Whither the Arts?
At Ricochet, Dave Carter links to Camille Paglia’s essay in the Wall Street Journal on the decline of the art world with a reminder of the wonders of the 700-year old Cologne Cathedral and writes:
To venture inside and see The Shrine of the Three Holy Kings (purported to hold the crowned skulls of the Three Wise Men), or the Gero Cross which dates back to 976, or the legions of statues, is to become virtually intoxicated with the divine devotion that conceived and constructed such a solemn place.
Where is there anything in modernity to compare? Camille Paglia poses just such a question, asking (and answering) the question of why so much of our fine arts have devolved into a “wasteland.” “Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and ’70s,” writes Paglia, who then zeros in on a central point: “What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber.”
It’s a chamber where the avant-garde first yielded to iconoclasm, which in turn has yielded to unimaginative and vulgar conformity. One need look no further than the artist who submerses a crucifix in urine, and then congratulates himself for bravely giving the finger to orthodoxy, all while carefully avoiding a cartoon of Mohammed so as to avoid getting his head chopped off. So much for breaking new ground.
If I’m remembering the history of modernism correctly, as early as the 1960s, modernists were looking back nostalgically at Mondrian, Monet, and other pioneering modernists as a Heroic Era long since passed. In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe would all be dead by the end of the decade. In pop culture, by the end of the 1960s, the “Easy Riders/Raging Bulls” crowd of Young Turks would slam the door shut on Hollywood’s golden era, cheered on by critics such as Pauline Kael.
About that last development, in 2008, Robert Fulford wrote in Canada’s National Post, in a description that was applicable to much of what was going on the rest of pop culture in the late 1960s, as liberals spontaneously declared the postwar Middlebrow era dead:
[Kael] announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond “good taste,” moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?
Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. “Violence is its meaning.”
She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.
When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and ’80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.
It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: “Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline.”
Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film’s worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. “It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”
And that’s the question modernists in general need to ask themselves. The other question that often remains unexplored in self-described “modern” art is in reality, how ancient it comparatively all is.
The content I put on my iPad is up to the classics, because I am putting the classics on my iPad. I’ve gone back to Turgenev, Gogol & I even have a complete Shakespeare in my iBook library.
Western cultural mediums are stagnating. But in the other places, they seem to be flourishing. Bollywood is a blast and gyms in America and the Far East have zillions of Zumba dancers inspired by Bollywood movies. The Koreans & Japanese have been making pretty good Pop & film music too.
What 21st Century architecture will still inspire awe 700 years from now? It’s still a young century. Maybe none of it will.
So I concede the point. Culturally, the West is a wasteland & has been…maybe since the 1920′s.
My 14 year old son just completed Gogol’s “The Nose” a couple of days ago. I had completely forgotten about it in the 30+ years since I had last read a work by him. I enjoyed it even more this time.
>>Will any art or architecture produced in the last 100 years achieve the cultural permanence of the 700-year old Cologne Cathedral?<<
No. And that's okay since it's almost entirely crap. We seem to have peaked in other areas of achievement, too. There are new refinements of old discoveries, but big, completely new things? Very, very few and far between.
Read Spengler’s (Oswald, not David Goldman) The Decline of the West. We’re now at the point where Western culture is essentially dead; the coming Western civilization (antithetical terms for Spengler) will be curatorial and sterile. Everything “modern” (after about the end of the Thirty Years’ War) will be treated with something between contempt and embarrassment, the more so the more modern it is; the “art” of the last half-century will be buried (along with any surviving creators and defenders), and people will tacitly agree never to speak of it again.
Carter’s comments about iconoclasm and the crucifix in urine are right on. The simple truth is that since the ’70s, any real iconoclasts have been angrily shunned in the conformist orthodoxy of the fine arts in America.
As someone who was involved in the fine arts from the ’70s on, I can tell you first hand that these are not bright and perceptive people capable of breaking through perceptual traps but people with a certain political view rigidly held in traps where orthodoxy trumps creativity who are almost brutally stupid.
Fine art photography has been literally destroyed in America as the people who would’ve occupied that space were chased out and the space itself shut down. What you have in it’s place is “photography” that is intellectual, textualized to the hilt and conceptual and has little to do with photography but rather marginalized photographic process. At the other end of this narrow spectrum are photos taken with unwieldy 8×10 view cameras lauded for their print quality and enjoyed as if they are paintings. In fact, taking a photo with an 8×10 camera is almost like using a tank.
From the point of view of museums, anything that once occupied an in-between is simply defunct. Even the once popular genre of documentary photography was little more than making fun of people almost from its beginnings. The laughable irony is that people who pride themselves on opening the doors of perception are so entranced by appearances and a political space that they can watch Obama’s hate-speech from Hampton U in 2007 little different from a Hitler speech in the ’20s and see justice. The whole point of the cultural revolution was to teach us to see with better eyes than that.
Nice column. I, too, often despair at the state of the Arts (and, truth be told, much of “thought” in general among the latest generation). When the topic comes up, I am often reminded of the questions posed by the late Francis Schaeffer in his book & film series: “How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture.” Although far from perfect (especially from a doctrinal perspective), he explored many of the boundaries of this dilemma, and if you haven’t read/seen it, I would recommend both.
I love the Schrader quote, and welcome the succinctness with which it captures my own frustration. As a Fine Arts professional myself, from college onward I felt I was in the rearguard of a long retreat. Even twenty years ago I described myself as a ‘reactionary’ to this post-modern assault.
Keep up the good work, and never forget “the sun also rises”.
In short, the institutionalization of the “no standards” standard has left today’s would-be “rebels” no direction — at least, no obvious one — for further rebellion. But this casts a rather harsh light on “rebelllion” as a motive force in the arts.
