I believe about half of us can participate in a new Renaissance, the other half is still trapped in a modernist/deconstructionist despair. Unfortunately, the modernist side still holds control over the culture and the institutions. While there is a new Renaissance going on in painting today, those painters are not well shown, and mostly toil in obscurity. The Renaissance will happen outside of the established venues, until it can’t be ignored anymore.
“I believe about half of us can participate in a new Renaissance, the other half is still trapped in a modernist/deconstructionist despair.”
- Very true.
The major difference between the intellectuals of the Renaissance and the Liberal/Socialist intellectuals of our time is that while the Renaissance Humanists paved way for something new deriving from their constructive openess of mind and lust for exploration, the latter hold the development of civilization back through their intensive marketing efforts of the cheap drug of Relativism and ridiculous, self-contradicting theories of everything being “social constructions” and suchlike nonsense.
When I was young our parish built a new church in the modernist mode. It looks something like a very large egg. I had a high school priest who exalted in the modernism of my new parish church over the "old" (and thereby invalid in his mind) forms of the other catholic churches in the city.
The modernist fanatics have the same mindset of all the "experts" in the arts. The fallacy in their thinking is that new is always superior to old...even if it looks inferior. They never consider that maybe all the best designs have been made. I'm not saying that some future architect, painter, composer, etc. might come up with something brilliant. But we may have exhausted most of the great forms. At any rate I much prefer old (pre-twentieth century) to new in just about any art form you can name.