If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts have their own menu page above.
Other links: The Band on Gab
Other links: The Band on Gab
This is the third post jumping off the Armory Show of 1913 into the toxic arrival of Modernism in American culture, and the first looking at the Christian aspect of the art and culture of the West. But before leaping into the ontology of Christian art, it's a good time to take stock of what we are doing, and thenset up the historical dive with some general observations on the relationship between Christianity and the degeneration of culture across the West. Although the larger journey has stayed the same, the Band has changed a bit in the little over a year since the Introduction in the featured post on the right. It turns out that exposing and dismantling Postmodernism is a much larger journey that helping third-tier philosophers/first-rate liars self-detonate.
We started with the fish in the barrel - the very first post was a little gif that captured the idiocy in one of the central ideas of Postmodernism on the most elemental level.
Using language to express the certainty that certainty cannot be expressed in language, is still beyond stupid. Were Rationalism real, this one statement would collapse the entire web of official culture. But it isn't. There is no logos in institutional culture today.
This took little deep diving, because the lies are so basic. But we were clear at the outset that Postmodernism is one of those nonsense terms that can't be summed up in a concise definition. You really only learn what it means through experience - by encountering enough metastases to recognize the patterns. And observation tells us that Postmodernity is vastly more pervasive than incoherence in the bathhouse ravings of Foucault. So we shifted course for the foundations of the larger cultural Postmodernism that traps us in a world of deception and manipulation. This meant setting aside conventional wisdom, approved narratives, and reams of convoluted verbiage for two guiding questions
Armed with a clearer understanding of the limits of the historical record and our own subjectivity, we could start to uncover the patterns of inversion, vanity, and fake secular transcendence that Postmodernity was built on. It's all connected - it is so vast that it is hard to even identify the target. Postmodernism and globalism don't mean the same thing. The Band prefers the term Satanic because it captures the mix of self-deification, hatred of Christendom, and inversion of truth so perfectly. But the reality is that we still are not sure where this is headed.
The ideas in the Band's first string of posts had already been thought through long before they were written. As the Introduction pointed out, the goal was to let people see what a house of cards this whole arrogant posturing academic gibberish really was. But as we progressed, we began to see larger patterns and face questions that we hadn't previously considered.
Relationships between pop and high culture, media, global finance, social institutions, philosophy, the occult, ontology, epistemology, etc. were coming into view that we'd never even thought about before. And during this process, our own perspectives have changed and evolved.
It has truly become a journey, and we are grateful to those of you who have decided to join us.
There is no secular transcendence at the end of our road. But there are some things we can promise won't change - we will continue to follow the truth as it is available to us while accepting the limits of what finite subjectivities can truthfully claim. What can we know and how can we know it?
This part of the journey is spending so much time around the turn of the 20th century because Modernism in the broadest sense is the precursor to the Postmodern culture that wraps us in self-erasing delusion. This is when the broad pattern of secularization that we traced from the Renaissance transformed society on a mass level. Long-festering myths about Progress!, Science!, and globalist utopianism somehow became articles of public faith. And because the faith was epistemological nonsense, it had no truth value, so there was nothing to check subversion and manipulation.
The arrival of Modernism in America is a specific point where a number of corrosive threads come together in a way that makes the pattern of visible.
Once you can see it, it becomes much easier to notice the same patterns elsewhere.
But there's more. There always is.
Another reason for looking so hard at the false idols of Modernism is because the lies are layered. The pattern is multi-dimensional, not flat, with lies built on top of misrepresentations. There is no one myth to blow up. This is how discourse works.
Once a particularly profitable secular transcendence is established in academe or whatever body serves as the "intellectual" authority of the day, it never really goes away. Even if the overall set of beliefs from the period it came from are dismissed as false. Here's the progression through the standard historical periods, with emphasis on how the physics was recognized as wrong, but the self-deification always carries over into the "new" paradigm:
In each case, whatever conclusion pushed human egos higher up the pedestal carries over. The unfortunate reality is that the vastness and complexity of history does require us to break it down into simplified structures that make it manageable. This means that the timelines are abstractions, where certain characteristics stand in for an entire time period. In Classical rhetoric, this is called synedoche, or switching the part and the whole. But while it is necessary, it also places responsibility on the historians to make their abstractions as representative as possible. There is no perfect answer. It's a judgment call based the weight of the available evidence. But you do have to actually weigh the evidence.
This is a reasonable timeline of major art movements put together by an artist and academic who inadvertently illustrates the problem we are dealing with.