It’s not clear why Americans succumbed, even temporarily, to the “no standards” standard. Perhaps out of a taste for variety, or a desire to prove ourselves “open minded?” But it hardly matters. One cannot transgress the “no standards” standard. After a certain point has been reached, one can only caper and mock, or repeat the caperings and mockings of others.
It’s not hopeless — at least, not in fiction, the art I follow most closely. There’s a lot of good work being done in the previously scorned “genres.” There’s some good stuff coming from independent writers, though (as you might expect) there’s a lot of crap in that channel as well. But in any art, to establish a persistent coherent identity — an “age,” if you will — requires not merely a community of artists dedicated to a certain theme or context, but customers who’ll patronize such artists. Just now, the amount of insanity in the visual arts (and architecture) is rather daunting for the consumer. The derision that’s all too often heaped on artists of a comprehensible bent doesn’t help much, either. As for music and dance, let more knowledgeable others comment.
The Cathedral building was guided by some higher principle (Christianity in this case), like the Parthenon was.
Even in pure humanist art (like the god-like human figures from the ancient greeks), Art is still driven by -and the consequence of, philosophical premises. The more transcendent the premise, the more transcendent the consequences.
As a lover of the Academic painting (like Rennaisance but not only), the so called “classical” music, classical sculpture, etc, I think there is hope for the future in those fields (see for instance Art Renewal Center, in the web) but I don’t really know the field of Architecture.
I strongly recommend the book “The Classic Point of View” by Kenyon Cox (1911), he’s very focused on drawing/painting, but he understands what’s that “Classic” thing is: the consequence of a Sense of life (A.Rand words) or the “classic spirit” (K.Cox). A spirit that’s not really conservative in the applications, but conservative in the premises:
“It does not consider tradition as immutable or set rigid bounds to invention. But it desires that each new presentation of truth and beauty shall show us the old truth” (K.Cox).
The best for the traditional (say, before Impressionism) art.
I thought the Cologne Cathedrale was built in the nineteenth century
Well, I can answer some about Koln Cathedral. It has stained glass in it, from the 13th century onward to today. In the 13th century masterworks, there are people. People on thrones, people doing stuff, apostles, women having babies. I want to say plowmen, crafstmen, weavers, readers. The whole place is stuffed to the gills with art with people in it.
They kept up the stained glass. However, as the centuries wore on, the people wandered out of the glass. There are some grand windows from the turn of this century. They use all the textures of factory glass. They are stunning pieces. They show airplanes and factories. No people.
The book I was reading on stained glass showed a modern church, in California. The pastor had commissioned a stained glass. It was an abstract representation of Christ. The people in the congregation nearly rebelled- they asked the window-maker ( it sounds so much better in german- fenstermacker)- to put people in. The artist acid- etched in abstract people faces onto the panes of color.
The book ended with a piece from a modern, San Fran church. It just looked like a giant blot of blood on the sky-light. No shape, form, narrative. I can put in a narrative, but it will be incomprehensible in 50 years. Even now it’s iffy.
The Cologne Cathedral itself answers the question-what happened? Why did the people not continue to be a part of the sacred story, as people themselves? Why were they taken apart, ignored, shushed, randomized, left a bloody splotch? Why the dehumanization? It’s not just since the 60′s. It’s a clock running down from the high medieval. I can’t make sense of it, yet.
And, second. to be fair: margaret sanger, and annie besant were running around in the 20′s and 30′s. The book Cheaper by the Dozen has a chapter where a representative from a New York birth control society visits the town they live in. The matron’s of the town find her risible; the send her about from house to house, each family having tons of children. These two were a joke in a fertile town.
Well, suppose you grew up under that regime? Birth control, delayed marriage, abortion on demand? That’s growing up the ward of a serial killer. The Black Plague killed 1/3 of the population of Europe. There really weren’t great, innovative arts and technical advances in plague- ravaged counties. We’re living in the same circumstance, more or less- without being able to call it a definite evil. Nobody made that mistake about the plague. Nobody sought it out, or praised it. We’re frozen in the early 20′s, b/c that’s when we started staring at the basilisk.
And,well, in 1917 the old order got taken apart in ways that we are still coping with. If you think about it, Holy Blood, Holy Grail- the basis for most heretical novels these days- is a traumatized reaction to 1789- which was several hundred years ago- we’re still in that moment after the sound barrier is broken, but we haven’t got the boom, or even our hearing back. What does war-time art look like? Propanda, or art?
And who produces it? Is it mass-produced, or private? I can tell you, Michael’s,a budget arts and crafts chain, does a roaring business with people making small art pieces for their private clients. Not for galleries, for private owners. I have no idea what they are making, but I suspect it’s not in the same vein as gallery artists. The people making it sound different: they have manners, for one.
Our church has a modern art installation going on right now, from a parishioner. there’s some sort of arts commissioning committee. it’s in hiatus, for a year. A museum curator member set up the most disquieting, awful, Good Friday service, ever.
The cathedral art was in a religious setting. there are religious arts books struggling with- well, true art questions- what does it mean? what does it represent? is it true? is it beautiful? and so on and on. There are other churches commisssioning work. Some churches have abstract or modern works. The cathedrals in the southwest have their native styles, too. There are still active icon painters. they aren’t in the old russian style, at all. I’m not sure that any of that would get publicized in the newspaper, or sent to ArtNews.
“We’re frozen in the early 20′s, b/c that’s when we started staring at the basilisk.”
Interesting thought with which I find myself agreeing. To extend the metaphor, too many in the arts community via obscene hubris decided to actually touch basilisk, hastening the decline.
