Having lived in and amongst the hipster elite in the likes of Seattle, Portland, SF, and Austin (I know, what is wrong with me?), I can say that this Bismarck's thesis is believed adamantly by all on the left and is hilariously ironic in ways they do not intend. As a bit of a free radical with morphing beliefs, it was always painful to sit in a room and listen to a certain type of people (always culturally/politically, self-described liberal) talk about how good their farts smell...I mean "explain" their "art" to me. The idea that transgression and shock and some obscure references make art has always been the apotheosis of this dimwitted, narcissistic view. Great essay.
The cocoon of self-importance around what passes as transgressive is it’s least attractive feature, and I can’t imagine wanting to hang out with people like that, much less put effort into appealing to their sensibilities. When the money from the Robber Baron and Tech Bro funds dries up they’ll return to the obscurity their fundamental mediocrity merits.
I used to hang with all types and find interest in most, below their surface shit. However, that ability has waned significantly with each year that passes. Now I am an old curmudgeon haunting Substack. I think your thesis is more true of good writers than any other art form. All good writing comes from a small c conservative well of history. Even the transgressions. If not how do they know that which they transgress.
Many artists whose work endures beyond temporary popularity are social misfits, and perhaps you've hit upon why. The classic "artist" personality is a high-openness, low-conscientiousness, low- agreeableness loner (see The Mind of the Artist by William Todd Schultz), so they don't fit in with nice, normal people with good values and common sense (here, loosely correlated with the "Right"). Many are degenerates in their personal lives.
OTOH, they have great bullshit detectors, so social trends and the latest idea of "progress" doesn't impress them. They see right through it to enduring truths. This makes them slightly suspect to the Intelligensia (here, loosely correlated with the "Left"), whom they tend to mock. Many are (effectively) religious in their inner lives.
So, they are complicated no-team cranks who focus on their work. Best people!
I tend to avoid the social-science framing (“high openness,” etc) but otherwise yes, I would say that artists at their best must be misfits because they’re not reflections of their time so much as conduits for the timeless. This outsider persona doesn’t necessarily reflect itself in outward appearance, but is very much in keeping with the rightist temperament.
Yeah, I am completely past the cringe boomer takes that Walt expressed in that article. There is nothing impressive, artistic, subtle, or meaningful in prog "art", which is always, only, ever, about destroying something useful and beautiful, sometimes replacing it with some half-baked juvenile pile of trash.
All they're doing is scratching some atavistic itch to smash what they don't understand, or to grasp after the prestige of innovation while avoiding taking any of the risks or suffering the costs that innovation requires. It's purely performative, the virtue signal or stolen valor of creativity.
Whatever clout prog art had, died decades ago. It's the fetish of neverland boomers who still think they're hip with the kids, strictly the domain of wine aunts, schoolmarms and self-styled intellectuals circa 1972. We had an absolute orgy of "transgressiveness" in the late 90s and early 2000s: every taboo was broken; every sacred cow slaughtered; every line crossed. We had gratuitous marathons of grotesque violence and torture in the goreporn genre; we had movies asking us to sympathize with practitioners of bestiality and pedophilia; we watched drug abusers self-destruct in real time in fiction and reality; we had a whole genre of art about desecrating the last few sacred things in the most stomach-turning ways the most degenerate minds could possibly imagine. There is nothing left to transgress, and it's not cool or hip or (insert latest word meaning cool). It's boring. Nobody cares, boomer.
If there's anything conservative about what Walt's saying, it's that he's chasing the coattails of an in-crowd that nobody likes anymore.
It’s what I meant by parasitic. It can only function against some existing, meaningful norm to attack. Once those are all gone, it’s just poking a corpse with a stick and calling it a fight.
Part of the issues plaguing Traditionalist art are the same things plaguing hiring traditionalists at all - the fact the you have to pay enough to raise a whole family on it. So - a skilled artist generally has 30+ years under his belt, which (if he's Catholic) is a family of at least 5 children. That takes money.
Most people in our society see price tags and go for the cheaper, in all things. And get what they pay for.
