ART's problem today is that it does not exist. Let us clarify: ART as a whole is nonexistent. Of course, we have so-called "literature," "visual arts," "music," "the media,"—but it is our thesis that we have no ART as such—no ART as a whole. One might pack into the lumber-room of the mind a thousand books and grasp some dusty aspect of one's self, the self of the author, the very self of the world—one might cry for characters, die of loneliness watching landscapes melt into the airy void of one's mind—one might slump into a gallery, experience a thousand disconnected images, endure an artist's semi-consistent style, find trash transformed into beauty and vice versa—and still be left scratching one's head, asking WHERE IS ART? All the genres of music, all the flowing and breaking of language, all the possible colors of the spectrum in shapes barely imaginable, even all the direct or indirect injunctions to care for one's fellow man—all these can be summed today and one would still be left with a nonexistent ART.
When the Greeks conceived their ART, they conceived it as an ART working through them, the Muses imbuing the uncollected rubble of what it meant to be with a cohesiveness of form and meaning that could be grasped immediately in connection with the living world of the gods. When the Christians of the Middle Ages beheld Jesus, two fingers thrust forward, inscribed into a mandorla, they saw in each of his figurations an expression symbolic of the divine—more than that, these figurations worked on those who behold them as real magic, fastening the viewer to the heavenly god in an uproar of emotion.
The ART of the early capitalist period was formed in reaction to this two-fold structuring of existence—a structuring of the world, and of the art which reflected that structure. The great feat of the artists of early capitalist period lay in the adaptation of the traditional symbolism of religious art to the mundane world of peasants, of merchant riches, of philosophical enlightenment. In time, even this ART melted away... at last freed from the grounding of truly metaphysical symbolism, artists began to experiment a priori, giving rise at last to the modernists whose accomplishments consisted in the very explosion of new forms; this art, nevertheless, was confined by its own avant-gardism: each new work demanded surplus shock and surprise, and this demand, increasingly, became impossible to satisfy.
Today an infinity of new forms present themselves to experimentation; this ever-rebirthing experimentation, however, has itself exhausted its power to surprise. Apathy slinks down the backs of too many artists because while an infinity of possibilities lie softly to them, the truth is that each possibility is as infinitesimally significant as the next.
Thus, ART at last has disappeared. ART itself has shattered into its component parts, each impotent in itself, each fragment casting its lot with the imperatives of the capitalist order, which demands ever increasing surplus, ever overpowering novelty, without regard for the artist nor he or she who attempts to apprehend the current "art" in its dispersed paucity. Contemporary "art," then, fits snugly into the space of the commodity—even that "art" which questions the commodity form never subverts, but only reacts to the vast empire of international capitalism, which calls into existence no opposite but more of itself, leaving no unexplored territory in which an artist might hide: for everything equally is exposed to the fantasizing eyes of day.
What, then, is there left to say?
A great deal, in fact.
To return to the ART of the Greeks, the medievals, and all ART which bursts forth from cultures whose metaphysics are secure: upon investigation, it is clear that the content of all metaphysics—and thus of all ART—is constructed. That is to say, no mystical power inheres directly in symbols, however ancient, recalcitrant, or secret; rather, the power of symbols in this age or any lies in shared understanding alone, in the collective acceptance of a world organization that allows for ART to contain in itself a cosmos in dialogue—such an ART reaches out and touches directly the soul, however it is conceived. This is the lost secret of culture—that a TOTAL ART is only possible given a shared, universal understanding of the mechanics of the world—or more properly, an understanding of the general understanding of the mechanics of the world—and only through this collective understanding, ART as a whole is made real, and can be understood in its individual forms.
