I wonder if they grasp what Art is. Certainly its not self-loathing. Art is a question put to being itself. The first question. It doesn’t expect an answer, is blind to an answer. That is the purview of Religion which is the first fractalisation of Art as a modality of sentient life. Religion acknowledges Art’s question and claims possession of the answer which it posits in an absolute other. This parsing of the truth from the whole of being is failure. But I digress.
What gets my attention is the assertion at the link that performance art mistakes pain for meaning. I’m thinking if it mistakes pain for meaning then it is a form of self-loathing, which expresses some deep seated guilt, which is an off-shoot of fear. Well, fear is a mode of idea which in turn is a mode of thought. Thought is a mode of consciousness, which is a mode of being. And, Being Is, or, The Real Is.
The self-loathing subjects are far from – many stages deep – into the descending levels of these modalities of The Real. They Own – are bound up in Having – not in Being. You can see it in their decidedly care worn faces.
Yes, even a pile of excrement might in a certain light have a bit of shine to it. But that doesn’t make it beautiful. It just makes it a participant of beauty of the very lowest order.
It used to be that the cream rose to the top. Nowadays its the opposite and the piece in question puts that on full display. A shiny thing gets your attention but if it has to give you a jolting shock to do so then its no more than the shine on the excreta.
There is a recurring theme in our culture. I’ve thought for a long time that its rooted in Christianity, and Islam too, and farther back in ancient Bronze age belief, this discarnate longing, the Daemonic in nature, an insatiable desire, also known as Don Juanism. The Religiously posited absolute other is nothing but an expression of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology. Perfection is “above”, “beyond” the ken of fallen man. The source of guilt is man’s station, below the perfection of the Heavens – his estrangement; the parsing of Truth from the whole of Being, Reality, and fixing it in the “Heavens”. Guilt is the source of fear, self-loathing, a “sickness unto death”. The infinite regress of dystopian dreams in which we are embedded is nothing but a fractalisation of that old Aristotle model of The Real. If nothing else we are eternally bound to this wheel whose spokes we hug and kiss, truly, a sickness unto death.