Ari, that is a remarkable and thoughtful essay.
As to contemporary politics, it is not often noted in public that MOST abortion clinics can be found in African American areas. Margaret Sanger was an early proponent of eugenics. Interesting, eh?
I’m not trying to rant- I’m trying to talk to you. You’re fascinating. You ask questions and know stuff, about stuff I have questions about, too.
My father just retired from architecture and my older brother is one of the few architects to survive the last four years. My father was a master of wood construction and that will not last 700 years.
My point is the materials have to last for the art to last. You need to build in stone without mortar if you want a building to last hundreds of years. If you are drawing on acidic paper it will be gone in a hundred years. We have lost thousands of early movies to the decomposition of celluloid.
Mount Rushmore will be around in 700 years.
“You need to build in stone without mortar if you want a building to last hundreds of years”
No one told the Romans that. The Pantheon is brick and concrete; the Theodosian walls are brick, stone, and concrete.
Your point about Mt. Rushmore is apropos. However, I can’t help wondering whether others (like me) in the future will wonder why Mr. Roosevelt is included in such august company? Will Mt. Rushmore end up being perceived as merely a cult of early American political personality vs. a recognition of the exalted philosophies espoused by Misters Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln?
Remember, those old cathedrals took four or five generations to build. People started the project knowing their children wouldn’t live to see it finished.
A question: Which two persons do not belong on this list: Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Ben Affleck, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, Robert DiNero, Marlon Brando, Matt Damon?
No hints should be necessary.
“…but, but, but Damon and Affleck won an Academy Award!”
i beleive there are artists and architects thinking about why providence is absent and are very keen on its return , especially by its inclusion in our work. I am one of them. I must work with ideas and only deep study can bring them forth. I have begun to turn to prayer for divine guidance. I apprenticed under the Architect John Lautner, who was trained by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was taught by Louis Sullivan. All of my architectural forebearers where immersed in the study of Nature. In fact, Wright’s churches and Synagogues are examples of inspirational architecture.The Europeans, because of the unbelievable devastation wrought by World War One, turned away from belief and Twentieth Century Art, especially that of the cognoscenti, never included it again. This negation has spread through out the West but the absence has made me notice, in the past two years, that it should be sought after again.
I practice not by copying but by deriving original solutions, in other words, ideas to answer problems. The answer is always in the problem and if the answer is real, if it is an idea, then it is timeless and it is part of providence. A great awakening may be happening again in the West…Surely, I am not alone and the fact that your article was written is more evidence that like minded thoughts are stirring.
Mormon temples.
The creative talent and energy that used to show in the arts now shows in technology. Gadgets, some marvelous and useful, others trivial, define modern culture, not cathedrals or symphonies.
Off the top of my head, the Empire State and Crysler Buildings, the San Francisco Bridge come to mind…
http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/postmodernism-is-dead-va-exhibition-age-of-authenticism/
As a painter and conservative (and a modernist, not a postmodernist) I wish to say that the culture is continuing to grow. And, it is correct to identify the health of painting as an “indicator species” of the life of art. The apples are there.
Timing is everything. Today on my ArtContrarian blog I announced my new book on the crisis of painting created when Modernism ran out of creative gas. It’s a Kindle e-book titled Art Adrift.
Much of the music and art which I appreciate has been said to be inspired. I do not doubt that today’s artists are inspired, but I have to wonder about the source of their inspiration. For now, I’ll stick to my favorites from a bygone era.
The gothic cathedral in Koln/Cologne – over 500 ft tall, an awesome site/sight indeed.
Having the fortune to have visited the place while touring through Italy & Germany in ’93 this one one of our must stops.
If you haven’t seen the film “Midnight in Paris” I think you should. Now ask the question why this is considered “gothic” architecture rather than simply “Frankish”?
The answer is that after the medieval period, design principles changed, the renaissance looked at these buildings with no sense of balance, that didn’t conform to the “classical” time honored principles of Greece and Rome.
The out of favor style was derided as “Gothic”.
An appeal to gothic architecture as the embodiment of classical form and virtue is just as valid as those long gone gentlemen who mocked the same styles as crass and out of touch with the classical forms of a previous era.
Aristote texts and mathematics (translated by the monks in Mont St Michel), also crusades pilgrins who brought back some visions of the oriental constructions, were for something, the gothic cathedral illustrate builders mastering of the calculs, and of the resistance of the materials
Thank you for this. I went to the Carter article, which was followed by useful, intriguing comments and finished up at the Paglia piece. Beside a brief, contemplative walk in my surrounds, you have devoured my entire morning!
I have a degree in art and I have my stories and opinions which a comment section cannot begin to encase but I would like to share a recent anecdote that gives me hope for the future.
I just took two sixteen year old girls from my Art History class to the Cleveland Museum of Art. We were there primarily to view Egyptian, Greek and Roman artifacts since that was the unit just completed. For fun, we went through the Martin Creed exhibit which consists of a glass-walled room filled with balloons (he uses a mathematical formula to determine the amount of air in the room that is encased in balloons). You are helped to carefully slip sideways into the space into which you navigate as best you can until you desire to find your way to the exit.It is a fun experience and one I had had while visiting Bard College in 2007.
Later as we sat waiting for a table at a Cleveland restaurant, discussing what we had seen and experienced, one of the girls asked, concerning the Creed piece, “How is that art?” Yes, it was fun and cool, but so are amusement parks with their rides and experiential offerings. There are many ways to answer her question but what I find most telling is that no one asked that same question about the Greek, Roman, or Egyptian art.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. I consider the Hoover Dam to be much greater then some church. IMHO, the Launch complex 39 at Cape Canaveral is the premier architectural accomplishment of the human race;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Launch_Complex_39
Eye of the beholder.
