Truth in Apprehensible Reality pt. 2 - Secular Transcendence, Inversion, & the Hudson River School

Abstract & Material Truth in the Inversion of Art at the Dawn of the House of Lies.

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If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above. 

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Sanford Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, Metropolitan Museum of Art

[Note - this got big. We have to split it again. This post uses the Hudson River School and a catalog to look at fake abstraction and the inversion of art for insight into the larger context.] 

A couple of posts ago we were looking at how we understand truth and proposed some examples of material-abstract interaction. This came out of thinking about levels of reality for the metaphysics book, but became interesting on its own. R/K selection theory was something we thought might make a good example of how empirical observation and abstract reasoning work together as apprehensible truth. Instead, we found it fit well enough with our observations about the House of Lies and wider ontological possibilities to spend more time on it. Then the Watchmen thing came up and the last post took the synergies to the SSH. A digression on one level, but really further development of abstract/material relations as we can know them.

The points – to test the practicality of the Ontological Hierarchy as a map of reality and to show how it works – haven’t changed. Now we want to finish that initial post with the things we didn’t get to. And some more that have popped up since.

We don’t want to rehash the structure of apprehensible truth. It's covered in the first part of the post that this one continuing, so check it out if you haven’t seen it or don’t remember. Since that first part ended abruptly, we want to jump right back in with the next example as if it were the same post. 

Apprehensible reality is that aspect of reality we can discern logically or empirically - apprehend. We talk about the two separately for analytical purposes but in human reality, they're constinctive. Hierarchically mutually distinct and defining within a larger frame of reference. Perception is the stuff of thought, thought is how we understand perception.

Apprehensible Truth means representation - internal or external - that corresponds accurately to what is apprehensibly real. To what is. Materially observable and logically consistent.

What started this was random. We often come across things that light up other connections. Most of the time they’re not that interesting to others, but sometimes they’re worth sharing, like the Rorschach heroism stuff. Something similar happened while reading about the Hudson River School for SG. One of the books we found online was an extensive 1988 exhibition catalog called American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here’s the link.

It's is the sort of high-quality, in-depth catalog that major museums produce for big shows. They’re basically coffee-tableish books with academic press-level essays and technical reports. They're expensive to produce - this one has a ton of pictures, including a lot in color. It is from the 80s and aimed at the specialist crowd, so lots of b&w too, since information density comes ahead of aesthetics. It's a great resource, so unconditional respect to the Met for making this a free download and posting it to Google Books. 

The Band is hard on beast institutions, but the Met is great for making their stuff available. A selection of recent offerings, all fully downloadable. Covering the whole range of the Met's activity and collections. Got some art of your own? The care and handling of art objects: practices in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a complete guide to how the museum looks after and handles priceless delicate things. For the completist, they have the 1987 version too. That and a whole lot more.

The Band promotes cultural awareness and using the resources that are available to us in an inverted system. We also know a lot of readers like art. It's worth the time to show how valuable it is when the old institutional purpose lingers on. Of course, the beast Art! narrative is assumed, so read with a careful eye. The documentable facts, pictures, and technical information is priceless. Or at least pricy, given the cost of books. For starters...

Oceania : art of the Pacific Islands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art - lots of coverage of the Met's world art collections

Instruments of passion: Music, painting and the contest of the arts: a symposium - discussion of cultural themes

Pen and parchment : drawing in the Middle Ages - focus on one medium in a period adds depth to breadth

Vanities : art of the dressing table - historical design and manufacture

Gifts for the gods : images from Egyptian temples - broad topic in ancient art around the collections

Warriors of the Himalayas : rediscovering the arms and armor of Tibet - world art, specific theme, design and manufacture

Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall : an artist's country estate - specific artist and project in context

Impressed by light : British photographs from paper negatives, 1840-1860 - focus on one medium in a period 

Prague: the Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437 - focus on one location in a period adds depth to breadth

The Cloisters : glossary of terms - extensive technical vocabulary around a period

Velázquez rediscovered - specific artist

The Cesnola collection of Cypriot art - broad topic in ancient art around the collections

Choirs of angels : painting in Italian choir books, 1300-1500 - focus on one medium in a period 

The armored horse in Europe, 1480-1620 - historic period, specific theme, design and manufacture

Landscapes clear and radiant : the art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) - specific artist, world art

Note how many paintings in this post come from the Met. Title links will take you to the institutional page, for them and others. 

