The Anxiety of Influence

In all the years I've been working on the thing, there's an essay I've avoided citing. Peter Hutchinson: "Mannerism in the Abstract", in Battcock's Minimalism anthology. I have it. I bought it or stole it 40 years ago. I've read it and remembered it and put it out  my mind more than once. Maybe it was just that it helped me too much and I wanted to struggle.

Contemporary Mannerist work sometimes gets so extreme in its use of acid color, exaggeration of shape, and in its drama that it appears hysterical. Indeed in today’s reaction against Romanticism, against Freudian explanation, against pure logic, these artists see themselves as useless members in a society where everybody is useless. Where art was once the only useless thing, now everything has lost meaning. If the artist himself feels he is losing meaning, no wonder he reacts with hysteria. He does super works with the directionless energy of a hysteric – and the result is often hysteria’s attendant paralysis. The coldness, the lack of motion, the acidity of color, the lack of detail (expression), are Mannerist symptoms felt before in other centuries in times of mounting disbelief. Bronzino’s human contemporary view will break out into horizons broader than hitherto, views not seen entirely from the human scope. It would be a true Mannerist convention that works done despairingly, that desperately parody, should turn out to be truly significant.

The scientist offers a hopeful world, a world where inevitable progress discovers more and more, a world that gets better and better. This world is sane, stable, and knows where it is going. The Mannerist counters with a world in intellectual hysteria, punctuated by frozen activity, a world where space-time cease to have meaning, a world of soundless gestures, where humans do not live.

But there's an even weirder example: pathological. I was a huge fan of Robert Smithson in the early 80s. I was working for his dealer in 1985. I read his writing, even reciting one of his essays in a video. The first time I saw a Koons I got the fucking point. In art as opposed to literature—I read Calvino and Borges as a teenager—Smithson was at the beginning of all this shit.  I cover all of it in the manuscript but about Smithson himself, nothing... NOTHING. 

Smithson, from The Collected Writings. Brilliant, hilarious

"A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art" (1968) 

Peter Hutchinson, author of "Is There Life on Earth?" (Art in America, Fall 1966), uses the discards of last year's future in order to define today's present. His method is highly artificial and is composed of paralyzed quotes, listless theories, and bland irony. His abandoned planets maintain unthinkable "cultures," and have tasteless "tastes." In "Mannerism in the Abstract" (Art and Artists, September 1966) Hutchinson lets us know about "probabilities, contingencies, chances, and cosmic breakdown." "Scientism" is shown to be actually a kind of Mannerist science full of obvious disguises and false bottoms. "Topology surely mocks plane geometry," says Hutchinson. But actually his language usage de- liberately mocks his own meaning, so that nothing is left but a gratuitous syn- tactical device. His writing is marvelously "inauthentic." The complexity and richness of Hutchinson's method starts with science fiction cliches, and scientis- tic conservations and ends in an extraordinary esthetic structure. To paraphrase Nathalie Sarraute on Flaubert,"Here Hutchinson's defects become virtues."

"Abstract Mannerism" (1966-67)

Ever since Clement Greenberg took over T. S. Eliot's role as the formalist culture-hero, he has been the keeper of abstract "quality." The word "quality" has many propaganda purposes. It is used in the art world the same way it is used in the advertising world. "The canvas standard stands for quality," Marcel Duchamp might say. Nevertheless, it was Greenberg, who in his flight from hard-core Cubism to soft-core Cubism, i.e., from Picasso to Morris Louis, stumbled on that great Mannerism, ultra-consciousness of the "framing edge." Before we go on, let us look back into awful art history. Jacques Bousquet in his book Mannerism says, "By a typically Mannerist paradox, the frame became the picture. In France, the feigned frame enjoyed great vogue." Meanwhile, back at the Avant-Garde, which is beyond history, Greenberg tells us in his essay,"American type" Painting, "What is destroyed is the Cubist, and immemorial, notion and feeling of the picture edge as a confine; with (Barnett) Newman, the picture edge is repeated inside, and makes the picture, instead of merely being echoed." History repeats itself, but in the Abstract.

"From Ivan The Terrible to Roger Corman or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the Cinema" (1967)

The films of Alfred Hitchcock are Mannerist on every level. "As early as the credit list monstrous faces writhe on a background of threatening sky," says Andre Techine writing in Cahiers du Cinema, "The obsolete device of double exposure is reinforced by the crudity of grimaces. No artifice is spared the spectator. The contrivances are avowed." Torn Curtain is perhaps even more manneristic than Vertigo. Hitchcock's actors, like the figures in pictures by Jacopo da Pontormo, seem trapped in a beautiful prison that produces intricate types of "visual nausea." (See Mannerism-Style and Mood by Daniel B. Rowland.) A sweetness of color pervades the totalitarian settings in Torn Curtain. One thinks of the moods defined in Vladimir Nabokov's novels. In Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov seems to be describing the Hitchcockian view, "I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically, but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error—and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down on me." The red ribbons, that represent a fire in a ballet scene, in Torn Curtain, suggest a means of escape to Paul Newman (scientist-spy) when he shouts "Fire." A panic turns Julie Andrews' face into a mask of exhaustion not unlike the swooning face of the Virgin in Pontormo's Deposition. The "amateur craftsmanship" is everywhere in Hitchcock's mise en scene, from the ghastly green glow over roof tops in Vertigo to the diabolical sky in The Birds. Hitchcock's humor informs every terrible situation he takes his "bad" actors through. His settings are a vast simulacra built by an evil demiurge, and peopled with frozen automatons.

nobody expects the spanish inquisition.

It's hard to know what to say, other than what I've said before. Varieties of decadence, and they're all so earnest. But still...

The Decadents knew that Catholicism pairs well with transgression. The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows it, too: It held an exhibition titled “Heavenly Bodies” in 2018, a show that juxtaposed liturgical iconography with high fashion and BDSM paraphernalia. Catholicism embraces the give-and-take between sin and repentance, formalizing it in the sacrament of confession. 

An open defense of Catholic decadence from a young "senior editor" at First Things.  Homosexuality, and other fun, are welcome, as long as you confess your sodomy on Sunday morning.  John Waters read this and he's laughing; and a lot of others too, all older than Julia Yost and Matthew Schmitz.  Richard John Neuhaus would be horrified. But what about his goddaughter? And Yost name checks Nick Burns (same link).  

Another recent trip down memory lane, because the liberals mocking her are equally so utterly clueless. Left right and center, it's all cosplay. 

Just for fun: Three posts on Alexander McQueen and Giovanni Bellini 

Also, Bronzino, who now has a tag.

In the larger sense I've been describing this for decades—the origins of the reactionary politics of truth. What I didn't predict was a literal return to the Church. I've quoted the popular definition of kitsch as something or someone being "more Catholic than the Pope", and now here we are! 

Also tagged Vermeule. 

 

Lorentzen has a series of podcast interviews he labels "Truth & Beauty".

The focus on aesthetics in a time of crisis, the false equivalence with "truth", the mix of puffery and denial, irony hiding sincerity, as if we don't have access to the history.  

