1: Art as a function of collective expression and articulation

To ask "what is art?" is to make it something static from the outset, for it follows the overly Platonic "what is...?" mode of reasoning that suffocates life and everything in it. Perhaps the question "what does art do?" is one that does not do it such a disservice.

The guiding thesis of this article will be a provisional answer to this question: Art has, as one of its functions, the expression and articulation of society - it is a collective phenomenon first and foremost. By now, it has grown deathly pale and claustrophobic from being incarcerated in such notions as "authorial intent", "individual expression", or, worse yet, "a dialogue between the author and viewer". What is needed, to make discourse on art socially relevant, and perhaps even politically valuable, is to open up a window to the outside. Art must be placed in its rightful place, the world. It cannot be taken as something that takes place in a bubble, which is then marvelled at by connoisseurs for its own sake. There is no such thing as art for art's sake, and never has been; it has always been intimately connected with its historical environment, and does not exist in a vacuum unless it is violently forced into it. Art does, it functions.

The way in which art expresses the environment in which it is produced is twofold: 1) It expresses society, its sentiments, and understanding, the way that they are currently, and; 2) it shapes social reality, by directly modifying said sentiments and understanding. It takes the first as a point of origin, and enacts the second by reacting back at what produced it, with an eye towards the production of the new.

This process is by no means readily visible in every instance of art. For example, it can be made deliberately reactionary, where its aim is only to reinforce the conditions whence it came. However, intentions and motives behind the production of this or that piece of art are never as important and impactful as the actual effects which it produces. Art sends shock waves, no matter how small, in no matter how narrow a social sphere, which inevitably alter the social fabric.

While the second moment is arguably more impactful, we will nonetheless confine ourselves to the first, as it concretely supports our hypothesis of treating art as a means of expressing and consequently diagnosing social tendencies.

Perhaps some justification is necessary for the notion that art is fundamentally social. How can it be unequivocally social in nature, when there are a number of cases of artists who never let their work "out into the wild", so to speak (Goya and Kafka being the first that come to mind for me personally)?

Well, who are these "individual" artists? Obviously they're people like you and I, regardless of disparities in gifts and characteristics. From the beginning of our species, the cases of somebody living entirely by themselves from cradle to grave are dramatically outnumbered by ones existing in a group. One does not pop into the world as an isolated subject, and then by some miraculous operation reaches out and encounters Others - rather, the world and the Others which inhabit it are there from the outset. It is only on the basis of this that one can take a step back from reality, and make farcical attempts at viewing it as behind the wall of a camera obscura. An isolated subject and object are derivations of a fundamental experience of being present in the world alongside other people.

Whether one resorts to Heideggerian mental gymnastics of showing ontologically how a human being's existence necessarily includes an awareness of Others, or picks examples from anthropology and archaeology to prove the same point, it is clear that, by and large, we are always among Others. Even if one chooses to live off the grid, out in the wilderness, the choice is still made in defiance to, i.e in relation to, other people.

The example of such social hermits living as autonomously as possible is very apt here, for it directly parallels the case of the secret artist.

A secret is first and foremost a social invention. It has no use or need for conception if there was no such thing as society. One does anything in secret only because they do not want others to witness it, for whatever reason that may be. Thus, when an artist chooses to make their work secret (like Goya's black paintings, or Kafka's oeuvre), it is done with society in mind. Moreover, since it is the contents of the art that the secretive artist wishes to conceal, they serve as a valuable diagnostic tool for society in general, because they manifest and express things and themes which are looked down upon somehow, or generally repressed. In a word, even secret art is an expression of society (perhaps the purest one, for it expresses that at which one ordinarily blushes and wishes to avoid).

This capacity of art being utilised as a diagnostic tool for society is the one that we will pay attention to the most here. To be sure, art is a very rich phenomenon, for which it is exceedingly difficult to attach an enduring "definition". However, it remains the case that that to which we refer to as "art" (film, fiction, paintings, etc.) expresses the society in which it is produced. Take your Hemingways, Melvilles, Shakespeares, place them in an epoch that is not their own, and they will not produce the works for which they're most famous (if they become artists in the first place). It is in this that we find justification in discussing art as a tool for unconcealing the "spirit" of an age.