The other issue is that, even among traditionalists, there is a part of them that hasn't expelled within themselves a fascination for what is ugly. A personal anecdote - A men's book club I'm in within a latin mass community, the last time we had a selection to vote upon what to read was Anna Karenina, Brideshead Revisited, and War and Peace. After we had just read Kristin Lavransdatter. Good books, but I tire of reading of adultery, and women's folly, and get tired of men wanting to examine how fallen the world is. Sometimes, no matter how beautiful you can see the soul that rises up from the ashes, you need to see the soul that doesn't fall to begin with.
In our modern times, we have a perverse draw to the anti-heros, the fall, the redemption arcs, etc. We need more beautiful tales that are clear cut at times, mythic, beautiful in themselves.
But, to people like Walt and the masses, those simply aren't appealing. And, I would say to them, that's because there's something in THEM not appealing. Not the art.
In my essay about Boccaccio I noted that most great artists and writers have day jobs, and that it’s historically unusual (and I would say undesirable) to try to live off one’s art itself. Better to stay outside whatever system funds Miley Cyrus and cultivate smaller scale and supplemental networks of patronage, I’d say. For a men’s book club, perhaps consider some 19th century adventure stories like Cooper or Stevenson of Dumas wrote. There’s more depth to them than people credit them for and I would suspect more to interest men than Anna Karenina.
Yes to the day jobs. That or that they had patrons such as in the middle ages, who could afford to hire them to create larger scale works for the common good.
We'll see on the book club. I'm pushing for more middle age stuff - like Beowulf or El Cid. This one is specifically trying to keep to 'great books' and longer ones, so we'll see how things go.
Unique to Anglophone culture is this drive for what is most cost effective and cheap vs quality. I notice this very quickly in food, as the continental concept (and Japanese oddly) of gastronomia is just foreign to the American mind. With art, most Americans see it as wall decore, rather than a visual lesson, a window of time and ideas. As such, it's just another item of cheap kitch to fill the space. Most houses are devoid of real art as I don't count a wood burning of a sunflower vector with the words "live, laugh, love" as art, or some simple impressionist landscape of a location and time that may or ay not exist, or just paint marks and splotches of color. Certainly not when compared to say a print of Ecce Homo by Antonio Ciseri, or an icon, or even a great secular painting like Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Friedrich.
I think what is missing in much modern art is connection to reality. Art which builds on past art will get that connect. But so will art based on hard knowledge and life experiences.
For example, the original Star Trek was created by someone who had served in the military, as did many of the writers and actors. Especially in the first season, the Enterprise felt like a military vessel.
War movies in general worked during that era due to the direct experience of many of those involved. This carried into other genres including westerns.
Today's Hollywood is more dominated by those who went directly from studying art to practicing it. And since university art departments have been corrupted by the Cult of Originality for so long, that training is wanting.
----
Jack London was a socialist, but his criticisms of capitalism were based on direct harsh experiences.
Robert Heinlein started off as a far leftist, but he had a long string of careers to build up interesting life experiences. Also, though he was an apostate, he was better read in the Bible than most modern preachers.
Thanks for the shout-out - I'm glad that I was able to contribute to this larger discussion. The whole phenomenon of "there's no right wing art" or "all right wing art is bad" is something I've been looking to dispel for a long time but it's difficult to try and offer a good counter-narrative when the only thing being held up as "right wing art" or "right wing entertainment" is the drivel coming out of and being funded by the likes of The Daily Wire and Rob Schneider. Needless to say, those are demonstrably wrong statements, but when that's all people see, it's hard to change their minds. I keep toying with the idea of doing an article on it myself, but I think you got to the point here better than I could.
You've hit upon the head of the nail again and again in this essay, we truly must return to the mythic well, it's what many of us have done hereon Substack (I mean it's what motivates me with my writing). And I must acknowledge that I'm utterly sick of more recent movies and fiction produced by those such as holywood as everything over there is utterly stale, for the reasons listed here.
The cultural exhaustion is very real. It’s why I recommend (and try to write) works that are connected to a living tradition, as opposed to the zeitgeist of rejection, subversion, and deconstruction.
Same, it is why I’ve gone back to Dumas and the likes of Howard & Tolkien, and even started reading again Ivanhoe (when not reading some of the fantasy writers hereon Substack of course). Best to go back.
Haven’t read his Rob Roy yet, will do so. I also hope to read more Nigel Tranter in the coming days, as he’s always a good comfort writer. His Macbeth & Robert the Bruce are great novels.