He recognizes the limitations of the Postmodern arts, but wants to rethink them using the same arbitrary period designations and Philosopher's Names that got us here in the first place. Supposedly "cognitive metaphor theory proffers a mode of thinking which can be applied to the analysis and creation of art" that will avoid the pitfalls of all the previous master narratives. It won't, because it relies on the same blend of artistic self-deification and bogus foundations as every other product of this fake discourse.
The Modern timeline shows how he accepts these nonsense categories as synonymous with "Art". Any model that starts here is equally meaningless. You can see the poverty of modern academia when he fails to demonstrate that his "model" isn't a "master narrative". His entire intellectual project is based on epistemologically empty "theories" like Bloom's discourse-worship or Lyotard's inverted garbage and outright lies. He is incapable of assessing material, so he accepts the Philosopher's Names as articles of faith.
There are some things we can learn from midwitted academic discourse-huffing though. Models that accept false official narratives can't "fix" official discourses. Put more bluntly, you can spin turds until the end of time and you aren't getting gold. And this one is relatively benign in presenting the timeline in a straightforward way. A quick duckduckgo search is revealing of a less innocent tendency:
Notice the distribution of dates. A lot of timelines jam the historical art of the West into a narrow sliver and treat nonsense Modernism as the principle subject. We do have to be selective, but the idea is to try in good faith to make the synedoche as representative of the historical evidence as possible. Think of it as qualitative statistics - generalized accounts of real data sets. This is empirical reality-facing, and by this measure, your authority - your worth as a historian or whatever profession - comes from the accuracy and insight of your work. What we have here is inversion - the designated "authority" declares something untrue to be reality and the name-droppers use it to build models. But there's more:
Notice something missing? What happened to the Middle Ages? Half the graphic is Modern, with the rest of Western history reduced to Greco-Roman antiquity and "Renaissance".
Misrepresentation is a cue to look closer. Notice the Renaissance example - two portraits of Florentine banking family members and the detail from Michalangelo's Creation of Adam that is popular on coffee cups. Most Renaissance art was Christian. Nearly all Medieval art was too, as was a fair chunk of late antique.
This makes no sense as a historical summary. But it is what a de-Christianized history of Western art would look like...
Bingo.
Here's two more with the Western Middle Ages completely absent. And note the Renaissance choices in the bottom one: another Leonardo portrait and Botticelli's Primavera - a great painting, but noteworthy for its mythological subject matter rather than representative of art at the time. There's no Christian art depicted at all.
This is a consequence of the demoralization of art into fake secular transcendence. There is no place for the epistemological honesty of Western Christianity or the moral clarity that results in the fake discourses spun by these husks.
There is no room for logos.
This indicates why morality is critical to the culture of the West. Consider how our histories are put together. The Band posted a lot on historiography - the methods historians use to organize and write history - and we found that it follows the same patterns as epistemology in general. We can move outward, empirically, into the unknown and build interpretations with the evidence available to our subjective minds. Or we can posit top-down master narratives on faith. And just like epistemology, the value of those master narratives can be assessed by how well they align with the available empirical evidence. But the results are human creations. There is no objective, timeless standard called "Historical Accuracy" to adjudicate bias and keep a discourse reality-facing. This no different from the problem that we see now in all fields - science, journalism, government, technology, etc.
Once you see the pieces the process is quite simple, although the pieces were a long time in the making. Transform art into a theoretical discourse with centralized institutions propped up by elite money. This way it is cut off from anything organic, but has the prestige and support of every aspect of globalist culture. Suddenly you have a secular transcendence occupying the place art traditionally did. Let's call it Art!. And once you have this, it can be anything the narrative engineers want it to be. But you have to hide the reality, and so it's down the memory hole with Christianity.
Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm, around 1850, oil on canvas, Museum Georg Schäfer.
Fortunately, we don't have to rely on the fake narratives. By asking what we can know and how we can know it, we can reevaluate the source material. This doesn't add to the available facts, but it does let us rearrange them into something less self-contradictory.
Here's a fact: there is no "art of the West" without Christianity. The moral presuppositions preclude it. Here's why:
The art of the West is an extension of the epistemology of the West, and this has three basic components: Christian ontology and ethics and Classical reason filtered through competitive national cultures. If we think of it graphically, it looks like this.
When we observe that Christianity is central to the West, this is not merely a point of historical fact. It means that the cultural institutions and assumptions of Western culture are predicated on a Christian world view. In other words, a Christian moral outlook is assumed as a check against certain kinds of dishonest behavior. One way think about this is through the distinction between between a guilt-based Christian morality and shame-based belief systems like secularism and many other religions. This rabbi has a nice succinct summery if you are interested. The theological mechanics of guilt play out differently in Christianity and Judaism, but his basic contrast with shame is sound. This means that the Christian's moral compass is inward - between the individual and God - and in this relationship, honesty is pretty much magnetic north. Shame-based morality has no comparable inner guide.