"However," one may contest, "is art not inherently ‘untimely'?". In a lot of respects it is. Innovative art, by and large, is quite literally "ahead of its time". However, granting that this is true, the work maintains a relation to "its time" as a point of departure whence it juts forward and goes beyond. The "untimely" is not a time outside of history in general. Rather, every historical period has its own untimely double, which, overtime, may become the status quo, which in turn will develop its own untimeliness.

Now, in what way is art expressive of its society/time? We may well take Carl Jung up on his claim that the unconscious is the source of art, only on the condition that we conceive of the unconscious itself as something historical, shaped by and shaping the world around it. By this unsavoury term, "the unconscious", we understand the general conventions of thought, action, and value (or, the historically produced "default settings" of viewing the world belonging to a given society). In them, art finds its objects for expression, modification, or attack. In art, it is the social, collective unconscious that speaks.

In our treatment of art in this way, one thing must be made especially clear: The author, as the alleged dictator of discourse regarding the meaning of their work, is dead (or at the very least should be, in a figurative sense). If we simplify it to a comical extent, we can say that art is always a "dialogue" between the viewer and the author. However, this doesn't really stick, as the author as such disappears in our consumption of the work, unless we deliberately bring them to the fore and let their presence alter our enjoyment thereof (Lovecraft's racism, Beckett's anti-semitism). Rather, art works through a relation between the work as something that stands on its own without the author acting as its crutches, and the environment in which the art is distributed.

If the author is to be taken as an isolated individual, it is completely wrong to utilise their biography as a way of accessing the "meaning" of their work. If the author is to be considered with regards to discourse on their work, it is only as a line of movement which stretches beyond the individual person's corporeal form. The author's name should not be taken as a proper name of an individual, but instead as the designation of a particular event (as is the case in physics, examples being the doppler effect, Riemann effect, etc.); a collection of heterogeneities coming together and interacting in a manner that produces something new and irregular. Hence, the author's name designates all the historical circumstances in which the titular person is immersed and shaped by. The "Hemingway effect", for instance, includes not only Ernest's individual experience of the Spanish civil war, but the Spanish civil war as such, as a constitutive element in the event which came to produce For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Perhaps the late master David Lynch has been one of the most genuine artists in this regard, where through his entire career he has adamantly refused to give any explicit dictum regarding how his films are to be understood and interpreted, despite their signature opaqueness and mystery.

Now, in order to serve as a proof of concept, we will take two films, Whiplash (2014) and The Menu (2022). It is not our aim to evaluate these films with regards to their technical sophistication, or to provide a film analysis generally speaking. Rather, we are treating them as precisely what we have described art to be: a diagnostic tool for society, expressing and articulating a worldview. More particularly, we will analyse how these films express the notion of "success" as it is understood in the modern day, so as to perhaps gain a better understanding of what exactly people are chasing when they invoke this nebulous term.

While this article will assume the reader's prior viewing of the two films, it will nonetheless attempt to summarise the essential details.

2: Whiplash

We will begin with Whiplash, as it is the more explicit of our two films in expressing the idea of success. It follows a narrative of one Andrew Neiman, an aspiring drummer attending the prestigious (yet fictional) Chafer conservatory, which is the most esteemed music college in the United States. We are shown that drumming, and music in general, has been a lifelong passion of Andrew's.

The opening scenes find Andrew practicing his skills at the college in solitude, when, abruptly, an intimidating bald man, dressed entirely in black, enters the room. While we are not immediately told who he is, Neiman nonetheless recognises him as Terrence Fletcher, one of the most feared, yet respected, conductors at the college, and consequently the country. Fletcher immediately humiliates Neiman, and when the latter begins playing the drums so as to display his skills, he immediately leaves the room with a slam of the door, signalling that he is not impressed.

This is the first of many moments of Fletcher hurling varying levels of abuse and demoralisation at musicians, all in an alleged effort to produce the new "Charlie Parker" of the time, who is taken as a symbol for greatness in music. This already gives us some notion as to how he believes success and greatness are to be achieved.

Later on, Fletcher intrudes on Neiman yet again, this time in the setting of a band practice in a classroom, under the guise of looking for new musicians for his own band. He makes several of the band members play, only to belittle their skills seconds later. It eventually reaches Andrew's turn to play, which is customarily shut down only a moment after like the others. However, something unexpected happens: Fletcher commands Andrew to join his band.

Expectedly, Andrew is on cloud nine, as he is finally seeing a prospect of becoming like one of his musical heroes. This elevated confidence was, however, only a cog in Fletcher's plan to grind him down to a nub, as immediately after returning to practice the latter throws a chair and screams at Andrew in complete hatred, as is seen in the famous "rushing or dragging?" scene.