I've said this somewhere before (I seem to remember it was in the Librarian's comment section): if you want historical fiction drawn direct from the trad wellspring read Rosemary Sutcliff--written for adolescents but never mind--and Alfred Duggan.
I like the use of pop culture in this essay, which addresses tradition as essence. I cannot think on these matters without T.S. Eliot coming to mind. He placed popular culture in its proper relation to great art. Earlier today in these comments I defined popular culture as we experience it now: "There is great art, there is culture and what is termed 'popular culture' which in a culture that has been led away from its great art denotes ideology disguised within cultural forms for the purposes of control, misdirection and pacification." I might have added annihilation. Had I done that I might then have asked myself, what is it that is being annihilated? The answer is the blood from which tradition springs.
"Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’."
TS Eliot, from After Strange Gods
"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn has modified the race to its own character."
T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy
The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, 1933
The text of Eliot's talk is available as a PDF here:
Eliot really hits on something profoundly important, in that an artist is not merely a shaper, but one who in turn has been properly shaped. The subverter or deconstructer or transgressor is someone actively pulling up the roots of the tree in whose shade he rests.
As land shapes race, and vice versa, with each intertwined, so poem shapes poet as poet shapes poem. It is a vast becoming. It originates from many points that together form a whole. It has epic immensity. However, there is also creative destruction, as per the Jünger quote: "Any power struggle is preceded by a verification of images and an iconoclasm." (from The Forest Passage), but you know that and I am stating it for those perusing the comments . . . We are in just such a fight over images. It is gathering its force and is some way from its conclusion. These are exciting and dangerous times. The Muses are dancing . . .
I just wish the children who write movies these days would remember that most movies are a Hero's Journey and Strong Female Lead who is so perfect, her only flaw is she lacks confidence, doesn't make for an interesting story or a particularly sympathetic main character.
I've completely lost hope that was passes for talent in the industry these days will ever learn "And then" vs. "Because, or the But and Therefore Rule.
It's not liberals that cannot do art. It's puritanical satanists. Lefty Hollywood was producing so much art that foreign countries were erecting trade barriers against it.
But that's before fagcism set in. Now that the homos have deemed themselves holy, they no longer produce good art.
---
For humor, the faction that is out of power tends to be the most creative. Hippies were cranking out the underground comics and other art back in the 60s. Today, it is young right wingers who crank out the cartoons.
And now that Christianity is out of power, the Religious Right can be funny. A half century ago, the Religious Right could only be funny through self-parody. Think Jim and Tammy Bakker. The closest they could do to telling jokes was Pat Robertson commenting on the news, and even that was mostly cringe, as Pat would cheerlead for more war in the Middle East.
Myths die when they lose their explanatory power. Ours never have. The 20th century - that between the 20s - was an attempt to reimagine for the public an entirely novel mode of being. The mass marketing exercise called liberal democracy is another god that failed, and now its fanbase drinks the bitter lees of disenchantment.
The new politics comes when the myths of the 20th century are dead.
'Shout out' (yo) to my astonishingly perceptive and pretentiously titled piece ostensibly centred on the not-widely-cared-about heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio (but really about *so much more*). I too cite Bismarck's article (and one by Morgoth to boot!) in making the point that RW artists are revolutionaries, not conservatives, and that some of the best were at least...slightly deranged.
PS: Pace previous commentators, Leonard Cohen was a v good lyricist but a shit musician, Nirvana an awful band and Neil Young only good for two or three albums (at most).
Revolutionary is a matter of perspective. Dio exemplifies what is best in heavy metal by incorporation mythic themes into his music and videos, and in being a genuinely talented singer unreliant on auto tune and such. Iron Maiden, Sabaton, etc. all accomplish the same end and I consider the metal fandom of my youth as being as formative as my book learning in terms of my artistic sensibilities. It’s only revolutionary in the sense that in a healthy age it would be normal. The chains and leather serve to differentiate it from the suits and ties of the neoliberal consensus occupying what should be genuine cultural space.
See I think Dio is qualitatively different from any other metal band. For one thing it's unique in having a totally original and fully unified imaginary lore.
He's by far the best singer in the genre and the music is a cut above Iron Maiden's, who sound merely *enthusiastic* by comparison. Queensryche are probably the next best 80s metal band.
