Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 42-43))

INSINCERITY: A NEW VICE

-“oh, THESE CUBISTS ARE NOT SINCERE”-A BRILLIANT EPIGRAM OVER-
HEARD AT THE INTERNATIONAL ART SHOW AT NEW YORK.
Gullibus:—A new vice! Could you be the protagonist, Satiricus, of a
new vice I wonder what it would be like.
Satiricus:—It would be the realization of a very old and a very beautiful
vice, but I should wish to apply it generally, to every form of life. Heretofore,
it has been in the keeping of a few artistic minds; but I should like to re-
organize it and make of it a religion, a philosophy or an educational system.
I speak, Gullibus, of the vice of the Artificial, the Insincere. Profundity and
sincerity have no roots except in sham and logic. I have noticed that the
stupid are always sincere. They are both virtues, are seriousness and sin-
cerity; Christian virtues, bourgeois virtues, the very marrow of moral systems,
English ethical codes and New England poetry. If you wish proof in philos-
ophy that seriousness, profundity, ugliness and stupidity are interchangeable
terms read the “Origin of Species,” Herbert Spencer’s “Psychology,” the
“Phenomonology” of Hegel, the “Creative Evolution” of Bergson, and
Karl Marx. Place alongside of them the dazzling artificiality and laughing
insincerity of Heine, Renan, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Anatole France,
Remy de Gourmont. The first build universes of lead, the second carve
universes out of the air and blow them away with the nonchalance of God.
Go to the Greeks, who were the supreme adepts of artificiality and in-
sincerity. The “Dialogues” of Plato are the contortions of a Harlequin.
Aristotle said, “The universe has no insides; it is all outside, and here it is in
my books.” The Greeks invented all the sublime lies that we have stolen.
Their fables, their allegories, their tragedies and comedies, their painting, their
sculpture, their architecture were artificial, transitory, things lightly seen and
lightly recorded by the light of a campfire, during a battle, in a bath, during a
love-siesta.
The “profound wisdom of the Greeks” is as purely an invention of the
elephantine European imagination as are the miracles of Christ The very
cosmology left to us by Hesiod is a fanciful tour de force. They have left us
no book that contains a “divine revelation.” They were in love with things
as they are, the divine artificiality of this day and this night, the ironic in-
sincerity of events. What was not registered on their senses did not exist,
and a dead man was simply a corpse—no more.
If no one took anyone else seriously it would be a delicious world. Man
has one supreme gift that has not been given to any other form of life in the
universe—the ability to pose. In the evolution of the human imagination the
summit is reached in the poseur. But he must be born to the purple; he
cannot put it on like a sweater. When we look back at the Greeks we see that
all they did was a pose. They seem to have decreed their own birth and

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