The arts of the West hit a turning point in the Renaissance. But inversion in the arts is part of a much larger failure. Part two in a look at centralization and secular transcendence in art and faith.
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Coming out of the Renaissance has left a lot of threads that need to be detangled. The last post brought a few of them together, so we need to continue from there, but more systematically. The core problem is epistemological - different types of knowledge are mashed together without any care for compatibility. This is a symptom of the larger intellectual failure of modernism, but manifests slightly differently in each instance. Art and religion centralize and invert, but the interplay of theory and practice aren't the same. And neither really map onto the historiographic models that posit "the Renaissance" as a moment of total transformation. We need to be attentive to specifics and the general pattern.
Lay out the main issues before flying off into speculation.
The Renaissance as a "period" is defined by sociocultural continuities and isolated changes and not overnight "rebirth" of anything. In order to get illusion of total change it is necessary to extend "the Renaissance" almost 300 years.
Cimabue, Madonna di Santa Maria dei Servi, 1280, tempera on panel, Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, Bologna; Bronzino, The Deposition of Christ, oil on canvas, 1553, Palazzo Vecchio Museum
Cimabue and Bronzino look different. They're also over a quarter millennium apart. Bronzino looks different from the art of the late 1800s too.
Carl Bloch, The Sheperds and the Angel, 1879, oil on copper
Bronzino doesn't look much like Bloch either. But we don't try and pretend that Bronzino to Bloch represents single moment of historic change. That would be pointless. So why is the Renaissance so stretched out? The short answer is that academics wanted their area to get some Renaissance prestige. Some narrative rub always trumps logic and observed facts in the beast system. If the narrative serves the beast at the moment. It can change fast.
The idea of the Renaissance as a change between two periods in an artifact of academic history and not historical reality. Look over those centuries and find some influential novelties and long-term continuities. Plus the changes happen in different areas at different times. The reality is that change in the material world is continuous - there is no actual total "consistency". What matters is whether we determine change meaningful or not.
Change vs. consistency isn't a real, objective choice. It's a subjective judgment of relative importance.
Art as it emerges from the Middle Ages is driven by the elites, but also expresses differences in regional and national cultures. It reflects the West that spawned it - local differences with a common religious and historical legacy. It's why we see similar subjects in what we called Northern and Southern Renaissance art but different styles and concerns.
We already used it to show differences in popular religiosity that ultimately bring the Reformation.
Hans Memling, The Man of Sorrows in the arms of the Virgin, 1475 or 1479, oil on wood, National Gallery of Victoria
Memling's Man of Sorrows is tame compared to some, but the emphasis on simulated proximity & visceral emotional response is clear. The vivid red blood, the weepy Madonna presenting the corpus like an offering, the faces acting out the Passion drama. All the devotional visualization we saw emphasized in the Northern art of the last post.
Pietro Perugino, Man of Sorrows from the Decemviri Altarpiece, 1495, oil on canvas, Vatican Museum
Compare with a contemporary Italian. You can see the similarity in theme, but the handling is so different. The emphasis on a visual connection is there, but the body is remarkably pristine & bloodless. The emotion is gentle, almost sleepy. The resurrected perfection of the human body is more the emphasis then identifying with suffering.
Cultural differences with a common frame. Art that develops alongside its community to express how they see the world. Imported "rules" are pointless because they reflect the perspectives of someone else. That is, not them. And since "abstract rules of art" are fake projected constructs, believing that they are superior won't help. It's volunteering to have your own heritage and identity conquered and destroyed by a hateful invader. Hateful, because the act of cultural replacement manifests the same psychopathic malevolence as any act of democide.
Richard Morris Hunt, The Breakers, 1893-1895, Newport, RI
The Vanderbilt's famous summer home.
Consider the Gilded Age obsession with European ostentation. Then consider that these frauds' power and influence were products of political and economic malfeasance and manipulation. In hindsight their satanic legacy is apparent - the country and the world would have been vastly better off without them. Any surprise that they announced their ascension with a war on the organic culture of their victims?
Why did they hate American culture? They weren't "American" by any meaningful measure. Oh, there were pieces of paper that said American, but these are ontologically meaningless. They could purchase paper with any country name on it. Nature isn't something declared, it's shown. By the fruits. And the fruits of the early Modern "elite" is pure soulless globalist filth. Nice house though, if you're a hollow demon LARPing a cultural identity you can't hope to understand.
Modernity is based on erasing natural refinements and distinctions for fake "standards" that aren't. Look at the modernist endpoint - undifferentiated ugliness without skill or reference to anything other than beast myths. To get there, you have to establish the lie that "art" is an abstract timeless entity that exists in ideal form independent of human activity. That art was like mathematical relationships - intrinsically & theoretically true whether anyone is aware of them or not.
It's so fundamentally retarded that it's irritating to have to explain it. Like much of the 20th century mythology we were parasitized by, it's humiliatingly stupid to boot. The devil has a cruel sense of humor.
The pure ontological inanity of claiming existential autonomy for a socio-historical construct comes through loud and clear in this description.
If it wasn't all atavistic fakery, the first question would have been how a creation can be ontologically prior to a creator. But they're not that bright either, judging from the screeds. So, how can you - or anyone - set the terms - or even speak at all - for something conceptually self-contained and autonomous? There is no answer because there was no sincerity.
Tl;dr - we want to put a toilet in your halls of culture. Words, words, words... we're putting a toilet in your hall of culture.
Obviously Art! can't be ontologically autonomous or have a "sake" apart from people making and viewing it. But this just means that if you go along, you're agreeing to ignore reality and do whatever they decide in the moment. Like the lights, it's the abandonment of intellectual free will. And with no reality as a check, they can force cultural suicide if the victims are dull, de-moralized, and insecure enough to take the gas pipe.
Giorgio De Chirico, Mystery And Melancholy Of A Street, 1914, oil on canvas, private
It's a harsh analogy, but looking into the characters of the "heroes" of Modernism makes it unavoidable. Modern art was like hiring people who are excited by raping your children to oversee your culture.
