Modern art is junk

[Josquin des Prez]

This is the thread where i vent my anti-modernist screed. Those of us who are still resisting the Bolshevistic take over of western civilization are welcome to join in to fight the good fight against post-modernistic hell. To commence:

http://www.progressiveliving.org/arts_essay.htm

Art & Enlightenment

In a humanistic perspective, the stature of a culture isn't properly judged by the strength or efficiency of its economy, though material prosperity is important; nor it is to be judged by the power of its military, though it must have sufficient military power to resist aggression; nor is it even to be judged by the educational attainments of its populace, if by "education" we mean only the rote learning of a welter of facts deemed important by the business community. Rather, the proudest achievement of an advanced culture lies in its capacity to cultivate individuals with an understanding of life and of the world that is both broad and deep. When this kind of understanding is coupled with moral vision and insight, there can emerge a fully human and humane culture. The word that used to be used for individuals who had achieved such fully human stature was "enlightened".

An understanding of life that is broad and deep can't be achieved accidentally. It requires many things: a knowledge of history, insight into the heart and soul, an understanding of the natural world, and—the arts, which can encompass all of these other things and bring home their significance and importance.
Western Culture & the Arts Become Disoriented

But the view of art as a key element of enlightenment, and the value of enlightenment itself, was assaulted in the mid-nineteenth century, with repercussions that are with us still. The advancement of the sciences, the industrial revolution, urbanization, robber baron capitalism, commercialism, and the questioning of traditional religious dogmas drastically disoriented Western civilization as a whole. And with the invention of the camera, the visual arts were spun off on ever more disoriented tangents.

The camera seemed to provide a vastly superior means of recording the physical appearance of reality as compared with representational art; and so some artists hastened to invent new purposes for art: the exploration of pure forms, or color; the exploration of inner worlds; the capturing of mood.
Disorientation Leads to Confusion & Fraud

This response to the camera was probably inevitable. And in retrospect, it can be seen that the abandonment of strict representation really did free the visual arts to go beyond the surface of things in ways that have often been tremendously productive. But sometimes the confused masquerade as rebels, and rebellion can too readily degenerate into chaos. Arguably what has happened with the arts under the deadly ministrations of "The Academy"— that is, the international art establishment that for many decades now has thought of itself as representing the most advanced artistic sensibility, if not the only legitimate sensibility.

In fact, however, a compelling case can be made that "The Academy" is a fraud. Indeed, the so-called "modern art" that it represents amounts today to little more than an elaborate scheme for bilking credulous art investors of their money.
Artistic Fraud Personified

Consider the recent aesthetic debate between Emmanual Asare, art gallery janitor, and Damien Hirst, darling of the contemporary British art scene. Arriving at work, Asare found a gallery littered with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, and other debris. He dutifully bagged it up and threw it all away. "It didn't look much like art to me," Asare was later to remark. However, it develops that the mounds of trash were, after all, a work of "art" assembled by Hirst.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,576979,00.html

(If you feel so inclined, you can have a look at a representative sample of Hirst's other work at: http://dh.ryoshuu.com/)

If Hirst was merely an isolated example, he might be casually dismissed with a shrug of indifference. In fact, however, his assorted doodles and cautious arrangements of M&Ms are very much representative of the long-standing state of disarray of the visual arts, the institutionalization of which can be dated to the establishment in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art.
The Loss of Consciousness in Art & the Cult of the Subconscious

While art historians have traced the roots of "modernity" in the arts to such relatively inoffensive mediocrities as Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas, the true meltdown began with the aesthetic musings of Symbolists such as Odilon Redon, who wrote, for example:

"Nothing in art can be done by will alone. Everything is done by docile submission to the coming of the unconscious . . . "

The problem with this assertion doesn't lie with its invocation of the subconscious in the creative process, which indeed has an indispensable role to play, but rather with the assignment to consciousness of a role of "docility", in effect, of no role whatsoever. It's perhaps not too much to say that Redon is urging the artist to abandon any and all critical sense. That the ultimate result would be so much artistic drifting could already have been anticipated.

