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Other links: The Band on Gab
Other links: The Band on Gab
This is the second post using the Armory Show of 1913 as a launch pad for a look into the toxic arrival of Modernism in American culture. The first looked at the Classical aspect of the Art of the West and uncovered potentially useful terminology. This one will make the case for why that is important even if you aren't interested in art per se.
Rune Guneriussen, Evolution # 03, 2005, 124cm x 170cm
Art is only one vector for cultural values, morality, and logos, but the same darkness surrounds them all.
The Band has been thinking about large patterns in the decline of the West for some time now. We've crossed the same ground along a few different routes to get a sense of how fake faith in secular transcendence metastasized into Progress!, the empirically nonsensical idea that "things" just keep "improving". The words are in quotes because the things can be just about anything - science, standards of living, social metrics, cultural achievement, etc., and the nature of the improvement depends on the thing. It is best described as a groundless social optimism fueled by some real progress - rising productivity in the wake of the Scientific Revolution that led to the efficiencies of modern engineering and material science.
Albert Robida, Le Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000 (Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000), around 1902, hand-colored lithograph, Library of Congress , Washington, DC
The technical progress curve wasn't steady. And none of the early futurists dreamed of the regulation and interference in our lives today. In 1903, the American government had not yet started extorting income tax.
Secular transcendence is the Band's term for pretending that ontological absolutes are possible in the material world. Endless progress is one such false faith. This is an old human fantasy that is appealing because it is so empowering. But reality far exceeds our grasp, and the deeper we look into the world around us, the less comprehensible it becomes.
Universal laws links collected from a quick duckduckgo search.
Laying down precise transcendent order isn't our strong suit as a species. Secular transcendence becomes dyscivic when society pretends the "laws" are real.
What we see are temporal patterns - fleeting things with some contextual predictive value, but hardly revealing of cosmic order. Secular transcendence is the fiction that these patterns and tendencies are actually universal laws - objectively true and higher than empirical, natural reality. The actual inversion is a a philosophical bait-and-switch - the act of replacing the transcendent with the circumstantial and contingent.
Like seeing a face in the clouds and thinking you know what the universe looks like...
Auguste Christian Fleischmann, Idolatrous feast celebrated in the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, where the Jacobins had an actress sit on the altar, November 10, 1793, etching published in Augsburg, 1793
Or placing a whore dressed as "Reason" on the high altar of Notre-Dame
This is relevant to the Armory Show because the Modern art scene that was introduced to America there was based on one of these secular transcendent masquerades.
Pablo Picasso, Woman with Mustard Pot (La Femme au pot de moutarde), 1910, oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
This painting appeared at the Armory Show in New York, then continued on the tour to Chicago and Boston in 1913. It isn't even a "good" Picasso, if anyone cares, but this is important. The Armory Show is considered the landmark event in American Modern art. This status was independent of the relative significance or quality of the works included - even by the Modernists' own fake value system. The artworks didn't matter in themselves but as a gesture. Any toxic gibberish would do, so long as it ridiculed the traditions of the West.
For something like this to be held up as the cutting edge of art, art has to have come to mean something very different from this:
Thomas Moran, The Golden Hour, 1875, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art
Even if both get put into the same category, housed in the same buildings, and sold by the same auctioneers.
The big secular transcendence in Western art - after the Renaissance anyhow - is that that there is a culturally autonomous category called "art" with objective, defining rules that can be set by... someone. Earlier posts looked at Louis XIV and the French Academy in architecture - it was pretty much the same strategy of central control and bombastic classicism in art.
Leonardo, The Last Supper, 1495, S. Maria della Grazia, Milan
Renaissance thinkers based the principles on the same Neoplatonic and Pythagorean ideas that we saw them apply to architecture.
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with a Church, 1811, oil on canvas, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte
Romantic aesthetics based them in feelings and emotions.
Claude Monet, Poplars on the Epte, 1891, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery
The Impressionists based them in contemporary ideas about perception.
Attempts to define art as something objective and autonomous are like our Universal law sites - you know intuitively that there is an order but it is beyond our ability to pin it down exhaustively. Art is a bit different because it is a cultural category, but if we think more broadly, there is similarity. Every culture has made visual representations - empirically, we could say that making pictures is a natural human impulse. But like the perception of universal order, there are countless different ways that people have thought about images. The Western tradition was unusually theoretical, but was no different in assuming that art depicts something.
The how may change, but the what - a visual depiction of something - stays the same. Another way to put it is that the theoretical differences between Leonardo, Friedrich, and Monet are just formalized 'hows'. They would argue fiercely over why pictures should be made and why we should make them, but they would at least agree that what they are making is a picture. This made it possible to compare different theoretical movements in the West with ancient or non-Western ideas. Once Modernism throws out the idea that a painting needs to be of something to accomplish whatever it is that the artist is trying to do, the entire intellectual tradition that developed in the West around images and representation gets tossed as well.