The history and institutions of the West
weren't "built on Christian principles"
They were built by Christians, and the moral
value of Truth was implicit in their world view
The schoolmaster of Esslingen, between 1305 and 1340, from the Codex Manesse , UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 292v
The origins of the Western university, and basically higher education in general, were in the Cathedral Schools of Medieval Europe. The ethics and commitment to truth that allow for robust intellectual inquiry are explicitly Christian.
This on-line lecture transcript gives a basic background, but note the writing style. It is presented as if speaking to 14 year-olds. It is one thing for older readers to see the statistics on the degradation of university standards. It is another thing to actually read the level of discourse in a non-SJW converged classroom.
Men repeatedly fail to live up to the lofty standards, but this is different from not having standards at all. The guilt-based morality of Christianity works counter to your worst impulses, even if it is not always sufficient to deter wrongdoing. When it comes to history - or most any other academic field - career success depends on production. Even the diversity hires have to out-perform the rest of their candidate pool. If your research proves fruitless or the obvious conclusions run counter to the preferred narratives, the pressure is to spin deliberately and even falsify. Where does the counter-pressure come from to tell the truth as accurately as you can?
Stephen Frederick Godfrey Farthing, Historians of 'Past and Present, 1999, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery
It won't come from "the discipline". Outright plagiarists and fabricators get caught from time to time, but spin? It's the discipline that's spinning up the fake narratives that the data was massaged to fit in the first place.
Broaden the question: what is there to compel History as a field to prioritize truth? The answer is something of...
Empirically, detached impartiality is actually counter to human nature. The fact that it is held up as some natural law is another of those infuriating secular transcendences where the metaphysics of the West are replaced with hollow human self-aggrandizement. True impartiality is an ideal, although not a universal one. There are many decisions where partial leanings are valuable - the water or the poison? Organic nationalism or Satanic inversion? It is like discrimination in that the moral utility depends on the circumstances. But in those circumstances, it is an abstract virtue to aspire to, not an inherent consequence of the job.
Geo Verbanck, Justice relief on the old courthouse, Ghent, 1961
Impartiality is the ideal state of affairs in any investigatory field where finding what's true is the goal. Law and justice, accountancy, journalism, and research fields like history all fit. But it is an ideal. There is a reason the personification of Justice wears the blindfold and not the judges - blind impartiality belongs to the realm of abstract principle, not fallen subjectivities in an entropic universe.
But there is a bigger question too. Why is getting at the truth, even if it works against your interests, the desired outcome? Intrinsic motivation? Then where does that come from? This isn't a rhetorical question. Without an inward-driven, guilt-based personal accountability before a higher standard, why not do what thou wilt?
Consider the alternative. The moral checks in shame-based systems are external, in the eyes of others. Here, there is no internal relationship with Truth to give honesty intrinsic importance. Put bluntly, morality consists of what you can get away with without being caught. Anyone can cheat, but only one belief system expects a commitment to the truth for its own sake.
Isolate the moment of inversion - when the ideal materializes into secular transcendence. Impartiality goes from an abstract standard that historians or whoever strives for, to a characteristic that is magically conferred to anyone holding the appropriate institutional credential. The syllogism looks like this:
History values truth because it filtered Classical notions of logical observation through Christian faith. It is the internal faith in metaphysical values that kept Western historians honest, not some magic power inherent in a disciplinary name. Replace the Christians with secularists and you remove the intrinsic prioritizing of truth. Oh there'll be lip service, but without the guilt-based interior pressure to align with logos, there is nothing to stop compromise for professional advancement, if you can get away with it. An if no one is internally motivated, then you get today's culture of blind eyes, back scratching and quid pro quo.
Portable Altar from Stavelot Abbey, Liège, Belgium, 1160-1170, bronze, wood, enamel, crystal
And histories of Western art without Christianity...
Since this post is a roundabout set-up for the Christian aspect of Western art, and by extension, culture, it is worth looking at how the Middle Ages as a period and Christianity as a theme are so easily read out. The short answer is that it occurs gradually. The longer one is based in the nature of the modern discipline. There is simply so much information now accumulated that it is impossible to avoid simplified general narratives - like the period history timelines up above - when characterizing a large span of years. Periodization, or some sort of abstract classification, is necessary to approach something as large and multi-faceted as "the West" with any coherence. But this is also a vulnerability, because it is here that raw data is written into stories. And while the facts may be endless, the authorized storytellers are a small group of post-Enlightenment secular transcendentalists.
