October 11, 2001:  Excerpts from American Renaissance Volume 4, Recollections given in a written affidavit and taken from the journal entries and field reports of art society member, alleged assassin, and government informant, Amadeo B. Effscott. Were both General Colin Powell and former President George W. Bush members of this secret society?

“Well, one really didn’t know what to believe or disbelieve about the strange secret community of the American Renaissance…

And I refer here to late members of the Society of artists that goes by this name, if there are any who are still alive, after our operation’s interventions.  This has nothing to do with the group of White Nationalists or supporters of the White Identity movement – that this administration also knows well about – who happen to call themselves by the same name of “American Renaissance.”  This society of artists called A.R.  goes back to the end of the War in Vietnam. Started by a former POW, one J. Harvey MaCebe, who preached about the coming of a prophet. It was only late in life that Macebe recognized the prophet he was waiting for was a man called Sean Dorian Knight.

Far from being a movement about White Identity, the origins of this American Renaissance included people of all color, from redheaded Irishmen to African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, whether gay or straight.  And, although there were many White Nationalist sympathizers who also joined our ranks and tried to claim relation to the great works of European culture by the color of their skin, their claims were disproven and rejected by Sean Dorian Knight. 

Artists indeed were a race, Dorian proclaimed, but they were an invisible race found living unrecognized inside all ethnic populations of the world.  Your identity as an artist and a member of the American Renaissance was strictly about a racially invisible group of artists who were family.  A family whose economic art revolution called for the overthrow of the marketplace for all cultural assets in which they were disadvantaged by the works of their dead ancestors.  They called for outright violence against all art institutions unless there was a legal path for standing ultimately before the Supreme Court to weigh in on technical anti-trust matters of the law.

This was the economic side of things in the American Renaissance. But then there was the moral side of things.

Because all morality was derived from art, they said, and as God’s Chosen People, in any society you could observe in their culture that it was artists as a family who were the actual arbiters of the moral law.  There was about this family however, on the whole, vagrant rumors of wild hedonistic practices that were acutely on the rise over the internet. 

Rumors of deadly feuds between self declared “artists” and local hermits in the rural countryside.  An unconfirmed scuttlebutt about a summary killing of one local professor by another in the name of some interpretation of art theory.  But there was nothing one could believe or disbelieve at face value when the stakes of morality appeared to be such a trivial thing as to not even matter to the Washington politicians. Even less to the ivory towered academics at the Department of State, or the many Washington Think Tanks that were oblivious to the fanatical religious depravity going on only a hundred miles south of the capital beltway.

Perhaps these atrocities were not true to most insiders in Washington. Artists would kill other artists, or anyone who didn’t believe in the economic prophecy of their leader, Dorian Knight, and have faith in their religious cause.  “Either you were with us, or you were against us,” was a common phrase members of the society said.  And many in the know in the intelligence community believed the virus of the American Renaissance had penetrated the highest levels of our government, even going to the staff members of the White House cabinet and the Oval Office itself.

But nobody in government without Ultra Top Secret clearance was aware of the danger or even prepared to believe the myths and religious fervor we were trying to contain in the inner countryside outside of Washington D.C, New York City, and from Pennsylvania to Ohio, the Texas hill country, Denver and San Francisco.  The mass economic hysteria of Dorian’s followers had reached such levels that legend had it all you had to do to be suspected of being one of these “invisible” artists was to do a little painting, and if you showed your artwork to a member of the society with a higher ranking than your own, you could be killed for painting the wrong thing. 

Or if you were in government – and suspected of being contaminated by the virus and of being a secret member of the society – perhaps you would not be killed, but you could be immediately fired. Or, if you were just a lowly foot soldier like so many of my former brothers in combat who went missing in the field during this domestic operation, perhaps you simply disappeared.

If one was suspected of being an “artist’ or contaminated by the ideology,  the careers of few other than the President himself could survive such an accusation.  But nobody who was not privy to the domestic operations outside of the professional intelligence community ever really believed the horrific myths many of us in the field bore witness to when living among this secret artist society.

It was quite a different thing, however, to see the truth of the local myths strike fear into the actions of the folks at the local bar, or cause them to stand watch by the clapboard windows of a country tavern in broad daylight and whisper blood thirsty tales of these happenings at the gatherings and festivals of the American Renaissance; it was where Dorianites met to worship their founding prophet and leader of the economic revolution.  Where they came to gather and debate the merits of artistic beauty, and what artworks qualified in stature to be included in their prophecy for the moral law of the new American century. 

Needless to say, there were several disagreements about the nature of the beautiful as well the concept of a moral law.  Disputes in which many times groups of artists singled out dissidents who did not understand the principles of the economic revolution, or quote the words of Dorian, their prophet, correctly.

“Don’t you see he is not only a prophet, but revolutionary and a multi-millionaire?”

You could hear the Dorianites tell the doubters and the non believers.   And there developed gangs and posses of Dorianites who roamed the countryside calling on all artists to understand what the prophecy meant so their art could correctly represent the new economic order.  There was a lot of money to be made in this artistic revolution.  So were established the early doctrines of his Church. Meanwhile, in this way moral disputes between artists – whether they be wanna-be painters, starving poets, weekend musicians, or destitute sculptors – were settled by resorting to tactics of a brutal criminal nature, and some raw form of frontier justice awaited those who happened to transgress the image of the society or its aesthetic code.

Several society chapters had sprung up in and around the Potomac valley, including the Maryland panhandle, in only a matter of months.  This was in the early 90s, the years preceding the turn of the new millennium, of course. And, yes, despite the danger of their economic ideology, I admit there was a genuine allure to their creed – never mind the rumors of rampant sexual orgies – I mean the allure to one considering oneself to be a member of the American Renaissance society – to believe in their true identity, that is – that one is a member of God’s Chosen people.  To identify oneself as an artist. And then there was the idea of riches, the obscene amounts of money there was to be made if their artistic and economic theory could ever prevail in court. Millions.

On the whole, the government – especially the boys at the Bureau – did not look kindly on this question.  As mentioned, many an officer was fired or never seen again after admitting to feeling some kind of affinity to the artist’s cause.

So, even when considering my own sympathy toward Dorian, and all the pressure he was up against – despite his staggering newfound wealth – I had to consider any logical affinity to their movement with the most guarded caution.  People, officers, former military brothers-in-arms, friends were dying or going missing in the most alarming numbers. Anyone who dabbled in just a little bit of art on the side. Regardless of how much actual talent or little talent they had. Not just African Americans and the blacks, white dudes and Asians were getting smoked by the authorities, too. The government was up to something, sacrificing its own highly trained veterans to become paid mercenaries and practically wage a clandestine domestic war on ordinary god fearing Americans. Right in Washington DC’s own backyard. But we weren’t being told why – the real reason for our ultimate mission, or any of our task force operations.

Contagion was not something that was taken lightly, I suppose.  “Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be artists or cowboys’s!”, we would sing and joke, those of us who were about to be sent into the field.

It used to be your mother didn’t want you to grow up to be a poor artist.  But, with Dorian’s cult of the American Renaissance, you could strike it rich. It was a direct shot of adrenaline to your belief in the American dream. Through his art, he had gamed the system itself.

Capitalism at it’s most pure, a new economic model that would level the playing field for artists competing against the works of all the dead artists who ever lived and overturn Capitalism as we know it.

It was like a drug, our superiors at the Agency told us. But would getting filthy rich be worth it if it meant we must lose all our past artistic heritage?   – to live in a land of cultural amnesia – in the truth of the eternal present without a past – if the price was right?  Well, most rich dudes never cared about culture or art until long after they got rich, is the way I saw it. But falling for the cult of the American Renaissance could lead one to suicide or treason at best, we were told, should one lose their professional sense of self and get brainwashed by the artist enemy.

Indeed, there were repercussions to national security in all that we were doing, we realized.  But – if all it was was a cult of some false prophet, then why the magnitude of this secret military response from the government?

Something much deeper and more sinister was being hidden from us about the nature of our preparation for what simply amounted to another ideology we must confront.  Something downright diabolical with frightening allusions to Biblical prophecy at its core. As if Satan himself, after two thousand years of being chained to the fiery pits of Hell, had come to be reborn on earth. At Joint Task Force meetings I attended between the FBI and the CIA, at first the running joke was you could get a promotion by getting your picture taken with Dorian, the false prophet.  It was only a matter of time before they wanted the false prophet dead. 

Meanwhile, in its overt plot for an invisible race of artists to rise up and bring about the destruction of all museums, defenders of the Society of the American Renaissance said it was only their perfectly just cause in the name of creating new and more jobs for unemployed artists. 

Soon billionaire art moguls and collectors began to secretly buy into artworks of the new movement. The legends of several artist members becoming extravagantly wealthy, in the many millions of dollars, soon drew many new amateur initiates to the cult of Dorian.  And whenever anyone in some backwater village of the Virginia countryside started a rumor of having seen Dorian Knight in the flesh, it wasn’t long before weekend artists from all walks of life wanted to join; mailmen, plumbers, doctors, engineers, policemen, small town lawyers, accountants, and even applications from the local garbagemen were said to be pouring in with application fees to their local chapter of the Society.  Each claiming a genetic belonging to the invisible race and the right to earn riches, by virtue of their sample tawdry and mediocre works of art. Each trying to gain membership and the American Renaissance seal of approval. 

Yes, but Dorian was said to be living in New York City at the time.  Already, it was becoming legendary how many a government spy in Manhattan had been lured into joining his cult, succumbed to the promise of riches, only never to be seen or heard from again.  And though his art revolutionary movement had been spreading all along the coast of the Eastern seaboard and west toward Michigan, Chicago, and all across the Rockies to Southern California, it was hard to believe if all the rumors of economic success could be true.

Temptation to strike it rich in the art lottery was labeled as nothing less than treason to the country and a virulent unpatriotic disease at the FBI. 

One had to see, in order to believe the truth, our superiors said.  But the Federal agencies overseeing the infiltration and counter intelligence of the movement tended to believe more in the truth of the rumors of criminal activity and ritual murders associated with the revolution’s plot to erase and destroy all works of Western cultural heritage on public display.  Those master works of art created by dead artists that, in the end, only took away the right of artists of today to have a job and make a living.   

Well, if there be gold up in those art revolutionary hills – How much of the rumors of it could be true or not true, I remember me and many of my fellow operatives thinking. Most of them, unlike myself, were all career military and special forces and didn’t have much sensitivity to art, whether it was good or bad.  But, getting a decent paycheck and wages for bringing in the kill – or perhaps just slapping together an oil and charcoal painting of what we killed – was something we all understood. And, whether in truth we of the clandestine agencies secretly identified as wanna-be artist or assassin, our ears were highly attuned to the price of where we could best auction off our services.

I admit attending many a party of the Society, where the long driveway to the home was parked 5 cars deep with a couple of Mercedes Benz, a Ferrari, and a Rolls Royce or two.  And there, such awful artworks and paintings a 3rd grader could draw better were on display in the most luxurious dining room settings.  The house and gilded, surrounding furnishings said to be bought from the proceeds of the artmaggedon of all auctions. And such riches on display, I admit I and not a few of my undercover colleagues at the Bureau whispered out loud the temptation to join the ranks of the Society.  This was all in a joking manner, of course. None of us were true believers.   But it looked so easy!  The vast majority of the art being so atrociously bad, I do think some Federal agents were truly tempted to betray orders, join the cult, and dream of becoming a millionaire artist rock star.  

But neither was the inner politics of being accepted a member of the art society considered any piece-of-cake or walk in the park.  In order to join the revolution, it was said one had to truly believe in the ultimate prophecy of Capitalism itself.  One had to pledge allegiance to Dorian Knight as its sole leader and be prepared to give one’s life for the cause of artists. 

Yes, for the cause of that same pennyless artist I had once known and befriended when living on the streets of Paris, France.  At the time, I never could have known how famous he would become.  No one in their right mind could ever have predicted how far the revolutionary influence, ambition and greed of a single artist could extend to being an ideology of life or death – a contagion that would spread across nations and borders – all in the name of genetic allegiance to some invisible race and its right to be recognized by the Capitalist money-making machine.

But God forbid one were to say out loud the wrong thing or make a false opinion about what art was and what it was not. That such magnificent and its purging of so many false artists and non-believers from its ranks, it was as if the Society of the American Renaissance was holding up the mirror of economic evil of the country at large. Dorian was increasingly feared, but nowhere to be found.  Ultimately, it was growing recruitment among artists and their message of amorality and capitalist greed that had to be silenced. 

But why the counter-intelligence Agencies’ need to meet the myths and legends of all the mayhem with such overwhelming violence and stealth military force?  Could it be that the American Renaissance was  a truer version of Capitalism itself..or why was the U.S. government so afraid?

Yes, and such was the frenzy of evil myths about the Society and its leader that began to circulate, I myself began to wonder if indeed Sean Dorian Knight truly was none other than the Devil incarnate, come to the heartland of America to impersonate the Second Coming of Jesus the Savior for which all of the Christian faithful had been in wait. The Reckoning.  But nobody in government had either seen him or knew how to get close to him, Dorian, the artist in seclusion.  All they could see were the incoming reports from agents in the field of all the chaos and destruction, the outspoken greed that resulted from his followers’ actions.

Then, there was the time I heard of the strange incident of an FBI case officer who had been seized by a fanatical belief in the virus (he died shortly upon being assigned to a Renaissance task force on the tails of Operation Bull Moose).  After learning of this demise of someone in our own ranks, we realized as well that one could admit nothing to one’s superiors.  Eventually it was found that the case officer had contracted and died from a rare form of radio-active poisoning.  Before he had become terminally ill, it was reported that he had taken up painting canvases with a mixture of chicken blood and unknown substances.  A derivative of Plutonium was found in his system during autopsy.

But he had lived long enough to tell of a shocking custom of human crucifixions done side by side infanticide and animal sacrifices.  Unofficial gossip placed his sighting to where he had been posted near Harper’s Ferry, just inside the West Virginia border nearby to where the reporter Ike Abramson had been killed in a car accident.  I myself had heard of first hand accounts of animal immolation and Satanic rituals once practiced in our very own Old Leesburg chapter. 

Sure, these were unconscionable immoral things, but this is not what the American Renaissance ultimately stood for – ultimately, it was about justice for artists.

For striking it rich, and although I did not necessarily consider myself an artist, I thought they were an interesting people to represent. I suppose I had dreams of becoming a politician back then, “an artist of the possible.”  So, it was in my humble attempt to preserve some objectivity that I, personally, more and more tended not to err on the side of belief or disbelief, but instead tried to keep an open mind.

Once, this was in Old Leesburg, I remember while stopping at the well at Harvey Macebe´s saloon style bar & grill (called the “depot” by some).  I recall I’d even gotten into a friendly “moral” debate. A conversation about the government prohibition of letting ladies in there to form a strip club.  The absentee owner, a Mr. J. Harvey Macebe, was said to be denied a permit for officially running the strip joint, or even selling liquor under his name, on some technicality in theory. But, in fact, it was really because he’d actually killed a man who questioned if Dorian Knight was even a real person on his bar room premises.

A former POW from the Vietnam War, supposedly this Mr. Macebe was now doing time somewhere in a real American jail, and dedicating himself to becoming a real professional artist – an abstract painter – while vying his revenge against the government prosecutor.  Well the framed picture of this J. Harvey Macebe, the saloon owner, was hung right behind the bar – just above an autographed portrait of our own local neighborhood celebrity – a young Colin Powell in uniform himself – and I recall debating some of the pros and cons of his legal rights to open up a strip club as a very important matter with the barman. 

There seemed to be some local ordinance that was against women being topless.  But our conclusion was that any law that would categorize this kind of act as criminal behavior in nature only meant that informed leadership was patently lacking in the legislature if any ladies at all were going to be able to have a decent strip joint to take off their clothes.  Not that I’d support such a thing mind you. Just that, as an attorney and as possibly their future representative [I suddenly came to have political ambitions at the time], I certainly wanted civil justice to weigh-in on the matter.

This was just the typical sort of innocent conversations I would have in Renaissance country.  I tried to stay away from any volatile or dangerous confrontations about art with the local folk. 

But, despite the confidentiality of my reports I owed my superiors at the NSA and DIA, I admit I had begun to adopt the practice of writing allusions to some top secret information coded into the verses of my personal stabs at poetry.  This, my government superiors said were the first signs of having been infected by this strange art virus that would have the power to incubate and affect the stability and well being of American capitalism for decades to come. 

And yet, that little bit of poetry, and a harmless round of beer at the local strip joint, were coming to be my only outlets after attending the secret recruitment meetings for this strange new art movement in Renaissance country.  The same movement the FBI had their sights on, Dr. Farraway said.  Them artists who considered themselves the real Jews, and for whom the Bible and all of the art ever produced in Western art history was proof that they were the invisible race of God’s Chosen People.

Well, it so happened that I had foolishly written about this little conversation incident at the strip club down in my government notes journal, and by accident, even more foolishly left it out in the open for my wife ———[name redacted ]- to find when she came home from her counseling session.  I suppose I can candidly admit that I felt bad, unfairly distanced from her when this happened. But I had to stop her. By no means did she have clearance to access classified foreign agent military papers.  I had reason to protect all of my writing, especially given the vulnerability of her mental state.

Yes, privacy is a right, isn’t it, even in a marriage?  People have to understand that sometimes the truth, or being able to hide it, can be a life and death matter.  I had to protect my personal writings at all costs, even from my most trusted colleagues back at the agency. What if someone were to find they even had some artistic merit?  There was no one you could trust.  To the extent that it still shocks me to this day. Yet I am glad I trusted my instincts…if they can only help me survive long enough till the day the truth is revealed to the world.

So, despite how crazy this art movement was – and that the government was no doubt going to put a squash to it – after already hinting at me being chosen to the Task Force to take out its leader – I didn’t think I could trust the government. 

Dorian was my friend, going all the way back to Paris.  Agents were getting knocked off and starred at Langley one by one.  And the few friends and artist acquaintances I had made at the Renaissance gatherings along with my poetry were the only outlet for my confusion from the strange dreams and haunting phone calls with no answer at the other end.

Yes, those dreaded phone calls ringing that old clunky phone off the hook. The silence at the other end, until one time I asked if it was Dorian calling me – was he mad at me? And this voice began to yell:

“But Dorian had died while you were in Paris! – think about it – how could he still be alive?  His twin, they have to die too. And if he goes to Syria or Iraq – like the prophecy said- we will go there too. We will destroy the whole country!” the voice on the phone said, and then I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming.  The phone was ringing off the hook in a terrifying manner and yet nobody would answer on the other end. Who was he Dorian?  – the artists, the government, everyone seemed to want to know.

You might now readily understand how I agreed to go see that shrink, Mr. Farraway. He’s the only shrink I ever met who doesn’t like to be called a doctor.  “Being an artist takes a little schizophrenia,” is what they liked to say at the American Renaissance meetings.

But the whole country, America itself, seemed to be schizophrenic, and I thought I was going crazy until I began to learn about the deeper history of the movement. The way the government had been painting AmRen as the enemy of the American people going all the way back to Vietnam.

But these odd little events happening at the most random moments begged organization and explanation.  And, there strangely being none, so it was that poetry again became the one necessary palliative to the restlessness of my soul.  It was my one ability to help me function, and indeed it may have turned slightly into an obsession. Does this mean I had been contaminated? Unfortunately, I doubted my tawdry attempts at poetry could ever be worth any money.  But after those Renaissance meetings, I found I could not function without it.

“The ability to contain two contradicting states of mind, and still maintain the ability to function, is the mark of a first rate mind.”  the poet John Keats said.

But as for me, the only way I could uphold my contradictory thoughts of becoming a poet as well as manage to function in service to my country and its war against this menace – this revolutionary art society of the American Renaissance – was by doing my best to gettaway! – gettaway to the countryside and keep a low profile!  To practice my quiet devotion to being – to embodying – some new order of Virginia gentleman.  Inhabiting the role of a gentleman poet – as it were – until my obsession became my cure.

And so I found that it was only in this, and in the pleasant weekend walks I would take into the farmland behind our new ante-bellum colonial style home, that I would come to breathe a slow climbing rhythm and once again feel whatever menace there was in the air subside, and feel myself still at ease with the pulse of the land.  While Maddy Jane gradually took to more and more pills and prescriptions, and tuned into her ghastly television murder programs in a yoga like trance, not to mention her dance classes, I was there in the American wilderness.  And it was there in the wilderness, feeling one and the same with the land, foraging through the evergreens, treading over thick beds of maplewood leaves and pine needles, that I would slowly begin to perceive again, in the stifling heat of the day, the function and beauty of the genius that is nature.

And though I did not know it then, these few spirited walks during my visits – here where that inwardly felt menace of art did not altogether disappear, but rather seemed to strangely inhabit the earth – were oddly bringing me into communion with perhaps the very thing I was running away from.  Was this very threat I felt here at one with the beauty of nature the contagion of the American Renaissance my superiors of the government had warned me about?  For if I felt any menace here in the midst of nature, I thought – then how could it be so bad?

It was as if nature herself were planting the germ of some kind of artistic meaning itself, a haunting seed of doubt in my soul that went beyond in power and scope than anything I could have imagined.  For in the timeless crush of the leaves underfoot and in the sweltering humidity of the Virginia heat, I felt the mysterious lure of of something buried underneath, some work of great beauty left unfinished, something immaterial, and yet pulsatingly alive. 

Foraying deep into the wooded groves, the faraway rumble of power from the nation’s capital would subside in my gut. The everyday noises coming from rural houses would be chattered over by the songs of hidden birds, the fences and backdrop conversation of rear porches would fade, and alone I would be left clearing my path.   And, yes, unmistakably, whether menace or not – some unexplainable alien force seething under the surface of everything I did and everywhere I went began to slowly emerge. As if it were the cryptic message or ghost and dreams of some artist past. And I am convinced, I believe its origins lay, still to this day, somewhere in the backdrop of wilderness that sprawls and reaches out yonder the Virginia countryside.

And, yes, here one can eerily feel like these feelings I speak of are not mine alone.  They were not of the American Renaissance alone either. 

It was as if the American renaissance movement spoke for the land, and the land, in turn, spoke for the dead. 

And I, clearing my path, like if I were going back in time toward a yet unheard of sound would walk, and hushed over by the tall pillars of timber, in the leafy canopy pierced by streaks of blue sky, I would feel the tremble of that forgotten past whispering in the wind; in the infallibility of the present – the markings, the distant echoes of a first rate mind.

12 “And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the men that we saw in it are men of great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants:  and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in there sight.”  Numbers 13: 32 – 33

But, insofar as the Reed Lindstrome’s orders and the Agency’s concern about the matter, the problem with knowing what was good for the country about the Renaissance movement revolved around confirming what events could be taken for true.  And, what if anything false or illegal, could be immediately wiped out by force, using deadly force if necessary.

So, when I reported to Lindstrome and my superiors about my plan to invite Michael Overbeck from the Renaissance Society’s Old Leesburg chapter to my home for dinner one night, perhaps I should not have been surprised that there was an apprehension of danger about the whole affair.  They recommended and settled for no less than a stake out team and a sniper be posed in some undisclosed location, just in case.  We had already lost an operative in the same Virginia region, after all, and nobody wanted to take any chances.  And, just in case there would be sufficient evidence of a crime of Federal proportions, they also insisted that I wear a listening device.

A court order and motion for probable cause was petitioned for and summarily granted by a Federal circuit judge. 

The listening device was live but, unfortunately, I was not given a hidden speaking device for two way communication.  The technology at the time would have made it too risky to detect, both on my body and with respect to the size of the surveillance crew which Lindstrome and the Agency directors wanted to keep to a bare minimum.  Nonetheless, I assumed the risk. They had advised me of the proper attire for a disguise and taped myriad cords to my balls and a microphone that tickled the insides of my armpits and chest hairs.  But, for all this discomfort, I had my own personal motivations too.  I was going to put a stop to whatever nonsense image problems I perceived in the community to be threatening the viability of my political platform from going to a national scale once and for all.

And, though now from the confines of my cell here – much like the humble artist’s garret I once lived in in the heart of Paris, I wonder if perhaps I should have stuck to a simple life and never given up on poetry…..At the time, I admit I was thinking on rather more grandiose lines.  I had done a good job of cutting back on my drinking, too. 

In repose of sobering concentration, I realized I was only an an anonymous one in a vast crowd of many strangely allied to the American renaissance, each vying to increase their fold.  And that now my every action and every chance of political viability in their underground realm would involve a far wider labyrinth of people.

I considered the treasonous vestiments of my secret government mission versus what I considered the immensity of my calling to public life, and in short, I’ll admit I was afraid.  But darling Amadeo [pardon, my wife used to call me that] was never so easily discouraged.  I reasoned that if one day I were to actually be legitimately elected, I felt my actions would be vindicated.  And, foreseeing the eventual need to court power in its highest forms, I decided that one of my first efforts at gathering support and extending the scope of my rollodex would be a deliberate reaching out to members of this secret society.

That very night, feeling an enormous void in my gut – probably akin to the need statesmen have to reconcile their gargantuan egos or their very existence with the men and women of their country – I actually went so far as to finally figuring out a way to solicit the help of  the one eminent neighbor and great American in the community whose support I saw could be critical to any Virginia or national campaign. 

At first, I was daunted by just the possibility of trying to bring him on board, and cannot say that it ever amounted to anything more than a reckless idea.  After all, this man was no “small fish” to fry.  He was the recipient of numerous U.S. military decorations, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Bronze Star Medal, and the Purple Heart. His civilian awards being the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and no less than an honorary knighthood (Knight Commander of the Bath) from the Queen of England herself. 

He was, in fact, like an American Caesar, whose political popularity ascended by virtue of his bravery on the battlefield.  And for this real war hero there was even a nationwide call for his leadership and a committee to draft him for President of the United States.

The only problem was so great was his fame that he was invariably too busy to attend any of the local home town Renaissance meetings, and because of the sensitive nature of national politics, his commanding power in the Renaissance Society was acknowledged only in underground whispers lest they jeopardize his immaculate public image and incur the retribution of his legendary private wrath.

I refer, of course, to none other than the mighty four star General, once holder of the most powerful military position in the world: the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and long time Old Leesburg resident  – General Colin L. Powell.  He was, around the time I’m speaking of, not yet in service as Secretary of State but, from the comfort of temporary retirement in our small town, engaged in his speech making for the Republican national convention and in the signing tour of  his very own book of the American dream, his autobiography entitled; My American Journey.

I suppose that I only saw in his teasing and reluctant disposition toward tipping his hat into the ring – in the coyness of his potential candidacy for President – as well as after the the writing of his very own book, that he was in a time of personal decision not very unlike my own.  And so, therefore, mentioning the great quest of the American Renaissance and its literary canon (along side his $7 million advance whe he had been given for the signing of his very own book deal, of course), on that night I went ahead and wrote to Sir Colin L. Powell, (Knight Commander of the Bath) a courteous letter of solicitation for his political endorsement.

I recall the previous fall I’d also wished him a belated happy Rosh Hashanah, and expressed to him that, at the very least, I considered a casual correspondence might be of mutual benefit and lasting friendship as neighbors.  Thereupon closing in a more formal tone of patriotic loyalty, and giving only a tangential allusion to my affiliation with intelligence circles, I signed it with a flourish of impassioned gratitude, and pledged to remain “cautiously optimistic” as to his support.

For the inner details of the secret art society all of America, and soon the world, will be talking about – get privileged access to the incredible beginning: Here

The post On the trail of the American Renaissance first appeared on The Cult Street Journal.

The post On the trail of the American Renaissance appeared first on The Cult Street Journal.

reporting by Sirene Gates and Justine E. Knight (missing).  Jeff Nimehsaki also contributed to this story.

What is the American Renaissance to America? 

In these times of national strife, it’s hard to justify any such thing as prophecy. For those who worry about the “End of Times,” what is there to fret?  No man is immortal they say, and perhaps it is why the Bible, in Exodus, tells us to identify with the lost and forsaken. In other passages, even to identify with our enemy, and the alien in our midst. “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” Moses, was believed to have written. And, in all our confusion and fear – of terrorism, immigrants, and the beliefs that make up our people’s identity – what else can a witness do but turn to the record of history?  Because history always repeats itself, it was once said, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. And there is a grain of truth and freedom even in the saddest human comedy.

Yet, for those who have witnessed America to be the chosen people of such a repeat historical destiny, one might be forgiven for seeing it as a land that strives against the law of mortality.  As the country where the voices of the prophets – like refugees fleeing the kingdom of the dead – have come to be born again and fulfilled. For who was Dorian to the prophet Abraham, one might ask, when he said on that day, that “the spirit of a wandering American was my father.” Or who was Abraham Lincoln to the prophet Abraham, who over two thousand, five hundred years before the Civil War between the North and South, it was written in Genesis 12;2 that God had said to him;

“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing; And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and through thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”?

The laws of earth notwithstanding, if one were even free to accept as true the old man Templeton’s story – of the existence of the secret prophecy found in Egypt, in 1963 – one must first of all caveat everything by admitting that the interpretation of prophecy is a fallible thing. In all my time in Washington and government service, never was I able to find anyone of high enough “pay grade” to corroborate the prophecy that was said to contain, in relation to a passage by Isaiah, “the calling of a ravenous bird from the east,” or the promise of a mysterious and miraculous birth in the days that we presently live.

For the historical record, however, we may draw relevant parallels from earlier spectacular archaeological discoveries – in Nag Hammadi, upper Egypt in 1945, at the end of the Second World War – the finding of the hidden [Gnostic] Gospels from within the century following Jesus’ death, 52 texts of sacred literature buried and suppressed by the Church.  Secret scriptures which include; copies of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Phillip and The Testimony of Truth, The Reality of the Rulers and The Secret Book of John among them.

Only two years later, in 1947, a number of atomic scientists in Chicago – in response to the nuclear devastation of the Second World War bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other auguries deemed dangerous to humanity – published what to this day is known as the Doomsday Clock; a representation of the perilous times we live in, with the hands of the hour set at seven minutes to midnight.

