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Anonymous
2016-02-26 14:42:22 Post No. 7745486
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Anonymous
2016-02-26 14:42:22
Post No. 7745486
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>We cannot, of course, here analyze the mythology of the modem elites in all its manifestations. We shall confine ourselves to a few remarks. First of all, we may note the redeeming function of "difficulty," especially as found in works of modern art. If the elite revel in Finnegans Wake, or in atonal music, or in tachisme, it is also because such works represent closed worlds, hermetic universes that cannot be entered except by overcoming immense difficulties, like the initiatory ordeals of the archaic and traditional societies. On the one hand, one has the experience of an "initiation," an experience that has almost vanished from the modern World ; on the other hand, one proclaims to the "others" (i.e., the "mass" ) that one belongs to a select minority-not, as once, to an aristocracy ( for modern elites lean toward the left), but to a gnosis that has the advantage of being at once spiritual and secular in that it opposes both official values and the traditional churches. Through their cult of extravagant originality, of difficulty, of incomprehensibility, the elites advertise their escape from the banal universe of their parents while at the same time revolting against certain contemporary philosophies of despair.
>Basically, being fascinated by the difficulty, not to say the incomprehensibility, of works of art expresses the desire to discover a new, secret, hitherto unknown meaning for the World and human life. One dreams of being "initiated" and thereby made able to understand the occult meaning of all these destructions of artistic languages, these "original" experiences that, at first sight, no longer seem to have anything in common with art. The torn posters, the empty, scorched, slashed canvases, the "art objects" that explode on opening day, the improvised plays in which the actors' speeches are drawn by lot-all this must have a meaning, just as certain incomprehensible words in Finnegans Wake come to be fraught with many meanings and values and with a strange beauty for the initiate when he discovers that they are derived from modern Greek or Swahili words disfigured by aberrant consonants, and enriched by secret allusions to possible puns when they are spoken aloud and very fast.
/lit/ in a nutshell