Historical periodization is usually defined by change - each period has a list of defining features that distinguish it from all the others. The Age of Faith believed this, the Age of Reason believed that, the Age of Absolutism thought this, and so on. Obviously the transitions are not clean and the change doesn't happen the same way everywhere, but large-scale history has to generalize somehow. Periodization does it by defining historical cultures then characterizing their mature forms
It sort of looks like a sine wave, where each peak is the fully-realized maturity of a period's character, but each is connected in a developmental way through history. Visualizing it like this makes it easier to see where thinking of history as distinct periods is misleading.
You can identify distinct peaks, but the whole sequence is a single line. Any generalization has consequences, and one consequence of periodization is that the emphasis on difference obscures the things that don't change. Continuities like the progressive self-deification we've seen above. Modernism conceals this with Progress!, where each period is different, but always in a way that is teleologically "better". This is obviously ridiculous, and one thing that we have seen over and over is this: official dogmas that are ridiculous are a good place to look for deception.
Sean Simpson, Steps of Civilization
You can see the difference between technological advancement and human progress
The continuity that's actually carrying over and progressing is blind faith in secular transcendence - fake human facsimiles of Western Christian ontology and metaphysics that clung to technological advancement like barnicles. Each period is differentiated by all sorts of superficial differences, but each takes up the radical advancement in human self-deification from the previous period as its starting point. This is how the Middle Ages can disappear from an art timeline - if the underlying continuity is the march of vanity, Christian art is backsliding. Much more Enlightened to go from the humanistic art of antiquity straight to the revival post-"Dark Ages", then onto the ontological devolution into Modernity.
Morally, this continuity is the slippery slope from the organic conception of Western Christendom to the relativistic luciferian Postmodern swamp that we see today.
Deceivers like to dismiss slippery slope arguments, like this basic IQ-stunted leftist.
To be clear, zit is attempting to refute the idea of steady moral decline, not identify where were are empirically with the question mark.
E. J. Pace, The Descent of the Modernists, from Seven Questions in Dispute by William Jennings Bryan, 1924, New York
Human nature makes slippery slopes inevitable without external standards. We are subjective and adaptable - today's shock is tomorrow's norm. At least until the whole thing collapses. The Band has shown that the Christian notion of a Fallen world and the uncertainty and entropy of our empirical world are different expressions of the same thing. The "slippery slope" is just entropy described in terms of morality rather than physics.
Rhetorically, Pace's concept is better conceptually than in practice. Visualizing moral entropy as progressive degeneracy on a descending staircase is a fantastic presentation. But the execution would have been better still if the dialectical component - the accuracy of the information content - was equally sharp. The steps aren't sequential. What we can do is take the idea of descent and apply it to period history by focusing on what carries over instead of what differentiates them. The one characteristic that never gets revolutioned.
The core error in Satanic inversion is will and desire over reality - what we wish over what is. Factor in moral entropy - human adaptability over time - and the period history of progressive demoralization looks like this:
Modernism is where this intellectual current becomes goes mainstream - becoming social policy and imposing its fake world view through every level of Western culture. We've already examined how its rhetorical pitch used circumstantial things - growth, prosperity, and technological innovation - to claim fundamental changes in human nature. Hence Modern. Now we can see one reason why it's fake ontology and epistemology were so successful. They weren't just lies, but layers upon historical layers of progressive, self-deifying deception. In the arts, Postmodernism rests on Modern autonomy and Romantic emotionalism, which rest on Absolutist authoritarianism and Renaissance Humanism. You can't unravel the discourse without falling into endless webs of mist and fog.
This is why our staircase graphic so clarifying.
Michael Löwy, Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia, from the Surrealist Revolution series, University of Texas Press, 2010
The sudden radical inversion of Modernism seems revolutionary superficially, but culturally was the part of a long, sequential demoralization, always working off of what came before. By the time the viral count exploded into public consciousness after the turn of the 20th century, what passed for the intelligensia lacked the means to address it. Their language had already become an impoverished secularist discourse-in-all-but-name that couldn't even frame a moral position.
Löwy is a theoretical darling with clouds of squid ink, but his collection captures the link between the ontological nonsense of Modernism and ontological nonsenses past.
On the "conservative" side, any number of cucks harrumphed about the timeless truths in the Great Books from their eroding ivory towers, pensions intact. Meanwhile, any legitimate defender of history, faith, and tradition of the West was dismissed as superstitious, a philistine, or gasp, unreasonable. Here is a piece that looks critically at one credentialist apparatchik's epistemological blindness, but is equally incapable of even describing the moral inversion of secular transcendence. Academia is largely unsalvageable because even the so called traditionalists are too vain and blinkered to see past their own vanity. Here's a good take.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster, first published December 1987.
