that’s a passage from Benjamin Barber’s essay in salmagundi called the price of irony (via). it’s an interesting piece which, admittedly, resonates with sentiment i feel sympathetic toward. technically it’s focussed on martin mcdonagh’s new play the pillowman but it’s laced heavily with damning pronouncements on irony in the arts in general.

for instance:

Irony is the postmodern form of conspicuous self-consciousness and suits our era’s puerility – its fey aestheticism and political cynicism — to a tee. It is complacency’s rationalization, disengagement’s excuse, the alienated spectator’s self-justification. The ironic bystander (the phrase is redundant) is the citizen’s jeering nemesis and the poet’s wily shadow trying to make sure that truth and beauty and goodness, those stalwarts of the world before it was disenchanted, do not re-infect the post-modern’s cool voice with hot earnestness. Or make us think too hard or feel too keenly.

and

irony is bad for art — but then what’s art? asks the ironist artfully. It’s bad for audiences — but then who cares? asks the careless spectator. And it’s bad for civility in both the civilizational and civic senses – but then are not civilization and the civic sensibility two of the ironist’s more fetching targets? ask the complacent aesthetes who pass as artists in the age of irony.

and

Irony asks nothing of us. In letting itself off the hook, it lets us off the hook. We don’t just laugh at the cruel and the bizarre – which might leave us feeling some culpability even as we laugh – we laugh at ourselves laughing. We do not merely distance ourselves from our terrors for reasons of psychic survival, we congratulate ourselves on our distancing.

and

Irony is liberation on the cheap; irresponsibility without regret. Puritanism may be too hard to bear; skepticism may be the price demanded by reason; but irony is all too easy. No wonder our infantilizing, attention-deficit, lazy, consumerist times are in love with it. The Puritans make work of play, moderns make play of work, but ironists make nonsense of work and play, seriousness and fun. To be too serious may at times be a sin; and to laugh too much at seriousness may be a greater one. But the ironist laughs at those who laugh at seriousness, somehow thinking this will enable them to recover seriousness without embracing its vices as seen by those who mock it.

Barber is obviously a man whose tired of the whole empty charade. in cultural terms, and in the visual arts most particularly, i’m sympathetic. you might not know it judging wholly by the goings-on here at the nonist. i am certainly not above dabbling in the ironic or post-modern here, but i do so, in this context, without guilt, because as i’ve said i do not consider this form to be “art” at all, but an avenue for experimentation and play. what you will most likely never see, however, is a physical piece of “ironic” art with my signature on it. (if i keep blogging you may never see a piece of physical art with my signature on it of any kind ever again… but that’s another fish.) a “post-modern” story or book? sure the tropes have their uses. and actually, in a way, it’s hard to avoid. the language of deconstruction is so prevalent stylistically that it seeps in as an influence. anyhow, in the broader sense, the “infinity-mirror” of irony is pretty tiresome at this point in my opinion.

then again it’s a tricky subject. there are many incarnations of irony as it has been popularly understood. so i suppose when we huff and say, “i am so tired of all the irony!” we’d do well to be specific. are we tired of socratic irony? or kierkegaard’s version of socratic irony? are we sick of romantic irony? or of self-irony? or is it just the brooklyn, mustachioed, koons’ type of irony? likewise the term itself is so commonly misused that the whole conversation is easily skewed and misunderstood.

further thoughts on the subject from others:

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument. -samuel butler.

The postmodern sensibility begins with Warhol, although it has a secret history that runs back not only to Duchamp, but to Kierkegaard’s reading of Socrates. While irony is part of a great tradition in the west, it is only after Warhol that one realizes that irony is not the preserve of a few quick witted thinkers or artists. The subtle and pervasive weaving of the media vectors of third nature into every and any convention or situation makes irony a fact of everyday life. Irony is everywhere, already. One can’t free oneself from convention when irony itself has become the convention.

As Catharine Lumby writes: ‘What if the role of the artist and the status of the art object were so uncertain that there was no longer a status quo to disrupt? Indeed, where would the possibility for ironic gesture lie when irony had become the status quo? In such a situation, irony might be said to have had its revenge—to turn on those who wield it—and collapse into complacency.’ What lies at the end of this thought is a certain vertigo: the artist or the writer might be the object, not the subject of the creative act. ‘The makers are no longer in control of the ironic possibilities. Rather, it is the objects themselves which mock us for our attempt to fix their aesthetic meaning and value.’ - from the virtual republic’s A Secret History of Sydney Postmodernism.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. - Kierkegaard.

Irony in art is totally dishonest. It’s a very ugly thing. It just cuts into the emotional experience of it and simply destroys the energy. Irony in art is like a sideways sneer: it’s a form of yobbishness, or snobbishness, very much to do with the pathetic yob culture which is now “in”. Mainstream artists are cowards; it’s all fashion. Gavin Turk and the rest - they are New Romantic, not punk rock. They are fashion: that’s why their work is so vacuous. They all rely on ideas, and artists simply don’t have good ideas. -billy childish (formerly of stuckist affiliation) interviewed here.

Pathos has not always succeeded in overcoming irony. Inspiration, by its very nature, can flow along a number of different channels. These channels may either issue from or merge into one stream. Perhaps art lies in the land between two channels. Hegel spoke of the aesthetic significance of irony in art. But then Hegel was engaged at the time in a polemic against Schlegel, and for the latter irony was the highest principle in art. Irony isn’t always self-destructive. It is rather close to the comic. Irony does not have to affirm itself.  It need not be an end in itself, for its own sake. An artist who laughs up his sleeve cannot create a great work of art, that is, a work that moves us deeply. -viktor shklovsky, from on einstein.

The reason that art in the postmodern, existential world has reached something of a cul-de-sac is not that art itself is exhausted, but that the existential worldview is. Just as rational modernity previously exhausted its forms and gave way to a-perspectival postmodernity, so now the postmodern itself is on a morbid deathwatch, with nothing but infinitely mirrored irony to hold its hand, casting flowers where they will not be missed. The skull of postmodernity grins on the near horizon, and in the meantime, we are between two worldviews, one slowly dying, one not yet born. -Ken Wilber, from the irony and the ecstasy.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive. -Robert A. Heinlein.

here is some further reading on the subject if it interests you-

the dictionary of the history of ideas page.

the final irony.

irony and what it isn’t.

irony and the historical.

irony, nostalgia, and the postmodern.

irony arrows / eros.

i, myself, am comically earnest in the flesh, as most of my friends will likely tell you, and though i’d have loved to have written extensive commentary on this subject, i am something else in addition to earnest; i am lazy. so the links will have to do for now.