Pseudery

I'm reading a philosophical book, Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (in translation): a sarcastic, rambling, unfinished novel about Viennese society immediately before the first World War. Musil had a sharp eye for pretentiousness, what Chris calls pseudery. Musil's (anti)hero, Ulrich, is a man who tries very hard to understand what makes his contemporaries tick, but finds it impossible to enthuse about their phony way of thinking and living. He simply can't suspend his cynicism and join in.

My generation has not always made me glad to be part of it, either. I nearly always felt like a fish out of water in the Sixties / Seventies and after visiting the Pop Life exhibition at the National Gallery last week, I'm once again feeling alienated from the sick society of those days, represented here by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons et al. It's not so much their attempts to jolt the Establishment from its complacency with disrespectful images—the banality, the psychodelic patterns in shocking pink, the anaphrodisiac pornography—that disgusts me, but the vacant look on the faces of these artists or their "models". The pop climate was supposed to be so liberating, such fun; I just found / find it claustrophobic. So does Chris. We breathed again when we got out of there, climbing the stairs to pay our respects to Hans Baldung Grien's Eve and Cranach's Venus. Now there, in 16th century Germany, was pornography of quite a different calibre.