The performance art of Emma Sulkowicz is only the latest example in the long decline of Western art. Her recent failed effort at amateur pornography, entitled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol in a sad attempt to make it sound sophisticated, was done under her own auspices.
But her earlier classic of “endurance performance art,” Carry That Weight, where she hauled a 50-pound dorm mattress around as she attended class, was sponsored by Columbia University as her senior thesis for her visual arts degree.
But Sulkowicz’s sophomoric attention whoring is only the tip of the iceberg. Contemporary art as a whole is ugly, narcissistic, puerile, and degenerate—in other words, it is a perfect indicator of the health of Western culture.
Art in a healthy society
Art is not utilitarian. The primary purpose of art is to be beautiful—to lift up the soul. Classical Greek sculpture and architecture are good examples of this. The statues of that period capture the ideal human figure while buildings, such as the Parthenon, reflect the order of the universe.
Of course, there are other reasons why people create art. Sometimes art is didactic, as in the case of the stained glass windows of the medieval cathedrals. These windows depicted scenes from the bible and the lives of the saints as a way of teaching illiterate people about the Christian faith.
At other times, art may have a political message. An example of this is the Medici Chapels in Florence. These exquisite monuments proclaim the wealth and high culture of the Medici family.
Medici Chapels
But even with these examples, the primary purpose of these works is still beauty. The stained glass windows are beautiful even apart from the biblical events that they depict. A modern day visitor to the Medici Chapels who knows nothing of that powerful family will still find the Chapels awe-inspiring.
So in a healthy society, art is not used primarily as vehicle to convey some political message or to be used as propaganda.
The beginning of the decline of Western art
Caspar David Friedrich – Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when art started to decline. My own guess is that the decline had its roots in Romanticism, an artistic movement that originated in the late 18th century and ended around 1850. The Romantic period emphasized the originality, emotion, and individualism of the artist.
At first glance, these do not seem to be bad values, but they set the stage for future degeneration. With originality, artists begin to feel the need to be completely unique. Each artist must represent a complete break with everything that came before him as well as his contemporaries. Introducing the emotion of the artist will eventually become making the art all about the artist’s feelings.
Marcel Duchamp – L.H.O.O.Q.
The art of the Romantic period is still beautiful and strangely powerful, but seeds planted during that period germinated in the 20th century with Dadaism movement, which may be best exemplified by the work L.H.O.O.Q. Although it was a small, avant-garde movement, Dada demonstrates that by the early 20th century, Western culture was already showing signs of exhaustion.
Contemporary art
Fortunately, the Dadaism movement was short lived, but that doesn’t mean that Western culture suddenly became healthy again. On the contrary, if we look at what passes for art today, it is difficult not to think that our culture is in a terminal stage.
Performance art
Shia LaBeouf – I Am Not Famous Anymore
The most obvious offender against beauty and sanity is “performance art.” In addition to Emma Sulkowicz’s garbage, there are examples like actor Shia LaBeouf’s stunt at a Berlin film festival where he sat on a chair with a paper bag that said, “I’m not famous anymore,” over his head.
After it was revealed that LaBeouf had posted plagiarized Tweets, he staged another piece of performance art entitled #IAMSORRY. In the piece, LaBeouf sat in a room wearing a paper bag. Visitors were allowed to enter one at a time with something that might be humiliating to LaBeouf such as an Indiana Jones whip or a copy of a book that he lifted the Tweets from.
Shia LaBeouf – #IAMSORRY
During one of these visits, LaBeouf claims he was raped. According to TMZ, a “woman walked into the private room — where he was having silent one-on-one interactions with fans—and whipped his legs for 10 minutes, then stripped off his clothes and ‘proceeded to rape’ him.”
LaBeouf and Sulkowicz are not alone. There are tons of other ridiculous examples of performance art. Literally anyone can do it as long as there is some “message.” This entertaining link has performance art that consists of a half-naked woman lying on the floor, a woman who screams at wine glasses, and a man in a colorful one-piece bathing suit who helps to awaken your inner child.
One of these artists (the half-naked woman) writes:
As opposed to a struggling artist, I am an artist who struggles. I struggle mostly with the depression associated with bipolar disorder (Type II) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but also with art’s power, or lack thereof, or appropriateness thereof, to intervene in questions of justice in the world.
Who can argue with that?
Painting and sculpture
Anish Kapoor – Dirty Corner
Contemporary painting and sculpture are not as awful as performance art, but they are degenerate as well. They tend to either contain some trite left wing message that attacks traditional values or they are just plain ugly.
Under the first category of artwork with a message we have the sculpture entitled Dirty Corner. It was created by British artist Anish Kapoor and is on display at Versailles. The artist described the work as depicting the vagina of a queen taking power. The implication is that it depicts the vagina of Marie Antoinette, who was beheaded during the French Revolution.
Would the French government have purchased this work if the artist used a more apt description such as “failed megaphone”? I doubt it.
Paul McCarthy – Train
In a similar vein, there is American artist Paul McCarthy’s mechanical sculpture, Train, that depicts President George W. Bush sodomizing pigs. McCarthy also designed the giant green butt plug that is at the head of this article. Is this really art?
Francis Bacon – Painting (1946)
Under the second category of art that is simply ugly are the paintings of British artist Francis Bacon. He seemed to be obsessed with slaughterhouse imagery. The paintings definitely evoke feelings in the viewer, but they are not pleasant feelings.
Architecture
Frank Gehry – Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Contemporary architecture fares better because, at the end of the day, buildings must still be functional. However, architecture still suffers from the requirement that all of the art be completely original and unique to the architect. This is a departure from the way that architecture was done before, where architects elaborated upon the designs of their predecessors.
Take the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which was designed by Frank Gehry. It is a striking, innovative design, but it is unique to Gehry. It has no antecedents, and I suspect that when Gehry dies, this design will die with him.
Conclusion
It would be wrong to blame artists for the decline of our culture. Rather, they are simply products of our culture and they are accurately reflecting the infantile, narcissistic, and leftist orientation of our society.
We can only hope that more artists will wake up from their indoctrination to once again start producing works of beauty, but for the foreseeable future, we will have to continue to endure more art by the Emma Sulkowiczs of this world.
Read More: How Modern Architecture Destroys Your Relationships
Ars gratia artis?
Giant butt plugs are not art, its cultural marxism forcefeed by the zionist media.
I don’t know, if Emma Sulkowicz can fit that thing up her I’d consider it art.
Haha actually there would be plenty of room left in her for another
Oooh nooo bad goy! Remember the 6 trillion!!!
http://new3.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/No+bad+goyim+remember+the+6+billion+_ff3f77abd1a001244aa7026bc9c7642e.png
Let’s make it 12.
It’s no mystery. Jews are responsible:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Darkmoon-ArtI.html
Neo Nazi Bot
Hardly.
I’ve been drawing, painting, sculpting and designing since I was a wee baby. The state of modern art is depressing. Me and the woman often walk around the galleries on First Friday and play a game called “is this anything?” When at the “modern” museum, the answer is usually no.
As for performance art, I’ve never gotten it and never will. I barely “get” dance, so performance art just seems like talentless attention whoring to me. Every piece I’ve ever seen (minus GWAR, who are amazing) have confirmed this.
There are a few counter cultural/Juxtapoz type artists who I find relevant, my current two favorite being Samuel Gomez http://www.samuelgomez.com/ and Dan Witz http://www.danwitz.com/ . Both are highly talented as well as creative and original (and not surprisingly, quite masculine in their subjects). I’m also a fan of graffiti, but that’s the designer in me and I hesitate to necessarily call it art.
I never got performance art. Just prance around in some idiotic clothes and impromptu make the “performance” up as you go along with whatever props you cleaned out from your closet and drawers and toss in some random household chemicals or even bodily fluids? Yeah, sounds like a great spectacle to behold!
I watched this one broad sewing two foot wide scraps of cloth together on an old sewing machine to make a long piece of cloth, stop, read a passage out of a book/journal, then grab the long cape like cloth run outside (almost running into clueless me) and turn around then run back in and start sewing again, ad infinitum.
I was dumbfounded by the complete pointlessness.
Performance “art” is the refuge for dancers who can’t dance, singers who can’t sing, painters who can’t paint, and writers who can’t write, but all massively crave attention and validation for taking a poop in a jar and smearing it on a canvas.
A refuge for fat and ugly short-haired man-thing women, in other words.
Isn’t it funny how only women who look like that tout the whole “Gender is fluid!” nonsense? Never see attractive women saying that… Go figure!
If whatever one does has no pragmatic niche in society, then he is an “artist”
Eh, I’ve always been pretty impressed by what I’ve seen mimes do. Standing that still takes control that I don’t have.
Plus, there’s room for genuine creativity, or at least humor, in simply performing. Like that guy who made videos of dressing up like a ninja, hiding in urban areas, then jumping out in front of people and breakdancing. Good for a laugh.
To be fair all “modern” art is cultural degeneracy, from the Impressionists, through Picasso to whatever butt plug they are traying to force up our asses.
The purpose behind Picasso’s work was to imitate the raw emotion natives have towards their African Tribal totems. The early art movements were a response to the photograph ousting the artist, and the chaotic aftermath of WWI. Now it just gives talentless hacks a good excuse to shit out anything they please.