Happily that result was delayed. Released from a literalism that had indeed been too rigid, the arts flourished for a number of years. The Symbolists themselves, Redon included, produced some brilliant work. The fateful turning point can be traced to a particular work by a particular artist: Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," (1907) today appropriately quarantined in the Museum of Modern Art. (Detail at left.)
Modernism and the Degeneration of the Arts

Picasso's failed experiment was to exercise considerable influence over Georges Braque, known to art historians as a "Cubist." It was Cubism that initiated the phase of "art as self-referential artifact" signifying nothing but itself, and itself not signifying much of anything. Cubism was to spawn such manifestations as "collage" (often little more than random assemblages of trash very much in the spirit of Hirst's collection of garbage). And Braque was to prove to be to the arts what a boot-sector virus is to a computer: a self-perpetuating disaster. In the years that followed, one artist after another, indeed, one art movement after another, was to succumb to this mandatory "art as meaningless rubbish " ethos initiated by Picasso and Braque.
Pollock Initiates the Final Meltdown

From about 1921, the ethos began to manifest itself in the form of "abstract" art, radiating from centers in New York, London, and Paris. Such spare and boring content as had survived in the work of the Cubists and their successors, was now expunged altogether. For example, from around 1947, we find American Jackson Pollock dribbling paint on canvases. Pollock explained:

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."

That this was very much a "Redonesque" admission that he had no idea what he was doing — apart from splashing paint on a canvas, of course — seems not to have been an insurmountable obstacle to the adoration of his many fans.
The Totalitarianism of the Modern Academy

Having now dwelt upon the deadening influence of "The Academy" for as long as we care to, perhaps the most appropriate question to ask is this: "why?" How could this aesthetic totalitarianism have flourished for so long? One paradoxical answer would be: by posing as the rebel vanguard. If one task of the arts is to knock off the blinders of indifference that settle upon us with adulthood, then art is, and should be, institutionally subversive. The genius of "The Academy" lay in usurping this subversive role for itself, by pretending that its mandatory meaninglessness is the whole of that subversive role.

In fact, it is no part of it.

To knock off blinders of indifference to replace them with blinders of meaninglessness is to subvert nothing but the significance and importance of art.

And so, it's time to be done with "modern art."
On Reviving the Arts

We'd like to see "modern art" replaced with art that would both advance human flourishing, and be part and parcel of it. And to do that we have to shed the bitter calumniation of reason that has been with us since at least Redon. To employ his idiom, what we have to do, in effect, is bring about the reconciliation of consciousness and subconsciousness, of feeling and reason; or to put this another way, to restore the human being entire to a place of honor.

The root of the enmity between feeling and reason has been identified elsewhere on this site as reductionistic materialism. We won't belabor this point again here, but rather go on to ask ourselves how best to move forward.
The First & Most Essential Task

The development of a persuasive aesthetic is the task of philosophy, in particular, that branch of philosophy known as "aesthetics." One way to begin a philosophical housecleaning is to examine the many competing theories that have been advanced, and to assess their respective merits, salvaging whatever may be legitimate, rejecting whatever is not, and utilizing the insights gleaned from this exercise to construct a new theory.

This task has been undertaken by American essayist Ralf Long. We present Mr. Long's analysis of previous theories in this summary diagram.  In addition, what is called for is an analysis of the fundamental purpose of art.  We've undertaken that analysis in the essay "Reflections on the Purpose of Art".  With this analysis in hand, we have the foundations of a new direction for the arts.

[drogulus]

     A large problem with the arts come from the adversarial ideologies that push artists into a position of hostility towards the society they live in. This is also a problem for critics of the arts. These critical approaches may come from the political or aesthetic right or from the other side. At the extremes they all amount to the position that people today aren't good enough for the right kind of art. I think there's something wrong with this way of looking at it. Art should communicate something to some part of the people that are here now, with their sensibilities, and not try to "abolish the people and elect a new one".

