Two-Dimensional Man
The Art of “Alegria” in the Age of Dysphoria
This past month, I participated in the great American tax filing ritual. For those yet to experience it, this humiliating procedure involves calculating how much money you owe your state and federal governments, both of whom are already in possession of this same information, yet would prefer that you personally sweat over the byzantine tax code, and potentially make a grievous error leading to fines or jail time. Understandably, third parties set up to help you with this process try to humanize it a little and diminish some of the berserker rage that can erupt while thusly engaged. The graphic style with which they do this is, however, increasingly despised. This begs the question: what system of values have we attributed to this style, to make it so worthy of hatred - and is this resistance to those values truly worthwhile?
Each successive step I took in the laborious process of filing my taxes online, I was greeted with glib encouragements like “you’re almost there!” Said encouragement was provided by cartoon images of some bizarre, humanoid species with quirky bodily distortions and implausible skin tones of vermillion and lavender matched against similarly vibrant backgrounds and objects that are not “true to size”. A couple variations of the style also seem to exist: one in which all the humanoid figures wear uniform smiles, much like Lego or Playmobil figurines used to, or in which their faces are blank featureless masks. The most successful exemplar of this - Buck Co.’s “Alegria”, or “Corporate Memphis” - is now a proprietary eponym within design culture, with the brand name standing in for an endlessly imitated design style of soft edges and radically limited perception of depth.
It is clear what the design team originating this style was attempting: a kind of final solution to the problem of modern identity politics. With naturally occurring human skin tones being replaced with implausible ones, and with all human body types being distorted in equally implausible ways, no one could reasonably claim about their lack of “representation” or the over-representation of some other privileged group. The ersatz-Cubist contortions sometimes displayed by the characters, along with the literal fluidity of their physical environment, and the uncanny sense that none of these characters ever experience any privacy, are nearly perfect visualizations of the worldview projected by tech behemoths Facebook and LinkedIn. An amorphous hyper-sociality is none-too-subtly depicted as a joyful experience; the literal lack of pictorial depth is like a grinning acknowledgement that a “mile wide and inch deep” approach to social organization benefits not just these companies, but “all of us.”
In this way, it is essentially Socialist Realism mapped onto the etherealized 21st century; morale-boosting affirmation for a time in which our consensus reality is so unstable that we no longer question the use of “up talking” to make imperative statements sound, like, questions? Like its spiritual ancestor, Alegria regularly depicts a joyful, un-reflective and collective participation in mundane tasks (like doing one’s taxes, natch) and combines that ebullience with said swathes of unnatural color palette to suggest confidence in a “brighter” near future. Sure, it has profound aesthetic differences from the classic examples of art-by-committee, to the point of outright inversion: the trope of square-jawed, hammer-swinging, revolutionary masculinity is traded out for a more feminine stereotype of coziness and “appreciating the little things”. Yet, in the background, both these styles have a similar telos: persuading their viewers that contribution to an impersonal, organizational goal is essential to personal happiness.
How Alegria has failed in this mission is, perhaps, more interesting than the story of why it has become universally adopted within corporate culture. At the very least, it is a reminder of how modern “organizational man” has become so demoralized that the sincerity of any outward happiness is always in doubt. (Some manifestations of this illness are actually perversely funny: see the autopsies on Walmart’s expansion into Germany, which partially attribute this to employees’ discomfort with having to smile at customers.) Granted, the omnipresence of mediocrity suffused with manufactured happiness is worth critiquing and pushing back against. The problem, however, is that those in a position to do so too often fall back on a competing form of banality: the romantic veneration of the abject and the damaged.
