This post is about despair. Carles, as often is his wont, deploys a Straussian strategy of deception to placate less-engaged readers of his work, and supplies an "explanation" that merely serves as a sop, a tub to distract his less acute followers: "This is a blog post about generating a relevant discussion about independent artist medical insurance, artist depression, substance abuse, enablers, and the rise of xtreme sports in the 21st century." But as careful attention shows, that is hardly what Carles is concerned with in this particular philosophical investigation.
Instead, Carles is concerned with the Kierkegaardian question of a faith-based ethical imperative. Structurally and metaphorically, the question Carles asks -- "Do u think festivals/promoters/miscellaneous altbusiness ventures should make performing artists sign some sort of ‘contract’ banning their participation in xtreme activities?" -- both mirrors and interrogates the question Kierkegaard asked in Fear and Trembling, namely, the question of whether Abraham was correct in offering his son to sacrifice in the full horrific comprehension of the apparently meaningless consequences.
The commercial apparatus that currently cocoons artists doesn't protect artists from the fundamental ethical dilemmas. They can't give over their creative impulse to the insurance imperatives of those that have arranged to exploit their efforts in the marketplace. At best this would provide an excuse for uninspired pseudo-artistic work in which the artist has failed to engage entirely with his muse. It would, as Carles cleverly intimates, forbid the artist from "xtreme activities" -- from the peak states that differentiate the artist from the ordinary person and makes their praxis aesthetically valuable.
Once the capitalist alibi is dispensed with, we are left with artists confronting the dangers inherent in their own creativity, the praxis which may destroy them in its struggle to manifest itself materially. An artist must decide whether their work deserves the faith required to risk its creation, since the act of creation may annihilate the artist herself, not least because the appreciation of the beholders becomes psychically overwhelming. As Carles notes, "I feel like so many people out there are enabling people to ‘kill themselves’, kinda like the Michael Jacksons."
He suggests that a jaded populace has led to a debased aesthetics, a glorification of the more self-destructive artistic practices: "Xtreme, deadly activities will be branded as ‘kewl’, and a person will keep doing xtremer things, even if it means they are killing themselves’." This is ultimately, as he terms it, "xtreme gravedigging," not autonomous artistic practice that makes for the development of the Self, in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term. In fact, it is a ramification of the despair that sets the individual against the divine; the individual that prefers his own extremity in sinfulness or unredeemability rejects the redemption that is freely available from the divine source of all authentic creativity. The artist enthralled by the extreme is not merely the sad plaything of the marketplace and its fickle demands, but also is doomed to fail to transcend the either/or and reconcile himself with the cosmos. No amount of "xtreme reading existential literature," as Carles shows us through his caption for a photograph of the particular artist he uses as an example here, can rectify this failure. It is not enough to read Being and Nothingness; it is not enough to live up to commercial expectations or sufficiently insure yourself against future dangers. One must commit to faith itself, independent of any imagined payout.
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