The Ebony Tower

Perhaps it was happening in the other arts .. in writing, music. ______ did not know. All he felt was a distress, a nausea at his own. Castration. The triumph of the eunuch. He saw, how well he saw behind the clumsiness of the old man..s attack; that sneer at Guernica. Turning away from nature and reality had atrociously distorted the relationship between painter and audience; now one painted for intellects and theorists. Not people; and worst of all, not for oneself. Of course, it paid dividends, in economic and vogue terms, but what had really been set up by this jettisoning of the human body and its natural physical perceptions was a vicious spiral, a vortex, a drain to nothingness, to a painter and critic agreed on only one thing: that only they exist and have value. A good gravestone; for all the scum who didn..t care a damn.
One sheltered behind notions of staying ..open.. to contemporary currents; forgetting the enormously increased velocity of progress and acceptance, how quickly now the avant-garde became art pompier; the daring, platitudinous. It was not just his own brand of abstraction that was at fault, but the whole headlong post-war chain to the present. But such rootlessness, orbiting in frozen outer space, cannot have been meant. They were lemmings, at the mercy of a suicidal drive, seeking Lebensraum in an arctic sea; in a bottomless night, blind to everything but their own illusion.
The ebony tower.

(The Ebony Tower; John Fowles; November 1974)