Over the course of the film, we see a horrifying antagonism between Fletcher and Neiman. Andrew is forced into a certain asceticism, where he denies himself everything that is a distraction from practicing his skills. Really, though, his aim is not just to attain excellence, but instead the perfection and excellence as dictated by Fletcher. Everything he does is to impress him, subscribing to another's dream, equating success with recognition by the Other.

From all this we can find two characteristics of the success which Whiplash expresses: 1) Sacrifice and torture being a necessary means for attaining success; 2) Success or greatness is technical perfection, a complete immunity to making mistakes.

There is a third characteristic, however, which connects seamlessly to the first two, and it is to be found in the mythical Charlie Parker. Both Fletcher and Neiman take Parker as the echelon of music, considering him the greatest musician of the 20th century. What's worthy of note, however, is the frequent use of the phrase "The next/new Charlie Parker". What is happening here? The turning of greatness and success into a representation. The goal is not to be an innovator, a cartographer of uncharted lands of music, but instead the achievement of a spot in the stuffy hall of fame of "the greats", or, worse yet, being a repetition of the craftsmanship of a musician that came before. Tradition over creation.

This representational treatment of success can also be seen in the ruthless pursuit of technical excellence. There is a certain irony in this, considering that the film follows jazz musicians, players of a genre which values improvisation and freedom of music. A song's "ideal form" has been laid down, and God help you if you deviate from it even to a seemingly negligible extent.

At this point, one may sceptically say "well, that's just one interpretation of success that the film presents, and it doesn't necessarily hold on a social level". To respond to this, we must go beyond the film itself, and witness its reception; specifically, the way in which the audience has perceived the ending of the film.

Following a violent falling out between Fletcher and Neiman, the latter gets the former fired from Chafer, as a result of which he seeks revenge against him. His plan is to ruin any prospect of a professional career in music for Andrew, by way of sabotaging his performance in front of an audience of seasoned music critics. However, the unexpected happens, and Andrew steels his resolve and performs an immaculate rendition of a piece named "Caravan", warranting, for the first and last time in the film, Fletcher's satisfaction, and then, fin.

This moment of the film is the most crucial for bringing society and its preconceptions into view. The director of the film, Damien Chazelle, said in an interview that he intended for the ending to be somewhat melancholy or sad, for Neiman fully submits himself to Fletcher's dream of perfection, and has his purpose fulfilled by winning his satisfaction.

However, the audiences have perceived it very differently, and it is their perception that interests us more than the intention of the author. If the reader has seen the film, I request that they ask themselves how they perceived the ending. In a lot of cases, viewers have seen it as a happy one, because Neiman achieves the success which he wanted, and which, unconsciously, they themselves accept as definitive.

Thus, the film, as a diagnostic tool, shows us that today, many people perceive success in the exact way as it is presented in Whiplash without considering whether it is harmful, ascetic, unforgiving, and worst of all, a representation of a pre-existent standard, and not a creation of a new one. We will save the deeper implications and meanings of this success till the end, and will now proceed to the second picture on our agenda, The Menu.

3: The Menu

As we said, Whiplash deals explicitly with the theme of success. Nonetheless, it is subtle in its qualitative presentation of the toxic idea of success that is commonplace today, and it could be argued that The Menu is an outright condemnation thereof.

The narrative unfolds on a secluded island, on which rests the world-renowned restaurant Hawthorn, the workshop of Chef Slowik. The establishment is considered the best in the world, and is accessible only to the wealthiest of the wealthy. It is a place of complete luxury and indulgence of the opulent.

The protagonist is a woman named Margot, who is presumably a prostitute that has been hired by her companion, Tyler, so that she accompanies him to the restaurant. This couple already reveals to us a major theme of the piece, which is the strife and antagonism between the upper and lower classes, as Tyler is a connoisseur of the culinary arts who buys into the pretentious narratives surrounding them peddled by high society. Margot represents the average person, who sees food as something to eat, and a restaurant as a place which services those who desire it; Tyler, on the other hand, sees food as a performance and an art piece, to the point where he's moved to tears by Chef Slowik's retelling of the history of… bread.

It is eventually revealed that Chef Slowik selected each of the twelve attendees of the dinner for the express purpose of punishing them, as a class, for all the misery they have caused him, and, more importantly, his art.

