ML/NJ
thx.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
Fascinating article, indeed for an atheist like me, art is the closest thing to a religious experience. The fact that art exists is to me the strongest argument for the existence of God.
Beautiful art still exists, at least in cinema. The Kubricks, Kurosawas, Bergmans, and Tarkovskys of the world will continue to carry the fire.
Not me, I don’t care about art at all. I don’t buy art and I don’t sell art. The artists can all starve, I don’t give a fig.
OTH, I do spend money on superbly crafted items of great beauty. I care about fine craftmenship quite a bit.
“...Deconstruction throws all objective meaning into question, so no one has to have the disappointing experience of being wrong or denied tenure, no matter how stupid one’s ideas. The burden of personal responsibility is mitigated, because one’s being is determined by accidental factors such as race, class and gender, not one’s owns values, decisions and actions. Skillful knowledge acquired by intense effort (or just being born smarter) is replaced by an obnoxious, hypertrophied adolescent scepticism that knows only how to question but not to learn.
It is grounded in a sort of bovine materialism that is not the realm of answers, but the graveyard of meaningful questions.
The primitive is idealized, because it is within everyone’s reach—I remember Rudy Giuliani’s comment about an artist’s rendering of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung: “If I can do it, it isn’t art.”
Of course, Giuliani was pilloried by the sophisticated N.Y art crowd, and with good reason. It is painful to have standards, because not everyone can attain them. ...” ~ Gagdad Bob (Robert Godwin, PhD)
Never Make a God of Your Irreligion
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/10/never-make-god-of-your-irreligion.html
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what about all that beauty on the inside stuff?
Don’t have time to read the article now. What happened to art, did morons committed mass murder on it and laughed?
He has now found his vision and will open on January 17 with a fabulous new show.
Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball have both been invaluable critics of the decay of art in the postmodern world.
This is a thoughtful essay. I think a bit more could have been made of the Platonic/Aristotelian trio of trancendentals: truth, beauty, goodness. Perhaps Kimball just assumes that everyone knows about that, but I’m afraid most people no longer do.
That, for a Christian, is where art ties into religion, because religion is all about what is real, true, good, beautiful. When you trade in the real for the material is where you run into trouble. Or, what I think he’s referring to when he says that the problems began back in the middle ages, when you trade in Aristotelian universalism for Ockham’s nominalism, that’s also where you run into trouble.
I had several opportunities to meet with Kramer and Kimball, and in their early years after founding their new magazine they thought very highly of high modernist art but hated pop art and postmodernist art. Perhaps Kimball is reconsidering that, too, in this essay, although he doesn’t quite say so.
He has now found his vision and will open on January 17 with a fabulous new show.
GOYA
bump for later
Thanks so much for posting.
www.artrenewal.com
‘Nuff said!
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Most art (and most architecture) these days is a monument to the artist’s ego. Nothing else.