Barack Obama tours the Pompidou Centre in Paris, June 6, 2009. Official White House photo by Pete Souza
The subversive benefit is that the West is severed from its own cultural memory - and paying to gawk meaningfully at colored shapes makes people look stupid. That's not hard with a treacherous sock puppet and Gropin' Joe, but it makes everyone who comes internalize a lie.
Art has been representational since prehistory.
Bison, Cave of Altamira, Paleothic painting, about 18,000 years old, Cantabria, Spain
Prehistoric humans worked out pretty advanced techniques of picture making long before written language appears.
Male Head, Nok culture, Nigeria, 550-50 BC, Brooklyn Museum; Ritual ewer, Yangzi River Valley, around 1200-1100 BCE, bronze, Smithsonian, Washington; Bust of Nefertiti, 1345 BC, limestone and stucco, Egyptian Museum, Berlin; San Lorenzo Monument 3, Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico; Mask of Agamemnon, Mycenean Greece, 1550–1500 BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Every ancient civilization that we know of made visual representations of people, things, and concepts:
Anonymous portrait of Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, around 1720-1725, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery
Every branch of Western culture from its historical roots on had visual art forms that represented things. Our three pictures from above is joined by an early colonial portrait to give an American connection and make the graphic fit.
If mimetic representation is out - if a painting isn't a painting of anything - then the the one thing that all these visual arts had in common is suddenly gone. So we are back to the question at the center of the last post. What is art? Or more appropriately for the Band, what is art in the West?
Set aside how art writers define art - looking to them is like asking the criminals to set law enforcement priorities or have lobbyists from big finance write banking laws... Right. One of the reasons for looking at specific things is to identify the larger dyscivic patterns that have made Western culture vulnerable to subversion. As big as the whole toxic mess that that "art" has turned into today is, it is just one example of a deeper problem with Modern society:
Modernism masquerades as part of a history of theory and style, coming after "Realism", as the Romantics followed Neoclassicism. Just like in architecture, fake teleology of stylistic and social Progress! is used to legitimate subversion. But the teleology is part of the fiction that a theoretically self-contained thing called art even exists. This post goes over the whole absurdity of "autonomous" art, so there is no need to revisit that fraud here. The take away is that the autonomy of art theory is just another fake secular transcendence. Ignore the incoherent metaphysical blathering of old critics - the progenitors of whatever style came next always did. There is no objective, transcendent category called art. There is only subjective posturing around what artists have already done or are presently doing.
Excerpts from the MA Contemporary Art Theory program at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Eventually symbiosis between artists, critics, institutions, and collectors means the art responds to theoretical and other art world pressures. The take-away is that "art" isn't an ontological category - it's cultural practice, twisted and metastasized by vanity and greed.
The headline poses a sound question. Even their name is grammatically incorrect. But note the highlights: visual art is "shaped" by theoretical perspectives, artistic practice is linked to "critical theory", and since it's all made up, you can basically do whatever you want and get a credential. Then consider who pays for this.
Any concept of art that is responsible historically isn't transcendental. It's cultural practice, and it is different in different places because it boils down to how a group of people make and use representations. Ban representation and you ban the way the way humans have understood art empirically, in lived experience, since there have been humans. If there is an "essence" of art, it is this:
The art of the West is mimetic
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow, Saturday Night, late 19th century, oil on canvas, Private Collection
It depicts things as a way of transmitting a message. Without mimetic representation, the theoretical blathering is all that is left, and that is too toxic and dishonest to define anything.
The illusion of autonomy was necessary for the inversion to happen. Mimetic art has built-in standards that push against this corruption because it has to do something. You can judge it by whether it looks convincing or conveys a truthful message. We know art isn't autonomous in the way that Modernist liars claimed, but the people who controlled and bankrolled the institutions of art selectively pretended it was. It was literally a lucrative game of collective make-believe - nonsense, really - and like any nonsense category, it can have nonsense rules.
The Modern Party at MOMA: Opening of Henri Matisse Exhibit; Members Only, Thursday, January 23, 2015
We are so used to this charade that it is easy to overlook how bizarre it is. Matisse was "controversial" at the Armory Show in 1913. This is from 2015. The venue is much posher and no one is looking at the art.
For mimesis to become suddenly oppressive, for artists to make deliberately ugly and culturally bankrupt things, "art" as a category cannot have any normal, real-world constraints. Traditionally, this would have spelled financial ruin, but this is where the art world actually is autonomous. This whole reeking carcass is kept afloat by endless streams of unearned money - either:
1. Globalist wealth
Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, around 1500, oil on walnut, Louvre Abu Dhabi
In 1017, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture & Tourism paid $450 million for this picture at an auction at Christie's in New York. This is the most money paid for a painting, and it blew away the previous auction record several times over. The amount of money is absurd, but like baseball contracts, today's absurd is tomorrow's negotiation point.