Metal was formative for me too but there's nothing worse than middle aged men arguing about young men music, so I will quit it.
Elixir to my parched lips and balm to my withered fingers winnowed in the tepid winds of popular culture! I'm a writer, poet and musician practising my art in a well ploughed space but still believe I might yet cultivate something. I agree that tradition and values have to be foundational - there are still chances in atomized space.
Fine arts went off the rails with Impressionism in the mid 19th Century, which is when all this claptrap about "rightist" and "transgressive" art became a talking point. This was primarily driven by the observations and writing of talentless critical hacks who were envious of genuine artistic talent and who wanted to tear down the Western artistic traditions using Marxist theories applied to art. This is where Gertrude Stein, Roland Barthes, and eventually Jacques Derrida all started at. Because to tear down the West you have to tear down Tradition. By the way, the artist who went along with all of this nonsense in a mockery of his own talent because he was greedy and envious and full of his own lusts, was Pablo Picasso. Him along with that upside down urinal guy did irreparable damage to the Western visual art tradition. Everyone from the artistic political left is merely walking out the resulting chaos from their combined efforts.
Great article. I've simply stopped consuming any modern media anything. Content from the 70s-80s still suffers from liberal ideas but it's at least good. Anything modern is just complete trash. Entirely predictable. The "artists" themselves are usually completely generic too. "Oh wow, you have colored hair (female) / long hair (male), oh and tattoos, and you want to travel the world and experience new things. Wow. How original!"
I always find it ironic that the left tries SO HARD to be unique and special but end up just being exact replicas of everyone else trying the same thing.
Having lived in and amongst the hipster elite in the likes of Seattle, Portland, SF, and Austin (I know, what is wrong with me?), I can say that this Bismarck's thesis is believed adamantly by all on the left and is hilariously ironic in ways they do not intend. As a bit of a free radical with morphing beliefs, it was always painful to sit in a room and listen to a certain type of people (always culturally/politically, self-described liberal) talk about how good their farts smell...I mean "explain" their "art" to me. The idea that transgression and shock and some obscure references make art has always been the apotheosis of this dimwitted, narcissistic view. Great essay.
The cocoon of self-importance around what passes as transgressive is it’s least attractive feature, and I can’t imagine wanting to hang out with people like that, much less put effort into appealing to their sensibilities. When the money from the Robber Baron and Tech Bro funds dries up they’ll return to the obscurity their fundamental mediocrity merits.
I used to hang with all types and find interest in most, below their surface shit. However, that ability has waned significantly with each year that passes. Now I am an old curmudgeon haunting Substack. I think your thesis is more true of good writers than any other art form. All good writing comes from a small c conservative well of history. Even the transgressions. If not how do they know that which they transgress.
What happens to the avante-garde when they find themselves in a cultural cul-de-sac?
Many artists whose work endures beyond temporary popularity are social misfits, and perhaps you've hit upon why. The classic "artist" personality is a high-openness, low-conscientiousness, low- agreeableness loner (see The Mind of the Artist by William Todd Schultz), so they don't fit in with nice, normal people with good values and common sense (here, loosely correlated with the "Right"). Many are degenerates in their personal lives.
OTOH, they have great bullshit detectors, so social trends and the latest idea of "progress" doesn't impress them. They see right through it to enduring truths. This makes them slightly suspect to the Intelligensia (here, loosely correlated with the "Left"), whom they tend to mock. Many are (effectively) religious in their inner lives.
So, they are complicated no-team cranks who focus on their work. Best people!
I tend to avoid the social-science framing (“high openness,” etc) but otherwise yes, I would say that artists at their best must be misfits because they’re not reflections of their time so much as conduits for the timeless. This outsider persona doesn’t necessarily reflect itself in outward appearance, but is very much in keeping with the rightist temperament.
yes
Yeah, I am completely past the cringe boomer takes that Walt expressed in that article. There is nothing impressive, artistic, subtle, or meaningful in prog "art", which is always, only, ever, about destroying something useful and beautiful, sometimes replacing it with some half-baked juvenile pile of trash.
All they're doing is scratching some atavistic itch to smash what they don't understand, or to grasp after the prestige of innovation while avoiding taking any of the risks or suffering the costs that innovation requires. It's purely performative, the virtue signal or stolen valor of creativity.
