Month: March 2025

A few years ago, the various authors associated with this website ran an online book club, which lasted for a couple of years.  Back in August 2021, we read Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher, an English author whose work ranges in style from academic aesthetic theory to popular commentary on the contemporary film and music scene, and who acquired a significant admiring readership among a subset of those who follow cultural criticism.  Fisher committed suicide in 2017 after suffering from depression for some years.  The bleak view of the world he presented in his work suggests that his decision to kill himself might in part have been to do with his discomfort at the many negative features of modern life he described, and not just the specific circumstances in which his own life was lived. 

The opening chapter of Capitalist Realism is titled, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.  It is a memorable statement, and it has achieved something of an iconic status within contemporary left-wing aesthetics of which Fisher was once an active participant.  However, it is not an idea that we encounter in the writings of the leading theoreticians of Marxist influenced aesthetics – Georg Lukács or Bertold Brecht, for example – who still believed in the possibility of a much better world, even if they became sceptical about its imminent arrival.  As the influence of Marxism on contemporary social theory has diminished, so too pessimism about alternatives to capitalism has flourished.  Post-modernism has mostly replaced hope with cynicism.

Continue reading “Lack of imagination”

Around six hundred years ago, the Florentine sculptor Donatello made a marble statue, almost two meters tall, of the Jewish prophet Habakkuk.  The statue was commissioned for a niche on the Campanile which stands adjacent to the Duomo in the centre of Florence.   Habakkuk’s large, distinctive bald head looked down on the people below with a stern gaze and disconcerting intensity.  As the authors of my history of Florentine art note, not even the enormous drapery folds, falling with such energy and grandness of scale, distract attention from the head of this prophetic orator, who appears to serve as conduit between the unfathomable and the human.  He looks a true prophet and there appears nothing ‘minor’ about his strength of his thoughts or character.

A century later, in the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari told a story that while Donatello was making this statue he became so affected by its likeness to life that he used to curse it, saying, Speak, damn you, speak!  Today, I suspect this behaviour is more likely to be read as a sign of Donatello’s eccentricity than his artistic genius, for we would think it implausible that he might seriously have believed that the stone figure he was carving could ever talk back to him, however impressive his achievement.  However, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl made an interesting observation about this story, drawing attention to the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which includes God’s rebuke to those who worship idols: Woe to him who says to wood, “Come to life!”, Or to lifeless stone, “Wake up!” (Habakkuk 2: 19).  Has Vasari conflated the sculptor’s behaviour towards the statue with the warning against sin given by the prophet on whom the statue is based?  Alternatively, as Schjeldahl suggests, is there a more intriguing explanation, namely that Donatello, an artist of unfathomable intelligence, was inspired, or somehow driven, to play out in stone a spiritual danger intrinsic to art.

Continue reading “Talking statues”