[vannrox]

THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE. IT IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE FEELINGS OF MANY, MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE ABSOLUTELY SICK AND TIRED OF BEING TOLD THAT JUNK IS ART AND ART IS JUNK AND THAT WE HAVE TO LIKE IT AND APPRECIATE IT. IF WE DON'T THEN WE ARE UNENLIGHTENED AND STUPID.

[moodyskeptic]

Good article! Here's one I wrote four years ago:

My heresy does not shame me. I'm no longer a youngster desperate for acceptance. The conventional contemporary wisdom proved to be idiocy, and I tired of the effort it takes to label crap as quality. This apostasy is not without cost. I am an artist.

As a young art student, my instincts drove me to practice my drawing skills, attempting to sharpen my draftsmanship (that skill that allows you to draw with realistic accuracy). The frustration of not matching what my eye saw and my hand drew tore at me. Little did I know that I was polishing the brass on the Titanic.

The more I took art classes, the more I was schooled in the new reality: representative art is passe. It existed now only for the unenlightened masses, the beer-swilling middleclass dolts that we must ridicule. We being the elite, steeped in ironic detachment and unburdened by old musty notions of pictorial beauty. All "serious" art was now confusing, ugly, crudely executed and deep. Accuracy was for chumps.

I went along for years. Modern notions of fine art secretly disgusted me; I felt that I would never really "get" all the smirky jokes hidden in modern art. After years of reading about the 20th century masters it hit me: it's a big con. Marketing and promotion obscured the sad truth that terrible artists were being exalted to the heights of fame and reputation.

It started with Impressionism in the late 1800s. Billed as an esthetic revolution in art, it was the death knell for the ascendancy of artistic talent. Dandies who held sway over patrons with more money than brains took advantage of the human weakness of ego. Rich people became easy prey for the big sell. Say what you will about the horrible Catholic Church controlling the fate of European artists for centuries, at least they set the bar high. Until the late 19th century, you must be able at minimum to draw, paint and sculpt with accuracy to be considered an Artist

When the New Relativism (who's to say what constitutes true art?) replaced the old ethic, the dam broke and a thousand bad artists took over. Sloppy impressions of light and shadow became "good enough" depictions of scenery. Then the selling kicked in, and eventually this lousy art became "better" than mere representative (accurate) depictions of the very same scenery. The moneyed elite gathered into "schools" of esthetic opinion, and the old boring traditionalists lost out.

For the next 125 years, all bets were off. Junk could be peddled as high art and representative artists would be marginalized as traditionalists, hopelessly mired in discredited esthetic tar pits of convention. Pictorial realism withered in the heat of this new reality.

Silver-tongued marketeers held sway. They destroyed Art by eclipsing the old values with the new, as if they could not coexist. Five generations of great artists were destroyed by this new esthetic. They died poor and disillusioned.

Don't get me wrong, I love some of the confusing, haphazard and angry modern paintings and "installations". I can identify with the urge to break conventions. I've done it myself. It's fun to slop the paint on thick and luxuriously, to care little for form and perspective and to stick it to the viewer. I've engaged in plenty of that. But it is a shallow and temporary victory, because I know it is not skillful.

I could be wrong, but I sense the first frail whispers of a Renaissance of representational painting and sculpture. A few brave wealthy fine art patrons are sounding off about the low quality of modern art. Well below the radar, talented artists with classic skills are toiling away on projects with precious little financial incentive, just a hunger for quality.

It could take fifty years to reach the top layer of acceptance, and by rights it should not replace other "isms" in its ascendancy. Neo-classicism should (and will) share the limelight with all the isms of the last 125 years: expressionism, primivatism, impressionism, cubism, abstract, symbolism, surrealism, Dada, folk art, and many others. No style should eclipse another style of worth and no style should be exalted above its rightful place in Art History. There should be a place made at the top for comic art, art for animation, video grabs and a whole host of new and beautiful disciplines.

Patience friends. We are slowly coming out of a Dark Age.

[END]

[McGavin999]

It's about time. It's also time that the idiot who patronize the "arts" get exposed as the know nothing lemmings that they are.

[King Prout]

I have long maintained the following Maxim: Most modern "art" is nothing more or less than an horrific and colossal practical joke, perpetrated by those with no talent upon those with no taste.

