Roger Kimball: The End of Art (Profound Essay)

First Things ^ | July 2008 | Roger Kimball

[mojito]

Nearly everyone cares—or says he cares—about art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, ­elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our culture’s continuing investment—emotional, financial, and social—in art. We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing.

It is a curious situation. Traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. The idea of beauty came with a lot of Platonic and Christian metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.

Nevertheless, if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia—as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations ­gratuitous. The list of atrocities is long, familiar, and laughable. In the end, though, the effect has been ­anything but amusing; it has been a cultural disaster.

[ETL]

See the Serra Sculpture, St. Louis, Missouri, between 10th and 11th Streets, Market and Chestnut Streets - and yes, it is an entire block.

Check this out...

Park Avenue Gets a Mao
By KATE TAYLOR | September 8, 2008

The final piece of the Asia Society's exhibition "Art and China's Revolution" was installed over the weekend [Sept 2008]: a 10-foot-tall sculpture of a Mao jacket, by the artist Sui Jianguo, which will stand on a median in the middle of Park Avenue at 70th Street until mid-November.

The sculpture, called "Mao Suit," is made of corroded steel and weighs 5-and-a-half tons. It is part of a series of Mao jackets — shown without the head or hands of their famous wearer — that the artist, who is in his 50s, began in the late 1990s and has made in a variety of materials, from steel to resin to colored plastic, the Asia Society's museum director, Melissa Chiu, said.

http://www.nysun.com/arts/park-avenue-gets-a-mao/85310/

[Desdemona]

That at least has form.

Check this out: http://stlouis.missouri.org/citygov/parks/parks_div/serra.html

[chesley]

www.artrenewal.com

‘Nuff said!

[Sam Cree]

*

[ETL]

Kind of looks like Maya Ying Lin's Wall.

"The Three Servicemen statue is the result of the controversy surrounding Maya Ying Lin's design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some veterans and their political supporters felt that The Wall was "a black gash of shame" or a "giant tombstone." It was too abstract a design for others who wanted a more heroic, life-like depiction of a soldier.

To meet these concerns, it was decided that a traditional statue would be added as an integral part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The late Frederick Hart, who had won third place in the original competition, was selected to create a suitable work of representational sculpture to be added to the Memorial site. The statue was unveiled in 1984, two years after The Wall's completion.

http://www.vvmf.org/index.cfm?SectionID=103

[Lorianne]

Most art (and most architecture) these days is a monument to the artist’s ego. Nothing else.

[Cacique]

btt

[txzman]

Great article - one of the BEST reads in a long time. Sheds light on the subtleties that push man farther from God, shaping and changing our society and culture for the worse.

“When human reason is made the measure of reality, beauty forfeits its ontological claim and becomes merely aesthetic—merely a matter of feeling. “

Bingo.

[Revolting cat!]

I think the boy’s obsessed.

The dead don't laugh!

[Desdemona]

It may look like a lot of things, but it’s supposed to be the confluence of the rivers.

[Buckhead]

Goya's The Colossus

[Buckhead]

Goya's self-portrait

[Buckhead]

Goya's The Third of May, 1808

[GOPJ]

This much, I think, is clear: Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself; it is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

Bingo.

[ETL]

Heart of the Andes, Frederic Edwin Church 1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Rocky Mountains: Lander's Peak, Albert Bierstadt, 1863

[ETL]

Storm in the Rocky Mountains (Mount Rosa), Albert Bierstadt, 1886

[ETL]

Yosemite Valley, Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830 - 1902) 1866

Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, Bierstadt, Albert, 1868

[Buckhead]

Those are awesome. Did not know Bierstadt. Thanks very much.

[ETL]

You're welcome. Church and Bierstadt were members of the 'Hudson River School' of landscape painters.

http://home.att.net/~hudsonriverschool/home.htm

http://www.allpaintings.org/v/Hudson+River+School/Albert+Bierstadt/

[ETL]

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

http://www.allpaintings.org/v/Hudson+River+School/Albert+Bierstadt/Albert+Bierstadt+-+Among+the+Sierra+Nevada+Mountains_+California.jpg.html