Milanovic rt'd a friend on why he didn't listen to stupid podcasts: the directness of listening to the voice as opposed to reading, the insecurity and fakery becomes obvious and almost unbearable.

notes before returning to an argument.

Idealism vs the historicization of idealism. If humanism is the study of the past, rejecting authority but respecting tradition, as Panofsky put it, then it is not strictly speaking "idealist".  Idealism is dogma. The brief period we call the High Renaissance was the moment between idealist dogma and the moral panic: the affect of Botticelli and Bronzino. If balance is achieved it's only in passing, and mourning it too much only reinforces reaction.

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Periodization works. Historicism works. Relations exist, but tempora mutantur. Times change. 

Art and money are in tension, not opposition.  The seriousness in the art world, the world of "non-commercial art" was not a world without commerce.  The parallels are obvious.

"The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures."

Art and money in the art world—the world of "fine art"—are no longer in opposition, or no more so than the tension between design and money—design and architecture are distinct (that's a subject). But that tension exists more and more, and more openly, in film and other forms of entertainment, except gaming (and again).

Gaming will be an art form beyond design when designers introduce tragedy. As Schrader says:"it’s still in the realm of the techies." The other option is not in games as such but "world creation", something covered late in Halt and Catch Fire, when test players and marketers become confused, and nonplussed, because the game designer Cameron has designed a game that's impossible to win. This is 2017 looking back at 1995. Schrader's article came out in 2014. Tempora mutantur. 

Cannes vs The Biennale  

Panofsky, 1934

"Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive."

etc.

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

My point has always been that this is the crisis of modernity, that Baudelaire and others said the same thing decades earlier, applied to themselves and their own preoccupations; that it applies even more to Modernism as an ideology predicated on the fallacy that no statement can be used to reflect back on the author without undermining the argument itself; that formalism, the insistence on non-contradiction, requiring only that statements be true according to their own criteria, is the definition of decadence, the replacement of observation with rationalism, of art with with artifice. That's the relation of Wittgenstein and Weininger's Fin de siècle Vienna. I even used Quine as an epigraph for Bronzino. The Gramsci quote is a perfect description of Mannerism, the crisis period of the Counter-Reformation before the resolution and return to relative calm, and the final flowering of Catholic authority in the age of the bourgeois. But I've almost never used that quote. it's too obvious.

Old and new
Panofsky, "What is Baroque?"

The twisted and constrained mentality of the Counter Reformation period shows in innumerable phenomena: for instance, in the frightful conflicts between religious dogma and scientific thought (a problem that had not existed for a man like Leonardo da Vinci), but the most illuminating fact is perhaps the reaction of the period upon the beautiful nude in general and the classical nude in particular. Invectives were hurled against Michelangelo's Last Judgement, which escaped destruction only by a thorough chastening, The church stated that classical marbles could be tolerated only if they were not exposed to public view; the sculptor Ammannati (at the age of seventy-one, it is true) repented in sackcloth and ashes for having made figures so scantily dressed, and the bronze fig leaf affixed to classical statues is a very characteristic invention of this period. On the other hand, both artist and art lovers were in reality no less susceptible to the beauty of classical nudes than were the Renaissance people, only their enthusiasm was marred—and sharpened—by a guilty conscience. What in the days of Raphael had been a matter of course now become a matter of either cool archaeological interest or sinful excitement, and often a mixture of both.  

In Bronzino's Descent into Limbo, the Eve is a literal adaptation of the Venus of Knidos, much more archaeological than any work of Raphael; but just this combination of classic beauty with a bashful posture and a seeming intangibility makes the figure almost ambiguous. The beholder feels that beauty is looked upon as something dangerous or even prohibited, and for this very reason is struck by these frozen crystalline nudes as by something more voluptuous and intoxicating than the straightforwardness of High Renaissance art or the sensual brio of the Baroque.

Panofsky Studies in Iconology

In the main group, Cupid is shown embracing Venus who holds an arrow and an
apple. The apple is tendered to the eager boy and the arrow concealed, perhaps
implying the idea 'sweet but dangerous.' Furthermore the adolescent age and more
than tender gesture of Cupid give quite an ambiguous turn to this presumably
harmless embrace of mother and Child. This impression is sharpened rather than
tempered by the fact that Cupid is shown as a quasi-sexless being, although the
myrtle plant appearing behind him is the classical symbol of love, and the two billing
doves at his feet signify 'amorous caresses'. To conclude: the picture shows an
image of Luxury rather than an ordinary group of Venus embracing Cupid, and this
is corroborated by the fact that Cupid kneels on a pillow, a common symbol of
idleness and lechery. 

On the left of this exquisitely lascivious group appears the head of an elderly
woman madly tearing her hair. For her Vasari's label 'Jealousy' is very acceptable;
for, just as Jealousy combines the terrifying aspects of Envy and Despair, so this
figure combines the pathos of ancient tragic masks With the gesture of frenzied hair-
tearing seen in a Dürer etching known as 'The Desperate Man.' On the right is a
putto throwing roses who on his left foot wears an anklet adorned with little bells, an
ornament or charm frequently found in classical, particularly Hellenistic art. To him
Vasari's terms 'Pleasure' and 'Jest' may be applied with almost equal correctness,
and he is certainly intended to establish a contrast With the sinister figure of
Jealousy. However, his promised pleasures are signalled as futile and treacherous by
the ominous presence of two masks, one of a young woman, the other of an elderly
and malevolent man.  

That masks symbolize worldliness, insincerity and falsehood is too well-known to require further discussion. But the fact that two masks are shown instead of one and that their features indicate a contrast between youth and age, beauty and ugliness, conveys a more specific meaning which links them With the figure  emerging from behind the playful Putto. This figure, sometimes described as a Harpy, sometimes, rather inadequately, as a 'girl in a green dress, is unquestionably identical with what Vasari terms La Fraude, or Deceit. Through it Bronzino manages to give a summary of and almost visual commentary upon the qualities of hypocritical falsehood which are described by sixteenth-century iconologists under such headings as Inganno, Hippocrisia, and most particularly Fraude. According to the dean of these iconologists, Cesare Ripa, Hippocrisia has feet like a wolf, half-concealed by her clothes. Inganno can be represented as a woman hiding an ugly face beneath a beautiful mask and offering water and fire 'in alternation.' Fraude, finally, is endowed with two heads, one young, one old; she holds two hearts in her right hand and a mask in her left, and she has a dragon's tail, as well as griffons talons instead of human feet.  

In Bronzino's figure these features merge into a unity which is, and is meant to be, both attractive and repulsive. His little 'Fraude,' obviously the owner of the two contrasting masks, really looks at first like a charming little 'girl in a green dress. But the dress cannot fully conceal a scaled, fishlike body, lion's or panther's claws, and the tail of a dragon or serpent. She offers a honeycomb With one hand while she hides a poisonous little animal in the other, and moreover the hand attached to her right arm, that is the hand With the honeycomb, is in reality a left hand, while the hand attached to her left arm is in reality a right one, so that the figure offers sweetness with what seems to be her 'good' hand but is really her 'evil' one, and hides poison in what seems to be her 'evil' hand but is really her 'good' one. We are presented here With the most sophisticated symbol of perverted duplicity ever devised by an artist, yet curiously enough it is a symbol not rapidly seized upon by the modern observer. 