The author forgot to mention all the skinny jean hipster assholes running around with “vintage” cameras taking washed out, over exposed snapshots of their vapid fucking lives and calling it art. Learn to frame a shot for Christ’s sake.
And instagram if you’re too lazy to do that!
Too bad about the hipsters. Vintage cameras are cool
There was some hipster are exhibition in Brooklyn a while back of photos of graffiti. Yes, that’s right FUCKING PHOTOGRAPHS OF SOMEONE ELSES’S GRAFFITI!
Now, while I’m no big fan of graffiti or tags, I at least admire the guys who risk arrest and injury to put up their tags. Then, along come fucking momma’s boy hipsters and TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS of someone else’s work and present it as their own art like the total fucking wastes of oxygen they are.
Remember, their moms were the feminists of 20 years ago who married rich.
Back when photography was a skill and art. Let’s continue to talk about how advancement in technology is so great
“Back when photography was a skill and art. Let’s continue to talk about how advancement in technology is so great”
There has bern some great advances in photo tech. but the worse thing to come along is HDR “High Dynamic Range” which essentially allows one to remove all the shadows. What happens is we see a ton of flat photos because idiots who know nothing have no concept of the importance of shadows. Ugh! Good example: trying searching for desktop photos of the grand canyon – most photos are overly exposed and colors overly up-amped due to HDR.
Piss on art. The world can be beautiful enough when we have the balls to experience it.
Nonsense. People have been making art since the dawn of time when they were full on living in nature. Do a google image search for Andy Goldswarthy. He’s a modern naturalist artist and does some pretty cool things with nature. I especially like his stuff with ice.
“Nonsense. People have been making art since the dawn of time”
Indeed. The cave paintings of lascaux come to mind.
What a great name!
One could argue the world is art.
Jennifer Lawrence butt plug collection is art now but we can’t talk about it without her permission.
Give me a menacing Caravaggio or Gustave Dore piece any day over all this modern garbage nonsense:
I love Caravaggio…A movie should be made about him. Read that he likely killed a man and then was a fugitive…
All my life I’ve wondered, why, if civilization has advanced so far over the past 500 years, why no one can create amazing masterpieces like this, or write symphonies, or build beautiful buildings. Sure, we live for a longer number of years, and we can research things on the internet, but in so many ways our life is demonstrably inferior.
A lack of patience? It took 2 or 3 centuries to complete Notre Dame- during the Middle Ages
There’s a legitimate opinion out there that we’ve lost the capacity to put people on the Moon and bring them back alive
Amusingly, because of politics. We can’t build more Saturn V rockets because they’re not green enough.
Also, the government seems to hate NASA, but that’s a different story.
There is that element yes.
But I’d guess there’s a gap arisen between science and practical engineering (and for that matter piloting), at least partially owed to regulations
I absolutely agree. And it is no longer opinion, when the last trip to the moon was in 1969, 46 years ago. Assuming the youngest scientist at NASA was 25, they would be 71 today. When literally no one is alive who has personal knowledge of how to do something, to some extent one must re-invent it again. We have essentially lost our space edge in the west. Any nation can read the literature about how to launch moon landings and try to make it work–the advantage comes in the personal expertise from doing it, which NASA no longer has. If I read correctly the last manned US landing was in 1972 Apollo 17 and there was only one unmanned landing since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon
Just look at how many failures there were as compared to successes–when you stop trying and learning from your mistakes and improving, you do lose ability. Now, emerging markets could just as easily land someone on the moon as the USA. Look at the most recent landings, USA, India, China, and Luxembourg (huh? Must be ESA funded). By the way, I never knew the USSR had the first unmanned moon landing – Luna 9 in 1966.
Things are less extreme today. Violence was rampant, new lands were being exploited, romanticism and living life to the fullest. New technologies were being unearthed and re-learned from the ancients (Rome) and even more discovered. Humanity was in its stride with a struggle to live. Since the industrial revolution, things became too easy, and we now struggle not to survive, but to keep our souls.
Agreed, and there is definitely something to the “starving artist” effect where harsh conditions produce great results; indeed even I am most productive when under pressure.
However, I don’t think that beauty and art cannot be supported even in ages of prosperity and peace. But really, I don’t think we have that much prosperity or peace. Perhaps more than in the past, relatively speaking, but America has been at war for the past 15 years straight, and there is poverty, crime, ugliness, and immorality everywhere. Why not embrace beauty as a way of lifting up the downtrodden, if not everyone else.
But what scene can an artist of today create to celebrate youth and beauty without resulting to pure fantasy? The image below is not a part of the experience of youth today. How does one sketch a gaggle of girls staring at their smartphones and make it beautiful?
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.201
“. Since the industrial revolution, things became too easy, and we now struggle not to survive, but to keep our souls.”
Well said, good sir.
We’ve entered a post-post-modernist period in which an artist would “mock the mockinjays” by having a blinged-out Circle of Chick Crows playing poker whilst attempting to cheat with their smartphones, in the style of Coolidge (and Caravaggio) …
Naturally, the faces of the crows should be distorted ala Edvard Munch, so that we may experience the existential Scream of those portrayed.
You protest? Well, laugh now, but …
https://weirdgopro.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/20091118we-banksy-laugh-now-but-one-day-we-will-be-in-charge-monkey-chimpanzee.jpg
That’s a very sexist image of those two poor repressed young women. The Victorian equivalent of Barbie dolls.
Either paint two little boys in dresses, expressing their sexuality or make the girls fat.
Oh, and paint like a retarded 6 year old. Then it will look more contemporary and can hang in the Metropolitan Museum.
There is still one fight left and it’s preventing oneself from the assimilation of the hivemind while keeping your individuality
“All my life I’ve wondered, why, if civilization has advanced so far over the past 500 years, why no one can create amazing masterpieces like this, or write symphonies, or build beautiful buildings.”
To quote David Bentley Hart from his book “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies”:
“When one looks, for instance, at the crepuscular wasteland of modern Europe -with its aging millions milling among the glorious remnants of an artistic and architectural legacy that no modern people could hope to rival, acting out the hideously prolonged satyr play at the end of the tragic cycle of European history – it is hard to suppress a feeling of morbid despair. This was Nietzsche’s greatest fear: the loss of any transcendent aspiration that could coax mighty works of cultural imagination out of a people. When the aspiring ape ceases to think himself a fallen angel, perhaps he will inevitably resign himself to being an ape, and then become contented with his lot, and ultimately even rejoice that the universe demands little more from him than an ape’s contentment. If nothing else, it seems certain that post-Christian civilization will always lack the spiritual resources, or the organizing myth, necessary to produce anything like the cultural wonders that sprang up under the sheltering canopy of the religion of the God-man.”
Gehry’s designs look like the buildings in Idiocracy
http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/z4m6jovwP3DhYfBGc3UlLsoGwQE.jpg
There are plenty of artists out there who produce beautiful work that isn’t designed to disgust or offend. But mainstream artists have been provided with government funds (in the US it’s the National Endowment for the Arts) and since the government is run by degenerate SJWs, guess who gets the money?
Obviously people who put a crucifix in a jar and piss in it. Something that a homeless guy with no artist talent could do.
” But mainstream artists have been provided with government funds (in the US it’s the National Endowment for the Arts) and since the government is run by degenerate SJWs, guess who gets the money?”
Who gets the money? Shit eating faggots like Mapplethorpe.
Prager University produced a short video explaining it all very well :
Damn, damn, damn! I knew he was going to come for graffiti art. I love graffiti art. I have no problem with referring to it as “art” (a folk art of course). Of course, I am not going to find, say, CES to be comparable with Botticelli or that Massimilano “dude”. That’s some serious stuff with serious depth but I’m more apt to commission CES to do a piece to hang on my wall than place a sculpture from the High Renaissance in my living room (even if it were given to me for free). That’s not my aesthetic and it doesn’t suit my contemporary tastes.
The video is also completely based on western concepts of art.
Very good ^^^Thank you for finding this.
That’s a great video but they are not a real university.
I know.
” they are not a real university”
That’s why their videos speak truth. I noticed they also have Cristina Hoff Somers in one about feminism.
I would wager that with the outrageous cost of traditional universites (dorm costs etc) and the toxic environment (raype hysteria false rape accusations) we will see virtual universites one day becoming commonplace.
Good article.
Roger Scruton explains pretty well how the degenerate left destroyed beauty in art. The celebration of ugliness is an attack on meritocracy, and at the end of the day, modern art is hatred for excellence. Aristotle wrote: love is the pursuit of beauty. The degenerate left is devoid of love. From video games to film, SJWs infect popular culture’s art and inspire hatred and animosity toward human success.
Scruton is an essential man in explaining what is going on. His documentary Why Beauty Matters is a must-see for everyone here.
https://vimeo.com/112655231
i watched the first 20:00 or so of this. looks good, and i’m planning on finishing it later. i’ve always thought of beauty as a virtue in and of itself, and that the rejection of this idea is at the core of what is wrong with the world nowadays.
I went to college for art. Most of the professors hated me, because I was competent (apparently) and wanted to learn. One of the teachers proudly stated before she was a professor, she was bagging groceries.
Now I’m working on a fantasy graphic novel series with redpill undertones.
Dude, is that shot taken from the movie The Iron Giant?
Yup. And possibly my favourite reaction pic.
That was a well done movie..from the animation to the way the rendered the small town in Maine and the specific time period, and to the voice actors emulating the New England accent.