The arts of the West are not only expressions of existing cultural perspectives. They're forms of communication. Art doesn't just reflect ideas, it promotes, disseminates, and normalizes them. It shapes how people think by "showing" them what things mean. This is no different today - other than the vastly more pervasive media-surveillance panopticon that inundates us with visuals. Far fewer images meant each one had way more of an impact. And a mass-produced image could define the sacred and our relation to it.
Michael Ostendorfer, The Pilgrimage to the Fair Virgin in Regensburg, between 1519-1522, engraving
The pilgrim souvenir print from the last post. The idea was to commemorate and promote - pictures weren't common so if you got a print, most everyone you know would eventually see it. But it doesn't just encourage you to go visit the statue. It shows you how to react when you get there. It defines what the experience means and is to those who see it.
Debasing or inverting art does rob a culture of witnesses to its highest beauty and virtue. And it also teaches and shapes the upcoming generations to see their culture as something degenerate, ugly, and depressing. It would have been more effective if people didn't tune art out - but that's what 20th-century media was for...
There's a natural dialog between reflecting tradition and creating new expressions in a healthy culture. The altarpiece is a great example - it's an established subject in a new place that changes how people perceive the Mass. But it isn't the same as an iconostasis in an Orthodox church, decorations in a Protestant one, or the satanic throne favored by "Pope Francis". Each draws on tradition to express present values. Centralizing art removes that dialog. It removes the ability to reflect organic difference. This leaves only the shaping part - the degenerate atavism of the narrative engineers.
We've all enjoyed a chuckle at these sort of encounters. But here's a twist -
Think about the message the picture is transmitting about the "culture" you belong to...
Centralization replaces art with a one-way propaganda tool for whatever occupies the center. And it removes an old and powerful vector for cultural transmission and renewal.
The question of who occupies the center is more complicated. The point of the arts of the West posts is to see what happened - at least according to the official history. Plus any light we might shed on the real history. It isn't so much one person calling all the shots as a shifting critical-institutional consensus. But a continuous one - at least in theory. "Art for Art's Sake" was only possible because art had been a self-defining space for so long. The Renaissance introduces the theoretical self-awareness.
Horace Vernet, Pope Julius II Ordering Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael to Build the Vatican and Saint Peter's, 1827, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
It was a murderer's row of talent - Julius had Michelangelo and Raphael painting down the hall from each other for three years. But it's also mythologized. Other than part of tradition, why is the Renaissance relevant to the early 19th century?
It's the same pattern of top-down lies that we see in beast tyranny overall. Start with an organic accommodation of the inherent disconnect between fallen entropic material and abstract absolutes. Then claim there are top-down rules that must govern practice. These are invariably the usual man as absolute measure, be your own god, Flatland nonsense at the root of all satanic inversion. Once this is established, increasingly degenerate overseers move further and further from any-level logos. On a macro scale, think moral entropy.
Summing up...
Beast centralization in art isn't the only thing that came up during our look into the art of the Renaissance. The Renaissance papacy was harnessing humanism and art to a vision of the Church that was drifting away from Christian precepts. And like art, this also needed the imposition of man-made centralization on an organic accommodation of higher abstract reality.
The art-Church-Renaissance connection is sort of indirect. Medieval art was primarily religious - whether paid for by the Church and its subsidiaries, or by aristocrats. Secular subjects existed but become more prominent in the Renaissance as "art" is better established as elite socio-culture. And secular themes increasingly invade religious subjects.
Michelangelo, The Deluge with surrounding Nudes, 1508-1512, fresco, Sistine Chapel
Why was the Sistine Chapel filled with nudes? Artistically, they're brilliant. Michelangelo absorbing the heroic proportions of ancient sculpture into his already-peerless anatomical art. But they have no obvious role in the symbolism and present major decorum issues.
So the Renaissance is pointing to two separate impulses - the centralization and secular transcendence of the Church, and the replacement of Christianity in culture. Religious, historical, and theoretical dimensions are all distinct but connected. Start with the basics. Here's one...
The nature of change in the physical world
We know that abstract absolutes can’t materially exist in our fallen, finite, temporal material reality.
The difference between the material and abstract is the most obvious necessity of the ontological hierarchy. It's a cognitive litmus test - if you are able to see it, it changes everything. If not - someone has to greet the multidimensional visitors to Flatland...
If unfamiliar with the ontological hierarchy, it's a graphic metaphor for the relationship between levels of reality, epistemological access to them, and the moral consequences. It's objectively true, so it maps perfectly onto other truths - like the pillars of the West on the left, or the arts of the West. Click for a link for more explanation.
This includes the ability of our fallen, finite, temporal minds to grasp abstract absolutes in their fullness. It's easier to see with examples.
We can conceptualize vague facsimiles of abstract absolute things, but these are descriptions, not the things in themselves. The difference between the infinity symbol or the phrase “sequence without end” and a literally endless sequence is as great as that between an angel and a pebble. Radically, totally, utterly, ontologically unalike and incommensurable.
Annunciation from the Black Hours, 1470 Bruges, Belgium
We can represent things that we can't materially remake in themselves - it's one of the reasons why we have representations. It shouldn't be necessary to have to point out this distinction, but pretending representation is interchangeable with the thing being represented is depressingly common. If your words don't correspond to reality, it's your representations that are wrong and need replacement. Likewise, "logic" is utterly useless if the sign system where the logical operations are taking place is faulty. A thought experiment perhaps, but nothing that makes a whit of difference in your existence. Remember this next time someone is claiming God's nature is knowable by our words and concepts on any grounds other than faith. They're either cognitively limited or dishonest, and in either case, best avoided.
None of our "laws of physics" - themselves strings of marks on surfaces - have anything to say about what existence is like outside temporal sequencing. They are as ontologically useless for defining God qua God as "what I can picture" is for defining the totality of the space-time continuum.
Unconvinced? Start with a rough measure of God's size - mass or volume. What about how fast He is? Heck, we'll even settle for the correct units...
The absolute difference between material and the abstract realities is clearest in the nature of temporality, finitude, and change. All three are related. Consider -
Change in temporally-determined entropic materiality is omnipresent, constant, and inexorable.
There is no escaping or stopping it. In the process of typing this one sentence, the Band had changed irrevocably. Cells died and divided, and the overall system aged a few seconds closer to it’s terminus. We literally aren’t the same as when we started it. And yet, we are the same person.
