Destruction of the Past
Last month, Tim Boucher, in his post, The End of Art, raised some rather interesting questions:
“If destroying human history meant that you could be the new Plato, the new Shakespeare, the new Beethoven, would you initiate or at least applaud that destruction? … What do you want to have power over? What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want to be quoted for and loved and hated for? Would you initiate a break with human history in order to be that? Or is this thinking a delectable trap of the worst kind?”
An excellent discussion rose up around this (I highly recommend reading the whole thing). I thought I’d share my own comments from that discussion here:
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Would I want all art erased from history? No. It’s a rich and beautiful history, and like all history, you can learn a great deal from it. If I need to look away from it to clear my head, I always can. I can meditate. I can stop listening to music for awhile. There are ways to shake off some of the over-influencing. But it’s the forms of the current culture, if anything, that I find most difficult to detach from, not the influences of the past.
The idea of destroying the old so you can claim the credit for (re)creating it yourself is just stupid, and people who want to do that are stupid. I suppose I could see art from other periods (just as from other people, now) as my competition (if I was stupid), but even if it is, good. Competition = positive. It’s much better to welcome competition than try to eliminate it. Without competition you degrade into mediocrity. You create with lower standards just because you can. And then you suck.
The difference between envy and inspiration lies in how secure or insecure one is. What some choose to let hold them back or keep them down, others choose to climb onto and springboard off of.
Also, originality is overrated, and can’t ever truly exist in pure form, anyway. Then again, there can be no two exact copies, so there’s an element of originality in everything. You could start an art movement that was nothing but artists all doing their own interpretations of the exact same image. Something interesting would come out of it. Musicians used to cover each other’s songs all the time. Different actors will bring different qualities and nuances to the same role. It’s like viewing an object from many different angles. Each of us is an ‘angle’. The more angles we have access to (ie: those from previous generations), the more of a complete picture we’re building. That may have its down sides, but what doesn’t?
I’ve recently started listening obsessively to the podcasts of zac, and some of his ideas are bubbling up as I write this. For one - archetypes. They’re always influencing us, and it’s great to be able to look back and see them more and more clearly, by way of the patterns emerging out of history - art history, cultural, political, etc. - it’s all of value, if you choose to make good use of it.
The other idea is the developmental model zac keeps referring to. I think it’s valid, and it applies to art as much as anything else. If you set out to destroy everything that’s been established before you, thinking it clears the way for the complete dominance of your own, newer, better ‘way,’ well duh, everything’s going to crumble, including you and your ‘way,’ and whoops, look, now we’re all back to square one. Good job.
One more thought. Some might say it’s good to go back to square one at some point and start fresh, when we’ve exhausted all the potentials of this line of development. But I beg to differ. To have that logic I’d have to assume a) that it’s even possible to exhaust a line of development - that there’s a limit to the infinite in any direction, and b) that if it gets boring, or you just want to try something different, that you can’t just shift peacefully sideways instead of destructively backwards, or maybe start combining the current line with other lines of development, bring in new elements - not destroying what exists but transforming it, alchemy-like, into something else entirely, gaining something new without losing (wasting) the gains of the old.
Just scrapping the past and starting over - memory erased, history erased - still being in the same line, but kicked to the back - that’s more like a waste of time than a good idea for something to do. It’s one thing to spiral around and revisit things from higher perspectives, but we’re talking about erasing and starting with a clean slate, if I’m understanding correctly, which seems the opposite of that. In any case, that was more than one more thought.
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