You should change your name to Hogarth.
LOL! This was the LAST great animated flick without CGI…
every scene with the Iron Giant was CGI…
True. But then again, even The Lion King had CGI. It took them a year to figure out how to sort out the depth for the Wildebeast stampede.
“The Cobbler and the Thief: Recobbled” has some great animation with no CGI!
Indeed every hand drawn style animated film has computer animation. Its just part of the deal these days. If they were do draw the complex scenes by hand it would be a damn mess. It would be like asking to build a sky scraper out of wood. I am a fan of old hand drawn animation though. I’ve grown to appreciate it as time goes on, but at the same time feels a bit quaint.
You sure about that?
“Bird, who has directed beloved hand-drawn projects like The Iron Giant and Family Dog…”
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/animators/brad-bird-i-want-to-do-another-hand-drawn-animated-feature-113377.html
Once hand-drawn animation goes, half of South Korea will be unemployed.
Nah man, the mobile game companies have picked up the slack and have been for a long time. Theres demand for it too as everyone in this damn country is on their phone tapping away at some fucking game every moment thayre not tapping away at Kaotalk.
This was announced just yesterday and should make you very happy:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/09/iron-giant-rerelease/
The feeling when a guest well-known artist visits to critique the students’ art, he robotically goes through everyone’s art and then gets to yours, looks at it for a while, and then goes off for 10 minutes about why it is successful…
“Well-known artist”? Not my school.
Although my animation professor (he had a career in filming commercials, so being a professor is essentially his retirement) was positively gushing at my attempts at 3d animation.
I got lucky my first semester, with a good drawing teacher who tore into my work. It hurt my pride but I learned a lot. Ninety percent of art classes were a waste of time, stuff I could have learned on my own, but once in a while you get a great instructor. But I suppose that’s how it is for most any subject.
Cool handle, it’s nice to know there are still Asimov fans out there.
Been an Asimov fan since I was eight.
Sorry, I missed the Asimov reference. Did he have something to do with Iron Giant?
My handle. A combination of R. Daneel Olivlaw and R. Giskard Reventlov, key characters in Asimovs galactic empire series.
Good luck with the book.
The Iron Giant: Sadly, a forgotten story. I loved it.
Got my girlfriend into it; now she sees it every night. Heyo!
….Every night?
https://imgflip.com/i/o0uiq
R. Daneel ice been followingvyour posts here, would you be willing to give us a url to your blog or wendite regarding your upcoming book?
Blog? Commenting on here on ROK is the most social media thing I do. I don’t do the twitters, the instagrams and rarely the facebooks.
I’ve been meaning to start a blog/website for my graphic novel, (did some goofing w/ dreamweaver a few years back). I also need to get the series proposal shotgunned to a buncha publishers… they need at least 5 pages of finished art, you know. I also need to finish building my drawing table (two years of carpentry experience is a boon).
Worst comes to worst, it will start off as a webcomic then grow from there.
I hear ya, but it would be good to know where on the net you call home and a place you will present your work. Keep us posted
I went to a museum in Spain recently and looked at the medieval religious art (paintings). It was fascinating and I could look at it for ages.
Then I got to Picasso and my first thought was “hmm”.
I was similar: there was a small art museum on my campus, and the first thing I’d always go see was the pre-modern stuff. The contemporary modern stuff looked like my gradeschool work.
At least the museum had a mummy.
That’s why I love modern art being segregated from genuine art in separate museums. Unfortunately, it seems as though that the more recently founded art museums tend to focus their collections on more contemporary pieces. Best then to stick (at least in the US) with museums in the northeast and midwest, and stay away from those in the south and the west.
As Picasso is claimed to have said…
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
&
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
To be fair, there are many people with otherwise low skills who can be good artists and good art teachers.
But she’s obviously not one of them.
There nothing wrong with modern art. We just get outraged with the ones we notice. In truth, there is many great works of art, but it’s become so common that we don’t notice it.
Many paintings in the past were done due to lack of photography, and now realistic pictures are so common that there is no use framing them in a museum. As for non photos, there are plenty of great ones in modern times as well. Take a look at well animated films. Take a frame, and pretend it’s from ancient times. Do you honestly believe it’s worse now than before? Now keep in mind that there are plenty of frames in an animation, and plenty of animations. Now pay attention to nerdy hobbies. There are card games with many many good pictures in them. Just imagine them framed and in a museum. Go to New Orleans, and look around for people making quick paintings for profit. Movie posters, ads, you name it. It’s just so common now, that we phase them out and give them low value. If anyone thinks that art now is better than art then, tell me why. And please don’t give me examples of the best of then and compare them to the worst of now.
You seem to have a very shallow understanding of art.
If so, please elaborate.
You are too below my level for me to waste my time teaching you. Get a book like “Story of Art” by E. H. Gombrich
So instead of giving a well thought out argument, you resort to a short ad hominem attack. Both times. You would make a good SJW.
SJWs are forced to love modern art. Your opening sentence was “There nothing wrong with modern art.” Think about this and read the book, research the subject. You deserve all mockery you get.
Mass-produced art like playing cards may be novel for a while, but they quickly lose artistic value because they are less human. Hand drawings come more directly from the human body with less technology between, so 15th century drawings will tend to be better. They also require the artist to be a good artist in order to make something aesthetic.
Chuck Close would disagree. Seeing his stuff to scale in real life is mind-blowing. His work post-stroke is amazing. The guy has talent for an “old medium” that really still grabs you by the balls.
“Chuck Close would”
Chuck Close’s work is interesting; he was seeing the world in pixels long before digital cameras.
There used to be a psychiatric disorder, Stendhal Syndrome (Argento made a film of the same name) which described those who – when encountering the ineffable in great works of art on a visit to the Louvre or Uffizi perhaps – would be overwhelmed with a kind of sickness on account of their proximity to something so close to divine and eternal beauty.
And that’s why I know art is just as good as its always been. I mean I know for sure I feel physically sick when I see mattress girl, or giant inflatable buttplug, so I must be suffering from Stendhal Syndrome. Thanks Sulkowitz for keeping us all in touch with the transcendent
ARGENTO!!! WORSHIP!
yep, Opera is great, and seriously underrated, although Profondo Rosso is my favourite. Argento & Goblin or Morricone are as good as it gets. I think the video illustrates a slightly different experience of the sublime than I had in mind!
Not for me lol! Saw Goblin twice on their recent US tour, even flew out of state to see them the first time. THAT was as sublime as it gets!
they’re still together! they must have done the music for suspiria about 40 years ago. Must have been great seeing them
You didn’t hear about that?? Man, it was unreal! They had footage from each film played behind them as well, craftily edited to match the tempo of the song. I went apeshit when they played Suspiria’s theme!
suspiria was the first film I ever saw by Argento – I caught it on TV in the middle of the night by accident just when I was about to go bed. Needless to say I was hooked from the first frame or should that be the first bar. It seems silly now but it scared me shitless and I was hooked on Dario. A lot of that was the Goblin score, but some of the Morricone scores are just as good. Great that you got to see them play
How perfect is this?:
I didn’t even realise he was responsible for the Thing theme. Very versatile: here’s the Stendhal Syndrome clip: you’ve got the art and morricone, and a barely legal Asia Argento
Argento hasn’t made a good film in 20 years. He hasn’t made a great one in 30.
As for film artists, I like long shot guys best like Tarkovsky, Tarr, Sokurov etc
I know. I made the mistake of watching a good portion of mother of tears. Giallo, with Adrien Brody was passable, but its obvious he’s lost it or is not even trying. Having said that some of the mid 90s films are much better than some would have you believe. Re. those Russians the only one I know of is Tarkovsky – a pleasure I have yet to experience
You seen Dracula 3D? It is god awful.
Hadn’t heard of that one. I hope he’s doing it deliberately
clip from the film illustrating the concept
ah, yes, visiting the art museum on psychedelics is quite an experience. or she was just another narcissistic bitch. look at me, i am so fucking overwhelmed.
she’s OD’ing on the Sublime. That’s Dario Argento’s daughter Asia. The whole film is wierdly enough about a brutal rape, so obviously he decided he’d put his only daughter in the title role. But in the film the real rape is that of the ravishment of her senses in encountering great art. Imagine being spitroasted by the Great Masters
what museum is that? i gotta try it there someday. the stuff here in munich is depressingly boring.
Uffizi in Florence. I went to go once when I visited but the queues were endless
The Uffizi in Florence, Italy. You can see the title in the clip above. It’s one of literally dozens of breathtaking collections of art and architecture there.
Go to a museum. Go to the Modern Art section. Meh. Nothing happens. A big circle on a canvas big fucking deal. Now go to the classics section and look at the Rembrandts, the Goyas and you feel awestruck. Humbled. Changed.
In my opinion, the point where art went to shit was the invention of the camera. No longer did artists need to paint realistic portraits as the only way to capture a person’s essence, they could just set up a machine that would do that same job in minutes.
Slowly impressionism emerged, which was still very representational but relied on less refined application of paint. Then came expressionism, which was bright colors and geometrically shaped objects, but was still representational (And from that came the primitivist movement). Then in the 40’s came the granddaddy of non-representational painting – Abstract-expressionism (Ya know, Jackson Pollock). Artists were now just painting nothing.
