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1913 stands out among the worst years in the history of the American nation for a few reasons. Income tax gave central government the power of extortion and theft, the creation of the Federal Reserve placed control of American finance in private hands, and the 17th Amendment kneecapped state power and set the stage for the unaccountable corruption of the government that we see today. Change doesn't happen overnight, but if you have to pick a year when dyscivic Modernity came to America, 1913 is the first choice. This post looks at that putrescent year through a different lens - one less well known, but just as insidious a herald of national subversion and degradation. That would be the Armory Show, or the International Exhibition of Modern Art of over 1200 works held in New York's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue. Here, we can see how the process of cultural inversion that we have been looking at in Europe and differed in America.
But first we have to consider what art is.
George Grie, Requiem or Music Set You Free, 2010 digital art
The art of the West is unmatched for its range and diversity. The best and worst of our culture are expressed in countless forms. At best, it turns our thoughts to transcendence by expressing things not seen in the natural world. Corrupting art with gibberish and depravity strikes at the soul of the West. Restoring the health of art is part of rebuilding national culture.
Modernism in art, like income tax, the Fed, universal suffrage, etc. didn't come out of nowhere, but was the flowering of long-germinating poison seeds. As a young colonial nation, America didn't have the old art traditions of Europe or the aristocratic customers to support much of an artistic scene. European-style academic art did arrive in with the founding of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1805, so there was a version of that stilted late 19th-century preciosity to stand for "the establishment". Click for a good summery of academic art. And the Gilded Age plutocrats loved the European fine arts. American Modernism combines criticism of cultural "backwardness" to its attack on tradition in a way that doesn't apply to the European Modernists.
Eastman Johnson, The Old Stagecoach, 1871, oil on canvas, Milwaukee Art Museum
Scenes of everyday life were popular in 19th century art - a sign of an optimistic national outlook. Modernists call this culturally backwards. You be the judge.
Urban art scenes and academies turn art into an elite cultural space of sociopathic critic-priests, money-men, and aspiring culturati. This becomes completely detached from the general public who is disdained, and is utterly disinterested in return. So "art" is a weird and narrow subculture posing as an expression of national identity.
Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880, oil on canvas, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
American academic art on the edge of Modernism. The technique is good enough, but there is none of Johnson's lively appeal. And it is unpleasantly homoerotic - more gay burlesque than a celebration of the American worker. Most people has no interest in this, making it easier to subvert.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
This painting by the important Modernist was one of the most controversial in the Armory Show - the big public debut of Modern art in America. The controversy had the desired effect of drawing "edgy" collectors to pedestalize a toxic foreign culture. The show was actually the work of very few people and generated negligible interest from the public. But "Art", for all the money and pretension, is a pretty small world and was easily bent to the same dyscivic agenda that we have seen in the general culture over the last few posts.
To understand how this happens, we have to understand where "Art" comes from - the historical precedents and ingrained presumptions that define the word and its place in Western culture.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them, 1766, oil on canvas, Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Fine Arts from an Academic perspective, but only a sliver of what "art" means today. A painting or a sculpture? A category in a bookstore? The liberal arts? Arts and crafts? The literary arts? Art critics and galleries? Graffiti art? Art means different things in different contexts.
If we look at what the arts have in common, they are purposeful creative acts, usually with some relationship to skill and originality. Studies of the arts usually divide them by medium - literary, visual, musical, cinematic, etc., though the visual arts are the ones that tend to come to mind when someone says "art" without a qualifier.
So what's the difference between "visual art" and a picture?
The simple answer - one is made by an artist - just kicks the can down the road to 'what is an artist'? Modern art theory tried to solve this by defining art as completely independent and detached from any function or reference - older posts have looked at the idea of the "essence" of art that was a big part of Modern art theory. But there is no pure essence.
René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, oil on canvas, 116 cm × 89 cm, private collection
Magimix food processor ad based on Magritte
Painters sold their work to make ends meet. Obviously designing a print ad is a different process, but broadly speaking, both subordinate art production to economic necessity.
Most people couldn't care less about the art/picture distinction, which is unfortunate because the implications for the history of Western culture were enormous. By creating a prestigious subset of pictures called art, financial elites were able to steer the direction of "high culture" with trickle-down effects on education and other public institutions.
Modern art can actually be fun for children because it doesn't require much skill or coordination. A child really can do it.
Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon, circa 575 BC by Nebuchadnezzar II, reconstruction finished 1930, Pergamon Museum, Berlin
The reconstructed ancient Babylonian gate shows the connection between advancements in the arts and urban civilization.
The structure was on an impressive processional way, seen here at the Pergamon Museum and in an artist's recreation.
