A critique of tendencies in contemporary art toward materialism and nihilism. The author is a language teacher and social-justice militant in Montreal

Hyper-subjectivism in Art : The Will to Self-Annihilation

by

Bruce Katz*

Bruce Katz teaches languages in Montreal. He is one of the founding members of Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) and a member of the CCCCH (Canadian Committee to Combat Crimes Against Humanity), an organisation devoted to the principle of putting an end to impunity. “ Hyper-subjectivism in Art “ was written in 1993 for the magazine, Cité Libre. The article has been translated from the original French.

What I affirm is that there is no culture
where there are no standards to which
our fellow-men can have recourse. There
is no culture where there are no principles
of legality to which to appeal. There is no
culture where there is no acceptance of
certain final intellectual positions to which
a dispute may be referred. There is no
culture where economic relations are not
subject to a regulating principle to protect
interests involved. There is no culture where
aesthetic controversy does not recognise the
necessity of justifying the work of art.

- José Ortega y Gasset
The Revolt of the Masses

Fyodor Doestoevsky once stated, almost in an off-hand way, that Beauty will save the world. Evidently inherent in Doestoevsky’s use of the word, Beauty is of a transcendent nature, cutting across regional and even national particularities to confirm itself in a universal though pluralistic cultural consensus. This is reflected in Goethe’s recognition of the similarities and universal themes of both Western and Oriental literature where transcendence, and hence cultural consensus rather than particularisms or cultural relativism, is the key. Ergo, art is not simply the expression of particular societies existing at particular times and influenced by particular technologies, but is the most profound expression of human existence. It is the attempt to give meaning to form and is the common bond which will necessarily link the cave-dweller to the most advanced technological societies of the future until time immemorial. No narrow historicism can defeat it.

/2
If it is true that art and beauty can be conceived of in such a way, this is only because a commonly-held hierarchy of values permits us to form the conceptual basis upon which meaning can be attached to form. When cultural relativism in art – the idea that any and all subjective expressions constitute “art