THE AVANT GARDE MYSTIQUE- AN OBITUARY.
Ever since it was realized that it is possible to be fashionably
superior and insufferable at the same time, there has been a self-proclaimed
avant garde. The cutting edge, tedious little plastic butter knife that it is,
has saturated the world with details of its own brilliance.
There is a formula for hack avant garde
practices:
1. Find some
obscure old thing that you think you can market.
2. Do a bit of
costing, and try and contact your superficial fellow illiterates about
marketing and cuts of the profits.
3. For the initial
impact of this new product of genius, discreet little gatherings of sycophantic
cretins are arranged, in modest palaces with some accidental global media
coverage.
The 20th century made a habit
of this process.
Every known prior idea or motif was dragged
in to the “revolution”. Bauhaus, formerly a rather noticeably legitimate effort
in new design, found itself a sacred cow.
Expressionism, which began as a
particularly badly expressed idea, appropriately enough, was roped in as a “new”
idea. It was never seen as what it was, an oddly lousy version of abstract art,
because the art market, in its chaste and pure obsession with niches, riches
and bitches, extracted it from the herd of abstract art forms. It wasn’t good
enough or deep enough to qualify as surrealism, so as a product identity it had
to be defined. Some of the most appalling, paint-wasting, insulting, artistic
sputum in history is identified as Expressionism.
In Literature, the miraculous invention
of the four letter word was a major breakthrough. A genre of scatological pith
and sententious wind did the rest. Further revelations were to be found in the
fact that a book can be made out of something that would otherwise be a single
sentence, and sold at correspondingly high prices. The mythos of the verbose
writer was begun when some hermit realized that a kind of social superiority
was to be gained from claiming to understand the most horrendously written
tripe.
The publishing industry, immersed in
itself as usual, was now able to claim to be supporting an art. Drab, spiritually castrated academics could
now hold forth about brittle, shallow books written by misanthropes with a
clear conscience, or whatever their equivalent mental process might be.
Subjects, “forbidden” in a sense that
only a real doormat could comprehend, were now publishable. Soggy tomes about
little girls and older men, endlessly dramatized, abounded. Sex was now
saleable, and the standard of writing was a rough equivalent of the raging sex
lives of most writers. I don’t know if you’ve ever settled in with a “sexy book”
and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy…. Why people want to translate their sex
lives into Latin, I do not know.
The “revolution” in topics continued,
well-informed vegetables around the world sharing esoterica dredged from
history. Another breakthrough; people not taught real history can be shocked by
it, and buy lots of books on the subject. (My only comment on history as
literature so far is that if you want a good horror story, read history.
Actually, what else needs saying?)
The avant garde component in all this
pointless pigswill was that many were able to claim the distinction of “discovery”.
Avant garde was now a claim to marketing ability, not an artistic reputation.
Perversely, those known to be recycling the fool-fodder of previous centuries
were also considered “avant garde” based on their lack of talent.
A case in point: “Free Love”. It was
never a 20th century invention. It was invented in the 19th
century, at the very earliest, and simply marketed to a receptive audience,
which also mystically had the ability to buy contraceptives on a large scale.
“The occult”, an obsession of many
previous generations, was equally new to the pitifully educated market, and has
blossomed into a thriving series of macros somewhere. In some cases people don’t
even know what they’re believing in, but because it’s been described as “occult”,
it must be exciting. Sales by innuendo.
The real avant garde in any generation
is rarely noticed. Breakthroughs are made in garages, on laptops, on scribbled
notes, or in moments when people can think properly. Not in press releases,
media events, or attacks of artistic xenophobia designed to lock in reputations
and marketability.
The methodology of media has lost track
of real advances in media. This is a fairly ad hoc article, and I don’t want to
belabor an obvious point:
Those who seek anything are rarely
looking for anything else. A lot of avant garde work is by definition outside
the references of media buying and media research. It’s practically impossible
to market or research something if you don’t even know it exists. You might
accidentally bump into a new thing, but most of the time you’re on a single
track.