There were also conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp who would take mass-produced items and put them in galleries and claim it was “art”, even though he didn’t make it, he just bought it out of a department store. This devolved into performance art and other forms of attention-whoring.
And wow, this post is the first time my art history minor has actually paid off!
Im not sure you are right about the negative impact of the camera. Impressionist art was greatly influenced by – you might even say driven by – the emergence of the photographic perspective. If you insist, I’ll get down my art books on the subject and start quoting chapter and verse.
I further suggest that Impression’s survival as a popular art form, when Cubism is quite dead, suggests that it made a permanent, positive contribution to the understanding of Light. To be fair, an art historian I know characterizes this period as “ice cream for the brain”
I agree the after Impressionism, , ‘incipit tragoedia, incipit comoedi’.
It can’t be any coincidence that the emergence of the popularity of the camera (As well as innovations that made it more available) directly coincided with fine art becoming more and more experimental. From the Renaissance on pretty much every painting and sculpture is representational and created in the most realistic manner possible.
Turner? Goya (Execution of the citizens of Madrid?. They are not anti-representational art, but they are not direct representations of reality – rather, ,highly stylized. You also should account for the major change in paint technology – standard colors available in tubes. This brought painting out of the studio and into the light, and enables everyone to wanted to paint to try without needing to make their own pigments. Consistent, uniform production of color on canvas was now possible. A complementary development was the new east of coloring black and white photographs (Tintype, etc).
All this helped lower the boundary between art created by humans and photographic representation of the world.
I’d suggest that Cubism is the real inflection point, much like ten tone atonal music. It inverted the paradigm of ancient Greece, which was the use of perfect geometric forms to organize our perfection of reality. Cubism starts with the same base, and then arbitrarily dis-assmbles the geometric forms, re-arranging them without regard to any representation of reality. It’s the sort of thing Scruton called a ‘death work’.
I believe Photography should be declared innocent of the charge levied against it, always excepting Pointillism – which, let’s face it, was a one time thing. In contrast, an artist can make a good living painting in the style or the great Impressionists.
The hdr (high dynamic range) technology makes every image look very unnatural – howdy doody and really crappy with loss of shadow contrast. It gets overused big time.
i’m not an expert on art, but it seems to me that it was pollock and warhol who really ruined things. ever since them there’s been this idea that anyone can be a great artist, no hard work required.
Art was on a downward spiral before them. I’m not saying all art was bad post-Impressionism, and I’m not saying that cameras suck. But from the Renaissance to the late 1800’s fine art was just getting better and better as more knowledge of the medium was realized. Then it went downwards, to the point where it’s actually a talent to be able to draw something that looks vaguely like something.
Again, going back to my art gallery days – Easily 90% of everything I saw was objectively ugly and lacking in any skill. Then once a classically trained sculptor or painter showed work then everyone shit their pants because THAT was objectively beautiful work, and then they’d suddenly stop trying to convince themselves that the coat rack in the middle of the gallery floor with a price tag of $45,000 wasn’t all that amazing (Yes, this was a real installation I saw in a neighboring gallery).
i’ve never worked in or really studied art, beyond a few mentions in history classes. i just go to the local art walk most months, and an occasional gallery here and there, but yes, what you say about the vast majority of current art requiring no skill to produce is also my impression. about 90% of the “art works” are either abstract or childish (as in, they look like they were drawn by a five-year-old, only without the charm of actual children’s pictures) not for some deep reason, but because the “artists” are incapable of doing anything else. i imagine that michelangelo and da vinci spent years working hard to acquire their skills, then were probably the hardest working men in italy during their careers. nowadays “artist” seems to be mostly shorthand for someone who doesn’t want to work.
It actually took skill to be an artist in the Renaissance, requiring years of schooling and apprenticeship. The fact that many Renaissance artists were also scientists and architects on top of that is even more impressive (This is where the term “Renaissance Man” comes from).
If you’re interested in standards of modern art, I suggest you check out this movie: https://vimeo.com/6515653
cool, i will check that out.
In addition, I don’t have issues with Pollock or Warhol, per se. They had interesting takes on what art could be. What I hate them for is inspiring legions of uninspired copycats. Because the art looked easy to do anyone with paint and a canvas or access to silkscreening equipment suddenly tried making their own splatter paintings or soup can prints.
exactly. i guess pollock’s and warhol’s ideas were sort of interesting, but no one who imitates them should be taken seriously as an artist. same goes for poets who imitate ee cummings.
The powerful influence of art is sometimes underestimated. Seen as the yummy foam that floats upon an already successful society.
But art speaks to the soul of man. Provides icons which people use to shape their own lives.
What’s going to produce a better society? Constant imagery of despondency and isolation, or imagery that depicts how people can work together toward higher ends?
The communists took over entire countries by replacing the nation’s art and language.
If there is an underdeveloped part of the manosphere, it is in the rise of true artists.
My absolute favorite sculpture is the New Deal-esque “Man Controlling Trade” in front of the FTC in Washington, DC. They scream man building society/American propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Controlling_Trade
You mean this?
https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=https%3A%2F%2Fs3-eu5.ixquick.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Fserveimage%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phuket-tours-24.com%2F845-thickbox_default%2Ffoam-party.jpg%26sp%3D75d166e2c54c73d7912dd4aaaa00ef75
I don’t know what I meant. But yes.
Well said
It’s why Marxism produced such awful architecture.
To break down the old order
I have to say it’s one thing to talk about modern art, but it’s another thing to actually be IN modern art. After college I worked in a NYC art gallery. This city is supposedly the mecca of contemporary art, with the best of the best doing whatever they could to get their work displayed. And I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that a retarded 5-year old had more creativity and vision than most of these hacks.
Abstract expressionism and conceptual art has completely ruined the art world. Part of my job was to go through submissions and book artists, and I’d say 90% of all work we received was abstract-expressionist (Like Jackson Pollock splatters). It’s to the point where someone who has never taken a painting lesson in their lives can splatter paint on a canvas, or worse, paint monochrome squares and nothing else, and be accepted into prestigious galleries and sell their works for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile I would get shit on for my love of Normal Rockwell – Yes, he painted some hokey Americana images, but he was a phenomenal draughtsman, and could easily out-paint 99.9999% of all artists in NYC.
I also found that the worse the artist, the bigger their ego. This was the Dunning-Kruger Effect to the max. I found that if I interacted with an established artist they were usually really cool, and they tended to have amazing art that reflected their personalities. But a lot of the up-and-comers who still had to pay their dues would talk like they were the next Picasso and that everyone else was an idiot for not realizing their “genius”. I’ll never forget during one opening for a group show this crazy woman who had never displayed work in a gallery before actually got in a world-famous artist’s face because he had the best spot in the gallery to show his work, and she said she deserved it.
And the people who talk about how innovative most of this garbage is are just lying to themselves. I’m pretty sure there’s an objective standard to artistic beauty, and modern art is fucking ugly. But still, they’ll pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for paint splatters because it’s “conceptual” or whatever, when a Thomas Kinkade print from Wal-Mart is probably prettier. And is it any wonder that these types are also the biggest leftists? It doesn’t matter if it’s social issues, politics, or art, living in an ivory tower makes one insanely delusional.
“Meanwhile I would get shit on for my love of Normal Rockwell – Yes, he painted some hokey Americana images, but he was a phenomenal draughtsman, and could easily out-paint 99.9999% of all artists in NYC.”
I hear ya. Rockwell was a draftsman and good at it, yet he did capture an era of Americana we all wish we could go back to.
Kinkade painted kitsch – yet it was imagery that represented an almost Disney-esque gestalt, his work is best described as “consumer friendly” which means it’s nice to look at but lacks real soul. This is not to say I like seeing the lame shock art that is made strictly to upset yhe viewer.
There has to be a balance though. Something that is contemporary yet done in a way that makes sense and is pleasing to look at. I thoroughly enjoy the classic art work – and a good friend of mine paints in the style of the old masters. But honestly when I see an old master style painting that was done today, it seems out of place. I dont want to go in to a lengthy comment, but If somebody wants to do realism then they should just stick to photography.
https://postmediaedmonton.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/tallusdome.jpg
this thing cost $600000 for the city to put up
What about that large white boulder they hauled across Los Angeles, disrupting traffic a few years ago. It was like a Flintstones cartoon, but live.
Is that a giant butt plug on the first photo? And it gets called “art”? The degeneracy is unbelievable.
The only “modern” art I like are works by Gil Elvgren, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vellejo, Luis Royo, and Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri.
Vellejo rules. No Vargas on the list for his pin-ups?
No disrespect intended, he’s included for certain and a book on him sitting on my desk, but I’d take up the page listing everyone: Hildebrandt Brothers, Petty, Manara, Bisley, etc. thought it was more important to get the point of “type” across.
About the green butt plugg, it was in Paris, and the artist that has built that (an American by the way) has been slapped in the face by a pissed off guy. The same night, a group of guys destroyed that sculpture.
The very brave artist felt too threatened and declined to put the “piece of art” back up. That is to show you how courageous are those artists: you slap them in the face and they disappear.
Weird, the first thought that popped into my head was: I bet it wasn’t a french guy but some Ahmed Muhammad that got pissed off.
“About the green butt plugg, it was in Paris, and the artist that has built that (an American by the way) has been slapped in the face by a pissed off guy. The same night, a group of guys destroyed that sculpture.”