Consider the players - Abu Dhabi is financially bloated by international oil sales to the point where money is disconnected from real world valuations. Christie's is half the duopoly in the high-end international art market. And the Louvre is the paradigmatic Western art museum whoring itself as an international brand.
This is one painting. Anyone wondering why the art world is the way that is needs to be aware of just how much globalist money is flowing through it. It is astounding to the layman.
Willem de Kooning, Interchanged, 1955, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Ken Griffin, founder of hedge fund firm Citadel, paid $500 million to buy two Abstract Expressionist paintings from the David Geffen foundation - $300 million for this De Kooning and another $200 for a Jackson Pollock. It was the highest price ever paid for a painting until the Leonardo.
Leonardo is sort of a perfect storm in the art market - one of the few artists who's a household name and with a tiny output almost completely tied up in permanent museum collections. It is a mediocre piece by his standards, but experts declared it a "Leonardo" making it a singular collectible. The Louvre tie with the Mona Lisa is also a draw. But it is still absurd.
So what about De Kooning?
The two paintings are on display in the Art Institute of Chicago. Griffin is a trustee.
Museums are a central nexus in the cultural subversion machine. The directors and catalog writers come from the Postmodern academic art world, while the donors and endowers are the cream of the globalist financial elite. A lot of "public" money is funneled through as well.
2. Public Funding
Like public funded anything, government money creates dependency that can be leveraged by whoever controls the central bureaucracy. This removes the need for the artist to provide value to their actual community so long as they dance for the apparatchiks. And when government is subverted by globalist elites, the teat becomes a propaganda vector - one that pre-selects who gets to create the artistic profile for your nation.
Most people in America have little idea how much public money is actually funneled into "the arts". The NEA is the usual whipping boy when people pay attention to this, and rightfully so because it has an appalling history dyscivic subversion. But when defenders of this theft point out how little it is relative to the US economy, they dishonestly leave out that this is a but it a small portion of the funds extorted to support a hostile anti-culture. Let's break this down quickly - NEA first, then government funding.
The SciTech High School Band of Springfield played at the State House on Feb. 15, after winning a Commonwealth Award
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent US federal government agency that gives money to artists and organizations. Some is worthy. Art does have developmental benefits, especially in a environment where any healthy sociability is lacking. What they don't ask is why is that?
Part of it pertains to neural pathways and cognitive organization. Mastering an artistic skill like playing an instrument activates different thought processes. It also requires discipline in the pursuit of order - music is complex symbolic structure that takes time and persistence to get good at. Proficiency then allows for much more complex and nuanced creative expression than world be possible for the unskilled. Ensemble playing introduces teamwork and sublimation of ego to a collective effort - benefits that also come from team sports.
Developmental benefits are the show pony - the typical deception where a positive trait is used to defend a dysfunctional system. Here's an old canard in new bottle claiming that because children with interest in the arts have better outcomes, money should be extorted to push disinterested youth into the arts. They are so committed to fake Enlightenment myth of human frangibility that they can't see that people are different and that interest in the arts might be a pre-selector. They are functionally cognitively impaired.
Then there is the equally-typical subversion of national values. It's subtle, like sponsoring an essay contest that is teed up to promote social justice solutions to imaginary problems.
It isn't the amount of NEA money as much as the people it empowers to set the agenda.
Of course, the NEA also funds debased and dyscivic propaganda that would otherwise have no audience:
It supports venues that would otherwise fold. And in doing so, squeezes out or co-opts the organic art scene in a community. Public funding of "the Arts" imposes a fake, externally defined system on communities in lieu of organic culture. And the definition is the same SJW-flavored spin on globalist anti-logos that has inverted most all Western institutions.
Jerry Springer the Opera is debased anti-Christian trash masquerading as edgy satire with seductive music that gives a little dopamine tingle to the animate husks that consume this.
That Americans are forced with threat of incarceration to support this is as perverse as the play.
Give the last word to Richard Serra, a tragic hero to the modern arts community since his homage to post-industrial detritus was broomed from Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan. Apparently the ugly eyesore also impeded circulation.
Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, formerly in rhe Foley Federal Plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City, removed 1989
For his part, Serra sniffed about property rights trampling free expression, which is too retarded to merit comment, and refused to allow the rusted hulk to be shown anywhere else. Basically, the atavistic asshole had a tantrum because he couldn't take a crap on the coffee table.
Tilted Arc still sits in storage for some reason. Surely there is salvage value in the metal.
As Richard says: “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing... Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” His argument is that you should be forced to pay to have ugly intrusions in your physical and social life because he wants to put them there. Serra is a symptom, but the problem isn't 'freedom of expression'. It's coercive parasitism.
