From Michelangelo’s Ceiling to Duchamp’s Urinal A talk about the decline of Westem Culture given by the British artist Sandor Szenassy, at the New York Academy of Art, Thursday 4 April 20021. Introduction: We stand on the shoulders of history. We have more knowledge to sustain us, more examples to guide us than any preceding ‘generation of artists. ‘We should therefore be capable of making the greatest art of all time. Instead we are less than the past. We are diminished. Our art, for the most part, goes through the motions — its greatest achievement to somehow resemble what modern art is supposed to look like. Like the arid landscape of our urban society, it is bleached out of feeling and humanity. Ithas lost its heart. The problem is not to do with absence of talent or technique. Technique can always follow where rigor leads. The problem is a loss of nerve ~ a failure of character. In both society and art, the strong and the natural is being strangled by the weak the syntheti We sleepwalk. Our society too closely resembles that described within the pages of novels like Brave ‘New World. Art, instead of resisting or supplying some breaking force, is content to tamely coexist. It identifies too casually with the dominant tendencies informing the values of contemporary society. Part of the problem is the continuing over investment by artists in the idea of the avant-garde at a time when the avant-garde has largely become the official voice of the art establishment. In an open society, virtually without censorship, art has no cnemy other than itself. ‘What I want to do is to attempt to construct a brief and simple historical framework by which to explain contemporary art’s failure and at the same time to pinpoint what it ‘would take to make art what it could be.2. The Power of the The 20th century is often referred to as the “Century of the People” in the sense that for the first time, all over the world, the people began to insist upon having a voice. This was made possible by a revolution in mass communication technologies, the apparatus of which we generically refer to as the media. This explosion in the availability of books, newspapers, cinema, radio, magazines, and more recently the intemet, helped ‘open peoples’ eyes to how they might live differently and be governed differently. But this same apparatus could also be turned against the people, And it was. The 20" century will always be associated, particularly the first fifty years, with the power of the lie, the untruth, to deceive and to destroy. Nazism and Stalinism were ideological revolutions imposed upon the people, from above, and rigidly maintained by the exercise of ruthless control over the media of the day, which systematically promoted the lie, by suppressing the truth. Truth is to the lie as broad daylight to the vampire. As injurious as the lie’s malevolence, is its relentless suppression of independent thought. Stalin had millions of his fellow citizens murdered cn the suspicion that they might harbor the capacity to think independently of the regime, ‘Common to these tyrannies was a pseudo-Darwinism that implied that their ideological concepts were more in tune with history, more advanced, more highly evolved than preceding ideas about how people should live, and, therefore, fitter to survive. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The lie is by nature ugly, since it cannot bear to coexist with the truth, The art of the modem tyrant, equipped with all the organs of a state controlled media, is to make the lie seem beautiful and harmonious, a natural extension of human desire. Mussolini and Hitler were deeply aware that their ability to manipulate the mood of the masses was as the sculptor modeling clay. In fact Hitler likened his world historical role to that of the politician of the future, the politician as artist and was fond of ridiculing Himmler, his deputy, as being too inartistic to rule. Once the complete suppression of truth is achieved, the power of the lie is almost unimaginable. To root out Nazism took the combined military and economic resources of effectively three continents — the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire, effectively bankrupting the latter and all but destroying Europe. What was left of Europe was dismembered, the Eastern half tossed to Stalin. Because Germany is culturally and geographically at the heart of Europe, there was a sense in which its disgrace tamished the achievement of European culture. As the Iron Curtain descended, leadership of the Free World passed to the United States. Stalinism survived for nearly another fifty years before finally being overturned in 1990 as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union ~ if indeed it has finally been laid to rest.