As a general rule mob justice is never good, but there are exceptions and in the case of green buttplug the mob rule was warranted.
A good example of the effects of feminisation, where everything is reduced to sentiment and muh feelz.
Craft is the foundation of all great art.
Great observations. Most of modern art is undisciplined, and requires little or no talent to produce. It’s unsettling, disorienting, and lacking in any elevating spirit. I talked about this a few days ago:
http://qcurtius.com/2015/07/07/beauty-seeks-beauty-and-ugly-seeks-ugly/
I wonder do our elites just have bad taste? Are they unable to recognize the beautiful? To me, the idea of beauty is universal. As you point out in your post, we don’t have to understand the underlying rules of Japanese arrangement to appreciate that it is beautiful.
No. You can find some Soviet writings talking about how ugly and vapid art is to be encouraged because it encourages degeneracy.
They’re quite enthusiastic about collecting real art for themselves.
You’re right, its one of the 46 steps mentioned in The Naked Communist.
Art was destroyed by design. Benjamin / Adorno were primary architects of its destruction: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
Quintus,
I think you’d be interested in a couple of old articles on Modern Art by Spengler (David Goldman) a few years back in the Asia Times.
“Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the
ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract
impressionists, most famously Clement Greenberg’s sponsorship of Jackson
Pollock in The Partisan Review. It is not supposed to “please” the senses on
first glance, after the manner of a Raphael or an Ingres, but to challenge the
viewer to think and consider.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IA30Aa03.html
“You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren’t one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important.
If we use the term “creative” to mean more or less the same thing as “irreplaceable”, then the number of truly creative individuals appears very small indeed. It is very unlikely that you are one of them. If you work hard at your discipline, you are very fortunate to be able to follow what the best people in the field are doing, and if you are extremely good, you might have the privilege of elaborating on points made by greater minds. Beneficial as such efforts might be, it is very unlikely that if you did not do this, no one else would have done it. On the contrary, if you are at the cutting edge of
research in any field, you take every possible measure to publish your work as soon as possible, so that you may get credit for it before someone else comes up with precisely the same thing. Even the very best minds in a field live in terror that they will be made dispensable by others who circulate their conclusions first.
Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto, “Glory belongs only to God,” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IE01Aa01.html
You’re suffering from apex fallacy. Being creative and being irreplaceable are not the same thing.
I think you mean Spengler was suffering from an apex fallacy. But the entirely of the article puts the point into context.
“During one of these visits, LaBeouf claims he was raped. According toTMZ, a “woman walked into the private room — where he was having silent one-on-one interactions with fans—and whipped his legs for 10 minutes, then stripped off his clothes and ‘proceeded to rape’ him.”
Then LaBeof woke up from his dream…. women never rape men sexually, they only rape men financially.
I dig these articles on art at ROK ! I completely agree with the author’s assertions.
Art is no longer about art, it’s about “brand”. That is to say that an artist becomes an artist if his name is fashionable. I read “The 12 million dollar stuffed shark” which is an excellent read and pretty much explains what is going on in todsay’s contemporary art scene among the artists, dealers and collectors.
I find Damien Hirst hilarious. I think he, like Duchamp, is just a really good troll. For the Love of God is such a ridiculous piece (A platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds) that he can’t take himself seriously.
I can think of a million better uses for a human skull, for fuck’s sake!
Men do craft, women do art.
I’d say it’s the exact opposite actually.
Art is craft gone wrong.
“Artists” today are children who are still fascinated by their bodily fluids, excrement, and genitalia. The shock value of Serrano’s juvenile “Piss Christ” wore off twenty years ago, but the spirit lives on in the countless hacks that have no talent other than their desire for media coverage and social media validation for their puerile fixations with blood-borne pathogens and displaying their crotches.
Worse yet, much of their idiocy is funded with government grants.
I received a design degree 20+ years ago and did a final paper on the National Endowment for the Arts being an analog for the Sovietization and subjugation of American art to government control. I was not very popular for it, but it appears I was prescient.
On another note, check out the movie Exit from the Gift Shop. It’s a great example of how “revolutionaries” in art are co-opted to be pets of the richest, yet when some entrepreneur punks that whole scene and democratizes it for the masses while making some coin, he is somehow vulgar. Great stuff.
“On another note, check out the movie Exit from the Gift Shop.”
I saw that documentary. It essentially is about the rise of the frenchie “Mr. Brainwash” and this has got to be the end of art. Mr. Brainwash hires a whole crew of people to take already existing works of art and uglifies them, mass produces them and hypes the fuck out of it…. and he makes money.
I will say however that I do have an appreciation and respect for Banksy. He at least is trying to say something meaningfull.
At the end of the documentary Bansky was at a loss for words and has stopped encouraging people to do art as a result of having encouraged Mr. Brainwash.
I loved that about the ending. It really made you think.
I know what you mean. That frenchie i think has a genuine interest in art, but he’s missed the point conpletely. Toward the end of the documentary both Banksy and Sheppard Fairy were at a loss for words regarding him.
Don’t let your dreams be dreams. DO IT!
There is an objective standard for art. I think modern artists now produce the current dreck cause they don’t how to paint or draw. Modern art reflects the laziness and lack of skill of our current crop of artists. Jackson Pollack punctured the bottom of paint cans and dripped them on canvases and his paintings sell for millions. John Stossel had a great show on years back. He had 4 yr olds paint canvases using fingerpainting , splattering etc . The usual way a 4yr old would paint on a canvas . He framed the paintings and then brought in a group of art historians and academic professorial art types to judge these works of “art” but were blind to who produced them. The academic types went on and on about how awesome these painting were , using highbrow lingo and descriptions. Stossel then marches in the 4 yr olds and the academic types were thoroughly shamed. I was in the Museum of Modern Art i.e. Guggenheim in NYC. On the wall was a canvas painted white. 100% all white. I thought it was just something to occupy the space while a real picture was being cleaned or something. No it was an actual painting of nothing but white!! They actually had the gall to put a bullshit description below it. Again a canvas painted all white was described as “art”. Modern art is a fraud
I know the critics are having the last laugh as the mock the idiots behind their backs who pay outrageous sums of money for what is nothing more than mindless dribble.
I’m an architect, and most people view Gehry as a hack.
Maybe so but a hack that earned a shit load of wedge for his creation and lived off the notoriety……..
The documentary “Why Beauty Matters” by Roger Scruton is related to this article and highly recommended.
http://documentaryaddict.com/why+beauty+matters-542-doc.html
Excellent.
munich is full of these inept sculptures. carve something that roughly resembles a man out of wood and call it “the life of man”. brilliant.
just snapped this little picture in front of an “art gallery”. for some reason, there were many cops and suits around who gave me a serious gaze. must have been miss merkel educating herself on contemporary art and wisdom.
then again, ruben’s girls weren’t the epitome of beauty, either.
Perhaps public funding of this sort of “art” is really a welfare system for people who lack talent.
what else would it be?
affirmitive action got me thinking. if everybody needs to be compensated in the same amount that they are being discriminated against, the most plausible law would be for job-seekers and employers to partake in a lottery. every employer must randomly pick a job-seeker, thus he will know nothing about the applicant and will be unable to discriminate.
the applicant will be identified not through name or number, as that could introduce number or name favoritism. instead, a hidden microchip creates the contact between the two.
Das tut mir leid.
Francis Schaefer’s book “How Should We Then Live” gives a lot of insight into art/history/culture/religion over the last 500 years. I highly recommend it.
Another one to recommend
Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music by E. Michael Jones.
This is also explanatory…
https://www.google.it/search?q=merda+d%27artista&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=HMWeVZLfHsOasgGN_7b4Dg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1600&bih=763#imgrc=K75EhdqEAwe3uM%3A
The guy here who said art reflects the beliefs of its age, was quite right!
Francis Schaeffer talked about the increasing abstraction of art in the 19th century as the certainties of life fell apart in the wake of the Enlightenment. This episode of a longer series was entitled the Age of Fragmentation, and traces art’s reflection of the spirit of that age. I highly recommend.
Francis Schaeffer’s book by the same name is highly recommended.
The “Enlightenment “……
I came to the same conclusion. The modern errors have their source in the “Enlightenment.”
It took off during the Weimar republic and was promoted by the Jews.
The purpose of modern art, literature, and music is to destroy the uplifting potential of art, literature, and music, so that man, bereft of his connection to the divine, sees his only creative option to be political revolt.
Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
Might want to read Terry Goodkind’s “Faith of the Fallen”.
Why?
It’s a good read, part of his “Sword of Truth” series.
More importantly, highly analogous to Marxism and the revival of the human spirit that comes from abolishing it.
Yes.
Isn’t that a quote from “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness” by Michael Minnicino? http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
http://www.incredible-pictures.com/2013/03/rosslyn-chapel-scotland.html#.VZ7G0Pnj9PY
Here’s a great work of art
“Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.” -Adolf Hitler. Though I am hardly a National Socialist, Hitler was on to something here. Inverting the natural order of things is perverse. It produces outcomes that are confusing, dysfunctional, and ugly. In a word, wrong.
Hitler wasn’t bad at water color…
Huh. I’d hang that in my apartment.
THAT would be a conversation starter…
“THAT would be a conversation starter.”
Indeed.
“Oh that watercolor is so lovely, where did you get it?”
