Art was a big part of my life before I started this blog. It was China of that time, before 9/11/01. I got away from it and it was a deep immersion. I studied the whole of art history from early Tang to the art of today. I am embarrassed to say that I came to think of art as most people, as silly. And there is some silly art. Expensive art. I was involved in the art scene in Miami for a few years. I came to think of it as conspicuous consumption on other things. I overheard a middle-aged man who I recognized as deliberately dressed down at Art Basel talking on the phone impressively telling his auditor that there were some million dollar works of art at the show. It turned me off, the whole scene, and I drifted away from art generally.
But today I had a reminder of why I once thought art was the most profound aspect of human creation. This reminder came in an unlikely tribune, the Decadent Movement of the late 19th century. This is just from the Wikipedia entry:
The Decadent movement...followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality...The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general skepticism, delight in perversion and employment of crude humor and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the natural world.
I thought of Don McLean's line in Vincent, "Now I understand what you tried to say to me. And how you suffered for your sanity." "Self-disgust, sickness at the world, skepticism, belief in creativity over logic and the natural world." That corresponded with the Gilded Age, the millionaires, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the Johnstown Flood. Beaudelaire and Gautier were proud to be Decadents.The skepticism and disgust was soon to bear Les Fleurs du Mal in 1914 when the world of logic gave way to the worst catastrophe in Europe since the Dark Ages. We entered a new dark age that lasted through the first half of the 20th century and was accurately foreseen by the Decadents.
Decadence, on the other hand, sees no path to higher truth in words and images. Instead, books, poetry, and art itself as the creators of valid new worlds...
Both groups [Decadents and Symbolists] are disillusioned with the meaning and truth offered by the natural world, rational thought, and ordinary society.
...Decadence says there is no oblique approach to ultimate truth, because there is no secret, mystical truth. They despise the very idea of searching for such a thing. If there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment. The heroes of Decadent novels, for instance, have the unquenchable accumulation of luxuries and pleasure, often exotic, as their goal, would have space in its search for thrills for even the gory and the shocking.[3]
Truth took repeated body blows in the 20th century, well deserved. It started earlier than that with the Decadents.
"They did not listen they did not know how. Perhaps they never will!"
But today I had a reminder of why I once thought art was the most profound aspect of human creation. This reminder came in an unlikely tribune, the Decadent Movement of the late 19th century. This is just from the Wikipedia entry:
The Decadent movement...followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality...The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general skepticism, delight in perversion and employment of crude humor and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the natural world.
I thought of Don McLean's line in Vincent, "Now I understand what you tried to say to me. And how you suffered for your sanity." "Self-disgust, sickness at the world, skepticism, belief in creativity over logic and the natural world." That corresponded with the Gilded Age, the millionaires, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the Johnstown Flood. Beaudelaire and Gautier were proud to be Decadents.The skepticism and disgust was soon to bear Les Fleurs du Mal in 1914 when the world of logic gave way to the worst catastrophe in Europe since the Dark Ages. We entered a new dark age that lasted through the first half of the 20th century and was accurately foreseen by the Decadents.
Decadence, on the other hand, sees no path to higher truth in words and images. Instead, books, poetry, and art itself as the creators of valid new worlds...
Both groups [Decadents and Symbolists] are disillusioned with the meaning and truth offered by the natural world, rational thought, and ordinary society.
...Decadence says there is no oblique approach to ultimate truth, because there is no secret, mystical truth. They despise the very idea of searching for such a thing. If there is truth of value, it is purely in the sensual experience of the moment. The heroes of Decadent novels, for instance, have the unquenchable accumulation of luxuries and pleasure, often exotic, as their goal, would have space in its search for thrills for even the gory and the shocking.[3]
Truth took repeated body blows in the 20th century, well deserved. It started earlier than that with the Decadents.
On Art
Decadence...is an accumulation of signs or descriptions acting as detailed catalogs of human material riches as well as artifice.[25] It was Oscar Wilde who perhaps lay this out most clearly in The Decay of Lying with the suggestion of three doctrines on art, here excerpted into a list:
"Art never expresses anything but itself."
"All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals."
"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life"
After which, he suggested a...search for shadow truth: "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."[30]
"Art never expresses anything but itself": Art for art's sake. Don't ask me what my painting means. It just is. Decadence art theory presaged Art for art's sake by more than fifty years.
Wikipedia lists the major figures under categories.
Writers
French
Charles Baudelaire
Remy de Gourmont
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Jean Lorrain
Octave Mirbeau
Robert de Montesquiou
Rachilde
Arthur Rimbaud
Frederick Rolfe
Marcel Schwob
Jane de La Vaudère
Paul Verlaine
Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Renee Vivien
British
- Aubrey Beardsley
- Max Beerbohm
- Richard Francis Burton
- Algernon Charles Swinburne
- et al, just the ones I recognize.
Irish
Italian
Artists[edit]
French
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Austrian
Belgian