See the problem?
Kiril Katsarov, The Writer and his Destiny, 2016, oil on canvas
Some changes are drastic. But the ones we are describing are imperceptible to us in the moment. There is even continuity of thought and action – completing the same sentence that we started.
In reality - in absolute terms - we literally aren't "the same" as we were a few minutes ago. But if asked, our feeling is that "nothing changed". That feeling is factually wrong - the truth is that we didn't perceive any change that mattered. Bringing us to the difference between change and meaningful change. Meaningful change is subjective, change is objective. It isn’t that nothing changed while writing the sentence - it’s that from our perspective, nothing meaningful changed. There was no perception of meaningful change despite obviously changing physiologically.
Clarify. What if one of those small changes triggered a catastrophic health incident. Or sparked a life-altering new idea like an epiphany? Suddenly, the changes of those few seconds seem very meaningful indeed. At least, they mean a lot to us. We notice those changes. We register them as “change”.
The Late Railway Accident, at Chester, engraved by Hare for The Illustrated London News, 12 June 1847, p. 380 i
The Dee Bridge disaster of May 1847 was caused by repeated flexing as wrought iron trusses failed to support the cast iron bridge. Each flex "changed" the strength of the iron beam, but no one noticed until the changes became meaningful.
The choice isn't really whether or not things are "the same as before". They aren't. It's materially impossible that they could be. Atomic decay and so forth. The choice - the judgment - is whether or not this segment of the inexorable change matters. Is it meaningless or meaningful to the person(s) considering it?
This is important when you consider the sheer number of human entities that profess absolute constancy despite that being literally intrinsically impossible. The first thing this means is that the claims are false. Whether the claimant is lying knowingly is a different matter. But the absence of material change in temporal reality is as impossible being in two locations at the same time. It isn't a technical impossibility. It's inherent in our material natures.
The medieval Church is ludicrous in it's claims of continuity.
Moving the papacy to Avignon after making metaphysical claims about Rome is a change. Either it isn't meaningful and Rome is irrelevant as a special place, or it is and claims of being unchanging are false.
The Church was obviously continually changing in absolute terms. Augustine put the timeless, metaphysical City of God outside of this material world. What doesn't change is the Truth - the message. The measure of the Church is how well it adheres to that - how well it accommodated the immaterial abstract in a flawed, entropic material world. Regarding Avignon, the onlly question is whether they were lying about the significance of Roman holy sites or chose to deprive Christendom of access to the sacred by replacing the fixed church with a fake French facsimile.
The Band's read is that the location really doesn't matter. It's the continuity and accuracy of the message. It's the plenary indulgences and "holy sites" that are the idolatrous addenda to Logos. Literally secular transcendence - pretending that the metaphysical inheres in the physical. Alternatively, one could make a theological argument that Christ linked salvation to genuflecting in designated spaces.
Antiquorum habet fida relatio, Bull of Pope Boniface VIII on the Jubilee of1300, 22th February, 1300
In which case, it's on the Church to explain how in 1300 it suddenly wiped your sins out to visit some buildings that didn't exist during the life of Christ. During an specially numbered year in a calendar that didn't exist then either.
The "argument" - centennial years have magic power and some old fool said he thought his father got his sins wiped a hundred years earlier. Oh - he made up some historical nonsense too. Seriously. Also, the date can be changed to whenever it's politically prudent. And this then theologically binding in forever after.
The problem with the medieval Church is ontological flattening. The popes want their spiritual custodianship - preserving the integrity of the message - to translate to worldly power. So their authority is based on metaphysical continuity, but then misapplied to worldly structures. Whether pretending material conditions are necessary addenda to salvation or claiming control over worldly things. Secular transcendence.
Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon from Nuremberg, around 1480, limewood with paint, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is a fine example of late medieval German wood carving. The page on the Met website gives different info from this Met article about medieval statues. Praying before this image - with confession and penitence - got an indulgence.
If we look at this objectively, it is a form of organic folk belief being leveraged by the Church to incentivize virtuous behavior. The confession and penitence being arbitrary, institutionally mandated ways to repent and strengthen faith. Not specifically spelled out as necessary in this format in the Bible, but acceptable as material-level accommodation of abstract necessity. The inclusion of a statue and transactional reduction of sin are medieval fabrications.
Once you have to differentiate between metaphysical consistency and retarded secular transcendences like jubilee plenary indulgences & magic statues, the moral peril is extreme. Same with stuff that was objectively made up and implemented at a point in historical time for clear political reasons. Like celibate clergy. Either the previous married clergy are retroactive blasphemers and their ministrations void, or you've admitted that the terms of the sacrament of ordination are man-made and ontologically posterior to human whim.
The City of God, from the works of St. Augustine translated by Raoul de Presles, 1469-73, colors on vellum, Bibliotheque Nationale Ms Fr 18 Fol.3v
Without ignorance or lies, claims of not changing is nothing of the sort. The Church may be metaphysically consistent in aligning with Augustine's invisible City of God. But its material existence is nothing but change. And as fallen material phenomena, those changes are subject to judgments of moral reasoning. Whether or not they remain in alignment with the metaphysical constancy.
One is fixed. One can spin like a wheel. This International Gothic artist got the difference.
What any claim of material changelessness really is is a claim that the perpetual changes occurring every nanosecond aren't personally meaningful to the claimant. Personalized - material reality is perpetual change, but it only matters when I notice personally. Ladies and gentlemen, the subjectivity of the fallen condition.
More seriously, this is a necessary consequence of our finitude. We are so vastly smaller than the world around us that we have to filter the overwhelming amount of raw sensory information. But it also means that there can be no consistent material world systems if the material world itself is perpetual change. The only question is whether we mark the perpetual inconstancy as significant.
Any system of thought based on the necessity of an absolute, unchanging material state can be dismissed outright as inherently nonsensical.
All that we need to consider is what changes are considered meaningful, and which are ignored.
Abstract reality is where we find the unchanging. And every higher human purpose – from religion, to art, to morality – has to apply unchanging abstract ideals to perpetually-changing material conditions. It's how we ensure that the inexorable changes aren't meaningful in the ways that matter to us.