Immediately we should ask: can’t an art denuded of happiness also be one whose emotional content is falsified, or being used in the service of some exploitative social arrangement? Why do we assume that any artistic depiction of suffering must have come from authentic experience, whereas only optimism and naive whimsy can be faked? We can point fingers at the New Left for being some of the prime movers here, with the Marxian critique of thinkers like Marcuse contributing greatly to the belief that an authentic individuality has been repressed by a facile happiness of imposed, “false” satisfactions (to wit: “…loss of conscience due to the satisfactory liberties granted by an unfree society makes for a happy consciousness which facilitates acceptance of the misdeeds of this society.”)1
Indeed, one of the expected critiques of Algeria is that we don’t, in fact, hate “flat art”: we “hate capitalism” and “what it does to creativity.” (As I’m sure the author probably realizes, the history of “flat art” is brimful of avant-garde contributions from everyone to Marcel Duchamp to Vladimir Mayakovsky, with the latter, of course, being the Soviet Constructionist enemy of capitalism.) I would argue that hatred of capitalism, along with the assumption that consumer culture the preferred breeding ground for kitsch idiocy, are not really the origin of creative-minded people’s negative reactions to Alegria: these are, rather, symptoms of a more deeply rooted suspicion of happiness as inauthentic.
Anyone who has spent a day or two behind the scenes of the “Art World” has likely witnessed the “negativity bias” infecting its curatorial logic (to the point where we should wonder how much of its output reflects existing miseries, and how much of it is just birthing new horrors). However, blaming the contemporary art scene for being an extension of critical theory’s sanctified miserable-ism is still just scratching the surface. As Roger Scruton has argued, the entire “aesthetic attitude…is already a kind of mourning…It places a frame around its object and looks upon it as something spiritual, transfigured – and therefore dead”. Let’s follow this line of argument a little further:
The primary object of aesthetic experience, for Kant, was nature, and in the aestheticising of nature we glimpse the Romantic movement in its deepest impulse. Nature had ceased to be the unnoticed background to life, and become instead an object of concern. The eighteenth century identified nature through the picturesque – in other words, through its image in art. […] The search for natural beauty is at the same time an attempt to preserve the old way of life – the rooted, pious, unquestioning and obedient life – which Enlightenment inevitably destroys.2
Scruton contends also that the aesthetic impulse, thanks in great part to Romanticism, “took over from religious worship as the source of intrinsic values”. This goes some way towards explaining the intensity with which lovers of the melancholic, abject or even morbid defend this type of artwork against superficial products like Alegria and its offshoots, which must avoid more penetrating insights and definite statements if they wish to maintain their amorphous sensibility of “something for everybody”. The influence of Nietzsche still looms large: for those who accept his claim that the aesthetic is the only “true” dimension accessible to us, the aesthetic is seen as continually under siege by a sham creativity acting as a means towards an end (commercial or otherwise) rather than an end in itself.
As I hammer out these words, I admit that I would wholeheartedly choose Romantic weltschmerz [‘pain of the world’], or the Heian Japanese mono no aware [‘sadness of things’] over the utilitarian mood engineering represented by Alegria…if these were the only two levers available to pull. However, the ubiquity of corporatized “flat art” has maybe fooled too many into believing that there is some sort of stark, resolute division similar to the unbridgeable gulf between aesthetics and morality that Søren Kierkegaard - another theorist of the authentic - detailed in Either / Or. There can be a light that comes out of darkness, and a profundity birthed from silliness: as any Zen student knows, all phenomena arise dependently, and so the possibility of one mode of creativity flowing into another always exists.
So, art laden with melancholia and / or cruelty needs to be something more than just an opponent to the superficiality of “capitalism,” or the superficiality of modern social arrangements in general. Sure, as Adorno and company remind us, “perennial suffering” has a right to expression, yet the belief in the superior authenticity of “perennial suffering” has thrown open the palace gates for opportunists who merely tell us what we want to hear, and who exploit our Romantic nostalgia for lost innocence with just as much malevolent skill as those who use naive “flat art” to exploit our instincts for togetherness and likability.