Answer: “It’s a Hitler”
It’s amazing that Hitler had been rejected twice by the Vienna Art Academy when his portfolio clearly showed he was good enough. I’m certain however, that unfortunately the Holocaust would still have happened had his life taken a different turn if he ended up in as an artist. The Nazi’s would have had someone else be their “mascot” (i.e. play the role of Furher) but at least Adolf would have been staying out of genicidal mischief and doing what he originally wanted to do with his life.
It’s hard to know really. The Nazi party was pretty marginal and didn’t have that much support in Germany. It was Hitler’s charisma and oratorical skills that contributed greatly to the rise of the Nazi party and its success.
Fascinating movie about Hitler’s art tastes and how they played a large role in the rise of the Nazis. It’s called The Architecture of Doom. Well worth the watch.
LOL is that a butt plug on the first picture? hahahahahah
Yea, I read an article about it a while back. The center of Paris in the background by the way…..
“With originality, artists begin to feel the need to be completely unique. Each artist must represent a complete break with everything that came before him as well as his contemporaries”
Good point. There is an old proverb that states “There is nothing new under the sun” which can apply to art today. Only until we make the next jump to VR technology and the human physiology keeps up with it will we see something “new”.
This is what is considered art now. This guy blows paint out of his asshole onto a canvas. In come the hipster $$$.
http://keithboadwee.com/section/384205_Keith_Boadwee.html
I believe this is quite a common form of contemporary “art”, men squirting “non toxic” paint out of their assholes, the ladies through their vagina. Blue is one of the favoured colours on the palette. The asshole provides a particular shape to the paint as it hits the canvas. As it is usually a degenerate queer splooging the mix from his well worn hole they have a lifetime of pain and rejection to discharge all over their creation. This gives them their rightful place along the great artists of the world.
I wouldn’t call it art just because one can spray diarrhea out of one’s anus and onto a canvas. Anyone could do that and drop a hit of acid and see the image of whatever with the half digested dinner from last night.
Beware of comparing modern art to stuff from the distant past. The ugly stuff from the past is destroyed.
Yeh that tired old argument. What matters is the BEST an era has to offer. The best of the 50s and 60s vs the best of [insert past era here].
Compare those jokers to the dutch masters or the best impressionists.
And who do you suppose we should argue is the most likely artist of the period to survive, Warhol? A little earlier, Picasso? van Gogh? I personally, am not all that impressed by the Mona Lisa at all. What if all of these are forgotten in 200 years because posters of their work are no longer sold in head shops everywhere and the bankers and museums who paid millions for the pieces burn in flames?
Great art is not created as much as survives being destroyed and forgotten, grandma’s mass-manufactured, top-selling, everybody has heard about it and loves ’em Elvis, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin record collection thrown out with the trash over and over by grandchildren who couldn’t care less.
And speaking of degeneracy, the Temple of Baal in Palmyra is considered great architecture, a UNESCO heritage site. Will we all gasp in horror when another degeneracy, ISIS, destroy it?
Dutch “masters”? “Best” impressionists? Even the terms for the periods are marketing. All art is degeneracy, a graven image of the likeness of man made by man. Enjoy the art while it lasts, they are fleeting and a shadow of what’s important to our lives.
Art is meant to stand the test of time, to last for generations, and indeed often beautiful and wonderous works of architecture are designed for no other reason than to house this art for hundreds of years into the future.
One of Plato’s most popular theories was concerning perfect Forms or Ideals–that there was the idea of perfect beauty (physical, moral, social) and it should be strived for.
A lot of beautiful masterpieces of art were never disseminated to the general public, and were often privately commissioned by wealthy elites. They were not, “top selling, high grossing” works of popularity, but instead, beautiful and valuable on their own merits. That we value collecting and displaying them today in public institutes and museums around the world demonstrates their independent value.
A note to nhzszm: You seem not to enjoy humanist art. Indeed, not all art will speak to all people in the same way. But art is much more than “a graven image of the likeness of man made by man.” Visit a major art museum the next time you are around a large city, and explore until you find something that speaks to you. If you love nature, there are landscapes, still lifes, and many scenes of wildlife for you to enjoy. And if spirituality is your thing, you are in luck, because that is one of the most popular subjects of art.
Yes. They had Plato, and we had Nietzsche. It’s possible we differ very much on what humanist art is.
The question of who will last is an important one, but it’s unanswerable given the kind of culture we live in now that focuses on immediate gratification.
As for your point about old pop and rock music, you are right to an extent, but at the same time the culture we live in is more retro than before because of the internet, so those names will always be in circulation.
A good test is if the art triggers your emotions. Standing in front of Guernica, I could imagine the suffering and destruction of the bombing of the innocent families there. Gazing at the Last Supper, one feels inspired. I will admit that some modern art is visually stimulating, but it doesn’t make me *feel* anything.
Another test is whether the art makes you feel differently if you see it in person. I didn’t give a shit about seeing the statue of David–everyone has seen the image of that naked guy so why would I want to go see it in person? Well, when I rounded the corner and saw the enormous statue of David at the end of a long hallway, I got chills up and down my body. It is an amazing and inspiring piece of art. Same with the above works–I just googled Guernica and it’s nothing special on a computer screen.
A good test is if the art triggers your emotions.
Besides disgust, I assume.
Good point. Piss Christ probably triggered more emotion than any piece of art in history.
Yes, that’s a good point. But I think while the idea of Piss Christ may trigger emotion, I think if you were to come across it in person you would see merely a vat of urine and a man inside–and you would feel no connection or emotion.
I had a similar realization the first time I walked through a European art museum.
I just walked around… Enjoyed the calm… Saw paintings here and there… And then one particular painting grasped my attention. I can’t describe my reaction, it wasn’t happiness, sadness, wonder, or any of the common emotions, but something about this painting captivated me.
I walked up to it to inspect the title and artist…
Picasso… It was right then that I realized that some art is somehow objectively better than other art. Picasso was a genius not because he did something “trippy” or “modern”, but because he did something that in some inexplicable way went beyond.
To me art went down the tubes in the 60s with Warhol and the pop art movement. it was the artistic equivalent of early punk rock. Basically any idiot could to do it: no real skills were required.
Most conceptual art sucks as well. I get the idea of trying to communicate a message, but the best art is able to do that via a skilled use of form without being didactic. Conceptual art just has a crude two dimensional quality that is very off-putting.
Performance art is just nonsense. Maybe 1 in 1000 of those artists are actually any good at what they do, and even then what they do is hardly impressive.
Novelty rules the art world today. There were two amusing films last decade that made fun of this problem: 1)Art School Confidendial (U.S.A) and 2)Achilles and the Tortoise (Japan). In both films the artists are told repeatedly that their work just isn’t different or original enough and it almost drives them crazy.
In Art School Confidential, the main character is probably the only student in the art class that has any real talent but his work gets overlooked for juvenile outsider art bullshit:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqbFAKood2w#
Just a reminder
serious question: what kind of people do you hate the most, fat ones or pussy feminists??
People who can’t see the forest for the trees.
You just keep getting better. And I’ll keep coming back to stroke your ego accordingly 😉
Am I detecting sarcasm? :p
if you are, your sarcasm detection skills could do with some improvement 😉
keep it together missy, this is ROK not flirtboard(dot)com.
trust the old fashioned fellow to point it out.
somebody has to, and I do love playing the wet blanket.
well I’m glad then that your notifying me wasn’t done solely because i had displeased you, sir
you just can’t help yourself, can you?
you just can’t either, or can you?
Do I know you under a different user name? I have my suspicions of you :p
pounds of fat on swings make me uneasy, is that what you’re referring to?
Nah, I was thinking of something else.
I remind you of someone? I’ll be very upset if I remind you of someone.
Thought you might be someone who follows me but decided to make a new screen name.
Seems like you miss someone who makes you think of BDSM :p
It’s my first time on here & I went with this name to ‘corellate’ with Nope.
Your truly lame. If everything you have written above is any indication, I can expect another frivolous, inane attempt at intellectual superiority. And be left with a feeling of your quite obvious inferiority complex.
You are in the wrong place.
Be ambiguous somewhere else where people actually care about you.
I mean, I get it. You’re intrigued by my “ambiguous” exchange on here with someone else and decided to let me know in a way that made no sense at all, but I deciphered as much, all while using the word ‘your’ incorrectly in your first sentence. I’d ask but I don’t care why someone else’s conversation got you so itchy. You don’t own nor do you directly admin the website and it’s comment section so be a good boy and don’t fill my inbox up with bullshit again, okay Jesse J?
Please just stfu? No one cares princess.
you don’t like it then fuck right off, bitch.
It’s our song <3
I have a long flight tomorrow and this is going on my playlist which means I’ll be the most annoying travel buddy and someone has you to thank for it
Hehehe. What? I get your panties twisted in a bigger knot then they were? Truly, your butt hurt must be depressing. for you. Good luck with that.
AND..yup.
i’m starting to wonder how old you are and whether or not that “yup” means you’re agreeing to be a good boy from here on out and also why you never seem to make sense to me
Pussy Feminists.
Any questions?
The feminist “art” looks like a variation of the “Interior Scroll.” But instead of a feminist manifesto, paint is falling from her snatch.
A combination of Schneemann and Pollock.
Dangit, my art education is showing. Strangely enough, from a class at an engineering school.