The Second Coming meets the End of Art History and the Writing on the Wall?

Coincidentally, you might say, that same year in 1947, there surfaced another distinct, archaeological find. The ancient apocalyptic writings and scrolls of a community of sectarian Jews, who lived in Palestine parallel and contemporary to Jesus’ time;  A vanished people’s stories, which lay buried for two thousand years in the dampness of their sacred library, in the honeycombed caves overlooking the Dead Sea. Among them; The Sabbath Sacrifice, The Apocryphal Prophecy, The New Jerusalem and the Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.

These being scriptures, at the time considered to be holy enough to be preserved for posterity, which scientists and archeologists have now long studied, for they tell stories never before known of Jesus and his time, and give a different interpretation of history.  One that has been remained quite hidden, perhaps for convenience sake. Perhaps to avoid inconvenient truths that could lead to upheaval in their revelation and prophecy of a truer way of life.. For very much like today, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the hidden [Gnostic] Gospel stories (as well as the Christian Church’s approved version of the Gospels of The New Testament), were written in the time of great cataclysm and war.

At a point nearly midway after the rise and the beginning of the fall of the Roman empire, the Gnostic Gospels (from the Greek word gnosis, i.e.
knowledge] tell, not only of the coming of a Messiah – and, in one instance, the notion that Jesus actually may have had a twin – but along with the first emergence of God as the Son of Man, of the first emergence personified in a sibling rival.

One might say it is an altogether different reading of He whom the New Testament introduces as another fallen angel, or messenger of the divine; Lucipher, the great bearer of temptation and light, who throughout and to the final end of Christian history, shall be there to question Jesus’ identity and sacrifice. To question his love in the hearts of men, to do battle with the truth of what it means to be Good or Evil, and as well as a good citizen in America.  In the same way the powers-that-be have questioned the life of Dorian, and in whose name he came to lead his people, the artists, out of the artificial reality the world had made their own private Hell.

 *                      *                      *

For the inner details of the secret art society all of America, and soon the world, will be talking about – get privileged access to the incredible beginning:Here

The post In death, followers prove claim artist fulfilled ancient prophecy of bygone days.. first appeared on The Cult Street Journal.

The post In death, followers prove claim artist fulfilled ancient prophecy of bygone days.. appeared first on The Cult Street Journal.

   
“Give to any hypothesis which is worth your while to consider just that degree of credence which the evidence warrants….. Truth happens to an idea; it is made true by events.“                                                                                                                            –  Bertrand Russell,  On Pragmatism and the Precept of Veracity, A History of Western Philosophy

The below excerpts were taken from journal entries and a subpoenaed letter leaked from the court papers of Nick Farraway.  Addressed to National Head of Scientific research, Dr. Dirk Scudlee, at the NSA, as well as New York editor, Jarrod Maxwell Smythe, they serve as prima facia evidence of a hidden motive behind the government’s operation to kill a false Messiah. (A controversial figure whom others believe was no less than the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.) 

The journal entries also serve to document the context of Mr. Farraway’s noted enthusiasm, after being allowed to join the international expedition of the manhunt for Amadeo Effscott, aka the rogue operative originally tasked with executing the government’s lethal mission. Mr. Farraway was the only civilian on a strictly paramilitary task force.  Photos were taken by him en route, joining the JSOC forces on the expedition just south of Harper’s Ferry, VA on the way to Dulles, then onto Pakistan, Iraq and Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Some agency photos are included for representational purposes.

Field Report #1:  by Nick Farraway,  circa 12/07/2003

“We are therefore pleased to inform our committee from the Joint Chiefs, the Chairman, and the limited sector of the press cooperating with our public awareness campaign, that we are on our way!  Our Federal as well as privately backed international manhunt team is being led by two quite capable men of strong Christian faith and indisputable military repute. Both of whom I’ve had the honor and pleasure of sharing their excellent company in the last two-and-a-half months.

They are Mr. Reed Lindstrome, the Executive Covert Operations Chief, as well as [Lt. Colonel William H. Bellamy], the former Marine Recon Special Forces Commander and Head of Scout Sniper Instructor School, now with the Special Activities Division [SAD] at Langley.

These professionals were selected by the Joint Special Forces Operation Command [JSOC] to lead our traveling expedition team:

a) On account of the combined quantity of their in-combat enemy kills and they being some of the foremost experts in their fields for open tactical guerrilla warfare and urban concealment and capture, respectively.

b) On account of both gentlemen having actually worked closely with Agent Effscott during lethal field operations conducted after he transitioned from Operation Menace to Operations S-Crypt and Bull-Moose.

c) On account of their impeccable moral integrity that would be highly unlikely to fall victim to the seductive allure of the movement of the American Renaissance and its ideology that has lately been infiltrating a growing number of members from our armed forces, government, and private sector like a pathogenic virus.

Despite our unsuccessful attempts to confirm Mr. Effscott’s location, and the many troubling doubts raised by the evidence of his case against the government, so far, our team therefore remains in high spirits. Comfortable in the knowledge that we are being led by operations men familiar with, not only Agent Effscott’s physical covert field ops paramilitary training and tactics, but also his psychological assessment, mindset, and way of thinking.

As a psychiatrist by training, I have been both puzzled, and at times fascinated, by their almost spiritual recounting of anecdotes, sermons, and parables they have experienced in the variety of lethal operations conducted with him. We are, nonetheless, uncompromised in the endeavor to obtain the eventual capture and rendition of former Agent Amadeo Effscott, so that he may face the true scales of justice and let history be his judge.

Field Report # 5, by Nick Farraway, (date unknown)

“Setting down the facts, and only the facts, about this dreadly matter.  For it to be recorded to you here – before I get some much needed sleep (after being admittedly haunted earlier when reconsidering some of the things Agent Harding was working on in her career), however: A word on our present circumstances; as I understand at least 3 of my last 4 cables, if not all 4 dispatches, were intercepted by potentially rogue communications officers at the NSA sympathetic to the growing cult and contagion of the American Renaissance. This message contains the latest encryption software developed in engineering isolation. I trust you will receive it this time.

I write to you from Anatolia (in Asia minor, modern day Turkey). Where we have come to after having left that raid of an abandoned hostel in Cyprus. Continuing on a path of strong human intelligence in regards to the purported route Mr. Effscott has mapped out for his missionary travels and escape. Since he has become well skilled in not leaving any digital trace, we have been here a full week. Searching all leads and sources capable of producing the most reliable paper trail of his whereabouts. Sometimes traveling by donkey into the remote foothills of this dust land. Where word of mouth from a flock of converts has led us to believe there was a sighting of him only in the last few months.

Indeed, we’re awaiting lab analysis of a blurry photo taken by one local tribesman.  A villager who claims Mr. Effscott destroyed their camera when he was photographed passing through. At first doubting this villager’s claim, we later became convinced and lost nearly a full day’s search when forced to hear the tribal elders’ plaintive lament the American fugitive offered only a sheaf of poems and a pack of Chesterfields as a form of reparations.

There appear to be no other violent acts or incidents resulting in loss of life committed against the locals. But still confident Mr. Effscott has been here, we press on.  Should we have no more luck in Anatolia, our intended plan is to return to Cyprus, then to Antioch by way of Corinth. Afterward, we may proceed to Jerusalem, Tarsus, and Phillipi. Where pockets of the population have professed some knowledge of (and ideological adherence to) the American Renaissance, if not yet having shown any outward signs of their adoption of the faith or spiritual allegiance to the cult.

And there is strong intelligence that one of these three cities is the postulated launching point from which former Agent Amadeo Effscott intends to embark on his evangelical expedition to modern day Galatia, Phrygia, and Ephesus. With the likelihood of ending up proselytizing in Macedonia, sailing to Athens, or Montenegro or possibly Rome itself.  Last but not least, we cannot discount the possibility Agent Effscott may have simply boarded a charter plane in Cyprus incognito, with a direct flight to either attend a fiesta in Spain or in his old stomping grounds of Paris, France.

            Government and taxpayer funds permitting, we are of course willing to bravely take our search to Madrid, Barcelona, or the French capital. If need be, there’s been talk of going all the way to Aleppo and Dabiq in modern day Syria. Despite the impending civil war on the road to Damascus, and the risk of danger in tracking him.  But, here’s where my sixth sense urges extreme caution and your thoughts on practical safety vis a vis the risks/rewards of his story’s possible publication would again be most appreciated. As should our expedition, in the interests of justice, have to go there (you know, Aleppo is not Ibiza), it so happens my colleagues have increasingly promulgated the strategy of me being the one designated to travel alone – all by myself – in this eventuality. After all, I knew Mr. Effscott as well. And, without extensive friction in our professional roles, there seems to be a unanimous consensus that, whatever far reaches of the earth he might end up going to where this new movement courts the shadowy paths of Armageddon, I am still the person most likely to obtain his trust and confidence and avoid being put in harm’s way.

My established rapport with the suspect comes, not only from the happenstance of being his good neighbor for a number of years, but from our first connection when I was the designated polygrapher for his induction and later assignment debriefings at the Agency. Upon afterward entering private practice as a psychiatrist, I was also trusted enough by Mr. Effscott to become the private medical psychologist for his missing wife. And given the grave nature of the allegations being made by this former Federal agent, I admit I’m almost disconcerted to report that he was always known to me as a person of unquestionable honesty and integrity.  

It’s my fervent prayer, therefore, that there’s no truth whatsoever to the apocalyptic beliefs that have been created by the latest legions of new converts to the movement of the American Renaissance in the face of sheer government denial.  Although the mere premise of the ascendancy of the cult, of course, we consider an impossibility that should require no public refutation by the government. But, to his credit, it is most surprising to report Agent Effscott retains an unblemished record in passing every official lie detector test which he has been submitted to. If captured alive in mid gospel, hence it is my ultimate goal to catch him in a falsehood.  Or, to somehow reach a scientific understanding as to how he’s repeatedly been able to pass all official polygraphs undetected with his bald faced prevarications about the tragedy of our true fallen Messiah who has already come.

A tragedy certainly, whoever this person was, if rumors are to be believed that it occurred by our own government’s cataclysmic blunder in a fiasco of mistaken identity.  But, as to the nature of the religious crisis and unsettling truths the case of Mr. Effscott presents believers and unbelievers alike, it pertains to a pervasive sentiment of mistrust that arose after the deadly incident of Operation S-Crypt [long after Waco], for which you are aware, all details remain ultra-classified.

Yet from where there emerged for many in the intelligence community – along with this sentiment – ample rumors of a protracted Holy War being covertly waged against the innocent American public amidst eye-witness accounts of religious happenings. The Bowling Green and Nameless Massacre, in which worshippers were killed on bended knee before the holiest of apparitions.  Rumors and allegations of the dead Messiah, it bears repeating, that if they were to be made public with only the slightest mere shred of truth to them in the wake of 9/11, the scale of the calamity and outrageous position it places the U.S. authorities in would be sufficient to rightly make even the bravest in our country tremble in their boots.

Nick Farraway  Field Report # 7, estimated date March 2004

Dear Mr. Maxwell Smythe, copying Dr. Scudlee here……I’m glad you received my last and latest missive, and I take equal alarm of the rumors you mention are beginning to penetrate members of our law enforcement and intelligence communities.  I trust your men will be able to handle appropriately. Yet, still this proud public servant feels a duty to convey here what I knew before leaving on this extended manhunt:

To give you one example of other dangerous rumors that have started to spread, consider the disappearance of Agent Jules Harding. Specifically with concern to the classified government contracts her name was attached to during the course of her life’s work. As mentioned, before and since the last DOD assignment of hers in Paris, many of Ms. Harding’s instructional films on espionage and the perils of undercover work have been widely appreciated by a diverse audience of trainees at the Academy.

Much of Agent Harding’s genre breaking filmwork [often filmed in a live, reality TV, documentary style] is housed in the FBI Library, which is notable for providing our police forces in every State with the latest law enforcement news from around the world. In addition, the library offers a variety of audiovisual materials, legal publications and online resources on how to both track and catch criminals and terrorists and how to avoid getting harmed by them. The issue of the rumors surrounds one last such assignment for the library Ms. Harding was contracted to film that many consider would have been the crowning jewel of her Academy oeuvre. It was an assignment she looked forward to with relish and one that, in her own words, as told directly to many of her colleagues, “she couldn’t miss.”  Yet she disappeared in circumstances unknown shortly before the scheduled filming date.  I refer, of course, to the documented siege and conflagration at Mount Carmel, in Waco, Texas.

Speculation in the Academy is that she wouldn’t have missed this filming assignment for the world. Unless, there was an even bigger revelation she was working on in her watch over terrorism containment for the Middle East. One that was most likely ultra top-secret, reaching levels in the chain of command beyond the cabinet of the President of the United States himself.  An assignment opportunity that she thus considered even more important than the false prophecies that were burned at Waco. That is, in terms of its religious consequences and potential political significance to change the world. Or, of course, the rumors have alluded as well to the possibility of foul play or some kind of government cover up of even greater magnitude. Or, what was so important that would have impeded Agent Harding to miss such a once in a life time filmic opportunity?  One she told everyone in her closest circle very precisely that “she couldn’t miss.”

Whatever the case, the resulting myths and legend surrounding this episode in the life and possible death of such an iconic agent has created a sinister undercurrent to the normally upbeat mood during training at the Academy. A mood that – ever since the Waco disaster and her disappearance – feeds into this growing culture of rumors rife with fear and paranoia that has been intense enough to spread a diabolical chill into New Agent Trainees (NATs) and even many veteran’s on the force.

Indeed, there has been grumbling in the ranks.  Most notably since the meaning of several declassified, formerly covert operations in which Ms. Harding participated – upon examination of her filmwork and limited available documents – came to be interpreted as the bonafides confirmation and proof of the existence of a vengeful, supernatural and unidentified enemy prophet. One that our government has been engaged in a covert Holy War against for many decades long before 9/11.

With these thoughts in mind, I now leave you to consider the grave feelings that accompany us in our pursuit of Mr. Effscott. Beset by the rumors we are on the front lines of a covert Holy War against an invisible supernatural element.  One whose evil and terrifying actions can only be made visible and confronted by way of capturing in video and film. Even though, it was Officer Harding’s constant emphasis on safety in her videos which makes her disappearance all the more troubling. And it begs the question of what classified information Agent Harding may have shared with Effscott that was beyond his pay grade or level of access, and which may give him an unknown advantage over we who seek to bring him to justice. As if a fugitive of the law might have access to a higher law than the law of the United States itself?

It is at this juncture where my background investigation into the case of Mr. Effscott has come to an end. And, finding myself camped out on the remote hills of south eastern Turkey – close to the Syrian border – I have had to give up on any speculation on what further information any potential meeting with Agent Harding could provide. 

Despite the legacy of Officer Harding’s filmwork and her contribution to the Academy, there appears to be an unusual lack of transparency and red tape surrounding the circumstances at the end of her last assignment. There are even other wilder myths that have circled about her. That, despite her marital status, for example, she may have engaged in an affair or perhaps having secretly eloped with the now fugitive Agent Effscott. 

Hence, I’m coming to the somber conclusion that it may be necessary to use the ruse of Amadeo’s missing wife as a last ditch effort to have him reveal his location. But with a long day of travels to go tomorrow, I now beg my dog-tired head to catch some sleep. As we load up our video cameras along with our weapons in place, and prepare ourselves to meet the weary fate the good Lord has in store for us all.             

                                                                                                                      Sincerely,

              Nick Farraway

*                          *                          *

For the inner details of the secret art society all of America, and soon the world, will be talking about – get privileged access to the incredible beginning:Here

The post The manhunt continues into modern day Asia minor first appeared on The Cult Street Journal.

The post The manhunt continues into modern day Asia minor appeared first on The Cult Street Journal.

Reveille.  Roused from olive green bunks in mid-slumber at 0:500 hours, in Charlie Company, the mentality necessary for a bespoke assassination is, at first, factory made. Candidate Amadeo sounded off his last name and number and was showered, shaved and dressed, his bed made, note-papers locked up, boots polished and machine gun rifle ready at attention in company formation out on the parade deck of the barracks in the piercing cold wind of the sunless Virginia morning.

This was Quantico, after all, and the way he spoke during his interrogation, it was just the way I had remembered it.  Like the bulk of his fellow platoon mates, Candidates Seagers, Kalk, and McGivemey, Candidates Ready, Price, and Freeman, he had expected to end up posted to anywhere at the most wild and dangerous fringes of the globe. 

But upon successful graduation from officer candidate school,  he was sent to a place…Yes, that place where the Company trains…well, we called it “the Farm”.  An isolated training camp on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia. 

…And after coming out of the pocket, “out of the pipeline,” it so happened that Candidate “Amadeo Effscott” – as he came to be known – had all along been slated for government service working just outside the local intelligence community in plain clothed civilian attire.  An unspecified counter-intel unit operated by a close-knit group of high ranking retired officers of the military and clandestine service.  Perhaps not so unbelievably, a covert domestic security Task Force existing as a body which exactly mirrored the official national security committee whose normal espionage activities may only be reviewed by Congress in closed executive session.  The following are the declassified excerpts from his FBI interrogation:

“..But, of this mirror body, I will simply say that this was not the case.  It was, at least at the time, under the furtive – and therefore illegal – control of the Nationals Security Council.  Yes, not so much different than the one Freddie had described, it remained – a semi or completely clandestine body aloof from congressional oversight.  And if anyone ever thought the Office of Strategic Services simply dissolved into the CIA one fine morning during the late 1940s, they should think again.  Whether or not Mr. David N. Richardson III, even to this day, would ever admit the nature of the task force that was under his control or the magnitude of its existence is not anymore of my concern.

And as for this body, any record of its existence is or was handily kept close to a shredder used immediately after any physical convening by the five principles of the group.  The group which in the words President Ford used to phrase the first public acknowledgement of its existence, “…reviews every covert operation undertaken by our government.”  Yes, some today have called it “the Deep State.” But we called it the Special Group, as so is the name by which they are seldom known.

Certainly, they thought themselves just that.  Probably in every minute of their days in the power meetings which they held on the fate of the country.  And the shredded minutes of those meetings, indeed, might have made history weep.  This, after all, was a second mirror body to the already secret ministrations of a group no ordinary citizen might track or take any notice of.  And according to their philosophy, no doubt jubilantly taken in measure from the clichéd good old days of Cold War unaccountability – if they did not exist on paper, they never really existed at all.

Payroll and operational expenses all fell under the domain of the National Security Councils normal operations – inside of which existed this small quasi-military department in theory answerable only directly to the Commander in Chief.  But I can aver no more than that which I have direct knowledge of.  As per this body, I cannot even say from whom my direct orders were received.  But only, with certitude, from whom they were not. 

The founding charter of the Central Intelligence Agency makes it a violation of law that they engage in any domestic operation.  No such action either, under the National Security Agency, as reviewed by Congress, could ever take such a course.  As per this body, it is not likely even the President of the United States himself ever knew of the true nature of its existence.  Other than Mr. David N. Richardson III, as of this writing, the names of none of the four other Task Force principals were ever uncovered to ordinary grade field operatives.  This limited information, and any of the foregoing or following assertions with respect to its mission as it came to be known to me, I herewith submit at my own peril to the best of my recollection.  This is my testimony.  ——(Statistics for house of rep. mid term elections have here been deleted)

Even after the new year, I was never but vaguely informed of its true purpose.  Weeks of further military and tactics training passed.  A thorough grounding and immersion in the subtleties of the tradecraft.  The “sticks and bricks” of the highly secretive world of professional espionage – the “brush pass,” the “dead drop,” the cash exchange, the stake out, avoiding surveillance, the techno-trinkets and cheap villainy disguises, “going black”…..— deleted –Yet regarding the more substance oriented fleshings out of a mission, only disquieting lectures on politics I at first thought were implied to be nothing but mock training sessions.  Sessions from which large numbers of young agent recruits were cut, new case officers graduated, divisions – directorates assigned.  The Near East division, The Soviet East European division, East Asia, Latin America, the Directorate of Plans, Operations, the Office of Technical Services.  Except that for me it was then the advanced Internal Operations course played out on the back streets of Washington… …”moving through the gap”, as meanwhile my wedding approached with nothing but these strange political briefings more reminiscent of a graduate level class on political science.  That is, only until we slowly realized we were being selected and picked out to be informed that they were the real thing.

During nightly lectures attended every week during December of 1996 by some one hundred and fifty isolated field agents in a small auditorium at Langley, under a severe oath of silence, we were ostensibly instructed and tutored by video conference on the imminent threat of a growing underground grass movement’s political power – a left wing conspiracy – and the imperative need to gather, analyze and report directly to the Task Force central command all manifestations of its presence detected in the population at large.  It was spoken of almost in biological-medical terms as a dangerous virus in the offing.

“My trusted colleagues, fellow Americans…”, squawked a tight jacketed anonymous senior bureaucrat in a dark suit on the live video screen.. “…You as I well know that even the most powerful players in our democracy make or break their careers on the beliefs of the American people.  But there comes a time when it behooves us to be on guard for rogue forces, who not by fair play or in the spirit of American values, would seek to exploit the god fearing nature of our way of life.  By devious means and wily subterfuge there exist those who would try to make a hoax of the very basis for our most cherished values.  That would make claims to the arrival of false prophets and even try to spread false rumors of re-enacted miracles so as to blaspheme the sacred truth of our Christian faith and so make a parody of our moral order…

“There exists at large in America today the scattered seeds of a poisonous idea whose sinister intent is to entwine the American audience in a plot to overthrow all established religion.  The poisonous seeds of an idea which, already, we fear has claimed many of our best and brightest in  government and the armed forces and made them ripe for treason.  Trusted colleagues, for the good of our country, I cannot be more adamant in my warnings to you to resist its subversive designs.  You have been psychologically screened and prepared – but above all – Beware. 

Trusted colleagues, fellow Americans:  Your Job is to stop it.  Through your intelligence and psy-op capabilities, to bring it within the power of the United States government to make use of it.  To channel this growing grass roots movement’s political power for the benefit of the Republican party in view to the millennial presidential elections.”, said the man on the video screen.  And regularly, a spontaneous applause would erupt from the large conference room of savvy faced operatives so zealous for further instruction.

Let the historian, and discerning witness, therefore take note of such extravagant hubris.  Operation code name “Bull-Moose”, as it came to be known, was a highly classified mission that, for the good of the country, its leaders considered paramount beyond the pale of ordinary politics.  And, if for no other reason, this is why I can only speculate that the besieged President who had just been re-elected was out of the loop of this strange task force’s self serving intentions.

For in fact, under an officially Democratic cabinet nearly desperate for moral leadership, this secret chamber consisted fully of no more than the aforementioned five unidentified heavy weight Republican sympathizers (i.e. the Special Group) – who by methods of illicit propaganda and timely disinformation once designed for use on an enemy’s civilian population in time of war – were intent on expropriating a growing grass roots art movement’s constituency of a patriotic American race of artists for their own partisan cause.

In effect, a political high-jacking of a growing independent arts movement deemed so dangerous to the political landscape that it was imperative that it be tamed and brought under the Republican party’s traditional wing.

  Distant field operatives submitted their reports through a system of secured wire cables.  Being assigned to the District’s metropolitan area, I would leave them in person by diplomatic pouch at a special drop off safe at Langley headquarters next to an indoor blind stand.  These were the only rudimentary orders we received for what seemed to amount to an excessive level of secrecy surrounding a mission of simple intelligence gathering on an obscure grass roots political movement.  Really nothing more than what at first seemed to be attended by a diverse spectrum of the ordinary American people.

For when I went out in the field, canvasing various political fundraisers and gatherings so as was my job to do, neither did I see nor hear anything beyond the ordinary of great alarm.  In the month of January 1997 alone, coming out of Camp Peary in plain civilian clothes, I attended more than twenty different associations with some sort of political agenda in an anonymous capacity where I’m sure nobody knew me with nothing of great interest to report back..  Mainly I had ended up going for the refreshments, and did not think that after any of the visits I would ever go back, or there was any use in seriously following up on their literature. 

And yet, though field agents were officially ordered not to speak even amongst themselves, indeed rumors of odd findings began to surface from other highly placed case officers in various regions of the country.  Rumors, even, of people said to be witnesses to miracles.

And there was luminous and variegated innuendo at the end of the second monthly briefing about several agents being surprised to discover so many Americans from every spectrum of the population; so many other soldiers, people in government, who were indeed secret members of a growing grass roots spiritual sect.  Where, inside, at the undisclosed heart of the movement, was said to exist a core of leadership whose names were only spoken of in code.  And many national events were said to be planned by them.  And ripe for treason or not, many were said to come from the highest echelons of government leadership in Washington.  Like a hornet’s nest waiting to explode on the land and the soft innards of the continent, it was said to be.  A secret Society.  Its reason unknown.  Its vision a paradigm of America itself.

Somewhere, and in unknowable pockets dispersed, this strange Society was said to exist.  The only thing is I wasn’t really sure I even believed it.  Had I not stumbled across that strange new-age periodical again, the one that had manifested itself on my Foggy Bottom brownstone’s doorstep inside Timbeck’s subscription nearly four months past, I don’t think I would have made any plausible connection.  But there it was, the magazine lying with the top up beside a box of my stuff I had brought over to Maddy Jane’s apartment, as we were nearly coming to be living together ever since I had returned from boot camp and on my weekends home from the farm at Camp Peary.  The American Renaissance foundation, it’s name, and there on the backside fold of the magazine, the very number I’d called looking for my old room-mate, only to be told he was recently dead.

An unnerving incident, a small death in America, the passing away of a friend that normally I would have struggled to make more sense of.  But coming to serve, through the auspices of the Marine Corp, in the halls of the hermetically uncommunicative bureaucracy of the intelligence community, I had been too overwhelmed simply trying to get my bearings.  In the brutal intensity of my schedule, I had everyday to fit into a dark olive green first lieutenant’s uniform, kiss Maddy Jane good-bye and be off, either to field training near Williamsburg, Langley headquarters, or to work at the Pentagon.  From  where I would then have to change back into civilian clothes, only to be back out on the street again looking for something I’d barely been told what it was.  I hadn’t had the time to really recognize or ponder the reality that Timbeck was no more.

Yet it began to haunt me, and so after finding that name and number and picking up the phone again, now I pressed down on the digits with the chilling recollection of the voice at the other end.

I distinctly remember the day.  How I could feel the beat of my heart going faster, the sweat of my palm.  The silence before the terrifying answer.  “Who is this?  Who is this? No one’s…”, the voice barked in a fury. “I was looking for Tim – I was his room mate.  I’m interested in the society of the American renaissance” I said quickly.  There was a moment’s pause at the other end. “You were Timbeck’ room mate?  I will note your address.  Someone will come out to talk to you.  We will send a messenger.”, said the voice, and no sooner than he’d taken down my information, he hung up…

“I see,” I said to Amadeo, but can I show you the notes from your diary in France, after you left Washington DC, following the attacks on Manhattan in 2001? Nick Farraway, the psychiatrist, went out of his way to fly out immediately and find you in Paris. Yes, I know you were at the Pentagon when it happened – but take me back to the Society, when it was first discovered in the 90s.” Amadeo looked at his notes from his conversation and interrogation with Dr. Nick Farraway. This time, we were in France again, after all. Couldn’t this help to jog his memory? The funny thing, I was going to be getting married soon the following year, and since the questions referred back to a decade before at a time close to when Amadeo first got married as well, it seemed to open up his line of thinking, even what it meant to be married within American society itself.                                            – Andrew McMaster, Station Chief East Africa.

Paris diary – Journal entry no. 19

Estimated date: April 25, 2003

“I didn´t know how long it would be before he came, the true messenger, or how I would be able to tell him from an impostor.  I didn´t know where or when to expect him….Not that I believed in any of this cockamamy bullshit, of course…..No, of course not….”  I´m telling Nick, “…Yet following the trail of the `Renaissance foundation` before my own wedding, I’d happened on more than a few venues of interest where sometimes the refreshment stand would be safely tucked behind the backdrop of often wildly uncontrolled re-unions of boisterous, incoherent banter by the local population.  A guy in an Elvis costume playing at bartender. 

“Nothing I thought my superiors at the National Security Council would find distinctly relevant to their research mission, but drinking and participating in their get-togethers in only a moderate capacity, I filled out my agency reports all the same.  Yet subtly drawn in, I continued attending many unsung political gatherings in the remote corners of the Maryland panhandle, Cumberland, the frontiers of southern and western Virginia; in high school gyms, abandoned courthouses, clapboard churches.  And, although in that vicinity, the rhetoric sometimes began to take on an eerie similar tone of ribald independence and deep rooted American pride, and male members all boasted sideburns that were unusually long, I never came to think very seriously on the matter.

“…..Sure, attending those meetings made it harder than ever to seriously abstain from drinking, but I did my utmost best to stay dry and sober, as by the end of February my Easter wedding was fast approaching.  All I could think of was the mounting objections to our intended plans of property and mixed faith marriage, that through his blatant refusal to meet me or even acknowledge me as a legitimate fiancee, ——--[name of wife’s deleted] father had appeared to project.  I hadn’t wanted to let a minor drinking problem become an added reason for his disapproval, you see.  From the mysterious distance from which he wielded it, I was beginning to see his influence as an unforseen obstacle in what was simply and honestly the fervent pursuit of our intended happiness…”, I finish saying to him.

“…Hmm…But you said you were not an artist, Amadeo…that you do not believe in the miracles of the artists – in their sacrifice for knowledge, in Dorian’s ultimate sacrifice – but still you refuse to even take a decent shower.  You know there are public baths…” No, no miracles, I want to tell him.  I was then – as now – a man of reason.  I had nothing to believe in.  I suppose I am just empty, Ok – a governmental tool, I want to say right up close to his face. – “Alright, I´m not an artist, I admit it, but don´t you see Nick – it was always straight forward history and not a historical novel that I wanted to write…?” 

But as I stand, a cruel instinct of rejection comes over him.  Nick suddenly jumps back as though I meant to harm him.  Or, as I desperately do need a real shower, maybe it is the smell he avoids.  He backs out toward the doorway like so many times I have seen him do –  afraid, afraid to trust in what he knows is impossible. 