[eyeresist]

I think it's a fallacy to blame modern art on the invention of photography. After all, there are no analogical innovations to explain similar developments in music or architecture.

The roots of Modernist progressivism stretch back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when our modern scientific understanding of the world began, and when political revolution (in America and France) seemed a real and imminent possibility. From the scientific revolution we gained the idea of the world as mechanistic, that is, changing via observable material causes rather than by divine fiat. This concept led to things like science fiction and the big public health movements of the 19th century, but also shaped that period's revolutionary mindset, which led to Marx's notion that society was like a boat in the sea of history, that's course could be altered at will, even (or especially) if the crew mutinied. This idea in turn fed back into the arts, leading to what we can call the Bolshevik art movements of the 20th century, which deliberately sought to insult their patrons, assault their audiences, and claim a privileged understanding of historical "necessity" ("anyone who has not understood the necessity of the dodecaphonic system is useless!").

The revolutionary pose of Modern artists was always a pose, of course. Artists did their best to get comfortably settled into the art (anti)establishment, usually with support from the public purse, and aspired to bourgois comfort even if they proclaimed themselves to be Leninists. Architect Mies van der Rohe insisted his clients live in stark, undecorated boxes, but his own homes were always furnished in a most comfortable and old-fashioned style.

After their peak of public interest in the mid-20th century, the vapidity of "revolutionary art" gradually came to be understood, but still few artists and critics are prepared to expose themselves to ridicule by suggesting that art should sincerely attempt to be understandable and beautiful, without the pretense of attacking or sneering at its audience.


I am wary of some suggestions in the essay in the OP:

We'd like to see "modern art" replaced with art that would both advance human flourishing, and be part and parcel of it. ... One way to begin a philosophical housecleaning is to examine the many competing theories that have been advanced, ... and utilizing the insights gleaned from this exercise to construct a new theory.

The idea that the solution to the problem of Modernism is "to construct a new theory .. that would ... advance human flourishing" seems to be self-defeating, smacking as it does of the old Bolshevik proclamations. The very cause of the problem is our modern propensity to raise up such theories. Dogma is the problem, not the solution.

[Jay F]

Not junk to me:

[Josquin des Prez]

Not junk to me:

It is most obvious junk to me, dear sir. Could it be that the emperor has no clothes? Are you sure your interest for those pieces is really genuine, that it isn't just a result of social pressure? Are you afraid of being considered unintelligent, old fashioned, even reactionary?

[Josquin des Prez]

I think it's a fallacy to blame modern art on the invention of photography. After all, there are no analogical innovations to explain similar developments in music or architecture.

The roots of Modernist progressivism stretch back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when our modern scientific understanding of the world began, and when political revolution (in America and France) seemed a real and imminent possibility. From the scientific revolution we gained the idea of the world as mechanistic, that is, changing via observable material causes rather than by divine fiat. This concept led to things like science fiction and the big public health movements of the 19th century, but also shaped that period's revolutionary mindset, which led to Marx's notion that society was like a boat in the sea of history, that's course could be altered at will, even (or especially) if the crew mutinied. This idea in turn fed back into the arts, leading to what we can call the Bolshevik art movements of the 20th century, which deliberately sought to insult their patrons, assault their audiences, and claim a privileged understanding of historical "necessity" ("anyone who has not understood the necessity of the dodecaphonic system is useless!").

The revolutionary pose of Modern artists was always a pose, of course. Artists did their best to get comfortably settled into the art (anti)establishment, usually with support from the public purse, and aspired to bourgois comfort even if they proclaimed themselves to be Leninists. Architect Mies van der Rohe insisted his clients live in stark, undecorated boxes, but his own homes were always furnished in a most comfortable and old-fashioned style.