How about the rockets, or the satellites?
I believe you are confusing fine art (kunst) with craft. The way to distinguish between the two that works best for me is that craft is useful for some physical purpose, fine art is useless physically, or practically if you prefer. Thus architecture is a craft, painting is a fine art. One can decorate or design a useful object such as a car, chair, spoon, rifle, and bridge any way you want. Still you may be creating great craft, but you are not creating fine art. Please note I am not comparing the relative merit of each activity, only the difference of one from the other.
Those, like myself, who bemoan the state of “art” since WWII might do well to look to demographics for an explanation. Most of the Western World is in a death spiral decline in population. Perhaps art is merely “leading” the spiral downward.
On the contrary, cinema, in particular, is not spiraling downward; and in fact is producing some quite commendable movies.
Western civ is dying because the people are so selfish as to kill their own babies. As for “cinema,” those people ran out of ideas about 40 years ago. They peaked in 1939 and knew it.
I think true art is intended to evoke something inside those who experience it, and I think the person who creates art has to have something inside themselves in order to create a piece that will be evocative to most of those who will later experience what they create. I’m afraid that we’ve become a mostly empty society of mostly empty people. And you can’t fake art.
We live in a post modern age, which is a cultural wasteland. There are no artists and no one makes art: narcissistic “performance” requiring no talent or skill is all the rage.
Classic modernism still claimed to have a connection to the past: one of Ezra Pound’s mottos was “make it new” — it being traditional culture. In the process the modernist destroyed culture because many of them lost touch with nature. They worked from their egos — think Mondrian and Jackson Pollack.
My favorite books on “the arts” are the two little gems from Tom Wolfe. The first is “The Painted Word” which deals with abstract expressionist painting and the second is “From Bauhause to Our House” describing modern architecture. Wolfe wrote these in the 1970′s but they are still relevant.
Wolfe’s thesis, expressly stated in “The Painted Word”, was that 20th Century art(now 21st Century)had become completely “literal.” In the “good old days” a “literal” painting was one that depicted a realistic scene taken from life. The thrust of Wolfe’s argument was that 20th cenetury artists, drivin by avant-garde “art theory”, devoted all of their energies to banishing all forms of “realism” from their art. The result was abstract expressionism. They went so far that nothing was allowed to look like anything. A similar transition took place in architecture.
Modern art became so removed from everyday experience that it could not (and cannot)be comprehended by anyone but a professional critic of the artist himself. Thus the written description that accompanies the piece and explains what the piece is supposed to represent is absolutely central to it’s existence as “art.” Wolfe summed up by saying (and I am parphrasing) – “Now art is totally literal – You cannot appreciate a piece of art without the explanatory text that goes with it.”
I used to write grants for government agencies in different fields. I never wrote one for an arts project but I am confident that the greatest art of the last forty years is locked away in the cabinets and files of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This art would be composed of the tens of thousands of grant applications for funding received by the NEA and NEH. Each would describe a different piece of “art.” In these applications the earnest artist would justify his or her vision of the project or the piece. They would tell the funding committees what the piece is supposed to represent and how it will serve as a worthwhile addition to the world’s artistic stock.
These definitions, these explanatory texts, are probably beautiful in their own way – Full of passion and conviciton. The actual piece described in each application is probably something your wouldn’t look at twice but the WRITTEN RATIONALE for the piece is undoubtedly a thing of beauty. Someday in the distant future (if we are all still here) these grant applications will adorn the wallls of museums as representing the highest aspirations of art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries – The desire to obtain public funding.
The problem, IMHO, is that art stopped being a celebration of something (people, God, ideals) and now the “primary purpose” of art is to “challenge and provoke”.
Aestheticism.
Don’t expect it come back.
Electricity.
Aestheticism.
Don’t expect it to come back.
Electricity.
(I forgot ‘to’. It’s haiku.)
What do you mean by “aestheticism”?
I read a few years ago that the sensitivity in Leonardo’s line has never been duplicated. My haiku has something to do with that.
Consider sports. Is there anything that human’s have not completely surpassed in the achievements of the past in the world of sports? But with fine art it is not so. There may be fine artists in modern times, but it can be safely assumed that every artist who can be considered at the top level of their genre or medium has studied the old masters. It can be understood from that that the past in fine art has established the standard as far as outright skill and sense. We don’t see those standards being surpassed, so I theorize that the world is simply too fast paced for that upper level of dedication to one’s work.
Also, for example, maybe you’ve seen on the internet where someone uses photoshop to make a picture (not a painting) and it looks excellent, flawless even, but could they do it with real paint and canvass? If they make a mistake they can erase it and try again, and no matter how many attempts it will not mar the canvass and force them to start from the beginning. I think that in technology something is lost in true ability. Like I said, I’m not saying there are no good fine artists, musicians, or writers out there now, but that as far as the raw aesthetic ability, it is in decline.
In his memoir “Notes of a Soviet Actor” Nikolai Cherkasov writes of his teacher Vladimar Maximov warning of the “formalists, sundry leftists and pseudo-innovators……who, while claiming that they were exposing the evils of old art, were in reality making use of pseudo-revolutionary phraseology to kill ideas and lead us to formalism, absurd stuntery and affectation”
Art is dead because Western Progressives had to reject the traditions of the Old Masters in order to achieve their Progressively Brave New Utopian World Ruled by Them
I’ve noticed that there are very impressive works of art to be found at the local/regional level. The artists in this realm have to sell their works to a broad, local clientele, and are often, in fact, supported by local businessmen (as one I know of, who was given a home to live in, after years of living in various hotel rooms). People, yep, bourgeois folk, like to support their local artists. As I suppose the local guilds, etc., supported the Cathedral and Michelangelo and etc., with contributions (and ideas).