The abstract provides a measure - to the extent that we can grasp it - to assess the meaningfulness of change. Otherwise we fall into old nemesis relativism. Because meaningful means meaningful to us. To the things we care about. Since we're born in medias res there's no way to morally reason without external standards. And any standard external to material reality is necessarily abstract.
Of course, we used to take that as obvious.
The only thing resembling progress that we can control is personal and moral – whether we come into sufficient alignment with Logos to fulfil the requirements. Large-scale events here may be relatively good or bad for our standard of living – but they are not inherently relevant to the personal progress that matters.
The beast system is a Flatland joint. It's based on secular transcendence - the deranged fantasy that supernatural phenomena inhere in material reality because the supernatural "doesn't exist". The pattern is the Philosophical Bait and Switch - offering up a contingent material things as an abstract absolutes. Progress! was the big one for modernism, but there are others. The whole "churchian" inversion of Christianity is another.
What is falsely presented as progress is centralization. Here's how it looks with money as a proxy.
It’s also not teleological in any way other than the fallen corruptibility of human nature making the lust for power inevitable. If anything, centralization is typical of a lot of beast patterns where both paths lead to disaster.
Unknown Flemish Miniaturist, The Month of June from the Grimani Breviary, f7v, 1490-1510, illumination on parchment, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana
We need to group together to accomplish much - we're at our most effective when organized
but
Too much centralization becomes anti-human tyranny
This is hardly insightful - Aristotle's Golden Mean addressed this very problem some 2400 years ago. It's just much less abstract than most readers of Aristotle take him to be. It's material.
The simple truth is we centralize to accomplish things. We can achieve more per capita in concert than as individuals. Group efforts require coordination and organization. Motivation too. Leadership. And once there are organizers, there is centralization. It’s not complex in theory. But it is purpose-driven, bottom-up, organic, and empirical. People banding together for identifiable benefit. Stay super basic.
This is not an abstract “value” or Good. It is situational and empirically verifiable. Centralization is only beneficial and moral to the extent that it betters our lot. If is doesn’t, then the objective moral and empirical imperative is to do away with that structure.
Abel Grimmer, The Tower of Babel, 1595, oil on wood, private
From an ultimate reality perspective, scripture appears after we were already in settled patterns. It takes collective sociability and worship as given. Beyond that, what is Caesar’s should be accommodated within reason for social peace, but is irrelevant metaphysically.
Then there's the beast notion of “the greater good” - more projected Flatland inversion. Lying about the moral requirement to kneel to a fake collective is merely a means of conditioning compliance. The only reason to compromise with a collective that doesn’t reciprocate benefit is if it has the power to compel by force. And that’s the opposite of a moral case.
Centralization isn’t inherently right or wrong. It’s relative, and like all relative judgments is evaluated empirically.
By the fruits. But readers don't need to be reminded of that anymore.
So how to tell when there is too much centralization? That one's easy. When the centralized structures become independent of the ostensive purpose they were set up for.
Consider the time requirements for longitudinal studies. There is no legitimate empirical scientific ground for this. Yet scientific and health agencies pushed a literally impossible claim in lockstep for political purposes. It's contrary to sound science in health. Yet the institutions lumber on. The central structure is all that remains.
Staying by the fruits. Does centralization optimize the the initial goal or some other outcome? This can be anything else. From enriching the overseers to increasing unaccountability. Then does it reach full inversion? Democracy that puts oligarchic tyranny over popular will. Education that grooms and brainwashes rather than presents logic and observation. Science that perpetuates oligarchic lies and hides actual inquiry. In each case, the centralized structure has gone way beyond a means to a collective end and become more important than the original purpose.
The test for this – are there organizational consequences for failing to deliver? Or does it just conga on?
Now consider art – the premise was to make pictures that were visually appealing and aligned with logos. To do this, centralization and organization are needed. First, there is skill development and resources. It takes time to get good at art making – time when you aren’t doing something that contributed directly to survival. Like working, or hunter-gathering, or child rearing. This means other people have to provide for you while learning to paint or carve. Then they need to have the surplus resources to trade necessities for pictures.
Lascaux Cave painting, around 15,000 BC
Look at prehistoric art. The only places where there are high levels of techne are when people could stay still for a while and others could feed and supply them.
Consider this deal. A society or segment of society will trade resources for works of art that they find appealing for some reason. Presumably, if the pictures are unappealing, or fail to meet their ritual purpose, support for the artist stops. We are oversimplifying. There were always control structures and people vying for leadership. It would have been a chief or council of elders making the decision. But the chief or elders belong to the same culture that they rule - likewise the artists they appoint.
The Guilded Age elite era of hating your culture and importing a different "better" foreign one is more of a inversion.
We saw in earlier art posts that Imperial Roman elites went all in on hedonistic Hellenistic Greek culture once exposed to it. There are current parallels with rulers that pay lip service to obsolete "civic values" that no one - least of all them - really believes in or wants to be personally bound by.
Roman villas developed from working country farms into lavish private elite resorts. Here, all the extravagances of Hellenistic culture could be enjoyed out of the public eye. But with their peers - then as now, entertaining was a major part of these show homes.
Architecture inspired by Greek sanctuaries, gymnasia, and palaces. Paintings from Greek myth and literature covering everything from erotica to philosophy. Seaside grounds landscaped with terraces, peristyles, wooded parks, and stunning views for dining, hunting, strolling, and sightseeing.
Any society that depends on it's elite keeping a higher moral standard than the general public is already dead.
Roman elites claimed old Republican values of prudent austere conservatism publicly, but chose Hellenistic opulence in private. Now judge this by the fruits. Other than the optics, there was no perception of personal value in the "values". Otherwise, they'd have intrinsic appeal and people would choose them even when no one is watching [click for a post on intrinsic and extrinsic morality].
Dionysian scenes from a Roman villa near Cologne Cathedral, Romisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne
This is a pretty tame scene - no need to share the erotica in the name of criticizing the morality. They're easy enough to find online. Not much staunch Republican virtue here.
The subjects are a mix of that Hellenistic Greek arcana with Egyptian and Middle Eastern admixture.
