—Ancient ideals, in their inexorable hardness and brutality, ought to be awakened, as the mightiest of monsters that they are.
—We should feel a boisterous delight in the psychological perception of how all moralised artists become worms and actors without knowing it.
—The falsity of art, its immorality, must be brought into the light of day.
—The "fundamental idealising powers" (sensuality, intoxication, excessive animality) should be brought to light.
824.
Modern counterfeit practices in the arts: regarded as necessary—that is to say, as fully in keeping with the needs most proper to the modern soul.
The gaps in the gifts, and still more in the education, antecedents, and schooling of modern artists, are now filled up in this way:—
First: A less artistic public is sought which is capable of unlimited love (and is capable of falling on its knees before a personality). The superstition of our century, the belief in "genius," assists this process.
Secondly; Artists harangue the dark instincts of the dissatisfied, the ambitious, and the self-deceivers of a democratic age: the importance of poses.