“I´m sorry, Amadeo, it is so very hard to believe.  Not only about the miracles other people told me, but what you say.  All of it, no matter who Sean Dorian Knight really was.  The Messiah?  And for some reason you are so afraid, that now Dorian´s people – the artists – have come to be afraid of you too.  Sooner or later they will hear of Jarrod.  You refuse to see them, to go out at all in public.  Why is it Amadeo?  Hasn´t the fear gone away?  Is a miracle something to be so afraid about?  When did you first hear about them, these odd happenings?” he says, but I give no reply.  “…Hasn’t the fear gone away…?  You must come out Amadeo.  You must sacrifice your fears for their knowledge.  Do not violate their trust, they know you were in the military, but they might really come to believe you are nothing more than a corrupted ex-government spy.  Mohammed, everyone, awaits your coming.” 

He looks at my face.  The scars faintly visible.  “I will tell them one last time.  Personally, I will arrange a meeting with the artists, Amadeo – You will tell them why Sean Dorian Knight was killed, if he did not die for them as the Messiah and savior of all artists,  —-deleted——-… A last chance, before Jarrod….”  Dorian´s biographer?  It is a futile sadness, I know.  A nothing man´s choice; to violate their trust – or else that of my country´s.  “Who really was Sean Dorian Knight?, tell me, Amadeo….”  I cannot answer him, say anything.  Nick begins to leave.  I hear him descend the stairs again.  Maybe for the last time, before everything fades away. 

Sacrifice for knowledge – and for what use?  I could never have known or ever imagined the extent of people´s delusions.  Of how important these futile hopes always were as dreams become the combustible fuel in the grand machinery of politics and unbridled political ambition.  As they became in my very own political awakening and  future perhaps.  But, at the time in question, I was merely tackling the responsibilities of my job, attending these strange “Renaissance” gatherings in the service of a questionable bureaucracy draped in the guise of a national security Task Force of unheard of secrecy. 

Like I said, I was a government tool.  A rational man who believed in nothing.  While engaged in the furtive espionage of this mysterious political movement, I believed in nothing but the rational achievement of my mission at hand.  In truth, it was all I had ever wanted to do, to serve my country well.  In the innocence of any darker motives, inspite of the National Security Council´s blatant admission of partisan bias, I was untainted by any confusion with respect to my faith in the good of our public service. 

And I say good faith, not belief.  With respect to “Operation Bull-moose”, before what happened at my wedding, it had all seemed like merely an harmless information gathering operation of subtle precaution on the diversity of the American electorate.  Reporting to and from the Pentagon was a daily thrill to me, and whenever I took the shady wooded turnoff from the George Washington Memorial Parkway that leads to Central Intelligence headquarters for my weekly analyst sessions, there was nothing so exhilarating as flashing my special clearance pass, walking past the blind stands, the nakedly purifying checkpoints, and ubiquitous metal detectors, proceeding on through the lobby and magnificently antiseptic marble atrium where the giant eagle and shield of the CIA – the dark hand of international espionage – was emblazoned like a great talisman of homeland safety.  Yes, every time I entered the highest and most technologically advanced governmental organ ever to evolve for the the protection of our national home and the ensurance of the American dream, I felt refreshed by those eternal words that boast chiselled into the shiny gray and black floor of its hallowed halls:  “And the Truth Shall Set you Free”.

Yes, the truth, howbeit ever unknown to us low grade field operatives, and only on a “need to know” basis – impregnable though it was – still softly padded the most disquieting rumblings of my conscience in my unquestioned zeal to higher performance.  And neither myself, nor any other regional field agent of our spy operation to my knowledge ever questioned the legitimacy of our mission.  Such as it was, regardless of it being launched directly on a domestic front, or in flagrant violation of the Agency´s founding charter.  Or even asked why at all it was controlled – down to the minutest detail – by the NSC´s secret Task Force from CIA headquarters, in stark contrast to the Agency´s strictly international agenda. 

No, career advancement was always the name of the game.  And so, to this bastion and brain center of impossible idealism, we – a limited cadre of hand picked government agents from near and far – had simply submitted our varied observations, safe in our service to the American ideal.

 Nevertheless, any qualms about domestic government espionage aside, all was not well.  Increasingly, [—–fiance’s name deleted] tended to betray signs of an irrationality that only months before could be considered ordinary jealousy.  But, with all due respect to the mystique of now being engaged to marry a man in uniform,  what at first seemed to be a penchant for meddling curiosity slowly began to border on delusions of distrust .  And, little could I have known how the nightmare associations of my secret government job would slowly come to merge with sinister consequences into the realm of my personal world. 

Since the time I came back from officer training, I do not know why, but [—future wife’s name deleted —–] was never again was the same.  And, as I – agent Amadeo B. Effscotsky – reported back my findings of all my forays into the political realm of the inner American countryside, I began to see that in the professional capacity of my secret government role, neither was I being told everything I needed to know.  For my own safety, and for the good of the country, some vital information of grave consequence had been kept chillingly secret for the abominal [sic] horror of its true revelation.  And, in the hermetic halls of the Agency, a general paranoia of insider spies, of traitors, had begun to set in.  So that nothing could be talked about by anyone without bringing scrutiny on oneself.  

No, no one  was above suspicion, for now this subversive and deadly virus was said to have at last infested the ranks of the best and the brightest…And, to put it euphemistically, at any moment, an officer could be left out to go into the cold…….

For my very own protection, from behind the inscrutable mask of national resolve which I dawned to my superiors, therefore, in my conscience there started to hide the turmoil of a more unpredictable identity.  An identity that my role as a governmental soldier cloaked in blanket orders of unstated purpose, but which perhaps unbeknownst to me, only made me hunger for a more stable meaning. 

And though it was not for me to question why – for them my duty was but to do or die – in the service of my country´s dream – perhaps for this very reason, so it was, that subconsciously I came to feel the need for larger answers to what that dream really was.  In the service of America, answers the great Federal behemoth never cared or knew how to give – nor that the hollow tone of a Presidential sound-byte ever did – but replete with illusion and delusion, I strangely found my ever more frequent meetings at the Renaissance foundation gatherings could. 

And although I had been warned in rigorous governmental training not to believe in this awful sect´s subversive appeal, at these meetings, the rhetoric would make allusion to someplace, somewhere, where an even greater Society was – await in hiding – as if pushing itself up from the fertile ground.  Somewhere, like a rough beast, it was said to be taking form. 

This dangerous political movement my clandestine mission had been simply to report back on, I had once even doubted of its existence.  And yet slowly, day by day,  now entering the middle April´s spring, I soon found myself struggling harder than I ever expected not to be enthralled by the authentic allure of its mystique.  In essence, all that was American.

And it seemed a harmless thing at first.  The mysterious ways and motives of this movement.  Their generous refreshment stands, their elongated sideburns that in keeping with the style I was forced to copy.  Despite the government´s utmost fervent warnings which typically veered toward exaggeration, at the time, I never thought to question it. 

Somehow I still preserved the notion that this peculiar social movement was simply associated with an alternative, if obscure, form of a publishing venture.  For, in those gatherings, there had been many veiled allusions to some great book.  The kind Jarrod Maxwell-Smythe maybe had been mired up in discovering.  Or maybe it was a new age literary guild.  And though it may appear ignorant on my part for whatever the dangerous nature of this movement was to have eluded me, I did not know – and no one possessing even the highest level of classified clearances was ever told – why it had raised the alarms of national security.”

**************** *************** *************** ******************

For the inner details of the secret art society all of America, and soon the world, will be talking about – get privileged access to the incredible beginning: Here

The post Operation Bull Moose, precursor to an assassination first appeared on The Cult Street Journal.

The post Operation Bull Moose, precursor to an assassination appeared first on The Cult Street Journal.

             INTRODUCTION

Using as its primary model the culture of ancient Greece, the great revelation of Dorian Knight follows from the idea that there is an epistemology behind art.  The stages of analysis developed here – are taken from his speech at Cornell University and his subsequent stop in Corinth, New York.

In my speech to you, my Dorianites, here shortly before the assumption of my own death, I shall outline the major themes developed in the Greek’s theory of art, and what we can infer from the importance of art’s use as a system of knowledge.  The association of art with religion, and what this historic relationship implies for the present day will also be raised.  Our analysis will not necessarily try to pinpoint exactly which artist, or work of art, marked the beginnings of these changing trends in Greek civilization.  Rather, it will attempt to highlight the underlying assumptions in their historical thinking that shed light on the idea of an epistemology that lies behind all art, and why this should or shouldn’t be of relevance to our time period.

This because, within the core of a tradition that came to consolidate the western European concept of what art is, it would be an over simplification to recognize the culture of ancient Greece as merely a strong influence. Greek thought is inescapably intertwined with that of the West; not only in the arts, but in philosophy and literature, as well as in science.  It is therefore that we include its artistic tradition, not as separate, but as the very foundation of our contemporary society.  While the link between the art of western culture and Greece is not considered to be one primarily associated with religion, this is not to say this issue, as it relates to both Greece and Modernity, is an irrelevant area of focus.  The kinship of religion with art has a much longer tradition still, and in Greek society was an issue of contention no less than our own.  In the more than two thousand years that have passed in between, many art works have been created; some religious, some not.  But bearing in mind the Greek origins of our aesthetic theory, it was the selection of a modest few works of art, and their historical categorization, which has given direction to the narrative of spiritual apotheosis in western civilization’s artistic tradition.Beginnings

The story of art theory begins in the archaic period of ancient Greece, at around the middle of he sixth century BCE.  Though this is not to say that what the still more ancient cultures of Egypt and Sumeria have to inform us of on the subject is marginal or irrelevant.  Historical precedents to western civilization in art can of course be traced back much further, and even to the dawn of earliest cave paintings of man in the Paleolithic era, but it is in archaic Greece where a theory of art most resembling our own is to be found. 

A further parallel, stark in its implications, stems from the fact that Greek society of that time period was also coming out of the grips of a Dark Age.  A historical stage of cultural disintegration following the conflicts of the Trojan War, and the devastating effects of the Dorian invasion between roughly 1200 to 800 BCE.  For Greece, this was a span of deep economic underdevelopment, and marked a phase of cultural stagnation similar to the medieval period in modern Western history.  Like the era of artistic flourishing that was to occur later in cuattrocento Italy, this historical stage in Greece was to be followed by the beginnings of a Renaissance of their own taking place around the late eighth century.

But the study of art theory, when beginning at such a relatively recent date (circa 600 BCE, even if that date is some 3,600 years ago), can also be misleading as to what art may actually be.  In part, our study of art theory begins here arbitrarily, because this is the first known instance of when a theory of art began to be formulated into a written record.  This having been said, what art was in its primal origins is skipped over when we begin the study of the theory of art by going simply to when it was first articulated.  Meaning that, whatever its original purpose was, and whether this can be likened to an epistemology, was already in existence for at least some twenty thousand years prior. 

In that long period of transformation, the external attributes of artistic expression had already passed down through ancient Sumer in 5000 BCE, several Semitic dynasties, and further evolved in Egyptian civilization up until around 1300 BCE.  The life of art’s mysterious incarnations, from the beasts depicted on the caves to the half-beast, half human characters embodied in the tombs of Egypt and their Book of the Dead, should give warning that the nature of what art deals with is not easily to be apprehended.  Also, when a theory of art first started to be written down in its first overt documentation in late archaic Greece, therefore, several layers of meaning – or the implicit potential for meaning – already obscured the original meaning art had served for the humans of the Old Stone age who painted on the walls of their caves.  Art, if it had once begun as an epistemology, was already abstract from what its original intention was in its primary origins.  Nonetheless, the study of art theory begins here.  Art’s original epistemology, or the scope and validity it had as a way knowing the world, both for the society it came from and the individual artist who created it, must be deduced from behind the more overtly aesthetic demands which came to the fore in the subsequent beginnings of Western civilization.

                                                                                         *          *          *

One is reminded of the accuracy of the kind of prophetic paradigm of history countenanced by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in the 18^th century.  Vico postulated that a civilization’s life line is marked by three cycles that evolve from a period of ill-defined Chaos; beginning with a Theocratic age, society is transformed by commerce into an age of Aristocracy, followed by an age of Democracy, which by its subjective nature causes a dissolution of objective tradition thereby leading to the disintegration of its society.  In the wake of a civilization’s fragmented culture, the lack of societal cohesion gives way to a newly denominated age of Chaos wherefrom another Theocratic age is to be born.   

Yet, all along behind the struggles of a civilization to define its tradition, lies art at the center.  And when a civilization’s tradition is hollowed out of any meaning, there working unceasingly behind this chaos is art, unsatisfied in its very purpose until it has at last effected another changing of the Gods.  The evidence that Greek art distinguished itself from Egyptian art has already been noted.  But not being satisfied with the Egyptian view of the world, neither were the Greeks complacent with their own worldview, as the striving for constant perfection later invited a kind of comparison between artists.  Experiment in the arts seemed somehow to intimate the possibility of a profounder knowledge to be captured, or we may ask then – what else was it that drove them?  To further spur the development of art, a competition not so different to our own society seemed to mark the pace of artistic experiment.  In the course of time, as described above, however, this experimentation was molded into a tradition.  Looking back from the vantage of history, the period of Classical Greece, and the heights of naturalistic representation that their sculpture achieved is now one of the standards of western culture. 

That the art of Classical Greece can be likened to a Renaissance comparable to our own, not least for its prided devotion in the depiction of deities (for example in the statue of Pythian Apollo previously mentioned by Diodorus, or the notorious Phydias’ famed statue of Zeus), also underscores how important the epistemology gained through art was to their culture.  Although there was no institutionalized religion, art served no less than to confirm the precise reality of their Gods.  As in our own European Renaissance that was characterized by the aesthetic rendering of Biblical themes for the sake of our culture’s sacred past, Greece had a vivid nostalgia for its own sacred era wherein their heroes strode along side distant deities.  Not to be easily outdone in artistic achievement by our later accretions, Greece also had a literature to go with it.  The fact that Homer’s brilliant (if largely fanciful) enshrinement of a long dead civilization not only survived, but became a combined Bible, moral code and source of practical wisdom for all Greeks of the classical age, remains one of the greatest paradoxes in European History.*  But if the knowledge of moral nature and supernatural beings that Homer sought to enshrine in Greek literature was “fanciful,” artists in both painting and sculpture pursued it with equal zeal in their own mediums. 

The further connection of these pursuits of knowledge in the arts to the underlying reality of the universe as a whole is also paralleled by the concerns of science in ancient Greece.  The quest for early Greek science was for a rational cosmology within chaos.  Measure happened to be essential in perceiving the formative principles of the universe, and for the Pythagoreans, also the musical scale of the universe.  According to Aristotle in his Metaphysics, there was the perception, by influence of the Pythagoreans, that it was numbers that made up the divine measure of things, and numbers themselves constituted the basis of all sensible things (like physical bodies), but also abstract things like justice.*  So there was the belief that everything, including the stars of the universe, could be reduced to consonant proportions.  The striving for symmetry in art was thus like a striving for the confirmation of these beliefs that could be thus proven to be ascertained knowledge, should the end result of art reveal beauty and harmony.  Viewed in this light, art for the Greeks was an epistemology no less imperfect than science or mathematics itself.       

At its essence, great art seems to be spring from a will to know, and this knowledge it seeks to embody is no less than the ultimate nature of reality.  Hence, we may call it a sacred epistemology, or at least a will to being a sacred epistemology.  And thus, so long as the world is not static, and society changes its forms whether from innate or external factors, in seeking out the invisible presence of that unknown aura art augurs the changes to come.  The modern notion that somehow art is dead, however, then is all the more startling for what resurrection lies in wait.   

                                                                                                *          *          *

As we reach the classical period of Greek art, roughly from 480 to 320 BCE, the theoretical elaborations of art came to constitute a fairly unified system.  Precise terms for achieving the perfection of form were developed and came to embody Greek art.  The critical terminology concerned with the properties of form included; symmetria – or the commensurability of parts; rhytmos – shape, composition; metra – measurements – akribeia – mathematical precision; and paradeigmata – patterns.*  By the time the first known theoretical treatise on painting appears, by Agatharchus in and around the middle of the 4^th century, new terms for this discipline also come into use.  Skenographia, the study of perspective is introduced, skiagraphia – the study of shading, as well as terms such as tonos; harmoge; splendor, as well as a new treatise on color, De Coloribus by Euphanor.  What should be apparent here is that the importance given to these new concepts for application in art, are laid down here for the refinement of art; and hence, we may infer, for the sake of an advance, or progress of some kind; the progress of knowledge.   Happily, for the Greeks (unlike for us, which it is no longer) this was found to be consistent with the epistemology of beauty, and its passionate pursuit. 

But when an art form reaches a zenith of perfection, as it conforms to a theory of knowledge or art criticism that is objectively espoused, a subtle reflection of what is missed in these external criteria seems to well up.  After so much effort to attain the standards of a tradition, as if by neglect, artists themselves as well as critics, begin to ponder what an artwork stands for in itself.  There is an introspective questioning of the intrinsic meaning of works of art.  As Erwin Panofsky put it, “…We deal with the work of art as a symptom of something else which expresses itself in a countless variety of other symptoms, and we interpret its compositional and iconographical features as more particularized evidence of this something else.”* 

It is this “something else,” which the physician Galen of the 2^nd century ACE deduced was behind the thoughts of Polyclitus’ Canon.  It was the intrinsic meaning of their works that had always motivated the artist’s writings and their own explanation.  After all Polyclitus was, before and after he wrote his treatise, a professional sculptor.  That we may liken this something else behind the meaning of a work of art to be akin to a mysterious sort of epistemology may, or may not be, going too far.  One gets the sense that it was perhaps something more menacing.  That, this “something else” intrinsic to art was not the epistemology, but rather the ghost that the epistemology was after.  When considering the public influence that artworks had begun to have in ancient Greece, it is no wonder that toward the end of the classical period increasing thought was devoted to the mystery of what lay behind art’s power.  The raised awareness of this question of intrinsic meaning would, by the time of late Hellenism in the 1^st century ACE, dramatically shift the focus of art theory toward a fascination with the artist’s imagination.  But four hundred years earlier, Plato, probably the most significant philosopher to shape the course of western thought, had already seized on the danger of art’s enigma.

Plato’s overriding concern throughout all his work follows from his hierarchical conception of reality.  For Plato, “empirical reality is but an approximation of ‘absolute existence’ (i.e. of the Ideas) but falls short of them (Phaedon 74bff.)*, and is therefore only their ‘image’”  (Phaedrus 250b).  Considering Plato’s attitude toward physical reality, which is only an approximation of the real, it is curious to wonder why his reaction to art in general – whether it be with regard to poetry or painting – would therefore prove to be so rife with enmity.  But we learn anecdotally from Diogenes Laertius that Plato supposedly spent ten years training in the priesthood at Heliopolis, at the center of Egyptian culture.  There he would have become well acquainted with their Book of the Dead and art’s uncanny power to mold the belief system of entire societies.  What relevance art has to religion, but which is eschewed by present day art historians for our own culture, Plato would have had first hand knowledge.  This, despite the fact that Plato did not live to witness the one thousand years of Christian domination of art during the European Dark Age.

Plato, knowing well art’s mythical role of representing the world of invisible reality, questioned outright the validity of its seemingly strange type of epistemology.  In the Ion Plato, through the character of Socrates, parodies the rhapsode Ion’s ability to have any claim to knowledge, saying that Ion’s knowledge depends solely on inspiration and therefore has no relevance to truth.  And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him….Herein lies the reason why the deity has bereft them of all their senses, and uses them as ministers, along with soothsayers and godly seers; it is in order that we listeners may know that it is they who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but it is the god himself who speaks, and through them articulate to us.  (Plato, Ion, p220 b-e)  Thus artists, poets first among them, communicate things by divine proxy.  They have no sense of other things.  This is because the God want listeners and spectators to know that the artist speaks for Him. 

Here Plato has elaborated his critique of the mimetic theory of art.  This critique is transferred specifically to the painter in the Republic when Plato states that, by clinging to outer appearances, the painter as imitator also has no knowledge of what he is really painting.  (Republic X, 601).  Therefore, for Plato, all art is an embodiment of falsity, and has no place in his ideal society.  What truth lies behind the illusion of appearance, the artist, in being servant to his muse, can never give us any knowledge of; and yet, Plato is shockingly aware of how they subvert people’s reason by their artifice.  Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is the weakness of the human mind on which the art of painting in light and shadow, the art of conjuring, and many other ingenious devices impose, having an effect upon us like magic.  (Republic X. 602c-d)  The realization of the power of the artist’s imagination that Plato seized upon was to signal new consequences for the evolution of art theory.  It foreshadowed the end of beauty, based upon commensurable symmetry, of being an objective quality that one could use for the reliable evocation of reality.  For the magic of art was seen to rely on something beyond the harmony of a simple balance of parts, and have its mysterious origin in the demotic imagination of the artist himself.  Long ago in Pharoahanic Egypt, in the rituals for their Book of the Dead, art had been used to narrate the objective of the soul’s journey back into the strata of the circumpolar stars and eternity.  The Greek worldview had deemed this strange art insufficient to correspond with the true nature reality as they knew it.  But, now once again, true knowledge of the ghost had eluded the sacred epistemology.     

As a result, beauty revealed itself to have a subjective nature, and its charm in affecting the soul of a person became the object of study.  The concept of beauty by now seemed to have come to symbolize whatever the true nature of reality must be.  Plato, in positing that the essence of reality lie behind physical appearance had, in effect, started a witch-hunt for an invisible entity.   Hence the eerie name befitting this artistic aspiration that historians now know as Phantasia theory.  And so, if the truth was elsewhere, artists, by the Hellenistic period in the 2^nd century ACE, would have to pursue with a new epistemological focus knowledge of the invisible entity’s presence by seeking evidence of whatever it was they were looking for in the expression of human and natural phenomena.  Philostratus the Younger, who wrote a book in the 3^rd century ACE, remarks on how the perception of the artist is now central to this search for knowledge.  The painter, in order to be a true master of his art, he says …Must have good knowledge of human nature, he must be able to discern the signs of men’s character even when they are silent, and what is revealed in the cheeks and the expression of the eyes…that a man is insane, perhaps, or angry, or impulsive, or in love.* 

The final break-up of the physically objective nature of beauty was then secured by Plotinus, in the middle of the 3^rd century.  However, that the whole be beautiful, its parts must be so, too; as beautiful, it cannot be the sum of ugliness: beauty must pervade it wholly.  Further: colors, beautiful hues as those of the sun, this theory would rule out; no parts therefore no symmetry, therefore no beauty.  But is not gold beautiful?  And a single star by night?  When one sees the same face, constant in its symmetry, now beautiful and now not, isn’t it obvious that beauty is not symmetry, that symmetry draws its beauty from something else?  (I. 6.1 p35)   So then, the essence of the classical Greek ideal of beauty is overturned.  As beauty shined from somewhere beyond the physical, no longer was it a matter of measurable symmetrical parts.  Instead, the ghost of the real resided in a mystical feeling that somehow art had the power to evoke.  This feeling was no less than a living presence.  The most living portraits are the most beautiful, even though the other happens to be more symmetric. (VI. 7. 22)  With the intellectual negation of the physical world, the structure of Greek and western reality (now under the aegis of the Roman empire) broke down, and art fell into the thousand year reign of the ghost that emanated from paintings in the Dark Age.  In western Biblical lore, it was a single guiding star that first signaled the Holy incarnation of its coming in the guise of a newborn God of human flesh.  Paradoxically, as the God who was transfigured into the commonplace, he was to become the ghost that had died for us.   

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The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful.  What would be the description of happiness?  Nothing, except what prepares and what destroys it can be told – And now I have told you all that had prepared it.

                                                                        –  The Immoralist, Andre Gide

In retrospect, the closing of the age of Classical Greece was due to many factors other than the shifting concerns of art.  But all the while the manifestations of artworks’ concerns traced the changes in their spiritual outlook of the world right up until Plotinus’ incipient medieval philosophy.  It was a philosophy of subjective spiritual feeling with no correlation of art to the material of the external physical world.  Like the strange manifestations of art one finds hanging in the cavernous walls of today’s Museums of Modern Art, the epistemology ceased to be a looking out toward the world of beauty, but rather became an inner dwelling of the spirit that would be intellectually shrouded over by veil of the west’s oncoming Dark Age.  Yet in ways eerily familiar, when the fragments of past knowledge no longer could fit into a coherent whole, it was a feeling in particular sympathy to what is now belatedly called the death of our own art history.  A feeling of atonement ensues, you can see it in the hallowed halls of museums, if for nothing else than to hold back an overwhelming sense of Chaos, now that the march of time that has brought us full cycle to the last Democratic stage of Vico’s analysis of history.

But the implication that art history can develop no further, that art has reached the end all of its historical process, augurs a profounder dilemma that we avoid only at our own peril.  The end of implicit beauty in the purpose of everyday art is an aesthetic loss we may lament.  Yet beyond beauty, art was once much more in that it was the key to religious insight, if not religion itself, and so the death of art portends a relinquishing of a kind of primordial power – a power of survival – essential to our nature.  This is not to say that art should affirm and uphold the western idea of Christianity or any other of the four main religions of the world.  Only that by being unaware, and having nothing to replace what was lost, we may find ourselves at the threshold of an age darker than we could have imagined. 

In a world besieged by religious fundamentalism and monumental ignorance, art has reached the end of its sacred epistemology.  And yet, if this is true, while we have thrown away the rational paradigm of western thought for its faulty reasoning, meanwhile on the geopolitical level, the irrational faiths that agglomerate mountains of people in the name of ancient systems of belief threaten our godless world with destruction.  Perhaps these recent conflicts are arguably the results of faulty western thinking, of being bound up in the race for political hegemony, colonial expansion, or capitalistic imperialism.  Perhaps the conflicts are merely the intrinsic result of our animal nature, or brought on by the simple fact of the scarcity of the earth available to meet our human needs.  Nonetheless, the ramifications for this sea change in the Modern western paradigm hover from the mundane and anticlimactic to the potentially dangerous and apocalyptic. 

Art, and its place in our system of knowledge, has traditionally been a signpost of changing historical currents.  Even if present day intellectuals prefer to disregard the prophetic associations of art, whether art has any ultimate purpose, or should have, one is not certain that this is something that can be changed by the simple asking.  That the world of art and artifacts, as a collective grouping of commodities, is now more than ever tied to the apparatus of our market economy makes the meaning of its mysterious presence all the more pressing. 

What holds in the balance for the oncoming future could be a dethronement of the exalted status of art – as perhaps, has recently occurred – or conversely, if the prophetic power of art has any truth to it, the maturing antecedents of incalculable bloodshed in the name of some sacred cause.

What are the distant early warnings?  The alarming answer of what times are to come may wishfully be a matter of which historical paradigm is adopted as the more accurate.  Conversely, the riddle of what art history’s past holds for the future might be contingent, not on what vision of history we prefer, but which one is more true.  To this end, our focus of mind in solving the mystery of art must pay special heed to what indications art shows of being a kind of epistemology.  All the more so if, indeed, it is a sacred epistemology, will be our necessity to understand what this mean.

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Before proceeding in this line of inquiry, however, it is interesting to take note of some more recent developments and currents of thought.  That is, musings about life, art, and the great thereafter – Art, the modern reader will recall, after all, is said to have already passed away.  “It is not art which imitates life, but life which imitates art,” adduced the playwright Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19^th century.  But if art is dead, should it follow that life imitate death as well?  Art, it is said by intellectuals of the modern western tradition, has come to the end of its history.  If so, what does this mean?  What exactly has ended – if, nevertheless, art objects are still being created, and its existence as a commodity continues to shape the culture we live in?  The suggestion will be made that it is art’s aesthetic use value, if evidently not its exchange value, that has come to its conclusion for the era that we live in.  While art works with aesthetic intentions may still be created, it is not likely they would tell us anything new – that is, so long as we continue to inhabit the same world as we know it.  Even so, if the end of art as an object of aesthetic appeal were all that was implicated in this, perhaps the matter would not be so grave.  Whenever there has been a death, it is only a matter of time – whether it be decades or centuries – before a rebirth is proclaimed.  Yet, what rough beauty looms over the horizon, art may no longer be able to tell us.

The contemporary assertion that “Art has come to an end,” also implicates the death of one crucial element of Modern art theory, not stated above, which is veiled by its aesthetic demise.  This is the religious association of art or that, art at its core, is fundamentally religious in nature.  Though it is a topic that is superficially avoided in contemporary art historical writing and discussion as it relates to the present, often because it is too controversial – or for lack of being able to raise answerable questions – skirting the issue might in fact betray signs of the unwillingness of society to confront mature conclusions inimical to its wellbeing. 

Historians of art generally have no problem considering the intrinsic relation between art and religion when assessing the art of the ancient past.  Icons and sculptures dating from before cuattrocento Italy or classical Greece allow present day scholars a safe distance from which to study the fascination of religious motifs.  The avoidance of the religious topic in analyzing contemporary art works is further justified, it is assumed, by the simple contemplation of western painting for the last four hundred years after the era of the Baroque.  Even in our society’s Renaissance, while painting is replete with religious themes, it is viewed as an increasingly humanist manner of religious depiction, whose religious content in the course of time, would virtually come to disappear as we survey art up to our present day.  Thus giving historians comforting evidence that western American and European civilization is, in effect, secular and far removed from the ancient worlds of misguided superstition. 

This attitude, however, neglects the many stages of art which older civilizations passed through before falling into the annals of history.  Furthermore, it simplistically skates over the explicitly religious and spiritual concerns that were fundamental in forming Abstract Expressionism; the last stage of the era of modern art (only fifty years ago) that we may have sufficient historical distance to evaluate.  This is not to say, however, that art exists to play some dramatic religious role at the start of our millennium.  Art may no longer be “the writing on the wall” if, in a matter of a mere five hundred years, it is indeed possible for an expressive trait as old as it means to be human to suddenly change.  Nevertheless, twenty thousand years of evidence of art’s uncanny power to work magic on humankind’s cultural beliefs should make clear that vestiges of art’s powerful religious implications still lurk in the backdrop of contemporary art theory.  Thus the term, the Sacred Epistemology, as used in the title of this essay.