After their peak of public interest in the mid-20th century, the vapidity of "revolutionary art" gradually came to be understood, but still few artists and critics are prepared to expose themselves to ridicule by suggesting that art should sincerely attempt to be understandable and beautiful, without the pretense of attacking or sneering at its audience.


I am wary of some suggestions in the essay in the OP:
The idea that the solution to the problem of Modernism is "to construct a new theory .. that would ... advance human flourishing" seems to be self-defeating, smacking as it does of the old Bolshevik proclamations. The very cause of the problem is our modern propensity to raise up such theories. Dogma is the problem, not the solution.

Agreed for the most part. The essay is flawed, but it was the best i could find on the spur of the moment (and i had to open this thread with something). Of course, while the enlightenment may have spurred progressive ideals, there is no historical precedent for what has happened in the 20th century. After all, the avant guard is not unique to our age. We have the so called Ars Subtilis of the Gothic, or the chromatic experiments of the late Renaissance, the most glaring example of which is the music of Gesualdo. Yet, those phases have always been short lived and never achieved the same level of extremes as today's art. Further more, a classical age always seems to follow a period of great change and progressive ideals. Not so with the 20th century. Why? What it is that makes the 20th century different?

Actually, i do have an explanation of sort for what happened during the second half of the 19th century, but i am not at a liberty to discuss it. 

Alternatively, there is always the old explanation offered by Gordon Rattray Taylor in his great book, Sex in History:

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/whatis/chap13.htm

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Not junk to me:

Amen.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Are you sure your interest for those pieces is really genuine, that it isn't just a result of social pressure? Are you afraid of being considered unintelligent, old fashioned, even reactionary?

Quit being a boob.

[eyeresist]

It is most obvious junk to me, dear sir.

Actually, I do enjoy the "colour fields" of Rothko. They seem to me to distill landscape forms to a powerful essence. I doubt they have religious significance, however.

Yet, those phases have always been short lived and never achieved the same level of extremes as today's art. Further more, a classical age always seems to follow a period of great change and progressive ideals. Not so with the 20th century. Why? What it is that makes the 20th century different?

Actually, i do have an explanation of sort for what happened during the second half of the 19th century, but i am not at a liberty to discuss it. 

Nothing to do with Das Juden, I hope? 
Somehow the immune system of the art world was unable to reject, or else safely adapt, its attacker, and ended up a mere host for a virus with quite other aims. Why did the immune system fail this time? Perhaps partly because of the spirit of the age, that change was in the air and those who opposed would end up in the dustbin of history. Possibly goverment support of the arts also eradicated the necessity for artists to be answerable to their audience (I really don't know the history of institutionalised arts funding, unfortunately).

I will have a look at the link you posted later.


BTW, I saw a very interesting documentary about 19th century painter Auguste Courbet recently. Definitely a predecessor of the ideological art movements, he courted public attention by painting large canvases of unworthy subjects (something we might not find so awful), but also by deliberately ugly scenes and unbalanced composition. He called himself a realist, but his subjects were largely allegorical in the old style, except that now he was merely mocking the old ideals, raising up vagabonds and prostitutes as noble models, presenting squalor as a kind of arcadia. All this I can cope with, but some of his scenes and figures are actually clumsy, showing he didn't necessarily have the talents of the academes he derided.

[Josquin des Prez]

Yes, Auguste Courbet is supposed to be the fore runner of modern art. His general attitude fits the bill as well.

All this I can cope with, but some of his scenes and figures are actually clumsy, showing he didn't necessarily have the talents of the academes he derided.

Most definitely:

[Josquin des Prez]

James, quit trying to be a second rate pressing of Karl.

[Josquin des Prez]

These critical approaches may come from the political or aesthetic right or from the other side.

Actually, they only seem to come from one side. Why do you think i became a conservative?

[Wilhelm Richard]

Actually, i do have an explanation of sort for what happened during the second half of the 19th century, but i am not at a liberty to discuss it. 

Pretty please? 