What warrants such a murderous grudge? What suffering did Slowik undergo while working in the service industry to induce in him a spirit of complete annihilation of his tormentors? In a way, it was closely akin to the sufferings of Neiman. He began as a young lad full of hope and ambition with his passion for cooking, delighting in expressing and developing his abilities as a chef. Over time, however, once he broke into the high-society stratum of the culinary industry, his love and passion turned into obsession, as Margot herself astutely points out near the tail-end of the film.

The obsession was largely the same as Neiman's. The obsession to one-up oneself over and over again, but most importantly, the obsessive pursuit of being recognised as great. Critics, investors, customers - everyone had to have their abstracted vision of food as a joy-less performance satisfied. However, like with most pursuits of such a nature, it was insatiable. The expectations kept rising, and Slowik's thralldom grew more suffocating in proportion to them. It is no accident that his first major restaurant was named "Tantalus", after the mythical character who had the objects of his desire forever dangled in front of him, yet eternally out of reach.

In short, an artist died in Slowik, and the Others served as its morticians that shaped it into a servile machine for reproducing representations of food as something to be appreciated exclusively by the elite.

In the end, he couldn't bear it. He executed the owner of his restaurant, as the first step of breaking free from the prison of unattainable recognition and commodification of his art. For the second step, he tortured and killed his customers, each of which were selected as representatives of the major ills plaguing him throughout the entirety of his career: The critic; the pseudo-expert and enthusiast; the nouveau-riche that immediately wanted to dominate him as soon as they came into money; the disinterested elite that indulged in his services as a means of expressing their wealth and capacity to afford such a luxury, but no genuine passion for his art. Only Margot survives, as Slowik had solidarity for her as a fellow service industry member, or a "shit-shoveller" as he affectionately refers to people like himself.

As we can see, representational success is elevated to a social and economic level, as opposed to the purely individual one of whiplash. It is not Slowik and Margot individually who suffer, but the service industry as such, the givers, those who are appropriated and alienated from their passion as a means of levelling them off to the base role of a part of an assembly line.

The Menu expresses the extreme consequences and culmination of being held in the sway of a need for recognition: annihilation driven by bile and resentment. Perhaps Neiman simply needed more time to end up in a similar way; a guess that is supported by the many parallels between him and Slowik with regards to their passion for creation, as well as the point by point correspondence between the portrayal of success-as-recognition in both films.

4: Cancerous nostalgia

With the insights provided by these two pieces, we are now ready to elaborate the conception of success as it is found in our society today. To characterise it, we'll use the term "cancerous nostalgia".

It is inherently nostalgic, as it is usually working under a fiction of a "golden age", a time of greatness which is longed for and idolised. However, it also has an eye towards the future, without ceasing to be nostalgic, as paradoxically as that may sound at first. To be sure, such nostalgia still wants something "new" - but in what form? The new is entirely understood in terms of the old, taking it as a point of reference and measure; it can be a great musician that lived long ago, or the wish to recapture the lightning in a bottle success of a previous restaurant or endeavour. Hence, it isn't really something new, but a "new-old", or, to put it more palpably, a "more-of-the-same".

And what of the cancerous component? The nostalgia of greatness, success, "The Good", has a tendency to metastasise and to debilitate. Metastasis: It spreads to every facet of the world, where everything truly new has value only as something that will someday be old, and hence something to remember fondly; or, everything that has already been is progressively integrated into the tumour of nostalgia, of memories to relish; or, further still, everything newly produced and created is measured against what came before, where the uniqueness of the work or phenomenon is deftly ignored as it is made to answer to a higher authority in the form of the vintage, classic, and other avatars of a worship of the past. In each of these cases life is aborted in favour of its oncological double, diminished and self-destructive.

Debilitation: What happens when everything becomes nostalgic? Action and innovation become either unfeasible or unthinkable. Life as such becomes suffocated and turned back against itself, as creation is circumvented in favour of reiteration and reproduction. We sink into a passivity, albeit sometimes a peaceful and pleasurable one, as we can do nothing but reminisce and regurgitate, when reality itself comes to be conceived of as one tumorous "remember when?".

One may contest that Neiman and Slowik alike act and produce. As the reader could tell from the above, however, they may see that their "actions" and "productions" are really two re-s: reaction and reproduction; reacting to the demands made by the Others and reproducing past glories (or a glorified past, which is almost the same thing).

