Thank you for posting this. As an artist, my wife is constantly battling the cult of “Expression” in the art world, but is starting to gain some ground among those who would rather have beauty in their homes than some maniac’s tortured “expression”.
This year’s Boardwalk Art Show in Virginia Beach, which has traditionally been a money maker for her, has decided they want to focus on the academic, disturbing, navel-gazing type of work that she most definitely does not do, so there will be a lot of artists sitting on the Boardwalk selling nothing, while the artists who do sell have been cut out of the show by its effete little cadre of judges whose agenda they don’t share.
I don’t need to read the whole article to commend it highly. The last time I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I found the experience profoundly depressing. From Rodin, yes, Rodin with his contorted agonized forms, onward in time, our culture has stopped producing beauty.
I still go to art museums, but I stick to the sections where even the Western religious art is still clearly iconography, the Dutch renaissance and impressionist sections, and the East Asian collections.
The high point of my depressing visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art was finding a beautiful cloisonee box from Japan dated 2003. As a rebellion against our culture’s embrace of ugliness from that day on I took up ikebana (Japanese style flower arranging). (And no remarks about it not being manly—many samurai in the Edo period did ikebana as a reminder of the beauty and fleetingness of life in this world.)
Haven’t had time to digest all of this interesting article but this in particular stood out: “Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.” Compare that to Romans 1:18-32, especially verses 21-23 & 32.
Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims.
I'd go further: desecration and desecrative art is always an attack against the sacred, not a defense. It is always prompted by evil.
Desecration of beauty is an expression of power (or the desire for such power) and as such is intimately political. Witness the diabolical rape fantasies wished upon Palin and her daughters: upon Carrie Prejean, and the rabid verbal assaults on every famous Conservative woman who happens to be beautiful and right.
Attacking beauty and holiness and seeking not only their defeat but their degradation is an integral part of the Left's war against humanity. Their breath stinks of hell.
To me it’s just another example of liberals taking over the language. They aren’t capable of creating, recognizing or enjoying anything beautiful and considering it art. So they take what they like and call it art. Liberalism is indeed a mental illness. Somehow they can manipulate their minds to make something totally unacceptable to them acceptable by simply changing what they call it. No change to the thing itself, just rename it to a more pleasant name and VIOLA, it’s a good thing now, even though it’s exactly the same bad thing in reality that it was before. Wow, wish I could do that!
And thus begins the construction of a whopper of a strawman.
To begin with -- why start with that time period? Why does the author ignore the tremendous body of art prior to that period, including the works of Shakespeare, Renaissance painting and sculpture, and the music of the likes of Bach and Telemann?
Second, one really has to wonder whether the author is quite serious when he states that beauty was ever actually the "goal" of art. Look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, for example; or some of the deliberately ugly characters in any number of paintings before and during the author's chosen time period.
Was Bach's or Beethoven's goal really nothing more solid than "beauty?" Highly doubtful -- Bach's religious music, for example, had far more than beauty in mind.
And Shakespeare -- was his goal really nothing more than "beauty," of phrasing, perhaps? Or does Shakespeare endure because of something a bit more solid, such as his amazing ability to draw out those quintessential aspects of humanity that we can still recognize today?
There was certainly great attention to technique and artistic talent ... but it is far easier to argue that "telling the story" was a great deal more important to the artists than "beauty" was.
We can certainly acknowledge the ugliness of much of modern art. But it's the ugliness of narcissism, within a decadent culture that feeds -- and feeds on -- narcissism.
The ugliness of modern art is a cultural thing. We say we value "freedom," and today's artists are certainly "free." Unfortunately, like so much of modern "freedom," it is a freedom without responsibility. Modern artists are not held accountable; indeed, they're rewarded for their "fearlessness."
SGT. HARTMAN says: “Your so ugly you could be a modern art(expression) masterpiece!”
There was a small sidewalk art show the other weekend in my hometown. I easily picked the winners of the show by simply locating the most vapid, ugly, intellectually vacant work there.
I was dead-bang-on, too.