It is art committees, run by people who want to appear ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘sophisticated’, and who acquire high status by belonging to these committees, who funnel public money into ugly and ridiculous and meaningless twists of metal and stone. (the theory being, if the New Yorker likes it, it must be important) They clutter our public landscape, replacing the Cathedrals with junk. This is true throughout North America at every level, from town to capital cities.
In a southern Alberta city, there was a battle over a statue designed and provided by a local history group, who wanted to memorialize their ancestors by portraying a farmer and his wife working in a field. The local grandees, in charge of public money, think this is just not ‘appropriate’ to their plan to bring ‘culture’ to their region. The local history group won that battle, but most are won by the local upper classes.
Also, a note as to television: the best shows, the ones that acquire ‘cult followings’ have spiritual underpinnings. I am presently enamored with Person of Interest: the first season is about redemption primarily of a man who is, as he remarks numerous times, very good at killing people. Watch the episode #4, entitled “Cura te Ipsum”, or, Physician heal thyself.
“It was fun watching the applecart being upset,” Schrader said, “but now where do we go for apples?”
The question revererates beyond the arts. Maybe Californians are asking the same question about gasoline.
I recommend a visit to the Parthenon, in Rome, for any consideration of the value of art and architecture, over time. Begun a generation before Christ, burned, rebuilt, burned, rebuilt, it took two centuries to “complete” and stood 2,000 years before a larger span was built. Almost to the foot, it is the same size as a nuclear containment which I, and others, engineered. (We omitted the hole in the roof, the oculus.) Our shell, atop the tall cylindrical containment took a few months to build. It has hundreds of rebar, each as big as your arm, and is designed to resist natural disasters which have not occurred since before the Roman empire. It should easily outlast the Roman masterpiece.
The Romans invented concrete; it changed the world, in barrels, arches, and hemispheres (with the help of those smart Greeks). Later came wooden trusses, using the new fangled iron connections. These spans amazed the world. Much later, the Gothic arches, turned stone into miracles, lace that soared to heaven, and allowed windows to admit light, heavenly light, into cathedrals. These too took centuries to build. With the invention of steel trusses, and reinforced concrete, in the later decades of the 19 th century, engineers exceeded these spans in months of construction. To do this, we invented steel cranes that accomplish impossible feats, down town, every day. Motorists no longer look up as massive loads swing over their car.
In the last decade, engineers have invented advanced materials, exploiting nanotechnology, which will again, revolutionize our world. Diamonds may cost the same as sand, the hardest, best heat conductor, and perfect electrical insulator known to man. Quantum computing will revolutionize computation. Buildings will sense an earthquake then change stiffness and dampening to resist the vibration. A Renaissance is in front of us.
Yet a study of the advancement of art, though the 20 th century is depressing. There are superb artists practicing today, but most lack basic support. Our sports are superb; our art is lousy. It is our commercialized culture, our values are warped.
I don’t know if I fit in the “classical” camp, but I have long held that the function of art is to communicate the true, the good and the beautiful. I also think that too much of what is done in the name of art today (and this has been so for at least a couple generations) does not just fail the true-good-beautiful test; it deliberately runs in the other direction. The more debased, assaultive, ugly, and pointless something is, the more likely someone is going to stick it in a gallery, plunk it down into one of our urban squares, show it on a screen, and/or (as chambers observes) pursue public funding for it.
I think the comments about belief in transcendence are both accurate and important. Without the “excelsior” motive embedded in the subconscious, cultures do seem to descend into navel-gazing and spiritual scab-picking (where there is anything resembling “spiritual” at all).
Francis Porretto @ 6 is right: If there are no boundaries, there can be no transgressions. The illogic of the crowd that prides itself on habitual transgression while living by the motto “No boundaries!” ought to be obvious, but alas, like vampires, this same crowd cannot see itself in the irony mirror.
Instead what we seem to find is that good art, like muscle, is produced through resistance. Challenged to find ways to “speak the unspeakable” without actually, y’know, speaking the unspeakable, artists in the past have come up with all manner of creative solutions — respecting the boundaries, but drawing artistic power from the tension of approaching them. It’s kinda like sexual tension between those TV couples in shows like Northern Exposure, Remington Steele, etc. In the tension was the drama (and the comedy). The minute they “did it,” zip, all the air goes out of the balloon. Pretty much all the old unspeakables have, by now, been spoken. Among other things, we are f-bombed on a daily basis.
And yet a whole host of other unspeakables has risen in our midst. Like the 50 million Americans who should be here but aren’t (see ari @ 9). Interestingly enough the suppression re: the “new unspeakables” is coming largely from the establishment arts & media communities, the very people who were so darned eager to shout all the old unspeakables from the rooftops and scream censorship whenever anyone criticized them. GOSH. Whoda thunk?
Duncan @ 14:
Funny that you should mention prayer dedication & the “two years” thing. Similar thing and similar timeline here, with a similar result in my art projects. I wonder if this tracks for anyone else? Maybe you are right, *something* is a-stirring …? … BTW, I really like that “one-legged table” on your website! Very impressive!
My sister has a PhD in music. She can bring tears to my eyes playing the Oboe or the bassoon. But she often gives me grief over my chosen profession of engineering.
I recently did a job at a paper mill. Basically upgrading their systems for efficiency. One of the more difficult tasks was programing, trouble shooting, and delivering the programing for the steam drum. Basically imagine a 14 foot across steel drum that has superheated steam running through it to dry the fresh paper.