Whatever clout prog art had, died decades ago. It's the fetish of neverland boomers who still think they're hip with the kids, strictly the domain of wine aunts, schoolmarms and self-styled intellectuals circa 1972. We had an absolute orgy of "transgressiveness" in the late 90s and early 2000s: every taboo was broken; every sacred cow slaughtered; every line crossed. We had gratuitous marathons of grotesque violence and torture in the goreporn genre; we had movies asking us to sympathize with practitioners of bestiality and pedophilia; we watched drug abusers self-destruct in real time in fiction and reality; we had a whole genre of art about desecrating the last few sacred things in the most stomach-turning ways the most degenerate minds could possibly imagine. There is nothing left to transgress, and it's not cool or hip or (insert latest word meaning cool). It's boring. Nobody cares, boomer.
If there's anything conservative about what Walt's saying, it's that he's chasing the coattails of an in-crowd that nobody likes anymore.
It’s what I meant by parasitic. It can only function against some existing, meaningful norm to attack. Once those are all gone, it’s just poking a corpse with a stick and calling it a fight.
Part of the issues plaguing Traditionalist art are the same things plaguing hiring traditionalists at all - the fact the you have to pay enough to raise a whole family on it. So - a skilled artist generally has 30+ years under his belt, which (if he's Catholic) is a family of at least 5 children. That takes money.
Most people in our society see price tags and go for the cheaper, in all things. And get what they pay for.
The other issue is that, even among traditionalists, there is a part of them that hasn't expelled within themselves a fascination for what is ugly. A personal anecdote - A men's book club I'm in within a latin mass community, the last time we had a selection to vote upon what to read was Anna Karenina, Brideshead Revisited, and War and Peace. After we had just read Kristin Lavransdatter. Good books, but I tire of reading of adultery, and women's folly, and get tired of men wanting to examine how fallen the world is. Sometimes, no matter how beautiful you can see the soul that rises up from the ashes, you need to see the soul that doesn't fall to begin with.
In our modern times, we have a perverse draw to the anti-heros, the fall, the redemption arcs, etc. We need more beautiful tales that are clear cut at times, mythic, beautiful in themselves.
But, to people like Walt and the masses, those simply aren't appealing. And, I would say to them, that's because there's something in THEM not appealing. Not the art.
In my essay about Boccaccio I noted that most great artists and writers have day jobs, and that it’s historically unusual (and I would say undesirable) to try to live off one’s art itself. Better to stay outside whatever system funds Miley Cyrus and cultivate smaller scale and supplemental networks of patronage, I’d say. For a men’s book club, perhaps consider some 19th century adventure stories like Cooper or Stevenson of Dumas wrote. There’s more depth to them than people credit them for and I would suspect more to interest men than Anna Karenina.
Yes to the day jobs. That or that they had patrons such as in the middle ages, who could afford to hire them to create larger scale works for the common good.
We'll see on the book club. I'm pushing for more middle age stuff - like Beowulf or El Cid. This one is specifically trying to keep to 'great books' and longer ones, so we'll see how things go.
Unique to Anglophone culture is this drive for what is most cost effective and cheap vs quality. I notice this very quickly in food, as the continental concept (and Japanese oddly) of gastronomia is just foreign to the American mind. With art, most Americans see it as wall decore, rather than a visual lesson, a window of time and ideas. As such, it's just another item of cheap kitch to fill the space. Most houses are devoid of real art as I don't count a wood burning of a sunflower vector with the words "live, laugh, love" as art, or some simple impressionist landscape of a location and time that may or ay not exist, or just paint marks and splotches of color. Certainly not when compared to say a print of Ecce Homo by Antonio Ciseri, or an icon, or even a great secular painting like Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Friedrich.
I think what is missing in much modern art is connection to reality. Art which builds on past art will get that connect. But so will art based on hard knowledge and life experiences.
For example, the original Star Trek was created by someone who had served in the military, as did many of the writers and actors. Especially in the first season, the Enterprise felt like a military vessel.
War movies in general worked during that era due to the direct experience of many of those involved. This carried into other genres including westerns.
Today's Hollywood is more dominated by those who went directly from studying art to practicing it. And since university art departments have been corrupted by the Cult of Originality for so long, that training is wanting.
