Nihilism and the Death of Art

[Vitruvius]

I was thinking recently about art - especially the division between pop art (e.g. Stephen King's novels) and pure art (e.g. Thomas Pynchon). The latter was said to be the divine face of art, the one intended solely for the elite readers, whilst the other is for everybody else.

This occurs to me to be very, very wrong. I am a James Joyce reader, I've read Faulkner, Pynchon, Nabokov, Burgess, Eco etc. and (not to brag, but) I understood them almost fully. I've also read Beckett, Burroughs and Rushdie: most of them struggle to prove that language is completely inadequate to express the true essence of human life and human demeanor. But, and this I ask as sincerely as I possibly can, what is the difference between these writers, who not only admit the futility of language and their writing, and the others who insist on telling a good story? I have read Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, John Saul (really rotten writing, but the ideas weren't too bad), John Case, John Grisham, Amelie Nothomb, Roger Zelazny etc. and at least they do something worth while, whereas the so-called modernist and postmodernist writers only manage to become increasingly annoying in their search to destroy language. I often find myself asking: why the hell should I care about Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his spouse ALP? Joyce had already proven his main theory that language is inadequate in Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is pushing it. I've read countless books on the Wake, read it almost twice, understood almost half - but the more I struggled with it it occured to me that whatever it had to say meant absolutely nothing to me.

This may be an after-effect of my slowly thinning spare time, but I can't seem to finish books that do not teach me anything. For instance, I love Dostoevski's work. After reading the Mad Russian, I tried to read Tolstoy, but it was excruciatingly boring compared to Dosto.

This is my recent problem: the death of art, at least in my eyes. There is nothing divine about pure art more than there is about pop art or the human soul itself, for that matter. I agree that language is but a virus, that it's inadequate for expressing everyday reality, yet still I can't bear it being said by every postmodern author over and over again.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, because my nihilism got the better of me. I can't seem to read anything but scientific work and philosophy (which tends to become rather depressing, seing as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Cioran are my favorites.)

P.S. : Please excuse any language mistakes, for English is not my first language. Thank you.

[Buh4Bee]

Well, maybe you need to reincarnate. Then you can read the present day authors and have a different perspective. Haha!

[Manchegan]

Funk all that noise. Language is, in fact, a very adequate means of communicating profound ideas. Real literature can (nay, must!) be both entertaining and thought provoking. It's sometimes fun to uncover a works true meaning when it's been buried under all sorts of craziness, but I think Joyce and the likes go too far. Writing should make it fairly clear what happened; the fun should be in figuring out why.

You're right to be tired of everyone pointing out the futility of language as a means of expression. Everyone's tired of that. Nihilism has just about run its course methinks. Only so much art can come from denying a purpose of exstence. It was a new, unique thought at first, but it's been done to death. Now it's time for artists to find a new purpose in life.

[Bastable]

slightly off topic i know, but i don't really regard chuck palahniuk to be pop art. also, one of the things Nietzsche detested was nihilism, and he actually wrote about combating it on occasion.

[Desolation]

Is nihilism the death of art? Or is it the cause of art?

You say that Nietzsche is among your favorite philosophers(a view I emphatically share), so let's look at it in a Nietzschean sense. As has been mentioned, Nietzsche argued against nihilism, however, this is because Nietzsche was, to an extent, a nihilist himself. From a nihilistic standpoint, the world is empty, and inherently meaningless...And that is why to the nihilist, the artist is necessary, for the artist creates to fill the void, and injects meaning into the world, and into their own life. This would be Nietzsche's existential nihilism in a nutshell.

The problem with the artists that you're referring to, is that rather than injecting meaning into the world, they were stuck on the idea that the world is meaningless, and never moved forward. So, the problem is not nihilism, but rather the unwillingness to take the next step after acknowledging nihilism.

[stlukesguild]

Desotaion... for once I almost agree with you completely. The painter Max Beckmann declared that he painted in order to escape from the void... in order to make some sense of life... to give it purpose or "meaning".

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2631/3784235668_5b248e276a_o.jpg

The Abstract Expressionist spoke of art in a similar manner... admitting that art was more about creating some new object that attempted to give form to their feelings than it was an illustration of visual "reality".

Where I would question you is on the suggestion that Joyce... or Beckett, Eco, Pynchon, Nabokov, etc... intended/achieved nothing more than an expression of the inability or inadequacy of art/language to express anything. It would seem that most of the innovations of Modernism were not rooted in a Nihilistic belief that art could "mean" nothing... but rather with the feeling that the older, traditional forms were no longer adequate to confront the new realities of the Modern era.

[Desolation]

Desotaion... for once I almost agree with you completely.It was bound to happen eventually...