Art is still a high-status urban scene, but what's changed is the expectation that the artists be good technically. Today, this is inverted, and in our insane, debt-fueled abundance society, dyscivic nonsense is supported by the same flacks that attack tradition with the vitriol of the soul-sold.
The Greeks are the first to have what looks like a philosophy of art and their influence was huge on the Western tradition - Western Classicism is Greek aesthetics filtered through Rome. The term Greco-Roman refers to this shared tradition, although it should not make us overlook the differences between the cultures. An earlier post looked at the lost Canon of the Greek sculptor Polykleitos as the Classical standard of ideal proportions for a human figure. Like a visual analogy of Plato's Forms, Classical sculpture stripped away accidents, variance, and imperfection to express a simplified, ideal essence
Discobolus Lancellotti, Roman copy of 5th century BC Greek original by Myron, Hadrianic period, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome
Classical Greek sculpture featured perfectly proportioned and balanced figures that seemed real and ideal at the same time. The nude male form was the standard of perfection - unclothed females only appear in the 4th century BC - and the notion of expressing perfect beauty with the human form ties into contemporary philosophical ideas.
The Classical period is relatively short lived. By the end of the 5th century BC, Late Classical art was moving away from formal perfection for more emotional effects. The imperial Hellenistic art that spread with Alexander the Great was way more diverse in the range of subjects and emotion.
To be fair, referring to Greek "artistic philosophy" is not exactly accurate because the Greeks didn't identify aesthetics as a formal area. What we can do is identify two opposite impulses in their art that line up with developments in other areas. The Greeks stand out in the ancient world for both their interest in the the natural world - especially the human condition - and systematic approaches to thinking and knowledge. The first can be seen in their invention of drama and other literary forms, and the scientific disciplines making up natural philosophy. The emphasis on realism in their visual arts reflects this.
Hermes Logios (Hermes Orator), Roman copy, late 1st-early 2nd century AD of a 5th century BC Greek original, Museo nazionale di palazzo Altemps, Rome
Athena Giustiniani, Antonine Roman copy after a Greek original of the late fifth-early fourth century BC, Vatican Museums
Greek thinkers looked for order beyond appearances. Ultimate reality in philosophy, harmonics in music, and poetic structure all express the relationship between material imperfection and Truth. Idealism in art reaches for this too. Classical female statues were clothed, but the foot placement shows the same pose.
Classical statues based on the Canon of Polyclitus like the two above are Platonic in that they accept the idea that things are just versions or "images" of higher realities. Only they flip Plato's rejection of mimesis upside down. Plato criticized the visual arts on ontological grounds - our world is already a pale imitation of an ultimate reality that our souls want to escape to, while art is a turn to even more imperfect imitations. But Classical sculpture tried to reveal the perfection beyond material reality. Consistent, perfect proportions, flawless complexions, and calm expressions were a glimpse of an ideal that didn't actually exist.
Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
This famous drawing captures the relationship between ideal human form to the cosmic order perfectly. Renaissance humanism was based on Greek ideas filtered through Roman sources, and Greek idealism was a move from complexity to simplicity. This is Neoplatonic in structure, with the One/Forms/absolute unity as ultimate reality. Pythagorean geometry distilled simple, consistent, mathematical relations beneath the messy surface of the world of empirical experience. They are therefore higher truths - steps on the way to the absolute perfection of ultimate reality.
If geometric simplicity brings material reality closest to perfection, then the human ideal is the one closest to geometric perfection. "Humanism" reminds us that Greek art is an art of the human body - that was it's appeal to radicals looking to confuse the transcendent and the material.
A quick note on the Canon of Polykleitos - the template for ideal classical proportions for millennia to follow. You can see how closely the Hermes and Athena shown above follow it. The original is lost, but there are Roman copies like the one below, so we know what the Canon looked like. The picture is on an earlier post on classical theory in architecture.
Doryphoros, 1st century BC-1st century AD Roman marble copy of Greek bronze original by Polykleitos from circa 440 BC, marble, 200 cm, Naples National Archaeological Museum
Art theorists treat the figure like a meditation on formal beauty and ignore the historical context for male physical prowess. But order was not just an intellectual exercise for the Greeks. Survival was a constant struggle against a chaotic and indifferent world. Classical Greece was fiercely competitive and violent - warfare was endemic and just about every aspect of culture could be cast as a contest.
The prevalence of athletics and combat gave sculptors models of functional muscularity and fluid movement. The Canon wasn't a puffed up fitness model - the powerful figure could move quickly and tirelessly in the heavy armor of a hoplite or compete for a prize at the Olympics. This was so ordinary that it appeared on functional items.
