I was getting drunk with a painter recently and, when the topic of this site came up, they asked me: how do you do this to yourself week after week? What is wrong with you? Most of the work in this city is barely even mediocre at best. How can you justify writing about it?
Cruel questions? Perhaps. It is difficult to justify writing about a lot of it. A great deal of it, maybe even all of it, is mediocre. This is not a matter of taste. Most of it is ontologically mediocre.
As a historian, mediocrity is something that I take an interest in. Human history, like most history, is merely a minor chapter in the long evolution of death. This chapter could be written as comedy, tragedy, or some hybrid. In the end, it likely is not a narrative at all, just a digression. Human beings are not even protagonists in this. The most generous thing you can say about them is that they are tools.
Most historians are bad historians because they do not have much of a sense of humour and because they imagine the world as a narrative of subjects. And most historians make the mistake of failing to recognize -- or take to its logical conclusion -- that human history is almost entirely motorized by mediocrity, idiocy, delusion, and habit. Certain strands of proto-cultural history at least inexplicitly understood this, although their descendants, clinging to fantasies of community and reservoirs of meaning in the second nature of the world, subsequently drove history writing (as well as anthropology, ethnology, etc.) in directions of unprecedented idiocy.
What is mediocrity? The following is a speculation based partially on some loose riffing off of Paul Fleming’s gracefully written exposition of the term in Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2008). This is not just some vague art theoretical issue either. The triumph of the mediocre as the essence of Contemporary Art was at the heart of two accounts of the city’s art history provided by two of its leading educators (see my commentaries here and here).
There is, and I will put the argument as crudely as I can, a notion of art derived from Hegel and some of his fellow travellers, an idea that the history of art is the separation of the poetic from the prosaic or banal. What defines art is its opposition to the mediocre. Art’s history has been the conflict between the bid for its sovereignty and its becoming engulfed in the everyday. The historical banality that purportedly conditions art tends to overwhelm the bid to transcend this. After the collapse of the age of heroes (mythology and the Classical) and the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Spirit expressed in Art gets stuck in the prosaic world of the mediocre. To the extent that art survives, it is either in making the mediocre poetic (something found in surrealism and certain strains of Pop) or in becoming art defined as the problem of defining art (Conceptual Art).
One could make a strong argument that both of these final directions ran aground fairly fast and became entirely banal, that their “transcendence” went more in the direction of pushing the banal to the obnoxiously banal. It could also be argued that the age of mythology was only followed by another age of mythology and more severe forms of mystification. This is what Art Pompier was in the nineteenth century and what its contemporary descendant is as well. Far from the world being rationally disenchanted, it has only become more delirious. The “prosaic” or everyday world, rather than becoming more grounded in the “reality” of “utility” has become even less rooted in any form of realistic perception. Within this context, the myth of “experience” -- that ultimate mystification of the historical -- has been accompanied by the spiritual myth of “culture” and the “socio-cultural subject” (or identity).
The arts have played an active role in this and this historical process has been inscribed into it on nearly every level. The visual or plastic arts traditionally required far more specialization and skill than something like literature. The rise of mass literacy clearly depleted the general artistic value of writing (and thinking), something that has accelerated in an extreme way over the past fifty years. In the plastic and visual arts, this trend has been followed with shifts in technology which have allowed significant de-skilling and de-specialization (or “interdisciplinarity”) -- both of which have been institutionalized by Contemporary Art as its norms -- and which have combined a lack of plastic rigour with an increased visual illiteracy. If there is a consistent attempt to mask this by “conceptual” discourse (largely through the appeal to generic cultural meta-narratives), current academic art still tends to remain a mediocre idiocy.
One of the most convincing general arguments you can make about Contemporary Art’s development in the 1960s, 70s, and onward, was that it was a drive to becoming mediocre. This is not to suggest that what preceded was not also mediocre, but it was not sanctimoniously mediocre in quite the same way. This involved both a denigration of genial art, an insistence on the anthropological and institutional definition of art, its “democratization,” and the stress on it as a form of utilitarian knowledge production, a consumer spectacle where “experience” was prioritized, and as a welfare system for artists.
Mediocrity is defined by its averageness, its midness to use a current term. You can have mid looks, be a mid lawyer, or an average student, but to certain schools of aesthetic theory, the idea that you can be mediocre and an artist (which is not identical to a craftsperson, etc.) is anathema. Most of what any “artist” makes probably does not amount to art, but it might be interesting, usually for how it fails to be aesthetically good. The quality of art is a circle where abject failure and transcendent success sit side by side; everything else is worse than nothing and that is mostly what there is. None of this has much to do with the audience, which tends to be even more mediocre than the works they encounter. As Barthes put it, good readers are even more uncommon than good writers. This is usually why “art” that is accepted by the art “community” is probably just mediocrity of the worst kind, why being approved by your “peers” is, as Thomas Bernhard once put it, identical to having people piss in your face. It is also why what tends to be termed “culture” (in its anthropological sense) is probably the lousiest garbage in the world and explains why it is the centre of both liberal and conservative morality.
One strain of Classical post-Aristotelian aesthetics/ethics had lionized mediocrity as the golden middle. Good art was thought to follow canonical rules and imitation was a means to maintain a tradition. This was not understood as fixed but as living and adapting. Mediocrity is a contingency; the golden mean is the best contingency. But Classical aesthetics also had a largely antithetical concept of mediocrity in which it denoted not the best of idiosyncrasy but the most middling of the average. The mediocre was definitely not the best; its value was it was tolerable. The mediocre was a middling success, it had mass appeal or was “democratic,” which meant that it relied on the easy rhetorical manipulation of average or less-than-average intelligence. It was political rhetoric, not fine art (which was not to say that art did not have an extra-aesthetic ethico-political aspect).
