The Invisible Principles of the Millennial Artist
"Monsters are just expressions of inner trauma." This, and other truisms drive our work. We think we are individuals but we're gripped by collective ideas.
As we’ve been discussing on Lucid Themes, we’re dealing with a world of increasingly radical individualism, isolation, and separation. All of our society’s incentive structures seem to be leading us only further toward a vanishing point that looks like each of us locked away in our Netflix boxes consuming content all day, having all our material needs met, and none of our spiritual ones.
In The Heat Death of the Soul, I attempted to lay out some of the implications of this process if we play this out to its poetic conclusion. As we discussed there, this slow process of dissolution has by no means failed to impact the artist. Indeed our entire conception of what art is, what it does, and who does it are shaped by invisible presuppositions along lines of intense separation, skepticism about reality, and self worship.
As we’ve just noted, what is important to first notice about these presuppositions is that they are invisible. That is to say, we who make art do not think about them, we do not see ourselves as embodying certain ideals or artistic principles. We are just as we are. We are not philosophers or aesthetes. We are taken by fancies, by the possibilities of our craft, we work with our hands, we worry about the various technical problems that we must overcome, and the finer nuances of excellence in our fields. Finally, we search now for that ephemeral thing that has become a tiresome buzzword: “inspiration.”
As I discuss more fully in one of my YouTube videos, we can look back even one century and find a time where artists were much more conscious of their reactionary status, say in the Dada movement, going so far as to name their ideas themselves, and draft out all sorts of manifestos and principles to which their members must adhere. This occurred in world cinema as recently as the 90s with Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and the Dogme 95 filmmakers.
Aside from this exception, a dying breath of the 20th Century revolutionary spirit, we find ourselves in a nameless, listless state that is hard to categorize. Sometimes you hear people ask something along the lines of “there were all these artistic styles in the 20th Century, but what’s the style now?” Avant Garde is a dead term, for there is no edge to cut anymore, and no group of artists seem capable, or worthy of naming a movement or style to describe our present status, or a direction towards which to move. Even if someone did, who would care?
The temptation is to say that, at present, all the principles have fallen apart. Now, we have no such principles, instead we have self-expression. Maybe this is an important innovation that there is no going back from. But I am convinced our individualism is a phony one. We have not ceased to be gripped by ideas. It is only the case now that we are totally unaware of this process. We know not what drives us, nor the name of the tree from which we pluck the fruit.
Let me try to make explicit some of the ideas that are floating around in the collective soup that drives the mind of the artist. My hope is that by naming these principles, we can see how they are affecting us. We can decide whether or not we really agree with them. We can decide if we want to shape our work in accordance with different ideas; perhaps something higher than ourselves.
Tacit principles of the modern artist:
All monsters are just expressions of inner trauma.
Repression of the self is the greatest (only?) sin.
Authority is to be mistrusted.
The self is the highest authority.
Because of this paradox, all of reality can be called into question.
Internal self-discovery is worth going to any length to achieve, regardless of the damage it might cause in the external world.
All art is fundamentally self-expressive. The more it expresses the self, the “purer” it is, the less it does, the more “commercial,” or phony it is.
The journey of self-discovery is about inspiring others to follow in my path to do the same.
Art and its metaphors are subjective. (Isn’t this obvious by now?)
The more authentically I express myself, the more someone else is likely to connect with my work.
This is far from a complete list. Of course, if we divided artists along political and ideological lines we could name many others. Those principles might be highly descriptive as well, but much easier to spot, and probably downstream of deeper feelings. I’ve instead tried to stick to more neutral and universal principles so far as I can notice them. If you think you can name some other fairly universal ideas that are floating around out there right now, or if you can think of examples of art that clearly adhere to these tacit ideas — I know I can — I would love to read some in the comments.
We furthermore, must understand that we are not mere individuals. We are that, yes, but we are individuals nested within fractal levels of society and community, however imperfect or flawed they may be. All of these forces and levels, be they the level of the family, the school, the trade, the nation, the culture, the faith, are constantly emanating down onto our awareness, serving as filters and lenses through which we view the world and direct our artistry.
I could try to come up with some better principles in reaction to these, but I am not sure that is how it works. Ideas are much more sticky than just little catchphrases that we nod our heads to. They bubble out of the summation of our awareness, and we, living in the same world to varying degrees, notice similar things, and give voice to similar ideas. In order to change ideas, we have to see a different reality. Yet, ideas themselves shape reality and are part of that filtering structure through which we make sense of our world. There is a top down, bottom up, chicken or egg, interchange between ideas and senses, event and emotion, but we’re a long way away from understanding that fully.
Maybe at some point it would be worth it to try listing out some better principles, but I don’t feel able to yet. I fear I am still too much in a reactionary posture to our world and I would be just adding to the noise of bald self-assertion. I think the most important thing is first noticing that we are indeed gripped by ideas. We have to give name to these ideas and ponder why they compel us. We have to do that first, far before we can try to lay out something better.
Update
I’ll be taking next week off from writing Lucid Themes. I will be busy this coming week and weekend with an out of town shoot, and I don’t want the quality of writing to suffer. I am excited to share some new film work shortly, and I will be taking some time here to talk about that as well. This marks one month of Lucid Themes and I have very much enjoyed it so far. Writing here has taken away some from my screenwriting, and that means the post schedule will change to some degree, perhaps going to every other week, but this will also enable me to post some of the bigger ideas that I’ve had bouncing around that feel too hard for me to unpack in a concise manner in one week. Thanks to everyone who has reached out with a kind word or a reaction, please keep doing that. Your critique and negative opinions are also welcome if you have them. It really helps me better understand if I am expressing these things in a clear enough manner.
See you out there in the real world.
Great post!
One pervasive theme I've noticed is that all of spirituality is a coping mechanism against the bitter pill of life; no view is correct or incorrect, it is simply how you get by. This could help explain the vaguely muddled worldview of so much modern art.
This stems into a second principle I've noticed, which is that truth is subjective to the individual. Therefor the imperative of any art is to speak to that subjective truth at any cost. This could help explain why self expression is so deeply celebrated, because by the very nature of that presupposition, self expression is the only thing that's true.