Panathenaic prize amphora, ca. 500 BC, terracotta, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Black-figure panel amphora; last quarter 6th century BC, terracotta, Dallas Museum of Art
These aren't "escapism" in the modern sense. When we think about physical Beauty, we have to remember that it is measured by alignment with higher order. The ideal form in the material world is practically competent. Art theory switched the ideal into audience appeal - intellectual or otherwise.
Put aside the validity of the Classical idealism for a moment - because the secular transcendentalists sure did - and consider the implications. Art has a moral aspect because it can represent what the order of the universe looks like when manifest in material form. Think of it as a sort of visual philosophy, where instead of explaining and analogizing a principle that we can't see directly in abstract symbols, you are shown a physical approximation. The premise is that they are as ontologically True as physically possible - this is what makes them Beautiful. The fact that these could inspire more carnal responses can be troubling to some viewers, but from a theoretical point of view, this is a problem with the viewer, not the work - the appetitive and not the rational soul is driving the chariot. Of course, theorists have always been excellent at rationalizations, and the rhetorical power of images to compel emotional reactions is the reason why they are used in the first place:
Alan LeQuire, gilded by Lou Reed, Nashville Athena Parthenos, unveiled 1990, gypsum cement, ground fiberglass, and gold over aluminum, steel, and concrete, Nashville's Parthenon replica.
This 12.75 m replica of Phidias' 5th century BC Athena Parthenos captures the impact of a huge gleaming cult statue. Philosophizing about perfect form is a rational - this is a purely rhetorical address. The fact that there is a full-size copy of the Parthenon in Nashville is odd.
Intellectualized theory disciplines and controls the power of images to move us. We experience pictures in the same way as the real world - through sight. We have to see something before we can reflect on the experience. Remember that written commentary follows initial perception. This is what makes images so powerful - they're man-made constructs like words, but they are taken up like raw sense data. Skilled image-makers essentially bypass linguistic filters and trigger pre-conscious response patterns to weaponize the psychology of perception. We see this everywhere, from marketing to porn. Rules remind you that this is just a picture and not "real".
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
At least in theory. Anyone who has seen the erotica that filled the 19th century French Academy shows knows that rules are only as effective as those implementing them. Bouguereau was the last great Academic master and his skill is unreal. The figures are based on classic prototypes and the arrangement is perfectly structured. But it is obvious that the point of this painting is purely emotional.
The Classical attempt to temper seductive realism with an air of intellectualism is an example of what the Band calls a philosophical bait-and-switch. This is when something circumstantial and temporal is passed off as transcendent or an absolute. Art "principles" are always abstracted from actual works by real artists. You have to see something to theorize it. Classical Greek artists were fixated on the body for any number of reasons and figured out how to replicate it effectively. The theory comes later, whether Platonic notions of perfect form or the rules of proportion built off them.
Apollo Citharoedus, Roman copy of Greek original of the 5th century BC, Vatican Museums
The idea behind Greek art theory - that it idealizes reality - is not terrible if you think of how musical harmony really does bring mathematical proportion into sensory experience. Classical sculpture attempted the same thing, only without an objective standard like the octave.
Apoxyomenos (Scraper), Roman copy after a Greek original by Lysippos, circa 330 BC, Vatican Museums
Ludovisi Cnidian Aphrodite, Roman copy (restored head, arms, legs), after Greek original by Praxiteles, 4th century BC, Palazzo Altemps, Rome
The Canon of Polyklitos was modified in the Late Classical period to a smaller head and leaner proportions. This is inversion, not re-tuning a lyre. Abstract ideals behind reality don't change with popular tastes. Whether or not patrons prefer more sinuous forms has nothing to do with philosophical or moral absolutes.
The appearance of female nudes around this time is revealing. Although, there is still a intellectualized idealism, bodily sensuality is becoming prioritized.
In Platonic terms, Classical sculpture expressed the quality of Beauty because of the proportion and symmetry of its form, not its surface appearance. This is a different notion of beautiful than the one that most think of today because it has a moral component. The Beautiful aligns with the Good, the highest of Plato's Forms - basically his concept of ultimate reality or the highest metaphysical level. The Beautiful, or the quality of beauty in things, is defined by alignment with the fundamental order of the universe. This means it is also True - the third of Plato's highest Forms. There was a sensuous appeal, but in theory, this took a backseat to the intellectual beauty of perfect harmonic form. Changing the proportions is an admission that whatever "truth" is being conveyed is relative and its beauty skin deep.
Historically, what we think of as art began as primitive picture making, but the introduction of theoretical assumptions complicated things. Artistic progress is empirical, in that the artist figures out solutions to represational problems and gets useful feedback from the client/ audience/public in the form of success. Things that are appealing are repeated and built on, things that are unsuccessful are scrapped. But when theory enters the equation, the relationship is distorted, and even subverted. Theorists are really just abstracting from what happened prior or borrowing from another subject, but they pass this off as knowledge of transcendent principles in order to assume a superior position. When content and quality become subservient to theory, art invariably ceases to be of social benefit.