Seems to be a common theme lately...when it comes to modern art, those who declare that the emperor is naked are attacked, dismissed as "brown shirted", and declared to be, quite simply, wrong.  To be right, just see the clothes, applaud madly, no questions asked.  That mentality in and of itself makes me question the entire movement...

[Jay F]

It is most obvious junk to me, dear sir. Could it be that the emperor has no clothes? Are you sure your interest for those pieces is really genuine, that it isn't just a result of social pressure? Are you afraid of being considered unintelligent, old fashioned, even reactionary?

Sticks and stones. I'm not afraid of any of those things. I love Mark Rothko's work. I always have, even before I knew what it was, or who he was. Richard Diebenkorn is someone I've started to notice more recently. I've never really enjoyed a lot of paintings that are, I don't even know what it's properly called, "realistic," "representational"? I've always liked work that's about color rather than someone's trying to do what a camera can do better. Gaugin and Van Gogh are about as realistic as I like.

I don't really care what you like. But someone needed to respond to such twaddle as "modern art is junk." Of course, the possibility exists that you posted that just because you thrive on attention, and if you can't get positive attention, you're more than happy to settle for the negative kind. Just a possibility, mind you.

[Josquin des Prez]

I've never really enjoyed a lot of paintings that are, I don't even know what it's properly called, "realistic," "representational"?

I don't think photo realism has ever been the mark of the great artist, else, we would have to place this painting over anything made by a Rembrandt, or a Vermeer:

I've always liked work that's about color rather than someone's trying to do what a camera can do better. Gaugin and Van Gogh are about as realistic as I like.

Sorry, but i find it really hard to believe you have arrived to this preference prior to becoming influenced by modern trends and ideals. You mean to tell me that you never enjoyed a single drawing or painting until you stumbled upon ultra modernist pieces?

[eyeresist]

Man, we see right through your hacked together bs, semi-quotes, rhetoric laden with pieces of phrases you have picked up from articles, other peoples posts etc. You're completely full of crap basically, and never have anything to offer other than a quote or a link etc. from SOMEONE ELSE. You haven't the first clue of what it even means or is-like to be an artist, play an instrument etc and to be on a highly disciplined path, because if you did you wouldn't waste so much time trolling and spewing the garbage you do.

To paraphrase: "RAAARRGH!"

Actually, they only seem to come from one side. Why do you think i became a conservative?

Actually, it wasn't always so cut-and-dried. Remember that the Futurists were proto-fascists, and some of the Surrealists were anti-republicans, IIRC. But in the long run, they couldn't compete with the intractable theory and bureaucratic entrism of the left (plus they lost WW2!).

EDIT:

Of the two Courbet pictures you posted, the first certainly has some problems with the figure, but I'm not sure what the problems in the second picture are, as the figure looks fine to me. Are you objecting to the wall that makes up most of the background?

[Josquin des Prez]

Of the two Courbet pictures you posted, the first certainly has some problems with the figure, but I'm not sure what the problems in the second picture are, as the figure looks fine to me. Are you objecting to the wall that makes up most of the background?

Those are not by Courbet, they are from the type of "academics" he used to rave against (the artist is William Adolphe Bouguereau). 

[Josquin des Prez]

BTW, for those who like colors:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-499240/Toddler-fools-art-world-buying-tomato-ketchup-paintings.html

[Que]

Oh my, a real "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) thread...

Well, I'm not wasting my breath.

Q

[Herman]

Are you afraid of being considered unintelligent, old fashioned, even reactionary?

Actually, i do have an explanation of sort for what happened during the second half of the 19th century, but i am not at a liberty to discuss it. 

Why do you think i became a conservative?

Maybe you got dumped by your girlfriend, who cares?

You clearly have an obsession with Big Solutions, even if there are no problems (does anybody force you to look at a Rothko painting? I don't think so).

It is unfortunate that classical music boards tend to attract attention seeker cranks of this sort, so do us all a favor and try to talk just about music, and keep out the hate stuff.