There are three states of reference. 1) when the drum is just started with steam going through it. It has about 40% of its volume with water in the bottom of it. So you have to overcome that fluid inertia. 2) when the drum is up to speed and all that water gets flung outward. Now you have a completely different inertia to deal with. Finally 3) the drum is at full speed, the water has been completely ejected, and now paper is rapidly spinning around. Its critical to optimize the 3rd state, while minimizing the problems in the first two.
That’s kind of tough. Now add in the fact that the gear system is older that dirt. So you got a lot of swishing between the gear teeth. Not done correctly, the computer logic will not recognize quick enough that the drum is spinning (we are talking about micro-seconds here) so the computer will max out the torque incorrectly.
Its a wonderful dance when done right…and a dangerous failure if it doesn’t work right. Fine tuning a mechanical system is awesome. And I get paid pretty darn good to do it.
If you see the Golden Gate bridge and only notice the paint color, you are missing so much of the beauty of it. The forces being canceled out, the noble daily fight against corrosion, and the shear strength required to stand up to the day to day traffic.
Ah but what do I know. I can’t tell the difference between Picasso and Chopin.
Some of you need to get out more…in my hometown of Scottsdale, AZ, there are a bunch of galleries filled with everything from high Art to low, of varying quality: a lot of it is extremely good and I wish I could afford more of it. Similarly, Santa Fe, NM, has many galleries with a lot of marvellous art. Laguna Beach, L. A., San Francisco, Sausalito, the same. Probably all readers have some kind of touristy place within a short drive – check it out, there may be treasures awaiting you.
If you’re not going to buy without the pre-approval of ArtWorld, go in peace, but spare us grandiose denunciations of something you don’t understand.
oh gifted men, vainglorious for your first place
how short a time the laurel crown stays green
unless the age that follows lacks all grace
Dante Alighieri c.1305
If you’re not going to buy without the pre-approval of ArtWorld, go in peace, but spare us grandiose denunciations of something you don’t understand.
Ah yes, the old “You’re too stupid to get it, hick” riff.
Actually, weSwinger, some of us have actually walked into more than one art gallery in this calendar year. And some of us, gasp, work/hobby in the arts.
I envy you sitting at the pinnacle of Western civ there in Scottsdale, where the ratio of excellence is that “a lot” of the “art” is “extremely good.” That surely explains the mystique of the Paris of the Southwest and the constant stream of glitterati scooping up all the modern-day Toussaints, Monets and Berninis.
/sarc
The point of the post, and many of the comments, is that the main current of the contemporary art scene is decadent and, in certain cases, downright nihilistic. Not that there is not a single good piece of art to be found anywhere in America. Get the difference?
I don’t know what your tastes are, and you only mentioned galleries, which excludes quite a number of art forms, but if your statement that “most” of the art is “extremely good” were (A) accurate, (B) representative across the country, and (C) true of most/all art forms, then neither this post nor the comments nor the articles referenced above would have been written. Believe it or not, critizing the state of the culture and role of the arts is not something people would be doing if they were peachy-keen with everything. People complain when they are dissatisfied. (duh!)
Millions of Americans have disconnected from current Hollywood products specifically because of what they perceive to be the warped nature of the content. It’s not that they don’t want to watch TV or movies, period; they just don’t want to watch what is being produced right now. Do these people just “need to get out more”? Are they insufficiently sophisticated enough to understand the nuance of grindhouse gore or too priggish to appreciate the humor of “Borat”? So if they miss “The Help” or “The Blind Side,” movies they might otherwise enjoy, whose fault is that? The tuned-out, turned-off, fed-up viewers who are unwilling to dig through the piles of cinematic poo to find the occasional pony, or the industry that created the cinematic poo pile in the first place?
As for what counts as “extremely good” art and how much of it there is: Yes, people are going to have different assessments of that. And, yes, personal tastes will play a role. For instance, Isamu Noguchi’s coffee table isn’t for everyone. (I happen to like it, but I can understand why others wouldn’t put it in their living room.) But is this really defensible as “extremely good” art …
http://oosi.ulib.csuohio.edu/scripts/sqloosi/oosipage.asp?vcount=158
… when the standard of measure is Koln Cathedral, Monet’s Water Lilies, Michelangelo’s David, or Kano Eitoku’s Chinese lions?
Really?
There is great out there. Unfortunately there is not a lot of taste in many art institutions to recognize what is great art.
In the make-believe world of art something remarkable has happened. One of the last living fresco artists just unveiled his latest work of the Transfiguration of Christ, easily the most significant contribution to the world of religious art of the past century. The images stand almost 20 feet tall and are the first OUTSIDE frescoes to be created in over 700 years. The face of Christ is based on the shroud of turin. The works were a gift from Artist Mark Balma to the small, struggling community of Stacy. you can see images of the work at facebook.com/stjohnsfrescoes
Dear Mr Hails and Mr Diablo, thank you for your thoughtful posts.
It’s something I’ve been asking around about, poking around about. I’m not on the arts committee at church- children, no degree- but that is one of my biggest questions- we know what worship from painters looks like. What does creation and worship of engineers, mathematicians, builders, programmers look like? Because creation is an act of worship. Absolutely, no question. Honest labor, and maintenance, are callings-
Having seen the stain-glass book, which wasn’t,btw, commenting on what I noticed- it was focused on technical advances- I’m not sure churches as a statement of the pastors’ ego are healthy environments. Or even churches where there is a monologue or stating. There’s clergy and parish and a few intermediaries. {arishioners and The intermediaries aren’t being painted into the scene, or woven in, or anything. Like, the agonized Christs that so gallumph movie directors. I’ve read that they weren’t realistic views of a crucifixion victime. They were excellent views of someone dying of plague. So, someone could see Jesus suffering alongside them, as their town suffered.
