DOI article:
John Weichsel, Artists and Others
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31335#0025
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or vulgarity. The worthy artist is he who serves the physical and moral
senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses
and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays, and
dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable
activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by
supplying of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been per-
ceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh
extension of sense to the heritage of the race.”
Now, in the face of such expectations from art, actual conditions, such as
they exist today in art-making and art-appreciation, are surely quite disen-
chanting. Neither the artist nor the public is inclined to take art with a seri-
ousness merited by its great social import. The vague feeling that we ought
to read literature, hear music and see pictures and dramatic works is taking
on an increasingly irrelevant character, hollow and sterile like a dying faith’s
ritual. I have previously pointed out that no other result could follow from a
surrender of art-mahifestation to a group of specialists. In all domains of
social life, only a broad participation of humanity can prevent a dwarfing and
perversion of public values, which, when monopolized, can not help being
transmuted into anti-social forces. The exhaustion of popular art-sources I
have already mentioned as one instance substantiating this assertion; as another
I take the now general shallowness of art-feeling, its growing perfunctoriness
and emaciation. These are the outcome of systematic, popular aesthetic
starvation. Let us now glance at the opposite phenomenon, that of over-feeding.
Just as the mediaeval Renaissance produced a type of man that glorified
learning beyond all bounds of reason, so is our own time nurturing the aesthetic
super-snob—one of the numerous species of intellectual snobs. Out of all
terrestrial chaos he plucks for his own beatitude the magic flower of art.
With this in his self-sufficient bosom he struts through life’s avenues with
skyscraping aloofness, with a song on his lips that is like this one of Otto
Julius Bierbaum:
“The world that’s somewhere round about
May stand upon its head;
We do not give a tinker’s curse!
No, if the world would disappear,
We would not care a red.”*
Now, art as a racial instinct of self-procreation of eternal forms of experi-
ence, of service only for what is racially human, can not and must not be nar-
rowed down to the confines of an historical day. A great artist speaks the
tongue of a thousand years and not the dialect of a generation. This does not
at all imply that art is not social but just the contrary of this. It means that
art is to reveal the fundamentally social forms, and not mere sportive mutations
which appeal only to curiosity and are the material for sensation and not art.
15
* Translated by Percival Pollard.
senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses
and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays, and
dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable
activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by
supplying of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been per-
ceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh
extension of sense to the heritage of the race.”
Now, in the face of such expectations from art, actual conditions, such as
they exist today in art-making and art-appreciation, are surely quite disen-
chanting. Neither the artist nor the public is inclined to take art with a seri-
ousness merited by its great social import. The vague feeling that we ought
to read literature, hear music and see pictures and dramatic works is taking
on an increasingly irrelevant character, hollow and sterile like a dying faith’s
ritual. I have previously pointed out that no other result could follow from a
surrender of art-mahifestation to a group of specialists. In all domains of
social life, only a broad participation of humanity can prevent a dwarfing and
perversion of public values, which, when monopolized, can not help being
transmuted into anti-social forces. The exhaustion of popular art-sources I
have already mentioned as one instance substantiating this assertion; as another
I take the now general shallowness of art-feeling, its growing perfunctoriness
and emaciation. These are the outcome of systematic, popular aesthetic
starvation. Let us now glance at the opposite phenomenon, that of over-feeding.
Just as the mediaeval Renaissance produced a type of man that glorified
learning beyond all bounds of reason, so is our own time nurturing the aesthetic
super-snob—one of the numerous species of intellectual snobs. Out of all
terrestrial chaos he plucks for his own beatitude the magic flower of art.
With this in his self-sufficient bosom he struts through life’s avenues with
skyscraping aloofness, with a song on his lips that is like this one of Otto
Julius Bierbaum:
“The world that’s somewhere round about
May stand upon its head;
We do not give a tinker’s curse!
No, if the world would disappear,
We would not care a red.”*
Now, art as a racial instinct of self-procreation of eternal forms of experi-
ence, of service only for what is racially human, can not and must not be nar-
rowed down to the confines of an historical day. A great artist speaks the
tongue of a thousand years and not the dialect of a generation. This does not
at all imply that art is not social but just the contrary of this. It means that
art is to reveal the fundamentally social forms, and not mere sportive mutations
which appeal only to curiosity and are the material for sensation and not art.
15
* Translated by Percival Pollard.