Consider our old epistemology diagram - the simplified graphic of what and how we can know - now modified to account for more recent posts:
As limited material beings, empirical observation and sound logic provide some knowledge of the universe that we inhabit. But this pattern recognition, not timeless Truth. Things beyond this threshold are known by faith.
The important thing is that the types of knowledge correspond to their ontological domains. Empiricism is no more use in understanding transcendentals than faith will reverse the laws of physics if you drop something. The Satanic inversion behind Postmodern and any other globalism is the pretense that the the transcendental can be known by limited, empirical minds, and that faith in this deception trumps empirical reality.
The Classical art theory of the Greeks seems to fit this pattern, if realism is thought of as an empirical attitude towards the world, and idealism the imposition of fake metaphysical standards. Add Christian art for symmetry and looks something like this:
Realism corresponds to empirical knowledge because is is based on objective observation of the material world. It is mimetic rather than verbally descriptive or quantitative, but it can be assessed for truth by comparing it to reality like any empirical representation. Likewise, it can't reveal metaphysical Truths - its higher values depend on the cultural context. Christian art is distinguishable by message and ideals, but also begins with recognizable representations. Idealism prioritizes man-made ideals over artistic creativity - the two coexist for a while, but reach a breaking point with Modernism, when the theoretical ideal is opposed to representation in general.
But this is too general.
Angelica Kauffman, Venus Induces Helen to Fall in Love with Paris, 1790, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum
Modern theory attacked the representational foundations of art, but older versions tried to coexist. Neoclassicism applied a version of Greek idealism, filtered through Renaissance conventions, to 18th century art. Everything about Kauffman's painting is subordinated to this classicizing Academic theory, but it is still realistic and coherent as a scene.
Paul Cézanne, Bottom of the Ravine, 1879, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (the site this image came from has a lot of Cezanne paintings, if you are curious about him)
Cezanne was typical of the post-Impression Modernists for his move into abstraction for overt theoretical reasons. This is the "essence" of art discussed in earlier posts - "higher" precepts or rules that define painting as an art. What is new about this brand of theorizing is the hostility to clear, coherent, representations that seem real.
The basic problem is the same as rationalism - that absolutes or transcendent principles are both knowable and communicable through material vectors.
Icon of Second Coming, around 1700, tempera on wood, Private Collection
Art theory is like rationalism because it claims knowledge of higher principles which is epistemologically an act of faith. This is perfectly legitimate when done honestly. The higher principles defining Christian art are drawn from Christian faith.
Orthodox icon theology developed out of the Neoplatonic roots of the Eastern church. Resemblance creates a spiritual connection with the holy subject of the picture. But not any picture will do. Icon painting is a ritualized act of faith that followed ancient formulas. The higher principles - Orthodox theology - are not misrepresented.
The problem is when the higher principles are just man-made rationalist opinions masquerading as "Truth", whether talking art or reality. Then it is another philosophical bait and switch subset of Satanic inversion. So when we talk about art, we have to distinguish practice and theory, even though there is a lot of overlap between the two. Pedestalizing theory is the same sort of inversion that we find with Science! and engineering, or credentialism and experience in general. In each case, the theory is based on something empirical but inverted into the higher law.
Lets look at the pattern:
The Charioteer of Delphi, 478 or 474 BC, Delphi Museum; ancient astronomer
The two domains are so qualitatively different that it is easy to miss the shared patters. But consider: Art gets more and more realistic before a theoretical ideal is systematized. The branches of natural philosophy develop when observations are systematized.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Good Education, circa 1753, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; François Boucher, The Triumph of Venus, 1740, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre; Frontispiece to Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, 1st edition, 1620
Working together, theory and practice break new ground. Academic art lacks the empirical precision of the Scientific Method, but both are based in reality. The art theory required representational skill, while science required hypotheses be proved.
Cézanne, Bottom of the Ravine, 1879; Eduàrd Zibnitski, The Age of Reason, drawing
Eventually the theoretical wing dominated. Modernist art disregarded the real world to focus on the nature and rules of painting on a theoretical level. Rationalism pretended that pretension turns whims into metaphysics.
James Brooks, Boon, 1957, oil on canvas painting, Tate Gallery
Finally, the empirical is banished altogether and it becomes whatever whatever the elite want.
There is a lot of overlap between theory and practice in reality. Some of the commentariat are artists, and many artists are theoretical in their practice. You could even make a distinction between artists that participate in the theory-based institutional systems of the Arts, and those who make an independent living selling their work or skills to the public. The ancient Greeks defined it bit differently. They used the words technê and epistêmê, roughly translated as craft and knowledge. Epistêmê works pretty well for theory, but technê doesn't really distinguish between art and images in general.
