The greatest curse however is that art here fares better than ever before. Subsidized by the state as never before, the jobs of artists ensured, the prices causing envy, hell for every simple life of the music score-, text-, and picture-inventors of past centuries, on whom they now live. The wallowing and writhing in self-pollution and self-destruction is self-satisfying, so long as they go along with it, incapable of all the old rules of art and feeling themselves liberated as never before. The ugly and base becomes the aesthetics of the sick repression, in the style of a neurotic mannerism of the money democracies of Europe forced into false memories and hatred. Memories that compulsively exclude forgiveness are not suited for artistic global models of yearning beauty characterized by pain-erasing sorrows whose erasure is not desired for the sake of power. Art as the world-forming ideal and corrective of the reality of the powerful has stopped being useful, and even if Kleist, Hölderlin, van Gogh, were ruined by this reality, they served as a warning with their work, whose ideal model became Goethe’s Weimar, associated with Prussia and a European world-center bearing the standard for an Arcadia north of the Alps.
The dissident status of the present-day age is hard to define, pluralism devouring everything. The resistance is spasmodic, the famed resistance of the terrorists of our democracies. Public funds flow even for the enemy, even if less. One can say and do anything, unless the public media are silent or struck dead. But they too still want their business with the most marginalized. Presidents bend graciously, show democratic benevolence at times; even the public can rejoice, and films of this adversarial sort find their subsidies, if they just impose themselves by enduring for a long time and there may develop, small and hidden, lucky fruits for the officials, even if silenced and like a secret. Everything is possible, even if it be by a denial of royalties, via accruals, so that one really wants it, in order to engage and decorate the others in secret. Everything is possible with the smallest measure and a commission with few men and the smallest team and the emptiness of the stage and the cheapest technology of the artistic underground, quicker presentations, hounded by the other engagements of the theaters and of the times, even if nobody wants them. But one can play the junk of pluralism in the punk-corner of the store, the high brought to the smallest simplicity, even with aesthetic consequences. One must look long and hard not to be taken in, until one finds oneself, in this exploiting age, beyond it; it takes a long time to find the grounds where it hurts, where they are all secretly at home, to wake them from the daily lies of the prospective democratic life, beyond the night, where it becomes quiet, in the noise and stench of paints, and where sleep begins, the unconscious, where they emerge from this daily routine of lies. And if they prepare themselves for the new of the next day, as in a dream of losses, like laments on the beauty of the lost, abysmal and alarming and as if it had never been, and when they wake up again, to know that there was however something else there to feel, of the art that was — like the old woman of a remote love, even if it be briefly and like a dream. What was once the center is now on the fringe, possible only because the center was divided? Violated, dispossessed, re-educated, occupied...