Art Theory- Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley- On Handicrafts...

"The truth is, of course, that most art has always been either bad or indifferent. This is inevitable. Artistic talent is an extremely rare phenomenon; therefore good art is extremely uncommon.

The only substitute - and it is at best a partial substitute - for personal talent is a good artistic tradition. This enables people with little talent to produce good work because it relieves them of the necessity for using their own second-rate, or tenth-rate, imaginations... But even at its worst the bad art of preindustrial times is seldom quite so depressing and never so painfully vulgar as modern bad art.

The badness and vulgarity of modern popular art are the result of a number of interlocking causes... Vulgarity is the price we must pay for prosperity, education, and self-consciousness.

Nor must we forget the influence of quantity upon quality. So long as population remains at its present density, ugliness is inevitable. For, reduplicated a million times, even the most beautiful object becomes hideous.

Even more hideous will seem the endless repetitions of objects originally and intrinsically ugly. And intrinsically ugly they must be; for, in a large, prosperous, and educated population, it is impossible that the level of popular art should be high.

It is impossible because, as I have shown, the consumption of the arts has increased for more rapidly than the natural production of men or talent. Great quantity inevitably creates bad quality and multiplies it till it becomes a nightmare.

So far, then as the popular arts are concerned, the prospect is none too good. Perhaps the wisest thing to do is to abandon them to their inevitable vulgarity and ineptitude and to concentrate all available resources on the training of a minority that shall be capable of appreciating the higher activities of the spirit.

Il faut cultiver notre oasis... Advances in technology have led not only to vulgarity, but also, indirectly, to the lowering of qualitative standards in all the popular arts."