Thus the entire group consists of Luxury, surrounded by personifications and
symbols of treacherous pleasures and manifest evils; this group, now, is unveiled by
Time and Truth. The figure of Time has already been mentioned and it is almost
unnecessary to say that the female figure on the left who helps to draw the curtain
from the whole spectacle is again none other than Truth, 'Veritas filia Temporis.'  In
the Innocence tapestry where the figure of Truth appeared in exactly the same place
she revelled in the justification of virtue; here, with a feminine disgust which
parallels the masculine wrath of Old Chronos, she participates in the exposure of vice.
That alluring sexual voluptuousness rather than other forms of evil should be
selected at this particular date to symbolize vice, is perfectly in harmony with the
spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 

Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600

As early as 1541,  perhaps even during 1540, Bronzino began the work in which he would mature a high Maniera in narrative and devotional art as he already had in portraiture: the fresco decoration in the Palazzo Vecchio of the chapel of  the Duchess Eleonora of Toledo. In the ceiling  fresco of the Chapel, with four Saints in a partial sotto-in-su, ['seen from below'] Bronzino seems not yet to be  quite clear about the direction of style that this  (relatively) large-scale and public work should take. It is highly polished, but in general lays  an unexpected stress upon effects of naturalism,  as if Bronzino might be deliberately making a conservative counter-proposition to the extreme style of the recent Medicean decorations by Pontormo. This minimizing of the earlier  Mannerist's distance between the image and  the normative appearances of nature is carried  into the style of the first wall fresco in the  Chapel, the Passage of the Red Sea (1541-2). The proportions of figures and descriptions of  anatomy and drapery appear as 'correct' as they  might be in a naturalistic and classicizing canon. But on this basis that relates to nature and to  classical precedent Bronzino imposes a repertory of devices for its stylization as aesthetically arbitrary as Pontormo's and (perhaps because they work as sharper contradictions of the  'naturalness' beneath) more extreme in their  effect of artificiality. Bronzino's stylizations  here are not, as Pontormo's tend to be, emotionally infused distortions of the forms, but  cool, excessive purifyings of them, making unreal smoothness and regularities and a temper  of precisely moderated, but obtrusive, grace.  The figures turn into equivocations between  nature and a neo-classic statuary of improbable  perfection, posturing in attitudes that are meant  to tell us primarily about their beauty and only incidentally or not at all about their meaning in the scene. In this scene, potentially dramatic, drama is relegated to the distance and there expressed only by objectively illustrated incident or a conventional vocabulary of response. The prime sense of the picture is in its accumulation of aesthetically remade beings, as untroubled by imperfections of emotion as of  form. The higher realm in which they must  exist is emphasized by a pure, pale tonality of light and by colour that makes the subtlest  distinctions in degree of glaciality. In the  second wall fresco of this time, the Brazen  Serpent (begun in mid 1542), there is a possible  reference to Michelangelo's design, but it is  difference, not similarity, that is notable. Along with episodes of naturalism more explicit than in the Red Sea, there are passages of statuary abstraction of still more transcendent and  poetical effect, and a calligrapher's enlacements of design. It is the altarpiece of the Pietà (now Besançon Museum) that crowns Bronzino's progress into high Maniera. Bronzino imposes on the inescapable tragedy of the subject the discreet suppressions required by the  high Maniera's code, muting grief until its  tenor is diminished and acceptable and endowing its bearers With such beauty of countenance,  attitude, and ornament that it irradiates their paled residue of feeling, and then stands before  it in our contemplation like a mask. An absolute technique asserts at the same time the intense plastic presence of the scene and the aesthetic factors that transform it. Colour, cold and  luminous as ice, symbolizes What has been made of passion. Both this form and colour, in  the intensity of sheer aesthetic sensation they produce, transcend illustrative meaning and in part displace it. Art does not narrate the tragedy but replaces it. 

But where content jibes With the kind of  feeling that is acceptable to the high Maniera, Bronzino exploits perfectly the sophistication  of form that he had created to express it. The so-called Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time (London, National Gallery), which must  be almost coincident in time of execution with the Pietà, demonstrates this to a consummate  degree, Based upon a complex verbal allegory of the Passions of Love, it pretends a moral  demonstration of which its actual content is the reverse: the exposition of a sexuality so knowing as to be perverse, and so refined as to be at  once explicit and oblique. Inverting Pygmalion's role, Bronzino has altered human  presences into an improbably pure statuary; but he has retained, in transmuted form, a vibrance that those presences contained, distilling what conveyed their sexuality and quick-freezing their subtlest sensations. Glacé surfaces of flesh emanate a contrary excitation; the  postures of the protagonists are frank and yet evade; cold grace is manipulated into attitudes  that convey, by the effect of pattern, the fine-drawn tension of the actors' states of mind. The  whole pictorial patterning, a crystalline, eccentrically kinetic skein, is an elaboration upon  this last effect. The colour, basically that of the enmarbled flesh and the ice-blue background, has the dual quality, by now characteristic for Bronzino, of intensity and abstracting cold.  The extreme refinement of the execution defines the matter and the meaning of the image in consonant terms, but it also conveys the sense that whatever else it may be, the picture is a surpassingly wrought object of art: fiction, ornament, and jewel, and this is an index of the attitude with which, from the beginning, the artist has approached its essentially erotic content. Even this aspect of human experience much be aestheticized, its values transposed into those of art.  

Paul Barolsky and Andrew Ladis
"The 'Pleasurable Deceits' Of Bronzino's So-Called London 'Allegory'"

Yes, the painting alludes to lust, to love  and time, to strife and love, to love and jealousy, to love and fraud. But to say that the  painting refers predominantly to just one of these possible allegories or that it does so in a spirit of earnest seriousness is to oversimplify Bronzino's accomplishment and transform the painter into a pedant. ... 

Bronzino's painting is highly contrived—artificioso, as they said in the sixteenth century: flesh like polished marble,  ringlets of hair like shavings of gold, the  whole brilliant tableau transformed into  pietre dure. The painter's artifice is exquisitely self-conscious and playful. Upon Venus's  crown sits a golden figurine, whose bent legs and upraised arm parody the goddess's own  posture, thereby making light of the fact that Venus is as artificial in appearance as the very jewelry she wears. Such artifice of form  is matched by artifice of meaning. Scholars  have sometimes noted in Bronzino's figure of Venus an allusion to Michelangelo's Doni  Tondo. But is the painter merely paying homage to the divine Michelangelo? Is the  reference to Michelangelo's Madonna not a form of parody—a sly disrobing of the holy Virgin, who is metamorphosed into a wanton Venus? And does not the figures resemblance to Eve in the Sistine Temptation present her in yet a third aspect and make of  Venus not only a Virgin, but also a fallen  woman? Michelangelo, as Vasari says, was  himself "ambiguous' (ambiguo) and ironic in  his utterances, speaking in due sensi. Would  he not have appreciated the other senses of Bronzino's droll and subtle allusions to his work?...

