Art and Anarchy

In 1960, the BBC invited Wind to present the annual Reith Lectures. In this series of six radio talks, titled Art and Anarchy, he examined why, and how, great art is often produced in turbulent circumstances. These lectures were later compiled into a book, also entitled Art and Anarchy. In it he notes that, over time, public audiences have lost their capacity for an immediate and visceral response to art. The production and appreciation of art, he observes, has become marginalized and domesticated to a point where it can no longer significantly and lastingly move its addressees. Wind's impulse in the piece is apparently restorative; he seeks to impede the observed tendency toward apathy and recover some of art's latent anarchic quality. Wind begins his argument by presenting the long-standing conceptual correlation between art and forces of chaos or disorder, citing a lineage of thinkers and artists including Plato, Goethe, Baudelaire and Burckhardt. Particular emphasis is placed on Plato's distrustful view of the imagination as fundamentally uncontrollable; Plato explicitly denied the true artist a place in his imagined ideal republic, not for lack of respect for the artist's talent but out of fear for his capacity to upset the social balance. Wind also notes the repeated historical coincidence – in Greece at Plato's time and in Italy during the Renaissance – of peaks in artistic accomplishment with political turmoil and breakdown. Wind notes, however, that the recent surplus of artwork available to the public eye has to some extent anesthetized the audience to art at large. Wind is quick to acknowledge that society maintains a broad and active concern with art as well as increasingly refined faculties with which to interpret such work. Yet this interest is a significant dilution of the passion with which art was received in the past: “We are much given to art, but it touches us lightly…art is so well-received because it has lost its sting.” Wind refers frequently to Hegel in isolating the particular change that art has undergone: “when art is removed to a zone of safety, it may still remain very good art indeed, and also very popular art, but its effect on our existence will vanish.” Art has thus, according to Wind, moved to life's periphery. Again, Wind notes that this distance carries with it certain benefits for the scholarly approach to art; “detachment brought freshness and breadth, and a freedom from prejudice, a willingness to explore the unfamiliar, even the repulsive, and to risk new adventures of sensibility.” At the same time, however, art has lost its ability to resonate at levels deeper than the intellect, to incite the passions. Engaging with a work of art has become an act of mere observation as opposed to “vital participation.” Art has, for Wind, gained interest at the expense of potency. By way of resolution, Wind suggests an intermediate and integrative approach, supplementing the tolerance afforded by aesthetic detachment with an insistence on personal assessment on behalf of the work's audience: “We should react to a work of art on two levels: we should judge it aesthetically in its own terms, but we should also decide whether we find those terms acceptable.” As such, Wind indicates that the intellectual advantages of the contemporary approach to art may be retained without sacrificing the “directly [felt]” quality that is so fundamental to it.