All art will be forgiven, except against Hallelujah! I thought this a few months ago looking at a painting. I can't remember what it was: it could be something by Graham Sutherland, Picasso or van Gogh. Much earlier the same thought struck me when reading a poem: All literature will be forgiven, except against Hallelujah!
When, a year or two ago, a friend of mine posted somewhere a painting by Basquiat, I felt immediate repulsion and, for a brief moment, was ready to condemn the art. Then I calmed down and realised the fallacy of my naïve – but noble – gripe: just because the content is against Hallelujah!, it doesn’t mean that the work is against it. Obviously, a work of art or literature does not have to offer or even hint at a solution; it doesn’t have to make an attempt at a diagnosis, not to mention suggest the correct one (which used to be the threshold of my approval) - it is enough if it conscientiously details the picture.
In the prologue of Une saison en enfer (which I’m reading by a pretty coincidence), Arthur Rimbaud explains this with startling clarity befitting a Seer:
[…] cher Satan, je vous en conjure, une prunelle moins irritée ! et en attendant les quelques petites lâchetés en retard, vous qui aimez dans l'écrivain l'absence des facultés descriptives ou instructives, je vous détache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damné.
( […] sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned*.)
*Translated by A. S. Kline