Dude, that ain’t paint. That’s menstrual blood dripping from her snatch. Fight the Patriarchy(tm).
couldn’t you have just allowed us to pretend it was paint….I mean really man…I didn’t need that image in my head.
Performance art at its finest. Viva Feminism.
For the love of God…I cannot unsee that.
Not that there was anything that disgusting like tearing dead bodies open.
Except the only body that was torn to pieces like a zombie apocalypse was the fact that everyone stood there and watched this moron embarrass herself, and everything that could be labeled art right in front of them.
I cannot begin to articulate my grief for what passes as “gifted” these days. I hate to admit it, but there had to people there who were enamored by this idiot and her “body of work.”
What is she doing? Pissing on a toy?
She’s menstruating on a canvas.
It’s an expression of the glory of being a woman.. and smashing “oppressive” patriarchal notions about wanting women to keep their private bodily functions to themselves.
Aren’t you inspired?
I know that I was deeply moved.
to retch.
Actually, she’s filling eggs with paint, putting them in her vagina and dropping them on a canvas. The good thing is that is strenghtens her kegel muscles so she will be a better lay after that – which is pretty much all she’s good for.
long live the patriarchy
Holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with this lady(on the right)? Jesus Christ man.
She is menstruating on a canvas
That, I think at least, is the misconception they would point out you have.
“Art” to them at least, is not about creating something like a sculpture, or painted canvas that pays exquisite attention to some detail, and highlights some sort of superior feeling or awe in the person. Quite the opposite actually.
To them, it is actually about making you feel disgusted with yourself, like they are. Or to be more precise, disgusted with themselves, and performing some sort of ridiculous act that shows how their personal misery desires your personal company.
So, their design is not about actual art, or building others up. But actually offending you is their art, simultaneously tearing you down for their own pleasure. By doing the ridiculous, they receive praise in their innermost sanctums at women’s studies departments at universities, and high fives. Perchance they rub their fat pussies together. Don’t care to find out.
However, their obvious inferiority complex is self-evident. They hate the art of the “patriarchy” because they obviously lack the skill, and dedication to their respective crafts to be real artists, worthy of the titles that the Italian Renaissance painters are lauded for.
Besides, like everything else they commit in life, they don’t want to work for accolades. Merely shame others at the threat of government lawsuits in to praising them like retarded children at the special Olympics. If you don’t run back at your superior intellectual speed, and help them “win with you”…you will be the odd man out. And therefore an islamophobic, cis-gendered, abilist, who can actually read a dictionary without making up useless shit words.
You patriarchal bastard!
Mad World….
…originality, emotion, and individualism of the artist.
At first glance, these do not seem to be bad values, but they set the stage for future degeneration.
This explains so much of the western condition. Democracy, women’s suffrage, freedom, individualism, etc. all do not seem to be bad values, but set the state for future degeneration.
.
A timely article. Art’s main function is indeed beauty, and this is why I do not enjoy most non representational art. Abstract images tend to lack beauty because there is no structure or form.
Modern art is embarrassing because there seems to be no real standards for it to be judged. You can literally do anything nowdays and call it art, where as previously there has to be a degree of skill involved.
During one of these visits, LaBeouf claims he was raped. According to TMZ, a “woman walked into the private room — where he was having silent one-on-one interactions with fans—and whipped his legs for 10 minutes, then stripped off his clothes and ‘proceeded to rape’ him.”
The janitor who cleaned that private room actually recovered the soiled strapon used to bufu leBeouf and turned it over to a sex-crimes detective. The cop had it checked for evidence (DNA, etc.) and returned it to the janitor, because the lab found traces of: lube, leBeuf’s DNA (in the doo-doo smeared on it), and semen from at least three different unknown men (no relation) per differing DNA, thereby indicating the act was consensual.
Modern art exists solely to shock, not to uplift. It is purposefully ugly. Its also easy to do. To uplift takes real talent and real work; however, to shock you just mostly have to be puerile. Modern art is just pissing in bucket. Andres Serrano did it and dropped in a crucifix for good measure; now he’s considered an “Artist.”
Ugly art is definitely a modern movement. I’m sure you can find examples in history where ugly art is made, but generally it seems like ugliness only became the predominant style within the last century or so.
Many idiots lap this stuff up though. Works of modern “art” sell for tens of millions of dollars, so as long as there’s a market for it people will make it.
I think another part of the problem is that our institutions don’t seem to have much interest in public art. Many of the greatest works of the Western world were either inspired by, or directly funded, by the Christian church. Cathedrals are a prime example; they are magnificent and were a source of pride to the local population, but they still served a very practical purpose. What is the church doing for art now? Not much. The Medicis may have made art for political purposes, but they still had the sense not to make it ugly or freakish. Now, the establishment supports people like Emma Sulkowicz.
This phenomena isn’t just limited to visual art. Naked Lunch is now considered a great work of literature. It has no real plot or developed characters, but is instead a drug-induced gay sex hallucination.
Fantastic. Minor quibble, please refer to this as “art” with the quotation marks to signal the appropriate derision.
Also, these “artists” will tell you that it’s not only about being unique, but in conveying some message that causes you to think (because artists like to give themselves far more credit for influencing culture than they deserve – as noted, the artist reflects culture, culture doesn’t reflect artists, though I grant the artists can reinforce corrupt cultural messages). But what gets left unasked these days is whether the message is any good, or worth listening to in the first place. Sure, a giant green buttplug is unique and makes me think about a lot of things, but does that make it good. “Artists” say “yes, mission accomplished.” I say “no, try again fucko.”
The majority of all contemporary art has always been shite. If it seems like it was better before, it’s just because only the good stuff has become remembered and all the shite been forgotten.
I on the other hand believe the Greek art was homoerotic and staring at that all day was bound to lead to the status we are in now. When you look at art you are seeing deep into a mans soul at what he values his north and south. The Greeks where perverse to the core and so was most painters of antiquities. We are going full circle now I think the Greeks and Romans probably painted way more debauchery but the most lewd pictures didn’t survive.
I disagree man. Ancient Hindu was even raunchier:
http://m.shutterstock.com/images/92520691/full
http://m.shutterstock.com/images/69783925/full
http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/88506/100370180/stock-photo-famous-erotic-stone-carving-bas-relief-panorama-lakshmana-temple-khajuraho-india-unesco-world-100370180.jpg
Look at their country now.
>>>”It would be wrong to blame artists for the decline of our culture. Rather, they are simply products of our culture and they are accurately reflecting the infantile, narcissistic, and leftist orientation of our society.”
A chicken or egg argument? I don’t let them off so easily.
Though there are larger factors at work, artists themselves have agency and I can easily directly blame individual artists for the decline of art itself, regardless if it’s “society’s fault.”
“Though there are larger factors at work, artists themselves have agency and I can easily directly blame individual artists for the decline of art itself, regardless if it’s “society’s fault.””
I respectfully disagree because there is indeed some really talented artists out there but why then, do they not get press? Very simple: the art mafia which decides who becomes famous. The current art mafia consists of progressives and shit eating faggots so don’t expect to see anything of real substance to be getting much attention.
This is also true.
Perhaps a Venn diagram is in order.
Art has always been a reflection of the world it lives in. The degenerate nature of art nowadays is no surprise. Expect more male degradation “art” in the next two decades.
Back in public school art class, they had an agenda appearantly to promote leftist art and artists. I learned young who Picasso was who was also a communist sympathisizer. Another great artist of the day who wasn’t mentioned was Salvadore Dali who had strong right wing leanings. I never heard Dali mentioned in school, only Picasso.
I don’t believe conservatism is a positive condition for inspiring good art. To paraphrase Garisson Keillor, there is a reason the iphone was invented in San Francisco and not Kansas. Creative minds need open, free societies to inspire them.
I greatly enjoy the work of Diego Rivera, a Mexican socialist. His work is real, colorful, and full of life. To me, socialism in the 1800s meant primarily concern over the working class conditions, which I also share. Would Rivera be in favor of affirmative action or gender equality? I personally think/hope not, but honestly have no idea. But a) he is dead and b) he is an artist, not a politician. While art certainly has great power in spreading ideas and changing minds, I am not afraid of ideas, and there is truth and beauty to be found in most places (don’t ask me to defend modern art). Enjoy art for art, enjoy beauty where you find it, and be wary of witch hunts and labeling.
I also love Salvador Dali, one of my absolute favorites, and had no idea he was a conservative. I’m not sure what his “right wing leanings” were (perhaps just that he supported the brutal right wing dictator Franco, and who knows if that was just personal opportunism on Dali’s part). But some of his art is very, very surreal and wacky, and I would imagine most conservatives of the day despised it.
Some Rivera:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2259ohrTcwc/T6AZjBusxlI/AAAAAAAAAUg/lmMLy7fkRrg/s1600/Diego+Rivera.jpg
http://www.diego-rivera-foundation.org/Portrait-Of-Natasha-Gellman-1943.html
http://www.diego-rivera-foundation.org/Slavery-in-the-Sugar-Plantation,-Tealtenango,-Morelos,-from-the-series,-History-of-Cuernavaca-and-Morelos,-1930-1.html
“To paraphrase Garisson Keillor, there is a reason the iphone was invented in San Francisco and not Kansas. Creative minds need open, free societies to inspire them.”
San Francisco did jack for the iphone. It was created by an organization in a culture that allows capitalism and people to own their intellectual property rights.
