The New Challenge Movement A Manifesto - Road to the Middle Class

Exhibit A is Singing Forest, a tired liberal play by Craig Lucas that recently premiered in Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. It’s about an aging Jewish matriarch and her dysfunctional family—you know, the Holocaust, psychoanalysis, a Nazi rapist, a cameo appearance by Freud, gays, slackers, and Starbucks baristas. Like, we are supposed to care about a retread narrative like this?

Exhibit B is the new Seattle Public Library designed by Rem Koolhaas. The New York Times loved it. And you can see why. The building utterly negates what you’d expect in a library. There is no solemn hardwood paneling; there are no scholarly nooks, no strategically placed desks where a spinster librarian can fix teenage boys in a withering glare. The meeting room floor is a rabbit warren, done in rounded red plastic. You get to the book stack on an up-only escalator that dumps you out in the middle of a continuous ramp. But how do you get out of the stacks? Thank you, Senator, I’m glad you asked.. There are floating platforms on which are arrayed platoons of computers, and black lightning bolts of columns and diagonal stiffeners crash out of the glowering thunderhead of a ceiling. Railings are done with galvanized gratings, and metallic stairs boom like fire escapes.

Well, these exhibits certainly are “challenging.” They challenge the notion that the challenge movement has anything left to say, assuming for a moment that sophomoric challenge art ever did have anything to say. But who will challenge the challengers? Who gets to judge who is the smug self-satisfied bigot, and who is the creative idealist?

Imagine a theater that “challenges” liberal hypocrisies.

Fiona, the twentysomething daughter of a lesbian has just found out that her mother mixed together the semen from two gay friends when she decided to conceive her daughter. When her lesbian relationship broke up, she responded by marrying a manÃ¢â‚¬â€after her daughter had grown up. What does it mean for a young woman to know that her father was chosen in a mix-up?

Imagine an architecture that “challenges” liberal hypocrisies. It’s hard to imagine what that might look like. Maybe it would respect the middle-class people that used it instead of slamming them in the solar plexus. And maybe it would be in love with the architecture of the past instead of sniggering at it with oh-so-clever inside jokes. And maybe it would restrict galvanized guardrails to outdoor applications where the zinc was needed as a sacrificial anode.

The whole point of transgressive art has been to negate the middle-class culture of order, harmony, and discipline. Its creativity is the negation of order and rules. Down with rules, genius is its own inspiration!

But let’s get Hegelian for a moment. How about a movement in art that is the negation of the negation. Instead of assuming that creativity occupies the opposite pole from order and rules, let us challenge “challenge” art with the revolutionary idea that creativity and hard-earned expertise go together like peas and carrots.

The new art will be a return to beauty. Beauty, it turns out, is not exactly in the eye of the beholder. All humans tend to respond with pleasure to certain shapes and representations because our brains are wired that way. The new art will be a culture of hope. Obviously it will negate the art of the twentieth century that believed in the end of values, and swirled downwards in a spiral of nihilism and despair. Instead it will return to the eternal hope that throbs in every living creature. Instead of abstraction and expressionism it will return to a natural classicism, in which humans will investigate the peculiar resonance between the elegance of artificial surface and the pulsing throb of chthonic life.

It’s time for a new generation to arise and smash the tired shibboleths of liberal “challenge” art. Down with edginess! Down with transgression! Down with artistical black! Ever since the 1960s budding artists have been taught that the way to creative signature is through transgression, through rejection of society, through celebration of the authentic voice of marginalized voices, through the power of raw talent, through the challenge to established ideas and economic power.

But what if that is all wrong? What if there really is a standard of beauty, programmed into our brains? What if creativity dwells at the union of preparation and inspiration? What if “challenge” is not about challenge but merely about power? If this is true, then it can’t be too soon to start a movement to sweep “challenge” art aside and start challenging the challengers.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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