Were Bronzino, Michelangelo, della Casa, and Vasari not to speak of  Berni, Molza, Folengo, and Aretino—to rise  from the grave and read the solemn, moralizing, and allegorizing iconographical interpretations of Bronzino's coy, ludic London  Picture now current, they would no doubt  smile, if not laugh, at such goffezza—finding  it, in the root sense of goffo, slightly goofy.   

The last, and most recent, unable or unwilling to describe decadence as what it is. Afraid of moralizing, Barolsky and Ladis are unwilling to simply look, to observe with enough acuity and human sympathy to understand that it's Bronzino who's the moralist, condemning corruption as he indulges it. Barolsky's a fucking idiot. He's got a lousy eye and he's not even interested in art; he just likes linguistic jokes. The obvious parallel is the academic Warhol fanboys, who see the glam without the self-hatred and the stench of death. It makes sense "His favorite painter is Matisse", without the mud and the flies.

Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 2

Receiving, therefore, variety only as that which accomplishes unity, or makes it perceived, its operation is found to be very precious, both in that which I have called unity of subjection, and unity of sequence, as well as in unity of membership; for although things in all respects the same may, indeed, be subjected to one influence, yet the power of the influence, and their obedience to it, is best seen by varied operation of it on their individual differences, as in clouds and waves there is a glorious unity of rolling, wrought out by the wild and wonderful differences of their absolute forms, which, if taken away, would leave in them only multitudinous and petty repetition, instead of the majestic oneness of shared passion. And so in the waves and clouds of human multitude when they are filled with one thought, as we find frequently in the works of the early Italian men of earnest purpose, who despising, or happily ignorant of, the sophistications of theories, and the proprieties of composition, indicated by perfect similarity of action and gesture on the one hand, and by the infinite and truthful variation of expression on the other, the most sublime strength because the most absorbing unity, of multitudinous passion that ever human heart conceived. Hence, in the cloister of St. Mark's, the intense, fixed, statue-like silence of ineffable adoration upon the spirits in prison at the feet of Christ, side by side, the hands lifted, and the knees bowed, and the lips trembling together; and in St. Domenico of Fiesole, that whirlwind rush of the Angels and the redeemed souls round about him at his resurrection, so that we hear the blast of the horizontal trumpets mixed with the dying clangor of their ingathered wings. The same great feeling occurs throughout the works of the serious men, though most intensely in Angelico, and it is well to compare with it the vileness and falseness of all that succeeded, when men had begun to bring to the cross foot their systems instead of their sorrow. Take as the most marked and degraded instance, perhaps, to be anywhere found, Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, which, vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensivenesses, is of all its voids most void in this, that the academy models therein huddled together at the bottom, show not so much unity or community of attention to the academy model with the flag in its hand above, as a street crowd would be to a fresh-staged charlatan. Some point to the God who has burst the gates of death, as if the rest were incapable of distinguishing him for themselves, and others turn their backs upon him, to show their unagitated faces to the spectator.

Moralists are horrified by what tempts them. Ruskin and Bronzino have a lot in common.

In the five lectures on psychoanalysis Freud says that as the result of a successful treatment repression is replaced by "a condemning judgment". He doesn't explain the difference between the two.

One of Brassai’s most famous photographs of 1930s Paris is of Violette Morris, later a Nazi collaborator and torturer for the Gestapo. Sometimes the demimonde understands, like Liebling’s wounded pimp, sometimes not. But Americans like to live their dreams. Edward Mendelson in 1981, reviewing After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde, by Christopher Butler.

The basic claim made by every avant-garde movement – that its artists offer real innovations, that they surpass the limits accepted by their predecessors – is central to Butler’s advocacy. ‘My plan,’ he writes, ‘has been to argue that in the 1950s radically new conventions for the language of art were developed by writers, musicians and painters who wished to break away from modernism.’ This argument faces difficulties at the start, since the avant-garde has been proclaiming its radical newness longer than anyone can remember. The most time-honoured convention of the manifesto-writers is innovation: the formula for newness is handed down unchanged from generation to generation. Butler quotes an artist who wants nothing to do with ‘all the structures, values, feelings, of the whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain.’ This happens to be Frank Judd speaking in the late 1960s, but all that distinguishes it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history any more. We’re in science fiction now.’ This remark, differing only in vocabulary from claims made early in this century for the new machine age, is proof in itself that Ginsberg’s ignorance of history does not exempt him from repeating it.

A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Ginsberg has placed his spiritual life in the care of a Tibetan guru (one consciously avoided by the Dalai Lama), the autocrat of a spiritual retreat and poetry workshop near Boulder, Colorado. Among the guru’s activities are punching recalcitrant visiting faculty in the face and having them stripped naked by his goon squad. Ginsberg defends the guru’s methods as an “experiment in monarchy”, and insists that he must not be judged by the standards of lesser mortals.[i]

“Frank” Judd is Donald, and the quote is from, “Questions to Stella and Judd”, an interview from 1966.[ii] Read in full it’s as dated as the fragment Mendelson includes. But in 2015 it was reposted on the webpage of the magazine where it first appeared, and called prescient, because the same debates are repeating, in an even smaller subculture.[iii] Mendelson is wrong though to say that  Ginsberg, Judd and Stella didn’t know history, at least as fact. They were still trying to escape it; they each saw ideologies and made their own in response, another schism in the church, another splinter group. But art succeeds if it transcends intent, if it’s more interesting than the chatter that surrounds it, and if the chatter and the art aren’t in conflict, generally speaking it’s the art that makes the chatter interesting, unless the chatter is interesting on its own. The interview is worth reading to understand how much has changed, from the 20s to the 60s and to now.

GLASER: Why do you want to avoid compositional effects? 

JUDD: Well, those effects tend to carry with them all the structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition. It suits me fine if that’s all down the drain. When Vasarely has optical effects within the squares, they’re never enough, and he has to have at least three or four squares, slanted, tilted inside each other, and all arranged. That is about five times more composition and juggling than he needs. 

GLASER: It s too busy? 

JUDD: It is in terms of somebody like Larry Poons. Vasarely’s composition has the effect of order and quality that traditional European painting had, which I find pretty objectionable.... The objection is not that Vasarely’s busy, but that in his multiplicity there’s a certain structure that has qualities I don’t like. 

GLASER: What qualities?


JUDD: The qualities of European art so far. They’re innumerable and complex, but the main way of saying it is that they’re linked up with a philosophy—rationalism, rationalistic philosophy.


GLASER: Descartes?


JUDD: Yes. 

GLASER: And you mean to say that your work is apart from rationalism?


JUDD: Yes. All that art is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like. 

GLASER: Discredited by whom? By empiricists?


JUDD: Scientists, both philosophers and scientists.


GLASER: What is the alternative to a rationalistic system in your method? It’s often said that your work is preconceived, that you plan it out before you do it. Isn’t that a rationalistic method?