I know what rocket scientists NASA worship looks like- the rockets and launchers are statements about reaching out to transcendance, exploration- what’s out there? When even a tour guide at NASA in Houston says ” We pointed a telescope at an empty section of space. There were 30 million stars in it. We are going there someday.” I know I’m hearing a credo. I don’t know why that credo isn’t in relation to that persons’ church, why it’s left outside the tent to get cold, or mugged by another faith. It is a statement of faith, and ought to be inside, getting some tea, and finding its relatives.
I volunteer at the library at church—a church library is best described as the conversation that the parishioners are having with each other. The parish, in Christianity, extends back 2,000 years- the saints are alive in Christ- and as a Protestant church- we assert that all of us are saints. So, if there is someone in the congregation who has worked on a book, or thesis, or a mathematical proof- it ought to be in the library. There ought to be enough art, painting, maps, globes, books, quilts, laying around that something can be set aside and forgotten for a few centuries, and not missed, exactly, b/c there is so much there already. They found letters from Augustine just stuck on a shelf in a library in (?) Belgium, somewhere like that, just this century.
There’s a new-ish cathedral in Los Angeles. It’s next to a freeway. When the archbishop objected to such a fine building next to a freeway, the architect said ” This building will be standing here for centuries. The freeway will be gone by then.” I don’t know what it looks like- the photographer worked to make it look grey and empty. Does anyone here know about it?
and, again, a ghost story. we are living in the middle of a very big ghost story. People in their seventies and eighties were in the first chapters of that book. They thought the ghost story was the world wars.Nobody ever believes the story “look to your left. Look to your right. Someone is missing on one side.” They think that’s about flunking out of college, not a true story about anyone 40 or younger. 26 states entire population is missing. The plague killed 1/3 of Europe over a century or so. We’ve managed it in half a century. That’s a lot of missing people.
I almost think that drives the Star Wars mythos- “oh, look! My missing kid was just misplaced! He’s okay! She’s okay!” and then, later, the acres of healthy young people, acres and acres and acres of them, trapped in some laboratory, in bottles, just like every horror show of an abortion clinic-bottles of babies, bottles of baby parts. The quote for Geo Lucas is Brave New World, but I think the emotion is not- it’s from abortions. Notice how the writers are trying to make the clones into autonomous individuals? They struggle with becoming human, individual, themselves?
And, Camille Paglia, for all her cleverness- the cathedral is still in use. Its not static, and its not over, and she’s not a parishioner. People in academia make that mistake all..the….time. The life of the parish is not a store vitrine for outsiders to gawk. It is not obvious, or advertised.
For instance, Mr Bloom has a book where he says Billy Graham is not consequential after he retired from the big revivals of the 1950′s, which I think was one of the oddest things I’ve ever read. Mr Graham went home and labored at his home church. He raised a son who is now leading a church, and talking with other churches. From what I’ve heard, the member churches make Christmas boxes for lonely, poor children. This is a primary function that Jesus told churches to do- look after widows and orphans. And, second, these churches are spearheading the modern Christian engagement with Africa- not as a victim of NGO do-goodery and IMF loans- but as sister churches. Nigeria, right now, is stabilizing and uniform-izing Africa as a glamorous place, through its VHS film industry- which is heavily Christian. It’s not for world-wide consumption. It’s Africa, for Africans. It’s not noticeable to NGO’s, b/c it’s home- viewing. It is, however, viewable by armies in the bush, armies fighting over mineral fields, people in apartments in the city, whichever city it is.
The opening of the video game Civilization #?? begins with “Yeto, yeto, yeto mbene” that’s not some odd African easy listening- that’s a hymn. Most people who start the game think it’s some Ladysmith Black Mambozo happy radio lint. People don’t necessarily know what they are hearing, or looking at- computer gamers are hearing a statement of faith and worship- but they just think it’s perky marketing music. It’s a Lutheran Hymn, commissioned and written at a Lutheran college- from a musician from one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world. The church is in Ethiopia. The parishioners are black Africans. They attend college in Africa, in Minnesota, and in Germany.
It isn’t obvious b/c the private religious colleges aren’t coastal. The Ivy League, which graduates elites that stock government, are provable biased against admitting Christian religious teenagers. Harvard admitted a Taliban member. He met other Muslims from around the world studying there. So, someone who thinks the Peace Corp, American gov’t crop advise, and Muslims, are means to engage the world- those people aren’t even able to see the categories of: Mormon missionaries- who bring square-foot gardening to the world- catholic missionaries- again with the square-foot gardening, american baptists- no idea what they do- church of christ- no idea, but it’s alot- lutheran missionaries(died in an elementary school in Haiti- already there before the quake- the Red Cross was a late-comer) world-vision- clean water and who knows what else-assembly of god- no clue, but the wealthiest nouveau riche in Brazil are from AG slum-work- 20 years in, they’re rich. Orphanages, hospitals, drug-dry-out facilities- those are the signature marks of “christ has been here.” Productivity, transparent gov’t, widespread literacy- all kinds of stuff. We’re just used to it being the baseline of normal. It’s not. We’re just a millenium in to the project, while they’re getting started.
I’ve tried for a long time to articulate just why I hate nearly all movies made since about 1960. They’re filthy, they’re propagandistic, they seem to be talking down to us, and so on and so on. It’s a big subject, and I think this article adds a lot to it.
Joe Queenan, who wrote about movies for a long time, said recently, “Movies are dreck.” For a lot of reasons, that about sums it up.