This is precisely the same as the modern elite pattern. And in both cases, they were able to degrade the culture to the point where lip service to traditional values was no longer needed. If Rome is a template, once basic logos - even pagan cultural forms - is collectively dismissed, it doesn't come back. The inverted clown world congas on until the economic base degrades to the point where it can't provide the luxury. Or aggressive invaders wipe the whole thing away.
Barring a mass revival of Logos, it's a matter of time. It always is,
There is inherently nothing moral in this resource-for-art exchange beyond the moral fiber of the leadership making the deal. If you want to toss in a bushel of wheat so someone can paint the temple or make a statue for the center of the village, that’s up to you. The moral judgment falls on the nature and message of the finished work. And whether the contribution is coerced.
For his part, the artist produces things that his employers like or they find someone else.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums Trust
To be fair, the idea that the center of the arts of the West would hate the Good, the Beautiful, and the True - however they're expressed at time - would not have been believed. Not in Phidias' Greece, the International Gothic, the Renaissance, or the Academies. Never. The fact it's accepted today is a sign that current society is already dead. The West may revive, but it won't be this systemic iteration.
So somewhere along the way organic cooperation became an oppressive degeneration and death machine. All while keeping the same words. Note how “support the arts” propaganda favors pictures of old good art or those odd contemporary works that are at least interesting to look at. The fact most people avoid art institutions works in their favor. It’s the illusion that you can “not pay to support this crap” by avoiding an admission. They don’t need your admissions.
Anicka Yi, Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble), 2019, in the Arsenale, Venice Bianale, 2019
Admissions are high - the beast won't pass a free dollar. But ticket prices aren't paying for this. Not in any way relatable to a small business.
This is the Arsenal in Venice.
So how does it happen?
Taking a wide view, the fatal flaw in centralization is the enhanced resources. Consider - the whole point of centralizing is to increase per capita output. Ten guys in tandem do more per hour than ten guys solo, so at the end of the day there’s more to divide up. Forget about share allocation, incentives, etc. Stay abstract – because if it collapses on the abstract level, there’s no need to parse endless failed material world attempts.
But the problem is inherent. In order to get the group efficiency, there has to be coordination. The central in centralization. And there has to be some sort of coercive mechanism to ensure everyone coordinates because otherwise willful people won’t stay with the plan. Then the efficiency is gone you’re ten individual guys again. This means that the overseer necessarily has a greater degree of control. Over the activities of the group and the allocation of resources.
The overseer in our example – in the capacity of overseer – by necessity directs the wealth and power of ten. Set aside practical morality and other particulars like selection, accountability, etc. Stick to pure pure necessity. For good or ill, centralizing means one or relatively few enjoy the fruits of many.
Alfred Elmore, The Emperor Charles V at the Convent of Yuste, 1856, oil on canvas
The target for corruption is inherent.
In a just system, the necessary controller also bears higher responsibility. Then assuming you want the best – or at least an excellent – guy in the driver’s seat, he needs to be compensated for the responsibility. That’s just empirical human nature or motivation. Fairness also means that if he bears the heaviest punishment for failure, he gains the biggest reward for success. And now we are in the world of executive compensation.
In theory, overseer responsibility and skill are compensated out of the surplus made possible by centralizing. If that's our team of ten, they all end up with more than a solo dude and the elite a couple or few more shares than that.
But if it’s 100,000 dudes - the pooled resources to direct and individual reward becomes enormous. 100 million... As centralization grows, central power keeps expanding. Resources are take over education, information, entertainment, law, medicine - pretty much now.
Increasingly asymmetric central power through surplus acquisition and resource direction is inevitable as centralization expands. Fluffing rolls of old paper can’t alter basic logical realities. Centralization starts as collectively beneficial - hence the illusion of Progress! But growth increases central power at a vastly greater rate than individual standard of living. The elite - whatever they are - enjoy ever greater control and lifestyle and luxury that separates them from the public. Not just "better off" but existing in resource bubble that has nothing in common with how "ordinary" people live.
This is the formula for degenerative tyranny. The only way to counter the cycle of necessity is bottom-up, inward-driven morality. Logos-facing society. Collective will to ruthlessly judge by the fruits.
William Bell Scott, The Eve of the Deluge, 1865, oil on canvas, Tate London
And this only moves from personal to societal ethos with environmental pressure and prioritizing K-selection. Note Noah's family eliciting sarcastic waves as they enter the ark.
Centralization in the arts is a variation on this theme. Art is especially susceptible because its existence depends on allocating surplus resources to non-subsistence cultural activity. From the start is is based on the ability to collectively support artists, then compete for them as civilization matures. The questions become who the elites controlling the resources are and what they want. The answers will determine how dyscivic and inverted the results are.
Art is a measure of the asymmetric central control of resources that inherently dooms centralization.
Christian elites with some connection to the territory they rule will support art that expresses the same. Ditto for the degree of importance for beauty.
The Limbourg Brothers, The Trinity; The Duchess in Prayer, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry, f.91v, 1405–1408/1409, tempera, gold, and ink on vellum
Like a lavish International Gothic prayer book. It's filled with aristocratic symbolism and court aesthetics.
Earlier posts looked at the formation of "art" as a class of pictures with certain features within later medieval elite circles. While this is the beginning of artistic centralization, the inversion was a long way off. The main characteristics here are current standards of unironic beauty and Christian piety.
In contrast, the modern church offers up literal piles of disfigured trash with words of praise that describe something very different. Start with the quote. Read the words for their literal meaning. Form an impression before looking at what he is describing. Then try and connect the two without concluding that the writer is a lying smear of filth.
A degenerate cretin praises a hive of inversion. The Jesuit affiliation suggests he's no more Christian than the cultural debasement he champions.
But before we compare his description to the actual terrifying beauty he describes, consider the comparables he tries to pass off.
John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, around 1840, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art
"Beauty and terror" pretty much describes the sublime.
Procession of Las Palmas, organized by the Brotherhood of the Entrance of Jesus in Jerusalem, on Palm Sunday in Astorga, León, Spain
Here's a 21st-century Spanish paso - underlined in green. The tradition of carrying these processional floats goes back to the Middle Ages. The idea has always been to bring the Biblical into the present day. Floats can be melodramatic, but they're usually well-made.