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As for antiquity, in trying to get a handle on what knowledge can be said to inhere from art, the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius remarks that Democritus wrote a book in the early 5^th century BCE entitled, On Painting.  Though what we know of almost all writings on art of ancient Greece is indirectly through second hand sources, the articulation of art theory in writing also signifies the beginning of its importance.  The subject of what art meant to the culture of ancient Greece, however, is further blurred by the fact that they did not have a distinct name for the term “art”, as we do today.  The closest term in antiquity may be the word technae, meaning a craft that required a conscious method or means at arriving at a desired end.  Indeed, what distinguishes Greek critical thought on the arts at its beginning in the early sixth century from more sophisticated inquiry later on, is that there was a concentration on the methodology of the creative process.  Such concerns about the creative process itself, its division into separate stages, as well as the characterization of the final result, are not far removed from the first approaches of our own culture’s critical writings in the Renaissance that would set the tone for our age. This when surveyed superficially, however, is not an investigation with regard to art’s epistemology; but rather about how an artwork is conceived and the skill required to bring it into being.  This superficial kind of analysis is fascinated by the aesthetic results of the object, or its likeness to reality – not with how artworks contain or transmit a certain form of knowledge.  For paintings of our western culture, the elusive knowledge which art contains – and is the primary objective of the artist – is harder to discern from the superficial content of the picture.  This is because, for western tradition, the concept of beauty at some point became separated from its power as a representation of truth.  In its beginnings, at least, for ancient Greece this was not the case.       

One example of the beginnings of this tradition of analysis, though probably anecdotal, is contained in the writings of Diodorus.  He comments on the travels of Theodorus of Samos, who was a sculptor and painter.  The story says that Theodorus and his brother, Telecles, spent some time among the Egyptians, where they learned a canon of sculptural proportions.  Commenting on the results of the statue of Pythian Apollo for the Samians, which had been finished independently by each brother in two separate halves and later re-assembled, Diodorus remarks:  This type of workmanship is not practiced at all among the Greeks, but among the Egyptians it is especially common.  For among them the ‘symmetria’ of statues is not calculated according to the appearances which are presented to the eyes, as they are among the Greeks; but rather, when they have laid them out the stones, and after dividing them up, begin to work on them….Then, dividing up the lay out of the body…they produce all the proportions of the living figure.  Therefore, when the artists agree with one another about the size of the statue, they part from one another, and execute [independently]….with such precision that their particular way of working is a cause for astonishment.*  What is highlighted hear is the distinct technique which the Egyptians used in creating symmetry. 

Symmetry was a term that would mark one of the foremost concepts of art theory for all of its subsequent history.  Its importance in the arts would become paramount in ancient Greece.  Diodorus, in rendering this account, is making not only a distinction of technique, but also one of style.  That similar standing postures to Egyptian sculpture can be found in early Greek statues evidences the influence that Egyptian technique had for the art form in Greek culture.  But, since Diodorus is remarking upon the difference, rather than the similarity, we may infer that Theodorus’ Egyptian technique, despite its precision that was “cause for astonishment”, did not satisfy or did not sufficiently conform to the later Greeks’ more modern view of their world.  For one reason or another – if it was not a matter of epistemology or the adequacy with which a particular statue could inform a society’s knowledge of the world – Greek culture would in the course of time see fit to change this technique in order to make it conform to what they considered a higher standard of excellence. 

This standard for art in Greece was most carefully thought out in the Canon of Polyclitus, written in the late 5^th century BCE.  Its detailed description of a new philosophical purpose of beauty using mathematical proportions made it the most renowned treatise of art in its time.  A passage commenting on Polyclitus’ Canon is found in the writings of the physician, Galen, recorded in the 2^nd century ACE.  Beauty, he feels, resides not in the commensurability of the constituents (i.e. of the body), but in the commensurability of the parts, such as the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus and the wrist (carpus), and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact everything to everything.*  This new preeminence of symmetry in Greek art, historian J.J. Pollitt comments, had a primary aim. “The aim of the Canon, however, was not simply to explain a statue but also to achieve tu kallos, ‘the beautiful’ in it; and the secret of achieving tu kallos lay in the mastery of symmetria, the perfect commensurability of all the parts… to the whole.”  A further aspect of the treatise concentrated on the method in which mathematical proportion could guide the artist in the production of perfect form.  Yet, we must be cautious to note that the precision with which the ideal of the beautiful is sought is not for its own sake.  If beauty were not understood by the Greeks to be a measure of order in the world, here there would be no talk of beauty.  Here art, we can deduce, is being used as a way to make the external world known.  For the Greek mind beauty is the proof, but order – [or one might say] a reliable epistemology – is of chief importance. 

The importance of this use of art as an epistemology, therefore, should not be confused by the stress put on beauty.  As here truth and beauty are evidence of the same thing.  Indeed, the search for order in Greek art and thought is central to their concept of tu kallos.  It was an urge toward identification with the interrelationship of all things – with the universe and the geometry of existence.  Pollitt explicitly touches on this point, saying, “The urge to discover or construct an order behind the flux of experience in the world is as inherent in the Greek mind, as is, for example, the urge for identification with an incorporeal, transcendental existence in Hindu thought.  Order is inconceivable without a conception of its essential characteristic – measure, which involves both definition (marking the boundaries of things) and analysis of the interrelationships of discrete forms.”*  Therefore, through their art, like in Hindu thought, an urge that is almost transcendental is seeking a permanent symmetry to existence.  Or, in other words, the Greeks in their art were searching for a permanent idea of knowledge about the external world; a knowledge that would be in harmony with the concept of their individual existence in the world – i.e. an epistemology.

Clearly, within the context of a search for meaning, in the Greek notion of symmetria we see a definite religious implication for art’s use.  The funny thing is that the culture of ancient Greece, like our own, was primarily secular.  The religious function of art that is implicit in the explanation above was by no means something overt.  That the religious essence of an artwork was something that lay hidden beneath the surface, or simply was not mentioned out loud, strikes as a kind of deep mystery; somewhat like the Biblical injunction against pronouncing the name of Yahweh aloud.  It was only much later, toward the end of the classical period, that the great philosophers would take issue with it.  In any case, as mentioned earlier, even though art’s original purpose since it first came into existence around the time of the cave paintings had acquired multiple layers of meanings (and more complex political and aesthetic functions), we see that – behind the façade of beauty – in its Greek incarnation, art still retained a hidden religious aspect.  Thus, we may also conclude, some thing of a societal purpose.

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With regard to present day American–European culture, in marked contrast to the kind of purpose art served for Greek society, our modern definition of fine art is strangely enigmatic for the quality of not being made for any particular use or purpose.  Sociologists may admit to religion still serving a purpose in contemporary society, but in the course of history this purpose was divorced from what art has come to mean for the present day.  Yet while in Greece beauty was the aim, and can be seen to have served a transcendental function – even if religion was not explicitly acknowledged in the purpose of art – for us not only is religion not considered an ingredient of art, but now even beauty has become only incidental to whatever art’s purpose.  Passing again through many transformations, art in the twentieth century finally came to be appreciated as having an existence all its own, or despite the bafflement that it still produces, what is colloquially called “art for art’s sake.”  The question that remains, however, is if the power to ascribe new definitions to something (or simply not being conscious of the actual origins of something) can actually be said to fundamentally reconstitute what a thing actually is. 

If art is no longer about religion, and can be about anything, or about anything without even having to be “beautiful”, then we have come to live in perplexing times.  Our existence has been transfigured into the commonplace of the historical present where being and nonbeing are indistinguishable from all else that is just a matter of course.  It would appear that humankind is prepared to exist in a universe devoid of any meaning it could ascribe to it.  But for this fundamental change to our nature, whether for good or ill, it appears we are not ready.  About exploring the notion that art can be anything in his pivotal work on contemporary art The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, the critic Arthur Danto comments of his provisional definition, “I argued first that works of art are always about something, and hence have content or meaning; and secondly, that to be a work of art, something had to embody its meaning.”  So then art, as it still seems to be the case, must be about something, just as much as we cannot abide by the notion that life cannot be about anything.  Therefore, art and religion presumably still retain what has all along been a relationship of universal concomitance in their intrinsic function to extract answers from the deepest questions of life.  And if answers are at all possible, we would wish (one presumes) that they be grounded in some form of knowing; hence an epistemology.  In any event, for as long as art, religion and humans have existed, apparently we have not been able to have one without the other.

The religious, or transcendental, aspect of art follows from art’s function as a medium through which people seek an identification with the world of outer existence.  The “urge” for this identification, or ‘interrelationship’, such as the Greeks sought in their ideal of beauty, underlies the importance they gave to prescribing a method for arriving and embodying this ideal in their greatest works of art.  While the association with religion was by this point in art’s evolution already tacit, we can nonetheless deduce that it was still there.  This problem of art raises the riddling question then, of why art’s profound, if hidden, relationship to religion has seemingly gone underground and come to be derided in the contemporary discourse of the art our present day.   

Relating the issue to modern concerns, we therefore arrive at new threshold in art’s mysterious evolution.  In counterpoint to the idea that there is any need to engage with the relevancy of contemporary art to religion – even if it be only on undisputed historical grounds – stands an alternate view of art and history itself.  That is the notion that present day western society has entered into the era of post history. 

Falling under the umbrella of Post Modernism, this historical paradigm defines itself against everything the Modernist paradigm of traditional history assumed about the progress of western civilization.     Thus for Post Modernism – a movement which spans nearly all branches of the social sciences – the attitude that we now occupy a different historical reality obviates the need to consider the relevance of present day artworks to the last stages of modern art of fifty years ago, let alone arts ancient religious associations.  It is in effect, as if we have been thrust out of a historical time warp, beyond time.  All logical connection to history has been invalidated because, at its center, the modern historical tradition of artistic progress has been deemed a glaring mistake.  So art has succumbed to the natural death of its history, and a new story awaits to be written in a brave future free from the past.     

The idea that mankind can, within the sweep of an intellectual movement, break unconditionally with the past to begin history with a tabula rasa is idealistically seductive.  Yet William Faulkner’s simple epigram that, “The past is never past, it’s not even passed”, warns that this is only wishful thinking.  The conceit that we are now living in a post historical age, or that our structural reality is inherently different than that which shaped the modernist framework of history, also seems to assume we are entering a final mythical stage of human development; the age of Global Enlightenment.  The exalted vision from which we may now look down on the history of the past implies as well that we have fathomed all pertinent avenues of knowledge in philosophy and the arts.  To paraphrase how Wittgenstein closed the Tractatus, now that we have climbed up the ladder of our old civilization, we may now throw the ladder away.  Those mysteries that so baffled other ages, having been shown the consequence of our faulty tools of reasoning and that reason is not to be trusted, now become for the contemporary artist and philosopher merely kindle wood for the modern Promethean fire. 

Nevertheless, this new attitude to history neither renders art’s mystical pedigree as irrelevant, nor does it Arthur Danto’s comments on the yet undefined meaning which art seeks to embody as it comes to be created within our midst.  There is, even as we go about our daily business, an unnerving religious aura of veneration to contemporary artwork, all the more strange when that work is profane or entirely unaesthetic.  For what this says of an as of yet undefined religion’s ghostly existence as it creeps into being, and to bear witness to what extent the invisible presence of this ghost goes un-remarked in 21^st century discourse about art, it would not hurt to recognize art’s earliest civilized beginnings. 

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Well before ancient Greece, art in its origins, served both as the wellspring of religious thought, and often the fertile ground for the propagation of its theological campaign.  Before the invention of textual writing in or around 2500 bce., art was the only thing other than speech that a society had to communicate its belief for the understanding of the world itself, and with which to postulate the existence of a world beyond.  This is understandable.  Yet, as greater knowledge of the physical world came to develop throughout the ages, the ability of art to represent and make known the invisible world did not decrease in proportion to this, but can even be said to have strengthened into having magical powers attributed to it.  These magical powers included the representation of deities, the power to invoke their beneficence, and the power to enhance religious ritual with the physical depiction of a people’s elaborate gods.

According to anthropological studies, “What we call art and what we call religion were inseparable through much of the recorded history of China, India, and Mesoamerica.  The same compatible purposes of art and religion can be found in images made by the Incas, the Scythians and Ife, the Moche and Cocle’, Jains and Vedic Brahmans, Parsees and Phrygians, and even the people, whose name is lost, who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan.”*  This is cited to recognize that this peculiar characteristic of art is not exclusive to western society, but a common symptom of cultures throughout the world. But that, far removed from its beginnings in the Paleolithic age, the powers of spiritual cognizance attributed to art furthermore developed into the Christian era, and even beyond the age of enlightenment up until the 20^th century, should give one pause to be aware. 

The parallels for our western culture of what this invisible entity manifesting itself as art and its religious connotations came to mean for the fate of Greek society, is apt to consider.  If not with foreboding, we should bear in mind that archaic Greece was born out of a Dark Age analogous to our own, and its later artistic flourishing in the classical period took a similar course to our own European Renaissance.  The Greek world which Homer knew (as opposed the syncretic Mycenaean age he drew in his poems) was desperately poor, a series of small isolated communities, each clustering around an isolated hilltop ‘big house’ run on feudal lines by some local warrior-baron.  The Dark Age practice of relying on a local chieftain for protection was encouraged by the canton-like geography of Greece, and proved oddly persistent; it foreshadows the city-state in embryo.* 

When the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, thus bringing knowledge to humankind, he paid a terrible price for it.  Condemned forever to being pinned to a rock, so that a vulture would pluck his liver clean until it grew back again, he became a hero to Greek mythology and modern man.  That the Gods vengeance on him for stealing the key to knowledge should have been to attack an essential organ for his digestive process is a fitting metaphor for our Post Modern condition.  That such intellectuals of this movement have avenged themselves on the age of reason by refusing to digest it, in effect spitting out the knowledge which was gained from it, once again signals humankind’s predilection for remaining enthralled to ignorance.  The refusal to acknowledge the powerful force of the religious impulse in shaping artistic thought, whatever it may be at the present moment, bespeaks a fear of art’s primordial beginnings and the realization of where all meaning comes from.  Set adrift on a new frontier, and unwilling to use our inherited tradition for guidance, looking back the religious origins of art appear hazily like a distant sun on the horizon.  There is a romantic darkness on the face of the waters.  But whether that fiery religious sun is setting, or only circling back beneath the underworld of our unconscious, remains to be seen.

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For the inner details of the secret art society all of America, and soon the world, will be talking about – get privileged access to the incredible beginning: Here

The post The Sacred Epistemology: knowledge and religion in the legacy of ancient Greece first appeared on The Cult Street Journal.

The post The Sacred Epistemology: knowledge and religion in the legacy of ancient Greece appeared first on The Cult Street Journal.

reporting by Gaby Saint Cruz, as told to her by Sean Dorian Knight

 ART AND POLITICAL ECONOMY: REVOLUTION  

                                       &

THE LOOMING CRISIS BETWEEN THE OBJECT AND IDEA

A Manifesto on What Lies Beyond the State of Post Modernism in Art

I. Art, Economics, and the World to be Created………………………p. 3

 II.   Parallel Concerns of Art and Economics in Western society: A Historical View…..……………………………………………….……..……………………………….p.5

III.     What Does All This Religion Have To Do With the Artist and the Critic?………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 10

IV. The Task of the Object of Art: Progress of the Spiritual or the Material Mind?………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 17

V.  Art, Private Patronage, and the Rebirth of Human Consciousness in Renaissance Europe……………………………………………………………………….… p. 24

VI.       Stolen Fire:  Rational Perception and the Crisis of Magical Realism…………………………………………………………………………………………………..p. 33

VII.      Moral Freedom and the Cognitive Divide Between Artistic Representation and Meaning………………………………………………………………p. 46

VIII.     Out of the Depths: The Philosophical Defense of Art and Religion:  Purpose Beyond Time……………………………………………………………..……..…p. 53

IX.   Magic in the Marketplace:  The Forbidden Realm of Unknown Purpose for Sale……………………………………………………………………………………………………p. 65

X.   A Disinterested View From Above the Masses: Climbing the Economic Ladder.…………………………………………………………………………………………..…..p. 76

XI.  Art and the Metaphysical Base: The Demographics of Revolution in a Political Economy……………………………………………………………………….…………p.82

XII.    Voices from the Past:  The Specter in the Capitalist Machine….…p.94

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I.  Art, Economics, and the World to be Created.

It is contended here that the appropriate and in depth criticism of art is due for a change.  One that, if it is to return to relevance, must become far ranging and organic in nature; a day to day interrogation of the most fundamental assumptions of our beleagured social and economic system whose weakened structural ideas frame the backdrop of art objects on view at every gallery and museum exhibition.  Having reached a stage in art’s history where the aesthetic encounter is no longer even a premise, medium, or a message that can stand on its own, the educated viewer of today must examine the entire vessel of historical ideology that shaped the journey of art that is created in a present where past is always prologue to art’s continual transformation.  Today, art is long past the era that once preoccupied it with the proper representation of our merely physical or material world.  Art has reached beyond the totemic symbols of nature into a secret garden of undefined territory where the invisible once again haunts the mind of anyone who would try to grasp at its meaning.

But if meaning can be encountered in art at all, the art object itself stands as a paradox of that very intention between artist and viewer.  Have they not understood what brought about their flawed attempts at a spiritual meeting in the first place?  Alas, the strange alchemy of philosophical theory and aesthetic grasping for meaning is the only constant of both object and history whose opaque knowledge has yet to be examined for the answer it conceals.  The experience of art today is one that is apprehended through feeling but never far removed from the academic nuisance of an accumulation of overhanging and underlying historical ideas.  But these ideas, of which some we will endeavor to hold up to the light of scrutiny in scope of this movement of the American Renaissance, seldom are paid more than scant observation by critics of the present art world. 

More to the point, the value of any such ideas are assumed validated simply by their incorporation into art, whether they have any weight in truth or not. Once “coined” into the existence of an object of art, when an art object is sold into the “world of art,” the art is deemed proven, and the counterfeit meaning of any such “idea” that it carries becomes substantiated by the final repository of the medium itself.  Finally, after the critical first few years, (sometimes decades since its first acquisition), the inherent value of contemporary art becomes consecrated at last by the dubious criteria of a small coterie of private collectors and museums who – for whatever and all intents and purposes – hold the fate of art history and its mysterious meaning for ransom to the whim of market forces and the next highest bidder.  But, if it is not the critic alone who is to stand up to the assessment of the validity of the motives and mysterious meaning of art beyond its commercial exchange – then who?

Yet, apparently for the today’s critics too, the small circle of collectors, dealers, and museum curators who make up the economic forces of the art world – seem to be accepted as the only audience that art was ever made to be judged by or created for.  Contemporary criticism rarely looks beyond the consumer facts and intellectual influence of an artist bringing forth the latest art product that is made to captivate the eye of the collecting cognoscenti.  After all, for them – just as for those owners of art who have a stake in upholding the illusion and stock value of their art investment – art’s value and meaning has elevated itself past the larger context of public social interest in art.  To the inner circle of the art world elite, art stands outside of this, with them, on the inside – like a secret form of knowledge coded in a hazy feeling of the supernatural.  As if in a secret garden all to itself, the modern art object is displayed behind velvet ropes – in a reality quite removed from the public interest and the museums where common tourists and aficionados struggle for understanding.

But into this secret world, like a thief in the garden at night, is where the critic on the outside must go if anything at all is to be explained in the interests of the baffled public at large.  He must question the very institutions on whose foundation that garden is laid.  He must go to the heart of the matter now so deeply obfuscated by the curious semblance of modern art itself.  The critic must mine the secret core of knowledge that sustains the modern art world’s ecosystem hidden from view.  And, without fear of getting lost, he must be prepared to examine and question the roots of both good and evil from which this ecosystem was built, as opposed to the merely superficial kind of criticism commonly employed by the practitioners today:  Those who visit galleries to summarily reduce the importance of art’s subject matter to the bland ethereal statements that are the facile lingo of interior decorators.  He must know that the secret world of art is not the world of entertainment, a public distraction for the senses on another plane in a world removed from ordinary life, but the essence of this world yet to be created and revealed.

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II.    Parallel Concerns of Art and Economics in Western society: A Historical View

In the long cultural heritage that came to distinguish humankind from other living species, the state of art (if it can be so categorized under today’s use of the term), was not simply some palsied notion of leisurely entertainment or amusement outside the public interest.  We may imagine how it may have begun in this way, but perhaps not so easily the seriousness with which its growing presence came to be regarded.  For at its beginning art represented, quite ambitiously for humans, the first attempts at symbolic thought; later, the concrete ability to establish the bridge between imagination and reality, and for humans to be able to make reference to something outside themselves.  

Art in the form of the visual image predates the evolution of linear writing and conceptual thinking by some twenty thousand years.   And, in the long developmental course of almost every major civilization, the image at once came to occupy the most salient representation of the public psyche as well as that of the world without.  In essence, art was an epistemology and way of knowing that made no distinctions between its own methods and those of the belief in alchemy or magic, or in the most rudimentary notions of incipient science.  The state of art in cultural practice represented and amounted to no less than the state of society’s ultimate awareness; of God, gods, monsters and everything else. 

In the last thirty thousand years leading up to the twentieth century – and quite noticeably in the last one hundred – however, art has undergone many changes back and forth in its outward form.  Art as a symbol has given itself to many interpretations, but not what art stands for as both object and product of the human mind.  As it is now, Western culture’s state of ultimate awareness by the public can still be measured in the literature and objects of our human heritage it ascribes value to for the consciousness they represent.  Then, we might ask in a general overview, what is this consciousness that the art of today tells we – the public – about what has become of human knowledge and awareness?  Is it not created, more than ever, in direct relationship to the context of the economic system?  The economics of the market system, more than ever, has become the mode of organization for all of society’s activities.  Economics controls all legitimate activities regulated under the rule of law, but also those (sometimes prohibited and illegal) that purposively manage to circumvent the authority of law.  It would be strange to think that only art, from its lofty perch in tradition as a representation of human consciousness, could somehow be allowed to subvert economic law.

Here, before venturing any further, a parallel between the discipline of art (as the product of an epistemology and way of knowing) and with the discipline of economics (as a way of allocating those productive goods needed for survival) will first be drawn.  Knowledge, whether of a scientific or artistic kind, shall as a matter of course here be considered as being among these necessary and productive goods.  In outlining this comparative relationship, it would be useful for the reader to keep in mind the distinction between what can be construed as the “pure” study of distinct branches of knowledge, as opposed to the applied form of the respective disciplines. 

A clarification of this perspective for viewing art within regard to its kinship with economics is also in order.  Economics however, being a relatively new “science,” grew out of a branch of the study of political science, most significantly toward the middle of the 18^th century.  Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, considered the blueprint for Capitalism, and still the reigning economic philosophy of our day, was published in 1776, whether or not by happenstance in the same year of the American Declaration of Independence.  The story of art is much longer, of course.  Art is as old as religion and human consciousness itself.  Art’s correlation with human’s religious and moral development is virtually inseparable – but it is precisely here that for our age an important point of economical contention arises.

Economics, and the notion of economic freedom, are at the core of what affects our daily life as people – whomever we are – wherever we live in the world.  Economics, at both the abstract and concrete levels, deals not only with the nature of national power, but individual human freedom and power.  Though one broad comparative distinction, with respect to the subject of this writing, would be that religious theology explicitly addresses our questions of God or some all-controlling power, while art addresses the expression and application of human creative skill and imagination.  But the controlling agents of each discipline; economics, art, and religion, are thus linked by a common relationship or appeal to human empowerment.  Economic study intends to govern our influence over earthly or material wants, we might say, just as the latter two (art and religion) address our concerns for control about things immaterial.  But on this subject, then it is perhaps better to ask, in other words; can art (albeit if only a rare conclusion expressed from the depths of human imagination) be considered our human creativity’s answer to the question of whether or not we are in fact free from some all-controlling power? 

Religion takes art’s answer, often out of symbolic context, we shall see, as evidence to the contrary.  Yet, between the tangle of art and freedom – religion and morality – it seems an uncertain score needs to be settled for the material privileges and goods on this earth.  Because, notwithstanding the odd skepticism of the modern reader who might still unknowingly be possessed of a medieval frame of mind, foremost, it is only with regard to the mystery of abundant life – and the scarcity of the temporal means to sustain it on our material planet – that there could still be any stake in the issue of human freedom in the first place.  Succinctly put, it is no longer the problems of the afterlife that can concern the branches of human knowledge.  But, lest the emphasis on earthly matters is forgotten here, it is useful to keep in mind that today the art market alone is a ten billion dollar industry living through objects and authors in a virtual afterlife of their own – with nine-tenths of it encompassing the trade in works of old masters, long dead and yet still posing keen competition with their struggling though still living contemporaries.  And, while one can applaud the paradox of a $135 million dollar painting by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) being sold at auction to the wealthy heir of a cosmetics empire (under the approving gasps of high society) while the great majority of living artists are disenfranchised and have yet to have a single solo show – wherein does this strange state of economic affairs lead?  If art indeed is something of concern for the public interest, it is the public that deserves to know.

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To Gustav Klimt – as well as to so many of his departed colleagues whose art has also sold for other exorbitant amounts; Manet, Monet, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso, et al. – accrue lasting historical tribute and eternal public acclaim.  They receive not a penny of the monetary proceeds, of course, but little of the rewards or posthumous compensation of such extraordinary art sale sums goes to their heirs either.  Instead, most windfall profits end up going to the legacies of those to whomever they sold the title of ownership to.  A common transfer of legal property rights seems to be all that is stake here between all parties involved.  However, the exchange of art on this level attains a peculiar historic status not unlike the transfer of a great deed of land.  In art, Spiritual estate becomes Real estate.  Cultural patrimony is amassed in the hands of a few collectors and in the heralded names of a handful of deceased artists.  The analogy is that for every sale of art by a dead artist, a precious amount of cultural earth needed to sustain living artists is thrown away – all for the sake of a grand cultural tomb – or is it perhaps that would-be spriritual garden enclosed behind velvet ropes at the center of our local museum?

From the perspective of classical Marxist theory, this odd scenario between haves and have-nots – between a few wealthy bourgeois collectors and millions of unrepresented proletariat artists – has all the escalading drama from which bloody world revolutions are made.  “What the bourgeois produces above all else are its own grave diggers,” Marx famously adduced in the Communist Manifesto, and even before, in words perhaps more poetic than prophetic;  “History repeats itself.  The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  (Marx, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)  So, museums become the mausoleums of the great names and spirits of art history, but there elite splendor is akin to the great pyramids of 18^th dynasty Egypt – built on the backs of so many illiterate slaves uninitiated into the magic of the priestly cult.  The illiterate slave in, in Marxian terms, was of course the medieval serf; a propertyless class of lumpen proletariat, inextricably tied to land, without class consciousness and at the mercy of those who owned the means of production.  In regard to the already “landed” cultural patrimony of art (i.e. those illustrious artists of the past, long dead an buried) and the recent social phenomena of the bourgeois collector, the proletariat lacking class consciousness is, of course, the contemporary living artist himself.  In matters of art history, often no more than an illiterate and powerless slave to the system.   

Marxist interpretations of everything from anthropology to literature have had a long academic following during the 20^th century, and no doubt have inspired the support and opposition of many scholars in the history of art.  In 1936, the late Meyer Schapiro (formerly the graduate Chair at Columbia University) argued in his article Social Basis of Art that “the artist had a place in the revolutionary process thanks to his alliance with the proletariat,” a stance he was later to characterize as without hope.1  At The First American Artists’ Congress in the same year, the artist and sociologist Max Weber sardonically commented on the “tragic situation confronting artists in New York, who had to try to survive without the support of art galleries in the face of art criticism of mediocre quality; ‘In the beginning of his or her career, the artist is advised to make connections.  We keep connecting, all our lives, and in the end most of us find ourselves connected with the poor house.”2

The blight of poverty is a cliché that has never been too far-a-field from the pursuits of an artist’s lifestyle.  It has been the aim of our subject matter, however, to address the idea of public or the republic’s freedom in art as well as economics.  And, in spite of all the interest Marx’s influence has generated in academics and social causes, such incursions into the role of aesthetics in society seem to have touched only tangentially on the subject of art with respect to its direct economic relationship to historical materialism.  Artists were equated with the working proletariat, yes, but not actually recognized as a distinct species of proletariat vis a vis the historical mode of cultural production themselves.  And it is precisely in this realm – where art and religious ideas merge and become fused to the boon or detriment of our civilization always on the brink of apocalyptic war – that the public interest of our subject matter really lies. 

Yet it is not the intent of this writing to side with or against Marx on the ultimate direction of history – any more than it is to uphold the assumption that Adam Smith’s laws of classic market capitalism are best left alone, or not alone, in regard to the paradoxical place art holds in our market system.  Nonetheless, in keeping with both of these thinkers on matters of trade and industry, the momentum of culture as well as business is here taken to be dynamic and, at root, quite often in conflict in matters of both class and religion.  It is the premise of this thesis therefore that the collusions and collisions of art and religion hide human interests and stakes that are far too great not to grant them their moment of civil judgment – and, short of the purification of some inconclusive truth by the violent clashes of fanatical ideology on this subject, the dispassionate arbitration of freedom for our modern civilization can only fall to the study of economics. 

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III.      What Does All this Religion Have To Do With the Artist and Art Criticism?

What has all this to do with art criticism?  To return to an eminent art historian on this subject, it was Meyer Schapiro who was also “severely critical of the individualistic artist who produced for a market that upheld the values of the dominant class while deluding himself that he was in fact independent.”3  To understate the larger social forces that affect the creation of art object at any given moment is to deny the organic nature of art’s existence.  Still, the thorny problem of addressing individual works of art within the larger framework of historical theory is a complicated one. 

