6 Quotes by Sohrab Ahmari

I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or 'limiting' can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.

Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today’s identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.

How could I permit my conversion to be reduced to politics and identity, when in fact it had been sparked by the opposite idea: that there is such a thing as truth, truth that is eternal and universal and isn’t circumscribed by politics, history, genetics, language, geography, or identity?

What unites the identitarians who lord over the art world is the belief that art is primarily, even solely, a political enterprise. That was also the premise of Socialist Realism, the theory and style of art promoted in the former Soviet Union. One could fairly contend that identitarian art is something like our era’s version of Socialist Realism.

The general public long ago stopped looking for beauty in high culture. But it still has TV and the movies... you are far more likely to find genuinely mesmerising images and real beauty in big-budget Hollywood movies – think of, say, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar or his Dark Knight Trilogy – than in any European art-house.

This last is identitarian art’s greatest injustice against the culture: since social power dynamics and collective identity are all that such art knows and cares about, its practitioners can’t grapple with individuality, with things of the soul, with the inner life – the very things that draw most of us to art in the first place.