Advertising and the state of Art — epilogue: Art

• I was afraid of this — hav­ing slept on it, I thought of other things I left out. It seemed to come down to a hand­ful of con­nected thoughts about Art and oth­ers about post­mod­ernism. So I’ll break them out and insert the usual dis­claimer that none of this may be worth the time it took to key it in. Just some thoughts, impres­sions, opin­ions and (hope­fully) edu­cated guesses.
  
  Other things to blame
  I gave my opin­ion about the changes in the visual arts: (a) that a lot of them have been for the worse, and (b) that taken together they indi­cate a kind of soci­etal sick­ness of the soul. It prob­a­bly goes with­out say­ing that that isn’t the way those in the art world see it. Here’s some of that con­ven­tional wis­dom, as near as I can fig­ure it out (I con­fess I can’t always trans­late the language):

  • No prob­lem, everything’s great — A great num­ber of Art’s chat­ter­ing class carry on as if Art is still a fully func­tional, highly regarded cul­tural force. They think that mod­ernist prin­ci­ples are still going strong as well. Coin­ci­den­tally, they voted for George McGov­ern and can’t wait do it again. What can you say? Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
  • It’s technology’s fault — With the advent of pho­tog­ra­phy, the patron­age fell off, as it was bound to do. Why would a wealthy patron sit for hours to have an artist’s inter­pre­ta­tion of them done when a mar­velous, sci­en­tific new device could take a com­pletely accu­rate photo in a mat­ter of sec­onds? And once orig­i­nal works could be cheaply and eas­ily repro­duced, why would the less wealthy peo­ple buy an orig­i­nal? So this ver­sion sees Art as just a vic­tim of circumstance.
  • It’s the public’s fault — Peo­ple these days are too stu­pid to appre­ci­ate the fab­u­lous­ness of por­traits of the Vir­gin Mary made out of paint, glit­ter and ele­phant dung. That’s the line any­way. Don’t ask me what this means; I’ve never been able to make sense out of it. The biggest prob­lem I have with this argu­ment is that it per­fectly insu­lates the speaker against any fur­ther debate by broadly hint­ing that if you don’t agree with them, you’re too igno­rant to know what you’re talk­ing about. I was tempted in Art classes to ask what level of edu­ca­tion I had to attain before it was per­miss­able to call a piece of junk a piece of junk. But then I’d remem­ber my grade-point aver­age and clam up.
  • It’s mass-consumerism’s fault — When adver­tis­ing and low-brow inter­ests cre­ated pop cul­ture, they cre­ated a mon­ster. By pan­der­ing to unsoph­i­cated people’s appetite for more, faster, big­ger, newer, they cre­ated an envi­ron­ment in which Art, with its more demand­ing appeal to our higher nature, couldn’t com­pete. I actu­ally think there’s some truth in this — or rather, I think there would have been some truth in this if Art hadn’t rot­ted away from the inside by the time it was asked to sur­vive in the world out­side of galleries.
  • It’s capitalism’s fault — Cap­i­tal­ism begets indus­tri­al­iza­tion which begets class war­fare which begets greed which begets com­mer­cial­ism, which kills finely devel­oped aes­thetic sen­si­bil­i­ties which kills Art. I believe that’s the way that one goes. To be hon­est, I’ve never paid atten­tion long enough to hear it all the way through. But it’s another big hit on col­lege campuses.
  • Just ran out of ideas — When imagery entered the mar­ket of mass pro­duc­tion, it sim­ply ran through all the pos­si­bil­i­ties of how to make some­thing look totally new and inno­v­a­tive. Pretty Art — done. (See also Renais­sance) Ugly Art — done. (See also Man­ner­ism – the Renaissance’s post-Reformation ugly step­sis­ter). Iden­ti­fi­able? — Real­ism. Unrec­og­nize­able? — Abstract. Big, small; intense, restrained; sophis­ti­cated, vul­gar; manly, girly — Been there, done that — so five min­utes ago. With nowhere else to go, Art started pan­ick­ing, offer­ing up bric-a brac from hard­ware stores as mas­ter­pieces (remem­ber Duchamp’s “Foun­tain”?) just to meet its deadlines.
  • This is pure truth, baby! — The argu­ment here is that if you can’t han­dle ugly, vio­lent, insen­si­ble imagery, it’s like Jack Nichol­son said: You can’t han­dle the truth! In other words that, like it or not, Art is doing its job: it’s mir­ror­ing a cul­ture so full of hor­rors and mean­ing­less­ness that it can only do it by reach­ing for the very worst images and lan­guage it can find. This may even be true, up to a point. The prob­lem with it is that it doesn’t reflect the opin­ion of most peo­ple, just the peo­ple con­nected with Art. If a mir­ror is dis­torted unless it’s held by one per­son, it’s not a good mirror.