Where I would question you is on the suggestion that Joyce... or Beckett, Eco, Pynchon, Nabokov, etc... intended/achieved nothing more than an expression of the inability or inadequacy of art/language to express anything. It would seem that most of the innovations of Modernism were not rooted in a Nihilistic belief that art could "mean" nothing... but rather with the feeling that the older, traditional forms were no longer adequate to confront the new realities of the Modern era.
That would be a substantial over-simplification on my part. I was referring more to the current brand of nihilism, a la Burroughs, that seems to absolutely refuse to move past the first stage of nihilism. More accurately, actually, I wasn't really referring to anyone or any movement or era at all, but rather the theory that nihilism is responsible for the death of art, in the terms that Vitruvius described. I don't honestly know enough about Joyce('Ulysses has been sitting on my shelf unread for months, I'm saving it for the right moment), Beckett(who I read for the first time today), Nabokov, or Pynchon to say anything about their work. However, I am familiar enough with their impact to know that they all achieved much more than a statement of the futility of art to express reality.

[LMK]

Art like all things is in the eye of the beholder.

For example, I think Stephen King is a wonderful writer. I'm not usually a fan of his content, but as a writer I think he's up there way high on the list of authors, in my opinion.

Just offering an idea that a book and its author might be separated in terms of lables; the artist and the art, perhaps.

~L

[Mr Endon]

Is nihilism the death of art? Or is it the cause of art?

You say that Nietzsche is among your favorite philosophers(a view I emphatically share), so let's look at it in a Nietzschean sense. As has been mentioned, Nietzsche argued against nihilism, however, this is because Nietzsche was, to an extent, a nihilist himself. From a nihilistic standpoint, the world is empty, and inherently meaningless...And that is why to the nihilist, the artist is necessary, for the artist creates to fill the void, and injects meaning into the world, and into their own life. This would be Nietzsche's existential nihilism in a nutshell.

The problem with the artists that you're referring to, is that rather than injecting meaning into the world, they were stuck on the idea that the world is meaningless, and never moved forward. So, the problem is not nihilism, but rather the unwillingness to take the next step after acknowledging nihilism.

:thumbs_up:thumbs_up

But I also agree with stlukesguild in that they went further than mere nihilism. Every work of art is an attempt at creation of meaning, so I don't think any writer can ever be 'stuck on' nihilism. If an artist is truly nihilist, he won't bother creating a work of art at all.

My suspicion is that such writers are constructing meaning through the deconstruction of language, just as Beckett grasps at the unword through the density of words, and Foucault criticised Reason with Reason. Thus a new meaning is created by pointing out the absurdity of language. This new meaning is not intrinsic, not absolute, not Meaning, but just something to hold on to, a necessity of the symbolic human being.

[Vitruvius]

Desolation,

I wasn't saying that nihilism is cause of the death of art, but that it's a manifestation of the death of art. Nevertheless, you've put it quite nicely. nihilism should be the cause of art, whereas most writers do nothing more than acknowledge the nihilism itself in their art. Let's take, for instance, Joyce's Ulysses. All those different styles and literary techniques - they were all used to show how meaningless language was besides real life. All those styles were equally inefficient in expressing the life essence.

Nietzsche was a nihilist that struggled to destroy it, I agree with that. And he was right, as we can see now: the world has lost its belief in the power of art.

Anyway, this may sound a little stupid on my part, but I have - sincer i started this thread - had a sort of epiphany. I.e.: if everything has been said before and nothing new and interesting can be said anymore (which I fully agree), than the sole purpose of art may be that to provoke thought, as someone has said here, and to challenge the reader. In other words, I think that the books of value stimulate the mental-awareness of the reader and this is something that helped me find that certain meaning of art again.

P.S. Thanks to everybody who took the time to reply to my thread.

[stlukesguild]

Art like all things is in the eye of the beholder.

And some eyes are better than others.

[LMK]

Nihilism as in the complete disregard of established rules is not the death of art, but part of a creative process. Using formulated paint-by-the-numbers stilted plot formulas are not to my mind art, but material that exists to look at and look through only because its there and one is stuck in a dentist's office with nothing else to occupy one's time, perhaps.

On another hand (this might turn into a Goddess Durga thing in the number of hands), someone trying to be different just for the sake of being different is not new and is not necessarily something I'd encourage.

There is the hand for exploration of style, form, medium, semantics, vocabulary, character layering and interaction.

There is the hand that writes what is in one's head and follows its twists and turns or its straightforward tale.

There are so many styles so nihilism in this respect allows for the creation of art.

