Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 71

THE EMBODIED ACT

This is another way of speaking of a counterfeit originality. When
an artist fails to submit to that which is original, he necessarily
falls into the trap of novelty, which ultimately represents a misuse
of freedom in service of a pseudo-art.
We Americans are especially tempted by this false path. Here's
what I mean: Americans (and Tocqueville observed this almost
two centuries ago) are lovers of equality, of immanence, and of
the future. When an affection for equality runs beyond its proper
sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between
the beautiful and the ugly, between the true and the false,
between the good and the vile. In other words, it becomes difficult to distinguish between art and pseudo-art. The American
taste for immanence makes an explicit striving for transcendence
an unlikely endeavor, and art without a transcendent element
is simply a counterfeit. Finally, an undue affection for the future
undermines the possibility of receiving the truth, embodied in
tradition, from the past, from that original utterance of God. The
result of these false assumptions is a confused notion of freedom
as it relates to the essence of art. A proper understanding of
freedom is the exercise of creativity toward embodying reality in
terms of originality. Thus, true art is freedom rightly expressed.
An improper understanding of freedom is autonomous expression without concern for (or even hostility toward) the original,
which is really another way of defining novelty.
Novelty is pseudo-art rooted in a pseudo-freedom that ultimately undoes itself. Consider in this light current conceptions of
sexuality, and we can better grasp the point by analogy. Freedom
in sexuality is the freedom to conform to that which is original.
Pseudo-freedom ignores or denigrates that which is original
and strives toward autonomy, which is to say, toward novelty.
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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