This is exactly the sort of book that is catnip to moderately clever self-fluffing secularists. It is an excellent and critique of the leftist subversion of 20th-century American academia that was ahead of the curve in some ways. Likewise the pop-culture obsessed idiocy of the average student in an era of open admissions and mass media.
But the only counter it can offer are equally empty appeals to the timeless wisdom great books - the hoary and empirically false civ nat piffle about freedom and equality and critical thinking and the like. No consideration of what we can know or how we can know it. No awareness that his faith in human knowledge of eternal truths is as ontologically ludicrous as the leftism it decries. But it lets cuckservatives whine about "the left" without considering their own false assumptions
Perhaps when both you and your supposed arch-enemies espouse objectively wrong ideologies predicated on "equality" it is time to reconsider your your notion of "critical thinking".
All the bleating of all the cucks can't change the reality is Modernism took over so easily because the authorities of higher culture and learning were already hollow shells. Pompous but empty credentials to be shuffled off to Western Civ. and Liberal Arts departments where they could blather harmlessly about dead atheists to dwindling classes while their culture erodes. How about swapping some of the bullshit about timeless searches for truth and "wrestling with the big questions" for some ontological coherence?
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Riverhead Books; 1st edition, 1995
The more direct question for Great Books secularists: what makes them great? How can you assemble a canon without having grounds for judgment? How do you identify what is legitimately wise from self-deifying projection? Disciplinary standards? The web of reading lists favored by the ghosts of credentialed secularists past? The discourse built on fake Enlightenment Progress!? We've already tried that - and the institutional decay that they cry about is the direct result false faith as a base
Bloom is a subtle reader with wise insights, but he is still trapped - taking the Enlightenment at face value.
Ultimately, the crises of the arts and humanities boil down to the fundamental question at the heart of the decline of the West. What can we know and how can we know it? Are you committed to what is True - observationally and epistemologically - no matter how blurry to our limited eyes? Or do you serve a comforting lie, proven false over and over again, that human opinion reveals the fundamental nature of reality? Both the radical Marxist leftists and the Great Books traditionalists accepted as articles of faith the observationally and epistemologically false dogmas of the Enlightenment. It's just that the "eternal principles" that they clearly perceived were contradictory - one using the myth of equalism to justify totalitarianism, the other a caste system masquerading as "meritocracy". Neither offer what they claim, because both are built on lies.
Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Riverside Books, 2005
Good question. Bloom was a champion of the Western tradition, but a demoralized, secularized version. He is puzzled by how to ascertain wisdom because he lacks logos - he understands the meaning of the word, but is too blinded by post-Enlightenment fantasies of secular transcendence to articulate the ontological incoherence of his own faith. He can't even frame the question.
The result is a form of idolatry or animism, where inanimate objects are conferred a numinous power by shaman-creators, allowing abstract atheistic Truth to shine into the world. This is basically the idea of the Romantic symbol mentioned in an earlier post. It is also utterly ridiculous. When the Western arts do approach Truth, it is because they reflect the epistemologically and empirically coherent Christian metaphysics that Western culture was built on. Trying to find wisdom in the canon after wishing that away is like interpreting someone's thoughts by looking at their footprints.
Remember our graphic on the epistemological presuppositions of different takes on art?
Remember how obvious it is that our knowledge of the world is empirically-sourced, and how things that can't be empirically verified are known by faith? And how the only way to evaluate the reasonableness of something believed on faith isn't its internal coherence - any good lie is internally coherent - but how it aligns with our empirical reality. The "timeless values" of the demoralized, secularist carcass of what calls itself the Humanities, Liberal Arts, or Western tradition are objectively untrue. But perhaps a graphic and explanatory paragraph surpass their critical thinking. So let's break it down to a level even a secularist can grasp:
The false tradition of secular wisdom is critically important to globalism because it is centralized and fake. The real battle isn't between "left" and "right" or liberals and conservatives. It is between the reality-facing and the servants of the lie - the righteous and satanic, to be blunt. And only one side is represented. The academies can't be reformed because their entire ideological substructure is a phantasm. Functional alcoholics in decades-old blazers and diverse, if cognitively limited teat-suckers alike can make up whatever best suits them. And with no anchor in reality to check moral entropy, subversives, self-idolaters, and the moneyed elites that drive these clown cars can define art as hostile to the culture that it was supposed to express.
This is what the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York looks like:
Classical architecture has connotations of timeless significance in the West. The scale, bombast, and location of Hunt's version further emphasizes the importance of this building. This is essentially a temple to Western culture and a manifesto that that culture matters. Then there are the resources - over 2 million works of incalculable market value, and an endowment north of $3 billion. None of which have prevented a budget crisis, but this is typical of organizations run by economically illiterate nonsense merchants with lots of tin accolades from their equally nonsensical peers.