Anonymous Sienese diptych with tabernacle frames, around 1400–1410, tempera on carved, gilt poplar, Metropolitan Museum of Art
"Iconito" - underlined in yellow - appears to be a made-up nonsense word. Small paintings from Siena and other Tuscan places look like this. The Cimabue Madonna at the start of the post is an older, simpler version.
People have a hard time with lies. It seems as if the idea that someone would simply state blatant falsehoods triggers a sort of cognitive dissonance. So even if the false words directly contradict observed reality, the inversion doesn't register. That's why we underlined clear statements and took time to look at the specific things referred to. Now look at what he's applying these words to.
Michael Tracy, Cruz for Bishop Oscar Romero, Martyr of El Salvador, 1980-1981, piled trash, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis
Here is is. Beauty and terror. Pasos and Sienese devotional painting.
You've read the words. You've seen the pictures.
He's a liar.
It was a false premise - reassuring while it lasted - that there is magic virtue in man-made institutions. All that matters is the intrinsic morality of the people making them up. A vain medieval aristocrat brought about tremendous beauty while a fake priest lies about it. Neither "the Church" nor any other collection of historically-traceable prideful bloviating is worth a mote of dust without Christian faith. That implies truthfulness. As in let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No. And judge by the fruits.
The modern centralization of art is systemic. There's nothing inherently wrong with a Museum of Contemporary Christian Art - it's the dishonest promulgation of inversion. Of Art! instead of the beauty and inspiration that by its own self-definitions is the point of Christian art. And you don't get from Leonardo and Vasari to this degree of linguistic pollution overnight.
Art centralization starts with the theorizing of the Renaissance. Abstract rules for techne is the founding category error.
Giorgio Vasari, Six Tuscan Poets, 1569, oil on panel, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti - some of these things are not like the others.
It's the construction of a theoretical "discipline" out of a bunch of disparate writers.
Art centralization continues with Academies. Fake theoretical "disciplines" need institutions to teach and enforce them.
Henry Singleton, The Royal Academicians in General Assembly, 1795, oil on canvas, Royal Academy, London
Note the primacy of the now roughly 2000 year old Laocoon. Not that there's anything wrong with tradition. But standards needs justification.
Art centralization peaks with the institutional apparatus of Modernism. Conflating "art" and "institutional setting" cuts off organic creativity and puts the resources and control in the hands of a few. And if their intrinsic moral direction is askew...
The degeneration of basic ability, insight, depth of thought would be humiliating were this real.
Note how the one constant is that somehow "the arts" keep becoming bigger and more centralized ideologically. Despite the art being as awful as it is and never getting better. It’s how you know that perpetual systemic growth is the primary end. By the fruits. If the beast apparatus keeps expanding and the art is self-evidently infantile trash next to a historical legacy that looks like a gift of the elves in comparison...
Although we refer to institutions for convenience, what we are talking about is less concrete. The general perception of “art” in society. This is not the same as the beast institutions, but they are sympatico. It’s the avant-garde process we discussed in earlier posts. Cultural “anti-heroes” make dyscivics “cool” then the establishment legitimizes the “radical” changes. It filters into the wider perception with help from the entire beast media-industrial complex. That’s really it – the rest is window dressing. Sort of depressing. Move on.
Classic boardgame of art collecting, auctioning, and forgery. First appeared in 1970 with subsequent reissues. Not commenting on gameplay - see the reviews on the linked page. Just consider the cards representing the masterpieces in question. Lots of hideous modern crap.
The game reflects what was considered important by experts and useful for beast money laundering valuable. It's following the mainstream - like thinking CDC "information" will improve your health and quality of life. Just another example where modern inversion is normalized in popular culture. Although Parker was also pushing Ouija at the time, so lets leave their inadvertence an open question...
Edgar Degas' Dancers in the Wings card from the Masterpiece game.
Just one example. Impressionist Edgar Degas is famous among beast dancers for his young ballerinas. Seriously. To the tune of "approximately 1,500 paintings, monotypes, and drawings". That's not a motif, it's obsessive fetishization. Consider that the Paris ballet had become a front for channeling low-income girls into the bustling Parisian sex trade and...
But there's a long string praise for Degas' light and color and quirky descriptions of his "solitary personality" that would never render hundreds of images of adolescent prostitutes - often alone in studio - for any reason other than "the art". Enough. These apologist freaks are as morally culpable as the abuser since they create the conditions that make it happen. Next time you read one of these wet-lipped apologists, just do what we've been saying to do. Look at the pictures and listen to the words.
According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, this is purely an artistic exercise.
The importance that Degas attached to the composition is evident in the preparatory drawings that he made for almost every figure, from the dancer scratching her back in the foreground to the woman yawning next to the stage flat.
Now the picture. Pay particular note to the "gentlemen" on the right.
Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, 1874, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Right. It would be amusing that fools think beast shills and their already-dead NPCs care about "hypocrisy" if it weren't so retarded and destructive. They don't. "Abuse" is something they fantasize about while using selective accusations to destroy reputations among people who do care. But when it comes to their own, pedophiles like Polanski and Degas are held up for extra accolades. Endless extra miles of defense. By the fruits - child rape with impunity enhances your appealing to secular globalism. It has to - the sexualized destruction of innocence is the Holy Grail of the beast system.
Centralizing of the arts turns out to be the same as any centralizing culture.
Pablo Picasso, Sylvette (Portrait of Mlle. D.), 1954 as Masterpiece card
Start with replacing bottom-up organic development with top-down theory and fake standards. Genius artists became “timeless” models. And gradually whatever it was that art was invented to do became replaced by a web of contexts and associations. The conceptual centralization that gives us Art! Once that stage is reached, whatever links to money and influence dominate set the terms. No matter how inverted into ugliness and evil.
And even "masterpiece" will signify the opposite.
And the root problem is the same as centralization in general - massive, distorting concentrations of wealth. It is of no consequence whether the sums are “public”, “private”, or some twisted bastard of the two. What matters is that whoever is overseeing the resources - whoever controls the central power of the centralized system - has access to streams of capital beyond reckoning. Limitless essentially.