With Kant’s theory of aesthetics, art becomes the province of genius. Not the product of rules (craft) or subject to the norms of utility or ethics, art is the autonomous outpouring of a “nature” for which the artist is only a conduit. Art, as the exemplary (which offers a rule of judgment) and original, is the ultimate state of exception or refusal of the mediocre. It has no rules; art is void of concept. Genius is given but taste is learned and a corrective on excess. Without taste, the genius tends to create an art that could never have an audience. When not firmly bridled, the genial imagination risks the total ruination of human meaning. Genius inspires genius, it does not imitate. But the genius has no end of apes. If taste (feeling rather than concept) disciplines genius, it is because taste relies on the possibility of universal sense. This communal sense (statistical average) carries the problem of readily being conflated with the vulgar, tainting the whole problem of taste with general ambivalence. Such a situation also clearly highlights a difference between art and the aesthetic.
Kleist once famously wrote that, “It requires more genius to appreciate a mediocre work of art than an excellent one.” By this, he meant that one’s critical faculties had to be more dexterous and discerning. While it takes nothing away from the genius of Shakespeare to recognize that it requires little intelligence to appreciate it as art (that is where its genius is), it requires a strong critic to wring much out of some piece of trash that probably means nearly nothing substantial (like a Rona flyer or a show at the Belgo). The “genius” of such a critic (one should add, an aesthetic “genius” rather than an artistic one) comes out through their skill at discursively redeeming the mediocre by chiselling out the good within it. In this, the critic becomes a kind of sculptor, hewing out the exceptional from what is mostly a failure. If genial art appeals to the universal, it requires little work from the viewer. But mediocre art requires far more activity to wrench out the communal sense that can lead to the universal and so more accurately indexes the path to it, a path that does not simply follow concept-less feeling, but necessitates the manufacturing of concepts for its journey. Mediocrity is the perfect means for an expansive media-based and educational asset stripping of art to fuel the performances of increasingly mediocre varieties of discursivity.
If, in Kant, the genius of art posed a radical threat to human meaning that had to be disciplined or equalized by taste, in Kleist we see the shift to a very different pole. The goalless inutility of art is turned into a game that requires not only the skill of the artist but of the perceiver of art. From it, rather than standing agog at the inhuman before them and indifferent to their conceptualization, for the gentrifiers and the mediocre, art and aesthetics become about the pathos of domestication (this coincided with the advancing of the novel, the increasing domination of narrative prose, and the general mediocratization of art). Rather than art being an autonomous and ethically indifferent matter, it becomes a tool to be used in the edification of the public and the forging of “social” bonds through the delirious but instrumentalized exploitation of “compassion.”
With the rise of the bourgeoisie, and equally, the rise of socialist ideology, the geniality of art comes increasingly under attack and the reduction of the world to the lowest common denominator becomes the norm. As high art becomes viewed as something essentially sterile and bound from the outset to be placed in the museum, mediocre or low art becomes an art of archiving banality. Such a museification/archiving of the world was overtly central to the advocacy for state-sponsored art in Canada in the 1960s and lives on in its most obnoxiously mediocre form in the commonplace “neoliberal aesthetics” that can be encountered on a weekly basis. In the age of the mediocre, high and low are both institutionalized. Idealism divorces art from the life of the everyday while the artistic “fidelity” to the everyday likewise is merely a way of institutionalizing it. It is the latter more than anything that becomes the most redemptive, most severely and fanatically religious art the world has ever known as it raises the banal to the level of the exceptional. This “realism,” often of a volkisch variety, helps to usher in the anthropological concept of art.
This was part of the move to what I have discussed as the redemptive model of art, which remains the hegemonic one to this day. In Kuspit this was split between what he saw as a tradition of art’s redemption of the irremediably particular and the anti-art tradition of art as the remediation of social identities. If the former relied on a painful negativity that opened the wound between experience and the work of art in a bid for new psychic growth, the latter relied on what amounted to an aesthetic lobotomy (or what he termed the moronization of identification). This was contrasted with the diremptive theory of art, which stressed that art vitiates the representational epistemology that makes social mediation sensible.
I would argue that the bifurcation between autonomous and genial art and utilitarian mediocrity tends to accord too much epistemic credibility to the alleged realm of the everyday. It needs to be stressed that the relation is a unilateral one. There is no “socio-cultural” world without art; the alleged referent that is conjured by this mystical dyad is the effect of an aesthetic illusion, not some innocent given datum in the world. It is art that precedes and conditions the possibility of this illusion and it is as an aesthetically induced delusion that it persists. This is why even art that employs a rhetoric of the documentary (utilitarian) for the redemption of the mediocrity of the subject, ends up being an ironic demonstration of its non-referentiality.
Mediocrity may be just another term for psychosis without talent that obeys the dictates of good taste. People tend to have a romantic or melodramatic idea of insanity. However, if you have dealt with the insane (those who cannot learn societal rules), they are consistently among the most mediocre and tedious genre of humanity you will ever meet. There is good reason that the various recognizable sub-genres of “Outsider Art” manage to be as predictable and uninteresting as any other. Even so, the doodlings of the average schizo still likely have more going for them than the “practice” of the average Concordia or UQAM graduate whose mediocrity has been compounded by the inherent mediocrity of education (the learning of societal rules). There is a world of difference between psychotic geniuses and psychotic morons.
