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An Ascendancy of Ugly and Stupid
Many years ago I went to the National Gallery of Art in DC (which I used to do more often) when there was a special exhibit of the works of Morris Lewis. I have to admit I did not get it and still don’t. There were a bunch of strikingly similar large paintings like this one below in which there were some runny painted lines in the bottom corners. The highlight of the trip was smiling and shrugging my shoulders while catching the eye of one of the museum guards, a middle-aged African American man. He was shaking, trying to suppress his laughter, his back against the wall, sliding down slightly until his hat pushed a bit down over his face. I think he was just waiting for someone not to solemnly stare at this stuff and just laugh instead. I felt like we were the only guys in the building who admitted they had just seen the emperor’s naked backside through his new outfit.
Art
I have no problem with a batch of random colors on a canvas or with people hanging it on their wall if they like it. But to put that stuff in a museum in a room next to Renaissance masterpieces or across from one of Jacques Louis David’s rich portraits as if some comparable skill, vision, and pursuit of beauty and truth were involved seems silly.
Figuring I must have missed something, I dutifully went down to the museum book store and opened a copy of the book that accompanied the collection (no, I did not buy it) and looked up the painting that had the fewest lines in the corners of the largely blank canvas. The book explained that I was wrong to think that the artist was just leaving most of the canvas blank. Actually, it was “a dramatic use of the white reserve.” The sheer genius of that utterly BS phrase was more impressive than the art.
In the Painted Word, Tom Wolfe explained how in the modern art world, critics are more important and powerful than artists precisely because the art does not really speak for itself, so the critic’s role is magnified. Popes and Italian merchants granted far more artistic license than do modern mandarins of art and architecture who now dictate the mandatorily ugly and offensive crap produced now. An absolutely marvelous take on Modern architecture can be found in this wonderful Current Affairs article. A sample:
The extraordinary fact about architecture over the last century, however, is just how dominant certain tendencies have been. Aesthetic uniformity among architects is remarkably rigid. Contemporary architecture shuns the classical use of multiple symmetries, intentionally refusing to align windows or other design elements, and preferring unusual geometric forms to satisfying and orderly ones. It follows a number of strict taboos: classical domes and arches are forbidden. A column must never be fluted, symmetrical pitched roofs are an impossibility. Forget about cupolas, spires, cornices, arcades, or anything else that recalls pre-modern civilization. Nothing built today must be mistakable for anything built 100 or more years ago. The rupture between our era and those of the past is absolute, and this unbridgeable gap must be made visible and manifest through the things we build. And since things were lovely in the past, they must, of necessity, be ugly now.
[Readers are invited to insert the image of favorite examples of hideous buildings in the comments.]
In so many places we are no longer allowed much less encouraged to expect, seek or try to produce beauty, that irreducible, fiercely subjective yet transcendent, and shared human experience. We are increasingly forbidden to celebrate tradition and culture where so many valuable ideas and timeless achievements can be found. All art or architecture is must actively offend the sensibilities and visual appetites of all those who lack the official credentials. If the bourgeoisie hates it, then it must be art.
I used to laugh at the silly art in the lobby of a couple of nearby office buildings downtown—always too large, always ridiculous standing “sculptures” (or just piles of random stuff glued together). A common theme in modern art is a guy with lower-middle-class origins who becomes a real estate tycoon or other business success and he and his wife buy what the Experts tell them is Art to thus affirm their (presumably always tenuous) hold on elite status.
In an article related to his Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe quoted an architect who said that it’s bad enough they make him build those glass and metal boxes but then they go and “put a turd in the plaza” meaning the obligatory large stupid blob sculpture that pollutes whatever shared, open space is provided in every office building in America built in the last 70 years. A huge ugly blob or even nothing at all (perhaps a dramatic use of the white reserve?) can be art so long as it is jarring, antagonistic to what every culture in human history would regard as beautiful, and is certified as such by official critics
That bad lobby art display I used to laugh at was kinda funny but I am not laughing much anymore. The large-scale marriage of soulless corporatism to soul-negating “art” and architecture is now merging with the worst of the anti-normal venom of woke culture. It is as if all the anti-human, anti-beauty, anti-truth forces were joining together against us like some massive evil Orc army.
At this very moment, some fiercely mediocre persons (each with a college degree certifying complete avoidance of the best of western culture) employed in some utterly sterile office buildings are currently commissioning really bad art, funding socially corrosive community action,” planning a hideous new headquarters campus, and/or issuing guidelines to censor any of us kids who might be inclined mention the emperor’s lack of clothes. The new anti-human, anti-normal codes coalescing all around us are our new rules of living, simultaneously enforced by soulless corporations and soulless government agencies trained by soulless academics and staffed by intentionally unimaginative people.
Millions of badly formed, badly-educated people now have a vested interest in ideological substitutes for competence, talent, and imagination and they are working hard to make sure there are no new Michaelangelos, Mozarts, Shakespeares, or Christopher Wrens (or Thomas Sowells, for that matter) whose creative output might remind people that there can be such a thing as excellence and beauty. And in lieu of creative, insightful, courageous political leadership, we have Joe Biden installed to extinguish all hope of a national renaissance of any kind. It is frightening how fitting it is that that a vaguely malignant buffoon should preside over a comprehensive war against excellence, beauty, human nature, discovery, and without being conscious of the scope of destruction.
