Posted on 06/08/2005 7:11:02 PM PDT by vannrox
IN 1913, THE ARRIVAL IN AMERICA of a simple idea drastically revolutionized the Art World. The occasion was the Armory Show in New York, the first exhibition of Modern Art in this country, and the simple idea was this: The proper role of the artist is to express himself. That was utterly new. It turned all the preceding centuries of Art History on their head. Fast-forward to the end of the same century: that same simple idea, that the proper role of the artist is to express himself or herself, was being taught as gospel in virtually every college and university in America, as well as in the art departments of essentially every high school, middle school and elementary school across the country. All major art publications accepted that idea as an unassailable given, as did virtually all art critics and art writers. And virtually every city council with a public art program anywhere in America supported that same idea, using tax money for the purchase of public artworks that were, almost always, examples of the artist expressing himself. By Y2K, in other words, that new, revolutionary idea had become entrenched and established-something that everyone had repeated for so long that nobody even questioned it anymore. Meanwhile, Modern Art1 set about claiming the Art World for itself. Any artist who refused to believe that idea was simply excluded from galleries and not shown; any art reviewer who refused to voice the new truth was fired; and vast collections of art that predated 1913 were sold off or hidden away in basements and closets, having been rendered quaint and obsolete by the new idea's artworks. And in the spotlights of places like Sotheby's and Christie's, Modern works began to sell for millions of dollars each, thereby establishing the godhood of the best proponents of that simple idea, including Picasso, Rothko, Pollock, Kline and Lichtenstein. Thus nobody thought it particularly unusual, much less bizarre, when a dead (stuffed) horse dangled from the ceiling fetched more than $2 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York in 2004, or when an anonymous buyer paid $5.2 million for a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling a chimpanzee named Bubbles, or when Steven Cohen, founder of a Connecticut-based hedge fund called SAC Capital Advisors, LLC, spent $8 million for an adult tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde.2 Such mega-sales stand as the ultimate proof that, during the 20th Century, that simple 1913 idea effectively took over the Art World in America (as it concurrently did in the rest of the world). And what's wrong with that idea? There are three things wrong with it. The first is that when you have the mindset that anything an artist does is art, credentials replace talent. Like this: MODERN ART ADVOCATE: "Artist Joe Schmo is a great artist!" The second thing wrong with the 1913 idea is that when all the focus is on the artist, his or her choice of subjects is finite. If your focus is, instead, the beauty and power of the natural world, then your subjects are infinite; but if your focus is yourself, then there really isn't a whole lot to say. To coin a phrase, the world is much bigger than any one artist.
Originality v. appropriation, infinite v. finite, painting the glories of America to inspire love and wonder v. constructing paintings to scare people into environmental awareness: that's the second thing wrong with the 1913 idea. But the third and by far worst thing wrong with that idea is that it trivialized the public clear out of the Art World. That idea turned the spotlight squarely on the artists, leaving the public in the dark. As the artist became all-important, the public became unimportant, even irrelevant. The 1913 idea totally changed that. Thenceforth, the public was irrelevant except as a source of tax dollars and as a target-the goal was not to uplift and inspire but to offend and incense. The mindset was this: "I am an artist, and therefore if you do not like what I create then you are anti-art and stupid and therefore desperately in need of the art I shall give you which you then obviously must pay for." The ideas at play couldn't be clearer. The public's idea: This art is offensive. The artist's idea: The public needs to be offended so as to be paddle-jolted from their complacency and ignorance into enlightenment. The director's idea: The public's feelings should be considered. The artist's idea: That director needs to be fired, since he clearly doesn't understand that what counts is not what the public feels but what I, the artist, want the public to feel. In 1998 Karen Finley went ballistic - that is, she sued the National Endowment for the Arts, which had had the audacity to turn down her grant request. Finley's "artworks" consisted of anger, nudity, profanity and chocolate-smearing her nude body with chocolate while screaming obscenities at an audience. Despite the art critics who had praised these "performance works" as "a provocative brand of artistry," the NEA turned down her application for more tax dollars. So, joined by three other "controversial artists,"3 she sued, challenging the NEA's "decency and respect" law as violating her right to Free Speech and accusing the NEA of Communist-style repression: "That's what they do in China," she said.4 And so the last bastion of offensiveness in America today is the Art Establishment, meaning those individuals and institutions who support or have been built upon that 1913 idea. The rest of us hope and strive always to avoid offending people, and displays of extreme offensiveness, like hate crimes and racial discrimination, are vigorously prosecuted. But artists who offend people - by, for example, pasting elephant dung on a painting of the Madonna, or by hanging statutes of lynched children from the branches of real trees in town squares, or by painting pictures of young girls, their dresses raised, being probed by octopus tentacles5 - are praised by the Art Establishment for their originality, their vision, their genius. JOHN CURRIN IS A PAINTER whose works hang in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. After