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In the Art World, They Think They Are Better Than You
Albert Barr’s Infamous Modern Art Flow Chart of 1936
There’s nothing new under the sun. “The Boston Manifesto,” a statement from concerned members of that city’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948, provided an accurate prophecy of the bubble of exclusion, irrelevance, and big money hypocrisy that today’s establishment art world encourages:
“Modern art, the manifesto declared, had become ‘a cult of bewilderment’; the gap between critics and artists and the public had produced ‘a … playground for double-talk, opportunism, and chicanery at the public expense.’ Modern art had ‘come to signify for millions something unintelligible, even meaningless…’”
The writers later backed off from some of their sentiments — not because they were wrong, but because they prioritized staying in ideological lockstep with their fellow travelers. The educated class bought completely into the utopian delusion that the slate of society needed to be wiped clean to bring about heaven on earth — their version of heaven being one where they got to pick winners and losers based on the whims of cronyism.
Because of their grip on academia, administration, the media and the cultural institutions, buying into this establishment worldview became the only game in town. They fancied themselves the New Aristocracy of the Well Connected. These incestuous New Class snobs were content to retreat into the cloister of like-minded elitists, where art, both the objects and ideas, became just other forms of status symbols.
It’s fun to imagine what possibilities await us once we break the stranglehold these reverse King Midases of the Ivy League hold on our culture. For generations everything they’ve touched they’ve turned to excrement, but still they kept up their tight networking, jealously guarding their privileges, working to exclude and undermine anything or anyone that would challenge their dominance. Since the results they produce themselves are often so poor, they’ve skewed the whole of society to assume credentials mean worthiness and achievement. Among the officially sanctioned creative classes, they’ve chosen a stance of entitled abuses of power instead of truly cultivating art that could connect with and inspire society at large.
But that voice from the outside won’t shut up. We’re not bewildered by the art world anymore, because in retrospect it’s all so clear how the culture went off the tracks, and just who was responsible for it. The exciting part is how we’re going to advance when we’re freed from the presumptions of the current power brokers. Their time is running out.
See more on the state of the arts at The Remodern Review.
Published in Culture
I’m personally an agnostic, but I really do love art that believes in beauty and order.
If the work of Bouguereau and the like is considered the highest form of art then it’s time to pack it in and await the zombie invasion. Sorry friends of artrenewal, academic realism has its place, but not in the top of a hierarchy. That said, the problem is lack of visual art curriculum in our schools. The visual arts have been gutted from public schools over the years in the US and the result is an increasing number of people who don’t know squat about art. I can’t understand how someone could say something like contemporary art leaves them cold. That spans decades from 1950-present! Lots of things have happened and are happening. Sure there are some weird things like Fluxus or Marina Abramovic, and I’d grant that curators and gallery owners dictate largely what gets bought and exhibited. However, during my MFA stint, my big influences were Velaquez, Rubens, Manet, Sargent, Janet Fish, Wayne Thiebaud, Fairfield Porter, Color Field Ab Exers and Arte Povera. Perhaps you may not see value or connections in any or all of these, but I do. I think the art world is thriving in some parts, and it will continue to thrive as long as people are willing to pay for it, be it buying art or supporting art education.
A must-read book that goes into the rise of modern “art” and the often-overlooked role that the destruction of teaching methods played is Twilight of Painting, written in 1946 by R. H. Ives Gammell.
I teach my students that order, intelligibility, workmanship and (both a part and a summation of the others) beauty are necessary elements for any great fine art. Modern “art” fails all four. Whatever it is, then – decoration, perhaps? – it isn’t art, but anti-art.
I am sorry but I disagree with this idea about how liberals view the immanentization of the eschaton. The unconstrained vision (modern liberals for the most part) believe that cronyism will quite existing once they get enough power. All the cronyism that currently exists is because the right kind of people don’t have enough power.
I think of young Bernie supporters who say, “Once we can elect Bernie. We can get money out of the system.”
