Posted on 09/02/2014 6:32:10 AM PDT by servo1969
For two millennia, great artists set the standard for beauty. Now those standards are gone. Modern Art is a competition between the ugly and the twisted; the most shocking wins. What happened? How did the beautiful come to be reviled and bad taste come to be celebrated? Renowned artist Robert Florczak explains the history and the mystery behind this change and how it can be stopped and even reversed.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Thanks for posting that. Everything he says is true, although in the interests of introducing his audience gradually to the premise, he doesn’t mention the underlying malice of a large part of the art world.
It was especially pleasing to hear the Art Renewal Center mentioned. This small family organization has done more to advance the cause of beautiful art and preservation of Western art than perhaps any other American institution. Bless them.
Ah, you have The Eye.
I quite agree with you and Andrew. One small addition which shows my admitted bias is that not much actual talent is required for a large portion of modern art. You can make money by expressing your anger and alienation.
The goal of the progs: When everything is “art” then nothing is art.
If the “The Creation of Adam” is the moral equal of “Piss Christ”, why spend time going to Sistine Chapel - why contemplate the eternal? We got MTV...
Occam’s Razor: modern artists know they can’t reproduce the masterpieces of old, so they created modern/abstract art where they and a few equally effete art critics would tell the ordinary person what was good and bad. Only an effete art aficionado would believe that Jackson Pollock’s drippings on canvas was art. Well, I guess it is art....exceptionally, crappy art.
The last time I went there, my sister joked how her three-year-old daughter had attended the latest gallery opening and acted as a guide to the crowd (really just a bunch of hobos who come for the free PBR and cheese cubes). When I saw the scene, my 16-year-old and I were aghast. The thickly-splattered paintings looked like twisted figures in hell. They depicted of every kind of sexual coupling: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, woman & child, woman & beast, all kinds of menages and orgies...We just backed out of there, shocked, especially in light of my sister's blithe comments about her daughter viewing them.
And then there's the "performance" art pieces.
There was once this piece, a video screen surrounded by wires and garbage displaying an image of a fat, bare-chested man wearing some medieval head gear. Running on a loop was this scene of the man flagellating his torso with a whip and then slashing himself with razors until his chest was dripping blood. The piece was priced at 10 grand. I don't think it ever sold.
On diehipster.com they show another performance from the gallery, this one of a woman stripping down naked and pulling cherries out of her vagina.
I just don't get it. My sister is a public school teacher and very intelligent, but that "art" doesn't even make her blink. It's as if she's numb to it's evil. And what's disturbing is she's very Catholic. Even though I don't follow an organized religion, I know that place is not sanctified by God.
Everytime I go there I feel so dirty. The entire area is either Chinese warehouses surrounded by barbed wire, a few shops here and there, but mostly empty stores, and so much nihilistic grafitti--oops--art sprayed on the walls. And rainbow flags galore.
When I get on the train & return to my tiny home two hours away in suburban Long Island, I am reminded that there is no art that can match the beauty of Creation: the blue of the sky, the sweet green grass, the flowering trees...even the jays with their harsh squawks bring me a sense of peace.
There' something broken in people today. It's as if there's this suicidal, self-destruct mechanism hidden away in their souls and their art is a manifestation of that.
Beautiful! You’re very blessed with talent!
When I see those works, I get a feeling of bliss within me; totally contrary to what “modern art” makes me feel. See post #49.
Long ago, I saw this documentary on fractal patterns and if you look at a Pollock painting and break it down into smaller and smaller groupings you can see that there is an order to his splatters; the patterns repeat just as fractals would.
I'm not saying he's great; splatter art usually isn't, but his work actually does show a strange sort of talent that his imitators can't match.
When you bring a Thomas Kinkade to the argument, it only makes me laugh. TK was the worst kind of factory artist hell bent on making money and pushed a phoney valuation scheme on his customers. TK’s art is real trash, not real art. He was sued at least once that I know of because of his crappy business practices and was more of a snake oil salesman than an artist.
“Let’s say someone is holding a gun to your head and he tells you that you have to do an exact copy of one of these paintings in a week. And one of the paintings is a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover and one of the paintings is a Picasso. It doesn’t matter which one, as long as the Picasso is one of the ones that is just a geometric patchwork of painted shapes. So, any Picasso from Cubism onward. The Rockwell can be any Saturday Evening Post cover. Now, with a gun at your head and your life on the line, which one are you going to copy? Exactly. Because pretty much anyone can do it. It takes no talent. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes.”
—Dave Sim
Freegards
On the other end is art that is original and "revolutionary" and makes the viewer want to wretch.
I'll go with the commercial hack, thanks.
Why do decent people allow losers and thugs to control our culture?
Who are we to impose our standards on artists? Usually we cringe at that question, but we shouldn’t. We are taxpayers; it is our money that goes to “artists” through the National Endowment for the Arts (and probably shouldn’t if they refuse to add something positive to our culture). We are the customers - we should not pay to see bad art even if critics pretend there is something “deep” in that art.
I support good art, but I refuse to support bad or harmful art, and I have the right and the power to make that decision or at least influence it. I will not defer to the professionals on the definition of “good” art, not when those professionals pretend to like offensive and sacrilegious materials. Movies? Those choices are a political decision, and I will not attend one as “pure” entertainment when it is not pure. TV? It’s a vast wasteland, and I don’t watch it more than a few times a year. Theater? There are occasional good or even great plays, but I want to know the details of a show before I support it with my money. Books? I may read them in a library (without checking them out, so I don’t increase apparent demand), but I won’t buy one unless I approve of supporting the author’s message. If we want better art, we need to make economic decisions that link an artist’s message and talent to that artist’s compensation.
It appears you have an opinion.
Thanks for sharing...
I’ve read where Pollock based his drip style on Indian art he saw in the southwest. I’ve seen Indian art like that, and it looked beautiful. I can’t say the same after seeing Pollock’s imitations or affectations.
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