A Critique of Modernism in the Arts

". . . the Arts have their criminals and lunatics as well as their sane and honest men . . . and . . . the gratuitous delusion that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is much more mischievous than the necessary convention that the King can do no wrong and that the Pope is infallible."

—George Bernard Shaw
    The Sanity of Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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