form that requires a very high level of civilization to support. People who can sing and act Wagner's Ring Cycle are like thoroughbred horses. They are outstanding at their jobs, but the extreme technical demands of their work mean that they can't really do much else.