his depictions of women sparked outrage among more than a few women viewers several years ago, he said: "When I paint a breast or a woman's body, it's almost a joke to be formal about it, because half of me is the kid in school still drawing on the bathroom wall. . . . But I don't think my works are offensive. If it is offensive, my reaction is kind of, well, whatever." Art Establishment advocate Gavin Brown was more blunt about Modern Art's harmlessness: "Paintings aren't offensive. They don't kill people." The depressing thing is to think about how many highly intelligent people wouldn't immediately see how bizarre that statement is. Spray-painting swastikas on synagogue walls doesn't kill people either. But the Modern mindset, in which the public exists only to serve artists by funding them and taking their punches, is that it's all just a game anyway, no harm done. As one of the most-praised Modern artists of the 20th Century, Francis Bacon, confessed: "Painting has become, all art has become, a game by which man distracts himself. And you may say that it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game." And the Art Establishment's strategy for this game is first to offend us, then to pretend to be incensed that we're offended, smirking at our discomfort, but ready always to fly into a rage if we cheat at the game by trying to withhold our tax money from their pockets. And that is the state of affairs in America today after nearly a century of the mindset formed by that simple idea as it hardened from new and revolutionary to old and entrenched. But these are the end days of that mindset. The Art Establishment's days are numbered. As surely as a simple idea changed everything in 1913, so a new simple idea will change everything again. In Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens wrote that, "There are only two styles of portrait - painting, the serious and the smirk." Before 1913, artists were serious; since 1913, artists have been smirking. Sounds familiar. Of course, it is. Just as the 1400s saw a rebirth, or renaissance of respect for the glories of the past (Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome), so we are again, at this moment-not just in America but worldwide-on the threshold of a new renaissance of respect for artworks from artists who don't view themselves as little gods or rock stars. One of those millions, art-lover Jim Kalb, posted this comment online in 2004: "Are you finally sick and tired of feeling you have to pretend to like modernist 'art' which you actually think is lousy/laughable at best, outright garbage at worst? If so, check out the ARC site." More than 5 million people are now doing exactly that every year - checking out www.artrenewal.com - and that number is growing exponentially as the word spreads around the globe that if you find Modern/Contemporary art offensive, you're far from alone, and you'll soon be vindicated. Fred Ross himself in turn welcomed the magazine: "PleinAir Magazine is fast becoming a major addition to the 21st-Century Art World, joining the Art Renewal Center in its call for a return to standards and training in the pursuit of excellence, truth and beauty." For the time being, PleinAir is the only art publication anywhere in the world - the only one - whose publisher has the clarity of thought and the courage to tell the truth about the Art Establishment's century-long reign since 1913. For telling it like it is, Rhoads has suffered financially. In retaliation for the magazine's editorializing about the whole Modern Art scam, subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions, and advertisers have withdrawn. But simultaneously the word is going out that "Eric Rhoads" stands for truth about art in the print media in the same way that "Fred Ross" stands for truth about art online - and the new subscribers climbing aboard are far outnumbering those who jumped ship. When PleinAir first began newsstand sales in 2005, for example, the response was not just far in excess of the national average for new launches, it was in fact unheard-of for any new magazine's newsstand launch: 50% in the United States and 70% in Canada. As the saying goes, money talks. So watch for more art publications to catch on to the fact that the Art Renewal Center and PleinAir Magazine are perfectly in tune with the vast majority of people on Earth, who for decades have been muttering their discontent but who now, finally, have found as their champions two megaphones of the 21st-Century media, one in cyberspace and the other on newsstands everywhere (or at www.pleinairmagazine.com). So what does the future hold for the Art World? The second absolute certainty about the future of the Art World is that America and the world will suddenly see a tremendous outpouring of masterful artworks, which in fact are being painted right now. Artists like Andrew Wyeth and Richard Schmid are internationally known for their personification of the new idea that is set to wash away the flimsy world of Modern Art in one titanic cleansing. But there are tens of thousands of highly trained and prodigiously talented artists like them only waiting to be recognized-painters like Will Wilson, for example, and any of the others represented by San Francisco's John Pence Gallery, and the far more numerous younger painters like Chelsea Bentley of Utah, Matt Smith of Arizona, Anthony Waichulis of Pennsylvania, and all the others seen in each issue of PleinAir Magazine. That means, for one thing, that the $8 million dead tiger shark in Connecticut suddenly will be worth less than the formaldehyde it's floating in. In 2001, there was a symposium at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The urgent subject was how curators and conservators could deal with artworks that were deteriorating badly, since these works were created from things like latex, lard, bodily fluids, and banana peels. Word to the Guggenheim: Don't worry about it - in the very near future, all such works will be recognized as refuse belonging in a Dumpster. |
Thomas Kinkade makes scandalous amounts of money from representational art. Hopefully your daughter will have the last laugh.