Despite the ineptitude and what looks like mismanagement, they have kept up the facility. The Met remains an impressive building with the resources to be a showcase of Western culture. Here are some recent aquisitions for contrast. To be fair, these are selected cherry-picked from a large list, much of which is historically significant. But they are also typical of the modern work collected by the museum - the pieces with artistic merit are either older or non-Western. The contrast between Modernism and the art of just about any other post-primitive time or place never fails to be eye-opening.
Irving Penn, After-Dinner Games, 1947, coffee and liquor, cards, dice, burned-out match
According to the Met, this collection of objects "conjures the traditional theme of the vanitas to compose a charming, late-night image of life and death: the games of chance we all play every day".
The blurb is full of references to the discourse of Art! - anything but the epistemological implications of placing this pile of debris in the Met. But to be fair, we'll look at the two references in the quote above: vanitas and chance.
Harmen Steenwijck, Vanitas Still-Life, c. 1640, oil on panel, 39 x 51 cm, National Gallery, London
Vanitas is a kind of still-life, or painting of inanimate objects, that represents the transience of material pleasures and the concomitant importance of spirituality and morals. This one is typical - a collection of discarded, decomposing luxuries and clear symbols of time and death.
Jackson Pollock at work as fellow painter Lee Krasner looks on
Toby Edward Rosenthal, Bach And His Family At Their Morning Devotions, 1870
Chance - or aleatoricism -incorporates randomness into art. In the visual arts, this is often connected to Surrealism. Pollock's splatter paintings are a famous example because the artist doesn't fully control the finished product. The Modernist squid ink is that chance is an age-old theme in Western art - like Bach leaving you free to play his fugues in whatever order you please.
The reality? One of these things is not like the other.
The themes of chance or vanitas in Bach or Steenwijck are secondary to the artistic value - the technê - of the work. The order of the fugues may be unpredictable, but they are individually exquisite examples of structured composition. The rhetorical appeal of the still-life comes from the eye-catching skill of the rendering. It's refined talent makes you an an artist in the West - Steenwijck was technically brilliant and Bach is arguably the greatest writer of music in human history. The skill comes first. The themes and subjects are what you make with it. There is no technê in the Penn. It's just a pile of stuff that he didn't make. The themes are detached from skill, then shills and deceivers spin up a cloud of squid ink pretending that it is somehow the same thing as skill-based art. The discourse, in the broadest sense of the term, is what gives the lies authority.
The Met looks like this:
Let's do one more from the Met's recent acquisitions.
Ernesto Neto, Lipzoid Spice Garden, 2000, polyamide stocking and spices, dimensions variable.
We are told Neto is "a key figure in contemporary Brazilian art" connected to older layers of that 3d nonsense web that modern art is built on. In this case, "Minimalism and the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement". See how it works? Older frauds are ensconced in the discourse as artistically legitimate, then newer frauds can springboard off them.
This version "aims to activate the viewer’s mind and body through an experience of sculpture in space".
Pay attention to the wording. It's a form of squid ink that piles up sophisticated-sounding words that when you pay attention to them say nothing. All sculpture exists in space, and so is perceived psychologically and kinetically. The comment applies to any statue, and so offers no argument for the value of this one.
What did the Met buy? Neto calls his things "Lipzoids", but it is common for modern artists to make up silly words for their antics. The blobs are actually polyamide stockings filled with pigments and spices and then dropped on the floor, where the impacts create random shapes. Here's an earlier version.
Be aware. The discursive squid ink is thick around this one.
Obviously randomness turns up again because unlike Modern art, the shape of the blobs is unpredictable.
Like the order of Bach's fugues. Or the dances of liars as they caper for nickels.
That isn't just snark. Randomness in Modernism was pushed as a rebellion against the implicit order of skill-based art. It was a typical anti-Western Satanic inversion like we've seen again and again. The appeal of aleatory was that it was the diametric opposite of the talent and discipline required to master a real art. This is one of those moments where the pattern becomes visible and you can see an example of history turned on itself. Some secondary trait in Western cultural history like aleatoricism or vanitas painting is pulled out of context then turned into a "concept" that inverts the primary characteristic - skill or what we've been calling technê - while claiming to be a historical continuance.
Michelangelo, The Deposition, 1547- 1555, marble, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence
Michelangelo believed that sculpture as an Art respected the material - the statue had to come from a single block and could not be painted. This is a late unfinished work, so you can see where parts were still only roughed out. He also idealized in the Classical manner, reflecting a Neoplatonic thread in his thought that gives his work an abstract dimension.
