ART FROM THE COMPOST HEAP

"See what forest has arisen from the rot."  -- Susan Barba

The Roman Colosseum was designed for the most brutal entertainments. 

Ancient Romans were thrilled to see victims ripped to shreds by lions and tigers.  The more fortunate victims were permitted to fight back (damnatio ad bestias or "condemnation to beasts").  The less fortunate were left naked and defenseless to be devoured (obicĕre bestiis or "to throw to beasts").

Centuries later, stones from the blood soaked Colosseum were taken down, polished, and used to build the beautiful Basilica of St. Peter:

But the corkscrew had one more twist: in order to raise money to build the Basilica, the church sold forgiveness to sinners.  Martin Luther, in his Ninety-Five Theses, blasted the church for selling "indulgences" enabling sinners to buy their way into heaven. 

That's the way the world goes. Again and again, terrible things somehow morph into things pure and beautiful.

For centuries, sugarcane plantations were among the worst abusers of slave labor.  Artist James Gillray drew the mistreated slaves who were forced to cut and press sugarcane in deadly heat, then boil the crop in hellish furnaces (below left).  Many perished in the process. The result: delightfully sweet sugar. 

Commenters on this blog have decried the disintegration of our culture.  The fine arts have become puerile and decadent; standards have declined; the absence of boundaries has rendered us shapeless;  digital theft, appropriation art, auto-toning and plagiarism run rampant; the odor of postmodern nihilism pervades; economics create all the worst incentives.  

Alarmed voices demand: "once our creative muscles have atrophied, our cognitive functions have diminished, and our taste has been softened by subjectivity, how can we ever go back?  How can standards regain any authority once they've been trampled?  How can innocence, once lost, be recovered?"

No one can say for sure, but on the subject of hope I often turn to the great Walt Whitman who mused about the purity and renewal of common grass:

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day...

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
....
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

If there is to be a renewal in the arts, what form will it take? We can't just unlearn what we've learned.  We can't reverse course to Rembrandt or Howard Pyle.  All I can do is direct you-- once again-- to the wisdom of the ancients.  In 700 BC, Archilochus had already discovered that no outcome should be beyond expectations:

Henceforth nothing is certain:

one may expect everything,

and none among you should be astonished to see,

one day, the deer, preferring the sonorous tides of the sea to the land,

borrow from the dolphins their sea pasture,

while the latter plunge into the mountains.