The film industry is an example. What is
bought is bought on financial risk values, not artistic values. (Well, now I can
say I’ve written something stunningly obvious.) A particular genre sells, so you’re more
likely to buy it or sell it.
Irritatingly easy as it would be to make
some puritanical statement regarding the “future of human art and the
obligation to push the boundaries further out”, (presumably in the interests of
our children, and our children’s children…) there’s an inherent gap between
media and new product. Films have become a reflection of technology, no longer
a showcase for technology and ideas, as they were.
Very few really new concepts occur in
the medium, because it’s geared to its production methods and costs. What
eventually comes out is pretty much proven content. Many of the animated films
now are really using old PC game quality animations, or their descendants. Some
are using the digital version of single frame movements, for example where only
the mouth of a character is moving against a static background. Action films
now happen mainly in computers.
Technically, the software is impressive,
but is it really much more than the current upgrade? I really don’t want to
belittle some of the actual achievements, which are substantial, but are these
movies? I could also make a few poignant comments about the fantastic costing
for some of these massive budgets, paying for processor time and tweaking codes,
rather than quality… I have a feeling someone’s probably thought of that,
though.
The music industry, that monument to
hypocrisy, has maintained its sterling record of non-innovation. There are
people using wave forms and synthesizer patches which are so old, and so very
un-musical, as well as unreliable, that it’s a joke. The advent of multitrack
has provided yet another market How To manual for hacks. Innovation? Avant
garde? These guys wouldn’t know a new idea if it bit them. The advanced music
of the early 21st century, so far, is a pure rehash of some
antiquated theories from the 1940s and 1950s.
The technological advances have become
jingles, not much more than ways of selling instruments to people that don’t
know much about instruments. “Sales features”, not musical assets. Every single
musical instrument and piece of electronic equipment ever built has potentials
and possibilities, and all you get are One Size Fits All recordings by the
bucket load, because nobody has ever experimented beyond the most cursory
level. Nor, incidentally, has anyone ever been told that they should, or why
they should. “This is how you play/record/produce music.” So that’s all they
do.
The global media is presently a
graveyard of established, predictable, forgettable and soon-to-be-forgotten
methods. The avant garde mystique is now a sales pitch. It started as real
description of those truly in advance of everyone else. Then it became a form
of pretension, a market image. Something to impress the other six year olds
with, art like new toys.
Now, it’s whatever anyone claims it to
be. What appears at first horrified, unwilling, blink to be a badly arranged
attack of some terrible disease turns out to be the Next Big Thing, the Newest
Of The New.
It’s the Ultimate Product of festering
genius, not the scratchings of some less than eloquent dead cockroach. It is an
artistic triumph beside which the Sistine Chapel is a garage rest room, not the
worthless whimpering of a mind incapable of getting paint on any surface. Wild
eyed accountants sat up in filthy palaces for weeks figuring out how to sell
it.
What appears to be a new use for
condemned urinals is your new, endearingly expensive mansion, derived from
mystic excursions into non-copyright designs. There’s a reason for garbage to
be non-copyright, and not a pleasant one. Whoever managed to get this hideous
abortion onto a set of blueprints, however, you will find is considered a true
artist. Well, that’s about half right, if you leave out the obvious preceding
word.
Three hours of chronic discontinuity is
the new film breakthrough. The utter loss of any story line may be attributable
to sheer dumb luck, but as art, it’s a revelation for all those other people
who can’t keep track of single sentences. The subtle use of people’s anatomy as
decoys to draw people away from any suspicion of the absence of a workable
screenplay is another novelty. Whoever came up with that is definitely a market
leader, if not a known saint.
The book about word associations, freely
lifted from any old, usually discredited, psychological text book, is
literature’s answer to the scandalous charge of mediocrity rampant. A bit of
subtext sniveling about the neglect of literary standards will convince any
professional idiot that it’s genuine. Use of the word “dog” as a term for
association also fits the Guidelines For Better Communication, embracing wholeheartedly
as it does the ability to communicate with young readers and the need to fill
quite a lot of space.
