It’s hard to define why certain things stick in our memory, and why other things do not. Beyond our control, various points or moments in our lives tend to cement themselves as ever present in our mental landscape. They sit there like a book tucked away on a bookshelf. Always there to be referred to or analyzed. For me, one such moment occurred during my first end of semester critique while in graduate school at Brooklyn College in 2011. The crowd evaluating my work at the time consisted mostly of professors and other professional artists that were invited to participate. The pointed discussion centered around two paintings that I had created amid the charged atmosphere in New York City (and the country) due to Occupy Wall Street, and the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet amid all the comments and verbal arrows lobbed by those in attendance, there was one that always stuck with me. Towards the end of the session, a guest artist in attendance suggested that I should be ‘more cynical’. I assumed this person meant the comment in a kind of overall metaphysical way. Basically it meant that some of the things I had said or tried to depict had ‘too much’ authentic feeling behind them. In his view, I was appealing too much to what some might call ‘The Good’.
At the time, I knew the comment was off the mark. Yet I had neither the chance amid the rapid fire discussion, nor the philosophical coherence to counter it. The person who made the comment was drawing from the well of postmodern cynicism and deconstruction. While I had just begun to draw from the well of metamodern feeling, though I didn’t realize it at the time. The paintings I presented were full of cynicism for the current political and economic moment. Yet they also contained elements of humanistic feeling and dignity. The call for me to be ‘more cynical’ was basically a rejection of the dualism or oscillation that resided in the work. It was a call to negate The Good, and embrace a simplistic, yet seductive cynicism. I guess the person making the comment didn’t realize that having come of age in the 1990’s, I had been there and done that already. It’s no coincidence that my generation invented the modern iteration of the mass school shooting. For bottomed out cynicism turned towards nihilism wasn’t a philosophical journey for many in my generation; it was the reality of how we lived in the world.
I suppose if I’m going to make a case for the importance of The Good, I should probably illustrate some philosophical examples first. In the view of the ‘give me more cynicism’ guy, The Good is probably seen as a kind of kitschy, naive, modernist formulation. In fact, he’d probably argue that The Good doesn’t even really exist; and he’d probably hand-wave away any appeal to authentic feeling - especially in art.
For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, The Good was the eternal, ‘ideal form’ that was the ultimate goal or aim of human life. The Good was the ‘sun’ that lit the way for humanity to see the truth about the world. It flowed through the virtues of individuals, all the way through to the nature and character of the state they inhabited. For Plato’s student, Aristotle, The Good was a more practical conception. Aristotle saw The Good as a kind of real world ‘happiness’, or ‘human flourishing’. This real world, ‘highest good’ for Aristotle consisted of human activity in accordance with reason and virtue. Whereas Plato saw The Good as something the human soul could reach through contemplation, Aristotle saw The Good as a practical matter that human beings might be able to achieve through cultivated activities and habits.
In Buddhist thought, The Good might be seen as an individual reaching a state of enlightenment, or contentment. A state where the individual has realized a state of detachment from their sense of self, and the spontaneous desires that enter their mind. Along with this state of enlightenment might come a sense of inner and outer compassion, that could lead to a broader good. That is to say, a group of individuals enlightened by a Buddhist sense of The Good would form a community that embodied The Good in itself. Interestingly, this idea of The Good being interlocked with the individual and their wider community, is embodied by the African philosophy, ‘Ubuntu’. For practitioners of Ubuntu, The Good is represented by the notion of ‘I am we’. The Good embodies the quality of the relationships between individuals and others. Things like compassion, cooperation, forgiveness, collective well being, and friendship could be seen as populating an Ubuntu conception of The Good.
These philosophical notions of The Good deal with the totality of human life. They address the largest questions about our short time on this planet. What is our purpose in life? How can our lives be meaningful and ‘happy’? How does The Good function in our metaphysical reality or collective existence? Clearly, the practice of philosophical inquiry goes hand in hand with discourse surrounding The Good. For unpacking and dissecting the true nature of The Good is a primary task of philosophy. In artistic mediums like literature, film, or music; The Good has always been a necessary subject. Stories or songs about human existence (fictional or not) must deal with The Good in some manner. Yet for visual art, like painting or sculpture, The Good isn’t a straightforward concept. It is neither a necessary subject of inquiry like in philosophy - nor is it an inherent narrative aspect of the creative product, like in literature, film, or music.