It's how over $450 million can be spent on this. Not adjusted for inflation. It's a fine painting and historically very important. The Band has made it clear that Leonardo is underrated in cultural importance.
In this case the huge glut of unaccountable capital did go to something of value. Zero connection to the West, its nations and people, or it's culture, mind you - the piece was for the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017 and not publicly shown since.
Looking closer...
According to the Guardian, there are questions about the authenticity. Grain of salt - the Guardian has always been low-IQ beast propaganda under hollow claims of "legitimacy". But that makes any shade they throw on the beast worth a look.
Apparently the painting was stripped down to the original layer of paint - presumably Leonardo's contribution - before the current restoration. Note the two thumbs - the kind of correction artists do when figuring something out. This supports the idea that Leonardo did it - unfinished pieces are standard issue for him. But it calls the "restoration", purchase price, and lack of public appearances into question. Hardly the A-list attraction for a new museum with the Louvre name and Gulf State money.
It was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The museum has been up and running for a while. The "Leonardo" has not been seen in public since its purchase. Current whereabouts are unknown. It was on Mohammed bin Salman's superyacht for a while. This means it's likely further damaged by dampness and other changing conditions.
The whole story screams of chicanery. Of course, "restoration" is itself a scam intended to transform paintings to better fit current tastes and market conditions.
Putting aside whether Leonardo or his workshop painted it, this is as much the work of the 21st-century restorers.
The Salvator Mundi sits in limbo because the Louvre is no longer confident in their attribution and Prince Salman won't show a half-billion "investment" without that certainty. The value comes from the name - a workshop piece with minimal direct involvement from Leonardo starts knocking zeros off the value. If it was made under his supervision by assistants, it may be worth a couple of million. If less connected than that, the price may drop below $100,000. The name is everything in the art market.
Note how none of this has anything to do with the truth, beauty, or techne in the picture. When judging the quality of a statement, who cares about the name of the author? Well apart from already-dead protoplasm shambling around in search of someone to think for them. And this only happens when Art! dances for elites with so many asymmetric resources that they can drop half a bil on a fake.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Study of the Figure of Christ, 1648-56, oil on panel, Louvre Abu Dhabi
It's not like the museum is ill-suited to handle rare art treasures. It's a first-rate operation technically. The problem is that of all newer museums - most of the names are already locked down. Even a small Rembrandt like this is a coup.
The only reason for Salman to keep the painting out of the museum is concern over public viewing. Because it will draw crowds.
Want new masters so you aren't dependent on finding tiny Rembrandts and fake Leonardos for millions? Culture has to prioritize real art. There has to be value in it to incentivize lifetimes spent developing genius. And there is two ways this can go.
1. People purchase art they like - in galleries, off the internet, at sales, wherever.
"Supporting the arts" by giving money to beast institutions and foundations is retarded. Might as well donate directly to NAMBLA and the Church of Satan. But supporting the arts by buying things from artists that you can afford and like is the complete opposite. When Leonardo painted a picture, a person bought it. No one was torching good money to support degenerate bureaucracies that hate them and beauty.
Brent Cotton, Early Spring on the Bitterroot, 21st century
That's how you find real art today. Like this painter - click for his site. The modern version of patronizing an artist.
The one thing about this path is that you may make a good living, but you'll never get the beast accolades that come from being within Art! That's because it's decentralized. Individual buyers don't wield the level of asymmetric resources - institutional or private - that the the system does.
2. The elites return to shoveling resources into developing the same caliber in contemporary art as the old masters they spew millions for.
This won't happen because - as noted - they aren't into the old masters for the techne or logos. It's the movement of money that matters to the buyers.
Not quite as much for the museums. They are complicit in the attribution-value game of course. But it's all from the same place for them. They like old masters for the name recognition that gets turnstiles spinning.
Having the Mona Lisa lets the Louvre do a Leonardo show like no one else. Just without the ones that might be fake. Even the ones that they won't come out and say are probably fake because the owner is a big-time donor, and the Abu Dhabi branch spent a lot of time cultivating the relationship, and...
Note how there is no talk in the reports about reversing the sale. The priority is the asset value and innuendo doesn't matter when the value comes from an Art! name. The Band has no idea if the painting is real. We've never seen it and wouldn't know what to look for if we had. The way a Renaissance workshop worked is one big confounder. Students, assistants, and the master were all painting for different reasons. Students learning, shop work for paying clients, big contracts for the master - and all under the master's supervision.
Philips Galle engraving after Jan van der Straet, Artist's Workshop, around 1580-1605, British Museum
The master would assist students, add highlights to shop work - his hand would be all over the output. Assistants were prized for the ability to simulate the master's style. So the question is always how much of the master's hand?
If the Salvator Mundi is a shop piece, it looks like a good one in the pictures. There is certainly some Leonardo there. The other problem is the restoration. It changes the look to seem more "profound". Like a Leonardo.
Take a look.
It wasn't finished, but Leonardos usually aren't. What's there is pretty intense. The hand is really good. There's nothing that would make us question expert consensus on this one either way.
The point is how centralization and asymmetric resources define Art! The piece is what is is. Is there truth in the techne? As a devotional piece - which it would have been - does it foster a pious mood? These are the factors that made the artist's name. The modern inversion is that the name is more important that the factors.
But we know this.
That's a Leonardo. The situation becomes more nakedly preposterous with modern sales. A Japanese billionaire paying over $110 million for a Basquiat has nothing to do with the arts of the West. It's something different. We've been using Art! but that describes the nonsense cultural apparatus. The intersection with large sums of capital moves into investments and banking. The vastly larger and more pervasive beast financial system. That is, the asymmetric resources that are necessitated by centralization writ large.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, private
That it's no longer the highest price for an American piece just further proves the point. It's not really about the art.
From a narrative perspective it's an important piece. Basquiat was brought over from street art in a transparently vampiric attempt at appropriating edginess. This was the breakout piece. The price comes from narrative consideration, not artistic ones.
That's centralization. To fridge it you have to define it, and for art, that starts in the Renaissance. The problem is that without some centralization, there's no art to corrupt. But any centralization points to increasingly asymmetric power and potential for corruption. It's like our condition is fallen, with moral entropy driven by subjective solipsism and inherent limits of discernment...