Too easy to get sidetracked. The Met actually puts what looks to be all their catalogs online for free, without registration requirements. This along with a huge body of essays and timelines and every work in their collection that’s been digitized. Including prints, drawings, and pieces in storage for decades. And all their conservation activities. The Band relies heavily on public access resources like this. The alternative visual history we are doing would be impossible without it. The documentary and historical information, and especially the thousands of images we can look at without leaving Band HQ. We are hard on beast culture institutions, but credit where it’s due.

A lot of museums are doing what stewards of culture are supposed to do and sharing their treasures and knowledge with the public. The fact that MPAI and don’t look at any of it isn’t their fault. Beyond creating an Art! culture built on lies that repels the balanced and healthy, anyhow.

There's also a long history of the system being rationally human and reward-based enough to seem like reality. That lingering Western Christian cultural momentum. And any of us who remember being immersed in it remember how people claiming it's fake were presented.

David  Sipress, The End is Near #1, New Yorker Cartoons

The trope, with a little SSH aside. Spot the gamma is the obvious game, but with a meta twist. The New Yorker is a self-selecting hive of systemic gamma - the upper-class r-selected abundance grazer worldview.

This is a reminder that we need to be careful when discussing levels in the House of Lies. It’s a fully integrated network, and many of the nodes are unaware of their role in a vast illusion. They don’t think about the logical contradictions in the things they claim to believe. Or how the same words now mean the opposite of what they did in the old documents they’re studying, copy editing, and publishing. We realize it seems crazy to anyone who can see it at all. It led us to a functionally two species analogy. 

Remember, the Huffers-Engineers cycle isn’t a simple binary. Some Huffers also disseminate – useful idiots in positions of authority and influence that are still NPCs in the script. Then there are those who see through at least some of the deception but are art lovers, and the mainstream is the only game in town. That can be someone who dreams of repairing and restoring old masterpieces, and has to work in a beast institution to access the training and opportunity. Or us, using sites we’d prefer to avoid for ideological reasons because that’s where the high-res photos are.

It's the basic House of Lies cycle. The false reality (red arrows) works on two intertwined levels at once. It is subconsciously traumatic and dehumanizing by nature just by existing. And there are all the deliberate fake narratives layered over that.

The huffers - FTS-2s - absorb the trauma and fake narratives and lose the ability to discern reality. They react to the narratives as if they were real, thereby making them real in effect. Empowering and reinforcing the narrative that reduces them to... orifices. Literally and figuratively. 

What this graphic doesn't show is that the huffers aren't monolithic either.

There are levels of FTS-2. Some act as enforcers or promoters of the fake narratives while believing them themselves. Useful idiots, to be less charitable. These are narrative huffers with a position of status in the House of Lies because of a chit. Their belief in the narrative is valuable because it makes their dissemination sincere and convincing. And turns civic institutions into narrative engines.

Delusional gibbering about "autonomy" aside, the arts reflect the society that they come from. The world of mainstream art is a weave of institutions, narratives, and disseminators on professional and social levels. Definitely a culture and probably fair to call a society of sorts. A sub-society. And a particularly leftist one to use the traditional terminology thanks to [modernist radicalist mythology] + [dependency on government and institutional funding]. Just as court artists tended to be royalist. Most artist "conviction" is a mix of social conformity and "who's paying?" Not that there's anything wrong with that - it describes life in most contexts. Just means we have to pay attention to the context.

Today, the career path through Art! school leads to the beast grant teat and/or networking with converged commercial galleries and buyers. It’s easy for an FTS-2 to waft into that structure and absorb the ideologies they’ve been hearing since kindergarten. Radical chic shouldn't really be surprising at this point. 

Government funding comes from a lot of places but the NEA is the best known. Conservative jobbers have staged outrage parties in the past about it while distracting from the actual issue. Impotent screeching never lasts because FTS-2 have fruit-fly tier memories. So the narrative can dismiss them first as loons then as relics, as the crisis fades and the House lies on. The real issue is why this body exists in the first place.

