I use the term “artists” quite loosely in this sense. “Arsonists” would be just as accurate, if not more so as a descriptor.
You may be familiar with perhaps the most infamous iteration of the modern art genre: the 1987 “Piss Christ,” in which a formerly obscure “artist” Andres Serrano placed a crucifix in a vat of his own urine, photographed it, and made a career for himself off of the controversy that he created.
For his act of vandalism, Serrano was awarded a $15,000 prize and an “Award in the Visual Arts” sponsored by the federal government’s National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Via Albion Monitor:
For many years, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has hosted “Awards in the Visual Arts,” a national competition for individual artists. In 1988, Andres Serrano was one of seven winners. His prize was $15,000 plus a place in the group show exhibiting the work of the winners. The fund that provided the money for the cash prizes came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, private donors, corporate donors and the NEA.
This summer, Pope Francis welcomed Serrano to the Vatican. It seems he has many fans in high places.
Similar-minded adult children, under the cover of high-minded concern for the environment, are gallivanting across the UK desecrating iconic paintings with tomato sauce and other aqueous debris.
Related: Who’s to Blame for the Damaged Adult Children Staging Sad ‘Milk Pour Protests’?
A degenerate pop star called “Lil’ Nas X” got a lot of attention for himself a couple of years ago for making music videos filled with satanic imagery and homosexual erotica, which I wrote about elsewhere at the time.
In the vein of all of this, I began revisiting this phenomenon of filth marketed as modern art while recently in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I visited a centuries-old Spanish colonial-era hospice and orphanage adorned with impressive Christian iconography on the walls and ceilings, including an impressive depiction of hell and redemption on the ceiling.
But just feet away, on the property grounds, were several “modern art” exhibits of self-professed feminists featuring clearly very intentionally distorted, hideous, shockingly vulgar depictions of the human form. One such exhibit contained this description on the wall, written in Spanish and English:
The works gathered here allow us to appreciate the plastic and visual experimentation of this artist marked by an immense chromatic, luminous, and expressive vitality enveloped by an unspeakable lightness or fleetingness. The contrast of intensities and temporalities not only operate on a perceptual level but also from a narrative and intellectual approach in which drawing and painting merge in the same field of action.
The representation of the female body stands out in disfigurements and scenarios that refer to the coven, the occult or profane, but also the grotesque, erogenous, and caricatured. Heresy as an emancipatory process for women, as a struggle against ecclesiastical and male oppression in the Middle Ages. In this respect, the Italian writer, feminist, and activist Silvia Federici points out… ‘in the transition from the prosecution of heresy to the witch-hunt, women become more and more clearly the figure of the heretic’. The fire that does not produce, is the fire that gathers and congregates, that conspires and attempts the established order and its terrible consequences.
The question is: why, and more to the point, why in such an explicitly Catholic space? Certainly, a lot of the incentive from the artists’ perspective is simply to create the most shocking and controversial bit of “art” possible and then to generate publicity for themselves on the back of the public outrage that predictably ensues.
But the underlying social trends that drive these nihilistic creations go much deeper. From a meta-cultural perspective, in the post-God, postmodern era, it’s hip and ironic to mock and ridicule anything that confers any sense of transcendent meaning or beauty and wholly unhip to seek or appreciate transcendence or beauty without scorn or subversion.
Marxist ideology, which has insidiously infiltrated every facet of society through academia, frames the history of the human race as essentially a struggle between oppressed and oppressor, in which the obvious implication is that the oppressed need be supported and championed and the oppressor vanquished, hence the pseudo-enlightened reference to the “emancipatory process” of heresy against the Abrahamic Patriarchy™ promoted in the above-referenced modern art exhibit.
Finally, from the technocrats’ perspective — the reason the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEA promote this bilge — making everything ugly on purpose serves to demoralize the population, the utility of which from a social engineering perspective I have explored at length elsewhere.