Bring up the next question – how is it to be avoided? The drive to centralize is historical and inevitable. As is the potential for corruption. The answer - as in all cases of necessary fallen moral entropy - is external to systems. It's the intrinsic morality of those who make the systems up. Alignment with Logos. The Christian West vs. the beast system.
Adam and Eve hiding from God; the Expulsion; Adam and Eve laboring, from an Old English Hexateuch, around 1000 AD, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv, f.7v
Live in reality or "be your own God all the way down to ontological self-erasure.
Same as it ever was.
But Renaissance centralization raises the question of who the asymmetric central powers were. For the imposition of a theoretical definition to begin centralization, there has to be some authority - soft or hard - to make it stick. The situation was symbiotic - theorists react to what the artists are doing, then make up rules that piggyback onto the appeal of the art. But the elite class allocating the resources to art production as well as the artists have to embrace them. If Vasari was told to pound sand or Alberti had it made clear his fixation on pagan immorality intolerable, there likely isn't a "theoretical revolution". Instead they and their ilk were feted by the elites and still presented as "primary source material" today.
So who were the elites that were so driven to impose these degenerative inversions on what was already centuries-old tradition? Not the weird Northern attempts to touch the holy figures, but the pollution of Logos with pagan lies and eroticism? Two main groups have turned up.
Giovanni Mannozzi, Lorenzo de Medici Surrounded by Artists, Admiring Michelangelos Faun, 1620s-1630s, fresco, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
We've mostly considered the aristocratic banking families of Florence and the Church. The families getting the attention since the birth of international finance is pretty important for the beast system.
But what about the Church? The Renaissance Church is a moral blemish on Christendom and one of the biggest single drivers of the Reformation. Consider one example.
In the 1490s Pope Alexander VI of the Borgia family hired the Pinturicchio - the eminent student of Perugino - to fresco his private apartment within the Vatican palace. they get less attention than they deserve - Pinturriccio would be overshadowed by Michelangelo and especially Raphael within a decade. And Julius II's hatred for Alexander made sure the rooms followed suit. He refused to live in the same suite and moved one floor up. The apartments Raphael painted for him were the replacement quarters.
Pinturicchio, The Room of Sibyls, 1492-1495, Borgia Apartments, Vatican Museum
Sibylline prophesizing of the Virgin birth and other Christian truths were noted since the early Middle Ages. But they only become recurring themes in major art projects with the rise of Renaissance humanism as elite intellectual culture. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel is the most famous example, but Pinturicchio's room is an important Vatican forerunner.
Pinturicchio, Micah and the Tiburtine Sibyl, 1492-95, fresco, Room of the Sibyls, Borgia Apartments
The subtle favoritism for the prophets comes through in their placement on the right hand side in each pairing. Otherwise, there is no obvious value to Biblical rather than non-Biblical prophecy.
The argument that God bestowed equal prophetic insight beyond his Covenant people shatters the exclusivity and unity of the Christian message and renders the Old Covenant unnecessary. And why? Because the elites think paganism is cool and want to make it part of the Church.
It's not only paintings of sibyls - they're just the most obvious examples. Take a look at Pinturicchio's Room of the Saints - the most elaborate of the apartments. The martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria introduces an Egyptian theme that Alexander uses as a springboard into a weird humanistic fantasy. This combines Hermetic misreading of Egyptian intellectual history, the beyond-retarded claim Osiris also typologically foreshadows Christ, and the motif of the bull as symbol of the resurrected Osiris and the Borgia. It goes much deeper, but the blend of heresy, stupidity, and vanity is pretty obvious from a thumbnail description.
Pinturicchio, The Hall of the Saints, 1492-95, fresco, Borgia Apartments
The room has a three-bay ceiling where Osiris and the Apis Bull as Christian-Borgia-Papal allegory plays out.
The large scene shows St. Catherine disputing the Emperor's philosophers prior to her martyrdom. Pinturicchio follows the walls of the Sistine Chapel by adding Roman architectural features to early Christian scenes. A triumphal arch topped by the Borgia bull connects late antique Alexandria to Alexander's papacy. The name provides another "typological" link.
Here's one of the bays. Note the tiny pyramids and the symbolic bull. Pinturicchio's pyramids are taller proportionally than Egyptian ones because he was unfamiliar with actual Egyptian material culture. His model was probably the Roman Pyramid of Cestius - a first-century BC tomb inspired by the wave of Egyptomania following Augustus' conquest of Egypt.
Pyramid of Cestius, around 12 BC, Rome
Not the Night Land - the steep monument that probably inspired Pinturicchio's versions.
The occult posts on Hermes untangle some of the ways distorted impressions of Egypt were folded into imperial Roman culture even before the birth of Jesus. This meant that there was already layers of historical nonsense in humanist "source material" from the beginning. Neither this pyramid nor Pinturicchio and Alexander knew a thing about Egyptian history and culture. They don't appear to have known much about Christianity either.
Alexander VI, like the visceral Northern devotional images in the last post are pre-Reformation. Utterly and incompatibly different visions of our relationship to God and reality, but still appearing under the same nominal "Church". Both perspectives can't be truthful. Arguably neither are. Then we consider that the medieval Church claimed authority on the Petrine succession - the claim that Jesus' scriptural charge to Peter necessitates the exact structural hierarchy of the institutional Church and removes it from criticism. Including "dogmas" made up in historically-identifiable political contexts centuries later.
Now we know that worldly changelessness is ontologically impossible. The question is whether the changes are meaningful. In the case of the Church, meaningful means consistent with the thrust of scripture - and not claiming powers and rules that Jesus himself does not. Costumes may change, render unto God and judge by the fruits don't. When we consider that the only centralized hierarchies in the Bible are superseded by the New Covenant, it is obvious the establishment of any legalistic system is a material-level interpretation of abstract truth. It can't be metaphysical. So changing the apostolic mission into a centralized self-defining order is meaningful - the question is what it means. That's for the next post.
Roman coin with Constantine I and the Sol Invictus, struck 309-310 AD at the Lugdunum mint; Roman Imperial repoussé silver disc of Sol Invictus, 3rd century, British Museum
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