Jordan Peterson Why You Need Art in Your Life

"Buy a damn piece of art! Find 1 that speaks to you!"

So sayeth Jordan Peterson, the psychologist-turned-celebrity philosopher-turned Mephistopheles of the Manosphere (Kanye is a fan), in one of his YouTube lectures on art. Last weekend, theNew York Times's peek into the Peterson phenomenon besides offered a look at the guru's own collecting taste: He is, unexpectedly, a connoisseur of Socialist Realism. (If you desire a taste of his collection, Toronto'south Leonardo Galleries offers a option online.)

Peterson's almost famous mantra is "make clean your room, bucko." For lost young men feeling that they lack prospects or a place, he offers tough beloved, blaming a gynocratic, PC society that has taught them non to value their natural drive for mastery over the world around them.

As it turns out, there'due south an aesthetic theory nested in hither equally well: "it'southward as well non that yous clean it up, it's that you brand it beautiful—if you lot have just made 1 matter cute, you have established a relationship with beauty," Peterson has explained. His ain personal quest to "establish a relationship with dazzler" has involved decorating his own habitation floor-to-ceiling with Soviet-era propaganda.

In matters of art appreciation, Peterson otherwise has essentially normie conservative taste that sounds like old-school Romanticism. He is fond of portentous generalities like "artists articulate the unknown," etc.

In fine art, his bête noire is postmodernism, which he declares "equally destructive in all realms, especially when centrolineal with neo-Marxism." It's not 100 percent clear what he means, but I presume the target is political installation art and conceptualism, because what he rails against especially is a civilization "driven by revenge and resentment" and a "hatred of quality and qualitative distinctions," abandoning Homo's primordial quest for college dazzler.

As a rule, generalizing about an undefined "postmodernism"—let alone postmodernism "in all realms!"—is lazy. The term covers diverse and mutually contradictory bodies of thought.

But stride back for a 2nd: the "postmodern" insight that perceptions of beauty are culturally constructed and therefore benefit from reflection on the appropriate standard of value really makes a lot more than intuitive sense than Peterson's notion of some embattled primal, "transcendent" universal standard. And it actually expands, rather than contracts, the "qualitative distinctions" that 1 is able to brand—one can, for instance, recognize that the qualities that make a good hip-hop verse are dissimilar from the qualities that make a skilful lyric poem, while still liking examples of both.

The funny thing is, Peterson's own sense of taste in art is the best example of this postmodern understanding of creative value!

Why does he decorate his firm with Soviet propaganda? What pleasure does it give him?

Offset, he says he loves the craft, which he sees as triumphing over the propaganda. But his appreciation is too concept-based: He also likes it, contradictorily, as negative propaganda. It is "a constant reminder," the NYT relays, "of atrocities and oppression." (Likewise, he loves the First World irony of the fact that he purchased these Communist castoffs on capitalist eBay. The first particular he collected was not a painting, but a silk flag made to commemorate a Soviet Five Yr Programme.)

Then the pleasures Peterson gets from his art collection are really not really reducible to their function in "articulating the unknown." They are, yous might say, rooted in a very postmodern aesthetic of "revenge and resentment," in his case towards the looming dangers of leftwing totalitarianism.

Is his affection for surrounding himself with this accumulation of propaganda and so distinct from the satisfaction derived from political installation or conceptual art of any kind? Equally a genre of artful gesture and as a rhetorical intervention, information technology mirrors the kind of aggregating of damning artifacts as evidence that i might have constitute—though with a very different target—at the recent "post-colonial" documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

The Parthenon of Books past Marta Minujin on documenta 14'south opening night. The structure is clad with books that have been banned in countries around the world. Photo past Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images.

The Peterson Collection shows that the guy may be a reactionary in content, but he's a postmodernist in course.

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Source: https://news.artnet.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-art-1291505

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