It is relevant to note that the first serious attention paid toward art criticism itself is traced back to the 18^th century French philosopher, Dennis Diderot, at a time when the rational explanation of economics was also just beginning to be underway.  Diderot was the first to start taking copious notes and writing about the objects of visual art he saw in the Paris salons.  Up until then, all the important writings on the subject of painting or sculpture had been the volumes of treatises that analyzed the great stylists of a particular school or tradition:  De Pintura, by Leonardo da Vinci, also the noted works of Alberti, Vassari, going back to ancient times with Polyclytus’s Canon, all examined the tenets of a grand following.  But, then why this new importance in the 18^th century with regard to individual works?  It being the age of the Enlightenment, rationalism and of growing individualism, there was perhaps a need to explain the vagaries of artistic phenomena.  The hold of “public” tradition was steadily losing its powerful grasp on Western society.

The distinction between art criticism and art theory is helpfully clarified by the scholar, Moshe Barasch.  Whereas art criticism addresses a particular object, Barasche explains, “When traditional art theory speaks of an individual painting or sculpture, the work is treated as an illustration of a general idea rather than a single work of art….Throughout the tradition, it can thus be said, the individual work of art remains an illustration of general principles rather than the unique product of an individual artist’s imagination and skill.”4     Every work of art is a product of its age, and as the 20^th century painter Vassily Kandinsky wrote, “Every work of art is the mother of the age to come.”  But few individual artworks attain this level of significance in changing history.

The Venus of Manet, Picasso’s Mademoiselles de Avignon, Duchamp’s The Large Glass and Any Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are a few examples of moments of watershed change or a turning point in the direction of the development of art.  But the historical influence of such individual works can only be noted in retrospect.  And the crux of the matter becomes, rather, whether it is then more important to criticize on the whole the less significant aesthetics of individual production, or instead, the greater components and ideas of society that give rise to the changing nature of the artworks in our midst in the first place. 

When appraising the works of individual artists in contemporary art though, hardly is any true “criticism” evinced.  To the casual social historian intrigued by the anomalies between superficial taste and extravagant prices, for example, it might seem obvious that there must be some hidden or secret explanation for why the vaunted meaningless of so much art on display is simply taken for granted.  But, to no avail, an observer may scour in wonder the texts in which artists and their work are descriptively written up, praised and interpreted by the leading art magazines.  As it were, name brand periodicals that – at the expense of substantive text – without even so much as pausing to question the prices of wall hangings that command more per square inch than the most coveted floor spaces of Manhattan real estate, consciously gleam with the most fashionable displays of high gloss ads and commercial font for the latest exhibition.  But so where is the curious observer to go for answers? 

Most contemporary books on art history, criticism, or the state of the actual art market lack the ambition to analyze the historical nuances of what made the art market they way that it is.  Moreover, as erstwhile investigative journalists, writers on art do not seem to possess the necessary incentives to even mention these perplexing and even troubling issues about art and economics.  This, despite the fact that the average art critic’s salary hardly affords him the means with which to buy a small New York studio apartment, let alone the art he is writing about.  It maybe for fear that any negativity against an individual work be taken too harshly by an artist, or because it would adversely affect the economic relationship between the gallery system and the “critical” magazines in which they advertise.  Perhaps it would be idealistic to say that art critics should have to answer only to the art they are critiquing, but is it so cynical to realize how obvious it is that – at least by the omission of the greater issues that they are skirting – they are simply answering to “the man?”  Whatever the truth, the criticism of contemporary art today, stifled by budgetary word-counts and buried within the back pages of inconspicuous magazines, stands in an abject relationship to the gravity of its subject matter. 

Among the important thinkers on art in the 19^th century, Pierre Joseph Proudhon was, besides an aesthetician, sincerely engaged in the problems of social reform and justice.  “Art is liberty itself,” he proclaimed5.  But, more importantly, he highlighted the social character and significance of art.  “In fact, the social character of art is so overwhelming that it almost completely overshadows its natural components.”  The conclusions are far reaching.  “Art, it follows from much of what he says, is too weighty and serious a matter to be left to artists alone.  Precisely because the painting or statue has such a great power of incitement, it is society as a whole, and not the individual, even if he is the artist, that must determine the subjects and uses of his art.”6  It is thus that we should aim to rightfully criticize, if need be even negatively, both the artist and the society from which the vision of his work is produced.

As we come to look with greater contemplation on the relationship with art and religion, what’s more, we shall see that it is as well imperative for the artist that he understand his work to be taken with utmost seriousness.  “Proudhon stresses that the artist cannot help being ‘committed,’ to use the present-day term.  To paint something without caring about what one represents is not only morally detestable; in the final analysis, it is simply impossible.  The artist will always take up a position, he cannot simply remain neutral, without color, as it were.  It is for this reason that Proudhon believes the artist to be the collaborator of the social reformer… The subject matter and style of painting follow from art’s function in social reform.”7 

Hence, a proper criticism of art cannot be limited to those individual objects in display in the gallery system, nor can it be in service to the approval of their economic interest in promoting their product.  In this regard, a proper criticism of art must be tantamount to a criticism of the economic and political system in which it is made as well.  And where there is politics and economics, as we know, religion is not far behind.  Just as art, we might say, is a priori to religion, or simply religion in its raw, un-politicized spiritual form.  But without the need to digress into the history of these two sister phenomena of art and religion, it is now almost suffice to name a few of the titles of some of the founding and most influential texts on economic thought to find common cause with the same moral weightiness of their concerns. 

Before his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) was to grant the founding father of modern economics Adam Smith immortal fame, in 1759 he had published a small sensation entitled: The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  In 1793 (the ominous year of another famous revolution) William Godwin, an ordained Anglican minister and the father of Mary Shelley, published Political Justice.  A book in which Godwin, addressing the problem of population for the promotion of national wealth foretold of a future where “there will be no war, no crime, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government.  Besides this, there will be no disease anguish, melancholy or resentment.”8  Another man of the church, the Reverend Robert Thomas Malthus, in the year 1798 published anonymously his legendary Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society; a dire warning of famine as the consequence of population overgrowth.  Frederich Engel’s prelude the to The Communist Manifesto and the zealous humanism that inspired Karl Marx was his meticulous and sympathetic study of poverty in The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1844).  In the Victorian era, the treatise of the University of Manchester professor W. Stanley Jevons on political economy was summed up as “a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain.”9 

The French political and economic satirist, Frederic Bastiat meanwhile published a work by the name of Economic Harmonies, “in which he was to show that the apparent disorder of the world was disorder of the surface only; that underneath, the impetus of a thousand different self-seeking agents became transmuted in the marketplace into a higher social good.”10  In the same spirit of observation, the American economic reporter Henry George’s book was called Progress and Poverty.  And the list of conspicuously moralistic sounding titles from the development of economics goes on; Thorstein Veblen’s famous, Theory of the Leisure Class and his essay on the WWI Versaille settlement Inquiry into the Nature of the Peace; on the same worldly subject, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and later his The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money.  

In sum, the problems dealt with in the very titles of the great works on economics and by the history of economic development within the last three hundred years are, from the very start, notably on the subject of human struggle, strife and the overcoming of the obstacles of earthly hardship.  Poverty, injustice, peace and war – the problems of good an evil, we might say – are the same problems that in the ancient past were addressed almost exclusively by religious texts, or parables and sermons regarding the morality of human actions. 

Making sense of poverty, injustice and war under the existence of an alleged divinity are the subject matter and at the core of almost all ancient religious teaching, but also no less centrical to the art that becomes the exponent of any religion’s narrative.  The common themes in Christian art: The annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Arrest of Jesus, the Crucifix – are, after all, deptictions that are a result of the devotion to the prophecy of one man on such matters good and evil. 

“Life is short, art is long,” the Roman senator Seneca is to have said.  Art is broad, we can muse; but even when it is about “nothing”, is it not still as if it were also saying something about these things simply by the fact it is classified as art?   Even when art is secular or void of any nominal religious content, the subject matter itself grapples with the themes of good and evil or the making sense of the dramatic consequences of poverty, injustice and war on the public itself; the moral afflictions of the human condition, and the ideal of freedom and its limitations under earthly circumstances.   We may take as an example the content of but a few of the most famous works in Western culture, and consider the pains they take to figuratively and dramatically render the spiritual state or moral qualities of their protagonists’ actions: 

Raft of the Medusa, The (1818) – Gericault, Theodore

Birth of Venus, The (c.1480) – Botticelli, Sandro [Alessandro Filipepi]

Scream, The (1893) [aka The Shout; or The Cry] – Munch, Edvard

Garden of Earthly Delights, The (c.1500) – Bosch, Hieronymus [Jerome van Aeken]

Oath of the Horatii, The (1784) – David, Jacques-Louis

Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) – Greco, El [Domenico Theotocopoulos]

School of Athens (1509-10) – Raphael [Raffaello Santi, or Sanzio]

The Potato Eaters   –  Van Gogh, Vincent

Liberty Leading the People (1830) – Delacroix, Eugene

Be it through a subject matter that is mythical, dramatic, or merely descriptive, the moral context to which each of these works draw the attention of the viewer is – not only plainly evident – but also a major emphasis made by each one of these major artists of the Western tradition. That the very nature of art is tied to the moral and religious tendency of humankind could be cited in any infinite number of ways. Show me a work of art, and I will show you a moral – or an amoral – statement. Art cannot exist in a moral vacuum, but inescapably leans one way or another on matters of value. Art, as if having a greater likeness to God than the concept of God itself, it cannot be or even pretend to be morally neutral and at the same time continue to exist as art. Meanwhile, to list here merely a small fraction of the major Western masterpieces in painting that are known by the titles of their religious content would occupy a space at least one hundred times as long.

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IV. The Task of the Object of Art: Progress of the Spiritual or the Material Mind?

In its widest scope then, the presiding theme of this paper is with respect to the contended disputes in art, religion, economics and the organization of human liberty.  These conflicts that beleaguer the human condition have been at the root of every civil society’s revolutions and wars, their faith in upholding a democratically elected government or in adopting alternative radical religious beliefs, and they continue to be of worldly and international import.  Yet, in the more narrow sense, all these problems have throughout history been consistently addressed by art in its various forms, and fall within the totality of its domain. 

Art’s relationship to the grand scale of this subject matter, however, has foremost been a traditional one with its basis in the physical art object.  What is meant by this is that, curiously here, we are literally speaking only of objects that have traditionally addressed these issues of the human condition, while the artists or the author’s of these many works themselves have been studied somewhat secondarily (although with increasing fascination since the Renaissance) as biographical subjects in regard to their mysterious talent in producing them. 

In this sense, the importance of an art object has always foremost represented a tradition in culture as opposed to the individual vision of its author.  In Ancient Greece, where the purpose of the sculptural medium was the expression of divine sanction over national conflict and domestic prosperity; likewise in Medieval Christendom – where icons served as an aid to the indoctrination of Biblical morality so as to curb human avarice and defer gratification to a promised afterlife, for example, the large body of artistic production is of anonymous authorship.  The object or icon itself is what is of supreme interest to the public.  Even in cases where the remarkable skill of an artist is highlighted by the learned contemporaries of his day (such as Dio’s comment of Phydias’s famed sculpture of Zeus in the 6^th century BCE), it was still foremost the art object as an expression of the divine that merited the attention and wonder of the audience.

But thus, although the ultimate consciousness of the Greek and Medieval Christian world’s subjects may have had a markedly different in outlook, the mysterious unity of art with the special power of consciousness in the artist who created it has remained largely neglected.  Superseding any fascination with the cult of individual knowledge and insight of the artist, the emphasis, general interest and approach to art by society has been object based, and notably bound to a tradition.  If we take for our consideration the production of art under these circumstances during the late medieval period, for example – we see that this meant that market economics, at least at this point in question, did not really enter the equation.  Where artworks were produced in keeping with a respective tradition, emphasis was on adherence to the characteristics of a canon rather than on innovation for the sake of economic gain or individual notoriety.  Little thought was given to the potential market worth of an art object.  And this remained true even when, outside the considerations of artistic matters, other products of human individuals were already forging sound economic relationships and exchanging their goods and services on basic principles of trade. 

But the art object was – and to this day remains – a cultural product that occupies a rare position in its insulation from the normal processes of economic exchange.  To use a contemporary European term that holds equally true for our modern museum culture as it did for the subjects of the world of Classical Greece or the Middle Ages, art is considered only as the stuff of “human patrimony” or the heritage and endowment of a culture belonging to one and all, or perhaps to the state or church, but to no one else in general.  The main difference we might say is only that cultural patrimony in the past was represented by a living canon of tradition – where myth, faith and the object symbol were one within its respective civilization (whether an oracle out in the open air at Delphi or the painting of the Virgin within a Medieval abbey).  Art was a public matter, woven into the very fabric of cultural religious belief.   

In recognizing this vital relationship that art had to the moral fabric of ancient societies, however, several issues are raised that cannot be addressed off-handedly or all at once.  Most salient of these issues is the conceit of the timeliness and universality of art.  Something that is easily taken for granted for an observer who is referencing an art object in the context of a living tradition.  The art of a society in such case embodies the living ideals of the time.  Thus, it can be said to be “timeless and universal.”  Yet, this point of view – to be taken up later in the course of this writing – is inevitably brought into question from a more distant historical perspective.     

For now, we may simply consider how a historical work of art – of the 14^th century, for instance – may still be our rightful cultural inheritance, but the great link between this art and the average citizen of our day is no longer a public spiritual affair approached with fear and trembling.  Everywhere we see how the secular museums of today have had to artificially create a hallowed sanctuary for the various dying traditions of art history that have splintered into becoming the anthropological relics of its various wings.  Outside the museum cocoon of their artificial preserve, even the most splendid artworks of the recent past run the danger of being objects that no longer possess any compelling social bond. 

Somewhere along the path of history, art first became materially divorced from organized religion in our culture.  Eventually, the changes that marked the development of artistic expression during the centuries of Western civilization would come to shape and recreate the moral fabric of our culture anew.  Both in its methods and intentions, as well as in its ownership, art would come to change hands.  In contrast, when subsumed under the hold of an artistic tradition, art was presumed not to be a matter of exclusive possession, or to be capable of being separated by private economic means from the one cohesive public entity that made up the substance of its representation.  And yet, however gradually it came to pass, the unity of tradition in art was discarded in favor of ever newer and freer mannerisms, customs, styles, spurred by private, commercial and economic exchange – until its development became diffused into the secular practice of today. 

But how – and, is not the art of a society always its very true religion itself?  The general observer may still look at the art of our day with a kind of awe, but – outside the privileged knowledge of art world specialists – it is not the same kind of awe.  Now, the most obvious form of value connection between the art and the general public is ostensibly aesthetic, but as translated by the paparazzi press of the communications world, equally measured by the astounding economic price tag that a given artwork can represent.

Nevertheless, a crucial similarity between the ancient past and the present is maintained.  Following the thread of our argument as pertains to the contemporary mode of art production – still anchored by the pantheon of the museum system that archives our “Western tradition” – and its comparison to the art of ancient societies where art evolved within the conventions of its own pre-Western traditional canon (that is, before now being etically assimilated as part of our own), we see that in economic terms our present culture is largely at the same archaic stage of development.  The term archaic is not here used in a pejorative sense, however, but only insofar as the market relationship between art and society is concerned.  Because, for all the analysis of the ideas in contemporary art, societal interests still place emphasis and importance on the phenomenological object instead of the human being who created it. 

And just so, for most of the long periods of its history, art had remained an object tied to custom and little given to the incentives of change.  Up until the times of economic prosperity when there arose a class of merchants or those of wealthy means – and solely then did it become evident that art (like any other product) was also an object that could be possessed. 

It must be underscored then, that it is mainly the degree to which art has come to be an object capable of being in private possession (and coveted in that manner), that in any way distinguishes our object-centered relationship to art from that of the pre-Western cultures of the past.  To be sure, there were always men of wealth who owned and collected art, and in this regard the main difference between our society and of those past is really a matter of degree.  When the art of a society increasingly becomes a matter of individual property, though, it is only of moderate value if in likeness and presence it is akin to the property of everyone else. 

In consideration of the main point of differentiation between Western art and those of more ancient traditions – i.e. the quality of possession – it is therefore appropriate at this point of inquiry to further note with emphasis that the central locomotive of the modern art world now resides within the United States of America; also the leading exponent of Capitalist philosophy in the world.  The United States of American was founded on the principles of laissez-faire Capitalism and the profound belief in the inherent human right to private property.  The giant canvas for the production of contemporary art now thus lies across one of the richest continents on the face of the earth – with New York and the industry of Hollywood, California at either end, and enveloping a whole inner continent of deeply conservative Christian belief in the middle.  Some say the grand torch of the Western tradition in art was passed on to us, its natural modern heirs.  Others say we stole it.11   Either way, we are a complex country of robust idealism, driven by material wealth, which holds itself out to the world as no less than the guiding light of human prosperity.   

Likewise, the development of art runs throughout the course of Western history as both symbol and representation of the flowering of the human spirit, some might say in a Hegelian sense.  Where there was poverty, war, revolution or a conservation of civil tradition – art has been.  But has humanity truly moved in the direction of progress?  And, as the ultimate representation of human consciousness, if art indeed changes as we see on its surface that it does – then what besides commercial economic trade, we must ask, is it that moves the object to change? 

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V.     Art, Private Patronage, and the Rebirth of Human Consciousness in Renaissance Europe

Putting the constraints of tradition aside, it is at this point – and upon specifying the modern quality of possession and ownership that an artwork can be subject to – that it may be useful to flash forward to the age of the Renaissance.  Not in the least because the relatively recent rise of capitalist America as the center of the art world evinces remarkably illustrative parallels to the newly established art market that quattrocento Italy became during this period in European history.

Renaissance Italy was the inheritor of the Medieval mind made aware of itself by the success of its new material wealth from trade and commerce.  From the Middle Ages, where art icons were considered to be the spiritual embodiment of the sacred, to renaissance Italy was transferred the idea that art representing people gave these people (wealthy merchants or aristocrats) a greater public as well as spiritual stature.  Art was a spiritually embodied object and renaissance Italy represented according to Jakob Burckhardt, “a spontaneous and ultimately inexplicable flowering of the human spirit”.12

Yet, in retrospect this need not be seen as inexplicable at all.  The rise of the Italian city states was impelled by the new creation of wealth, and it spawned an unprecedented consumerism in all things – as well as in art.  It was the birth of pre-modern Capitalism.  Art became the object of consumerism, we might say the object of a consumerism in the human spirit.  And it is here, at this unique time in civilization, that art marked the immense shift toward the new mentality of human individualism that contrasts our thinking from the tradition-based mentality of the Middle Ages. 

It is what in Western sociology today we call our humanist tradition.  And, it is not for any specious reasoning the Renaissance is often considered by scholars to inaugurate what we might more appropriately call the “history of the artist” instead of the “history of art”.  The history of art is object-based, whereas “a history of artists” – to use this adoptive term – would necessarily place more emphasis on the human being behind the art.  We have noted how in the Middle Ages the art object followed a staid tradition outside any concept of earthly progress, but more poignantly, nor was there then even any notion of human importance on earth.  Life was little more than an annoying preparation for a world to come in the promised hereafter.  In marked contrast, in the Renaissance the chief distinction of the man of culture became individualism and worldliness.

A major historical catalyst to the emergence of the Renaissance spirit of individualism over the authority of tradition was the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, largely occasioned in around 1453 by the influx of classical scholars fleeing the Muslim siege of Constantinople.  “The Ancient Greek, as revealed in this literature, was also a strong individualist, for the voice of the literature was, of course, that of democratic and individualistic Athens rather than the regimented ant hill of Sparta.”13  But the new fascination with the ancient world was not limited to the Renaissance vogue for the strong individual voice of lyrical poetry, for which it also came to be known. In keeping with this new voice, “Another important facet of individualism was the insistence on the well rounded man.  If a man is only a unit in a social mass, there is a strong obligation to be as much like the other units possible.  But if a man is an individual, an end in himself, then there is a value in his differences, in his uniqueness.14 

So, we are here analyzing the birth of the humanist tradition; of our fascination with the artist “man” himself.  And though the profound consequences of this realization may have not yet reached its full economic development even in our contemporary present, we can hardly deny that the human being is the ultimate origin at the root of any fascination with the phenomenon of art.  “To be radical is to go the root of things,” said Kart Marx, “and at the root is man.”  Yet a closer look at the man of the Renaissance is still helpful to assess, not only similarities, but the differences that the later “more” economic man would have to undergo as we come to survey the development of art and the artist within the context of  our modern market economy.  On the ideal nature of the human being of the Renaissance, for example; that he “furthermore, [should] be complete, with all his faculties developed, instead of being a mere specialist who must be completed by other specialists…. 

“The accomplished courtier of the Renaissance is supposed to be able to fence, to ride, to read Latin and Greek, to organize the siege of a city, or to write a graceful sonnet to a lady.  And in actual fact, we find figures like Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, engineer, and inventor; Sir Walter Raleigh, explorer, freebooter, courtier, poet, and historian; like Thomas Campion, physician, poet, and composer.”15 The ideal of the Renaissance man, of course, still holds a certain level of magnetism for both women and men of today.  It is perhaps in the completeness of the development of this kind of human being, however, that our modern economic status also notably differentiates us from this Renaissance or worldly outlook.  For even though more individuals may have access to the development of these personal qualities today than ever before, still, the history of economic development has also made largely obsolete the aristocratic class structure which enabled this frame of mind. 

Certainly, there are profound similarities as well as differences between the art world of modern America and that of 14^th and 15^th century Italy.  In our own “modern” day, the vast majority of society is yet required to specialize themselves in the task which they are alloted.  If no longer by birth, in the traditional sense of ritually observant societies  (wherein if your father was a mapmaker then to such office was your calling) then, perhaps all the more, simply by the way nature itself determines one’s talents.  Indeed, at any point in human history, the matter of how much choice any individual has in the selection of his or her metier is circumstantial and highly questionable.  Under modern Capitalism, all that the centuries of enlightened political thinking have bequeathed our government and its subjects is the promise of a fair playing field, and the intrinsic right of every individual to pursue one’s happiness. 

But so the crux of the conflict in this economic analysis returns to the question of the art market and the artists who are the subjects of its peculiar mode of distributing wealth and prosperity.  And, without getting into the matter of choice for the moment, or the polemical findings of modern genetic science on the melancholic predisposition of the artist (as opposed to his more happy-go-lucky bourgeois counterpart?), it is from here that art’s special relationship to the modern economic conflict within man – between production and consumption, capital and labor – shall further ensue.  Both modern and post-Modern art are merely symbol and testament to the ongoing progression of this conflict, yet to no discernable end or decision.   

In pointing out, nevertheless, how the worldview of 14^th century Italy was a momentous turning point for the inner consciousness of human beings vis a vis the choices offered by their earthly setting, we are staking a claim for the human faculty of choice.  Also, that the art and the conscious formal symbolism in its content during this time of historical change is a mindful and volitional expression of this awareness.  Because someone, after all (i.e. artists, whether individually or collectively), were conscientiously making the formalist choices in art now representative of this change of awareness.  And because, among other things, art is a reflection of the conflict within human liberty, we see in its development at this historical time a mirror of how the inner conflict between mankind’s fated mortal existence and its then widespread belief in a heavenly benediction presupposed a new type of aesthetic representation that held in the balance.  A balance that ever more gradually became measured and depicted by the value of things obtained in the here and now (of that newly evolving time) rather than in the timeworn promises of the afterlife.

“One of the principle forms that the Renaissance took was the rejection of authority – the determination to make one’s own decisions, right or wrong…Thus the central position of the Reformation was that a man could deal directly with his God without going through the channels of the Church, and that he should have the Bible in his own tongue, to read and interpret for himself, instead of merely accepting oficial dogma without going to its source.  The beginnings of modern science can also be found in this same rejection of authority, for it automatically involves a fresh look at the evidence.”16    

The foundational stimulus for this rebirth and reawakening to all things worldly, though, was not any whim of the artistic imagination determined to break free from the constraints of tradition.  But rather a complex diffusion of ideas precipitated by the establishment of new navigable trade routes for commerce, over land as well as sea, which resulted in new reserves of surplus wealth.  It was the tide of a rising economy that determined a new outlook and vision of mankind’s place on earth.  And the horizon of the new earthly domain was only to be further expanded by the discovery of the new frontier of the American continent in the 15^th century. 

It is perchance only coincidence, but nonetheless fitting that as of yet the simple word “America” evokes a mythical earthly paradise to so many people around the world.  And that, indeed, the American ideal or a notion of the American “spirit,” just as the connotation of the phrase “the American dream,” all share almost a kindred connection to the same spirit of individuality, rejection of authority, and penchant for earthly interests that characterized the man of the Renaissance’s emerging world view.  In the Florence, Italy of then however – all the same as in the America of today – this large shift in consciousness toward the new contextual setting for human destiny (from the ultimate aspiration for the rewards of an afterlife to those granted by achieving worldly abundance), did not mean the forsaking of all religious ideology. 

Rather, it was as if the same dramatic forces of humanity’s inner spiritual conflict – once symbolized by the otherworldly icons of the medieval period – were, now during the Renaissance, only transferred and returned through art to their rightful stage of origin; the human individual himself.  Such was the magnitude of this transition from the icon to art; no less than the birth of art – and therefore of consciousness – as we have come to know it.  If not the greatest leap, still perhaps the greatest intellectual development in modern society.  Whereas before, a religious man or woman may have been a mere outsider – as if an onlooker in the audience overseeing the plight of human existence as narrated by the venerable tales of Biblical script – now suddenly artists and a new class of human beings could, through artistic patronage, become illustrious protagonists in the escalating drama of the human story.

The commissioning and creation of art during the Renaissance, no longer the exclusive product of guilds in service of the Church, gave the new patron of accumulated wealth an image of himself in beauty and immortality.  If this was not enough, more than a few noblemen had their own private chapels constructed and adorned in frescoes for their own entombment.17  Renaissance Italy, we recall, was also the birth of modern consumerism.  In Florence itself everyone became aware of their relative net worth. There was a showing off, a legitimization of private property, and possessions came to be an objectification of the self.  Selfishness.  The idea of American captialist consumerism in art seems no more than a page out of this time of artistic flourishing.  Today we could even say we are in an American renaissance.  In America there is a passion for spending, although our spending – as in Italy – more often commemorates the spender or patron, not the artist, or worker.

The fascination here, however, is more precisely with a sudden transferring of political influence by economic means.  Art, with all its attendant power as a force for political propaganda and religious reverence, went from a domain previously reserved for the sacred auspices of the Catholic Church – to the private domain of the owner of market capital.  The introduction of an art based on tradition to the demands of an emerging market was in essence the metaphorical, and real, transfer of moral autonomy – from the most powerful religious institution the world had ever known, to the consciousness of an individual group of society with the increasing means to comfortably sustain itself on earth.  It was, perhaps, truly the economic as well as the spiritual prototype of modern day America.  It was as if in fact the ability to create conscience and consciousness itself had been transferred from God to man. 

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VI.       Stolen Fire:  Rational Perception and the Crisis of Magical Realism

Now, it is the conceit of those acquainted with art, or the vision of an artistic mind, that there is a moral quality behind it.  The sacerdotal connection of the artist to the divine has a long historical pedigree as well.  At its extreme, the idea of artistic vision implies a quality of genius – even prophecy; that it is the responsibility of the artist to give the human soul proper direction in its path through the bewildering changes in our unknown future.  But, if change might be inevitable, there is no precondition to guarantee that our response to it will have any intrinsic moral determinant – perhaps, especially, if the societal perception of art is so habitually skewed toward its existence as a sensual object/commodity, in disregard of its importance as a repository of enigmatic knowledge. 

Nonetheless, the aesthetic and formal changes that have marked the development of the history art – we shall see – have been as much the result of cognitive processes in art theory, and have gone hand in hand with the course of material economic developments.  It remains to be seen for our contemporary day, however, how a conscientious fusion of economic principles and a return to the cognitive underpinnings of art might augur an entirely new change in the mode of human experience.

“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition,” remarked the German critic Walter Benjamin in his famous essay; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction.18  Writing amidst the political upheavals of the 1930s, Benjamin’s concern was with the disappearance of a qualitative essence in art he labeled as its “aura,” as works of art became increasingly subject to instant reproducibility with advancing technology.  A technology that, by virtue of its capacity for the mechanical replication of the image, signified to him perhaps the nullification of any possibility for artistic development within a tradition.  To extend this thought further to its logical conclusion seems to imply that – as the originality or uniqueness of an image therefore loses its singular place in time – all art created since will increasingly lack the necessary foil of a developing tradition that it needs in order to distinguish its meaning. 

Now at the cusp of the 21^st century, we are therefore verging on a world of only virtual content in art, where the mechanically generated distribution of images can give promise only to a valueless end result; a consistently static redundancy of ever multiplying copies – a strangely fixed tradition existing outside the natural time zone of history.  But one that is, if not universal, paradoxically timeless in its imperturbability; a tradition by default.  No wonder the most common criticism often heard about contemporary art is that it no longer says or reveals anything new.  But, since the time of the Renaissance, something has clearly changed.  Yet, what is it – and how has this affected the artist and the market?

Benjamin also noted with due diligence that, “During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. …Tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.  An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol.”19 

Before proceeding with the subject of our study it may be useful, at this juncture, to recap and pause for a moment of contemplation.  It may also be useful to wonder to what extent the attitudes in thinking about art (vis a vis the ancient statue of Venus, for example) are politically determined.  But, putting this thought aside for the moment, suffice is to say that the foregoing contrasts in the thinking about art during such distinct times are hereby illustrated to point out that the attitude and relationship of society to art is, by and large, cognitively based. 

Not to be misled by Benjamin’s terminology, it is apt to consider that art may be both created and experienced by “sense perception.”  But the point, moreover, is that any slant toward meaning is processed by our cognitive function – which criteria, of course, are also ever changing as it keeps pace with “humanity’s entire mode of existence.”  The importance of this conclusion must be here noted with emphasis, as it reverts back to the premise of our approach stated in first beginning pages of our study. 

