02.23.12
Art and decline issue
The Pernicious Talk of Decline In the Arts
My problem with theories of decline is that they suggest historical inevitability—and are therefore an affront to liberal experience. In his great essay, “Historical Inevitability,” Isaiah Berlin worried about a belief in “the occult presence of vast impersonal entities … which we have but little power to control or deflect.” I think that any serious discussion of the decline of the arts risks this kind of impersonality, in that it denies—or at least seriously endangers—the individual’s ability to change the situation. The arts, which are so inextricably involved with the possibilities of the individual intelligence and the individual imagination, are certainly one of the clearest demonstrations we have of the folly of historical determinism. And it is the critic’s duty, no matter how overwhelmingly bad the news may be, to refuse to reduce art to a deterministic pattern.
This is important, and if we seem at time to preach the decline of art it is for another reason: the distance from the creative moment of the early modern. The great moments of art tend to cluster in a way made clear by the historical study of eonic effect. The result outside of those periods is not so much decline as ‘steady state’ at a lesser state of creativity.