This was also a statue Michelangelo had planned for his own tomb. A devout if tormented Christian, he carved his own features on the face of Joseph of Arimathea as a permanent expression of faith. The statue was abandoned when he realized that he couldn't finish it to his satisfaction, partly because of his insistence on a single block. So the primary motivations are Christian and mimetic - Classical sculpture used for intensely personal expression of devotion. Or epistêmê and technê. The materials and style are just how he did it.
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1984, concrete, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas
Modern abstractionists believed that sculpture as an Art was material form in space - what it was made of is the subject. And there is no representation - the abstraction is all that there is left to the form. Secondary traits in a skill-based technê become primary in the degraded husk husk of Art!.
This is a weaponized inversion of the Western canon, and easy to see through because the skill disparity is so obvious. But what if the bottom one was equally well made, only it depicted something degenerate? Where does the the ability to judge what belongs come from? What are the grounds?
The larger message? Postmodernism built its web of lies on top of Modernism's already multi-layered rejection of truth. This is why it is so easy for Postmodernists to retreat into bewildering mazes of Philosopher's Names and theories. It's also why the Band emphasizes distance management when discussing this stuff. If you get caught up in their game, they can spin allusions and problematizings and re-readings of idiocies past until the original discussion is forgotten. But from above, the sham nature of the whole mess is clear.
The Band is looking at Modernism in art as as way to trace the larger pattern of Modernism in general. Art brings together money, the institutions of culture, and globalism together in a way that makes it a good proxy case for the deep inversions in the centralized society in the Postmodern West. But there is more to it than just showing how dyscivic forces destroy culture. There are plenty of hapless defeatists content to wallow in what has gone wrong over the last however many decades. The West has an indescribably rich artistic heritage with countless national variations that the soulless would steal from us. Uncovering inversion is the necessary first step to reconnect with our real heritage - not the effete bloodless "revivals" of Victorian toffs, but a real understanding of the legacy that we have been gifted with. The full range of thoughts, expressions, and tradition that they want you to forget.
Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream, 1840, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art
At its best, our art expresses our forefathers to their posterity, and that's a message that we need to hear.
Our first Modernism vs. the art of the West post looked at the Classical tradition and ways to think about the relationship between theory and practice gives meaning to art in a culture. The second looked at the money and degeneracy of Modern art, and how that was tied up with a self-serving myth of autonomy. It turns out that our Classical Greek terms help expose the idea of autonomous arts for the absurdity that it is. Now it is time to consider the next pillar of the West and its art: Christianity.
Rembrandt, The Holy Family at Night, between 1642 and 1648, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum
Christian themes were pushed out of the art of the West long before it collapsed into nonsense, but the historical reality is that the art of the traditional West was Christian. If we look at the fake doppelganger Art! by its fruits, we will not be surprised to find that sincere Christian sentiment is virtually non-existent. And that's virtually as in 'it's possible that an instance we're unaware of' exists', not 'there are a couple of obscure cases that aren't relevant to a general discussion'. Christianity is treated as a historical "influence", like the Feudal System, by demoralized secularists who lack even the basic conceptual vocabulary to describe their subject.
John Currin, Park City Grill, 2000, oil on canvas, Walker Art Center
It's what gives us "traditionalists" like Currin. He paints in a realist style and his work is filled with references to past masters. But he puts them together in ways that distort and "problematize" notions of beauty. Most of his work is sexualized in a crass and degenerate way - this is a relatively PG selection.
He's been criticized as a pornographer, but doesn't quite account for the feeling of creepy unease his works create. To get where that's coming from, you have to understand that the art of the West is defined by logos - the natural order that we see empirically as through a glass darkly and the Christian metaphysics that account for the problems of origins, evil, and the fallen entropic world we live in. Without that, there is no beauty - the influences a Frankenstein pastiche equally devoid of soul. Critique of Western notions of beauty? Try grotesque.
This is the same problem faced by the Great Books humanities - the purported experts on the Western canon are on the same side of the epistemological coherence/secular transcendence divide as their globalist "opponents". They're all secularists - the only disagreement is which man-made idols to follow. Is the Western tradition superior to Modernism and its bastard spawn? Obviously - but not because it somehow manifests metaphysical properties in a materialist ontology. That's simply retarded.
There are only two ways to justify the superiority: one empirical, one faith-based.
Without external principles, the only way to judge value is relative - the arts are expressions of the culture that makes them, so it follows that people of that culture will tend to prefer their own. Your music, literature, art, etc. reflect your world and speak your language. The qualities that they prioritize will are your shared national values and customs.
