03

Outrageousness is an artist's prerogative, a protest against the herd-like mediocrity of the generality, who do not like to make decisions for themselves and become too individualistic, since for them sanity is objective or, in the male (actually pseudo-male) case, conditioned by objectivity to a degree which precludes anything approaching the subjectivity of the artist.

The artist as philosopher; outrageous from an academic point-of-view, since less dependent upon scholarship and more self-reliant.

In his struggle with mediocrity, the artist must constantly re-invent himself and, hence, the nature and practice of his art.

The artist is not only ahead of the people, he is effectively contrary to them, since he lives from within, whereas they live from without, dominated by others rather than thinking for themselves.

The artist is not merely once removed from the unthinking herd, like the thinking herd of the bourgeoisie, nor even twice removed from it, like the unthinking individual (more likely an autocrat), but effectively thrice removed from it as a thinking individual whose thoughts, or capacity for thinking, can prove especially alarming to those, including individuals, or individualized persons, who don't think. One recalls the expression 'cat amongst the pigeons' with a degree of ironic resignation in view of the kind of effect one's thoughts or thinking processes can have on those in the neighbourhood or social vicinity who don't think and are so seemingly allergic to thinking, so sensitive to the occurrence of thought in others as to be inclined to react, in what may often be a censoriously thumping manner, against anyone who does think, thereby intending to combat and, if possible, preclude or at least inhibit it from a standpoint rooted in objectivity.

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That man who cannot extricate himself from the masses will be sucked down by them, as by a swamp of human quicksand. That man who cannot extricate himself from the masses, even as physically he lives amongst them, will never become an artist, but simply remain or become the opposite of one, namely an apologist of social conformity through female domination, whether from the standpoints of science or of politics.

The concept of “people's artist” is a blatant contradiction in terms, since absolutely failing to do justice to the nature of art, which is anything but populist or sensationalist, never mind proletarian. One can be an artiste in relation to popular culture, but never an artist! For subjective individualism leads, inevitably, towards metaphysics, and hence away from the people in the transcendence of 'the world' of physical and chemical (not to mention subordinately pseudo-chemical and pseudo-physical) norms.

Even metachemistry, being objectively individualist in character, would fail to meet the requirements of art, which is not only 'high' but antithetical to science and, hence, the empirical view of the world which tends to its domination, not, manifestly not, to its transcendence An age dominated by science, as by various manifestations of metachemical autocracy, will necessarily be inimical to art, as to metaphysics and inner values generally. But so, for that matter, will ages or societies characterized by the predominance of chemistry or the preponderance of physics, if in opposite ways; that is, less in respect of science than, more mundanely, of politics or economics.

The artist who is in any degree genuine, or metaphysical, in ages dominated by metachemistry, chemistry, or physics (if not all three, in varying degrees, together), will be a pariah, an outsider if not outcast whose work, having religious connotations, will be slighted and spurned by those for whom science, politics, or economics is their raison d'être and criterion by which life is evaluated and effectively understood. But the artist who, fearing his work will be misunderstood or shunned, 'sells out' – presuming, as I am, that he was not a sham to begin with and therefore unaware of his position – to one or another of the prevailing ungodly tendencies is, in truth, no artist at all but, at best, an artiste and, at worst, a dilettante or fake, whose 'art' will be little more than propaganda in the service of externals.

The painful truth is that, in an age when the inner values of religion are no longer in vogue (metaphysically limited to bound soma at the expense of free psyche as those inner values may traditionally have been), most people can get on perfectly well without art and, thus, artists, not least when they take the form of the philosopher-artist, the self-appointed 'free-lance' theoretician who is anathema even to so-called academic philosophers, meaning those PhDs who are accounted 'chairs' and more usually given to some 'bovaryization' of philosophy not incompatible with a scientific, political, or economic turn-of-mind within civilized frameworks long beholden to 'false gods', the kinds of 'gods' that Nietzsche, himself a 'free-lancer', railed against with such phlegmatic distinction. And did so, moreover, as a philosopher-artist, or philosophical artist, not as an artist-philosopher, a mere artistic philosopher whose books are rarely if ever entirely free of scholarly references, but tend, rather, to derive from other books to the detriment of original thought.

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