Mainly, it is not our purpose here to analyze the individual aesthetic experience, nor of any necessarily subjective encounter with art.  Right or wrong, the practiced observer of art will – before any given object – determine the sensual value of their experience for themselves.  The perils of the fastidious judgment of our senses notwithstanding, our concern with art’s importance therefore is primarily with respect to how the underlying substance of art equates to a form of collective epistemology – or knowledge itself, be it of the most esoteric kind.  We may even go so far as to say that it is an a priori knowledge (in the sense that it pre-existed in the mind of the artist, even if subconsciously), for which the art object is merely the empirical vessel in which it is encrypted.  At the most fundamental level, though – whatever the important truth that art may carry – it can only be of consequence to society if it is efficiently processed in the market of ideas where it can take its rightful place as both the object and representation of its message.  (In this light, the political aspect of the problem may become slightly clearer as well.)

Nonetheless, our concentration is first on the aspect of art’s meaning, or the way in which it is apprehended and processed within the context of its relationship to society.  And where meaning is involved, it is the cognitive faculty that must be taken into account.  Simply put, if society’s relationship to art were not a product of the predominant mode of cognizing the matter of its content, an ancient statue of Venus would not have made one iota of a difference to either the citizens of Classical Greece or the clerics of the Middle Ages.  It would simply have been a statue like any other.

The philosophical distance that modern art has required, however, and come to in its own inner development – in order to be able to realize this simple point – is still largely disavowed by observers who are reluctant, or incapable of, understanding art other than on sensual grounds.  And so, the overwhelming evidence of the cognitive aspirations and political impulses of modern art notwithstanding, the cultural establishment’s general refusal to accept it on its own terms might thus appear as none other than a conspiratorial undermining of ideas that stand in opposition to the inherited knowledge base of Western society.  The logical basis for this assertion will be taken up later in concordance with the evidence. 

It is now necessary, however, to first discuss the evolution of logical precedents in history before drawing closer to any inescapable conclusions.  We should be forewarned nevertheless that the roots of these precedents record little but the splinter and tear of the still unanswered quandaries that separate faith and human knowledge. The history of when and why Western aesthetics forfeited the functional role of the cognitive faculty in art can be traced back to the 18^th century, around the time of the consolidation of the Enlightenment.  It is, on its own, subject enough for an entirely separate paper on art theory.  Here, it shall serve by way of example to only briefly elucidate how mental paradigms can fundamentally affect the direction of artistic consciousness – and for our purposes, to foreground the setting of our final thesis within the context of the historical transitions of the past.

The initial turning point in the 18^th century pivots upon a philosophical reaction by certain thinkers on aesthetics against the rise of scientific rationalism, and the attempt by some of its proponents (called dogmatic rationalists) to establish an overarching metaphysics based on its deductions.  Two of the main figures in the dogmatic rationalist camp were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and his disciple, Christian Wolff (1679-1754).  In analyzing the mode of human mental thought processes, Leibniz and Wolff maintained that the mind had two different modes of cognizing the world; the higher one being thought, the lower mode being that of sense perception.20  But with respect to our ways of knowing, the difference between thought and sense perception was not a distinct type of knowledge, rather a matter of degree.  “Sense perception”, they said, “cannot be made distinct without turning it into thought; lower cognition is only a preliminary stage of the same knowledge.”21

Thus Leibniz and Wolff considered beauty and the pleasure derived from it as thing appreciated and esteemed through the mental understanding of perfection.  Prior to this turning point in the intellectual history, art too was construed in cognitive terms.  “Art presupposes this cognition and makes it possible through its creations; art ‘imitates nature’ in the sense that it produces the best examples of perfection of which nature (the world as phenomenon, i.e., as perceived by the senses) is, ideally, capable.  Art pleases to the extent that it teaches us through examples.”23  (Ibid) 

We may note, in particular, of this formulation of art, that here the word “teaches” accentuates the pedagogical quality of art or, in other words, its function as kind of a epistemology in addition to, or coterminous with, its ability to convey pleasure.  The cognitive function of art, moreover, is described as necessarily of the first order.  “By the same token, sense perfection can have no perfection on its own, and hence no rules of its own to govern such perfection.  The rules that apply to it are simply the rules of all thought: the principle of contradiction, and the principle of sufficient reason (which is the principle that God followed in making the best of all possible worlds).”24       

In this early 18^th century formulation of art that had held sway since the dawn of the Renaissance, in other words, the beauty of the senses was entirely dependent on our cognitive process.  But this statement on its own, while superficially correct, is still a simplistic assessment of the powerful impact that images and their sensual component had on the human mind in the early to late Renaissance.  For at this point in history – before any reliability in the scientific method had been established by the advances of quantitative mathematics in the fields of astronomy and physics in the two centuries that were to follow – there was an utter lack of distinction between truth that was perceived either sensually or cognitively.  Sensation was cognition, and the perceptions of the senses were not subdivided into any separate epistemological category.  In the realm of art, this gave images (in keeping with their Medieval legacy) a persuasiveness and authority that was tantamount to magic.  That is to say, before the impending moment in Western history during the 18^th century, magic (i.e. art) and truth were but one and the same. 

According to one Renaissance scholar, the late Ion P. Couliano, indeed magic (manifested in the form of “phantasms”) was the “ruling myth” of the Renaissance mindset, and magic exercised its power, above all, in the form of images to the extent that they were capable of manipulating the senses.  Here, the modern conflict in man between body and mind, matter and spirit, may be said to have begun.  It was in fact the influence images had for proselytizing variations of the faith, as well as for subversive political propaganda, that directly led to the iconoclastic backlash of the Reformation.

Couliano cleverly outlines the historical clash of the antagonistic forces of textolatry and idolatry (each representative of our two differing modes of thought; cognition and sensation) in his sweeping book, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.  “By asserting the idolatrous and impious nature of phantasms, the Reformation abolished at one stroke the culture of the Renaissance.  And since all the Renaissance “sciences” were structures built on phantasms, they too had to be overpowered by the weight of the Reformation.”25

In the Renaissance, insofar as knowledge and universal education was concerned, we must recall that images were still largely functioning as devotional aids for Biblical study by the illiterate.  And, as the powerful legacy of medieval icons standing as divine surrogates was still in the air; images, as opposed to written concepts, were no doubt the more powerful presence.  Furthermore, by the standards of today, all knowledge (or that which was understood as such) in general was derived from sources in some manner directly linked to the sciences of the occult.  For logical reasoning had yet to be taught, common sense did not know to question the magical reality of existence itself, and the faith in any one small thing was only further upheld by the greater absurdity of faith in all.  In cognitive terms, it is thus not too far fetched to infer that in an age where universal literacy was non-existent except in the circles of the clergy and the aristocratic elite, art even had too much power; so much, that its dominion over society’s perception of truth – in tandem with the great individual outburst of creative expression during the Renaissance – constituted a grave threat to the established religious doctrine and order of the Church.  A matter of circumstances that could not go unanswered by the ruling establishment, and hence led to the iconoclastic repercussions against images.

It is Couliano’s educated opinion though, that – in order to understand the sociological implications of any great historical transition – the studious observer must do their best to place himself in the exact historical frame of mind that he is studying.  To do so, we must thus imagine our undivided perception as if overwhelmed under the sensual impact of images and the mystical corroboration of phenomena by historical legend.  “On the other hand, if we wish to understand anything about that historical enigma the rise of modern science -…. we must first go to the heart of the Renaissance sciences, of which astrology, because of its universality, was the most important (magic, medicine, and even alchemy can be regarded, in a way, as astrological disciplines”).26  

The conclusions of his important work thus become an important preface to understanding the existing frames of thought  – and hence the mode of human existence itself – that were in flux at this momentous period in history when science, and later rational economic thinking, were about to impose their disciplines on Western society; when knowledge was based on the mysteries of the occult, and truth itself was still considered to exist largely beyond the ordinary range of human experience.  To the modern reader of today, it is perhaps even exceedingly difficult to imagine the veritable shock to human consciousness that such a wide sweeping overhaul of accepted common sense mean to the average citizen of that time.  A time when man considered himself the pinnacle of God’s creation and at the center of the universe but, over the course of merely a few generations, the modern scientific heliocentric model of the universe – later to be empirically proven by Galileo – would veritably hit the occult sciences of the Renaissance at their core center from which all of its other magical sciences derived; that is, at the heart of its astrological foundation. 

In American Renaissance, another exhaustive and more literary work on the period in question, the contemporary “anti-novelist” and artist Sean Dorian Knight writes of the promethean challenge and heroic resignation to uncertain knowledge that the artist of the time was forced to assimilate in the face of troubling scientific reality:

“Sacrifice for knowledge – it happened – as well – long ago.  The baroque was a fascinating period.  Yes, to the artist – the scientist of the soul – they were fascinating times, indeed.  But outside the masterpieces of light and dark, in the physical sciences men from all over were uniting in alliances of information and experiment.  The secular world was overcoming the dogma of old religious order.  Everywhere explorers were discovering the proper facts and machinery of our universe.  The motion of the world and the motion of our species – the destiny of man – was coming into gear.  They on the brink of the age of enlightenment were vitally aware a revolution was at hand.  Money and national wealth were thrown in to form established scientific societies.  Governments appropriated powers from the church to cement the change.  The Royal Society in England, chartered 1662.  The Academie des Sciences in France followed the establishment of similar societies in Italy.  Scientific publications and periodical literature communicated the results of the emerging scientific method…. 

“….But, we must not forget their sacrifices.  It is easy for us to assimilate even more recent discoveries to our body of knowledge.  But how easy would it really be if we – like they of the late seventeenth century – were forced not merely to add one fact upon many others – but forced to throw overboard – to destroy – almost every single thing we´ve had to learn since the age of two?……..As they of the seventeenth century – the century of late Renaissance and Baroque – pivoted on the brink of the revolutionary crevace which they had reached, men highly conscious of their place in history clamored for the change.  Scientists called for a new form of knowledge, a new method, and a system to be put forth.”27

In American Renaissance, the tragic hero of the book calls for a similarly new system – a new form of knowledge in art capable of rivaling the importance of science – to be put forth by the artists of our day.  It is both an epic elegy and simultaneously the battle cry for a return – through reason – to the magical mode of understanding in art that existed in the Renaissance.  In Couliano’s book, it becomes apparent that it is modern science, and the modernist notion of progress that scientific advance has connoted, which he holds in contempt for putting a stranglehold on the Renaissance age of magic – perhaps even, for some reason, to a greater extent than the iconoclastic attack led by the Protestant Reformation. 

Our focus, though, lies not with Couliano’s lament for the loss of that magical bygone age, but rather with his delineation of the two major historical movements that at cross-purposes, and under entirely different interests, set the stage for the drastic change of perception that was to occur during the 18^th century.  In a passage where he ably attempts to record the broad historical causes and effects that can produce sweeping changes to human modes of perception, he sums up the factors that precipitated our turn from “magic” in art as well as life.  This book attempts, in fact, to record the concepts of a phantasmic era, their rise and fall.  The Reformation interests me only to the extent that it produced censorship of the phantasmic, and consequently, a profound change in human imagination.28  And, On the theoretical level, the pervasive censorship of the imaginary results in the advent of modern exact science and technology.29

To the acute reader it becomes apparent that, along side the important cognitive transition to rational thinking that was to occur in the mode of human understanding, there was during the Enlightenment years likewise a transformation in the spiritual state of society that was slowly taking place as new explanations came to displace long standing myths.  For every gain or advance in human perception, society seems to have been taxed with a corresponding loss.  Purely rational economic thinking, and the principles of the free market, of course, had yet to make their impact.  Yet, at this time in question, everywhere the various forms of knowledge that had existed under the long standing myths and pseudo sciences of the occult; astrology metallurgy, medicine, alchemy, “magic” even, were all being overtaken by the new discoveries in astronomy and physics, and increasingly subject to the testing and discipline of scientific method.  Reason, and pure rational thought, seemed to have no bounds to limit the extent of their domain.  The Renaissance age of “magic,” may certainly have been coming to an end. 

But, how then, did art elude the exacting analysis of this new cognitive thinking – and, in doing so, did it in fact preserve a certain amount of magic for itself?  In keeping with our first line of inquiry, the question of how the development of art – both then and now – has been determined by its odd relationship to normal economic principles shall come into greater focus from hereon.  After once again contrasting the societal changes that have informed our perception of modern art since the Renaissance, it shall then be up to the present reader to question to what extent art, by its cognitive shortcomings, has remained a form of knowledge that for all the advances of our modern age has willingly relegated itself to the occult. 

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VII.     Moral Freedom and the Cognitive Divide : Between Artistic Representation and Meaning

It is our premise that the principle of human creativity in art exists in close paradoxical relationship to the human faculty of cognitive reasoning.  As will be demonstrated during our brief overview of the 18^th century, the human imagination is also well aware of its own economic interests, and is likewise affected by the most advanced thinking in philosophy.  The ideal of human freedom inherent in our ability to create, however, takes umbrage at any intent to define the limits of art’s bounds – and if there is one fundamental trait of our imagination it is that it is always prepared to radically demonstrate the conscious autonomy of the human soul. 

At a time when the Enlightenment’s unchecked vogue for rationalism appeared to be conducting a thorough disenchantment of the world, therefore, it is little surprising that an equally staunch reaction to this mindset would begin.  Artists, and those who upheld art as the symbolic expression of the human spirit, would of course not allow themselves to be limited by any cognitive prison.  The argument against having the spiritual and religious domain of the senses being subjected to the standards of reason, though, would in itself have to be made rationally.

In principle, it was a fair crusade against the reductive mentality of those denominated as “dogmatic rationalists” and “dogmatic positivists.  Two of the key figures in the disarticulation of the rationalist argument were Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), and his student Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777).  In a somewhat facile stroke of philosophical revisionism, Baumgarten and Meir took the conclusions of Leibniz and Wolff that “sense perception cannot be made clear without turning it into thought,” and came up with an almost effortless conclusion to a complex problem.  While sense perception can still be “confused,” they said, it cannot be perfected “only” by turning it into thought.  “Sense perception, they maintained, can have a perfection its own, a perfection whose standard is not that of logic (although it is analogous to that standard)…Hence there are two different kinds, rather than just stages, of cognition (knowledge), and two kinds of theory (or ‘science’) of knowledge: logic and aesthetics.  Aesthetics in the broad sense is the science of sense knowledge.”30

The chief philosophical argument made in separating the realm of aesthetics from the cognitive faculty was made by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his Critique of Judgment, which was intended to unite his first two works, The Critique of Pure Reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason into a complete system.  If his overall aim was – as he avowed – to save religion from the full frontal assault it was undergoing from pure reason, then his defense (for all its proxy subdivisions of 18^th century mind into transcendental and non-transcendental categories) must be still reckoned as a success. Philosophy has been deprived of the coordinated knowledge between both art and science ever since, and the world has been living in the grip of the consequences still to this day.    

Kant was to take the theoretical premises of Baumgarten and Meir, and in accordance with Aristotle, explain the human mind as being divided into the separate categories (or processes) of rational, ethical, and aesthetic thinking.  For the latter category, Kant would presuppose another indeterminate concept that Kant called the supersensible basis to nature’s “subjective purposiveness.”  This concept of the supersensible basis (though it appears to be variously conflated by Kant with the idea of nature’s subjective purposiveness)31 – we can assume to be an idea that is safely beyond our cognition of the phenomenal world. 

Nevertheless, the necessity of its existence was argued speculatively in Kant’s first Critique, and as a necessary practical deduction in Kant’s second Critique.  In the third and final Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the idea of the supersensible basis as a substrate of nature’s subjective purposiveness, however, becomes the essential premise to reaching his conclusion that judgments of taste regarding beauty do in fact have universal validity.

What Kant had logically articulated into existence was, in essence, a conceptual category over and above reason that could be transcended only by art and religious thought – i.e. feeling – but never cognized.  This conceptual category (or the “supersensible basis”), moreover, set up an entirely new standard of judgment for all art – making it immune to rational critique, and nearly exempt from all logical questioning.  The contemporary writer, Michael Lewis, describes this approach to art as the “anti-materialist” or “materially disembodied” theory of art criticism.  “It was the premise of idealist or post-Hegelian art criticism that art should, and could, be disembodied from its material context…[The] anti-materialist spirit survives in some of today’s art history departments, which stress connoisseurship and attribution over context and a larger historical canvas.  The student receives a high grade if he can tell Lorenzetti from a Veneziano; but if he wishes to know anything about why this or that particular picture was created, he must moonlight in economics or literature or history.”32  But, then it is little wonder why today’s university curriculums – where the materially disembodied approach to art history is so prevalent – place so much stress on the superficial plastic attributes of the art object if the ultimate rationale of their theory is that neither the meaning of art, nor the very reality of its existence, can ever be rationally known. 

Similarly to religion, in effect, the genesis of all art is deemed to proceed from that otherworldly realm beyond the range of ordinary human experience (the world of phenomena) that Kant labeled the “supersensible basis,” and which was in tune to man’s natural but unknowable purpose on earth.  For Kant, though, the problems leading up to the necessary postulation of this concept of the supersensible basis to “nature’s subjective purposiveness,” as well as the idea of nature’s subjective purposiveness itself, were manifold.  The problems that gave rise to its existence were those that were addressed in his Critique of Pure Reason, which sought to resolve the inevitable “antinomies” that vexed the theoretical attempts of understanding made by dogmatic reason.  These antinomies were contradictory propositions of truth, based on a priori logic, the solutions for which were unaccounted for in the thinking of Kant’s philosophical predecessors; namely Gottfried Leibniz, and his disciple Christian Wolff. 

Though Kant was trained in the same rationalistic metaphysical tradition as these thinkers, his critique of their dogmatic reasoning is an attempt to move beyond their inconsistencies.  Specifically, that; one can prove that the world is limited in space and time and that it is not; that composites consist of simple (irreducible) parts and they do not; that there are first causes (causes that initiate a causal series) and that there are not; that there is a necessary being and there is not.33  Meaning that all metaphysical knowledge, as evidenced by the confused state of its conclusions, was incapable of giving any ultimate enlightenment whether it be in science, morality, or religion.

In essence, for Kant the act of rational reflection on aesthetic judgment for a civilized human being thereby becomes the great transition point and mediating principle that unifies our rational understanding with nature’s subjective purposiveness when contemplating an object of beauty.  In fact, as Kant emphatically states it: Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.34  The “morally good” is to be analogously related to supersensible basis of the moral law as determined practically by the conclusions of his second Critique.

The objectives of the Critique of Judgment, to make aesthetic reflection serve as a special mediating faculty for further apprehending the underlying supersensible basis of nature common to the premise and conclusion of his first two Critiques, thus hinged on Kant’s ability to prove the validity of a universal aesthetic reflection which was common to all.

The first, and most necessary premise, regarding the nature of the beautiful, is that beauty is not a property of an object that we contemplate to be beautiful, but rather a feeling that belongs to the observer.  That beauty is not a property means that it is not an attribute or concept we give to an object because, if so, this would be purposive and contingent on our pleasure.  Judgments of taste must, therefore, not be connected with our sensation of the good or the agreeable, but be disinterested.  Whereas a liking for the agreeable is connected with what the senses like in a pleasurable sensation, and a liking for the good is connected with what we like merely by this a priori concept – in contrast, a liking that determines a judgment of beauty is devoid of all interest.  It therefore follows that, between the three forms of liking that are three different kinds of relation between presentations and the feeling of pleasure, only our relation to beauty is disinterested and free.  In essence, as encapsulated in Kant’s saying, Thus [Aesthetic] judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom.35

But while there may be such a universally valid experience with regard to the beautiful, and though the pleasure of the beautiful is that feeling of universal communicability, the essence of the experience of beauty resides in the fact that it cannot be communicated (ergo the materially disembodied approach to art history, and the division of the arts and sciences, prevalent in most Western universities).  Because, to reiterate, if we were to take the beautiful and make it a conceptual idea, we would be taking it out of the realm of the beautiful and making it cognitive.  For Kant, there simply can be no concept of beauty because it would get in the way of judgment.  Therefore, as judgments of taste have no prior given concept (such as the concept of a “dog” presupposes the existence of what we know to be a dog), what serves as the basis for the feeling of universal communicability in the observer in making such a reflection must come from within. 

Here, in apprehending nature’s subjective purposiveness, imagination and understanding are in “free play”, since regarding this purposiveness, there is no pre-determined concept; only something that is felt, but not cognized.  This indeterminate principle or feeling our judgment must use is once again nothing more than a sense of nature’s subjective purposiveness.  Meaning that the reflection of aesthetic judgment (on beauty), in effect, therefore determines in what manner nature is subjectively purposive. 

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VIII. Out of the Depths:  The Philosophical Defense of Art and Religion; Purpose Beyond Time

The preceding synopsis of Kant’s logical argumentation has been made mainly to demonstrate how the quagmire and the crisis in meaning posed by the object in modern art has its roots in this strange intellectual inversion of the 18^th century.  As the poet John Keats would famously encapsulate it in the summation to his Ode to a Grecian Urn:  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty/ and that is all that ye know on this earth/ and all that ye need to know”; the only thing was that you couldn’t “think” it. 

But, at the same time that art theory was renouncing the cognitive dimension in the apprehension of beauty, we can also take note of how Kant preserved that special domain for art’s “subjective purposiveness.”  This mysterious and transcendental universal realm of feeling that implied a sense of purpose and meaning to the direction of art’s development.  It is from here only a small imaginary leap to interpret the development of art history’s purpose as a series of stages that connote progress:  Much like the stages in the advancement of science revealed the physical laws and workings of the universe, the analogous transitions in art history likewise reveal the moral laws and spiritual direction of mankind’s place in the universe. 

During the 18^th century’s categorical revision of Western civilization’s existing body of knowledge, thus we see the first branching out of the main intellectual paradigms that characterize our modern framework of thought.  In the work of Immanuel Kant, the Cartesian division of body and mind (as propounded by Renee Descartes 1596-1650) appears to finally sediment its lasting influence on the division between matter and spirit.  Once the rise of science became the bane of the Church, from then on it seems art (now the lesser threat) was fully prepared to be absorbed into the overflow of quasi-religious feeling that – for perhaps the first time since as far back as the Middle Ages – would again unleash itself in the form of the Romantic movement.  Yet while art was allowed to submit itself to the passions, and was given “free play” in the manner of its aesthetic development, there existed in all other branches of knowledge the tendency to further corral all findings into rational specialties.  To the extent that thinkers in each field built their lasting historical reputations on the discovery and explanation of the innate laws of nature held to rule their respective disciplines. 

Between 1600 and 1800, the fields of study that in the latter days of Classical Greece both Plato and Aristotle had weighed in on in a general and, moreover, literary type of exposition, became subject to the most exacting overhaul ever made by Western philosophy.  And, at second glance, we still find that – in substance – almost all segments of our accepted base of knowledge in contemporary modern society are a direct consequence of the rationale analysis handed down from that period of intellectual ferment when “our” great philosophers tried to build whole edifices and systems of thought.  After the important work of Hobbes and Locke, it was Montesquieu who, in elaborating the laws of political science to each and every discipline, wrote:  ‘The law is not considered as heretofore the arbitrary will of one man or any nation.’  “Laws,” he says, “in their broader sense, are necessary relations which derive from the nature of things, and in this sense, all beings have their laws…”36  And so, just as Newton had revolutionized physics, and the political philosophers were to lay the foundations for the American and French revolutions in Democratic government, it was Adam Smith who was to spell out the fundamental laws of Capitalism that still reign as our existing economic model. 

Though not all of the sciences were to advance their theories in unison, of course, and the work of other rational thinkers (such as Darwin in biology) would have yet to make their revolutionary impact, the overall legacy that the period of the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us is the ideal of progress through reason.  “Surely the preponderant evidence would show the opposite of cultural decline in science and scholarship, healing and engineering, over the last fifty years,” wrote the critic Clement Greenberg in his essay the Plight of Culture in 1953; “Most of the Western world eats better prepared food and lives in pleasanter interiors than it used to; and whatever the rich may have lost in formal graces, those less rich are certainly gentler than they used to be.”37  Before making any valuative judgment on the merits of rational progress and what this has meant for the state of word affairs, however, we must first note with emphasis again how art – by the hand of philosophers, poets and artists – had conspicuously absented itself from being held to the same standard of “science and scholarship.” 

In the previous quote, Greenberg, the foremost expositor of the theory of the avant-garde, was reacting to the 20^th century poet T.S. Eliot’s assessment of our cultural decline.  In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot had written on the problems of comparing different civilizations and their respective stages of development:  “Nevertheless, we can distinguish between advance and retrogression.  We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago;…I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period of some duration, of which it is possible to say that we will have no culture.  Then culture will have to grow again from the soil…”38  The necessary quibbling over the definitions of “culture” and “civilization” between these two intellectuals is, in itself, a salient example of how even the terminology of our subject matter has lagged behind any human advances in conceptual thinking.

Any narrative view on the development of the art of Western civilization is, of course, a matter of historical reasoning imposed by writers in retrospect.  Even if we were to consider that any changes to our tradition, gradual or sudden, could sometimes represent progress (technological or otherwise), it is often only a subjective valuation that can be assessed.  For the purposes of our thesis, however, if we were to take the previous statements at face value – that culture has patently declined (Eliot) but surely the opposite has been the case in science, scholarship, healing and engineering (Greenberg); here the undeniable influence of economic development – as the branch of learning concerned with the production, consumption and transfer of wealth – on all areas of human activity (including aesthetics and all forms of knowledge) comes once again to the fore.  Precisely because, out of all the necessary items produced within a society, it is mainly art whose development – after the Renaissance and since the late 18^th century – has been virtually exempted from the realm of rational thinking and hence deprived of the benefits of being promoted by the adherence to strict economic principles.

In here citing the notion of progress within the development of art, specifically in the context of is relationship to economics, a necessary qualification must first be made:  Foremost, that in terms of “progress,” it is not the focus of this writing to engage with any superficial formalist debates on matters of style.  Nor is it to anecdotally belabor over the sayings of impressionable artists who suddenly proclaim with stupendous élan the daringness of their plastic breakthroughs.*  To do so would be to concentrate merely on the formal qualities of artistic development (as a medium of representation) – and not, as according to our first premise – that the importance of art to society is in fact much more than an escape through aesthetic ends, but in fact the key source of knowledge that defines the bounds of our conscious reality itself.  Whether in fact this ultimate reality exists, like for Kant, at the threshold of some other-worldly transcendental realm – that can be represented but never cognized – or is, no less plausibly, only a further stage of our own reality that the creative mind enables us to inhabit beyond our self-constructed labyrinths of space and time, is still to be determined.

Whatever the case, in keeping with our view that art is an epistemology, any importance art might have would not be a result of its merely formal attributes of representation (aesthetically pleasing though they may be) – if in fact there were not some unanswered human need for knowledge yet to be “represented” in the first place.  Albeit, logically, if there is behind the content of art, and within the make-up of its human creator – not just a feeling – but a necessary type of knowledge deserving of economic valuation, also remains in question.

It so follows, here, if we are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the different reactions to a statue of Venus in Ancient Greece and during the iconoclasm of the Middle Ages, that the paradox of whether the substance of art is timeless and universal – or simply a product of the historical knowledge or consciousness of its day – becomes a major impasse if (as we first contended) art is precisely in need of being subject to both rational and economic analysis.  Nonetheless, that the enigma of art is primarily of cognitive import – and hence, akin to vital information that is subject to economic valuation – can be attested to once again by contrasting our modern detachment (or disinterest, if you prefer) to a statue of Venus.  Of those uncertain and iconoclastic believers in the Middle Ages who may have regarded the Venus as an ominous idol, we can adduce that their fierce reaction to such statues arose because these represented a disturbing clash to their system of belief and accepted base of knowledge.  In contrast, we can look upon such a statue with pleasure, as it presents no threat to our cognitive understanding of the world.  The varieties of change in religious experience within the context of our modern experience, furthermore, allow our relationship to art to be flexible on these matters.  Under the empirical guidance of rational science, we are no longer in thrall to art’s magic.  But then again, perhaps, neither has art concluded the trajectory of what it has to say.   

To further confront the question of whether art represents the “timeless and universal” or in fact what amounts to the historical consciousness of its day, we must be prepared to once again recognize the fundamental difference between art that was created within the context of a living tradition and that of art that was created within the framework of our modern market economy.  Mainly, that it is the degree to which art has come to be an object capable of being in private possession that in any way distinguishes our object-centered relationship to art from that of the pre-Western cultures of the past.  Moreover, because it is principally this quality that precipitated the development of art’s formal stages as evinced in the history of Western culture. 

Along with private possession, art appears to be inspired with the need to reflect our greater sense of individual human empowerment.  Against the bonds of tradition, the dynamics of an art market has the ability to symbolically enact our capability of shaping future change.  Whereas in societies where a more public art embodied the static ideals of their time, and was created within the canon of a tradition most often by the state or Church, we recall that there was little change in human consciousness that creative beings needed to express and record through art.   

And so, just as the story of our culture shows, it was only when the growth of commerce over a long period of time led to private patronage, that artistic innovation would become a quality that was in demand.  Even though it was not until the latter days of the ancient Greek world, and later beginning with the surge in private wealth during the European Renaissance, that art objects came to also command a substantial price for their making.  Only from this point did it follow that, the more rare and grandiose the spirit of an object’s workmanship, if recognized, the rarer and more priceless the issue of its economic value or worth.  Until, by virtue of an object’s origin and authorship both singular and unique, to an artwork’s new economic possessor was also soon transferred the mysterious cult status of an artwork’s spiritual power. 

As it is with the development of almost any modern product line – be it new automobiles, appliances or even clothes – the question of monetary value of art therefore seems to go hand in hand with an object’s distinctiveness or uniqueness, and innovation at the expense of tradition appears to be an equal pre-requisite for this quality.  The genesis of “progress” or development in art, as such, shares the same beginning as the birth of economics in art – and thus appears to come first from the capability to think of art as a product.  An abstract notion perhaps too easily overlooked in some circles of our mechanical-digital age where there is still a lament over the loss of art’s “aura.”