Art has become a mockery of itself. And, artists have become the equivalent of a traveling carnival freak show. There’s nothing very intellectual or important about displaying conjoined twins to the masses. That’s just trying to make a buck off the unusual.
One big question he's trying to address is: why is art the way it is these days and have we actually lost anything, or is it simply different? Along the way one has to address some pretty basic statements about human perception.
The difficulty with naming "expression" as the fundamental value in art is that it requires an object, that is, something that is being expressed. Beauty? Well, the art I prefer approaches that, but what beauty is, probably needs to be considered. Truth? (Keats' "Beauty is truth; truth, beauty" risks the status of platitude by now but it's worth considering). It is a strange thing (to me, at least) to hear a classical musician describe the upshot of a perfect composition as "true," and yet I know what he's talking about. The expositional nature of this is perhaps easier to perceive in music than, say, in a painting or sculpture but it seems to be there as well. In literature it's so evident that it's almost cant.
This is not a truth as expressed after any rules of formal logic (necessarily) but one of direct apprehension, that moment Scruton describes here:
Not surprisingly, the idea of beauty has puzzled philosophers. The experience of beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal, that it seems hardly to belong to the natural order as science observes it.
Robert Pirsig likened it to a Zen moment of pure apprehension and tried to neutralize the term by rephrasing it as "quality." That seems to be where Scruton is coming from as well:
Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture.
That's Zen all right. And yes, it's hard to explain. But when I'm walking down a row of paintings and one of them - not one I'd describe as particularly "pretty" - seems to jump off the wall and grab me and start shaking, that's the direct apprehension of something: beauty or truth, internal consistency, something. It last happened with a Picasso - I know diddly about expressionism and was too ignorant to recognize it as his, but the thing was just good. If it had been signed "Schnitzelfritz" it still would have been undeniable.
"Undeniable" - that word just came out. Truth, I guess.
And yet Mozart done in a pastiche of copulating bodies may well be a reach for some sort of truth but it strikes me as a false proposition. I suppose others' mileage may vary. But I suspect it may not be that at all, it's something else, and Scruton's invocation of "transgression" leads me to suspect that it's simply an intention to evoke a strong emotional reaction of some sort. Any sort, not just the sort reserved for a direct apprehension of whatever symmetry I'm trying to describe here. (Unsuccessfully. That's Zen too.)
Other emotions such as anger and hostility, perhaps revulsion as well, seem easier to evoke because these do not require the structure, the internal consistency, that a "true" proposition does. An artist after a cheap thrill may well throw turds on a canvas, and there is, actually, an underlying proposition there that mocks both artist and audience, but one suspects that the truth thereby illuminated is one with the medium. John Cage's notorious four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence made the same sort of meta-statement, in my humble opinion, and risked insulting the audience not for failing to understand it, but for understanding it perfectly. (Cage was also an exponent of Zen and perhaps that is what he was after, but it simply isn't that easy.)
But strong emotions - anger, hostility, revulsion - require quite a bit less work than crafting that one true proposition, and so perhaps there is an element of artistic laziness at work here. Perhaps dilution as well - we live in a time when art, especially music, is, after one fashion or another, so omnipresent as to be nearly inescapable. One used to have to make one's own, but sheet music sales started to tank when that evil fellow named Edison invented that tool of the devil, the gramophone. There are occasions - elevator rides come to mind - when one prays in vain for a few moments of blissful peace.
The market used to be the control over all this, and in a sense it still is, but in fact nowadays more people have more money than any Renaissance city ever held and hence there seems less of a strict control than there used to be - artists seldom starve these days (only the good ones). Deadly to that is the call for government subsidization of the arts, for the good of society ostensibly although it seems to result mostly in the good of bad art. One could fill a very slim portfolio with "Great Art Of The Soviet Union," in a country so steeped in artistic history that the vacuum should be horrifying.
I hold onto hope, however. I saw a young feller in a music store the other day, purple hair and enough metal in his face to set off a mine detector, and when the opening statement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto piped through the store he just smiled and whispered to his girlfriend, "that's good." Well, it is.