Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationssort; and he thinks of discovering artistic wonders outside his idealworld of sound as little as he expects great writers still to emergefrom our exhausted and colourless languages. Rather than givingear to any kind of vain consolation, he can endure to direct his profoundly dissatisfied gaze upon our modern world: let him becomefull of bitterness and hatred if his heart is not warm enough for pity!Even malice and mockery is better than that he should, in the mannerof our 'friendsof art', give himself over to fraudulent selfcontentmentand quiet dipsomania! But even if he can do more thandeny and mock, ifhe can love, pity and assist, he must nonetheless atfirst deny, so as to create a pathway fo r his helpful soul. If music isone day to move many men to piety for music and to acquaint themwith its highest objectives, an end must first be made to all pleasureseekingtraffic with so sacred an art; the fo undation upon which ourartistic entertainments, theatre, museums, concert societies rest,namely the aforesaid 'friend of art' , must be placed under an interdict;the public judgment which lays such peculiar stress on cultivatingthis species of friendship fo r art must be l>eaten from the field by abetter judgment. In the meantime we must count even the declaredenemy of art as a real and useful ally, since that of which he hasdeclared himself an enemy is precisely art as the 'friend of art'understands it: for he knows no other! Let him by all means call thefriend of art to account for the senseless squandering of money onthe construction of his theatres and public monuments, the engagementof his 'celebrated' singers and actors, the maintenance of hiswholly unproductive art-schools and picture-galleries: not to speak. of all the effort, time and money thrown away in every household oninstruction in supposed 'artistic pursuits'. Here there is no hungerand no satiety, but only an insipid pretence of both designed to misleadthe judgment of others; or, even worse, if art is taken relativelyseriously one demands of it the engendering of hunger and desireand discovers its task to lie precisely in this artificially engenderedexcitement. As though one feared perishing through one's own selfdisgustand dullness, one calls up every evil demon so as to be drivenlike a deer by these hunters: one thirsts for suffering, anger, passion,sudden terror, breathless tension, and calls upon the artist as the onewho can conjure up this spectral chase. Within the spiritual. "household of our cultivated people art is now a wholly spurious or ashameful, ignominious need, either nothing or something malign.The better and rarer kind of artist is as though caught up in abewildering dream so as not to see all this, and he hesitantly repeats218