The more turgid and lifeless, the
better. It adds some credibility to those who have read a book saturated with
unnecessary, obsolete information. If written in that patronizing prose which
includes infinite detail on one point and almost none on any related points,
artistic credentials are secure. That’s what text books are supposed to
contain, isn’t it? So any other form of
literature, written pedantically enough, must be good.
People are impressed by quantity, and
generally have very little exposure to quality. There it is, 600 pages of
irrelevance, and the shriveled ruin of a reader is able to quote passages from
it like a book of nursery rhymes, so making the book a masterpiece and the
reader an educated, informed person. In criminal law, the deprivation of
liberty alone would qualify as grounds for prosecution, but not in modern
literature. The mind, shackled to some verminous, odious corpse of verbosity,
has no court of appeal.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of
person victimized by the avant garde mystique. In no position to argue with the
sources, and drastically under-educated by exposure to them, if not already
illiterate. The film buff, knowledgeable enough about many aspects, is brutally
misled by the pure fluff of production, and usually deprived of comparisons
with the ancestral film techniques. The music lover, unless inoculated by jazz
or classical music, is floundering in the “values” of current music.
(The arts can always vaccinate their
fans against the garbage, but few people know that. They just don’t get enough
exposure to the good stuff.)
Most of this atrocity is based on the theory
that it’s “new”. In marketing terms that also means nobody has anything against
it, yet, which is a valuable selling point. Those promoting something new get a
bit of leeway from industry, because all industries need new product, all the
time. Media, however, suffers from too much new product, ironically enough,
since it can’t handle its daily input of new material. Existing outlets just
cannot absorb the deluge of creative work pouring in to all facets of the
various media distributors.
In fairness, quality is a major issue,
but they’re swamped, and would have no hope of even beginning to look for
quality product, the way they take in material. Some have even stopped looking
at new work. So if you’re wondering why the 80s are so popular these days, that’s
probably when the scripts and books were written.
The promoters of the “new” material don’t
have that problem. They’re on an inside track, and they block anything else
from running. The danger is that these pseudo-imaginative scum are poisoning
both the producers and the industry.
I frankly do not believe any of the
people inflicting themselves and their ludicrous products on global media
content are capable of selling sex in a jail. They don’t have the education, the
depth of experience, or the talent. They also now have less scope than their
audience. What seems new to the marketers seems new to them based on their
understanding of the medium. The good news is that is what will eventually kill
them. They can’t keep up. YouTube, myspace and others have already proved that.
The average nine year old, without
trying too hard, will by about age 12, be an expert in finding thousands of
media products without the assistance of market mythology. A kid like that will
want to know since when anyone can tell them what they want to watch, read, or
hear. That generation doesn’t have to listen to hype, and it won’t, if it can
help it, and nobody can make them. Someone claiming to be “avant garde” to the
coming generations will have billions of people able to start forming a judgment of that statement in .024 seconds.
We may consider ourselves very fortunate
indeed to even be able to think of a time when useless, plagiaristic,
irrelevant people in the arts and media can be classified accordingly by a
search engine. A life based on film credits might not be such a good idea if
what comes out is a list of irredeemable rubbish as a career.
To me, the only real avant garde are the
real innovators, those who actually do the basic experimental work needed to
develop an art or a science. For innovators, the “own goal” factor is the real
problem. The avant garde needs to be able to connect efficiently with its
market, to be viable, and allow further innovation. At best, the current
situation is haphazard, and few if any innovations ever get into the public
eye.
What normally happens is that someone
discovers something, it is ignored, then someone else picks it up, and a
lineage of time consuming, wasteful, and ultimately counterproductive evasions
of genuinely new product, occurs. Who does it help? Not the industries,
definitely. Not the advertisers, their
marketers, or the employment demographics.
For example: Laser recording was nearly
30 years old before it was picked up as consumer technology. The disk drive is
already obsolete, because someone’s discovered you can use the same solid state
technology for computers as you do for digital cameras. Convection cooking is
far more energy efficient than conventional, or microwave, and it’s 50 years
old. You can boil water instantaneously.
Innovation is a very rocky road for
innovators. What credit they get, they deserve. How about we stop enshrining those
useless hacks, and start paying attention to the people who actually produce?