Today, we have no spiritual metaphysics which holds together the world and our art. This is not because we have lost our faith in religion; rather, we have ceased to see culture itself as the source of metaphysics, a metaphysics, however, that rests on nothing real, but rather the very labor of human construction. We have ceased to recognize it, but it remains—it remains even as it is disguised under many names. Consider the fact that the contemporary Westerner can identify some two hundred logos, but just about five trees. Only a fool then would say we live in a fragmented, atomized world; our shared codes are so familiar to us—in the form of logos, advertisements, TV shows, internet memes—that they have disappeared entirely from sight and understanding. All the above we share, and it is these that make up our cultural metaphysics. One does not need a God for metaphysics to be real; it is clear now that the fundamental metaphysics which must undergird any TOTAL ART bears no necessary relation to the world as it exists, but rather only a relation to what is communicated about the world in the form of universal signs.
Pop Art is nothing but coaxing forth from the ground of our culture as it exists; it places a Coke bottle in a museum as a representative of the present ART, an object whose meaning, naturally, is immediately clear to all who consider it, both in terms of its capitalist significance, as well as its significance for the history of "art" in the museum. But our goal is not to till the fields of this infertile metaphysics, the furrows drawn as merely the reflex action of the economic system; rather, we wish to fortify the ground of our being here in the world with a new form of ART.
Advertising is nothing more than the contemporary Catholic Church. Learning from the example of the past, we must begin to offer to the minds of people everywhere the seeds of understanding so that, upon a glance at the ART of the future, they will see their very selves as part of the ART that grows in the world that breathes...
What must be done for ART, then, is not continue to scrape the barrel of this unsatisfying, accidental, yet extant metaphysics—rather, what we must do is recognize that all metaphysical grounding is constructed, and that the present project on which ART must embark is precisely the construction of a new metaphysics, a new shared understanding which will prop up and undergird literature, visual art, music, drama, etc. If we cannot escape the global dominion of capitalism—having no safe haven from which to attack—if we cannot even make a political revolution from within—we can only change what is ever-presently available to us: human nature itself. We must ready a new ART as metaphysics so that one no longer apprehends one picture or a single anecdote, but instead perceives immediately a vast interlocking system, which contains ART, us, and the world.
It is worth considering that the novel itself as a form—as all forms—had to be invented; that it took years of habituation to draw the category of fiction into being; that for a long time, fiction had to masquerade as fact to be accepted; that the same is true for all new forms of art—that all constructions must present themselves as already accepted facts, well before the facts are certain, in order that that one today is not left with only the tools of yesterday, but the ability to fashion the instruments of tomorrow.
The Soviets knew this—distracted by their failure, we have ignored their success: the creation of a secular metaphysical culture whose every manifestation—however banal—fit into a grand socialist ART—whose every panting, every novel, every pamphlet was both a work in itself, even as it was implicated in the mechanics of a cohesive ART
Marx writes that under communism our senses will be liberated; no longer will our many senses be reduced down to the single sense of having, possessing; rather, through our liberated senses, we will be able to connect directly with the object of apprehension, the object another's labor, drawing its meaning into ourselves even as we amplify the meaning of the object itself.
We argue that the special sense of which Marx spoke must take the form today of a shared sensibility concerning the metaphysical foundations of a new culture—yet to be seen—which we now christen: ART. The ART of which we speak is apprehended via the free sense, the sense conditioned not by the limitations of capital, but by the freely-working logic of the grander ART itself.
Lacan speaks of the big Other, that Other with which every communication is tied up, whether between me and myself, me and you, we and anything else. The Other is the unspoken, shared virtual foundation of our communication made real only by our collective acknowledgement of it. The Other defines the rules of engagement; it always listens; through us, it speaks. For us, the big Other is new ART of our creation.