Serra's rusted hulk wasn't an NEA project, which brings us to the second part of the public money issue: the NEA is just a small portion of your money that is funneled to the globalist keepers of the arts by unaccountable bureaucratic subversives.
NEA funding and grants from the most recent public report.
Defenders for arts funding like to point out the relatively small dollar amount in the federal budget - the cups of coffee/week analogy that thieves love. As if the size of the extortion mattered morally. But the existence of the shills indicates the real problem.
Grants may be small on a federal scale, but they allow individual artists and small non-profits to remain afloat. This lets them to devote all their full time and energy to cultural degradation in venues that would not otherwise exist. In short, those few cups of coffee are seed money for force multipliers. They're the difference between someone smearing menstrual blood on a canvas while raging against reality full-time, and having to work for a living. "Arts funding" is extorted payroll for cultural termites. Click to see why the NEA needs figurative fumigation.
The other thing is that the NEA accounts for just a small portion of federal arts funding. These stats are from a 2012 report released by the NEA, so the numbers are dated, but they provide a decent sense of the breakdown.
The NEA is significant - tied for fourth with the equally corrosive NEH. There's money for public radio to keep infusing Marxist toxin into the nation's airwaves. Pay attention to the museum funding - the Smithsonian at one with a bullet and the National Gallery at six. These are influential institutions that are converged to academic Postmodern globalism and use their positions to craft revisionist history. Museums provide the employment and sinecures that link academia to culture.
More professional force multipliers.
Then there is the funding within lots of other government agencies. This is not an attack on some really good programs. It is an observation that if you don't know who is spending your money on the arts, you have no idea who it is going to. Consider that government hiring is credentialist. Then consider who grants the credentials.
More professional force multipliers.
But all the direct spending by the federal government is a small part of public funding for the arts. Here is a breakdown from the same study showing museum and non-profit art group revenues to give a sense of the proportions.
Contributed income is the portion that comes from grants and donations - the rest is earned income from gate, merchandising, licensing, investment returns, etc. This is distorting because it lumps everything in together. Popular groups and venues generate the revenue, while dyscivic garbage obviously has to rely more heavily on laundering stolen money. But set that aside. State and local government funding is much more generous than the feds and follows the same b.s. globalist Discourse!. All the same professional termite force multiplier stuff applies here too. But the biggest donors are private - individual and corporate gifts account for close to 30%. Freedom of choice, right?
They're tax deductible.
This is the real scam. Deductible giving means you can fund the art world in lieu of tax. That leftists are innumerate doesn't mean this doesn't have to be made up by other sources - honest taxpayers or loans taken in their name.
There is nothing wrong with a nation to supporting its cultural forms. The Band encourages buying art and craftwork, but from artists directly, through local fairs, galleries and the internet. But support what moves you and expresses your values. The kind of subversion we are looking at comes from the rejection of national values from a degenerate elite cadre and their dancing-for-nickles NPCs. If you buy original work, you wouldn't choose any of their trash because it brings no value. Like any purchase, art is an exchange, and this implies that you give something up to get something back. A purpose motivated you - it can be anything from aesthetic pleasure to common cause, but you chose what you wanted for reasons. To get to the point of extortion for imposed hateful propaganda, you have to pretend that art exists for itself, that it has no moral or aesthetic purpose other than the whims of the creator. Don't think about free expression being a purpose or that imposing your expression suppresses of mine. Facts have no place here. The point is cultural inversion and subversion and that needs art to be devoid of any positive standard or quality, but with high boundaries and powerful gatekeepers to control who gets to be an artist.
It needs art to be autonomous.
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Oval String with Color, 1966, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Autonomous means intro-level woodworking sitting on a pedestal - autonomously - in a famous museum. There is no reforming this - keep the buildings, but staff them with Americans, or the people of whichever nation are playing host.
Note that this fraud was knighted for her work. How could generations have observed things like this and view "knighthood" with anything other than derision? Some are worthy. Some are Dame Hepworth. But only a moron puts stock in a title, especially a one that is observably a lifetime achievement award for hacks and subversives. By their fruits...
The post mentioned earlier traced the idea of autonomy in the arts to the Renaissance - the humanist addition of defined "Fine Arts" what was an unrecognized faith-based notion of objective liberal arts. Painting, sculpture, and architecture were established at this time as the visual arts and lasted way longer than the fake metaphysics used to justify them.For example:
Leon Battista Alberti, the Giacomo Leoni edition of della architettura, della pittura, and della statua, London, 1726 and modern translations of the books.
Humanist and architect Alberti was the first significant writer to treat art theoretically. His three works were actually called painting, sculpture, and architecture. His categories are based on a humanist's reading of ancient art - limited exposure to material culture and a deep knowledge of the written sources. But Alberti wasn't a metaphysician and there is no ontology here. He chose these arts because the ancients practiced them, and based his aesthetics on his reading of ancient writers. If there is any ontology, it is the Renaissance humanist faith in the supremacy of ancient sources.
