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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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

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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