----
Jack London was a socialist, but his criticisms of capitalism were based on direct harsh experiences.
Robert Heinlein started off as a far leftist, but he had a long string of careers to build up interesting life experiences. Also, though he was an apostate, he was better read in the Bible than most modern preachers.
https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8?si=LrEmnewLFnTJekkY
Thanks for the shout-out - I'm glad that I was able to contribute to this larger discussion. The whole phenomenon of "there's no right wing art" or "all right wing art is bad" is something I've been looking to dispel for a long time but it's difficult to try and offer a good counter-narrative when the only thing being held up as "right wing art" or "right wing entertainment" is the drivel coming out of and being funded by the likes of The Daily Wire and Rob Schneider. Needless to say, those are demonstrably wrong statements, but when that's all people see, it's hard to change their minds. I keep toying with the idea of doing an article on it myself, but I think you got to the point here better than I could.
Thank you for the great essay on your part. I’m looking forward to reading about the end of the Bakeryverse.
You've hit upon the head of the nail again and again in this essay, we truly must return to the mythic well, it's what many of us have done hereon Substack (I mean it's what motivates me with my writing). And I must acknowledge that I'm utterly sick of more recent movies and fiction produced by those such as holywood as everything over there is utterly stale, for the reasons listed here.
The cultural exhaustion is very real. It’s why I recommend (and try to write) works that are connected to a living tradition, as opposed to the zeitgeist of rejection, subversion, and deconstruction.
Same, it is why I’ve gone back to Dumas and the likes of Howard & Tolkien, and even started reading again Ivanhoe (when not reading some of the fantasy writers hereon Substack of course). Best to go back.
Ivanhoe is a personal favorite of mine, as is Scott’s Rob Roy.
Haven’t read his Rob Roy yet, will do so. I also hope to read more Nigel Tranter in the coming days, as he’s always a good comfort writer. His Macbeth & Robert the Bruce are great novels.
I've said this somewhere before (I seem to remember it was in the Librarian's comment section): if you want historical fiction drawn direct from the trad wellspring read Rosemary Sutcliff--written for adolescents but never mind--and Alfred Duggan.
Ouais, them, Tranter, Scott and Dumas are the way to go. Thanks for the recommendation.
I like the use of pop culture in this essay, which addresses tradition as essence. I cannot think on these matters without T.S. Eliot coming to mind. He placed popular culture in its proper relation to great art. Earlier today in these comments I defined popular culture as we experience it now: "There is great art, there is culture and what is termed 'popular culture' which in a culture that has been led away from its great art denotes ideology disguised within cultural forms for the purposes of control, misdirection and pacification." I might have added annihilation. Had I done that I might then have asked myself, what is it that is being annihilated? The answer is the blood from which tradition springs.
"Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’."
TS Eliot, from After Strange Gods
"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn has modified the race to its own character."
T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy
The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, 1933
The text of Eliot's talk is available as a PDF here:
https://archive.org/details/afterstrangegods00eliouoft
Eliot really hits on something profoundly important, in that an artist is not merely a shaper, but one who in turn has been properly shaped. The subverter or deconstructer or transgressor is someone actively pulling up the roots of the tree in whose shade he rests.
As land shapes race, and vice versa, with each intertwined, so poem shapes poet as poet shapes poem. It is a vast becoming. It originates from many points that together form a whole. It has epic immensity. However, there is also creative destruction, as per the Jünger quote: "Any power struggle is preceded by a verification of images and an iconoclasm." (from The Forest Passage), but you know that and I am stating it for those perusing the comments . . . We are in just such a fight over images. It is gathering its force and is some way from its conclusion. These are exciting and dangerous times. The Muses are dancing . . .
Great stuff.
I find right wing art as ennobling and invigorating. It is the well versus what we have now… the sump pump.
A lot of what I wrote here is the nonfiction version of themes I tried to hit in my story Laburinthos.
I just wish the children who write movies these days would remember that most movies are a Hero's Journey and Strong Female Lead who is so perfect, her only flaw is she lacks confidence, doesn't make for an interesting story or a particularly sympathetic main character.
I've completely lost hope that was passes for talent in the industry these days will ever learn "And then" vs. "Because, or the But and Therefore Rule.