Then again, the older socialists I know have pretty much given up. Once they believe that the liberal utopia isn’t possible, they become jaded people with a nihilistic bent. This doesn’t mean that they don’t love their families and their hobbies but they are consigned that the broken world remains broken.
But then again that is just my experience. Do the rich socialists you know really like cronyism? – even if they indulge in it?
Thanks to computer gaming, we live in a new golden age of landscape art. It’s just not in a frame on the wall, so people don’t think of it the same way.
Is it possible that instead of people not knowing enough, that they know and have experienced far too much? Over the last 24 years, I have probably attended at least 12 degree shows for a place that awards MFAs and Master of Architecture degrees. I have seen thousands and thousands of pieces of contemporary art. I have been to many other shows and galleries and museums.
I have enjoyed some of the works. Some have stopped me in my tracks. Others have exhibited marvelous levels of humor imbued within them. Unfortunately, I doubt that the percentages were as good as would be reflected in Sturgeon’s Revelation. Luckily, I have forgotten most of the lesser works except a few tied to social justice and that showed such an incredible lack of skill and technique.
Artists of the early Twentieth Century started by learning how to draw and paint and be artists, and then they branched off into new ideas. Before Picasso was Picasso, this was Picasso:
This speaks to me far more than photographs of a woman defecating along a roll of waxed paper.
The problem is not that the schools do not teach art. They don’t teach anything anymore. The problem is that “artistes” do not reach out for a common audience. The old artists did.
Personally, I blame photography for the direction of contemporary art.
The visual arts have been gutted from public schools over the years in the US and the result is an increasing number of people who don’t know squat about art.
Sound teaching, both in the practical area of drawing and painting as well as just informing young minds and exposing them to great art, is extraordinarily rare. And a bad education — teaching kids that ugly is beautiful, bad is good, etc., and that the leaders in modern crap are on the same level as Velasquez or Sargent– is worse than no education at all. So I don’t mind that the public schools have gotten out of the business of propaganda, which is what most art education consists of. Good riddance.
Well I am incredibly unqualified to talk about art. But without anyone explaining anything to me. I stared at a Van Gogh painting of tree for over fifteen minutes. It was like the painting was talking to me. It looked like Louie Armstrong’s horn sounded.
Any modern art that doesn’t look like anything does not have that emotional appeal.
We have fetishized art so much that it has become now an “asset class” that people invest in, usually the kind of people who have no appreciation for the art itself, only its monetary value. In order to inflate the value of art, the name of the artist has become more important than the piece of art itself. A 20-second doodle by Picasso is more expensive today than a beautiful painting by an unknown, which of course is nonsense. At least in the case of Picasso, he did some good work. Today there are artist names that are essentially built on nothing of artistic value, just pure marketing.
The spread of museums is partly to blame. I enjoy visiting museums as much as the next person, but mainly for their quality as an orderly (and often beautiful) meeting place, a sort of public square, more than for the art itself. Museums have elevated big-name art so much that there is an obsession with the new, so much so that a painting today that is as good as a Van Gogh but painted by an unknown would never be noticed because it is not new. Instead something that is new and vapid is elevated to great status and wealth.
Start by cutting government subsidies to museums and see what happens. Could be good.
It’s like everything else. Some folks acquire perch, leverage and become gate keepers, some because they bring knowledge and skill, others access, credentials, ruthlessness, tenure, but once they work there way to the gate, they get to charge admission, tout what should be called valuable, corner the little markets they create, extract rents, promote the thing they control, control the thing they can promote and conspire with their tribe of gate keepers, to restrict access, reward tribal members. Guilds, unions, professional associations, all government, political positions, leagues; it’s just the way it works and occasionally has to be pruned back, broken apart, begun again. Markets do this and free peopled as well, when they just go their own way, if they can. In this information age keeping the gate should be increasingly difficult, maybe even in the stultifying epitome of the process which seems to be the world of modern art.
Gregory Cochran posits that modern art’s value is in its use as a status signal for the wealthy:
Two related points:
Watch the film (untitled) which addresses this issue in a a sympathetic, and hilarious, manner. The send up of avant-guards visual art is priceless (e.g. cows in formaldehyde, conceptual art, etc.).