Jupiter (Asklepios), mid-fifth century AD, marble, Altes Museum, Berlin
Technê is a standard of excellence because the Greeks and Romans believed that was a defining characteristic of art. They would criticize less technically refined work as inferior. But another culture may not value the same goals or use images the same way. The balance of anatomical realism and Classical idealism is a perfect expression of the humanistic Neoplatonism of their metaphysics.
Chakrasamvara Mandala from Nepal, around 1100, distemper on cloth, Metropolitan Museum of Art
But it's worthless for representing the metaphysical relationships depicted in a mandala. This is one of the oldest examples of Nepalese religious painting, and here, the metaphysics are Yogic and Tantric - with ultimate reality signified by abstract pattern relationships and symbolic depictions of gods.
Which one is "better" depends on your cultural frame of reference.
A more objective judgment than relative cultural preference moves us into the realm of faith. That sort of assessment needs underlying principles that are outside the shifting tides of our finite fallen world, and that's ontological coherence country. What can you know and how can you know it?
Sarah Meyohas, photo from the Speculations photo series
The images in this series are produced by the infinite reflections of two facing mirrors - what she calls “a series of speculation relations that never find a definitive end”. Meyohas uses a one-way mirror to take a photo from the center without appearing in the reflections. It's a great illustration of relativistic discursive churn. There is no end, but it doesn't go anywhere.
It is also worth noting that while there is no end to the reflections, there is to our ability to discern them. We are finite beings, and beyond a point see only shadow. An apt metaphor for the path of self-absorbed secular transcendence.
Secularists have no metaphysical avenue of appeal, only empty blathering about timeless searches for truth that lead nowhere. They can sense the profundity of the Western tradition, but are incapable of saying why. Instead they play a more tepid version of globohomo inversion while the footprint of the actual tradition that built the institutions they haunt dwindles Office Space style. It is unclear if they get to keep their staplers.
It is obvious when you step out of the mirror trap. The timeless truths that the Western tradition secularists never seem able to identify are echoes of a logos that they are incapable of perceiving.
Pauline Baynes, illustration from C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle
They're like the dwarves in the stable in Lewis' The Last Battle - they can hear Aslan, but the truth is distorted by their own inability to face truth.
Consider Aslan's conclusion:
"They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own mind, yet they are in that prison, and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
It isn't Classical logos the secular humanists are picking up on either. It actually looks more like this:
Empyrean Light, 1867 Gustave Doré image of Dante and Beatrice gazing into the Empyrean color modified by Kalki
Classical logos was flawed because it was based on claims of secular transcendence that don't vanish because Renaissance self-idolaters want them to. In the West, it was superseded by a Christian notion of logos that didn't pretend we can see ultimate reality, is epistemologically consistent with what we can know and how we know it, and accounts for entropy, both in nature and in morality. The next post will look at the transformation of art, logos and epistêmê when the ancient world became Christian.
The Pantocrator/God the Son as Creator from the Bible of St. Louis, f.1v., 1220-1240, Toledo Cathedral
The Gospel of John opens "In the beginning was the λόγος [logos or Word]", combining the Greek concept of natural order with the creation story in Genesis. In the next post, we will look more closely at this.
As we've seen , the compass uses the order and reason of the geometer as a metaphor for the grander order of Creation. Technê expressing the metaphysics of a reality that is chaotic in appearance - look at the world He creates - but is built on a logos that we can see as through a darkling glass.
The Medievals got it.
And as for the superiority of the Western tradition over globalist degeneracy and inversion? The only epistemologically-legitimate objective claim requires acknowledging the foundational Christian metaphysics that aligns the arts of the West with what we can know and how we can know it. Without it, you are reduced to moral relativism in a hostile globalist monoculture. We're seeing how that worked out.
Ron Arad, Concrete Stereo, 1983, stereo system set in concrete, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Ah, the V&A. German aristocrats masquerading as English. The unintended irony of this pile of crumbling debris winding up there is piquant.
Empirically, the defensive strategy for any secularists who actually cared about the West was obvious. If you want your institutions to protect your cultural values without having to confront the epistemology of faith, it is best to limit employment to those who share those values. Because the subversives and inverters do have a clear agenda. They're driven to attack logos with all the fury of their father, and against that sort of hellstorm, tepid, agnostic, relativism is less than useless.
If the bitter clingers with their Lockes and Voltaires actually cared about the tradition they weep over, they wouldn't be champions of diversity, inclusivity, and interfaith dialog. They would be making the case through their thought and actions that their tradition is valuable.
How many actually balance body, mind, and spirit, and seek truth with sincere humility in the face of the unknown? How many use their resources and reading lists to help those less fortunate to understand what we can actually know and how we can know it? How many use their "critical thinking" and timeless classics to approach reality in a way that offers any insight at all into this valley of shadow that surrounds us?
