I’m inclined to agree with you that much modern art is deconstruction. Ortega Y Gasset referred apparently approvingly to it as “dehumanization.” I posted a thread on Helprin’s essay in which he used Gasset as a springboard to attack modern art yesterday, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1817366/posts
However, while I agree that in the past, before art had a capital A, served a much more practical master than “self expression,” it was still self expression that made great art great. Velazquez may have spent a lifetime in the service of royalty, but it was his unique vision and his ability to put it on canvas that has elicited admiration and wonder through history. IMO.
I never graduated from college but did have a class in humanities and one in English literature. In each of those classes we studied the works by one artist and the stories by one writer.
In both cases I remember getting into a heated discussion with the instructors over the "intents" of the painter and the writer that my teacher was tellin us. In both cases I could not for the life of me understand their lines of thinking regarding one painting by the artist and a story by the writer. Ultimately I left the class feeling like a complete moron because I just could not get it.
Well after reading this entire thread I have finally gotten it. I'm not the one who was stupid because I couldn't get it, but rather the teachers were the ones who were stupid because all they were doing was echoing the stupid philosophy that they fell hook line and sinker for in order to get along with their fellow elitists........
There is a new fresco at the top of the stairs in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. Titled Vanity of Vanities thr artit applied a bright smear of pink. blue, and yellow and an indication of his glases and jeans. I think it mocks the idea that the artist is a philosopher responsible for the form and content. The vision behind the Sistine chapel was the Pope who conceived and executed it including hiring Michealangelo. This is not to demean, at all, the genius of the artist who rose to the top of his field, it is just saying that we expect too much of them, now.