HOWEVER, (sorry to raise my voice, but this is the important part) nihilism as a philosophy of destruction creates nothing and destroys all in its path, not only art, but everything, in my opinion, including the one practicing the nihilistic behavior.

~L

[Vitruvius]

Just to be clear on this: I never said nihilism was the death of art. It's just that the art I was talking about seems to embrace ideas that are pretty much nihilistic.

[billl]

Sounds like a separation of art from life, maybe?

[Vitruvius]

Heheh: this seems to me like a collective effort to deconstruct and overthink at a lexical level my title.

[Barbarous]

I will say a few bits on the Joycean literature.

The wisdoms you automatically search for after a read, or two as you say with the Wake, come in reflection and with the help of other reads. Obviously you started Finnegans Wake not once, but twice because it interested you, that is enough for the time being, you discover on your own what it means to you. Yes, it is the obvious, but overlooked message as that is only what we can provide to you. So in question, why should you care, answer it yourself because if you've read numerous books on the Wake and as you said understood it, you might as well be able to.

And for the record, my opinion is that Finnegans Wake achieves way more than Ulysses could. You must have thought already that Ulysses is Stephen King compared to the Wake. Therefore I don't think the Wake is pushing anything, but is a mere stance of literature and language compared to the celebration of literature and language in Ulysses.

[mono]

I was thinking recently about art - especially the division between pop art (e.g. Stephen King's novels) and pure art (e.g. Thomas Pynchon). The latter was said to be the divine face of art, the one intended solely for the elite readers, whilst the other is for everybody else.

This occurs to me to be very, very wrong. I am a James Joyce reader, I've read Faulkner, Pynchon, Nabokov, Burgess, Eco etc. and (not to brag, but) I understood them almost fully. I've also read Beckett, Burroughs and Rushdie: most of them struggle to prove that language is completely inadequate to express the true essence of human life and human demeanor. But, and this I ask as sincerely as I possibly can, what is the difference between these writers, who not only admit the futility of language and their writing, and the others who insist on telling a good story? I have read Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, John Saul (really rotten writing, but the ideas weren't too bad), John Case, John Grisham, Amelie Nothomb, Roger Zelazny etc. and at least they do something worth while, whereas the so-called modernist and postmodernist writers only manage to become increasingly annoying in their search to destroy language. I often find myself asking: why the hell should I care about Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his spouse ALP? Joyce had already proven his main theory that language is inadequate in Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is pushing it. I've read countless books on the Wake, read it almost twice, understood almost half - but the more I struggled with it it occured to me that whatever it had to say meant absolutely nothing to me.

. . .

This is my recent problem: the death of art, at least in my eyes. There is nothing divine about pure art more than there is about pop art or the human soul itself, for that matter. I agree that language is but a virus, that it's inadequate for expressing everyday reality, yet still I can't bear it being said by every postmodern author over and over again.
Welcome to the forum, Vetruvius, interesting ideas.
Though I consider myself no nihilist (a fan, but I feel a bit more of an absurdist), and I say this even as a fan of the more "snobby" literature, the differentiation and intended disparaties between "pure" literature and "pop" literature can sound like quite a joke, the invented superiority and implied values of humanmade things, when, in fact, many of these stereotypes end up merely assumed. Just like how some car-producing companies make better vehicles than others, the declared "worse" vehicle may have at least a few features more usefull to someone; regardless, this does not affect the commercialization as to which seem the "better" vehicle in the public eye. Certainly Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon, and everyone else you noted wrote for a more select audience (even though Faulkner, especially, rose to great fame in all public, winning the Nobel Prize for literature) than King, Grisham, and Case, and the intention of the reader may affect this obviously-made bias - whether s/he desires to read for less-cerebral enjoyment as opposed to something mimicking study.
On this subject, Nietzsche, perhaps the most prominent nihilistic philosopher, deeply described the differences between knowledge and perception. Can we know for sure that James Joyce objectively seems the superior literary writer over Stephen King? No, but it seems within the common perception that Joyce had more ability than King; though I agree with this common interpretation and blunt comparison, we and generations before us have created this perception when, as no one can contest, art proves all humanmade, something created with faults, inevitable biases, and some sort of inherent ugliness, from which someone seems bound to feel offended or unsettled.
I would never go far enough to call this nihilism the "death of art," which you never said, regardless, but if it does prove the death of art, or even the manifestation of the death of art, especially as a thing contigent upon human existence, art never lived. Even if art could thrive indepedent of human existence, something absurd to imagine, it seemed doomed to death, based upon nihilism, upon its invention, since its values appear connived.

P.S. : Please excuse any language mistakes, for English is not my first language. Thank you.
On the contrary, I thought your English excellent. :)