Really managed to crystallize a bunch of scattered ideas swirling around in my head about why art is so fucked up, and why people are so fucked up too I guess. The ideas in this short book are quite forcefully presented meditations on, like, "the Western soul" and other abstract philosophical entities , yet all ended up feeling instinctively true to me, in a 'when-you-see-it-you-can't-not-see it' sort of way. It's as if the inscrutable people we know of as art-lovers and artists have clumsily dropped their scripts and notes and now we can pick the mess up off the floor and read it all to figure out exactly what these guys are all about.

I'll do my best to summarize the thesis here as simply as I can:

At some point in the midst of the age of Enlightenment, thoughtful souls began to feel that there needed to be something in life to guide us beyond rationality and empiricism, yet few wanted to go back to the old religious ways. Art (with a capital A) was settled on as encapsulating what this supra-rational force should be.

Therefore, the production of Art was held to be desirable for its own sake. The idea was that the creation of beauty would in hope reflect images of a more desirable world, which would eventually guide us into bringing that world about.

This lead to a new, unspoken self-propagating ideology transmitted through works of Art, which preached that

1. The world as it is is ugly, flawed, and imperfect
2. To make the world a better place, art should be consumed and created
3. The pursuit of rational, utilitarian ends should be eschewed

The problem is that this idea just doesn't work - looking at beautiful pictures all day will not solve our pressing moral problems.

Rather than give up the fight, however, each successive generation of artists inevitably doubles down on their beliefs, leading to the whole history of modern art going deeper and deeper into the ugly, depressing, irrelevant, bizarre, etc. The previous generation of art didn't transform our forsaken world into an aesthetic utopia, therefore we need to go deeper into revealing the world itself as ugly and abhorrent, we need to go deeper into emphasizing the irrational... etc. Eventually leading to the baffling, ruinous state of contemporary art today.

This is an interesting thesis to me. It seems very intuitive to me when looking at the contemporary art scene that This Is Not How It Should Be, that there is a sort of natural organic impulse in the human system to create art, but today's artists have deviated from it drastically, so drastically that almost everything that comes out of their mouth when they try to talk about art seems wrong, as if they are approaching the problem entirely the wrong way...

This sense that we've left a healthy way of living and gone horribly wrong somehow naturally has us looking for a Fall, an erroneous historical decision to which we can give blame for the whole trajectory. It's easy to find these scapegoats - Marxism is a good one, non-representation is another, but what this book implies is that the Fall is synonymous with the invention of the concept Art itself. It truly is a Biblical narrative - it's man (as artist) becoming self-conscious which lead him to bite the apple of knowledge and be expelled from the garden.

This means that any artist who may dream of restoring Art to its former glory is in an entirely wrong place - looking to Art for salvation makes you the problem in the first place.