WHY NORMAL PEOPLE DESPISE THE FAUX-SOPHISTICATES.

Astral Codex reviews, in his inimitably elaborate style, Tom Wolfe's (the latter-day cultural critic, not the ferroequinologically-minded novelist) From Bauhaus to Our House.  It's too long to quote from at any length: his send-up of trendy academic methods, though, is worth a few observations.

The Artist was a genius, brimming with bold new ideas that the common people could never understand! The Artist defied the norms of bourgeois society! The Artist was part of some official collective with their own compound in a trendy part of the city! The compound produced manifestos explaining why their vision of Art was better than everyone else’s!

This romantic vision was so powerful that you could become a well-regarded artistic movement just by doing the collective, the compound, and the manifesto especially well. Whether or not you produced art was of secondary importance - the sort of question that a bourgeois who didn’t understand your true genius would ask.

At the same time, Europe’s intelligentsia was falling in love with socialism. There was an inevitable wave of new socialist art compounds, each writing a manifesto explaining why their new artistic movement was the one that truly threw off the shackles of capitalism and represented the proletariat.

Preeminent among these was Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919. Their big idea was “starting from zero” - since all previous art had been contaminated by capitalism, we needed a hard reset where people started by (eg) contemplating what color and shape really were, then gradually building a new socialist art from the ground up. This new art must eschew ornamentation, associated as it was with kings and nobles who had money to spare on gold trim or sculpted curlicues. Real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build. If this sounds harsh, remember that this was right after World War I, the old order stood infinitely discredited, and starting from zero must have seemed pretty appealing.

Epistemically closed hothouses are always like that. The role of some self-despising rich guy making it all possible generally gets hidden away, and the history of starting from zero tends to develop amnesia where Thermidor and Brumaire are concerned.  And so it will be when the culture-studies types turn on each other.

Imagine for a moment the 2024 equivalent of Bauhaus. Someone has just started the woke artists’ collective, claiming to perfectly encapsulate all the principles of wokeism and be the wokest people around. What happens next? Obviously every other group of woke people accuse them of being racist, and they have bloody internecine feuds for the next twenty years, right?

Right. No sooner had Bauhaus developed their new socialist architecture designed to utterly remove all traces of bourgeois influence from design forever, then all the other socialist artists said: “I dunno, seems kind of bourgeois”.

Look no further back in time than the Duke English department, circa the beginning of this century.

The barbarians, though, will win in the end.

The concept of “the experts are a corrupt priesthood and you can safely ignore them” hadn’t really entered mass liberal consciousness. The idea that hard scientists were real experts but everyone else was just kind of faking it was decades in the future - and the Modernists were nothing if not good at faking the mantle of science and reason. This was mostly psychological - but also partly structural. There was no Internet. If you thought modern architecture was ugly, but all the experts said it was beautiful, there was no Twitter where you could shout your opinion under the cloak of anonymity. Every household got the same few TV channels and the same few magazines, and their architecture sections were all written by professionals who were singing the new style’s praises. So what are you going to do? Go to a cool party and shout “I think the style that all the experts say is the sign of an uneducated philistine is actually better”? Would you really?

Yes.  Next question?

And bet on emergence.

Why should our entire built environment be optimized to amuse a sliver of one percent of the population, even granting that it amuses them very effectively? People mock kitsch art as “the kind of picture you’d put up at the dentist’s office”. But it serves this purpose fine. People don’t want to go to the dentist’s office and see a picture of the Virgin Mary in a vat of urine. You should keep the avant-garde stuff for the museums and let ordinary people living their ordinary life see normal pretty things.

So I think it’s fine to hate modern architecture. If someone else says it reinvents the idea of light, just tell them that’s really cool for the 1% of the population who notice it, but that the rest of the world deserves buildings they don’t hate.

Per corollary, why should our popular culture be optimized to please a sliver of one percent of the population?  Feel free to add to the list of other things ruined by the vanguard.