It is taken as axiomatic that art should be realistic in appearance and emulate Classical antiquity when possible.
The thing is, the Fine Arts didn't have to have to be coherent ontologically so long as elites will support them. Pompous gasbags can wax on for decades to adoring sycophants about whatever they want, so long as the checks come in. The money supports a lucrative economy built on allegiance to nonsense, and for those tapped by the gatekeepers, fame and wealth await. Spots are few though, guaranteeing crowds of desperate aspirants willing to stroke egos - and worse - for a kiss on the forehead. Academies and other controlled societies facilitate this.
Louis Le Vau, Palais de l'Institut de France, originally Collège des Quatre-Nations, begun 1662, Paris
Louis XIV's art academies were reorganized into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1816. The Academy is housed in Institute of France's grand 17th-century palace.
Seats at the Académie des Beaux-Arts were held by the leading practitioners of the official academic style like Ingres, the preeminent artist of his era. He was a better theoretician than practitioner - a poor man's version of his beloved Raphael - who brought Romantic emotionalism to a rigid Classical structure.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Francis I Receives the Last Breaths of Leonardo da Vinci, 1818, oil on canvas, Petit Palais
Ingres' homage to Leonardo captures the essence of the Western academic art - an ordered system of representation based on tradition and excellence. It assumes qualitative judgments. It isn't egalitarian. Leonardo's skill and creativity reached a level few have glimpsed. Artists deserve the respect of kings, but they have to earn it.
This isn't ontology, it's culture. A culture where logos is a given, even when pathos is the goal. You can see how structured the painting is, with the characters, setting, and lighting enhancing the impact of the moment. The figure types and arrangement are based on the achievements of older masters like Leonardo. But the Renaissance foundations of this system were based on Christian humanism. Once the gatekeepers of official culture rejected Christian metaphysics and antiquity, all that was left was tradition, or 'just the way we've always done it'. And we know how that worked out in Modernity.
Baron François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, Belisarius, 1797, oil on canvas, Getty Center, Los Angeles
The Academy had 14 seats in painting, since reduced to 10, and Gérard was the first appointment to Seat 8. He struggled at the start of his career since opportunities were fiercely competitive on qualitative grounds. There was always corruption and nepotism, but the technical mastery was assumed. Eventually his career took off and he became one of the most decorated painters in France before he was eclipsed by Romantic solipsism.
Guy de Rougemont, Untitled, 1967, oil on canvas, Private
Seat 8 is currently occupied by de Rougemont, one of six Frenchmen in the French Academy of Painting. One seat is vacant and the others are held by two Chinese and a Serbian painter. Giving away rare spots funded by the French government would be a disgrace were the artists producing something of value. As it is, the disgrace is that the Academy is funded at all.
Guy's masterpiece did pull 32,500 euros at an auction a couple of years ago. This is what gets overlooked when people focus on the huge sums like the Leonardo or De Kooning sales - the countless smaller sales that aren't newsworthy but funnel significant money to individuals who would otherwise have to do something productive. This works the same way as a grant. What about muh free market? Think about paying around 36 k for a bit of third-tier graphic design. It only has value because it inhabits the corpse of Western art. But the hollowness is laid bare when the veneers of tradition and qualitative excellence are stripped away. "Art" is still an arbitrary, elite cultural notion, only now you don't actually have to be good at anything.
The Bal des Quat’z’Arts was the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts annual costume ball from 1892 to 1966 (link below). This was Academy's school - where theory becsme curriculum. The parties are a perfect metaphor - debauched orgies with a highbrow cultural perversion. Admission to this exclusive event was restricted and special invitations were prepared by the school's artists around a theme. They were arty, but with "witty" sexual references - like the traditional lotus as genitalia.
Perverse images are a problem. It is necessary to expose degradation and inversion, but reproducing them disseminates their message. The Band hates defeatist porn that wallows in 'look how awful they are' masochistic titillation. This is a tamer example - if you want to see more, you can go to the link.
The balls ended in 1967, but the debasement didn't go anywhere. The current faculty at the École includes the Satanic degenerate and Podesta fave Marina Abramović of Spirit Cooking fame.
This link puts that POS in context of rampant depravity in contemporary art. It is thorough, but spews the 'right to free expression' garbage that got us here in the first place. Free expression is the visual version of free speech, and the observable historical fact is that both were subverted into weapons of culture warfare. The arts have objectively failed to manage the responsibilities that come with the privilege of creative freedom. Note the solipsism - the "offensive, disturbing, and scandalous means of expression" of his punk rock was "absolutely warranted and necessary at the time", but objects to the downstream consequences. Typical Boomer. Still worth a read.