Nevertheless, on the question of material wealth and human empowerment, it is our purpose to see how the market’s role functions here as the great catalyst of change and human liberty.  And if it is, ultimately, economics that has determined the value and market allocation of all objects and products that have benefited the advance of living conditions of humanity – not only their price, but the very representation of their substance as well as the meaning of their content – why then in like manner, not art?  After all, did not Kant himself say that, “Aesthetic judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom.” 

An efficient economy raises standards of living, creates wealth and inspires the forces of competition.  Competition leads to experimentation, even diversity in product, as a means to get ahead.  Capitalism’s ordained right to private property, we see, presumes to operate on the most visceral territorial instincts in our nature, and perhaps even mimics the laws of natural selection.  All in the name of human liberty and humankind’s right to the pursuit of happiness. The obvious Socialist critiques on the flaws and excesses of Capitalism’s business model notwithstanding, the strength of the American economy has still made it the one most emulated by the leading industrial nations around the world.  For a moment, there seems to be a teleological direction to human consciousness and intent.

It may be that desire and greed – as much as the prize of the beautiful and true – are, after all, simply the lure of human ingenuity.  And yet, something is amiss.  Capitalism in itself, as well as the rough and dismal science of economics, is morally blind to the crude market realities and attendant consequences of subsistence level poverty and exploitation that exist at its base.  But who is at fault?  Or could it even be at all possible that our art and culture – as the most salient products of society excluded from the rational framework of economic exchange – are themselves to blame?  In other words, if something like art is not the development of more acute human consciousness of reality (i.e. akin to ultimate knowledge itself) – but instead considered “timeless and universal” – then what need has it to progress or be further updated in the weltanschauung of our contemporary system?

With moral inspiration, the artist creates from and for the freedom of the imagination, and yet – on matters of pressing social concern – he or she is largely ignored, or always relegated to peddling their influence where he or she can be the least disruptive.  All the while, in accordance with Capitalism’s cause, the art and cultural establishment pays heed only to the object and product of the artist’s “unconscious” self.  But art objects have no rights in themselves, nor do they aspire to any kind of inherent freedom.  As we shall further see, they do not obey the same rules of economic exchange.  Even as symbols they fail to serve the cause if they go against the market system. 

Aesthetic judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom?  In the passage above, of course, Kant was reflecting on his own assertion that the nature of aesthetic contemplation should be devoid (free) of any personal interest – but, for the moment, this only addresses (in the manner of art’s reception) the consumption side of the economic equation.  Insofar as the artist’s own production is concerned, however, the ultimate desire for communication of the creative act does presume an interested intent, whether or not there is any monetary exchange or the artist was actually successful in realizing what his intent was to convey.  In witness to just the past century of development in Western art history, perhaps we may even conclude that there always was (and is) in the artist the will or desire, not only to express, but bestow – a certain radical kind of knowledge.

But, before we are to speculate on the hypothetical market value of this knowledge, over and above the object of art that is its residue – any more than we could speculate on the monetary exchange value of religious beliefs – here, we are again reminded of Benjamin’s statement that, “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.” (Benjamin; Illuminations p. 223).  What this meant for him was that the aura of any artwork was exclusively tied to its origin created in a singular place and time.  Thus, in experiencing a work of art, a beholder was automatically linked – even if at a meeting point in an entirely different locus of existence – to the work’s originality and authorship.  There was, one might say, the possibility of a spiritual union with the preserved moment of a bygone past, in rare instances, to a moment of an act of genius, no less.  As it were, something in a work of art that was indeed timeless and universal and transcended the barriers of historical difference: a mysterious aura, not unlike the undying remnants of the immortal human soul. 

But, if true, it is a delicate thing to behold; just as it is for any artist to create – a sign of the most fragile and timeless and universal esoteric erudition.  And yet the idea persists that, so long as the physical object has withstood the passage of age, the universal qualities of a great work of art may be rekindled in an eternal present.  That great art throughout many civilizations, including our own, retains a relationship to the mystery of religious experience merely accentuates the gravitas of Benjamin’s concern with respect to the loss of its aura.  Also, it emphasizes the extent to which art is still relegated to Kant’s transcendental domain of nature’s unknown subjective purposiveness.

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IX. Magic in the Marketplace: The Forbidden Realm of Unknown Purpose for Sale   

Whatever art may stand for today, it is clear that its impact and importance to the general population of society has changed a great deal since the Renaissance.  The once unavoidable political implications of artistic expression have been diffused into various forms of mechanical-digital mass media and entertainment production at the daunting pace of technological developments.  Meanwhile, politicians as well as the factual news media have employed the power of images to impose their economic and ideological agendas on our senses.  It almost seems that the term “art” no longer has any traditional relationship to a single human source.  In spite of the implicit political impulses of the artist’s message, nor does the singular art image provide barely any true reflection of its contemporary social context; all images (even – or one might say, especially – all historical masterpieces) have furthermore been infused with the capability of multiple existences through the act of digital reproduction.  Art has become but one more commodity, now fully integrated into the structure of capitalist production.   And yet, we seem to think of art, from its vary beginnings, as being completely at variance with the most basic rational principles of Capitalism’s creed.  As has been mentioned, it does not even follow the normal rules of economic exchange.  It now remains to for us to take a look at the evidence, both past and present.

In a review of three different books published on the topic of the art market, in April of 1994, the writer Michael Lewis reported on his past experience as fledgling stock boy for a prominent New York gallery.  Musing on the apparent indifference the gallery had for unburdening itself of the millions of dollars of worth of artwork in the form of old masterpieces, he wrote: “…In 1982, the public almost never turned up.  The last of the great nineteenth-century French dealers resembled a moribund business, or front for a thriving drug operation.  So scarce were Wildenstein’s customers that the salesmen in their fifth floor offices could fairly assume that whoever wandered in off the street was either lost or looking for a bathroom.”39  The author estimated the book of the gallery that owned 3,000 works of art to be around $3 billion dollars.  But an estimated guess of the book value in today’s prices would be almost $ 9 billion dollars given “…the dozens of Courbets, Manets, Monets, Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Gaugins hoarded for a century; more than 100 Picasso’s purchased directly from the artist; major works by Rembrandt, Hals and the Dutch landscape painters; 200 or so Italian Renaissance pictures; several hundred pictures by the better-French knickers-and-garter painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – including sixty-nine Fragonards; and countless assorted goodies from the interstices of art history”40 that were to be found in the gallery’s annex warehouses.

But, the former stock boy goes on to say, “What chiefly distinguished Wildenstein from an ordinary business was not its secrecy, but its reticence.  The gallery didn’t especially to want to sell.  A lot of drawings and paintings fell within the price range of the average millionaire, but the average millionaire was never informed of their existence.  Inspecting the merchandise was the privilege of the few, rather than the right of the market.”41   From here, an analysis of the book From Manet to Manhattan, by Peter Watson, explores several myths that have grown out of the backdrop of the modern art market. 

Watson’s book breaks down the history of the art market into three major stages, after the founding of the auction houses Christie’s (1766) and Sotheby’s (1744).  The modern period emerges mainly from the years 1882-1929, “the years of Impressionism and of the boom in America’s demand for great European art; 1930-1956, years of draught and the Westward expansion of the British auction houses; and 1957 to the present, years of plenty and the emergence of New York as the center of the art world.”42  But, after pointing out the importance, in 1883, of the American Art Association (the first American auction house with “snob appeal”), which introduced New York to French Impressionism, the reviewer makes an important commentary that illuminates the sociology behind art as much as it informs about the basic history of the market.  “The single even that shaped the trade in portable art objects in this

[the 20^th]

century was that Americans suddenly became very rich.  Once their fortunes began to grow, someone was bound to feed them art.  That rich people should collect art was, by the 1880s, a widely held assumption.”43

The widely held assumption that persists even today with regard to the relationship between wealth and art collecting, we find, sprang from the perpetuation of certain art market myths.  Among them, the myth of the great art collector, which follows from the notion that there is a kind of “moral authority in being physically associated with Great Art.”  Then there is “the myth of the Great Art Dealer.  We admire the Great Art Dealer because, unlike, say, a jewelry salesman, he soars beyond commerce.” (Ibid)  As Watson, himself writes; “Truly great secondary dealers (Wilenstein, Seligman, Gimpel, Carrit, Thaw, trading in the works of dead artists must be connoisseurs who know what they buy…the dealer is truly as much a scholar as a merchant, and therefore the acquisition of art, on the part of collectors, from such dealers is as much a learning experience as it is a purchase.  That is the difference between collecting and shopping.”  Or to take Watson’s other statement, “[Andre] Emmerich is truly as much a scholar as a merchant and has written several books on Pre-Columbian Art.  He will never push a work, pushing a painting for him means [it’s] not art; it’s merchandise.”44

From this point the reader is led to explore obviously overlooked questions that are in need of being answered, if one is to attempt to fathom the mystery behind the art world’s aloofness to normal commercial practices.  As Lewis writes, “How did any market develop anti-market prejudices?  Why was it an insult to describe a painter as ‘commercial’ when the world’s most commercial painters were Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rembrandt?  Why did people clap as Sotheby’s after a tycoon paid some huge sum for a work of art?  Had the tycoon done something admirable?  And if it was admirable to pay a great deal for art, then why wasn’t it also admirable to engage in the hard selling practices that would lead others to pay a great deal for art?  Why didn’t art dealers show more enthusiasm for a deal?”45  These questions are hardly ever asked in contemporary criticism and reporting about the workings of the art market. 

The mystical view of the nexus where the art buyer meets the art seller, “and both are ennobled,” appears to have been long ago taken for granted by the art viewing public.  But on closer analysis, major problems arise – though more than shedding light on the contrarian thinking of the art market pretensions, they merely illuminate the absurdities in what seems to be an ongoing illusion by the mutual consent of all parties involved.  For all the lofty associations made about art and the scholarly art dealer, the reality of art transactions are often a much more mundane affair.  As Lewis recounts the average sort of conversation he was exposed to when lingering outside the gallery sales room while both the dealer and collector met;  “Probably these [interactions] were somewhat more elevated than the art world norm; this was Wildenstein, after all.  About four-fifths of what was said, however, was on the level of  ‘That green will clash with the sofa” and “So who is more famous, Monet or Gaugin?’  When the salesmen pitched Renoir, they said, ‘I like him because he doesn’t require to much concentration’; when they sold Boudin they said, “We say here that Boudin is the Monet of the skies.’…Occasionally they told stories about a picture, of the famous people who had owned it and the famous museums that had displayed it.  Their message was rarely; buy this and you will enjoy looking at it.  It was: buy this and you will join the class of superior people who buy it.”46

The illogical associations made around any given art object may certainly be strange, but they would be stranger if they actually proceeded from the artwork by itself.  Most often, though, the cult status of art and the odd market behavior that accompanies it is a direct result of the sociology of art that has now almost seamlessly integrated itself with the myth of the art market’s system.  But though it be illogical, that is not to say that there is no method in it.  At the tail end of the 1980s, a boom decade for the New York art world, and economist by the name of William Grampp wrote a book titled Pricing the Priceless, in which he made a compelling argument for the unexposed rationale behind art world economics.

“Grampp proposed that art objects, like other commodities, were subject to diminishing marginal utility: the more you have of one kind of art the less you want to pay for more of it.  The production of another dozen Schnabel plate paintings will, holding all else equal, reduce their price.  That is why the market demands different kinds of art.  Grampp likened artistic innovation – from Proto-Pop to Pop to Op – to product differentiation.  It made sense, by this logic, that styles in painting changed more rapidly in twentieth century America than in, say, twelfth-century France.  The demand for art increases with income, and the brisker the demand for art, the more rapid the change in styles.  What is more, said the economist, in a society such as ours, in which income has dramatically outpaced investment in taste, one would expect art to appeal to minds equipped to appreciate novelty – it’s flat!  It’s abstract!  It’s new – rather than complexity.”47

What has the contemporary artist to say about all this?  The hard truth is that if successful in the art market, buoyed by his or her rising prices and sales, more often than not the artist will look at these indications as sufficient proof of the viability of his work.  Critics are looked upon with disdain, and how much the vagaries of collectors’ whims are a result of arbitrary speculation – or simply the savvy marketing of the gallerists – become an irrelevant question so long as the artist’s view point is represented in an important collection or museum.  The economist Grampp cites Renoir as a typical example of how monetary success can breed a great deal of faith into an artist’s view of the market.  “Thus Renoir once said, “get this into your head, no one really knows anything about it.  There’s really one indication for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sale room.”48  Given the demographics of gainfully employed artists at any time in history, however, we must keep in mind that the prosperous artist is, far and away, the exception in the reality of the market.  But, what about the unsuccessful artist? 

Two scholarly works demonstrate a strong case that it was, in fact, the inability to successfully compete in a crowded market economy that led artists to use the mythological element of art’s aura for their own commercial gain.  They are Richard Goldthwaite’s Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600, and Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art and the Market.  Goldthwaite’s book is of particular interest because it reveals striking parallels between the surge in demand for art in Renaissance Italy and the new passion for spending on art that spread among the newly acquired fortunes of the American upper-class at the end of the 19^th century.  The new Italian society of city-states was well aware of its cultural indebtedness to the art and sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome.  Just as America itself, as the civilization of the new world just beginning to come of age, had its own motivations for shaking off the burden of its cultural inferiority to Europe.

Devoid of the oppressive canons of any stifling tradition, America was in theory almost akin to a philosopher’s dream state; a tabula rasa on which to erect an ideal utopian society.  But, suddenly freed from economic dependence on the powerful Catholic Church, quattrocento Italy was no less ripe for artistic innovation and experimentation.  To describe some of the social forces which distinguished Italy from the rest of Europe: “a booming monetized economy based on trade and finance; a permeable social structure based on wealth in which there were always newly rich men anxious to establish their credentials; and a distribution of wealth far more even than that of medieval northern Europe, or modern north America for that matter.  In northern Europe, wealth was based on class.  In Renaissance Italy, class was based on wealth; and so the display of wealth became tantamount to the display of class.” 49 

But as is evident from Goldthwaite’s research, what was most radically different about the new Italy from the medieval one that preceded it, was the change in moral attitude that went along with the desire and consumption of wealth.  According to Lewis’s interpretation, “The Florentine moral climate fairly rapidly accommodated the needs of the newly rich.  The religious objections to luxury were overcome, in principle by a barrage of intellectual treatises and in practice by the piecemeal sale of churches.  Theorists such as Alberti and Pontano legitimized possessiveness in a way that was without precedent in medieval moral thought.”50  Once the mentality of the society could accept material ostentation, then it was only a matter of time for the supply to meet the demand.  Times were certainly new, but the great yearn and enthusiasm for cultural innovation did not necessarily advance at the same pace as cultivation in taste.

“The tastes and the habits of the Italian businessmen were, by the standards of the modern art market, relentlessly middlebrow.  The finest artworks were made to order.  The Duke of Ferrarra paid by the square foot.  The legendary merchant of Prado, Giovanni di Bardi, paid for time and materials.  Anyone who was anyone bought a chapel and redecorated it in his own honor.  By the early fifteenth century there were in Florentine churches six hundred private chapels filled with frescoes, altarpieces and memorial tombs.”51  And yet, that human creativity was here still indirectly in the service of the faith of the Church, hardly begins to give one an accurate idea of the extent of this new obsession with art. 

As Lewis claims, like so many art historians before and after him, Florence was the greatest art producing culture ever.  “Rapid innovation in painting, sculpture and architecture spawned the invention of whole new art forms: painted and transparent smalto, niello, wood intarsia, maiolica, stained glass.  (Consumer markets outside the fine arts, a concept that did not yet exist, kept pace.  The list of different styles of chairs in a 1663 inventory of the Strozzi palace reads like the menu of a fine restaurant – segiole alla Genovese, seggiolle con fondo, seggiolo con cuscine…)”52  

The outright consumption of art during this time though is, on closer philosophical analysis, indicative of something far more controversial.  Here, there were no hidden pretensions or aloofness toward the direct, unabashed commercial engagement with the substance of art.  It is this unapologetic materialistic trait during this time in which so much great art was produced that, according to the author, has since made the field of Renaissance studies a pivotal area in the debate against the materially-disembodied theory of art.  And, if Renaissance Italy, being far closer and under the shadow of the religious tradition and sacred aura of art inherited from the Middle Ages, was so conspicuously materialistic – then how is it that the idealistic notion of art as the symbol of pure spirituality still pervades the commercial trade of art in our own market at the cusp of the 21^st century?  When, in fact, it is also this very flamboyance and lack of hidden aesthetic pretenses in art that our culture so esteems upon contemplating the era of the Renaissance in our history. 

“The shamelessness of these progenitors of the modern patrons of the arts is somehow refreshing,” writes Lewis of the aristocratic patrons of the Renaissance, “They make no pretense of disinterested contemplation.  Their interest in art was keenly interested.  They were propelled into their artworks by the same forces that drove the world’s first modern consumer culture.”  Goldthwaite’s book has the last word; “…by enshrining these objects in museums we pay homage to the luxury consumption of the past and thereby reverently celebrate the passion for spending for things that keep the capitalist system of the West going.”53 

We recall, of course, the great Kantian philosophical inversion of aesthetic contemplation during the 18^th century.  But would the turgid writings of Kant’s philosophy have managed to carry so much weight up until our own day had his anti-rationalist theories not been supported by the growing economic problems of the working artist? 

                                                *                      *                      *

X.  A Disinterested View From Above the Masses:  Climbing the Economic Ladder

Art and the image during the Renaissance, as the scholar Couliano noted, were phenomena of imposing metaphysical import.  As barometers of truth in everyday reality, as well as tools for political manipulation, their power was on par with “magic” and any unconfirmed faith in empirical science itself.  It was only after the simultaneous rise of rational empiricism, and the crushing backlash of the Reformation, that images lost the overwhelming power they had on the human imagination.  Kant’s philosophical defense separated art’s standard of knowledge into a different realm from that of science, but from this point it was up to the artist to redefine art’s relationship to the market.  Moving forward from the Renaissance, we therefore go on to question the particular moment when art became in essence more akin to the way art is understood by our society today.  We should as well take note, more than in passing, that it is the manner in which art is evaluated economically that largely determines the public’s concept of its essence.

“The Florentine art market-place perceived the value of a painting and its aesthetic worth as closely related; the qualities desirable in a work of art – ‘magnificence’ and ‘splendor’ – connoted also expense,” asserts Goldthwaite, “What happened between then and now to render art something like an antidote to price theory?  [But] what led William Blake to insist that ‘where any view of money exists art cannot be carried on.”?54    

In answer to these questions, Woodmansee’s book Art, the Author, and the Market focuses on a moment of failing market interest in the work of artists and literary authors.  According to Lewis, her research also disputes the “controlling assumption of idealist aesthetics, that art is timeless and universal.”55  While Goldthwaite’s book concludes that the market demand for aesthetic works of art in the Renaissance arose mainly alongside the market for other consumer durables (as a more or less another material product), Woodmansee describes how our modern “romantic” understanding of art came into fruition out of a veritable market crisis.  “The idealist ideal achieved its modern form in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century…..in response to a democratic market for works of art.  A German poet, named Karl Phillip Moritz sat down, pen in hand, to rationalize his inability to sell, and created a distinction between an object of mechanical art that served a purpose (such as a clock and a knife) and an object of Fine Art that, he explained, ‘does not have its purpose outside of itself, and does not exist for the sake of anything else, but rather for its own internal perfection.”56 “In establishing art as a discrete realm of ultimate purpose, the German poet ‘was simply transferring an essential property of the Deity to the work of art.”57

An explicit disdain for the public’s ability to discern between the quality of good art and bad art was at the core of Moritz’s idea.  In Moritz’s own words, “If the thought of approval is your main consideration, and if your work is of value to you only insofar as it brings you fame, then you are working in a self-interested manner…You will be seeking a false glitter, which may dazzle the rabble momentarily, but will vanish like fog before the gaze of the wise.”58  And so, the Romantic inversion was complete. 

But this pure aestheticism, which combined a religious reverence for the artist, was not (according to Woodmansee’s point) a purely spiritual matter.  “If the new theory of art was one part displaced theology, it was also one part displaced market anxiety.  The [modern] idea of art grew directly from the economic self-interest of artists…In addition to rationalizing popular failure, Woodmansee argues, the anti-materialist idea of art led to intellectual property rights.  Before there could be copyright laws, there first had to be some notion of the artist as sole creator….Art’s defacto loss of instrumentality could be recuperated as a (supreme) virtue…Moritz makes a triumph out of defeat and ‘rescues’ art from the determination by the market.” (Ibid)

A further example of this newly adopted theory of art in the face of the new democratic market economy is attested to in the letters of the German writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.  The complete reversal of Schiller’s previous point of view evinces how the new theory provided a powerful intellectual concept that artists could use to advance their falling economic position.  “After his first popular success, the year before Moritz had published his ideas, Schiller had written to a friend that ‘the public is now everything to me, my school, my sovereign, my trusted friend.  I now belong to it alone.  I shall place myself before his and no other tribunal.  It alone do I fear and respect.’”59  Fame was good.

“Yet a decade later, after a series of market flops, in a letter addressed to his patron Schiller concluded that it was ‘impossible in the German world of letters to satisfy the strict demands of art and simultaneously procure the minimum support for one’s industry,’ Schiller goes on to write, ‘Our world is no longer Homer’s world, where all members of society were at roughly the same stage with respect to sensibility and opinion and therefore could easily recognize themselves in the same descriptions and encounter themselves in the same feelings.  There is now a great gulf between the elect of a nation and the masses.’”60  Suddenly, fame and popularity were bad.

As Lewis sums up his interpretation of the consequences for today’s contemporary art market, “The religion of art has [now] been appropriated from artists by collectors and dealers… There was a dizzying moment in the ‘80s when the art market was booming alongside the markets for other luxury goods, and it clearly paid to push new merchandise.  This was nicely demonstrated by the crockery smasher Julian Schnabel.  Schnabel and his dealers courted publicity: photo spreads in fashion magazines; countless newspaper interviews, a memoir ejaculated at the premature age of 34,…Obscurity was bad, fame was good….And while the initial critical response to his work was mixed (‘Schabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting’, wrote Robert Hughes), his prices rose inexorably from about $3,500 in 1981 to $35,000 in 1982 to $93,500 (at auction) in 1983 to mid six figures in 1987….And the cognoscenti caved!  The Times gave Schnabel a good review.  The Met bought a painting.  The Whitney gave him a show.

“But the really interesting thing was that, even in the commerce-drenched culture of the ‘80s, the market preserved some of the old Romantic conceits.  The artist, of course, tried to have it both ways at once.  The result was a wonderful balancing act of the most artistically incorrect deeds with the most artistically correct utterances.  Above all, the artist and his image-makers grasped that there was something fishy in an artist being too well-liked.  In an interview with the Times as his prices climbed into the low six figures, Schnabel said he saw his work ‘driving people crazy; they don’t know what to make of it.’  In 1987, as his prices rose into the mid six figures, he said that ‘I no longer expect people to understand me.’  His dealers understood him completely. ‘I guarantee you that when his show opens here it will be the biggest opening we’ve ever had,’ said his Los Angeles dealer, ‘and people will stand around saying, “I hate his work.”’  They may have hated it, but they bought it.  (They may have bought it because they hated it.)

“The downtown art world perfected the new game of pushing the merchandise as hard as merchandise can be pushed, while preserving a rhetorical distance from the mass market.  Whatever else you can say about this phenomenon, it reminded the market of what the market was.”61  Yes, the market is what the market is.  And while the sophisticated pose of the contemporary art merchants and collectors toward the products they deal in may not completely answer whether the essence of art is simply material – or also by its symbolic representation, possessive of the inherent quality of self contained perfection that theologians ascribe to the essence of the Deity – there is yet a lesson to be learned here.  These variables concern only the demand side of the economic equation.  The public can be trained and instructed on how to approach a work of art with cultivated disinterest.  But, as for the supply-side, the artist is almost the sole determinant of the presentation of his product – and he has absolutely nothing against the positive interest and material valuation of his creative product.  Just as any pure-hearted Capitalist would proudly aver of himself, the artist is an economic animal. 

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XI.       Art and the Metaphysical Base: The Demographics of Revolution in a Political Economy 

Given the choice of market success versus unsung obscurity, it is rarely a question what option any living artist would choose.  The strange moral apprehension toward commercially motivated profit by members of the contemporary art world, however, requires that artists cultivate a more nuanced approach.  Today, as well as in the time of Renoir or Schiller before him, we can see that the less well-to-do artist can still have recourse to fall back on the long mystical tradition in the history of art; wherein the materially disembodied substance of art’s undying aura is presumed to hover like a disdainful ghost over the spoils of earthly success.  To no lesser degree it is also evinced in the anti-market pretensions displayed by reticent gallerists dealing in the works of dead masters.  There is an illusion of occupying the moral high ground in championing any virtuoso painter who sacrificed all material pursuit of wealth for the sake of his art, just as for the living artist, to think that his work is misunderstood, can be tantamount to saying that it “soars beyond commerce.”  But this contrarian, anti-rationalist theory of art can only serve to further obfuscate and confuse a crucial issue in determining the substance of art’s importance to society.

Nonetheless, rather than risking any objective self-criticism, from both artist and dealer there ensues a confidence game with the potential to defraud the essence of art’s message to our conscious reality.  It is used when the tacit proclamation that art that is rejected by critics, as well as the public, is said to be on account of it being even closer to that other-worldly realm of ultimate reality that is beyond cognition, and therefore, obviously misunderstood.  Most of the time it is never said at all, in fact, but nor is there any need for it to be said.  (The public cannot afford to buy it, usually, neither the critics.)  All any interested observer has to do to confirm it is have the nerve to ask about the meaning of an object of art on display at any gallery in Chelsea, and measure the clarity of response from one educated individual to another. 

There is in the anti-market pretensions with which one is greeted the thinly veiled conceit of the cult-like relationship of art to religious experience, should one have the further education to discern it.  A strange feeling if one is unfamiliar with the art world, somehow kept strangely alive by the mysterious aura that is the legacy of the anti-rationalist theories developed in 18^th century.  To the ambitious fortunes of the few living artists – numbered in the hundreds – lucky enough to have such a gallery representation, of course, there will be less to complain about as they (along with their pictures and assorted objects) await their inclusion among the rank and file of the still more fortunate deceased artists.  They, at least, have the illusion of societal recognition and the hope of being heard.  The market, too, may smile upon them.

But to the vast hordes of living and unrepresented artists – numbered perhaps in the hundreds of millions all across the world – the picture is less sanguine.  But the interesting thing is that by this measure – when art is implicitly accepted to operate within the same spiritual territory as religious truth – the closed and mysterious world of art world sits atop the altar of culture like a pandora’s box.  And, logically, a forbidden door lies in wait to be opened; for the millions of financially destitute artists to morally assert their competitive right to challenge religion’s hidden presence in the order of our economic society.  A revolutionary proposition, if the compelling case could ever be made.  But is not revolution inherent in the very nature of art and the creative act?

At first glance, the scenario of an aggrieved class of proletariat artists, possessed of sufficient class consciousness to join in concerted effort to forcibly overthrow a bourgeois cultural establishment in control of the means of production, i.e. the gallery and museum system living off the works of dead masters; smacks of ludicrousness.  (But we must take into consideration that art is not “officially” consecrated as art until it has been hung on a gallery or musem wall where few living artists get their due before they are dead, and that Marx himself had written that history repeats itself; first as tragedy, the second time as farce.)  Furthemore, before questioning the absurdity of any such idea, historical evidence demonstrates a long precedent for art’s most radical spiritual argument. 

The auratic quality of art, still given credence today and indicative of an eternal reality beyond, was not first invented in the 18^th century by Moritz, Schiller, or any of the other previously mentioned German writers and philosophers.  Kant’s transcendental aestheticism in his third Critique was in staunch reaction to the tenets of empirical reason, but it was merely the consolidation in Western philosophy of a tradition that spans the millennia of stages belonging to human civilization. 

The distinguished critic and scholar of ancient and near-Eastern philosophy, Thomas McEvilley, traces this auratic quality of art beyond Plato to at least the time of the poet Sappho in the 6^th-century B.C, “who said her poems would bring her immortality….. This view of artworks goes back to times when they were sanctified objects made for use in rituals.  It is primitive magic plain and simple, which ritually abolishes historical time.  It typified Egyptian tomb art, which portrayed the places and things of eternity and was itself magically equivalent to them; it goes back probably to those Magdelenian paintings in the distant depths of the caves, beyond the reach of night and day.  Yet despite the extreme primitiveness of its beginnings, this theory of art came into Romantic Europe whole, and has survived to the present day.”62

Knowing specifically how this idea of art has become further tangled and embedded in the art historical narrative of the West thus might even require a thorough and systematic dissection of our most basic cultural assumptions.  For if there can be any factual conclusions to these theoretical premises of art, whether they are true or not, would logically presuppose resounding consequences both politically and economically.  Albeit it is the case (now stated here and to be further demonstrated) that for these very same reasons, any continuity of our cultural civilization as we know it has required that critics and scholars leave this enigmatic quality of art unanswered. 

Nevertheless, the essence of every discipline of art being connected at root, the genesis and inspiration of all religious texts, works of poetry, and existential writings can be questioned and examined (if at least on ethical and moral grounds) to illuminate this potential economic crisis.  In evidence of this, we can see that, with regard to the literary production of artistic works, a cultural safety zone for the revolutionary essence of art – as an ulterior and higher reality – appears to have already been long ago established, and even required, for the permanence of our social order.  Art in literature is thus denominated as “fiction”; and so literary works are further categorized and classified into genres in order to be published according to their corresponding market niche.  While whatever shadowy presence of any alternate and higher reality exists behind inspired words on a page, as so called “fiction”, they do little to harm the existing reality of our Western historical imagination as it was handed from Judeo-Christian Biblical text. 

