[vannrox]

I agree with this appraisal.

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[denydenydeny]

Bouguereau, "A la fontaine"

[NewHampshireDuo]

What, no more art made from fecal matter?

[AntiGuv]

One can only hope..

[Blood of Tyrants]

Read "The Nake Communist". Among the stated goals of communism is to replace traditional art with ugly shapeless garbage and then tell the people that they were stupid for not seeing the "artisty" of a jar of urine with a crusifix immersed within.

Check out this link for some REAL art:

http://www.artrenewal.org/index.html

[Sam Cree]

"I look at modern art as very much like what happened with communism - it was an idea that was a house of cards and couldn't work," says Allan Banks, president of the American Society of Classical Realism and vice chairman of the American Society of Portrait Artists."

What a great remark.

Two Victorian painters I like are Thomas Eakins and Dagnan Bouveret - both swam against the tide, were "realists."

Eakins

[happygrl]

"I look at modern art as very much like what happened with communism - it was an idea that was a house of cards and couldn't work," says Allan Banks, president of the American Society of Classical Realism and vice chairman of the American Society of Portrait Artists.

"A lot of the rubbish that we've been handed (in the 20th century) has pretty much played itself out," ...

That is Wonderful News to those of us who love art. Art should be communicative, something that is grasped by the common person, not a cipher of artist narssicism.

[cdefreese]

Thank God.

Smeared feces is not art, no matter what the inspiration is.
Neither is an empty room with a light blinking on and off.
Same goes for a room filled with cheese.
Placing objects in jars of urine or hangins sexual aids from strings inside libraries isn't art.
Mutilating yourself isn't art, it is sick. If anyone else without 'artist' as an occupation did that, they would be put into a 'facility' to undergo observation for mental illness.
If my 3yr old can reproduce your work, I can not take your or your 'pieces of art' seriously.
If I go into a junkyard and pull out scrap metal that looks like something that is in front of a building, that isn't art either.
If you make an everyday object 1000 times its normal size or make it 1000 times smaller than normal, it might be neat or interesting as a second rate tourist spot, but it isn't art.

OK, I am done ranting...

[LiteKeeper]

ead later

[dennisw]

At the Fountain
by William Bouguereau

[B-Chan]

Now that's art.

Lord Leighton bump.

[Nubbin]

I like sacred art and am especially drawn Botticelli. To me his paintings have a magical and joyful quality. Here is what G.K Chesterton said about The Nativity of Botticelli

Do you blame me that I sit hours before this picture?
But if I walked all over the world in this time
I should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not in this picture.

I believe Botticelli was a contemporary of Michaelangelo who said:

It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think it is necessary for the painter to be very good in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit my inspire his intellect..."

[society-by-contract]

Dates and catagories are not the most descriptive means to convey ideas about a school or movement. Ok. Modernism began in the last third of the of the 19th century. If you like you may pin the date to the Salon d Refuse in 1863. Modernism was supplanted by Post-modernism in say 1945 by artists such as Pollack & Bill Monroe. I'm not endorsing either movement.

By the way, be careful about referring to art currently being produced as modern art which denotes a particular period of history; contemperory art is preferred.

Non-Objective art is preferred to abstract art.

Perhaps I should have studied art history instead of economics in school so I could prvide more detail; alas aesthetics is an avocation.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

I know a fair number of Neo-Pagans types with leftish to hard-left politics, who go adore Pre-Raphaelite art. If modernism is losing the left, it's dead.

[xJones]

Thanks for this article. So many times as I've walked through *modern* art exhibits and musuems, I've thought, "The emperor really does have no clothes". It was all nonsense, that evoked nothing but wonder reading the convulated critical praise of such....nothing. But like the emperor's crowd, we were all supposed to marvel at it, for fear of being called bourgeoise and anti-intellectual.

[mpreston]

It's happening to the music industry, they just don't realize it yet.

[kidd]

Modernism, by definition, cannot be universal, because if you're not conversant with the lexicon, you're not invited to the debate

I was a guard at the Walker Art Museum, a modern art museum in Minneapolis, for three years in the late 70s. I had lots of time to look at their collection and the reaction of the visitors to the art.

I would guess that 99% of the visitors had no idea why 99% of the stuff was called "art". The only ones who seemed to have an appreciation for the modern art were the guards who were art students. And amongst them, they all had one or two favorite artists that they had studied and thought the rest of the stuff was junk.

The only time the general public enjoyed the exhibits was when the museum had a big Alexander Calder show (he made large mobiles and had a number of circus toy collections) - the show catered to children, and was sort of "fun".

[Lessismore]

Art was, before 1850, an expensive but necessary way of constructing a visual representation of a scene. In many cases, the artist made a living doing portraits, rather than the grander paintings.

It was killed by photography. It died during the last half of the 19th century. It is not just resting.

[Erasmus]

Six years ago, the Christian Science Monitor sneered at Bouguereau's work as "official art" that was mostly "purchased by rich, undereducated Americans."

Brings to mind a story about Henry Ford and his wife Clara.

Henry had very little in the way of formal education, but by 1920 or so he was of course wealthy, and perhaps the best known industrial tycoon in the world.

Yet his tastes remained, shall we say, simple.

He and his wife were visited by some art collectors who felt that persons of their socioeconomic stature should have invesmtments in fine art. So the collectors brought catalogs of color reproductions of available masterpieces and went over these with their hosts, explaining the virtues of each piece and its artist. It was understood that the catalog itself was a gift to the Fords.

At the end of the presentation, the collectors discreetly brought up the subject of acqusition of some of the works illustrated in the catalog.

One of the Fords (I do not recall which) replied, "but with all of these wonderful illustrations, why would we need the originals?"

As a coda to this little anecdote....

Henry's son Edsel was a very different soul. Although he was denied an education by his father, he (with the help of his society wife) became interested in the arts. He became a patron of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and was responsible for bringing Diego Rivera and his mistress Frida Kahlo to Detroit for some time, to paint a monumental mural, depicting industrial America, at the DIA.

[ConservativeConvert]

I have long belived that history will judge the conceptual art movement of the late 20th century as pure trash and the critics, galleries and collectors who uphold such nonsense as fools. Sticking a finger up one's ass and wiping it on a canvas does not make one an "artist". Those who claim that such rubbish is indeed art and look condescendingly down their noses at those too "unenlightened" to appreciate it as such are the equivalent of those who insist that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". That is not to say that all abstract art is devoid of aesthetic or creative value - much of it is real art. Howver, those who claim to be "artists" without demonstrating a shred of craftsmanship, creativity or aesthetic integrity will be relegated to the dustbins of history. The thousands of fine artists who create beautiful things but who are entirely ingnored by the art "establishment" or denigrated as mere "decorative artists" will not recieve their due until they are long dead. Several years working in the art industry left me bitter and disgusted with a system that ignores talent and beauty while rewarding charlatinism and creative/aesthetic bankruptcy.