Mon Beauf, Michel
I have been introduced to Michel Houellebecq upon reading his book Interventions 2020 (Polity 2022). I have come to certain conclusions of a political nature as a result. Both left and right agree democracy is the best form of government. The difference is, a conservative French critic of culture is a loyal citizen with aristocratic tastes. The leftist complement is a loyal citizen with plebeian tastes.
The left doesn't consider culture worth dying for. Pop culture is tolerated by the left. It is a distraction from the social agenda. Since anything aristocratic (under the Republic) is officially disdained, conservative critics must be content deriding what is tolerated. What is tolerated is bourgeois Pop culture.
The right doesn't oppose democratic culture because it is the right of every citizen. The right opposes the cheapening of culture by democracy. Price is the measure of everything. If it isn't in a museum it is, by default, for sale. Artists are as much at fault as acquirers. They don't create so much as pander.
Democracy makes art a mark of achievement. The irony of the situation is that putting a price on art is the very thing that cheapens it. Price supplants appreciation in art. Its value becomes its significance.
Everyone can't own a unique work of art. Desire is unsatisfied on a mass scale. The body politic seizes on this token of gratification, now that. A citizen may not have the price of a handbag, but she doesn't publish a critical review of the handbag, therefore. If she can afford to purchase it, she might post a "review." The art critic reviews what he cannot have.
What is this “significance” of which I speak? Michel Houellebecq said it best when he cites the sexification of culture (my neologism.) Natural selection is diverted in popular culture from natural satisfaction to unnatural compensation. Art is a Totem of status. Probing social critics call it the fetish-ization of culture. Happiness is impossible without ownership.
That's my synopsis. Critics of culture will persist, like Diogenes searching for an honest man, in search of the exception amid the commonplace. My objection to the present state of things is that if the strivings of natural selection are frustrated the economics of expenditure steps in.
What is lacking is compassion for the human condition. Love is both venal and compassionate. The two aspects of love cannot be separated. Pity is never erotic, as eroticism is never forgiving. The object of pity can't be at once the object of desire. The object of desire longs to be possessed.
I am merely suggesting that the diversion of lust doesn't have to lead inevitably to materialism. I am acutely aware that my paintings of people on the skids will never sell. I have the satisfaction of painting my paintings. What sustains my efforts is the idealistic notion that the significance of my paintings is other than materialist.