  And so it goes. The list of pos­si­ble scape­goats is endless.

  Art and Reli­gion
  I’m sur­prised that it’s that hard for Art’s chat­terati to see a bond between Art and reli­gion. Good­ness knows, they’re not known for giv­ing reli­gion credit for any­thing good. Still, I don’t know how you ignore the evidence.

  The ear­li­est paint­ings we know of are Neolithic cave paint­ings, like those in Las­caux, France made from 15,000–10,000 B.C. (link HERE). And what was the pur­pose of the horses and bison stam­ped­ing across the cave wall? To quote from Janson’s His­tory of Art:

  Hid­den away as they are in the bow­els of the earth, to pro­tect them from the casual intruder, these images must have served a pur­pose far more seri­ous than mere dec­o­ra­tion. There can be lit­tle doubt, in fact, that they were pro­duced as part of a magic rit­ual, per­haps to ensure a suc­cess­ful hunt.

  The ear­li­est art objects we have are “venus” fig­ures, like this one from approx­i­mately 25,000 B.C. — female fer­til­ity fig­urines. And think of the ancient archi­tec­ture (or is it sculp­ture?) of Stone­henge, the pyra­mids of Egypt, the zig­ga­rauts of Mesopotamia, the Bud­dhist tem­ples, the Aztec ruins, the Amer­i­can Indian totem poles. The dif­fi­culty isn’t to find Art that did orig­i­nate with reli­gious expres­sion, but to find any that didn’t. Through­out his­tory and in every cul­ture, from Greek vases to stain glass win­dows, the desire to rep­re­sent the nat­ural world in pig­ment and glass and stone has gone hand-in-hand with the desire to artic­u­late spir­i­tu­al­ity. The sym­bolic act of re-making the nat­ural world using the ele­ments in your envi­ron­ment doesn’t seem to hap­pen apart from the desire to get closer to your God or gods. When artists decided to leave that aspect behind, it was the begin­ning of the end. In that regard, it’s actu­ally sur­pris­ing that “god­less” Art has sur­vived as long as it has.

  Sec­u­lar Art and Insan­ity
  Just as patently evi­dent but just as ignored is what hap­pens to Art apart from God. Sep­a­rated from the idea that it could man­i­fest heav­enly truths on earth, Art could only man­i­fest its oppo­site — iso­la­tion, dis­or­der, hell­ish­ness. There are lots of ways to char­ac­ter­ize insan­ity; I won’t even begin to try to define the word in all its per­mu­ta­tions. But to my under­stand­ing, it refers to the sep­a­ra­tion of the mind and senses from the order, cohe­sive­ness and enjoy­ment of Cre­ation. Apart from God’s light there’s only dark­ness, and so it’s been the sad legacy of a dis­ci­pline that could have refreshed our souls with beauty to grow pro­gres­sively blinder and more obsessed with its own darkness.

  The night­mar­ish ele­ment existed as early as the medievel works of Hierony­mous Bosch, but it took the dem­a­gogues of Enlight­en­ment think­ing to pass off night­mares as things of deep value and mean­ing. And so Fuseli’s “Night­mare” and Blake’s twisted visions became defin­ing works of Art in the 1700′s, as were Goya’s dark rav­ings and Turner’s scrab­bled seascapes (which Mark Twain described as look­ing like what you’d get if two tom­cats fought in a plate of tomato sauce) in the 1800′s. And good grief, in the late 19th and early 20th cen­turies, we went from this (which sup­pos­edly depicts the field where he shot him­self) to this to this (and so on and so on and so on …).

  So what’s the hot new mar­ket that the Art world has been buzzing about? Well, that would be Out­sider Art, the Art of any­body who inhab­its the fringes of soci­ety or is labelled dys­func­tional by soci­ety. That can include prison inmates or des­per­ately poor peo­ple, but since they have a dis­ap­point­ing habit of get­ting out of prison (thus los­ing their dys­func­tional label) or being enriched by their art (thus los­ing their fringe sta­tus), the best Out­sider Artists are crazy peo­ple — psy­chotics, schiz­o­phren­ics, any­body that’s invent­ing their own real­ity. If they’re treat­able, that’s no good, because then they can’t offer us the thought­ful reflec­tions like this one or this one (which is part of a 15,000 page book about the bat­tle between good and evil, star­ring “The Vivian Girls” who fight against “Glan­delini­ans” with occa­sional cameos by the Cop­per­tone Girl and a comic strip char­ac­ter called Lit­tle Annie Rooney).