Terracotta column-krater, circa 360–350 BC, Late Classical red-figure, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Technê and epistêmê in one image. The vase shows the technical craft of painting a statue. The statue is shown with Classical pose and proportions.
Plato suggested judging by the goal - a practical outcome or knowledge/the Forms in themselves. Aristotle refined this - technê deals with things that change and epistêmê with things that are permanent. This also aligns with our distinction between empirical and transcendent reality, because the world of change is the empirical world and theory claims absolute status. Click for a clear summary of this.
The principles of Classical art can be thought of as technê guided by epistêmê - skill in making that aligns with knowledge of higher truths. The theoretically-informed artist in an Academic sense would fall under phronesis, or "practical wisdom". This is the application of abstract principles to real life to guide virtuous behavior in line with the Good/cosmic order. Extrapolating, good art had phronesis, or expresses truth through technical skill. But this has no binding force - the canon of proportions had changed before Alexander. It gets clearer:
Ludovisi Gaul and his Wife, marble, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, circa 220 BC
The Hellenistic era followed the conquests of Alexander the Great and Greek art became a sign of imperial opulence. One of the famous dying Gauls from Pergamon has the muscular ideal body of a Classical statue, but the tranquility and balance are gone. The subject is violent and full of emotion. The style and aesthetic appeal are kept, but the search for higher order is taking a back seat to sensory appeal.
Another way to put it with some other Greek words: logos and pathos. Pathos refers to emotional appeal and Aristotle connected it most closely to rhetoric. Logos has no single English translation, but is important in Greek thought and a central thread connecting it to Christianity. Logos refers to concepts of language and logic - or more accurately, the formal order that they share. Language is inherently orderly - it has to be to be intelligible - and logic a refinement of that syntactical order. Heraclitus is the earliest thinker known to use the term, but it was the Stoics who developed it into a concept of a world-soul - or rational universal animating spirit. It makes sense if man is a microcosm of the cosmos. Since the reason or logos that separates man from other animals is seated in the soul, the rational order of the universe can be thought of the same way. We can use the 2nd century Roman Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius to set things up. These quotes are from his Meditations, with the translator's choice of "reason" for the original Greek "λόγος" replaced with the more accurate anglicized "logos".
Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, around 175 AD, Capitoline Museum, Rome; Bust of Marcus Aurelius, 161-180 AD, Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, quotes from Marcus Aurelius, The Communings With Himself of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome (Meditations), Loeb Classical Library, Book IV, 4 (pp. 70-71) and VI, 1 (pp. 130-131).
In the first one he connects human reason and behavior with the rational order of the universe under the idea of logos (λόγος) then connects this to morality. The capitalization of λόγος in the second quote follows the original translator and distinguished the cosmic world-soul level of logos from the fallible human. But the idea that man, society, and the universe follow the natural order is consistent.
There is a lot of overlap in the intellectual currents of late antiquity so there is no point trying to distinguish the specifics in a blog post. But this concept of logos was compatible with the Neoplatonic ontological structure that the different schools of thought shared some version of. We can revisit a graphic from an earlier post for the general outline:
Plotinus was an influential Neoplatonist who defines ultimate reality as the One, an absolute transcendence, that is the source of all reality. All that "is" overflows or emanates, becoming less “real” as it gets metaphysically “further” from the source until it reaches our material reality. The diagram does mislead because the One is also all-encompassing. Creation is still within the One. To deal with the problem of how an absolute transcendence emanates, Plotinus proposed the nous or divine mind.
The terminology is imperfect, but the outline is that the One has a sort of self-awareness that infinitely contemplates its infinite perfection. This is recursive. The nous can be thought of like an exterior turn or an awareness of "exterior" as a concept. None of this is temporal as we understand it - the One is infinitely beyond us. But at the ontological extreme of the One, there is no difference between "awareness" and "being".
A graphic representation of a simplified Neoplatonic ontology. The One contemplates exteriority projecting the nous which coalesces into the world soul. This can be thought of as the purely intellectualized nous expressed as the rational principles that order our material world. Laws of mathematics, natural law, and so forth. From this comes material reality. Just remember that this is a continual flow rather than distinct steps and the One simultaneously encompasses the whole thing. Humans are material, but the soul is analogous to the nous, and seeks to return. This makes us unique in our ability to shift between ontological levels.