Contemporary literary production of art is thus “make-believe,” and yet for the overwhelming majority of the population in the Western world, the most profound knowledge of  “ultimate reality” comes through the literal belief in the ancient stories of mythical scripture.  In these holy works, edited for centuries by priestly scholars, the faithful read of human immortality and an afterlife.  Meanwhile, the costliest political campaigns and bloodiest wars are still fought in our day and age under the avowed moral guidance of the divine faith that these works of art have wrought.  Yet, in spite of complex moral problems and crisises unique to modern existence, what the contemporary writer has knowledgably to say can only extend, but not overturn, the millennia of human imagination.  Moreover, it is the living artist whose livelihood and spirituality that is at stake, and the destiny of modern culture that lies in the balance.  But, again, is this crisis all about our old imagination gone wild?  Or, what does the notion of “art as knowledge” have to do with economics? 

Only if, as in keeping with our beginning premise, art is recognized as an important epistemology – and thus an ultimate source of our knowledge of ultimate reality deserving and worthy of necessary economic valuation – does the financially burdened relationship of contemporary art to the cult status of art in the Western tradition come into inevitable conflict.  With respect to literature, as art in language is necessarily cognitive in nature, it can question knowledge no further beyond the boundaries of what the mind has already processed; such that even poetry is now static, and a prisoner to linguistic thought.  And new knowledge and insight into the metaphysical structure of the world is constrained and subsumed under the oppression of the old. 

Human creativity and perception, inherently dynamic before the changing material factors of technology and modern experience, is by this manner rendered moot and without the instrument of an expressive voice.  And although the value of such knowledge to economic society may be qualitatively unquantifiable, to the living author whose work must be preemptively classified into the category of “fiction,” this categorical understanding of literature stands as both an economic as well as metaphysical oppression.  In no other branches of knowledge do the living practitioners of their trade have to compete against the dead.  Lawyers, doctors, and scientists do not compete against dead lawyers, doctors, or scientists for their livelihood – even if their ideas, arguments, and hardfought conclusions of truth may still be in contention.  On the contrary, every such discipline builds, overturns, and even confirms the findings and discoveries of the past – but societal compensation for the contributions within these fields is never paid to the deceased practitioners in detriment to the economic plight of those now struggling to make a living.  As it should be in any logical state of affairs, renumeratrion and economic standing is justly paid to the living practitioners of all other disciplines, while knowledge is passed on for the benefit of society as a whole and the advancement of human understanding. 

To take up our previous example, knowledgeable pronouncements of ultimate reality in literary art may change, but it appears that no longer can any pronouncement on the consciousness of immortality (or any other-worldly realm) be spoken for within the confines of text, nor can it be owned.  Living authors must compete against the chapbook prices of centuries of traditional literature, and still cannot dare to complain of how the content of their imagination is clearly overshadowed by the age-old monopoly of sacred and religious beliefs based on formulations of “truth” conceived when – by all in question – the world of the earth was still considered to be flat.   As such, for all the ignorance and bloody consequences that these metaphysical assumptions give rise to, new literary art can make no breach against the sacred past:  The terminology and meaning of sacred – outside of its additional religious context – here to be understood as “sacrosanct,” “inviolable,” “secure,” “defended.” 

But, in at least one regard (in the manner of painting and sculpture), the evidence of how “fine art” still preserves the creative freedom to explore the sacred realm – i.e. the ultimate domain of consciousness that has the power to influence the weightiest decisions of our leaders in government and culture – is plain to see manifested in the workings of today’s modern economy.  In fact, the very way in which this art has today come to be understood as a real metaphysical product (i.e. non-fictional), in spite of it representing something beyond the material appearance of reality, is what primarily represents its overcoming of the past.  And here is where the economic struggle of the contemporary artist might very well come into play – if not through revolution – then perhaps, plausibly, by legal and political action.

For, even if one were to completely negate and disprove the materially disembodied theory of art for lack of sufficient spiritually quantifiable evidence, the substantial economic stakes in art – calculated as over ten billion dollar in fine art sales annually – would only become more concretely reified and subject to material dispute.  And herein lies the double-edged sword of the cult status of art.  If art were merely another material product, the sheer degree of openly monopolistic practices engaged in by museums against the individual artist would be a prima facia case for an antitrust suit of resounding historical dimensions.  At the very least, the incestuous nature of dual exhibitions, curatorial collaboration, and inside dealing that goes on between the New York cultural establishment’s most prominent museums and private galleries (happily trading in dead white men’s merchandise) would leave their principals severely challenged to defend themselves against a formal legal indictment for collusion and restraint of trade.  The punitive damages would be treble.

What are the chances?  If in substance art represents a form of ultimate knowledge and insight into the nature of reality, and if our experience of reality is manifestly changing – at least in material terms – it is only logical that contemporary artists see fit to proclaim the priority of their creative consciousness over that of the past.  And, in fact, we see that nearly the whole of 20^th century art history; from Cubism to Futurism to Suprematism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism – records the creative movements and artistic revolts of generation after generation of artists both individually and collectively sacrificing their livelihoods to raise artistic consciousness in continuous effort to overthrow the constraints of a declining Western tradition.   

In his manifesto on Suprematism, in 1927, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich wrote:  “We have seen how art, at the turn of the century, divested itself of the ballast of religious and political ideas which had been imposed upon it and came into its own – attained, that is, the form suited to its intrinsic nature and became, along with the two already mentioned, a third independent and equally valid ‘point of view.’”63

“Anti-art” inaugurated the first decades of the 20^th century with a bang.  In Marxian terms, it was as if the newly born creators of the superstructure of the industrial West sought to overturn rather than mirror the material corruption of Capitalism’s economic base.  Behind the cataclysmic backdrop of the First World War and the Communist revolution in Russia, artists saw common cause with the working proletariat’s struggle against the reality of the bourgeois status quo.  The desire of artists to change the conscious perception of society was political just as much as it was stylistic. 

Stylistic representation, moreover, amounted merely to the formal means to point to true knowledge of a higher reality beyond.  In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky called for a “non-objective” painting free from the tyranny of the object, while Mondrian criticized Cubism for not following its own discoveries, and for retaining a lingering attachment to the natural object that “veiled the pure relationships of nature” [reality] with matter.  As the historian Barasche writes; “Belief in this hidden reality was a crucial assumption underlying the reflections that eventually became the theory of abstract painting.  It is no exaggeration to say that the whole theory of abstract painting as it emerged in the early twentieth century was based on the thesis that there is such a reality, and that it can serve as subject matter of works of art.  The difficulty in experiencing it, we should repeat, did not cast any doubt on its very existence.”64  In what is currently the most litigious society that has ever existed on the face of the earth – is it too far a stretch of the artist’s imagination to consider that this “reality” could constitute the basis for a class action suit against the cultural monopolies of the museum and art gallery cartel?

Or, we might ask even, what course of action would not be appropriate for the innumerable masses of unrepresented artists to take against the ingrained anti-trust interests that mock the very ideals of our fair and just economic system.  For all of art’s revolutionary insurgence against the reality of the past during the last hundred years, the mystical essence of this vanguard art as a symbolic portal to a world beyond has – in effect – proved true only insofar as these works too have become enshrined within the context of the very same past aesthetic tradition that their radical politics sought to repudiate.  And so, at the turning point of every art’s singular place in time, the aura Benjamin spoke of as being uniquely embedded within the fabric of our tradition has remained in place and refused to die or go away.  Just as the mythical narrative of Modernist art history remains today tangled and embedded like beautiful scaffolding over the facade of our most profound yet disintegrating cultural assumptions. 

It was perhaps then only an ill-fated experiment when the Conceptual artists of the late 1960s, in similar spirit, sought to sidestep the paradoxical trap of art as an exploited commodity by trying to author ephemeral works.  In the end, the Capitalism of the art market would again feed off the residue of even this art’s most elusive aura.  As it is, that the art of the past survives to the economic (and perhaps moral) detriment of the artist of the present remains a fact of life of every living artist’s waking moment.  The unsung artifacts and props of most leading Conceptual artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Yves Klien, and Joseph Kosuth can likewise be found within the canonical line up of traditional works at auction and for sale in the private collections and major museums of the west.  The market, we see, has acquired the almost ritual power of magical transfiguration over any item, no matter what revolutionary presentiments it ostensibly represents.  And so the words of Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti, proclaimed in 1909 in the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, echo as true once again:  “And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?”65 While, like the encrypted symbol of some forbidden knowledge, or a riddle from so many dead authors’ sealed lips – the aura of art lives on.

In concluding our point, it is once more Thomas McEvilley who succinctly illuminates how this enigmatic quality is metaphysically connected to our obsession with our idea of art as an object.  “Works with exaggeratedly durable materials – such as the granite in which Egyptians carved Pharoahs – participate in the Platonic daydream of transcending the web of cause and effect here below.  The idea is, of course, integral to the formalist Modern tradition, which is throughout solidly founded on primitive thoughts and intentions.  It is why the artwork is held to have no relation to socio-economic affairs: it has transcended conditionality and, by capturing a spark of the divine, has become and ultimate.”66  Vita brevis est, ars (i.e. the object) longa. 

Hence, to contemplate a work of art is akin to being able to contemplate eternity.  All the better if one can own it, no matter the price.

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XII.                 Voices from the Past:  The Specter in the Capitalist Machine

So far, we have surveyed the theoretical premises behind art; how artists and even art dealers and collectors, the principle market forces of the art world, have treated the object as representative of something that exceeds the materiality of its content.  The spiritual association and irrational quality of art, we have seen, goes back to the first beginnings of symbolic thought by the earliest human societies.  And that, in addition, the cult-like, primitive religious reverence for what art represents has persisted even to our own day, and still plays a valuative role in its production and at the hour of its monetary exchange.     

That being said, our modern system for the equitable exchange of human goods and services is of relatively recent genesis.  It was only since the turn of the 18^th century, as the rise of rational thought came to occupy all fields of knowledge, that the science of economics also came to be society’s principal method for the organization and dissemination of new products of knowledge.  It was also precisely then, after the Renaissance, that the functionality of art within society came to be differentiated from the rational school.  From the subsequent cognitive division between the arts and sciences, thus has followed our modern inability to believe or understand any idea of unified moral and technological progress through reason, as art has refused to accept being determined by this categorization.  But does it necessarily follow that art cannot progress as the other branches of knowledge? 

At the turn of the century, a disaffected artistic class came up with a slogan that sought to preserve art from the imposition of any outside interference with the autonomy of its meaning.  Le art pour le art or, “art for art’s sake,” was the rallying cry for many artistic thinkers and intellectuals intent on demonstrating that art’s ultimate value resided in its freedom from any social or moral constraints.  Proponents of this philosophy – including leading figures such as Oscar Wilde or Edgar Allan Poe – could trace its precedent back to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  The claim of art for art’s sake was predicated on the notion that artistic pursuit need not answer to the influences of history, religion or anything else.  It abjured and looked with disdain on the earthly problems of finance and government.  

Nonetheless, it has been the speculation of this writing to ascertain whether, in fact, an equally constructive relationship between the study of both economics and art (in their applied forms) might produce the occasion for greater advancement and insight within these traditionally separate fields.  While this premise maybe wholly hypothetical as a tool of thought, still, it parts from an ancient nostrum that all things are rooted in a continuous reality.  A magical realm, perhaps, that to this day has been veiled and occluded by the object that once sought to give it light.

In “Beyond the Aesthetic,” in 1946, the painter Robert Motherwell commented the following on the social reaction against the artist’s role in our culture;  “The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more human.  It is then that he is disposed to revolution.  Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore treats him as an anarchist.  Society’s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not.  Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist’s path.” 67

It has been argued in the preceding sections how, at root, the relationship of consciousness to art is foremost of a cognitive basis.  Yet, as such, when the cognitive elements in art are a priori, and hence, at odds with the general mode of relating to the pre-established art of a culture, it seems there is a natural dissonance that occurs at the moment when art must be incorporated into the empirical body of its tradition.  This can be attested to by the long history of scandalous receptions that have always accompanied the presentation of new artistic works to the audiences and societal patrons of their time.  The debut of Impressionist works at the Paris Salon des Refuses in 1872 is only one of the more famous instances. 

Cognitive understanding regularly takes time to bridge the dissonance of perception that occurs at such points of aesthetic progress.  Feelings of unease must be chastened and subdued to illuminate the rugged tastes of people toward the useful and the good, so that in the end, freedom may be celebrated.  However, this often happens at the expense of the artist’s orginal intentions, resulting in patently erroneous and willful misinterpretation for the sake of personal and societal comfort – in many cases posthumously, as the complete disparagement of the author’s voice is secured without any legitimate way of being contested.  But so it is; the hard truths of art can be difficult to palate, and by the officious meddling of career oriented academics in artistic affairs, book after book of theories are published in apology of the cultural establishment’s status quo so that dissonant voices may be incorporated into the cannon of tradition.

Artists, like true connoisseurs, though, know that in the beginning all great works of art arise from a vision of exactness and perfection – in the will to transfer the spiritual into the material world – that is, before communication inevitably breaks down at the rough threshold of the material object, and whatever moral message may become lost at the source.    Yet, the tragedy for artists of our time – perhaps the most changeful epoch ever in Western art history – is that this rift between object and idea has also resulted in the summary dismissal of the great energy and critical social engagement that went into the most important artistic movements of our past century.

Specifically, in the controversy always inherent at such moments when artists exercise their moral right to engage with the public sphere, and their conflicting message is most unwelcome.  As was the case in movements like Surprematism, Futurism, and Dada that included, along with their artistic message, manifestos and ideas that were as outright political as they were aesthetic – but, at the hour of their greatest relevance, of course, were largely ignored.  And, still, the confusion and harmful effects of this recalcitrant and myopic attitude toward art persists.  The historical consequences are doubly relevant to us, though, because – above all – the injury toward the original cognitive intentions and ideals behind the founding moments of modern art continues to be perpetrated at the highest echelons of the art establishment itself; by those whose responsibility is to illuminate rather than occlude the sociological roots of art – and yet with effete and sanctimonious casuistry, willfully substitute their own interpretations of the residual object of art for the intended meaning behind its content.  But, why always this obsession with the material object, over the import of its idea?  One has to wonder how exactly, in politics as well as art, the invisible hand of the market is always at work.

“Feelings must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols.  It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses to the objects of the external world.  Apart from the struggle to endure – …the changes that we desire in the world are in the interest of feeling….But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means.”68

This statement by Robert Motherwell, in particular, addresses the subtle distinction between the artists’ objectives – to bring new structures of feeling into the world – and the confusion that arises when art (or the medium inherent in the artwork that communicates these feelings) is mistaken for the desired end, instead of the receptacle and symbolic representation of the desired end.  The resulting paradox would seem to amount to a viscous circle where object and idea are mutually identified, and incapable of separation without mutual annihilation.  But this rather archaic mode of thought – though completely valid when art exists within a unity of tradition (as in ancient statue of Venus or when in the Middle Ages icons acted as a surrogate for the presence of Christ’s divinity) is wholly inappropriate to the interpretation of an art that is conceptually based on the premise of establishing new changes and feelings that go beyond the medium of traditional art.  It must be said, furthermore, that the artist’s averred intent to introduce new feelings, structures, and changes into contemporary reality – whether he is successful at it, or not – still connotes a peculiarly political slant in its motivation.

The energy of the void that exists in the unfulfilled gap between object and idea is testified to in the words of the American sculptor, David Smith.  Writing in the late 1940s, at the same time as Motherwell, he said;  “Art is a paradox that has no laws to bind it.  Laws set can always be violated.  That confuses the pragmatic mind….[Art] is created by man’s imagination in relationship to his time.  When art exists, it becomes tradition.  When it is created, it represents a unity that did not exist before.”69

All art exists, therefore, in an effort to bridge the gap between time and antecedent tradition.  But the disjuncture in unity is not always so easily overcome.  The artist, we recall, “stands for the human against society” – and it is often the case, even (or especially), when in the context of a society that alienates the human.  Again, Motherwell’s interpretation of the artist’s stance in society strikes out for its use of clearly political terms.  This having been phrased so explicitly by him, it is only relevant to wonder why the problem of market economics in art has avoided any mention – is there not any connection here? – from so many artists who, just like him, have shared the same moral attitudes toward art.  But, at this stage, the problem of what ideological or political truth could actually replace the art object as it attempts to fill the metaphysical void is perhaps too great a question to answer. 

Nevertheless, we may somehow suspect that a connection is there.  When, as of yet, it is precisely because of the conundrum in art that “feelings must have a medium to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols,” that any and all cognitive intentions within modern art have continually been the easy target of co-optation by a Capitalistic art market system that is only too eager to incorporate artworks into the medium of “tradition” as objects of fetish rather than as the symbolic cries for human change.  After all, we are speaking of ideas (whether political or not) within art – even knowledge – that is potentially injurious to the system, and whose existence almost certainly does not yet have the maturity or high enough relationship within the means of production to sell as well as objects.       

Thus the paradox of modern art is marked, above all, by a giant disconnect between audience and creator.  One that further echoes the political alienation of the artist’s human voice within society.  Tradition (even one as expansive and flexible as our late Western tradition has become) always invokes the pre-established modes of understanding in the mind of the viewer whenever they encounter an object – even if that object stands in direct opposition to all that our tradition has ever stood for, in spite of its objectness. 

“I feel no tradition.  I feel great spaces.

I feel my own time.  I am disconnected.

I belong to no mores – no party – no religion – no school of thought – no institution.  I feel raw freedom and my own identity.  I feel a belligerence to museums, critics, art historians, aesthetes and the so called cultural forces in a commercial order…”70 writes, David Smith. 

The trajectory of David Smith’s art is noted for its innovation in avoiding the concept of central mass that was the common organizing theme in the history of sculpture.  In hollowing out the central mass of his first pieces in the late 1930s -40s (often by creating them within the open space of a welded metal boundary, an artificial representation analogous to the picture frame), his beginnings suggest how his entire oeuvre may likewise be understood as the pioneering of the sculptural form into the conceptual void of present moment.  By the same token, the dictum that “art is created by man’s imagination in relationship to his time” is also evinced by David Smith’s choice of modern materials.  By the 1950s, the maturation of Smith’s work was a unique fusion of the main current of the aesthetic influences of Cubism and Surrealism; a virtual translation of “drawing in space” that Smith paralleled in his marked use of industrial materials, found objects, and welded metals – the new three-dimensional idioms – he pursued in sculpture.

“I believe that my time is the most important in the world.  That the art of my time is the most important art.  That the art before my time has no immediate contribution to my aesthetics since that art is history explaining past behavior, but not necessarily offering solutions to my problems.”71

Smith’s statements highlight the necessary approach of a thought-based understanding to modern art; one that is not hog-tied to the pre-established relations of culture to past tradition, albeit that his sculptures remain objects all the same.  Nevertheless, the increasingly cognitive progression that art has taken (along with artists’ increasing ambition toward creativity that is not dependent on the sensual object), is evinced by several other factors that have become rooted in Western aesthetics since the beginning of the 19^th century.  Among them; the complete turning away from figurative representation, marked by Cubism as well as Suprematism in the period of World War I, Duchamp’s experimental Readymades in the post war period, and the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s after World War II.  Later, the trading of the pictorial plane of the canvas by the “Combines” of Pop Art and Minimalism in the 1960s, and the preponderance of Conceptual Art in the 1970s – each mark a cumulative assimilation and expansion of the cognitive dimension in art.  To the point where the contemporary critic and scholar, Arthur Danto remarked on many different occasions that, “Art has become philosophy.”

“Much of what contemporary art is about is the concept itself, so its meaning must be understood with reference to art-world discourses which are still ongoing when the work is shown.  Artists always have an ideal audience in mind – an art world for which they work….. The great works of art are those which express the deepest thoughts, and treating them as mere aesthetic objects cuts one off entirely from what makes art so central to the needs of the human spirit.”72

But, though Danto’s writing on this subject (in 1999) is the closest we have examined in proximity to our own time, any careful reading of his texts nonetheless reveals how futile, or impossible it has been for contemporary thinkers and artists to escape from the tyranny of the object.  “…the being of a work of art is its meaning….” Danto comments earlier in critique of the poet Archibald McLiesh’s famous epigram “A poem should not mean, but be.”  “…Art is a mode of thought, and experiencing art consists of thought engaging with thought.”73  And so still we remain, it seems, caught up in the same old perpetual art-world discourses, referencing the same old conundrums presented by the object.  And, when not even the philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, is prepared to radically question whether the object’s role in the discourse is merely of nominal value in the first place – or a superfluous extension of the mind of the artist  – all the more simple it is then for the many scholars, museum curators, and gallery critics whose job it is to illuminate the historical motivations of art, to instead occlude them (and the artists unpalatable views) according to their own vested interests in commercial objects. 

There is, of course, no conspiracy or oppression where there is no voice that is being oppressed.  But, when transferred into the context of the gallery or museum, and pronounced as “art” – it is notably apparent how the voice of the artist is ceremoniously traded for the mute object, safely voiding any of the cognitive antagonism of his speech.  And, while it is only in the most successful instances of the unbridled expression of feeling through art that the artist’s voice may be redeemed through his created object – how few in number of those living among us are heard at all.  More often than not, they are long dead by the time their audience is ready to understand the urgency of what they had been saying all along.

“Art is not divorced from life.  It is a dialectic.  It is ever changing and in revolt of the past.  It has existed in the minds of free men for less than a century.  Prior to this the direction of art was dictated by minds other than the artist for exploitation and commercial use…The freedom of man’s mind to celebrate his own feeling by a work of art parallels his social revolt from bondage.  I believe that art is yet to be born and that freedom and equality are yet to be born.”74

The preceding issue between the art object and the unrevealed thoughts behind its creative intent has been delineated in order to highlight the modern crisis in art’s meaning.  A parallel outcome to our final inquiry has been to raise the question of the paradox of the (perhaps illogical) necessity of the object as the representation of a mode of thought.  Illogical, if only in the sense that – not only does the artwork’s cognitive background gain relevancy mainly within the context of an object’s existence as a commodity; but, if art is to be engaged with as a mode of thought (as the critic, Danto proposed), it is worth reiterating that the object itself would almost seem a superfluous extension of the mind of the artist himself. 

The issue is, of course, unnecessarily confused in the modern mentality still accustomed to assess meaning in art primarily through the filtering lens of aesthetic contemplation.  But as pointed out, unfortunate though it may be, this attitude amounts to no less than a controlled ignorance of the deepest cognitive intentions at the origins of modern art.  And, while clinging to the past, we may understandably say; “I do not care what the artist intends, all I care is that his art be beautiful,” this attitude in no way changes the reality of the message of those artists who were emphatically at war with the legacy of Western tradition.  A message whose accompanying significance for the meaning of art as well as the world would of course be moot, if that’s all it were – simply a message – unless art were indeed more than an aesthetic diversion; unless art is in fact a fundamental way of knowing, a strange and sacred epistemology not to be disregarded.   

In final summary, we may debate whether or not these changes in artistic tradition represent spiritual progress or – perhaps – the reverse.  But more importantly we are again reminded of Benjamin’s conclusion first stated regarding what happens when a civilization undergoes a change in their standard of perception: “During long periods of human history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” 

In considering the historical precedents of art’s power for political influence, propaganda and religious reverence, furthermore, it would neither be a fallacy to assume the inverse – that the entire mode of human existence can change for a long period of human history simply with a change in the mode of human sense perception.  It is where the object of art and the objective of the artist finally meet, as if absurdly at last, like in some unforeseen antinomie in the suprasensible world that Immanuel Kant never considered inhabitable by the human mind. 

For this change in perception after all is what art’s cognitive intention has always been about.  And, yet, we see that the ideological mind of the artist intent on progress at any cost is blocked from the realm by the art object itself.  It is the looming crisis between object and idea; but, just as we salute the greatness of the art object in our contemporary lives, so we await unawares the historical depths of the abiding revolution between art and political economy.  And, so for all those artists beholden to the idea of perceptual change – we conclude whatever illuminations we have had, for now, cast back into the shadow of unsuspecting danger that is born from the title of this work.

                                    *                      *                      *

REFERENCES

   Barasche, Mosche:  Theories of Art, Vols. 1,2,3; London: Routledge 2000.

   Baudrillard:  For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

   Beaud, Michael:  A History of Capitalism

   Benjamin, Walter:  Illuminations, Essays and Reflections ; Schoken Books,

   English Translation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1968.

   Bonafoux, Pascal:  Van Gogh, The Passionate Eye;

   Caws, Mary Ann:  Manifesto, A Century of Isms; University of Nebraska Press 2001

   Couliano, Ioan P.:  Eros and Magic in the Renaissance; The University

   of Chicago Press 1987.

   Danto, Arthur: The Madonna of the Future; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2000.

   Greenberg, Clement:  Art and Culture; Beacon Press 1965.

   Guilbaut, Serge:  How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; The Universtiy of

   Chicago Press 1983.

   Heilbroner: The Making of  Economic Society;  Simon & Schuster, New York

   Helibroner:  The Worldly Philosphers; Simon & Schuster, New York 1986.

   Hornstein, Percy, Brown:  World Literature;  Mentor, New York 1973

   Hughes, Robert:  Nothing if Not Critical; 

   Hume:  Writings on Economics

   Kandisnky, Vassily:  Concerning the Spiritual in Art

   Kant, Immanuel:  Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;

   Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.

   Knight, Sean Dorian:  American Renaissance, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice in

   the Arts and its Influence on Morals and Happiness;  Greenlee Publishing, New York   

   2003.

   Kristin Stiles and Peter Selz:  Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art; 

   University of California Press 1996.

   Krauss, Rosalind: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths;

   The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massechussetts  1986.

   Levi-Strauss, Claude:  Myth and Meaning;  Schocken Books New York, Universtity

    Of Toronto Press 1978.

   Lewis, Michael:  “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,

   Vol. 210 Issue 17  p. 27-34

   Marx, Karl:  Das Capital, Volume I

   McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; Documentext,  

    McPhereson & Company 1991.

   Plato:  The Republic, Phaedrus ;

1 Guilbaut, Serge:  How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art;  (The Universtiy of

   Chicago Press 1983.) p.24

2 Guilbaut, p.20

3  Guilbaut, p.21

4 Barasche, Mosche:  Theories of Art, Vol.2; (London: Routledge 2000.) p. 123

5   Barasche:Volume II, p. 331

6   Barasche: Volum II  p. 332

7  Ibid

8   Helibroner:  The Worldly Philosphers; (Simon & Schuster, New York 1986.) p.77

9   Heilbroner:  p. 177

10  Heilbroner:  p. 183

11 Guilbaut, Serge:  How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art;  (The Universtiy of

   Chicago Press 1983.)

12 Lewis, Michael:  “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,

   Vol. 210 Issue 17  p. 27-34

13 Hornstein, Percy, Brown:  World Literature;  Mentor, (New York 1973) p. 445-446

14 Ibid

15  Ibid

16 Hornstein, Percy, Brown:  World Literature; (Mentor, New York 1973), p.445-446

17 Lewis, Michael:  “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,

    Vol. 210 Issue 17  p. 27-34

18 Benjamin, Walter:  Illuminations, Essays and Reflections ; (Schoken Books,

   English Translation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1968.) p.223

19  Ibid

20 Kant, Immanuel:  Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;

   (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.)  p. xlviii

21 Ibid

23  Ibid

24  Ibid

25 Couliano, Ioan P.:  Eros and Magic in the Renaissance; (The University

    of Chicago Press 1987.) p. 194

26  Couliano, p.182

27 Knight, Sean Dorian:  American Renaissance, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice in

   the Arts and its Influence on Morals and Happiness;  (Greenlee Publishing, New York   

   2003.)  p. 596 

28   Couliano, p. 195

29   Couliano, p. 182

30  Kant, Immanuel:  Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;

     (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) p.xlix

31 Kant, Immanuel:  Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;

     (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.) see p. xxiv and pp.1xii, 1xiii

32  Lewis, Michael:  “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,

     Vol. 210 Issue 17  p. 27-34

33 Kant, Immanuel:  Critique of Judgment; Translated by Werner S. Pluhar;

     (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis 1987.)  p. xxxi

34   Kant; 353, p. 228

35  Kant; 196, p. 37

36   Hornstein, Percy, Brown:  World Literature;  (Mentor, New York 1973.) p. 356

37   Greenberg, Clement:  Art and Culture; (Beacon Press 1965.) p.24-25

38   Ibid

*   In a documentary film on art, the late Barnett Newman is recorded commenting on the   moment when he had the audacity to paint a solid orange line down the middle of a sublime deep blue background, “Well, I took one look at it on the canvas, and then hid it for six months in my closet, afraid to go near it.  I thought to myself, ‘what have I done’?”

39 Lewis, Michael:  “Paint by Numbers”; The New Republic; 4/25/94,

    Vol. 210 Issue 17  p. 27

40  Ibid

41   Ibid

42   Ibid

43   Lewis; p.30

44   Ibid

45  Ibid

46 Lewis; p.31

47   Ibid

48   Ibid

49  Ibid

50  Ibid

51  Ibid

52  Ibid

53  Lewis; p.31

54  Ibid

55   Ibid

56   Ibid

57   Ibid

58  Ibid

59   Ibid

60   Ibid

61   Lewis; p.34

62 McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; (Documentext,  

     McPhereson & Company 1991.)  p. 75-77

63 Caws, Mary Ann:  Manifesto, A Century of Isms;

    (University of Nebraska Press 2001)  p. 411

64 Barasche, Mosche:  Theories of Art, Vol. 3; London: Routledge 2000.) p.313

65 Caws, Mary Ann:  Manifesto, A Century of Isms;

   (University of Nebraska Press 2001) p. 188

66 McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Discontent; Theory at the Millenium; (Documentext,  

     McPhereson & Company 1991.)  p.177

67 Kristin Stiles and Peter Selz:  Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art; 

   (University of California Press 1996.)  p.27 

68  Ibid

69  Stiles and Selz; p. 37

70  Ibid

71   Stiles and Selz; p.38

72   Danto, Arthur: The Madonna of the Future; (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York  

     2000.) p. ix-x

73   Ibid

74   Stiles and Selz; p.38

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