When Will the Normals Reclaim Art?

Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch Museum

You would think that the tiresome joke that is modern art would be over by now.

That this is museum-quality art is obvious nonsense, but you still have to admire the chutzpah and sales genius of the grifter who foisted this alleged objet d'art onto the "art" world.

Many years ago, I met a young woman who worked at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum of modern art. She said that the maintenance staff had been chastised for leaving crossed mops and brooms over buckets just to see if patrons would stop and examine their ad hoc artwork.

Roger Scruton wrote that religion does not reduce the sense of awe and intuition of the larger reality to sterile propositions, but instead offers an opportunity to join a community to celebrate and find meaning in that shared intuition. He said that art can also be a path to that personal search, that innate awareness of something higher and better that can be induced by the experience of beauty and creative insight.

The attack on genuine art is intended to cut off that pathway in the same way that religion, tradition, common sense and humanism itself are under assault by the anti-humanists of the left. The project of making humanity a petri dish for ideological pathogens requires the complete extinction of an awareness of fuller existence.

Modern art is also a model of leftist rule: What the people want or believe is irrelevant—all-powerful critics tell us what is or isn't art. Mediocre creators and grifters displace genuinely talented people. The rich pour money into the enterprise to be certified as enlightened and sophisticated. That evil joke is now the blueprint for "our democracy."