You don't know the art world. They HATE Thomas Kinkade. He isn't considered an artist!!
Of course they HATE him, he paints stuff that people enjoy and for which they don't have to be forced at government-sponsored gunpoint to pay.
Also at the Hirshhorn Gallery they had video of a woman sucking her toes on a loop and called it art. I was glad admission was free.
Great story. There are gonna be some pissed off folks with million dollar "paint spills" on their walls. Long live the beauty and honesty of realism.
Bump.
There are others who could explain it far better than I can, but I am bumping this to all of you on my Catholic list because I see this fight over the nature of art to be one of great importance for us. The nature of our public art and beauty impacts all of us. In addition we have seen the same demolition of all things beautiful in our Catholic Churches, and had cathedrals get demolished and replaced by abstract monstrosities. I think that process is dieing off, though there will still be last gasps here and there.
Great art can lift the soul. It can put us in touch with the greatness of our history. It is so often an opportunity to lift our souls to God and to teach ourselves and our children about our traditions.
I suspect that this revolution in art was a part of the whole century long attempt to divorce us in the West from our Christian heritage. Make us forget our roots so that we can be pried away from Christian faith and morality.
I think, like the battle for the Church, the modernists are slowly starting to lose the battle for art now. Art, lacking the central authority the Church has went farther away from the truth, and is starting to come back more slowly, but it will return to its former glory.
patent
Most of modern art is money laundering.
Great read over here...
Sadly, Thomas Kinkade has figured out a great way to scam the system. He does not sell paintings. He sells prints, run off in the thousands, and then separated into variously priced "editions". This pushes the limits of ethics in the business because he has flooded the market with these prints, but priced them as though they were limited runs. The franchises that sell these prints give oh-so subtle hints that they are investments, but the sad fact is that they are run off in the thousands, touched up on an assembly line, and maybe, just maybe, lucky enough to get TK's hand brushed up against them, raising their price another few thousand dollars. For the numbers, you might as well invest in a museum poster of one of the greats.
Very interesting.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Bump...great story.
Thank you for that. It was one of the most thoughtful and well-written posts I've read on Free Republic.
Guess there's still a sucker born every minute, even to this day.
Hello, patent.
Some on this thread are calling for the restoration of beauty to art, as if beauty per se is what's needed. So I want to point out that art is not ordered to beauty. Art is ordered to truth. It's true that many times beauty serves and proclaims truth, but beauty is only a means and never an end. To reduce art to a merely decorative function would be to degrade it; the fact that so many Americans believe that's precisely what art is for explains why so many regard it as a dispensable luxury, an indulgence for those who like that sort of thing. To say that art exists merely to please us is another way of saying that man himself -- who's art's creator -- exists only for himself and his own pleasure. This is false, of course. Indeed, man creates art to indicate things that transcend humanity, to direct us to something that lies far beyond ourselves even as it mysteriously concerns us deeply in the core of our being. Which is to say, Art is incarnational. It is Logic-al, dealing in signs and images fraught with meaning. Art exists not to affirm us where we are (when it does, it degrades to mere propaganda), but to speak prophetically of thigns that are distant and hidden.
When Jesus taught the people with parables and founded a Church entrusted with sacraments, this was not a mere whim, but a revelation of how finite man can approach and embrace infinite truth.
Thank you for the very appropriate ping.
St. John of Damascus teaches that in the Incarnate Lord we have the icon of the Father, the icon that had been theretofore forbidden by the Law of Moses. "If you see me you see the Father". Much in modernity is superstitious fear of looking around, lest God is found. The blasphemy of modern art is one aspect of such fear; denial of the sacramental Church is another. There is no better disinfectant to modern iconoclasm than looking at great art. To be a lover of art is to be one step closer to Catholicism.
But beauty is truth.
(BTW Awesome homepage)
Great article. Thanks!
Sez John Keats, but I'm not convinced, esp. because (look around you) there are so few who've thought about beauty and its relationship to truth systematically to the extent that they can distinguish authentic beauty from what's spurious.
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