At present, there is little evidence that the curatorial strategy of the official Art World will do much to limit such opportunism. A sort of “abjection-as-resistance” ideal has, ironically, settled into a tradition for those who would otherwise want to be seen as iconoclasts, and an increasing number of art shows have the same forensic solemnity as U.N. hearings on human rights violations. In this environment, “art-rocities” such as A Serbian Film - to provide just one example of an abusive work pitched as a profound “political allegory” - will multiply and intensify, counting on audiences’ faith that artful use of suffering will always entail something “transformative” and “critical,” and that being outraged or offended will jolt us into enlightened consciousness. Being forced to see ourselves “as we really are,” and to acknowledge that we can never again attain anything as worthwhile as that which is gone forever, will continue to be marketed as the most meaningful of aesthetic experiences.
Yes, there are effusions of expressive brilliance that do precisely that: it is difficult to argue for something like The Waste Land being excluded from the canon of cultural significance. Yet there need to be other criteria for meaningful aesthetic experience than just its authenticity: a work’s closeness to “reality,” or the “seriousness” of its subject matter, do not alone determine its depth. A work of acceptable depth requires a personal commitment to the work even if (or especially if) its popular acceptance is not a given. That commitment can be to a portrayal of absurdity, comical incongruity, and all variety of states having nothing to do with our current depressive reality, or with the vanished past - the knowledge of which may do little more than make the current reality more unbearable.
I’d argue that great art with “negative” themes earns that status for reasons more complex than the dark being a more resolutely meaningful place. Some “dark” forms, like the horror film or dystopian sci-fi, are more interesting now than at any time in their history: not because our current age is quantifiably more hopeless and monstrous than others, and thus more deserving of such art, but because these forms regularly use the mutability of the human essence as their subject matter. Darkness and morbidity become the framing device for thought experiments about reality’s malleability and the shaping of the spirit (in this sense, a film like the original Martyrs runs rings around A Serbian Film for the philosophical interrogation of unpleasantness).
Put a different way, the most lucid of these nightmares portray our relationship to nature and the self in continual flux - they show them as something more than what they now are. To use words once used to praise the “weird fiction” / horror author Clark Ashton Smith: an artist of the negative may be a “Prophet of Doom,” but “he is robed in hues of gorgeous purple and gold”.3 By not merely accepting the “way we really are” as a pale imitation of some previous incarnation, and refusing to base our acts of resistance upon the need to return to a past that is very possibly also a falsehood, we can somehow manage to craft beauty, or alluring novelty, even in works that illuminate the unhappy. Just as importantly, we can do likewise with works that are joyful.
Given all that has been said here, I feel confident enough to close out with a prediction: Alegria and friends will be utilized by the institutionally recognized artists of the future as a serious, critical and meaningful tool with which to express nostalgic longing for the world as it once was in the ‘20s. The cheap sentimentality that we now mock this style for will be seen as a sincere cri de couer for inclusivity and accessibility. Critics and curators alike will affirm its value as a window onto the Real that now eludes us in a world of even more ephemeral systems of control. International symposia will be held, the A.I. replacements for the ArtForum editorial staff will dedicate special issues to this phenomenon.
Until some unanticipated upheaval causes us to sicken of such stances, we will continue to witness whole cultural movements that view joyful expression as a provocative insult; as another symptom of a historically unprecedented level of social alienation. The corporate vision of “flat art” may indeed be proof of the disenchantment of the world via its commodification. But we already have the receipts for what happens when we hope to re-enchant and re-authenticate the fallen world through explosions of misery: we end up turning these qualities into cliches. We will have a gradually more difficult time trying to fight cliches like Alegria with an opposing set of cliches - and maybe we would be legitimately happier building on the rubble of the lost past, rather than trying to resurrect it.
Marcuse, H. (1991). One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Scruton, R. (2019). Modern Culture. Bloomsbury / Continuum: London / New York.
Hillman, AS. (1949). “The Lure of Clark Ashton Smith” (review of Genius Loci), Fantasy Review, February-March.