JUDD: Not necessarily. That’s much smaller. When you think it out as you work on it, or you think it out beforehand, it’s a much smaller problem than the nature of the work. What you want to express is a much bigger thing than how you may go at it. Larry Poons works out the dots somewhat as he goes along; he figures out a scheme beforehand and also makes changes as he goes along. Obviously I can’t make many changes, though I do what I can when I get stuck.


GLASER: In other words, you might be referring to an antirationalist position before you actually start making the work of art.


JUDD: I’m making it for a quality that I think is interesting and more or less true. And the quality involved in Vasarely’s kind of composition isn’t true to me.


GLASER: Could you be specific about how your own work reflects an antirationalistic point of view?


JUDD: The parts are unrelational.


GLASER: If there’s nothing to relate, then you can’t be rational about it because it’s just there?

JUDD: Yes.


GLASER: Then it’s almost an abdication of logical thinking. 

JUDD: I don’t have anything against using some sort of logic. That’s simple. But when you start relating parts, in the first place, you’re assuming you have a vague whole—the rectangle of the canvas— and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts, or very few. The parts are always more important than the whole. 

GLASER: And you want the whole to be more important than the parts?


JUDD: Yes. The whole’s it. The big problem is to maintain the sense of the whole thing. 

GLASER: Isn’t it that there’s no gestation, that there’s just an idea?


JUDD: I do think about it, I’ll change it if I can. I just want it to exist as a whole thing. And that’s not especially unusual. Painting’s been going toward that for a long time. A lot of people, like Oldenburg for instance, have a “whole” effect to their work. 

Judd is talking about moral imperatives, founded in theological argument. He wants to see things, not arrangements, facts, not chatter. A woman I knew, who’d gone to grad school at Yale, and imbibed all the theory and whose own work was “transgressive’ had always associated Judd with the “Enlightenment values” and art for bank lobbies. And then she met him, and realized that nominally an atheist he was a still a self-punishing Calvinist. She’d seen kink behind the Puritan morality and now she loved the work. 

Michael Fried was right to say that the focus on objects, qua objects, as things which displace air or water and which change in our perceptions as we move around them brings us to the point of theater. 

…I want to make a claim that I cannot hope to prove or substantiate but that I believe nevertheless to be true: viz., that theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such - and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with modernist sensibility as such. This claim can be broken down into three propositions or theses: 

1. The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre. …

2. Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre. …

3. The concepts of quality and value-and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself-are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre. 

Remember Panofsky’s description of the Florentine intermedio… “where the conclusion of Plato’s Republic appeared on the stage”, and the nobleman who wrote “that it was very beautiful but nobody could understand what it was all about.” “Performance art” in the 16th century and the 20^thdeveloped for the same reasons: the need to reconcile mandated idealism, eternal, deathless, with growing worldliness, economic and intellectual, and engagement with life as experienced in time.  Performance art was a way for artists raised on idealism to come to terms with relativism, using what they knew to make formalist abstract forms of narrative. Fried was right to say that it was “the negation of art“ as he defined it. Theater is the death of art only for those who associate art and philosophy, with “truth” and not fiction. Minimalism maintained Modernist idealism about itself, as materialism, but not about experience. Fried quotes Greenberg on its beginnings.

Objecthood has also become an issue for modernist sculpture. This is true despite the fact that sculpture, being three-dimensional, resembles both ordinary objects and literalist work in a way that painting does not. Almost ten years ago Clement Greenberg summed up what he saw as the emergence of a new sculptural 'style,' whose master is undoubtedly David Smith, in the following terms: 

To render substance entirely optical, and form, whether pictorial, sculptural, or architectural, as an integral part of ambient space - this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are not offered the illusion of modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only optically like a mirage. 

Fried tries to pull back from the implications, resisting the change that Smith’s work described. Smith’s sculptures aren’t modernist, they’re Baroque. The Minimalists were faced with the dilemma of  object-makers in a world where interrelations are more important than things; to be loyal to their calling and limit it to what it could do best they became puritans. 

Panofsky called the Baroque a return to the openness of the Renaissance, but transposed. The Counter-Reformation had faded. Late Mannerism had been seen in the forms and facial expressions of sitters for Bronzino. “It is as though the life of these people had gone frozen, or hides itself behind a motionless mask, melancholy and cool, shy and supercilious at the same time.”[iv]That imagery of curdled utopianism is ubiquitous; nihilism is everywhere.  But all these things are mixed, especially now: openness and authoritarian dystopia, humanism and anti-humanism. The Reagan years were floods of human warmth compared to now; the decadence of the 70s is looked back on with nostalgia as an age of innocence. 

In the 80s Stella managed to turn what had devolved into formalist kitsch into something American and grand: the grandeur of the American landscape meeting the formalism of the pedantic American imagination. He rationalized his way over decades and made the result into a baroque amalgam of Walt Disney and Herman Melville, and he made it work. 

Moby Dick, or the White Whale.

A hunt. The last great hunt.

For what ?

For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow- white.

Of course he is a symbol.

Of what ?

I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it.[v]

I quoted Lawrence earlier not just as someone critical of America but as a great critic of American art. His essay on Moby Dick is brilliant

At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won't do.

And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he's not sure of himself And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

The artist was so much greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical- transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or any- thing else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

One wearies of the grand serieux. There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.

The one mistake is to say that Melville ceases to be an American when he lets go, but without the repression you can’t have the escape. But I’m not going to go off on an excursus on Stella. He’s succeeded in making complex things, bright and dark, pop and sophisticated; with an optimism suited for the era of Reagan and Thatcher. I’m not going to quibble about politics. The baroque is conservative; it’s big money without guilt; it ignores things. 

The 80’s was the beginnings of art’s move into commercial culture, not the use of its imagery, but the desire to be part of it. 80’s art is full of people who wanted to make movies, who were trying to escape the contempt for film, and for pictorialism, that they were raised with. It’s hard to explain the hold of Greenberg’s moralizing puritanism on the imaginations of people in that world, of Greenberg’s formalism but also the moralizing and intellectual snobbery of conceptualism. I’ll deal in a later section with the artists from what’s now called “The Pictures Generation”, artists torn between jealousy and snobbish contempt for film, a few of whom later after they were successful as artists tried and bombed in Hollywood. Stella found a way out. In 1983 he was asked to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. His subject was Caravaggio and the future of painting. Working Space[vi]is a testament to the results of years of rationalization and slow transformation. Stella the fundamentalist worked through all the logical arguments he’d grown up with and while still claiming the same faith, he ended up a liberal. If Stella were a brilliant writer it would be a brilliant book. But Stella is one of the most important artists of the post war era; the book is ancillary, doing awkwardly what the work describes brilliantly.  

Deleuze claimed that philosophers create concepts. They don't. To repeat what I wrote above: “By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile. Concepts come late to the game. Sensibilities predate their clear articulation.” Nihilism came with Modernism, De Sade is a creature of the Enlightenment, negative idealism that scoffed at but couldn’t escape mirroring utopian claptrap. To rationalists the first answer to rationalism is irrationalism. But then slowly they begin to adapt.  From Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production, by the architectural historian Dalibor Vesely. 