It's not liberals that cannot do art. It's puritanical satanists. Lefty Hollywood was producing so much art that foreign countries were erecting trade barriers against it.
But that's before fagcism set in. Now that the homos have deemed themselves holy, they no longer produce good art.
---
For humor, the faction that is out of power tends to be the most creative. Hippies were cranking out the underground comics and other art back in the 60s. Today, it is young right wingers who crank out the cartoons.
And now that Christianity is out of power, the Religious Right can be funny. A half century ago, the Religious Right could only be funny through self-parody. Think Jim and Tammy Bakker. The closest they could do to telling jokes was Pat Robertson commenting on the news, and even that was mostly cringe, as Pat would cheerlead for more war in the Middle East.
Do you think you could share about these right-wing comics? I am curious.
I'm referring to memes, which are basically political cartoons.
And, of course, there's Arkhaven ...
I wonder if there could be a photo book of the best memes? Make sure to include the racist ones as well.
Good point
Myths die when they lose their explanatory power. Ours never have. The 20th century - that between the 20s - was an attempt to reimagine for the public an entirely novel mode of being. The mass marketing exercise called liberal democracy is another god that failed, and now its fanbase drinks the bitter lees of disenchantment.
The new politics comes when the myths of the 20th century are dead.
There are older and better myths to draw upon than those of liberalism, modernism, and postmodernism. My hope is that we return to those.
'Shout out' (yo) to my astonishingly perceptive and pretentiously titled piece ostensibly centred on the not-widely-cared-about heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio (but really about *so much more*). I too cite Bismarck's article (and one by Morgoth to boot!) in making the point that RW artists are revolutionaries, not conservatives, and that some of the best were at least...slightly deranged.
https://shadeofachilles.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/144857277?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fhome
PS: Pace previous commentators, Leonard Cohen was a v good lyricist but a shit musician, Nirvana an awful band and Neil Young only good for two or three albums (at most).
Revolutionary is a matter of perspective. Dio exemplifies what is best in heavy metal by incorporation mythic themes into his music and videos, and in being a genuinely talented singer unreliant on auto tune and such. Iron Maiden, Sabaton, etc. all accomplish the same end and I consider the metal fandom of my youth as being as formative as my book learning in terms of my artistic sensibilities. It’s only revolutionary in the sense that in a healthy age it would be normal. The chains and leather serve to differentiate it from the suits and ties of the neoliberal consensus occupying what should be genuine cultural space.
See I think Dio is qualitatively different from any other metal band. For one thing it's unique in having a totally original and fully unified imaginary lore.
He's by far the best singer in the genre and the music is a cut above Iron Maiden's, who sound merely *enthusiastic* by comparison. Queensryche are probably the next best 80s metal band.
Metal was formative for me too but there's nothing worse than middle aged men arguing about young men music, so I will quit it.
Elixir to my parched lips and balm to my withered fingers winnowed in the tepid winds of popular culture! I'm a writer, poet and musician practising my art in a well ploughed space but still believe I might yet cultivate something. I agree that tradition and values have to be foundational - there are still chances in atomized space.
Fine arts went off the rails with Impressionism in the mid 19th Century, which is when all this claptrap about "rightist" and "transgressive" art became a talking point. This was primarily driven by the observations and writing of talentless critical hacks who were envious of genuine artistic talent and who wanted to tear down the Western artistic traditions using Marxist theories applied to art. This is where Gertrude Stein, Roland Barthes, and eventually Jacques Derrida all started at. Because to tear down the West you have to tear down Tradition. By the way, the artist who went along with all of this nonsense in a mockery of his own talent because he was greedy and envious and full of his own lusts, was Pablo Picasso. Him along with that upside down urinal guy did irreparable damage to the Western visual art tradition. Everyone from the artistic political left is merely walking out the resulting chaos from their combined efforts.
Great article. I've simply stopped consuming any modern media anything. Content from the 70s-80s still suffers from liberal ideas but it's at least good. Anything modern is just complete trash. Entirely predictable. The "artists" themselves are usually completely generic too. "Oh wow, you have colored hair (female) / long hair (male), oh and tattoos, and you want to travel the world and experience new things. Wow. How original!"
I always find it ironic that the left tries SO HARD to be unique and special but end up just being exact replicas of everyone else trying the same thing.