Today, in the United States, revolution is a laughable, pathetic concept; even elsewhere, there are few attractive possibilities for meaningful action against the ever-pervasive, ever overpowering empire of international capitalism. There is no escape in a world whose only education consists in the directive to find a safe haven in the money game, where one can enjoy oneself, limited only so that one might enjoy as long as possible. Under these rules, there can be no development, only meaningless advancement along the same lines, repainted and dressed in fantastic colors. The solution represented by a loose conglomeration of separate loci of resistance is not appealing to us; our goal is not the fragmentation of human dedication or the preservation of the fool's gold of personal identity, but rather the shaping of resistance into a greater whole represented by the metaphysics of new ART, which takes as its material human nature itself. Our tool is neither political nor economic action, but the very sculpting of memory and understanding through the re-founding of a cultural metaphysics as a strange and encompassing ART.
But, what is this new ART? We understand now perhaps the why and the how, but what about the what?
We have an answer.
The content of our metaphysics will not be god, gods, the nation, the proletariat, the ever-renewing "benevolence" of modern capitalism—instead, the very content of our ART will be ART itself. ART—the impulse to experience—to create experience—to preserve—to solidify—to discover and relive—to unearth—to transcend—to organize from being into being itself—ART is as universal a signifier as any god. ART for those who find it becomes a need—a hunger—an way to collect together one's life. ART makes real the imaginary; as such it has the power to shatter the illusion of ideology, by confronting the imaginary on the plane of the imaginary with the real; to tie bodies together; to demonstrate that man is more than his material condition, but a being historically here. It is only through ART that history becomes history, time becomes time, human beings become not fleeting actors, but architects of history through the metaphysical erecting of a new culture. ART is the means. ART is engagement. And yet, ART has no entrance fee, no prerequisite; ART is the only free path to salvation. There is no catch, but the willing struggle to reconcile one's self with one's ART, the need to perfect, to make commensurable, the need to work in leisure. ART is the path through existence that leads one to new landmarks which imbue one's path with historical significance; ART's paths unite being to being; ART's paths cut through the atrium at the heart of existence where the possibilities of the human being are freed from the diminishment of an unexamined culture. Upon their liberation, all human beings will grow new eyes on the palms of their hands so that as they press the next work of art into the ART of our being-there, they will see with new eyes their very own creation, whose place is securely mounted on the altar of an ART whose construction is our own. Only in ART are we free; only in ART are we at home in the world, at home in our very exile from history; ART sits at the point when our history becomes ours to recall; ART gives our shaking hands their satiation, and through ART we can enact a sorcery of the beautiful and the terrible, the refined and the cast out; through ART, all movements becomes symbols whose power emanates from the Other—ART—whose many names are illuminated by its own emanations, seeming to burst from beyond the horizon, but whose light, nevertheless, shines forth from the eyes on our hands, leaving our bodies only to immortalize the names of our being here as the rays of its light streak with fire through the cold expanse of the void.
All this is to say: ART and ART alone is salvation; the center of the world is the CHURCH OF ART; we are its priests, its magistrates, its philosophers; we hang the name of our new Lord on the walls of our temple, where an eternal flame overflows with meaning, to which the name of our Lord adds its own glow. Our CHURCH OF ART which will reach out and clasp together the world in shared worship. But, just as past churches gave only the foundation to life, and left the living to others, so too do we make ART real only so that the rest of the world is free to collect together the experience of being here or there without irony, without shame, without pathetic sense, without fear of meaninglessness, with all the assurance of a sorcerer, of a magi at the height of his powers. Like churches in all ages, we will shamelessly use the tools of propaganda to impress in the collective memory the symbolism of our ART so that soon it forms a ground of culture strong enough that all future ART might rest upon a secure foundation, a foundation that recognizes that ART ITSELF is the most powerful means to change the world, that ART provides the life that is elsewhere, the life universally livable; ART alone removes one from the immobility of place, the paralysis of impoverishment, the banality of affluence—ART is all you want and more, as long as you convince the world it is so.
ART, therefore, is your trapdoor, your fire-escape, your getaway car. We provide all this for you, under the condition that you speak clearly the secret, so that all who hear it will remember it, all who remember it, realize it, all who realize it, internalize it, all who internalize speak it to the Other who hears all and who whispers in everyone's ear: THE SECRET IS ART.