The visual arts are a corner of the larger NEA funding mission. A look at their project guidelines is very typical of the House of Lies. Benign language that seems unobjectionable enough. Socially responsible even. But as is often the case, look for what isn't there. No mention of talent, skill, or truth. No measure of "art" as understood throughout its history. Instead, things related to art as a career. A credential, cut off from its fundamental originary purpose. Representation over reality. Structural inversion and open to whatever agenda the narrative calls for.

The whole mainstream “art” narrative is a materialist fable made up post-facto for self-serving and/or atavistic reasons. But it’s presented as fact. “The way things are”. It’s no trouble for artists and art lovers to get caught up in the nonsense and then reinforce the same nonsense to others. And round we go again. 

What we are saying is that not everyone caught up in the narrative is willfully, knowingly evil. But they are personally responsible for the self-serving lies they believe.

 

The catalog was published for a major show “rehabilitating” the Hudson River School in the beast art narrative.

The cover shows a Thomas Cole (1801–1848) painting - one that invariably turns up as the example in summaries and overviews. It also serves the beast art narrative.

Cole was the self-directed founder of the school, though he didn't set out to lead a group. It was that his vision inspired followers who did group together. Art genealogies become apparent in hindsight. His work was also full of religious and other reflections drawn from his studies. The Oxbow does reflect his interest in the sublimity of the New World landscape. But it ignores his own interests as an artist to make him fit a post-facto significance in beast world. 

The real strength of the catalog is the list of paintings - "THE PAINTINGS" in the contents. It's a set of well-researched mini-essays, alphabetical by artists, going into a detail on all the artworks that appeared in this big show. Along with photos of drawings, places, and other relevant supporting materials.

The essays place the school within the beast narrative. This is what we're focusing on.

Example of the picture studies. Facts are factual. But framing isn't necessarily. Be wary of breezy conclusions that sound truthy but are unsupported anywhere. Like comments on "changing tastes of the public" that don't consider changes in how art was exhibited or made available. "The public" aren't connoisseurs. They're easily directed by the options you allow them. Read against the narrative grain and extract the logical or archivally legitimate data points.

It's an attractive book. Packed full of info and very readable. Not filled with jargon and nicely laid out. We want to focus on the Beast Art Narrative™ that this effort goes to setting up. It's similar in important ways to the Darkness of Man™ that we commented on in the Watchman post. One refers to human activity, the other to human nature, but they are alike as distorted inductive abstractions inverted into false "causes" or explanations. 

That's the thing about true and false abstraction - Abstract Reality and unreality. An inductive Abstract Reality is derived from pattern recognition in groups of "things". A deductive one is derived from logical principles. But in either case, they are apprehensibly real - materially observable as well as logically consistent.  Abstract unreality can pose as either, but in neither case is it consistent in logical and materially observable terms. The tricky ones - like the DoM - are partially true. There are consistent observables included to make the whole package feel convincing. The Fallen entropic aspects of material reality make DoM seem real. The full picture of Creation in God's image exposes the larger lie.

We can induce a spherical shape. Or that they're colorful. The same could be deduced from the manufacturing processes.

To only show two of the front ones and claim they're all blue and white, or the front right two and claim they're all the same size is dishonest. To claim they can "can't be used for games" because autonomy or "must be organized in a certain way" because ontology is retarded.

It's not actually complicated. It's that lies and abstract truth come in similar forms and the entirety of the House of Lies is aimed at obscuring the difference. 

Inverting cause and effect is extremely destructive bad faith. With the DoM, de-moralization  - deliberate, conscious, immoral decisions - can be reimagined as misfortunate "human nature". When the real human nature is the ability to be slow trapped and broken by the House of Lies. The DoM has a demented twin that pretends all humans are sparks of inspiration striving for self-actualization and if given a free laptop and GBI totally won't waste it on vices and porn. Perversely, DoM and the Pollyanna inverse both remove real moral questions from social policy. There's no need to consider the downstream effects of our choices if we're all Lord of the Flies or young Prometheus. And the same inverted House of Lies that creates the [trauma and alienation meets r-supportive abundance] cocktail gets waved around as the solution either way. More control. More intervention. More gibs. 

The Beast Art Narrative also needs a convenience acronym. BAN is uncreative but works on a couple of levels. To make sure new ideas mesh with old ones, here's how it fits. What we call Art! is the inversion of the arts of the West from the production of L+T to fake centralized narrative. So think of it as defined by BAN and populated by modern trash. It's similar to DoM in that it takes bits of truth - in this case real works of art - and makes up a fake narrative around them. One that is a living index of the rise of beast centralization but pretends to be as objectively true as the sunrise.

Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

The idea that a group as skilled and visionary as the Hudson River School needs rehabilitation tells us a lot about BAN and it’s institutional promoters. The group’s art hasn’t changed since it was painted, other than some damage and aging. Same paintings showing the same things. People loved them then, people love them now. 

This one shows Thomas Cole and his friend nature poet William Cullen Bryant in their beloved Catskills. It was commissioned for Bryant by a mutual friend after Cole's untimely death in 1848.

What the catalog shows someone outside the system is the arrival and metastasis of BAN before the Armory Show of 1913. The mythic endpoint of the arts of the West posts. This is probably the context that set the stage for the modern trash to come.

What we're seeing is the development of an integrated Art! world. We start with Cole's unique vision tying sublime landscape to elevated themes. Click for a short essay on Cole and selection of his paintings from the Met.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Cole's four-part Voyage of Life series combines fantastical sublime Romantic landscapes with a Christian allegory of life. The first shows the soul emerging into a bright, fecund world under the watchful eye of a guardian angel. Glorious morning sunrise evokes the potential and wonder of a beginning.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1842, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

The final installment shows the triumphs and trials of the world receding to to irrelevance while the soul focuses on the final reward. Not hard to see why a materialist narrative would find this ,ess than appealing.

The first problem is the fit. The author of the second essay wants to put Cole in the context of Joshua Reynolds and the Enlightenment aesthetics that Modernism "rebels" against in BAN. It's worth an extended quote and breakdown to show how Cole's actual artistic interests are replaced with narrative service. The big one is the Enlightenment idealism. Cole's art is idealistic, but really different ideologically from Reynolds. But nothing a bit of legerdemain can't overcome to set up a familiar narrative piñata. From pages 25-26 

We really don't want to get sidetracked into Reynolds & the beginnings of English academism. It's a huge topic, not that deeply relevant to the Hudson River School, and turgid reading. Reynolds isn't a "systematic" thinker, but that's irrelevant if the foundation is nonsense. 

Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait, 1780, oil on panel, Royal Academy of Arts

Reynolds was a central figure in Enlightenment-era English art. He was first president of the Royal Academy, leading portrait painter to the elite, and his Discourses on Painting are a manifesto of his influential brand of English academic art. See how he's posing with a document & classical bust, not a brush and easel. He wants to be seen as an intellectual, not a craftsman.

And there's the secular transcendence. Art isn't pure Logos. There is no material abstract reality that doesn't need a material manifestation. Downgrading techne for "pure reason" is a major Enlightenment inversion. One that untethers art for substanceless and therefore subvertable blather. 

Reynolds' techne is English Grand Manner. English art developed differently from the continent, where Italian Renaissance and Baroque ideas steadily trickled out. In England, the ideas trickled through individual artists and collectors without the totalizing control of the French Academy. Or the intense organic hothouse of Italy. Reynolds' art follows the ideals of classical art theory filtered through Van Dyck and Rubens - the masters that brought that art to England. His ideas are products of influence and context. Organically influenced by organic reactions to organic ancient art and ideas. But he pretends that they are pre-existing Abstract Reality that express ontological Truth.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, A discourse, delivered to the students of the Royal Academy, on the distribution of the prizes, December 11, 1769, by the President, printed in London by William Griffin for the Royal Academy

Reynolds wrote fifteen discourses between 1769 and 1790, each published shortly after its delivery. The first seven were published together in 1778 and the first collected edition of all fifteen appeared in 1797. Over thirty editions have been published since. 

The Royal Academy was founded in 1768 by a group of 40 artists. The idea was similar to the French - a combination think tank, school, and professional society - only without the absolutist context that made the French so hegmonic.

Reynolds' stilted blather makes him hard to excerpt. He needs a big text block to get to the pseudo-point. Here's a link to the full text of the Discourses. To get around the problem, we'll take a big chunk of pages 155-156 and break it down with comments. As usual, the quotations are in this font and the comments are in the usual black text to keep things clear.

Let us for a moment take a short survey of the progress of the mind towards what is, or ought to be, its true object of attention.