The critical turning point in the formation of modern aesthetics was the contribution of Leibniz, who opposed the Cartesian autonomy of clear and distinct ideas that deprived human senses of any claim to understanding and truth. He firmly believed that our senses do, in their own way, reveal the nature and truth of the world. Unlike ideas, however, the senses are not clear and distinct but only clear and confused, and for that reason inferior. Somewhat poetically he compares them to the murmur of the sea: 

"Although our senses relate to everything, it is not possible for our soul to attend to all individually, and that is why our confused sensations are the result of a variety, altogether infinite, of perceptions. It is almost like the confused murmur heard by those approaching the shores of the sea that arises from the accumulation of the reverberations of the innumerable waves." Leibniz's understanding of the senses is still based on the integrity of the scholastic world in which the sensible or visible is a manifestation of the universal order. This manifestation is also our main encounter with beauty, in which the perfection of the order is revealed. What is new in Leibniz is the shift toward individualizing such experiences, which coincides with his notion of the individual soul as monad. As he sees it, 

the beauty of the universe could be learned in each soul, could one unravel all its folds which develop perceptibly only with time. But as each distinct perception of the soul includes an infinity of confused perceptions which embrace all the universe, the soul itself does not know the things which it perceives, except in so far as it has perceptions of them which are distinct and heightened and it has perceptions in proportion to its distinct form. Each soul knows the infinite, knows everything, but confusedly.

Such confusion arose, Leibniz and his contemporaries thought, because perceptions could not account for their own reason, because their origins and meaning remained hidden. For Leibniz himself and others who believed in providence, this obscurity was not a significant problem, because the unknown, inexplicable, and mysterious was seen as part of the divine plan of things. However, for those who believed in the transparency of the world, in reason, the inexplicable was very troubling. It was difficult to accept that whole areas of reality, such as works of art or the landscape, stirred strong feelings and a sense of beauty that could not be ignored yet could not be explained. This experience was described already in the seventeenth century as the "je ne sais quoi—I know not what."

Dominique Bouhours, who devoted a whole treatise to the issue, declares: "One can say with certainty that 'je ne sais quoi' is one of the greatest wonders and one of the greatest mysteries of nature." Montesquieu, some eighty years later, writes: "There is something in people and in things, an invisible charm, a natural grace, which cannot be defined and which one is forced to name je ne sais quoi.' It seems to me that this is an effect based primarily on surprise." The self-sufficiency of the Leibnizian monad was what brought the inexplicable into the domain of subjectivity, "each mind being as it were a little divinity in its own department."

With Leibniz, we stand on the threshold of a new epoch, in which the harmony and beauty of the world, revealed gradually in a dialectical process, became a field of aesthetic experience dependent on the cultivation of taste and on the role of the genius. The new experience created a distance from things and events, thereby contributing to the formation of modern aestheticism and historicism. Aestheticization itself is closely linked with the relativity of taste and the formalization of experience. [vii]

The translator of Deleuze’ book on Leibniz and the Baroque is a philologist. A history of rationalism is an act of empiricism. Philosophers don’t create concepts any than the first man, or woman, to say "je ne sais quoi” was the first to smile in appreciation. Aesthetics begins when things in the world no longer give a direct relation to universals, when objects as thingsbecome the experience of  things. Experience is individual, a danger to authority. It’s a danger to eternal truths, and thus to the King, as history is a danger to philosophy. Leibniz and Deleuze, as philosophers and conservatives, struggle to reconcile the multiform with the ideal. They’re creatures of their time, no more or less than Caravaggio and Stella. 

Stella defends a spatial formalism, including illusion, in effect defending what is now a cinematic eye, cinematic rather than photographic because the eye is moving. The lectures and book caused a ruckus at the time, but what struck me was less the discovery of Caravaggio than the denial of the worldliness that came with it. This was the 80’s of Schnabel and Salle, the rise of big money in big art, the time when the darkness of Warhol became the common theme. It was a time of crisis, a crisis that only faded because the fights in any real sense were given up. But Stella cruised along unfazed, now like a Hollywood filmmaker who’d never bucked the system to make the work he wanted to make. He was successful young; he’d never had to. He never claimed to be a leftist, a maker of “radical art”. He was only a painter who’d rationalized himself into a corner when he was young and rationalized himself out of it as he grew older. There’s honesty to that.  

Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History is one of the founding texts of the field. It’s a brilliant book. When I read it, a bit late, I thought of Stella and it made me laugh. It was all there, even the evasion of the political in favor of the formal. And then more recently I found the paper quoted below and it made me laugh again. Irving Lavin was a friend of Panofsky, the editor of the  book of Panofsky’s essays that I’ve quoted, and his successor at the Institute of Advanced Study. This was presented at a symposium at the University of Jena to coincide with an Stella exhibition.  

Wölfflin defined five categories of human perception between the extreme poles of which all artistic development must inevitably oscillate. He illustrated his principles by the contrast between the historical periods of the Renaissance and Baroque, but the categories have been also been applied to French painting of the nineteenth century and to the development from Classical to Hellenistic in ancient Greece. And, mirabile dictu, Wölfflin’s categories fit Frank Stella’s development like a finely tailored Italian suit of clothes: linear to painterly, planarity to spatiality, closed to open form, multiplicity to unity, clarity to unclarity  …Consider even the subcategories Wölfflin includes under Closed versus Open Form: Geometric versus Organic structure, Symmetry versus Asymmetry; frame controls composition versus “accidental” relationship between composition and frame. The “flat,” rectilinear, parallel lines of the early stripe paintings reappear in the recent “smoke ring” motifs, transformed into looping skeins that remain parallel but now define intricate, looping, transparent planes. The graphic system uncannily recalls that of Mellan, except that Mellan models form by varying the thickness of the line, whereas Stella’s computer-generated filaments are uniform and modulate space by expansions and contractions of the intervening distances. You would think that Stella had read Wölfflin; I never asked him, and I don’t want to know. 

The only problem with this is that it reduces Stella’s work to formalism. Later in the essay Lavin falls back into the hyperbole of the artist as a god-like creator of worlds, boilerplate that works only if you add that it means good artists are great liars, and that great artists tell lies so well they affect you against your will. Lies are formal constructions; their forms are the manifestation of an ethos, a “value system”, and we read and interpret them in relation to each other. Donald Judd’s “unrelational” objects
 exist in relation to their environments and also, obviously, since he says so specifically, to art and ideas that he thought were wrong or “messed up”.  Stella’s best works are bright and poppy, graceful and blunt, dark and violent. It’s worth thinking about, and with, and through.  You can use them to think about the late 20th century, about America, about “art”, about the individual and society, about capitalism, about Caravaggio and Disney World, Clement Greenberg, Herman Melville and Steven Spielberg.  Like all philosophy, his is best read for context

