Cultural Marxism, Modern Art and Hipsterism | Jay's Analysis
It is a frequently misunderstood notion that “modern” and “abstract” art was an organic development that arose from grassroots battles against “oppression” and the “folk art” of the lower classes. In fact, ugly, degenerate art arose from Soviet and communist circles as a means to attack aesthetic beauty. I often remark that “Bauhaus” architecture is communist to the surprise of listeners, but the facts are, “modern art” is almost wholly a communist and Soviet invention of weaponized culture.
To understand this, one must look at the Frankfurt School of Marxism, tasked primarily with social engineering and destroying culture. Weaponized culture was a key tool for destroying the West’s social values and social structure. This is also true of the modern transformations of “art” into its own internal nihilist critique of meaning itself, with hipsterism. Hipsterism could accurately be called the full blossoming of Theodore Adorno’s critical theory, particularly in terms of music. Adorno writes:
What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man…. The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks…. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.”
So modern music is geared towards the breakdown of order, beauty, form and meaning, waging a war on all the elements with the intent of disorienting man’s psyche and breaking down his worldview. In fact Adorno describes it as an attempt at actually causing mania:
It is a frequently misunderstood notion that “modern” and “abstract” art was an organic development that arose from grassroots battles against “oppression” and the “folk art” of the lower classes. In fact, ugly, degenerate art arose from Soviet and communist circles as a means to attack aesthetic beauty. I often remark that “Bauhaus” architecture is communist to the surprise of listeners, but the facts are, “modern art” is almost wholly a communist and Soviet invention of weaponized culture.
To understand this, one must look at the Frankfurt School of Marxism, tasked primarily with social engineering and destroying culture. Weaponized culture was a key tool for destroying the West’s social values and social structure. This is also true of the modern transformations of “art” into its own internal nihilist critique of meaning itself, with hipsterism. Hipsterism could accurately be called the full blossoming of Theodore Adorno’s critical theory, particularly in terms of music. Adorno writes:
What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man…. The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks…. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.”
So modern music is geared towards the breakdown of order, beauty, form and meaning, waging a war on all the elements with the intent of disorienting man’s psyche and breaking down his worldview. In fact Adorno describes it as an attempt at actually causing mania:
