Gary, seeing that our conversation is continually touching on the subject of modern art, I thought I might write something about Pierre Klossowski’s views on the topic. It’s a bit potted and if it offends someone enough to make them reply then well and good.

I’ve previously written about his ideas on the soul, its tonality & moods, which comprise an intensity without intention, and its phantasms. I’ll distinguish between a mood of the soul and a phantasm. If I am a melancholic it is not because of experiences I have had. If I happen to spend a lot of my life painting pictures of old houses, this is because of experiences I’ve had. It is relatively easy to see that I am a melancholic. It is not so easy to say what the pictures of old sheds signify. I am a melancholic by tonality and mood. I am also driven by some phantasm or other but it is impossible to say what. This is because all we have is the expression of my phantasm – the pictures of old sheds.

So what do we have? a melancholic mood, an instinctual obsession – for that is what a phantasm is – of unknown origin and meaning, and it’s expression, the paintings of old sheds. These paintings are what Klossowski calls ‘simulacra’ – the expression of some phantasm, an instinctual obsession.

Now we are in a position to say what artistic expression is. Artistic expression is the expression of some phantasm. According to Klossowski, artistic expression is without intersubjective meaning.

Nonetheless, works of art communicate. How is this? Well, according to Klossowski, simulacra become detached from the phantasm of which they are the expression and they enter the code of everyday signs. In other words, simulacra take on a communicative function and become part of language, in this case of a visual language. When they come to take on strong communicative significance Klossowski calls these detached simulacra ‘stereotypes’.

Here is a good example of a stereotype. In Panofsky’s book Perspective As Symbolic Form, he describes how Renaissance battle signs differ from earlier feudal depictions. The hand extended towards the viewer by a soldier shot through the eye by an arrow, or the shaft of the arrow, which is thicker at one end than the other, does not describe things better as they are but represents a powerful symbol of the new perspective, and thus a means of teaching the new view. A work of art takes on communicative meaning because it gives expression to phantasms through the manipulation of established stereotypes.

Seen in this light, modern art can be given a precise meaning. With modernism art became critical. Modern art is critical art (this, incidentally, is why the post-modernists are so anti-critical – it’s not just political comformism). Modern art is art that is self-conscious of itself. For the first time, art recognised the constraints of its symbolic heritage and it threw them over. In order to do this it aimed to forsake expression. A good example is the work of Braque and Picasso in the hermetic period, when they goal was to make their paintings indistinguishable, to suppress all evidence of a phantasm. It was an impossible endeavour. The consequence was a new, broader, more comprehensive set of aesthetic standards, and with that new stereotypes began to emerge. This is why, as Adorno wrote, painting a la cubist now is like making advertising posters.