It is important to understand how entwined this art world is with social elites - not just cash flow, but a shared debased culture.
The Academy is still divided by art forms, only expanded to reflect today's art scene. But note section 6. These are members who aren't actually artists. The Academy says very little about how they are chosen, which is usually smoke. This is where trophy and other political appointments mingle with the arts establishment privately and directly.
Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, 19th century photo from Les Rothschild, une dynastie de mécènes en France by Pauline Prevost Marcilhacy, Somogy Art Publishers, Paris, 2018
Like the Rothchilds. Edmond was appointed to Seat 10 of the Section 6 in 1906. His relatives Alphonse de Rothschild and Maurice de Rothschild were named to Seats 1 and 2 in 1885 and 1937 respectively. Calling the debased revels of the Bal des Quat’z’Arts exclusive wan't an overstatement.
In a world of big money, vanity, and all the perversion that the demoralized, Modern culturati can dream of, who cares if the autonomy of art is ontologically consistent? What matters is that the gatekeepers maintain the appearances - the spray of symbols, the stilted pretension, all the social in-grouping - that let the hollow feel clever. Timeless values were the bait - 'art is what we say it is' was the switch. But readers know that deep-pocketed corners of culture trumpeting hollow values are like catnip for subversives. So long money and pretension keeps the carcass wheezing on, the "theory of art" can be anything they want.
Georges Braque, Houses at l'Estaque, 1908, oil on canvas, Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art
The squid ink around Proto-Cubism is that Braque and Picasso were breaking down the artifice of Classical representation. Seriously. The "revolution" is that an arbitrary system is arbitrary. That this was the solution reveals the real target - the ordered pursuit of truth, or logos inherent in a technically difficult realistic artwork.
With Modernism, the trick was to define mimesis as an "external" dependency. The meaning is dependent in some ways on its fidelity to something else, like reality. Techniques are dependent on the curriculum so some authority. The nonsense is what made it so powerful - if you don't have to account for reality, you can claim whatever you want. And if you control the money, you can make the parasites dance for you.
The dance is real. This is the same pattern that we see in popular media. If people change their behavior to fit your lies, the fake reality has actual consequences. Harmful ones, because the behavior is trying to act on something impossible. For art to maintain an impossible theoretical purity, it has to stop doing what it always did.
It is a flaw in the righteous that they are prone to falling for liars. It is human nature to project, and it can be hard for a basically honest person to really grasp the level of sheer malevolence at the root of this sort of cultural debasement. Why else would the public passively observe the installation of excrement in well-funded galleries? Because the liars use complex jargon and are condescending?
A lack of morality makes people weak and insecure - easy prey for predators. The globalist left is so obsessed with identifying and credentialing because it gets people to treat them as other than what they are. Like calling Modernism "art", or a pedo enabler and a crone "Christian leaders".
Fortunately, there is an old test in the West for lying impostors:
Eventually art gave up the war on mimesis. The standard story is that it was a creative dead end, which is true, but that was so self-evident for so long that it can't be the whole picture. Modernism ran long enough to ensure that the chains of Academic tradition were broken and it's ideology dismissed as oppression and kitsch. When mimesis comes back, it is Postmodern - equally bereft of talent or social value, but now with pictures.
Yoko Ono with one of her installations at the Guggenheim, Bilbao
But this is a story for another time.
The myth of autonomy in early Modernism is a familiar pattern - a fake establishment generates a fake reaction through controlled channels to attack national culture. Ignore the squid ink and settings and think about what autonomy really means. I get to do whatever I want, however want, and if you criticize, you are a tool of oppression, an philistine, or both. It is literally infantile and cannot actually provide a basis for anything. This is no longer anything resembling the arts of the West. The only connective threads are institutions and money - ironically the pure commodification of art that Marxist critics bleat about.
Invitation card for the Bal des Quat'z'Arts, May 15, 1907 at the salle Wagram in Paris.
Robert E. Lee Memorial Engraved Portrait, 1870, hand colored engraving
Language does shape our understanding of reality. But reality precedes and is indifferent to our representations. We have to recognize the power of language while remembering it is a human creation, and not fall into relativism.
See how it works?
The Greeks developed a system of visual art organically then derived principles from that that did not replace the traditional purposes that this art was used for. No one said that the Canon of Polykleitos reflects ideal universal proportions, so art should no longer entertain, ennoble, teach, or propagandize. Theoretical autonomy was too preposterous to consider. Who would want or support such a thing? When the Greeks introduced art theory, they were formalizing an established practice. The possibility that an image could project higher values enriched the traditional role of art. It didn't replace it.
Alexandre Cabanel, Michelangelo in His Studio, Visited by Pope Julius II, 1859, oil on canvas, Private
It can be thought of something like this.
