I thought I’d write a little about modern art, as I am a trained illustrator. However, as I wrote the thing out on my computer it quickly expanded into 5 pages—a thread in itself.
Suffice it to say, you have human institutions created around ideas that may or may not be human in origin. Some may be divine in origin. However, humans aren’t perfect (save for the Christ), and they make errors in their policies and administrative practices—their methods of human governance. The result is you get splits and schisms.
This denotes something more than “rebellion”. Mere rebellion suggests nothing but negation—getting a rise out of making oneself difficult, a rise out of seeing things torn down and destroyed.
That’s not necessarily what happened with modern art. Or not the only thing, I should say. Rather, you had groups of persons who honestly believed they into the realm of “discovery”, possible universals of the subconscious mind, modern alchemy. This is exhibited no better than by the abstract expressionist artist/theorist Wassily Kandinsky.
However, in capitalistic systems “art” becomes a commodity—people can and do make their living by creating it and selling it (I ought to know). And so you get these human remora fish—less noble souls who latch on to a potentially constructive movement and then disseminate vacuous forms of it, doing so for profit.
“Cubism” is an intellectually vacuous form of modern art. Nothing more than a novelty—try to make everything look 3D. This is actually called a “trompe l’oeli” and normally requires an artist skilled enough at academic painting to do photo realism—only cubism relies on a gimmick, namely, you paint the subject into cubes (however sloppily or hastily), and voila, it looks like a bunch of little paintings done in “three quarters view”.
Once that fad wore off in the 1930s nobody ever returned to it.
Furthermore, there were art movements that really were about nothing but negation—artists who weren’t trying to offer anything constructive whatsoever to the surrounding society.
During the first world war you had anti-war protestors create “dada art”. Dada was art that represented total nihilism, total chaos—a bunch of newspaper clippings and individual printed letters glued together to form a vague and unreadible abstract painting; random bits of metal glued into mobiles that hung suspended—rather than stood on anything solid; mass-produced furniture and machinery rendered useless, then put on display. Basically, a junk pile in a gallery meant to spread secular pacifist message, wrapping it in psychobabble whenever the viewer might question either secularism or pacifism.
I myself spent a year studying modern art (amongst other genres) at a private art college in the 1980s. Suffice it to say, by then art schools had become little more than spigots of cultural marxism, with the “pop art” of the 1960’s and 70’s nothing but a rehash of dadaism. Everything was now about “fighting fascism”, with it being increasingly questionable whether/not such a fight was worthwhile.
On my own I came to the conclusion that it’s meaningless to discuss any intrinsic value of art apart from its surrounding civilization—aside from this it’s a mere novelty, worth no more than whatever a collector of novelties will pay for it. And so after that you immediately get into a discussion of “what makes for a worthwhile civilization”—Plato’s Republic all over again.
I myself hold to the belief man is of a dual nature—both Dionysian and Apollonian, the passions and the reasoning, the horse and the rider—and that the happiness and overall constructiveness of any civilization rests on its institutions encouraging the rider to be in control of the horse, encourages its citizens to gain control over their own passions—be a master over these things, use them as a tool for one’s own higher self, rather than be mastered by them.
To the extent art in some way(s) supports and encourages this model of the reasoning in control over the passions—this “order over chaos”—then such art is beneficial and constructive for a civilization. But to the extent it fails in this challenge, then it isn’t beneficial per se—it is at best “neutrally decorative” (or merely “neutrally informative”), and at worst a stimulator of vice.