  So, in the ulti­mate insan­ity, irra­tional­ity is seen as impor­tant and insight­ful and rea­son is deemed worth­less. What’s that quote I’ve heard from an Ortho­dox source? Some­thing about, “When the world goes mad, then mad­ness will seem like rea­son …” I’m sure some­one can help me out.

  Art and Love
  On a lighter note, I don’t mean to say that there’s no rea­son to visit an Art museum. Even feel­ing the way I do about the direc­tion things have taken, I can’t stay away from them. In spite of all the baloney, there are glints and glim­mers that catch the Light that it dare not allude to. And when that hap­pens, they sparkle all the more for the dark­ness that’s around them. And so when you see some­thing like this, you see the work of some­one with a love of sto­ry­telling; when you see this, you see the work of some­one who loved the coun­try­side; when you see this, you see the work of some­one who loved the gath­er­ings of the com­mon peo­ple. The com­mon ele­ment is love. Only love would make a man work on his back for seven years in a medium he hated and pro­duce this. Or make a woman paint enor­mous flow­ers like this so that “other peo­ple could see what I see.” Or make a man almost blind with cataracts in his old age paint his favorite place again and again and again.

  It’s a fine thing that made man look at his world and know some­how that it was good. And it’s a extra­or­di­nary thing to still feel that way when your head has been filled with a lot of bad the­ol­ogy and bad phi­los­o­phy that tells you to think dif­fer­ently. Those peo­ple who have the tal­ent with raw mate­ri­als to offer back visual impres­sions of the good­ness of things still have the power to evoke the sweet­ness of heaven in the mid­dle of the dreary world. Those are the things that I go to gal­leries and muse­ums to see. And with mod­ernism dead and buried, a new gen­er­a­tion of artists, archi­tects and musi­cians has emerged that isn’t afraid to make things that are play­ful, beau­ti­ful, fab­u­lous, elab­o­rate or just fun.

  But that’s prob­a­bly some­thing to take up in the next epi­logue that focuses on post­mod­ernism. (Whew! This thing got away from me! Oh well, it’s keep­ing me from div­ing into a bag of chips on this Labor Day week­end. You gotta love that.)

  
  

  Related posts:

  1. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — part I
  2. Giv­ing the nanny state a new uniform

  
  
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• d_s 09.02.2006
  

  “It’s capitalism’s fault “
  “To be hon­est, I’ve never paid atten­tion long enough to hear it all the way through. But it’s another big hit on col­lege campuses”

  Well at least you’re hon­est!
  But hon­estly, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to hear it “all the way through”.
  Ever hear of Eddie Bernays?
  Or the Torches of Free­dom cam­paign? http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/torch…

• Grace
  

  Good heav­ens! Who knew any­body was actu­ally mak­ing their way back this far? I had to re-read it to fig­ure out what I had said.

  Well, thanks for the link. I had seen things like it, of course. I was actu­ally just being face­tious (or engag­ing in wish­ful think­ing) when I said I had never heard this type of thing all the way through. As an art stu­dent at a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia uni­ver­sity taught by ex-hippies, I would’ve had to call in sick every day not to hear anti-capitalist screeds. Con­se­quently, I’m afraid I’m a lit­tle fatigued with blam­ing Big Busi­ness for the death of all that’s good. Give me another decade or so — maybe I’ll come around.

• d_s
  

  Reduc­tion­ist think­ing seems to be a west­ern trait, such as:

  Mary wor­ship– “bad”;
  Downplay/get rid of Theotokos (Mary)

  hip­pies– anti Big Busi­ness, ” stu­pid” etc.
  Big Busi­ness must be blame­less and above reproach

  Art is a reflec­tion of cul­ture.
  Who then IS in power and respon­si­ble for shap­ing west­ern “cul­ture” and the course of his­tory?
  Antony C Sut­ton knows … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sutton http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_… http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolsh… http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/books/best_…

  Movie rec­om­men­da­tion:
  The Dis­tin­guished Gen­tle­man -
  No “T” or “A”, foul lan­guage or vio­lence
  Imag­ine that in a “mod­ern” Hollyweird/Hellywood pro­duc­tion!
  And doesn’t the char­ac­ter Dick bear an uncanny resem­blance to my (for­mer) con­gress­man from Sug­ar­land TX?
  To think the movie pre­ceded real­ity!
  Does “art” imi­tate life or does life imi­tate “art” or what?

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