California is currently being ran into the ground by the current democrat state government and is the recipient of a third of all welfare in the US. Good luck with the rolling black outs and water shortages.
I’m writing an action story novel. When I complete the manuscript, can anyone let me know who is willing to read the manuscript and give it criticism?
Maybe try rooshvforum. But you should really solicit help from someone experienced in writing or editing, not just someone who has the same beliefs in women and neomasculinity as you 🙂 I would offer to give it a read, but by the time you’re done I don’t know where I will be or if I’ll have any free time.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/t31.0-8/10473862_1567517503471524_3547781754783749207_o.png
PSA: The author didn’t mention it, but the way you pronounce the letters LHOOQ in French sounds like “elle a chaud au cul” which means “she’s got a hot ass.”
Every year here in Australia at two major beaches (Sydney and Perth) they have public art titled Sculpture by the Sea.
http://www.sculpturebythesea.com/Home.aspx
Some of it quirky but most if it really does belong in a rubbish dump.
I can appreciate a lot of what this author is speaking about. I attended 6 years of art school where art history was required for several semesters. I feel that the modern art movement starting in the late 20th century saw the decline of artistic integrity. Personally I’m not a fan of the current art movements and i draw a lot of my influence form classical and traditional styles of painting. Here is a piece i did earlier this year.
Six years of art school and that’s it? Go get a refund.
Is that oil or acrylic?
Digital painting in photoshop.
Question
Question
https://imgflip.com/i/o0uiq
Question
Never saw the point of art, it always just screams ridiculous pretentiousness to me no matter what the setting may be. To each his own though. I mean for god sakes I’m a Liverpool fan.
“Expression for the sake of expression” is a concept formed through improper childhood upbringing, or what the west calls the “self-esteem movement”
you don’t judge your kids and they’ll turn out thinking any shit they make is worthwhile
the same applies at school – hence it’s time for a bit more intolerance
I think youre throwing the baby out with the bathwater. arts purpose isnt just to make you feel cuddly and happy and fuzy. art inspires emotion and imagination. a roaring sea wasnt pretty to men in the 1700s, it was terrifying and awer inspiring. paintings of murder, rape and arson were common throgh all of history. bacons works are the same in that they inspire disgusted fascination. he was the first genuine gore artist and for that he merits respect and disctinctionfrom the trash in the list.
I saw ceci n’est pas un viol, I thought it was art, but to my astonishment it was just porn, and bad porn I must say, emma you suck at porn
I agree art should be beautiful, I suggest watching this video series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL619ED61282CD714E
Does photography count as art?
Hell yes it does. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, etc.
I greatly enjoy much of the art on this gallery’s website:
http://cordair.com/
It calls itself “The finest in Romantic Realism”. I am not an art expert, but I like this style.
Was that an advertisement? No harm done.
“It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when art started to decline. My own guess is that the decline had its roots in Romanticism”
———————
Most likely the degeneracy can be traced to the late 19th century impressionist painters (who were also the first Jewish painters btw. There were ZERO Jewish painters before then).
The invention of the camera changed art for good or bad. Portraits and landscapes could be produced is mass quantity and lost the ability to inspire.
An absolute must-read for anyone looking to explore this further from an academic perspective:
http://atlassociety.org/students/students-blog/3671-why-art-became-ugly
What I will say: objective standards of beauty and morality do exist; it is no coincidence that 99.9% of the time – those who try telling you otherwise, are often trying to sell you something ugly, immoral, degenerate, and corrupt. Always trust your soul with these things. There’s a reason Renaissance Art provides anyone who’s sane with spiritual ecstasy, whereas modern and postmodern art makes them want to puke. What does it say about a civilization when it celebrates the latter?
This is why – no matter how crazy those Muslims are – I still have a lot of respect for their civilization. They may not be living in 1st world standards, but you’ll never see crap like this in their world:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8YR9IV9Alc
Oh brother…… good find. At least the bitch in the ‘performance’ piece didn’t give herself a coat hanger abortion. I agree that things have gone horribly wrong in the West.
The problem I have with Islam is that they do not allow any kind of art under Sharia law. Not even classics are allowed, which I think is too extreme. Textile design is allowed under sharia guidlines as is architecture which is heavily controlled.
All of this makes for a boring uninteresting existance.
But I see your point. After having viewed those videos i did think to myself that the West really has to pull back some, and rethink, and re-establish quality and aesthetics.
Ironically though, the Tehran Museum Of Contemporary Art (yes in Iran) has a Jackson Pollock in their collection:
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-18248624
I can appreciate both ballet and pole dancing. I just don’t pretend they have equal value as art. You know what I’m saying?
Roger Scruton has an excellent hour long video on this subject on Vimeo. Let me see if I can find the link …. Ah yes. “Why Beauty Matters”
https://vimeo.com/112655231
The Guggenheim in Spain is disgusting. The Guggenheim in New York is tragic.
I like Frank Lloyd Wright. He was very good at designing houses.
He was terrible at designing a museum. A continuous slope does not lend itself to the purpose of the building. It’s probably the biggest miss of his career, and one which people gloss over because while the building fails at its intended purpose, it is still iconic.
I have started an art movement called Pulchrism which champions Beauty as the purpose of art. Here’s a link to The Pulchrist Manifesto: http://www.jessewaugh.com/the-pulchrist-manifesto/
Modern art is crap. It’s like calling noise, music. Who is the “artist” who created that giant butt plug? What’s its title?
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/20/paul-mccarthy-butt-plug-sculpture-paris-rightwing-backlash
Just the other day, I met some chick who told me she was an artist. She showed me her paintings on her phone. I’ve seen better art from 5 year olds. OK, I can understand if the paintings were even stylized or something, but the weren’t. Seriously, the lack of talent was embarrassing.
She wasn’t bad looking but I was embarrassed to try to shift her.
the Nazi party was right with their hatred on “entartete Kunst”, experimental dance, nihilistic literature and “Atonal music”. You surely have the right to like those kinds of things, but the problem I have with them (as with any art) that it’s being propagated in the public domain, state media, most of the time subsidized=taxmoney.
Once in a while my municipality comes up with another statue or sculpture that they want to place somewhere at a new housing estate or shoppingmall. It’s always the same sketchy abstract BS. And you have no say in the placement of it. The town council chooses (very conveniently a group of people) that all happen to find it very beautiful and also meaningful art. With that they think to radiate democracy and transparancy. Which is a lie of course.
Then you get something like this:
That’s where your taxmoney is going.
http://www.hetverhaalvandehondsrug.nl/album/8-Kunst%20op%20de%20Hondsrug/Gemeente%20Borger%20-%20Odoorn%20-%20Odoorn%20-%20kunst.JPG
They also valued physical fitness. They burned pornographic books and art that was considered to be offensive, which is where the whole Nazi book burning thing was about. The myth of banning guns wasn’t true.
http://propagandaprofessor.net/2011/09/26/the-myth-of-hitlers-gun-ban/
Cuntemporary Art
I can find better art in the bathroom stalls than in this cuntemporary art
XX/XXI Century…..
Art = Depravity.
Progressive = Loony
Celebrities = Freaks .
The best website I have found for true art is: http://www.artrenewal.org/ and here are a series of articles on their philosophy of art: http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/ARCphilosophy.php and my favorite article on the passing off of crap as art: http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/ArtScam/artscam.php
If anyone wants to learn draughtmanship, a skill men used to learn a century ago, then there is no better starting place than the Charles Bargue Drawing Course. Two resources for it: http://www.bargue-drawing.com/ & buy the book and another DVD for it here: http://www.arc-store.com/arseheboandd.html and here: http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Bargue-Jean-L%C3%A9on-G%C3%A9r%C3%B4me-Ackerman/dp/2867702038
This is a sad little article in which the author doesn’t like any art made in the last several hundred years or more. It’s a perfect example of why a little knowledge is dangerous, and a very little knowledge is very dangerous. All the Impressionists, Post Impressionists, Abstract Expressionists, and Surrealists got swept away in there, along with people like Picasso who are rather hard to pigeonhole, just to name obvious examples.
His assessment of Francis Bacon is, I dare say, regrettably, stupid. You can get a better understanding of Bacon here: http://artofericwayne.com/2014/08/31/in-defense-of-francis-bacon-2/
My guess is the author would hate my work as well (see example attached).
But, yeah, there’s a lot of hyped up drivel out there. Let’s not burn all the great stuff with the crap and call it all shit though.
My art blog: http://artofericwayne.com/digital-painting/
art has been degenerating since 525BC
Well, his pierce of art had been deflated by the public, and the author got a good spank up…
This picture pretty much says it all.
An article about the degeneracy of contemporary art and no mention of AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee? Two aclaimed artists that capture perfectly the “beauty” of our age. From the exhibit intro…
The exhibition “PLAID” was first of all an invitation : AA Bronson invited Keith Boadwee to revisit some works he had long abandoned, only this time as a collaborative project. The collaboration seems almost intuitively natural: Bronson’s work as a healer famously concentrated on the anus; both Bronson and Boadwee have histories of working collaboratively by generously inviting younger artists to play a role in their work. This is exactly what happened here. Bronson the elder invited Boadwee the younger into his court at the prestigious Salzburger Kunstverein to restage certain of Boadwee’s seminal works.
Trigger warning…