“What do you disagree with?”
That ugliness qualifies as art simply because someone thinks it conveys a truth.
That is propaganda, not art.
I didn’t say “simply because”. What I said is that beauty and art are in a complex relationship and art is not reducible to beauty.
If you want a condemnation of moder art I got one. The story of 20c art is that of probing and degradation. There were real questions in need of answers:
- is art replaced by photography and molding techniques? Surely some traditional function of art is replaced by them.
- can visual impact be divorced from storytelling?
- does self-expression trump things outside of the artist’s person?
The way modern art answered these was to amputate as much as possible and see if the patient still lives. At some point, roughly in the 60’s, the patient died. We now have the task of growing new true art, having learned some painful lessons, from the roots we have abandoned. I would agree that classicism from Poussin to Bouguereau is one such root; medieval religious art is another; folk art is another.