Notes from a randomly selected book. 1.

Francis Bacon - Study from a human body (1949)

From Jacques Barzun’s ‘Art in The Vacuum of Belief’ in The Use and Abuse of Art (1973), about the status of contemporary art:

Art is largely devoted to show the contemptibilty of the human animal or, by pointedly neglecting him, his irrelevance and superfluity.

Nor is this repudiation directed at the single specimen or type. Art fights just as relentlessly against the large gropus, classes, masses, nations and their institutions.

…

As Vladimir Nabokov, at the launching of a new book, said to a reporter: ‘I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine’. This hardly improvised verdict on himself can cause no surprise; we acquiesce in the artist’s boasting of madness and lucidity together.

But more important in the paradox is the fear behind the pose, the fear of being caught in a belief. Any degree of self-acceptnace would be an acknowledgement of the power of life, with all the risks involved. … This shuffling stance is not new, and judging from its frequence among our aristoi, not easily avoidable. It marks the supreme degree of self-consciousness, which has become the ruling passion: the mind automatically rejects anything that might imply confidence, much less self-confidence. Now confidence is a word built on the root meaning faith; absence of faith, its studied rejection, is the warrant for my calling our peculiar situation a vacuum of belief. It differs radically from the old sorrow at the loss of a common underlying belief; it is not the distress if facing a chaos of warring beliefs; it is not a painful skepticism about a remnant of strong beliefs; it is the inbred avoidance od the risks inherent in any belief; it is a flight from the sensation of belief – and therefore from life itself.

I don’t know whether I agree or not with this. Surely, it is a very broad claim, and I am deliberately suspicious of any broad claim. Though, it resonates in me.