Art Movement as Cult. Art Movement as paramilitary

He's right about the power of groups and the importance of self sacrifice. There needs to be new art movements. And they need to look like cults. They need to look like paramilitaries. We need new utopianisms. and we need people willing to give everything to create them.

Art cults need art cult leaders, and new shiny isms need star players to represent the isms. There's certainly an interesting mystique to doing artwork anomalously (as a group or as an individual), but that also leads down a path where eventually one would feel ashamed at publicly identifying oneself as an (individual) artist.. fuck that.

Do they need -cult leaders- or do they need a membership that understands the power of cults?

It's a metamodernist position. You can't overturn the facts of the postmodern situation, but you can look to the modern epoch for examples of disruptive power wielded by small disciplined groups.

One of the means of organising those is dedication to a leader. Another is dedication to a vision. Whatever it is it needs to be able to be able to survive the fact we live in an incredibly democratic time. where everything you create is subjected to instant feedback whether you want it or not (and due to the all prevailing nature of this phenomenon, even no feedback is a form of feedback).

How can the individual withstand this pressure? especially when coupled with the necessity of making a living, even before the slightly more subjective problems of 'success' and feeling like you are making a contribution.

Part of the strength of the cult is offering a closed society, in which the standards of achievement can be set within the group. Part of the strength of the paramilitary is in openly courting conflict, upsetting the rules that govern the current dynamics of social interaction and the logic of creativity that is dominant in late capitalism (i.e. very risk averse, and don't be fooled, being obtuse is as much of a risk minimisation strategy as being safe and popular. I think we're all painfully aware of just how conservative society is.)

So the vision needs to be something that can withstand being violently rejected by wider society, it also needs to be something that can withstand the breakup of the movement that spawned it, something that members can carry forward even when isolated. The conventional ways to do this are to couch it in some wider tradition (so that if an isolated member is called to labour alone they can contextualise their role within its history and remain an active producer of creative output for the tradition, This is also useful in the context of a group/movement to encourage participants to pool their energies in order to attempt ambitious "landmark" projects beyond the reach of an individual artist) or within a reading of the direction society is heading (this has the advantage of being more 'immediate' to a wider variety of people, especially if it coincides with a zeitgeist or popular enthusiasm, the trade off being that it's more vulnerable to setbacks and loss of momentum due to factors outside the movements control i.e. changes in the world situation). The 'paramilitary' approach to this would be an aggressive cultivation of 'the propaganda of the deed', a call for members to undertake progressively brasher and more confrontational acts, to the point of total disregard comfort, safety and security.

With that said I don't think anonymity is necessary and it may not even be desirable, there's more to self-sacrifice than foregoing recognition.