‘Beauty,” Camille Paglia once wrote, “is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.” But as today’s high-culture world descends into the morass of identity politics, beauty itself has surrendered to the politically correct nostrums of that world’s masters, who in turn have distorted nature out of all symmetry and proportion, as Sohrab Ahmari capably (and depressingly) demonstrates here.
An Iranian-born, American-educated, London-based editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, Ahmari mostly covers politics, as well as its intersection (if you’ll pardon the term) with the arts. In this slim volume, he enlists recent trends in dance, film, theater, music, painting, performance art, and other media in his argument that contemporary high culture has eschewed both beauty and truth, the central artistic signifiers for millennia, in favor of “the art world’s one totem, its alpha and omega: identity politics.”
Today’s leading artists focus almost singlemindedly on issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Beauty and truth are not merely subservient to the “identitarian” agenda, they are excised from the conversation altogether. It’s not just that the New Philistines have weaponized art in the service of an aggressive social-engineering campaign; they’ve pulverized it.
Ahmari’s chilling examination of a recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at London’s Globe Theatre—in which jumbled roles, incompetent casting, and incoherent rewriting of Shakespeare’s comic masterpiece yielded catastrophe—reveals the fundamental poverty of the identitarians’ vision, such as it is. Tragically, Ahmari contends,
For similar reasons, the New Philistines wage war on the very notion that their work should be widely experienced by a broad audience transcending gender, ethnic, and religious categories. “When identitarians attack legibility,” Ahmari contends, using their buzzword for artistic accessibility, “they are also taking aim at the liberal-universal vision of culture. For democratic liberalism is indeed bound up with a universalist idea of culture.” Put differently, by resisting “legibility,” the identitarians deliberately undermine the central purpose of art, at least as understood throughout all known societies in recorded history: “wrestl[ing] with the timeless and transcendent things in the world.”
Why abjure universality? Because the timeless and the transcendent must yield to the exigencies of today—namely, to ensuring the ruination of traditional notions of artistic merit and, simultaneously, the elevation of the once-taboo.
But in fact, the identitarians have already won the cultural war so decisively that they can now openly demean someone as groundbreaking as Caitlyn Jenner—arguably the first mainstream transgender celebrity—as white, rich, and (gasp!) Republican. Yet the New Philistines still can’t take yes for an answer: “Acknowledging these facts,” Ahmari observes, “would be tantamount to an admission of defeat-in-success. It would mean having to produce art and art criticism that answer questions other than those posed by identity, resistance, heteronormativity, blah-blah.”
And here Ahmari, channeling Paglia, articulates the most pungent criticism of identitarianism in the arts: It’s lazy. Over and above all of its other faults—political radicalism, pseudo-Marxist agitation, economic illiteracy—the artistic left often seems to degenerate into an orgy of identity politics because it seeks to avoid the hard work of genuine cultural achievement, because it shirks the rigors of traditional artistic discipline—in short, because it’s easier to be loud than to be good.
Worse, it’s not as if today’s artists are incapable of creating beauty, truth, or both; they simply choose not to. “I pity these artists,” Ahmari writes of two filmmakers at a London festival whose inane dialogue obscures their evident creativity. “They obviously aren’t untalented. There are glimpses of beauty in their films.”
Ahmari explains why the broader body politic should worry itself over the art world’s inside-baseball trends: Because “ideas that begin with elite, avant-garde institutions invariably trickle down to popular culture, then go on to impact our daily lives.” Not only has identitarianism leached from the art world to the broader political world, it’s also begun to infect the so-called majority culture. In a disturbing trend all too evident in recent months,
This worrying development can trace its roots directly to the identitarian approach adopted by the left over the past few decades. But more fundamentally, that approach has deeply impoverished our culture. Perhaps Ahmari will follow this polemic with suggestions on how we might resist it.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel.
