Culture in Austria helps to suppress and hush up things. This neurotic nation simply cannot endure reality with all of its conflicts. It doesn't seek to process history, but rather to suppress and forget it. Since there is no solution to conflicts other than death in Austria, this weakness is expressed through a longing for and glorification of death. From the Secessionism at the turn of the century to today's dialect rock, we are confronted with the deplorable, puerile pathos stemming from an obsession with death-necrophilia because the present, past and future are not coped with, only supressed. Thus the forces of history are passed on. Art in Austria supports these crimes by glorifying death and forgetting history. In this respect, art also represents a form of crime and oppression.
"Fortunate is he who forgets"; what does Austria really want to forget? Metternich, the crimes in the many-people's state, the fall of the monarchy, Hitler, Austria's great son? "I am dying everyone should die, for death is wonderful!": a personal decline becomes the order for everyone's decline. Wine-drinking sentimentality and necrophile bliss suddenly turn into a total negation of life. A class, society, nation doomed to fall wants everyone to fall, but the end of a world view doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world. Ethics is always the ethics of a dying society. The victim of an apocalypse makes itself an apocalyptical knight and spreads the seeds of violence and death. Necrophilia is the personification of an obsession with death.
Art that reverts to atavisms, deep emotional levels, direct sensual stimuli can be understood as a reaction to technology. But doesn't art by remaining an island of reminiscences, of rudiments of past forms of being, become one-dimensional, one-sided and anachronistical itself? Doesn't it set itself outside of time, annul its utopian function, that is, the provocation in and of time? Reduced to entertainment and the sensual titillation.
Ritual is the kitsch of tomorrow.