To go somewhat deeper with the social analysis of this, we must clarify that this isn't a purely individual phenomenon - it is a societal malaise. The individuals in our two films are only indicators of a larger issue which is much more near and familiar to us than we may think at first. If we look around ourselves, and consider our own desires, we find that we ourselves are more often than not the seekers of the more-of-the-same. Even while writing this article, I am concerned about its reception by the Others, whether it will be recognised as good or not, with reference to conventional understandings of quality and success.

The individual level must be seen only as a means of entering or grasping this larger phenomenon. The prevalence of the cancerous nostalgic worldview manifests itself on individual as well as social levels. Individually, we are pushed to our limits with regards to productivity, all in pursuit of an ideal of perfection that has been laid down in advance, handed down to us, culminating in the representations of success that we have discussed as elucidated by our two films.

Socially, as a people, we are too fatigued to desire anything new. Nostalgia has its sedative and comforting sensations because the past which we cherish is a time when we no longer need to act. The present is defined by action, by deciding what to do. Today, this decision-making has been aggravated to the level of paralysis and burnout because we must not only keep acting without pause, but to act perfectly, we must always be productive. It is then no wonder that the past or the future-past is seen as a refuge, as the time for action has passed, the time for asceticism and automatism whose demands we must meet. Forgiveness and mercy towards oneself are now only means for perpetuating the cycle of automatic reproduction of representations of success. Perhaps it has reached a point where we are even too tired to die.

To use a concrete example of this ubiquitous desire for representation we can say the following: the reason that the entertainment industry today thrives on formulaic rehashes is because we want it so. How could it be otherwise? How could the vote of the dollar not be the decree, the will, of what art is to be in the modern day? Money is only a conductor for collective desire here, a desire for reiteration and reproduction of an always-tranquil fiction.

If the reader has resonated with these sentiments even somewhat, they may have noticed that daily life is for the most part prey to cancerous nostalgia. Another good example is the over-work ethic that is being accepted as more and more necessary and tautological. We needn't produce laundry lists of statistics and charts to display that more and more people are burnt out and made passive with regards to their own life as time goes on, where the only intense action that we can conceive of is destruction of ourselves and others, as in the case of our tortured chef.

In many countries today overachievement is the norm, where excellence is the default. But what excellence? The one that we have been talking about this whole time: a lying prostrate in the face of pre-existent measures and values that can never be satiated. The fact that the reward for excelling in one's work is more work and more slavery is slowly creeping into the scripture of things to endure and accept as necessary under the heading "That's life" or "Life is hard".

It is this social illness that we must be made aware of, in its many facets, as sometimes it is all too easy to take it as a given, without scrutinising the fact that it furnishes us with the most devastating presuppositions about our life and the world, where the past takes precedence and all we can do is hold grudges or reminisce instead of living, i.e acting and creating. Society itself comes to be seen as a taxidermic work, a corpse that has been made to look alive and appealing, an imitation and monument of death.

How has all this come about? How long has it been at work? Perhaps the equation between quality and effort is what leads to the asceticism of the pursuit of success and excellence; Perhaps capitalism, being inherently vampiric, is what forces us to reproduce and reiterate, to tap more wells of value so as to exhaust them, only to then move on to another untapped reservoir of nostalgia to be commodified; perhaps the traditional way of philosophical thinking that has always privileged representation is the cause for representational success becoming commonplace, finding its conditions of possibility therein.

Perhaps... perhaps... perhaps.

While these questions impress themselves on us with great force and urgency, it is nonetheless beyond the scope of this article. The greatest "perhaps" is that of whether or not we have the right symptomatologists to assess this illness and prescribe a course of action for going beyond it.

Conclusion

And so we come to the end of our endeavour. A convincing case has seemingly been made for art to be used as a means of diagnosing our present state as a society. Whether it is a satisfactory one or not is for the reader to decide.

With regards to our findings that were produced from an attempt to utilise art in the manner that we laid down, we can say the following: it is imperative to not get the order of events wrong. If cancerous nostalgia is indeed a social predicament, it is futile to point fingers at any one group or mechanism. Society as such is complicit. It isn't simple corporate greed that works us like mules or reduces art to formulaic regurgitation of what worked before; rather, these things occur because, on some level, we consent to them. As to how this comes about, how we come to desire the suffocation of our own life, alienation from our own passions and talents, is a matter for another day.

- I.S, 2025