An Aesthetic of the “Grand Style”: Guy Debord

A Distancing from the World

It is difficult today to determine what might correspond to that model of aesthetic excellence that Nietzsche defined with the expression “the grand style.” Certainly, in the various arts, works keep being produced that correspond to the features of contained power, classical rigor and unbounded certainty; unfortunately they come to the attention of experts and the public with greater difficulty and more slowly than in the past, both because of literary, artistic and cultural overproduction, and widespread cynicism, superficiality, and insensibility. “The grand style,” in fact, implies immediate concern, respect, memory—in a word, veneration. These aspects do not blend well with the general tone of contemporary daily experience, but precisely because of their rarity they may render “the grand style” the object of more diligent research and more zeal than ever.