THE REGRESS OF PROGRESS

Theodore Dalrymple muses on the word 'progress', as do I from time to time, and comes to a similar conclusion:

"If jesting Pilate had asked what progress was rather than truth, his failure to stay for an answer might have been more excusable. Indeed, whenever I hear the word progress nowadays, I reach for my … no, no, I won’t go quite as far as that, but I do ask myself the question, “Progress towards what, exactly?”  The only answer I can give is, “Towards an existence without boundaries”—at least boundaries that have not been decreed by progressives. In other words, progress is movement towards rule by progressives; all else is reaction."

In his ruminations he considers the idea of 'the progressive' in the area of the arts and it is here that I find myself in particular agreement with his appraisal:

How was what Wyndham Lewis called “the demon of progress in the arts” unleashed? Howsoever it was unleashed, it has certainly been nourished by a certain vulgate of art history ever since, combined with a good dose of faulty logic. The vulgate is as follows:

• “Official” art in the nineteenth century was terrible.
• A group of courageous revolutionary artists grew up in opposition to it.
• Their work shocked the public.
• Though they were mocked, derided, reviled and persecuted at first, they produced great art and finally won through.
• A number of false deductions from this vulgate are accepted consciously or unconsciously by artists, art critics and the supposedly sophisticated element of the public, among them:
• Throughout history, all great art and great artists were not accepted as such in their own time.
• All great art is oppositional, revolutionary and an advance on what went before.
• The function of art and artists is to shock, and what does not shock is not art.

Of course it is true than art may shock, that a few great artists have gone unrecognised in their lifetime, that some have been revolutionary, that academicism may exhaust itself and become mere kitsch; but these are small aspects of art history, not the whole of it, nor are they historiographical principles that any aspiring artist ought to keep in mind, or that should guide the judgement of the critic or the public. The only proper judgement is sub specie aeternitatis (under the form of eternity)."