Stella interviewed in 1969 

I wrote my thesis on Celtic, Carolingian and Ottoman manuscript illumination. And it was ostensibly involved with historical problems, about problems in kingship and political issues, and how the ideas of the political leaders of the time were represented by the representations of the God or king figures in the manuscript illumination. But more than a third of it is devoted to a kind of pseudo-aesthetic appreciation of the problems of sort of[sic] interweave and interlace mainly in Celtic work, with a long aside which  should have been a footnote. But since I had to pad the thesis to make
it acceptable I actually included it in the thing on Pollock and the basic problem of decoration and what actually constitutes decoration and how decoration becomes art and when it ceases to be just decoration. And my argument essentially was that both Pollock and Celtic illumination were both art. One happened to be painting and one was manuscript illumination, but they both reached the category of art and left the lower category of simple repetitive design or pedestrian decoration far behind. It doesn't sound very radical in a way. [viii]

1983

The question we must ask ourselves is: Can we find a mode of pictorial expression that will do for abstraction now what Caravaggio's pictorial genius did for sixteenth-century naturalism and its magnificent successors? The expectation is that the answer is yes, but first we have to try to understand what Caravaggio actually did in order to see if his accomplishment can help us. …

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space — space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live. This is what painting has always been about. Sadly, however, the current prospects for abstraction seem terribly narrowed; its sense of space appears shallow and constricted. This seems ironic when we remember that painting had to work so hard to create its own space, or perhaps more accurately, had to work so hard to free itself from architecture. [ix]

Neither Stella nor Judd began with the Enlightenment; neither began with humanism. Stella changed. Judd stayed loyal to his original preoccupations. He collaborated with dancers; he let choreographers supply an organic element; Stella does it all himself.  You see how the ambiguities build. But both are in the space between philosophical absolutes and relativism,  relativism which can also mean no more than the description of subjective experience, as in theater, literature, film.  For Judd and Stella, that’s still not enough.  

---

[i]  Edward Mendelson. “Post-Modern Vanguard”, London Review of Books,  September 3 1981

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v03/n16/edward-mendelson/post-modern-vanguard

[ii]Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd”, interview edited by Lucy R. Lippard, Art News, September 1966, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, University of California Press, 1995

[iii]http://www.artnews.com/2015/07/10/what-you-see-is-what-you-see-donald-judd-and-frank-stella-on-the-end-of-painting-in-1966/

[iv]  Panofsky, “What  is Baroque”

[v] Lawrence, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick”  

[vi]  Frank Stella, Working Space, Harvard University Press, 1986

[vii]Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production, MIT, 2006

[viii]Sidney Tillim, “Oral history interview with Frank Stella”, 1969. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[ix]Stella, Working Space

Christopher Lebron Interviewed at 3AM.

This strand of perfectionism, as I interpret it goes something like this: there is no offense in saying that there are people who not only do some things better than others but that some people are better than others more generally; the real offense to my mind is when we are complacent about that fact or possibility, thus the person who can be better qua human potential, refuses to tax his or her own capacities, or – and this is actually important for my own brand of egalitarianism – those who are more advantageously positioned in this way withhold the resources (capaciously conceived) for others to more fully develop their skills. (I admit, little support for this last condition can be found in Nietzsche, but can be found in Mill.) I think some will find my position odd because on the one hand it affirms a position that most find inherently aristocratic but then tries to retrofit an egalitarian ideal over it. How does that work? I suppose it depends on an empirical hypothesis that could prove to be confused but in the absence of such proof I am supposing that each of us possesses a certain kind of genius to be better than merely competent moral agents.

Perfectionism is mannerism, a rigorous formality, propriety as opposed to logic, eliding contradictions out of fear. The language in the two paragraphs below is tied up in knots, the author craving attention, approval and respect, and then dismissing it.

LeBron in the Boston Review

On any given sunny afternoon, or appropriately dusky early evening, when the air seems filled with possibility and release, you can hear me coming a block away. Depending on your socio-cultural background you might not like what you hear. See, my car has thirteen speakers, two of which are subwoofers, and I get a great deal of gratification playing my rap music loud. I won’t reproduce any lyrics here, but suffice it to say, my preferred urban poets don’t always say very ‘respectable’ things. I often get side-eye from the police (playing my music the way I do is practically an open invitation to law enforcement to harass me), and from time to time white mothers and fathers clutch their sons’ and daughters’ hands a bit more tightly as I approach, leaning my lean, smirking my smirk (not at them, mind you).

I’m also the guy with a PhD from M.I.T and a faculty position at Yale. I’ve written a book that has won an important award in my field of political theory, I’ve published academic articles in good journals, and I’ve written for the New York Times as well as Boston Review. This despite having been on welfare, having collected unemployment, having been raised mostly poor, by a father without a high school education and a mother who never set foot in a university. I was the first in my entire extended family to get a four-year degree, much less a PhD, much less a PhD from the likes of M.I.T. Despite the fact that I’ve accomplished and produced more than many white counterparts, I’ve got to work hard to get what they tend to acquire with relative ease, which I do.

A portrait attributed to Bronzino in the Frick Collection is a characteristic specimen of the second phase of mannerism, which. is the very style of the Counter Reformation. It sets in almost precisely with the beginning of the Council of Trent and outlasts it only by a few decades. Now things were settled,but freedom of life and thought, happiness, and even beauty had to be sacrificed on the altar of the dogma, now firmly reestablished but oppressive and tyrannical as long as its rule was still threatened - and the same was true of morals and customs (Spanish dress; Tasso). Thus such a portrait has in common with the Raphael portrait that the figure is again quiet and full of composure; but it differs from it in that the carriage and expression are emphatically uneasy and unhappy. While in the Raphael portraits the self-restriction revealed a complete freedom and and self-sufficient harmony, it reveals here a constrained reserve deliberately secluding itself from the outer world. It is as though the life of these people had gone frozen, or hides itself behind a motionless mask, melancholy and cool, shy and supercilious at the same time.

Lebron is a "philosopher", interviewed at one of Leiter's favorite sites, a fan of Nietzsche's reactionary elitism, and exhibiting all the traits of Leiter's new favorite terms, ressentiment and reaction formation.  In his case it's the anger of Norman Podhoretz and Clarence Thomas, the anger of the striving insecure petit-bourgeois, the moralizing outsider who wants in just so he can say "fuck you" to his new peers and be a snob at the same time. Leiter himself like a character out of Philip Roth; maybe they all are.

As an outsider who had no way in Lebron might have gone for radicalism or religious fundamentalism, other versions of mannerist overdeterminism.  But times have changed and he's chosen the imperatives of elite academia, as Coates has found a home in the American press.

Lebron is responding to Randall Kennedy.

My parents inculcated in me and my two siblings a particular sense of racial kinship: in our dealings with the white world, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as ambassadors of blackness. Our achievements would advance the race, and our failures would hinder it. The fulfillment of our racial obligations required that we speak well, dress suitably, and mind our manners.

...They never suggested that these circumstances were just; to the contrary, they resented them and abhorred the prejudice and discrimination that littered with dangerous booby traps the pathways trod by their beloved children. They believed, however, that one had to face reality with clear eyes in order to fashion responses with any hope of success. They were under no illusion that strict adherence to their protocols would immunize us completely against the ravages of negrophobia; they knew that racism targeted “good” blacks too. But they reasoned that their strictures would at least improve our chances of surviving and thriving.

...Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most influential young commentator on contemporary race relations, has called the appeal to respectability one of the “most disreputable traditions in American politics”

"Booker T and W.E.B"- the phrase I remember from childhood.  Everyone above is craving respect in the American mainstream, but at the same time they want to feel intellectually and morally superior. Coates just won a MacArthur grant.

Let's hear it for Jewish comedians


To explain what I don't want to: Drake identifies as Jewish. His mother's in the video. And of course popular culture is full of images and demonstrations of ressentiment, the anger of the powerless: the Panthers and the JDL, Farrakhan and Kahane The JDL and NWA. True fascism begins and ends as a pose. But Leiter who has power and identifies with power, mocks the anger of the weak.

Irony is the glory of slaves. I should make it into a tag.

The other question Leiter won't address is the role of reaction formation in sexuality.  Following the usual definition both drag queens and gay bashers are demonstrating self-disgust at the fact of their homosexual desires.

Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, What is Baroque? [see previous, and there may be some typos.]
update: I've added the first paragraph, which I've posted before more than once.

The late Scholastic logicians devised amusing helps to memory by which the many forms or figures of syllogism (conclusions from a major and minor premise) could be remembered. These mnemonic devices consisted of words of three syllables partly real and partly made up for the purpose. Each syllable stood for one of the three propositions, and the vowels therein signified the character of these propositions. The vowel a, for instance, denoted a general and positive statement; the vowel o, a partial and negative one. Thus the nice name Barbara, with its three as, designates a syllogism that consists of three general and positive propositions (for instance: 'All men are mortal all mortal beings need food consequently all men need food"). And for a syllogism consisting of one general and positive proposition and two partial and negative ones (for instance: "All cats have whiskers some animals have no whiskers consequently some animals are not cats"), there was coined the word Baroco, containing one a and two os. Either the word, or the peculiarly roundabout fashion of the main of thought denoted by it, or both, must have struck later generations as particularly funny and characteristic of the pedantic formalism to which they objected in medieval thought, and when humanistic writers, including Montaigne, wished to ridicule an unworldly and sterile pedant, they reproached him with having his head full of "Barbara and Baroco," etc. Thus it came about that the word Baroco (French and English Baroque) came to signify everything wildly abstruse, obscure, fanciful, and useless (much as the word intellectual in many circles today). (The other derivation of the term from Latin veruca and Spanish barueca, meaning, originally, a wart and by extension a pearl of irregular shape, is most improbable both for logical and purely linguistic reasons.)

...The twisted and and constrained mentality of the Counter Reformation period shows in innumerable phenomena: for instance, in the frightful conflicts between religious dogma and scientific thought (a problem that had not existed for a man like Leonardo da Vinci), but the most illuminating fact is perhaps the reaction of the period upon the beautiful nude in general and the classical nude in particular. Invectives were burled against Michelangelo's Last Judgement (fig. 33), which escaped destruction only by a thorough chastening. The church stated that classical marbles could be tolerated only if they were not exposed to public view; the sculptor Anunannati (at the age of seventy-one, it is true) repented in sackcloth and ashes for having made figures so scantily dressed, and the bronze fig leaf affixed to classical statues is a very characteristic invention of this period. On the other hand, both artist and art lovers were in reality no less susceptible to the beauty of classical nudes than were the Renaissance people, only their enthusiasm was marred -and sharpened- by a guilty conscience. What in the days of Raphael had been a matter of course now become a matter either of cool archeological interest or sinful excitement, and often a mixture of both.

In Bronzino’s Descent into Limbo (fig. 12) the Eve is a literal adaptation of the Venus of Knidos (fig. 34), much more archaeological than in any work of Raphael; but just this combination of classic beauty with a bashful posture and a seeming intangibility makes the figure almost ambiguous. The beholder feels that beauty is looked upon as something dangerous or even prohibited, and for this very reason is struck by these frozen crystalline nudes as by something more voluptuous and intoxicating than the straightforwardness of High Renaissance art or the sensual brio of the Baroque.

It is therefore not by accident that the Rococo or Louis XV style of the eighteenth century, striving for emotional values of a more or less lascivious kind, shows often an unmistakable similarity to the later phase of mannerism. The Amor and Psyche by Jacopo Zucchi, (fig. 35), a pupil of Vasari, in the Borghese Gallery (1589) strikes us as an actual anticipation of Charles Joseph Natoire’s representation of the same scene in the decoration of the Hôtel de Soubise (fig.36) completed 150 years later, in I739. This the proud and melancholy remoteness of mannerist portraits eloquently expresses the interior tensions or “inhibitions” of the Counter Reformation period, whether we consider a young man such as the Ludovico Copponi (fig.32) in the Frick Collection, or a great lady such as Eleanora of Toledo Grandduchess of Tuscany, as portrayed by Bronzino (fig. 37).

Bernini

A Baroque portrait, however, is free and open to the world again. The attitude of Bernini’s Costanza Buonarelli (fig. 38) [on the left here] sensuously cheerful, throbbing with unrepressed vitality, harmonious in spite of her susceptibility to every kind of impression and emotion. The Baroque (I am speaking only of Italy where the style originated) had overcome the crisis of the Counter Reformation. A modus vivendi had been found in every field; scientists were no longer burnt like Giordano Bruno (whose death might he called an emphatically manneristic occurrence, while the release of Campanella by Urban VII was a Baroque event); Roman sculptures were no longer hidden in cellars; the system of the church was now so powerful that it could afford to be tolerant towards any vital effort, and more than that:it would gradually assimilate and absorb these vital forces, and finally allow the very churches to be filled with that visual symphony of gay putti, glittering gold and theatrical sceneries as seen in the Cathedra Petri. In the field of portraits this gorgeous decoration has a parallel in that late bust by Bernini of Louis XVI (fig. 39), the triumphal outburst of the new freedom gradually conquered during the seventeenth century.

The release or deliverance achieved by the Baroque period can be observed in every field of human endeavor. The Florentine intermedios of the manneristic theater (similar to the English masks) abounded in such complicated allegories as seen in the Intermedio of 1585 and 1589 where the conclusion of Plato’s Republic appeared on the stage, including the Planets, the Harmony of the Spheres, the Three Goddesses of Fate, and even Necessity, holding the adamantine axis of the Universe (fig. 40). We happen to possess the diary of a nobleman who saw this play and stated that it was very beautiful but nobody could understand what it was all about. A few years later those allegories were replaced by the modern opera, full of natural emotions and tuneful melodies (Rinuccini’s Daphne, 1594; Monteverdi’s Orpheus, a bit later). The very style of writing had assumed a specific manneristic character all over the continent (Gongorism in Spain, Euphuism in England: Lyle, Greene and Donne). This too was overcome by Cervantes and Shakespeare. A beautiful instance is Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale (1610-11) deliberately ridiculing the euphuistic prose of the courtiers, and opposing to it the emotional and even versified, but beautifully natural, profoundly human speech of the main characters.