[WKUHilltopper]

This is great! These modern "art" fools are the same idiots who inspired "The Emperor's clothes" story. I'd be damn madder than hell if my investment company bought a damn dead shark! Especially for that money!! Wonder if they could recover the cost with an exhibit of dead mutual fund managers...

[Sam Cree]

placemark

[SlowBoat407]

My wife is an artist who must fight the 1913 model constantly. She is being left out of more and more art shows, where she sells most of her work, because her art (ceramic relief) does not fit in with the Modernist philosophy that art must be painful, enraging, political, and above all, lacking in any evidence of mastery of the medium. Last year, at one outdoor show, Best in Show was won by an "artist" who cut out photographs and pasted them sheets of newspaper, then mounted grommets on the whole thing to hang them. His work was "a comment on his nomadic life as a child", when his family moved quite a bit.

My wife called it a cry for help.

Bravo to ARC and to PAM for taking the beach head!

[Republicanprofessor]

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.

I maintain that you can still work from your own view of the outside world and make original and personal art that can speak to others.

And in all those centuries, the role of the public was to view and admire artworks so as to be inspired and uplifted.

Not quite. Until the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, the public was quite excluded. The rich paid for the art and enjoyed it, but if you think Louis XIV opened Versailles for the public to enjoy the art, you have another think coming. Chartres and other Gothic cathedrals were not built so much for the public to enjoy as it was for the public to feel the power of God and to worship as the Catholic Church told them to.

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.

Not all modern and abstract artists do this. I do find this work reprehensible. But the only alternative is not perfect realism that the public laps up. There is a whole range of art that is not offensive, and maybe the internet will provide more accessibility to these striving artists.

I do believe that the tide will change, but I don't think it will be so sudden. The instigation was 9/11, when the leftists' rant that there is no true right and wrong was dashed. The relativism of Postmodernism is dead. And the future is for a wide range of art: from realism to a new, warmer and more meaningful kind of abstraction.

I see this as similar to Giotto's developments in 1300s. It took the world a century to absorb his innovations in modeling and realism. And then around 1400 Masaccio added realistic light to Giotto's mass and weight and there was a revolution in art.

Giotto's Kiss of Judas from 1305 and Masaccio's Adam and Eve from about 1420.

But now I think the revolution may be in abstraction. It's taken a century for the world to absorb the abstraction of Picasso (and to work through the Manneristic postmodern ennui). Now it is time for a new kind of abstraction, I think. But the public will always love realism, and if that's what they support, so be it. Others may want and find something new in various kinds of personal abstraction.

[Terabitten]

[kayak]

bttt

[two23]

The best came first

[mollynme]

Great article. I have been waiting for years for someone to point out that "the emperor has no clothes".

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.

Wow. He nailed it.

[Ditto]

About time Bump.

[retrokitten]

Thank you for this article!! Very welcome news.

[chs68]

Thanks for posting this article.

A few years ago, I went to an exhibit at the Hirshhorn Gallery (part of the Smithsonian) in Washington, DC. The exhibit was entitled "Visions", or something similar. The theme of the exhibit was the future of American Modern Art.

One thing I saw in that exhibit revealed to me how utterly vapid and barren the current notion of "art" is.

What I saw was a pile of bricks. The pile of bricks -- the sort of thing one would see at a construction site -- was, somehow, "art" -- because it was being exhibited in a Museum. If I had seen the same pile of outside the museum, it would have not been art -- the "artistic elite" had proclaimed it art, and so, according to them, it was "art".

[numberonepal]

UNEXPECTED ILLUSTRATIONS OF AYN RAND’S PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS
Good Essay

[RightWhale]

the proper role of the artist is to express art

There it is, the new mantra. What does it mean. Hmm. Oh, art is devoid of meaning. Meaning is rationality. There are informational applications of art, maps being one example , but if art is to be expressed, then what does art do? Express expression? To mean meaning? Dig out that old recursion theory book, looks like the time has come.

[Eva]

Thanks for posting this. It's good news for the art world and good news for conservatives, as well.

[Liberty Valance]

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.

[patent]

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

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Most of modern art is money laundering.