The energy and unparalleled achievement of the American national enterprise was that we were all about individuals not waiting for permission from some self-appointed ruling class to create, invent, build or change. Suddenly, we are a people subject to an “elite” comprised of those who despair of transcendent meaning, who despise all past achievements in our vastly rich shared heritage, and who vehemently insist that we share in that despair and live, think and feel in accordance with increasingly stupid cognitive, aesthetic and moral limitations. How the hell did that happen?
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When I lived in DC, I used to stop by the National Gallery and visit her – so beautiful.
I think modern art is effectively a version of camp. Modern artist are more into breaking with the past traditions than actually being good.
Being good is so predictable. Incompetence is more dramatic.
Steven is a Ricocheteer (as in mouse?). He should be involved in this discussion. @stevenseward, take note! He’s also my husband, if you compare his website and my avatar. Proud wifey. We’re together nearly 23 years and it still takes my breath away to watch a blank canvas turned into, well, what’s on that website. And it takes work. Lots of work. It’s also amazing to see how a single small brush stroke, placed just right, can change a facial expression or any one of a number of things in a painting.
What do you think? Nouveau East Berlin or Nouveau Pyongyang?
I abstain.
My first reaction was “Arm photon torpedoes!”
My first reaction to this was “ Does anyone get time off for good behavior?”
The Painted Word is a timeless masterpiece.
In the 1980s, my brother had a job in the Old Executive Office building and a talented friend made him a large joke gift painting of Elvis with his arm around my brother, done on black velvet. There was an exhibit in the new building of the National Gallery of art by government types and that painting was among the White House staff contributions. For reasons I cannot fathom, it was not made part of the permanent collection.
?
Seattle main library. Designed by Rem Koolhaas. I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, and I hoped it would leak like a sieve in the rain. Its main problem now is all the homeless bums who hang out there.
From my extensive private portfolio of refrigerator magnet art by my grandchildren, here are samples done by two of them while in grades 2 – 4:
Something that hangs in a taxpayer-funded gallery should require more skill, color awareness and quality of design than is typically exhibited by grade school kids, nor should it require an opinion by a recognized critic to ascertain its merit.
I actually really, really like the first one. I would hang it on my wall.
When that thing was first unveiled, I believed (and still believe) it was intended as a joke on the yokels from an Eastern architect.
Put a handle on either side sticking up, and a ball of yarn or two peeking out of the top, and it’s my mom’s knitting bag.
I think the one in the lower left with the orange and blue stripes is an interesting illustration of contrast.
What a shameful waste of perfectly good concrete.
Too much color for Pyongyang.
No room for giant Kim posters either.
I saw that painting at an exhibit of Color Field painting in Denver years ago. I must say I loved it, but I am a huge sucker for Color Field painting.
No accounting for taste I guess, but I do think it’s unfair to lump the Color Field guys in with the architectural brutalists, or Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol etc.
Although Morris Louis isn’t my favorite, here’s one of my favorites. If you ever have a chance to see a Morris Louis in real life, do so. They’re truly impressive which isn’t conveyed by a jpeg.
Most modern “art” is not art. It is merely decoration.
Personally, I believe that much of modern “art” is just a way to launder money.
When I was in college in the early 80’s, the architecture students in freshman year were always tasked with designing a building inspired by a fruit or vegetable. Every year you’d see these drawings being carried by students. Some would draw a building vaguely shaped like fruit. Others would just draw a still life fruit with a parking lot. I always wondered who got the higher grade from those two approaches.
Now, living in Austin, one of our buildings resembles an artichoke (the Frost Bank Tower). I always wonder if the architect went to my university.
Welllllll . . . it’s complicated. Graves was one of the more recognizable post-modernists, but he is channeling traditional motifs. He’s just blowing them up to unreal scales. In the context of the times, at the end of the solipsistic mirrored-glass buildings, this actually was considered a return to the traditional vocabulary, in its own way.
That was my experience on my early morning visit. It stank. The entire experience of the building was dank and forgettable. Koolhaas has some mesmerism that makes American civic leaders swoon, and think “we’ll be seen as hip and with-it if we have one of his buildings,” and then they stand around with tight smiles when they reveal his plans, telling themselves it has to be genius because it’s a Koolhaus,a and privately, silently feeling a bit abashed because they don’t quite get it.
It’s a clumsy thing without any grace, but it’s working in the classic American skyscraper style. Just not very well.
So what do people think about this? I actually have pictures I took when I was in Vienna in 1996, but I can’t find them now. This is a real apartment building. Can you look at this building and not smile? It’s called Hundertwasser House. Across the street, there’s an underground mall with similar mosaic walls and floors.
It’s beautiful. But it looks familiar.
It’s very Fountainhead.
I just love getting into these brawls about Modern Art!
Your story is so typical in museums. I’ve seen hundreds of people stare in stunned silence at pieces of garbage, terrified to express any critical comments lest they be thought a fool. The hallowed atmosphere of a grand museum contributes to the illusion of greatness, and visitors are sure that the people in charge must know something that the humble viewer does not. If you saw the same junk at a yard sale you wouldn’t have paid 50 cents for it.
My wife and I like to tease people in museums that are looking at blank canvases with a single brushstroke, or pencil mark, or spittle, or worse. When we make derogatory remarks about the piece, the viewer is often greatly relieved that somebody else sees the ruse that is going on. You are not alone!
It’s because being “different” is a helluvalot easier than being “good.”
At first I thought it was a pencil sharpener . . .