Freud and the avant garde

Take Freud’s famous comment about a group of avant-garde artists: ‘Meaning is but little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given over to the Pleasure Principle.’ One way of making sense of this is to suppose some failure of sublimation because these artists had got stuck at a preliminary stage of narcissistic and hedonistic pleasure and had not done the transformative work necessary for a ‘proper’ work of art. Staying with this example, we can infer that for Freud successful sublimation was intimately connected with a process of conventional refinement. But when the gap between immediate pleasure-yield, lusty curiosity, transformation and interest begins to close, as it does in many forms of modern art, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out a conventional model for the sublimatory process: indeed it was one of the Surrealists’ tactics to aim at works of art that were anti-sublimatory in their effect.