For visual art in the past, The Good could be seen as being tied to older notions of 'truth', or ‘beauty'. Think Michaelangelo's, 'David', or Claude Monet's 'Water Lilies' paintings. The pure formal wonder of these works could be seen as participating in an ideal Platonic form of 'beauty’. Though Plato himself saw art as a mere (and inferior) imitation of ideal forms or essences; for our purposes, the general point stands. The Good, for many centuries as it related to art, was directly connected to the formal aspects of the work. The technical mastery of the artist was the main vehicle for portraying The Good. Even as abstract art began to gain prominence in the 20th century, The Good was still reflected in the formal excellence of the work. This could be seen as viewers were moved by the ephemeral beauty of works like those from Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, or Helen Frankenthaler.
Yet as the age of postmodern deconstruction (and eventual cynicism) took hold in the 1960’s, visual art became less focused on formal dynamics, and more focused on institutional and societal critique. Artists began to engage the hypocritical morality, racial discrimination, technological advancement, existential emptiness, and emerging mass media culture of the time. It was the beginning of a metaphysical reality that was moving away from condensed, linear progression, towards increasing complexity and uncertainty. And it was the beginning of the end for the mental vice grip that the WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) ruling class held over the rest of society. The 1967 film, ‘The Graduate’ was a brilliant illustration of this. Especially in the scene where recent college graduate Dustin Hoffman gets told by a member of the WASP ‘old guard’ that he should consider an exciting future in ‘plastics’. The uninterested, detached look on Hoffman’s face served as an apt metaphor for a generation that had no use for the stale, traditional structure of the society they were entering.
Unfortunately, this justified rejection of the ruling class status quo brought with it an unintended casualty; the idea of The Good itself. For The Good became associated with things like the false, ‘patriotic’ narratives used to justify the Vietnam War. Or the oppressive, religious ideological constructs that curtailed the rights of women or the LGBT community. Even the seductive advertising, and dehumanizing greed of unfettered capitalism became identified with a nefarious form of The Good. In other words, The Good was seen as a kind of empty vessel of propaganda. Something that was used by those in power to control, and undermine the rest of society. Of course the ruling elite of the time were not exemplifying the true nature of The Good, but this mattered little. The ruling institutions that projected the false notions of The Good were still some of the few institutions in society that put forth an idea of The Good. This meant that when younger generations (including artists) sought to destroy the mirage being presented to them, they accidentally destroyed the benign idea of The Good, along with the false notions. Much of contemporary art then became not only antithetical to notions surrounding The Good, it became antithetical to the idea of The Good itself.
As the decades went by, contemporary art and society at large began to be warped by the advancement of unfettered capitalism. By the late 1980’s, the void created by the ideological deconstruction of the 1960’s had been filled by capitalism itself. The Good was now increasingly defined by what kind of job you obtained, and the material objects you accumulated. The 1987 Oliver Stone movie, ‘Wall Street’ coined a famous line that summed up the era nicely: ‘greed is good’. Business, economic profits, and ‘professionalism’ defined the contours of what it meant to live ‘the good life’. Consciously or not, contemporary art began to be taken in by the gravity of economic hedonism. Thus the art world embraced its own false form of The Good. One that ironically embodied many of the things that artists and activists had been moved to attack and deconstruct in the 1960’s.
Yet by the 1990’s it became evident that there was a significant problem with capitalism filling the well that The Good was intended to be drawn from. In philosophical language, it might be seen as a ‘category mistake’. That is to say, capitalism was an economic system intended to generate wealth. It was never meant to function as something that human beings gave their lives away to, or something that provided meaning and existential fulfillment. Capitalism was basically a tool that human beings created to allow for the greatest amount of pathways to true meaning, or The Good. But contained within itself, capitalism was utterly empty of genuine human meaning, or true manifestations of The Good. In fact, untethered, or unfettered capitalism stoked sentiments in the human mind that were the very opposite of The Good. It was no mistake that greed, hedonism, and existential cynicism reigned during the 90’s amid the rubble of past (flawed) traditions. This metaphysical equation was captured supremely by what many regard as the peak of postmodern storytelling; the HBO television show, ‘The Sopranos’ (1999-2007).