The Greeks provide single words to talk about art that don't exist in English. The last post introduced technê, epistêmê, and phronêsis to describe the relationship between technical skill and metaphysics in art. The purpose is not to claim that they are "right", but to use them as alternatives to the loaded and limited language of Modern art.
Words bundle and label the ideas that we use to structure thoughts. It sets the parameters of what can be said. The concepts that cluster together in a word come to seem natural because they come pre-combined. We don't have to put them together.
Logos is a great example of such a term. It combines notions of logic, harmony, and truth across psychological, physical, and metaphysical planes. We don't have an equivalent word in English - we can define it, but it takes a lot of explanation. It isn't a compact definition. Having a word that bundles these notions makes the speakers of that language implicitly aware of their connection in a way that those without an equivalent - those forced to figure it out through long explanations and pattern recognition - are not. But English is extremely flexible in assimilating new terms. By learning the word, we can convey the bundled concept. The words aren't creating reality, they are allowing us to describe it more thoroughly with imperfect, arbitrary sign systems. When languages and other symbols ignore reality, or pretend that they can replace reality, we've crossed over into
The whole toxic clown car of Modern art is a perfect example of Postmodern discourse - the idea that symbolic systems are reality. Discourse is a pretentious word with a vague, amorphous range of meaning that can't be succinctly summed up. To really get it, you have to be trapped in venues where it is often used - exposure brings the frame of reference into focus. This is a way for official culture to stay exclusionary - only insiders speak the jargon. It has nothing to do with intelligence. To participate in the discourse, you have to have had to the proper upbringing in the right programs under the right degenerates and deceivers. What it really is is a dialect made up of bundled concepts that are disconnected from reality - like autonomy and truth to materials. The Greek words reveal real patterns and connections across domains that better fit the empirical reality of art in the West. By their fruits...
October in Artforum: Special Issue, October, 2004 issue of Artforum
This is a high-profile publication. The lead author, Thomas Crow, is "the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, and Associate Provost for the Arts at New York University". Another title.
According to the release linked above, Crow leads off "with an essay that tracks the pop/art dialectic from the eighteenth century atelier of Jean-Antoine Watteau to the studios of London’s Royal College of Art in the mid-1950s".
Antoine Watteau, The Feast of Love, around 1718-1719, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
Royal College Of Art today: "the Harvard of fashion"
A tired Postmodern trick is to set up a selective history where inverted, contemporary garbage is somehow connected to technical achievements of the past. Discourses are so complex because they are layers built on top of layers of nonsense terms disconnected from reality.
1. Occupy a "chair" at a prestigious institution
2. Start with the notion that art has nothing to do with skill or logos.
3. Highlight Watteau as subverting Classical theory with sexualized scenes of contemporary aristocrats.
4. Point out that Pop art was also subversive and self-indulgent.
5. Fake history is spoken into existence.
Charles Le Brun, Horatius Cocles defending the Bridge, around 1642-1643, oil on canvas, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
Antoine Watteau, Les Plaisirs du Bal, around 1715-1717, oil on canvas, Dulwich Picture Gallery
The Greek terms help us see through the discourse. The official story is that Watteau was reacting against the "oppressive" Classicism of Le Brun and our old friend Louis XIV's French Academy. His style - usually called Rococo - was loose and free, and the grand historical themes were replaced with contemporary trivialities. Art discourse sees this as a forerunner of Modernism because they see their tear down logos and order catechism in it. Their discourse is too impoverished to even describe what is going on.
Greek words technê and epistêmê relate to our definitions of top-down and bottom-up epistemologies from earlier posts, but filtered through the practical occupation of art-making. It is easiest to translate them as technical skill and universal principles, but both were considered forms of knowledge, so both have an appropriate logos. Because art was assumed to have some sort of value, it was assumed to be mimetic. No one would even consider that there would have to be a rule about this. It shouldn't have to be said that art has to look like something to make any sort of connection with an audience.
Here's the catch: it's technê that determines what something looks like. You don't need epistêmê to have a convincing illusion. The Platonic critique of art in the Republic argues that illusions pull us away from higher levels of epistêmê. The seductive allure of art is independent of the moral quality of the message. Hollywood has mastered the technê of stunning hypnotic lies. Aestheticizing moral inversion gives Watteau more in common with Avatar than with than Pop.
Higher principles are something that the illusionists are expected to add in order to add value to their artifice. But epistêmê is abstract - it doesn't look like anything. Enter phronêsis.
Phronêsis is applied virtue. For art, it can be thought of as the representation of epistêmê through the conventions of technê. This is the combination of real and ideal that is the foundation of Classical aesthetics. The problem is that epistêmê is ultimately knowable only by faith. The human metaphysics at the root of art after the Renaissance art are just secular transcendences so the epistêmês are fake. We deal with this by making judgements. Phronêsis in art is a claim - this is what is right. It is our responsibility as moral agents to reject fake imposed discourses like "Art" and consider paintings and other works on their messaging. What do they actually express?