Why should I lift a finger, Gary? If there are idiots out there who want to pay a fortune for so-called “art” that is just crap, why should I care? I don’t see it as being a liberal-conservative thing, particularly. There are foolish and pompous jerks on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s really no different from wine snobs, and countless other types of snobs. Let them have their thing. I’ll just ignore it.
I read that while playing Final Fantasy XIV on a computer with a 4K monitor. It’s not only a visually stunning game, but there are parts of the music that are amazing and uplifting in the best classical sense.
This is not just about an art career, this is an existential struggle for the survival and direction of our civilization. Art plays a bigger role in this than is generally appreciated. To let the decadence and artifice of the establishment art world go unchallenged is to be passive in the face of evil and cultural suicide. But fortunately there’s nothing grim for me in this fight, art is a source of joy to me and I love sharing what’s good about it with the world. It is a vital part of the cure for what is ailing us now.
That is what art has been reduced to, by the chicanery of the cultural Marxists: a mere object, a status symbol, a materialistic marker of wealth. Design is where the achievement is these days, without a doubt, but design and art do not serve the same function. Design makes function elegant and efficient. Art invites endless contemplation of the mysterious state of being a human spirit in this world. Nowadays most people don’t associate that amazing thrill of significance with art-that is because the establishment art world is so invested in hyping nihilistic, soulless junk, instead of art.
What you think on grows. Think on the good art and share it. Ignore the rest and let it find its own landfill.
Such views can only exist if those who hold them are snug in their own denial, hypocrisy, and double standards. True art will not let such assumptions stand, it is ruthless honest.
Yes.
It is true that so much of our skilled creative energy is poured into design these days. But the state evoked by art, that slow sense of wonder and mystery, is hard to maintain while multitasking. The game may be presenting stunning vistas, but it’s hard to really lose yourself in it while you are slaughtering an army of orcs.
What I experience in the art world is artists are pandering to the tastes of other artists, curators, and virtue signalling elitists. This keeps the art world small and insular. In reality the art world should be as big as the whole human race.
This sums up about 90% of what drives the contemporary art world.
Sure, let the suckers waste their own money. But what they are supporting is a toxin that ruins culture outside just the narrow range of the museum and art gallery. The Post Modern mindset that is destroying the foundations of Western civilization nests in the art world: the idea that everything is relative, that there is no such thing as beauty and truth, that it all comes down to power, money, connections, celebrity and will to power. You cannot ignore this stuff, because art shows what our values are as a society, and these values seep in everywhere. We’ve let a group of power mad Marxists hijack the direction of our culture and they are driving us all off the cliff. Art must be part of the fight against their destructive rampage-in fact, it is the key battleground. “Politics is downstream from culture” – Andrew Breitbart
There’s a lot of junk out there. However, there’s always been bad art in every era. I have confidence that history will distill the best work, and reject the bad. That’s why I call myself a painter and not an artist. History will decide if my work holds up, which is why I teach so much art history to my students. One of the most enjoyable and accessible shows that I’ve been to recently with my kids was WONDER at Renwick Gallery in D.C. It was installation art, arguably an overly inclusive and difficult genre for many people to appreciate. But this show was really well done. I can’t tell you how many people I talked to about the show, mostly because they saw pics I posted online about my visit – and these were not regular consumers of art, either. Many art schools still teach drawing, painting, sculpture etc. through observation. But that’s the foundation, not an end in and of itself. Some schools are very conceptual. Some are worthless. I know someone who spent two very expensive years in art school and never made anything. Really!
Don’t ignore it, but an even bigger mistake is to take it seriously. If you want to get rid of it, make fun of it.
Mockery is a powerful weapon, and they make it oh so easy with their absurdity.
Art School Confidential
I do trust in time as well as the great filter. Once freed from the self-serving interests at work these days, what endures from this era will look very different than what is currently promoted. I believe the future of art is being determined outside the higher education/academic system. They’ve been hopelessly compromised by their ideology and elitism. Studying art history is a great cure for contemporary over inflated self-regard.