And, while I’m thinking about it….we don’t know, b/c we don’t know the streams, and reservoirs of our creative past.
Warhol gets mentioned a lot. Andy Warhol took communion weekly. He was struggling through with his prints- how did his skill and technique and life interact with his faith. I think it was a cri de couer- that his commercial skills were as faithful and useful as any garret painter’s canvas attempts. I don’t think he interviewed about it- because-pray in secret to your Father, that you might be rewarded- I think God and Andy Warhol talk about ART in Heaven.
I think the people who used Mr Warhol’s mediums- acrylics and advertising- maybe they are dipping from the bucket, not the well.
And, well, let’s see. Shape-note singing is from the church. It’s been borrowed by protest puppet-makers. My mother-in-law can still go to church and sing in shape-note. I’m not sure a puppet-maker can compose in shape-note. But the puppetmaker is on the front-cover of the NYTimes.My MIL will never be on the front cover of the NYTimes, nor will any hymn composer.
Aaron Copland did Appalachian Spring. The first movement (?) the one that shows up on itunes- is “Tis a Gift to be Simple” from the shakers, from “lord of the dance” which is a quite gruesome medieval hymn- cheerful, perky, singing about leading the dance of death. Clever, sophisticated types will go to a full-orchestra concert, and hear Aaron Copland. I will go to a down-market, shrinking Methodist church, and sing “Lord of the Dance” on Easter, while a more liberal, wealthier parishioner might sing “Tis a gift to be Simple”. . Vaughn Williams used that set of notes, too.
They might even buy Sarah Ban Breathnach’s books. Daybooks, with titles near spiritual classics. She’s borrowing without crediting, and, well, getting it wrong, the way a barbarian would wear a bishop’s stole as a sash to hold his sword.
Justin Timberlake grew up in a church.
I have questions about Psy of Gangnam Style. South Korea was honorably labored over, after WW2 by quite gifted missionaries. It has enormous, gigantic, mind-bogglingly huge, enormous churches. The culture is optimistic and youth-oriented, entirely unlike the rest of Asia, but very much like Christendom. Psy was comfortable coming to America to study music. His video is different than other SoKo pop-stars. Is he Christian? Was he raised Christian?
Bishop Rutt, of the Church of England, worked in South Korea. He opened Parliament a few times. He also wrote knitting histories.
The lead singer of WhiteSnake is Christian. He’s changed lyrics before, to a more Christian understanding.
David Beckham, the soccer player, has Christian tattooes. He’s certainly running his family different than, say, Tom Cruise. One of his teammates is in Rome, studying for the priesthood.
Whether Lucas’ likes it or not, the Indiana Jones stuff plunders Christian history for plot points, for hardware, for libraries, for sculptures.
John Woo. Those doves? His statement of faith in his medium- violent films. How noticeable is it? If you know, it’s like a cross carved on a wall that you can touch as you go by, about your day. Otherwise, it’s just a cool film effect. You may get attracted, and look further. You might not, but it’s there whether you notice. It’s his credo in his medium.
Christening gowns would have three tucks in them, or three sets of three tucks: that’s a prayer in thread: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Would you notice them, if you were looking at white infant dresses?
and, low-culture-pop-Twilight, the books- cite Western civ all over the place. It’s attractive, on its own, even without banging drums and citing MLA style.
I think western civilization reached its apex (art, literature, music) in the 17th & 18th centuries. Medicine and technology belonged to the 20th – but we lost something along the way.
I thought we were limiting ourselves to the visual arts! Because again, if you remain open and give living artists a chance to support themselves, buy their books and/or listen to their music, you will find 1st class stuff. (I hope I’ll be excused from excluding the truly decadent pop culture stuff – that needs no nurture!)
If you’d like my ideas of good, non-academic artists; there is Neal Stephenson in Literature, Wynton Marsalis in music and Will Wilson in painting. Any of these guys might last 700 years, that’s for our grandchildren’s great-great-grandchildren to decide.
Who knows? They may see our time as one of great flux, where we started integrating their everyday technologies into our lives and arts. A time of great excitement — where we long for the spiritual sureties of the high medieval age.
At any rate, my vote is a distaste for the critical practice using an era as a club to beat upon another.
What certainties? We’re still working out what was being debated in the high middle ages. The vividness isn’t from certainty, it’s from seeking.
Personally, the statement about high art merely being decorative, earlier in this thread, strikes me as wrong by definition- not of craft, but of high-art-decorativeness. The high decorative arts were communication and instruction and debate devices when most people were illiterate. They weren’t static, at least in the western part of the roman empire. if we cite greek statues- they were functional as well. One dealt with a god through the medium of the sculpture. it became decorative when its function was no longer necessary, about, like, say, lice-scratchers, or long cigarette holders, in this century.
The functions aren’t always obvious- codpieces, for instance- are cited as exaggerating men’s forms, but are as likely to be padding for holding mercury on syphilitic sores. Venus de Milo is, arguably, spinning, from the position of her arms, but nobody knows.
So, I would put satellites and space capsules and rockets in the same category as cathedrals. We do have an aesthetic sense about them that is different than the Soviet aesthetic, so there’s even regionalism. Sputnick, all by itself, is beautiful as sculpture. They are reaching out to the infinite, by use of our most advanced technology. For cathedrals- that’s arches. For rockets- it was slide-rulers and steel.
The popes were usually the sponsors of observatories, chemists and laboratories. Glass was in private hands, so materials science was privatized, but sold to ecclesiastic clients.
The question now is, are the current patrons responsible? The Piss Christ, and most modern anti-human post offices, suggest not. The foolish works in smaller mitteleuropean capitals tended towards sugariness, not to depravity.