Aesthetic Nihilism

aesthetic nihilism. like, when you rip something apart or share the angst and call it art. a reaction to all things you don’t like, don’t want near you, things that call up memories of ugly things that happened in your past. things that when you seek to explain them feel like a corkscrew being wound slowly into your eye. or ear. a fashionable statement like punk, or neo-punk. anti-establishment almost to the extreme. almost, because it draws the line somewhere between disturbed and deranged. skinheads aren’t aesthetic nihilists. there’s no aesthetic there. just prejudice and hate in a tribal unification kind of way. the aesthetics aren’t there when creative expression doesn’t exist to offer insight. rather, aesthetic nihilism exists when the point of what you’re saying, doing, painting, playing, is in doing it, capturing a moment’s angst like a balance sheet captures the state of a business at a particular point in time, adding depth and understanding to the experience. the seattle sound, CBGBs, the velvet underground, funk, rap, goth, francis bacon paintings … all of them symbolic of the gut-twisting way things are, or appear to be in one's personal vision, versus the ‘60s rebellion that wrote, spoke and sang of what could be. what will be will be different than what is, simply because we are made to see it for what it is, and the knowledge that what is isn't always going to be pretty. knowing that, and understanding that much of existence appears to be or in fact is futile, leaves us facing the choice to end it or go on. thus, the aesthetic, the expression that lays it out; the nihilism is that what is laid out before us, while worthy of examination, may not be worth much more than that.