Logos aligns with the nous - the "active" awareness of the One that is the foundation for the possibility of reality. By nature, the One is absolute perfection. If we can imagine an "external" to this, alignment with the One is right or correct in the most basic possible sense. Since the nous is the metaphorical self-consciousness of the One, it expresses 'alignment with the One' in a way that is applicable to the the lower levels of reality. In this configuration, the logos is the intellectualization of the One - literally the cosmic order. To act without or against it is to cut oneself off ontologically and embrace solipsistic falsehood on the most basic level. Most Neoplatonists agreed that wallowing in material pleasures pulled the soul away from reunification with the One after death.
Creation scene, with God, holding a pair of compasses, circa 1411, Bible Historiale, vol. 1, British Library Royal 19 D. III, f.3
The creation of reality was compared to the work of a craftsman - one who orders matter to higher principles. Neoplatonists developed Plato's Demiurge from the Timaeus into the creative aspect of nous that produces our universe. Since the nous is logos, its emanation is similarly ordered.
Enter the compasses from an earlier occult post. The tools of the builder and geometer represented the principle of logos that linked craft to creation. God is not the Demiurge, but it is a good illustration of the relation.
In theory, we can think of Classical art as reforming matter according to logos. This brings it into alignment with nous and ultimately the One. It therefore aspires to the True and by extension the Good. The measure of its success is its Beauty. Beauty is ontologically True, so material beauty is the expression of logos in form The Greeks assumed that art depicted things - technê included technical skill in picture making - so the beauty or 'logos in form' of a statue is a perfectly proportioned human figure. Practice is different.
The gold standard was musical harmony, since this is fixed.
Changing the canon of proportions means that the same standard does not apply to statues.
Hellenistic art evolved from late Classical art - you can see it in the way it treats the ideal figure, but it is way less connected to metaphysical notions of harmony or logos. The Hellenistic era is weird - Greek culture was the toast of the ancient world and the big centers like Alexandria and Pergamon dwarfed Periclean Athens in wealth and luxury. The courts adopted Eastern ideas of imperial luxury and art production exploded. But the same globalism that brought elite wealth also undermined cultural unity - the alignment of man and cosmos through logos lacks the same appeal among the aristocratic rulers of polyglot empires. Their art is a festival of sensory stimulation - figures of all ages and types, including groups, lower class types, and animals. Male and female nudes are more sensualized, erotic scenes appear, and drama and emotion become common.
Farnese Hercules, probably early 3rd century AD copy by Glykon, after a Greek original from the 4th century BC; Drunken Old Woman with a Lagynos, Roman copy after a Greek original of the 2nd century BC; Crouching Venus in Rhodes, 1st century BC Roman copy of a 3rd century BC original, Archaeological Museum of Rhodes; The Old Fisherman or Dying Seneca, 2nd century AD Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, Louvre Museum, Paris; Pseudo-Seneca statue, fourth quarter of 1st century BC, National Museum in Warsaw; The Farnese Bull, 222-235 AD, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples; Athanodoros, Agesandros, and Polydoros, Head of Odysseus from the Polyphemus Group from the Villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga, probably 1st century BC; Bronze head from a statue of a philosopher a statue, between 3rd and 1st century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens
So technê has two faces coming out of Greek antiquity - the allure of sensory appeal and the beauty of higher order. Both are "art", but only one strives for transcendence.
Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros, Laocoön and his Sons, 1st century BC Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from around 200 BC, Vatican Museums ,
One of the most famous Hellenistic statues for its technical skill and emotion. It shows the priest of Poseidon and his sons being killed by serpents for questioning the Trojan Horse. The order is clear in the design structure - how the figures flow together. But the the subject is a problem. A heroic figure being destroyed for a divine lie is the opposite of alignment with logos. The values are the opposite of the Classical.
Technê here is pure mastery of the craft, but organizing a group is not the same as expressing cosmic order. The moral Truth of Beauty - epistêmê - is missing, so there is no requirement of phronesis.
Veiled and Masked Dancer, late 3rd or 2nd century BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Aphrodite, Eros, and Pan, circa 1st century BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens
A sensuous, veiled figure shows technical skill, but has the opposite effect of Classical clarity. The Aphrodite is a typical Venus type, but any moral of lust and restraint is overpowered by suggestions of sexual perversion. Technê, but no epistêmê so no phronesis. Logos in the craft, but not the message.
The use of refined technê to deliver seductive, dyscivic messages in the visual arts shouldn't surprise us.
The Postmodern concept of art as an elite discursive space where technê is explicitly unwelcome like the Armory Show would have been beyond conception to the Greeks. It is Modernism that creates a distinction between technical proficiency and no technical proficiency - previously the idea that good art included skill was so self-evident that no theorization was needed. This is a problem because our understanding of art is a product of the first known anti-skill art tradition in human history. When the primary division is between
But Modern art is nonsense. It distorts the history of Western art in the same way that placing a shouting retard in a chamber ensemble then re-categorizing the players as musical and non-musical would.