Apollo Belvedere, Roman copy from AD 120–140 of a Greek original from 50–325 BC, Vatican Museum
Antonio Canova, Perseus, 1800-1801, Vatican Museums
Consider these two statues: one an ancient Roman copy of a Greek original and the other a Neoclassical variation on it. Canova is obviously emulating the ancient statue in the proper Academic way. But the values are very different.
Classical Greek epistêmê: a mutable, imperfect shadow of an abstract metaphysical order where humans straddle the line between spirits and beasts.
Idealized art offers something to aspire to - an image of true beauty in a flawed world.
Enlightenment epistêmê: a timeless, self-generating universe running on reason where things appear from nothing and human nature inclines towards benevolent order.
Idealized art reflects the supremacy of human reason.
Same technê, different epistêmê.
Back to Watteau: Louis' absolutism was based on an epistêmê - a fake, self-aggrandizing epistêmê,
but an epistêmê - that ordered society and its art around the Sun King. The thing is, removing the fake epistêmê perversely legitimates it by accepting its pretense for actual logos. And Satanic inverters can't create. They can only destroy or pervert. Watteau exposed the Classical Age for the pantomime it was, but as a decadent sensualist cut off from logos, he couldn't construct anything more truthful in its place. All he has to offer are the fleeting pleasures of idle voluptuaries. The notion that his revolution was against Old Regime "repression" is superficial and misses the real point. What really matters is that art was disconnected from epistêmê - real or fake. In Greek terms, this makes phronêsis impossible. There are no higher principles to manifest. And if you create the assumption that art is pure pathos, you remove the expectation that is have any inherent moral utility or truth value. In other words, a big step towards the myth of autonomy.
Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Venitiennes, 1718-1719, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery
But what Watteau did have plenty of was technê. His style seems loose and disorganized compared to the more solid Classicists, but he is a skilled painter. Modernism banished technical standards of judgment, so the discourse has a blind spot here. The Greek terms bring our attention to the artistry, and on this level, there is no drop-off. It was a given that even without phronêsis, a preeminent painter would be a master of technê.
With this in mind, the impovrishment of the discourse becomes obvious, and the deception clear. The only way to get from Watteau to Pop is to redefine art to exclude technê. The discourse hides the fact that they aren't the same thing. And the only way to rule out qualitative judgments is to declare art "autonomous" and therefore beholden to nothing. Nothing but the stakeholders' whims, anyhow.
Greek art was human-focused. Painting and sculpture were the main art forms, but the sculpture is all that was inherited by the West. Virtually no Classical Greek painting survives, and there is no swarm of Roman copies to show what they looked like. We do know what kind of things they painted - sculpture was where we see perfect forms, while paintings showed large scenes. But in either case, something human - either idealized form or idealized action - is the vehicle for the message.
Hades abducting Persephone, 4th century wall painting in royal tomb at Verghina, Macedonia.
A rare example of Hellenistic painting with the same energy as the sculpture of the time. Look past the style - on the simplest level, it is telling a story with figures. Greek art uses human actions and events to relay a message, whether that's pure pathos or phronêsis
Technê has a logos - the craft skills needed for appealing representation - but it has no further moral bent. That comes from the message. When the message expresses epistêmê, the art has the social value of phronêsis. When it doesn't, it's pure rhetoric and ripe for subversion.
Historically, the Greek contribution to the art of the West is sculpture and architecture, so we don't need to worry about painting. The academicians knew less about Greek painting than we do. The main idea that gets inherited is the formal ideal aspect of human-centered Greek art, because that's what the statues could show them.
Votaries of Diana, Wedgwood jasperware plaque with Birmingham cut-steel border, late 18th century, British Museum
The Classical ideal is based on ideas from Greco-Roman sculpture, filtered through a contemporary sensibility.
In the Classical ideal, the body is a physical analogy for immaterial principles like logos and beauty. The figure isn't an end in itself, but a vision of something more perfect that leads to awareness of higher ideals. But the Classical is just one pillar of the Art of the West, and what came next radically restructures the notions of what we are calling artistic phronêsis, and the relationship with human perfection. With Christianity, analogy becomes incarnation.
Traditio Legis (Christ the Teacher), late 4th century, paleochristian mosaic, Basilica di San Lorenzo Maggiore, Milan
But this is too much to start here. We can look at that next time.
Skillful interpretation of the industrial and scientific revolutions and their efficiencies in modern engineering and material science with the resultant postmodernist nonsense of secular transcendence where "the pretence that ontological absolutes are possible in the material world". That is temporal patterns, eg faces in the clouds.
ReplyDeleteEnlightened analysis of modern art through the filters of techne, episteme, and phronesis.