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become clear that the experiment of capitalism masquerading as The Good had run its course. The financial collapse of 2008 had revealed the true nature of a capitalist economic system left to its own ends. Greed was not ‘good’ anymore; instead it was a wrecking ball that crushed the middle class on down to the poor. The justified cynicism that followed the economic downturn was reminiscent of postmodern social reactions of the past. Yet there was an added sensibility that made it different. Embodied by former US President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, there was also a kind of tempered ‘hope’ or optimism. People were angry, but they were also open to meaningful change and purpose. For younger generations especially, there was a feeling of the need to tear things down. But there was also the yearning to build something meaningful in its place. In other words, there was a desire for a new, and true conception of The Good.
This desire for a true conception of The Good is nothing new, in fact it is inherent to human nature. If the idea of The Good is replaced with the notion of ‘meaning’, then Viktor Frankl’s ‘will to meaning’ comes to mind. As human beings, we are oriented to doing things that we believe will give us meaning in life. Things like the will to power or the will to pleasure fall under the ‘meaning umbrella’, as they are pursued by individuals with the hope they will fill what Frankl described as the ‘existential vacuum’. Think about capitalism becoming a false form of The Good. The greed and hedonism that was unleashed captured the minds of individuals because they seemed like pathways to meaning and purpose. The same could be said for never ending postmodern cynicism and deconstruction. The very act of embodying the postmodern outlook became a way to create purpose and meaning in the lives of those that felt disaffected.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it seemed like this inherent human desire for The Good had aligned with true conceptions of The Good. That is to say our inherent desire for The Good had finally realigned with things that were actually meaningful and fulfilling. False conveyors of The Good like greed or hedonism still maintained their allure. But true reservoirs of The Good like community, meaningful work, family, healthy ‘spirituality’, human dignity, love, grace, and compassion became recognizable aims. It also seemed like there was a kind of subconscious realization that The Good was a critical cornerstone of certain political and social causes. This was illustrated poetically by David Simon in HBO television shows like ‘The Wire’ (2002-2008) or ‘Treme’ (2010-2013). Simon showed how we cared about things like poverty, racial injustice, economic injustice, education inequality, or drug addiction because they created a deficit of The Good. The absence of The Good created by these societal ills was the reason we cared about fixing them.
So as I sat in that room back in 2011 at Brooklyn College during my critique; this was the water I was sitting in. As I was requested to be ‘more cynical’, I was already in a place where cynicism had run its course. I knew there probably wasn’t a ‘God’ in the sky, at least how human religion had conceived. Yet I knew that there was spiritual nature to our existence that dealt with love, grace, and things beyond our comprehension. I didn’t believe in some kind of naive ‘kumbaya’ feeling that would solve all of the problems in society. Yet I did believe that things like friendship, compassion, brotherhood, and understanding were essential to human flourishing. I knew that previous conceptions of ‘traditional values’ were pretty much bullshit. But I also knew that as human beings, in order to thrive, we needed certain moral structures to refer to. Basically I knew that the time I was living in wasn’t one of unbridled cynicism. It was a time where cynicism remained; yet it was also juxtaposed, and increasingly oscillated with, ideas surrounding The Good.
To deny The Good as a part of our reality is to deny a part of reality itself. Therefore, if one wants to capture or reflect the reality human beings experience through art; The Good must be considered in some form. This doesn't mean one should engage in naive sophistry about earnest human feeling. But it also doesn't mean earnest feeling should be negated or cast aside. The Good should be considered in terms of the way it functions in our consciousness. Our minds know The Good is real, and we yearn for it. We recognize the absence of The Good in terms of situations concerning injustice and inequality. We experience The Good in fleeting moments; and sometimes we try to chase it through false means. Unbridled cynicism doesn’t reflect the reality of the human condition, nor does it reflect the metamodern nature of our current times. The question for the artist who seeks to capture our current moment is not whether to engage with The Good. Rather it’s how to engage with The Good in a way that reflects its true nature.