August 2, 2025, Stefan Ruitenbeek
So what is this ennobling portraiture?
Ennobling portraiture is built on a realistic view of power, and it takes us out of the bog of liberal-elite art.
Currently, the world is stuck with art that sees power in simplistic, opportunistic terms: powerful people are inherently evil; ressentiment, Marxism and slave morality rule, and so forth. It claims complete autonomy for the artist, as though the artist speaks to the world from some a priori elevated position, and cannibalises the status that art has historically gained in Western culture. This mode is built on the false premise that such autonomy exists as an absolute category. In reality, autonomy is always contingent, always embedded in power. This fake autonomy is sustained by the decentralized oligarchy that buys and sells at Art Basel, propped up by liberal institutions, state-funded museums, commercial galleries, NGOs, and global development programs. This is the art of the liberal elite. It holds the highest financial and symbolic value in the art world today, though its value is now decling, which may be telling. (Watch KIRAC episode 20 if you want to understand more about this.)
Some people on the right try to copy paste aristocratic forms into the present, which results in reactionary and conservative art. I don’t believe in this. At best, it becomes propaganda for some authoritarian power that will eat itself, because it lacks curiosity and jest. It mimics the forms of strength but not the spirit. It looks upward but sees nothing new. It claims order, hierarchy, and tradition, but without vision, without danger, without play. In the end, it retreats into style and resentment. More nostalgia than power.
The question is: how do you build an artform for this time, an artform that engages with the power of this time? How can we use today’s metaphysical, political, and technological transformative abundance to make great art and create a strong culture that not only produces more and generates greater wealth and possibility, but also carries a vertical, elevated orientation between rulers and ruled? Something that sublimates the tension between them and at the same time directs it toward beauty.
Here are two key axioms to do this, which we are developing and testing in our films. That is also why we speak of artistic technology. Art is something that should become better over time, not worse.
- The artist, even a genius, does not define the metaphysics the work responds to. The work reflects those who shape the world and the goals, often metaphysical or religious, that drive them. The artist’s task is to master the means to portray beliefs and those who embody them today.
- It is a duty. Leaders must allow themselves to be portrayed. It is their way of giving something of themselves, of lifting the cynical tension between themselves and the public. And when they do, a weight falls from their shoulders. When a ruler commissions a work, he gives something of himself. Offered to those already caught in the pull of his capital. Not out of fear. Not to distract. But: I want this made. It carries my need. My longing for something greater. A piece of sky, shared with those who live beneath it.
If you need historical examples, Shakespeare is a great one of course. But when looking at his work, one should not imitate its superficial formalities or adopt its historically snobbish affections. Instead, one should look deeper at the underlying structures.
Nietzsche is by far the best thinker for art. Nietzsche developed an artist’s metaphysics. Introduced in the preface to The Birth of Tragedy, explored deeply in The Gay Science.
Artists need allies in today’s political spectrum to make this happen. Curtis Yarvin is compatible in the sense that he is similarly occupied with the difference between the appearance of power and objective power. He focuses on political reality, rather than artistic metaphysics, but those two are part of the same game. The following excerpt is from an interview he gave:
CURTIS YARVIN: The formal legal reality of power and the objective reality of power have become diverged. That’s very common historically. The Emperor of Japan has not been the Emperor of Japan for a thousand years.
INTERVIEWER: Why is this a problem, and why would formalizing the distribution of power be so good?
CURTIS YARVIN: The main benefit for the powerful of this divergence between appearance and reality is that when the appearance is powerless and basically symbolic, then the reality is unaccountable. Because no one thinks of it as an organ with power. And this is especially effective if it’s decentralized, like any oligarchy.
I see art as an invitation to (shadow) kings to step into the light and, in the process, edify themselves and become accountable rulers. Our film The Goat is a first dramatized exploration of how this could work today. There is a lot of farce in that film, but at the same time it is a serious proposal.
Art stands between the rulers and the ruled. It plays the fool. This fool role is fundamental. Shakespeare is also a fool, it is not just about literal jesters at court. Art is an intersubjective, playful interface that allows both ruler and ruled to step into each other’s shoes. It is inherently humanistic, but not in the sense of slave morality. This is the enobling portraiture we are developing.
(Some might ask if this relates to the Houellebecq film you’re waiting for. In a way, the conflict with him helped us refine our method. It clarified the gap between twentieth-century art, like his literature, and the crumbling assumptions it rests on. The international attention from the trials and the scandal brought us into contact with thinkers who sharpened our ideas. This intellectual adventure will form both the subject and the plot line of KIRAC 27: Houellebecq.)