Adolf Friedrich Erdmann Menzel, A Concert of Frederick the Great, Aquatint on paper, Library of Congress, Music Division.
Cello, violin - they're just musical strings. Basically the same thing.
There is no place for Modernist putrescence in the art of the West. It's very presence in our books and galleries separates us from the richness of our cultural heritage, like a spray of the excrement that leftists so adore over a rare gem. Rather than endow a chair for our screaming retard, the Band prefers to take a pressure-wash approach for the Modernisms and limit the discussion of art to art. Obviously Classical Beauty and Hellenistic allure are both products of skilled, ordered techne, but the goals are diametrically opposed. With the last streaks of Modernism disappearing down the storm drain, we can see the real artistic distinction.
Apollo and Marsyas, panel of a sarcophagus, ca. 290–300 AD, Louvre, Paris
Music makes a great analogy because the Classical Greeks identified the two directions in this medium. The story of Apollo and Marsyas is a music contest between the god of light and music and a satyr - a bestial man-goat associated with uncontrolled lust and emotion - where the victorious deity has the loser flayed alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), E. W. Fritzsch, 1872.
The significance of the story goes beyond a high-stakes determination of who is the better player. The contestants represent the two different impulses within art, which are the same as the those found in the dualistic nature of humanity - logical order and emotional self-indulgence, logos and pathos.
Nietzsche called these impulses as Apollonian and Dionysian in his first book, but the meaning is what is important. Apollo as symbol of complex rational structure and Dionysios, the god of wine, unrestrained emotion, and madness. His followers - feral wasted humans like the bacchants and beast-men like satyrs - epitomized carnal frenzied abandon. Marsyus is interpreted as a proxy for his master, and his pipes, a haunting rustic instrument associated with wild passions contrast with the urbane sophistication of Apollo's lyre.
Leonid Ilyukhin, Apollo and Dionysus, oil on canvas, 2018
Here is a good take on the contrast by an contemporary artist who explicitly references Nietzsche's terms on his site.
Charles Meynier, Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy, circa 1789-1800, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art
This has been taken a lot of different ways - civilization vs. barbarism is the most common. But focus on the technê. There is no screaming retard in this story. Both are sufficiently skilled players that contest is needed to determine who is better. Given that Greek music was harmonic, it is assumed that there is order to their crafts - the difference is in the goal. Apollo represents a balance of logos in a Pythagorean sense, where harmony with cosmic order makes it Beautiful - and pathos or emotional appeal. It is moving and uplifting at the same time - phronesis.
Simon Vouet, Bacchanal, before 1639, oil on canvas. Private collection
Marsyas applies craft skill purely to pathos - firing emotions without consideration of anything more than dopamine hits.
If we add Modernism, there is a pattern:
In a way, Hellenistic sculptures are more honest than the Classical ideal. They accept the reality that transcendentals cannot be objectively depicted in the material world and go about doing what images do best - fascinate and entertain. But this disconnects art and morality in an ontological sense. Being fascinating or good at entertaining is completely different from aligning the viewer with cosmic order, natural law, logos, the True, or whatever we call it.
Allure is not beauty.
Mandala of Amitayus, 19th century, paint on wood, Rubin Museum of Art
Classical order is arbitrary, but that says more about human limits of discernment than anything. We can't see the order of the universe directly so we come up with symbolic systems, and these are arbitrary by nature. That 'the nous doesn't really look like that' is hardly an insight.
A mandala also represents cosmic order and tries to link material reality and transcendence. It looks nothing like a Classical statue, but they share the idea that morality is human alignment with this order.
Symbols lack metaphysical substance, and transcendence impossible in a finite world. Of course the statue doesn't actually touch the Forms. It follows that if we can't depict Truth and Beauty directly, the Classical notion that transcendent morality inheres in certain forms is impossible. But only Postmodernists confuse symbolic limitations with reality. This means that intentions matter - the artist's and the cultural values that determine what "art" means his society.
What is the point of the work? What beliefs are implicit? What is the desired effect? Change the frame - does the work look for cosmic order, even if it can't be directly represented? Is it compatible with the concept of logos? Or does it use refined technê to seduce the audience into self-satisfaction and hedonism?
Who is the master?
Put aside the theory, and the real split that comes out of Greek "art" is a moral one, if we consider morality as alignment with cosmic order - literally the Good. Classical art tries to harness sensory allure to higher intellectual principles like a mandala in human form. Hellenistic art puts pathos over logos, emotion over intellect, and disconnects from ethos all together. What makes this blurry is that the facial and body types stay consistent, and without the original paint, the marble looks the same too. Classical and Hellenistic sculpture clearly belong to a larger category of "Greek Art", and later revival movements often lumped them together. This is important for understanding how the art of the West developed, because Greek art is the basis for all later Western classicisms.
