The Serious Artist

A translation of Ezra Pound

Marlene Dumas, The Baby (1985)

I’m writing a book on the Muses, a remystification of the arts, that expands on this essay. It will be published by Census Press in 2025.

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It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But the wisdom of the present is freedom from history. For the living to cultivate their discernment would be needless: Art is good when it makes us feel good in ourselves and about our opinions. Still, in the age of Houellebecq as in the age of Woolf, we are asked what position the arts are to hold in the ideal republic, whatever that may be. And it is obviously the opinion of many people, the age’s foremost Shakespeareans among them, that the slop on streaming platforms is somehow related to art.

The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of the human, the immaterial human, the human considered as a thinking and social and sentient creature. It is from the arts that we discover what sort of animal humans are. That the premier question for the arts, “What are we?,” has been superseded by “Who am I?,” an infinitely less compelling question of the self, is the nub of our waywardness.

This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports.

If an artist falsifies his reports as to the nature of the human, as to his own nature, as to the nature of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that, or the other, of the gods, if the gods exist, of the life force, loss, delusion, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, perception, of the force with which he believes this, that, or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or triumphs; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of his class, to the conveniences of a set of wildly contingent social values, then the artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness or ignorance, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence.

It takes a great deal of typing to convince a layman that bad art is “immoral.” And that good art, however “immoral” it is, is wholly a thing of virtue. Purely and simply that good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness. Not to virtual problems. Not for the artist to be seen witnessing. Not witness borne within pseudoreality. I mean art that is the most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness. You can be wholly a liar in pretending that the particular vagueness was precise in its outline.

To take three pages to say nothing, to say clever waffle, is not style, in the serious sense of that word. Ornamentation, decoration, are play upon a surface. Aesthetics are concerned with depths.

By precision I mean maximum efficiency of expression, I mean that the artist has expressed something in such a way that one cannot resay it more effectively. I also mean something associated with discovery—either of life itself or of the means of expression. Much great art of the previous century alienates those unwilling to acquire a sense of how the means of expression have in the last hundred years exploded. Not all new means however entail discovery. Very rarely is expression significant.

Under our liberal order, we accept as good and proper the separation of church and state. Those autonomous realms of the human experience are kept, as much as is possible, from meddling one with the other. Why then should the arts, another wholly sovereign realm, be brought under the jurisdiction of whatever the reigning political philosophy? Why the arts’ forced alignment with secular humanism? The principles by which an ideal society may be run cannot be, are not, the same principles governing art.

Our culture’s humanistic aspect, necessary perhaps for our living peaceably, certainly necessary for our climate of tolerance, meanwhile permits art’s degradation. An overbearing humanism cares more for whether the aspiring artist is furnished with state resources than for the substance of his art.

A fatal tolerance of mediocrity has many causes, among them the employment of a majority of artists in the apparent role of educating the next generation in their form. These artist-teachers, in seeking only to nurture within their protégés the speck of the relative good, forgive the blindingly pervasive bad. Their generosity of instruction dims their judgment, numbs them to the derivative, so that they themselves, unsuspecting, produce art that cannot be other than complacent. The teaching poet’s audience is shrunk down to the schoolroom, the poem to an object for supervised discussion among fee-paying youths.

Young artists should not be encouraged. Their encouragement yields only misery and inferior products.

That art is a civilizing force is obvious. How it is so is not. When Sidney wrote of “the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action,” and of poetry as the best subject for such learning, he could only have hoped so many nonreaders of his four centuries hence would be in agreement. Plainly Sidney was mistaken, and it must fall to historians working comparatively across the wide ranging arts, of music and architecture, painting and poesy, across the great sweep of centuries and cultures, not bound within their quibbling disciplines, to expound for us how it is art constitutes civilization.  

As there are in medicine the art of diagnosis and the art of cure, so in the particular arts, literary and performing and visual, there is the art of diagnosis and the art of cure. We may call one the cult of ugliness and the other the cult of beauty.

The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air, and the sea, and high-quality animal protein and good sex. The cult of ugliness, Coetzee, Michaux, Tamura Ryuichi, Celan, are diagnosis. Marlene Dumas is diagnosis.

Beauty in art reminds one what is worthwhile. I am not now speaking of shams. I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, by either trad or lib, not telling people that beauty is the proper and respectable thing. I mean beauty.

Whether the institutions held in esteem across generations, whomever may constitute those institutions in any moment, deserve respect in the present is an issue the serious artist can no longer refuse to countenance.

Art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything.

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don’t like. You are a fool to read the classics or your contemporaries because others do and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good taste if you haven’t naturally got it. If there is one place where it is idiotic to sham, that place is before a work of art. Also you are a fool not to have an open mind, not to see how vital is the separation of high and low, not to be eager to enjoy something you might enjoy but don’t know how to.

We have no want of a beyond. “That green thrust is itself the divine event, the fruit of the marriage at Eleusis.”

Francisco Goya, Atropos (The Fates) (1819–23)

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On the latest episode of the Manifesto! podcast, I join Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel to discuss Ezra Pound’s 1913 essay “The Serious Artist” and Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, a new book of verse that should send painters to their watercolours, give rise to great series of huge works on paper. Listen here.