The whole range of Greek art was taken up by the Romans, as part of their adoption of Greek culture after the conquest of the Hellenistic world. The opulent arts of the aristocratic cities fascinated the Romans, who didn't have such advanced literary and artistic traditions. It is actually historically remarkable how completely affluent Romans took up Greek culture - to the extent that "Greco-Roman" isn't inaccurate. Most of what is known of Greek statues - including most of the ones shown here - comes from Roman copies. An entire industry grew up in the empire copying Greek originals.
Sarcophagus with the Muses, 240-260 AD, Museo Palazzo Massimo Alle Terme, Rome
The Greek Muses on a Roman sarcophagus is a good depiction of this adoption of Greek artistic culture.
The problem with "Greco-Roman" as a category is the same problem as "Greek Art" - it's too broad, to the point where they contain contradictory things - only more so. The rough Classical-Hellenistic contradiction that we just traced out was an organic development that took place over some time, as Greek society changed. Classical idealism reflected the unified world view of a small, homogenous, relatively isolated polis while Hellenistic allure appeared in aristocratic, imperial centers. The contradiction was sequential, not co-extant, and only is ambiguous when we look at Greek art as a whole. This is pretty much exactly what the Romans did.
It's not essentially different from retro - things are taken up from the past because they are representative of an era or attitude, but without the deeper understanding of the cultural meaning. Romans copied and collected statues from the pre-Classical kouroi on, so there is no place for visual phronesis of the Classical type. The impulse comes from surface allure.
The other issue is that copies are not exact. Humans are incapable of replicating an artwork perfectly - even the same artist does it a bit differently each time. This lack of precision would seem to be another instance of the entropic nature of a fallen world - perfect order is even beyond us in our own movements, let alone those of foreign copyists. What these works really tell us is what Romans admired in the art of the Greeks.
Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century BC, Vatican Museums, Rome
Augustus favored a style that resembled the Classical ideal in body and expression. The relief on his breastplate shows his victories with allegories of conquered territories and some gods beneath the sun. Romans could pick from the full range of Greek art so the Classical was a choice, and not the essence of Art itself. Choice makes style symbolic - picking a Classical look means "timeless values", regardless of actual meaning.
Augustus is claiming that his conquests were divinely ordered - on his way to claiming to be a god himself. A Classical figure reinforces this with lingering associations from Plato's Athens.
Order in the technê, but the rest is intention.
The dishonesty of this kind of symbolic idealism is obvious. Empire and self-divination are the opposite of logos, but Classical style can be applied to make them appear "rational". If that sounds familiar, it is the basic Satanic inversion of temporal and transcendent that we find in all solipsistic versions of secular transcendence from Enlightenment to Postmodernism.
François Gérard, Napoleon in Coronation Robes, 1805, oil on canvas, Palace of Versailles
Ordered technê normalizing imperial pretension, early modern style.
This was a bit of a journey through things we have cone upon before but to understand art in the West, it is necessary to have a handle on the Greco-Roman tradition. It is a long and complex history that played out over centuries with no overarching one narrative to rule them all like Modernism. We can see the outlines of an idealist theory of sculptural Beauty, but this is eclipsed by sensory allure as the main factor driving technical improvement. The Classical style does keep its association with higher order but it is just one technique among many and the claims of order squid ink over naked power.
If it stopped there, we could say that the Greco-Roman tradition defined art as a blend of aesthetic preference and technical skill. Instead, European civilizations idealized the Classical ideal and somehow turned into the backbone of art theory from the Renaissance to the beginnings of Modernism. These are Classicisms, and while they are based on the Classical thread in Greco-Roman antiquity, they are not the same.
Allegory of a Commercial Treaty between France and Great Britain, Wedgewood, design attributed to John Flaxman, 1787, Brooklyn Museum
When Classical order is used to sell arrangements between imperial nation-states, there should be no illusions about the metaphysics.
Classical idealism has an admirable aim, but, like any secular transcendence, its metaphysics come up short. There is no path to Truth in finite human manipulations of an entropic material world. There is logos in craft, but the end-point for any humanist fantasy of phronesis is Hellenistic hedonism or Roman propaganda. What this means for the art of the West is that the whole history of classicizing art theory is a philosophical bait and switch - something temporal and subjective posing as an absolute. That is not to say that logos as understood in the Classical Greek sense is impossible in art - only that it can't be seen with human discernment. It belongs to faith.
Luckily, the Greco-Roman tradition is only one pillar of the art of the West...
Christ Enthroned with Saints and Angels, after 547, apse mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna,
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