Hold on to the notion that Reynolds is a gamma for now. The idea is a quasi-platonic ascent from a barbarous state to culture through the cultivation of the mind. This isn't radical. But the secular transcendence is. He wants the idea of progress towards a humanly-perceptible metaphysical ideal but in an essentially materialist ontology. Divine watchmakers and perpetual motion machines not withstanding [secular transcendence is the central ontological category error that doomed the Enlightenment project and opened the way to the House of Lies. If interested, here’s a link to a post on it].

Man, in his lowest state, has no pleasures but those of sense, and no wants but those of appetite; afterwards, when society is divided into different ranks, and some are appointed to labour for the support of others, those whom their superiority sets free from labour begin to look for intellectual entertainments. Thus, whilst the shepherds were attending their flocks, their masters made the first astronomical observations; so music is said to have had its origin from a man at leisure listening to the strokes of a hammer.

This is a projected defense of his leisure class clientele dressed up as fake just-so history. Obviously art a) has cultural value and b) requires resource support. It's why it's always connected to money or the equivalent. But the whole argument is inverted. We know as indisputable empirical and historical fact that the elites don't "look for intellectual entertainments". The opposite is true. Reynolds is ontologically reverse-engineering contemporary English aristocratic posturing. There were noble  like exceptions like Shaftsbury and Burlington who used their time and intellects to energize the arts. But this wasn't typical. They were intrinsically-driven guys that would have excelled in the arts from any background. Most patrons collected art and wore velvet bags on their heads because it was a class status marker.

Jean Preudhomme, Portrait of Douglas, 8th Duke of Hamilton,on his Grand Tour with his Physician Dr John Moore and the Latter's Son John, 1774, oil on canvas, National Museums Scotland

The Grand Tour was "enculturing" but not like a scholar or artist going to study. It was upper crust finishing school - see the sights, drop the names, and buy up as much as possible for the estate. But not because the Faunlteroys and Ha-Has were becoming erudite. Because that was the class marker of the time. Like some pampered tool today virtue signaling about whatever. They do it because they are told to. What Reynolds was doing was creating a post-facto justification for a particular form of sophisticated r-selected consumption by pretending it's "natural".

The human history of art was not driven by learned gentleman relaxing to the sounds of labor.

Enlightenment "nature" might be the most retarded concept in a movement made of them. We say might, because the bar is so high. The Band's early posts dealt with this absurdity so we won't go in depth. It's enough that "the Rationalists" wanted to keep all the intellectual and cultural structures of the Christian West while pretending that the metaphysical underpinnings they derive from don't exist. Which is logically self-detonating. Like using the Pythagorean Theorem while denying the reality of math. But abstractions can lie. That's the whole point of distinguishing real and not real abstraction  All that happened was that those abstract and spiritual aspects of human being-in-the-world that didn't stop being obvious got put onto "nature". And the great books poseurs wonder why poststructuralism demolished their incoherent secular idealism.

The pseudo-history continues. Enlightenment thinkers loved infantile projected fake origin stories that just so happened to "prove" their solipsistic nonsense. Rousseau being the king [heady times indeed when the secret king steps out of the shadows and all the right people clap].

Charles Eisen, frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'architecture 2nd ed., 1755 

Laugier's allegorical engraving of the Vitruvian primitive hut is typical of this epistemological mess. From the link - Laugier is an example of a tendency in architectural theory over the period 1750-1850: the primitive hut is transformed from a historical point of origin into the embodiment of a-historical design principles. We have Vitruvius taken at face value as historical authority - the naturally-emergent form of human dwelling was a proto-Greek temple. Ergo, the  classical standard isn't just arbitrary cultural preference. It's Natural!.

The old Renaissance concept of art as divinely inspired genius was essentially Christian Neoplatonism. It was based in the Ultimate Reality of God/the Good, and could anchor authoritative judgments of beauty logically. The new version wanted divine-tier standards to be intrinsic properties of the physical universe. Or a chick in a nice dress. What secular transcendence is.

Stone Age stilt house recreations, Lake Dwelling Museum, Unteruhldingen, on Lake Constance, Germany

In some cases, prehistoric dwellings conform. Classical Greek architecture is not structurally complex by ancient standards. The carving and finishing is, but columns and entablature are basic post-and-lintel systematized into formulas. And a peaked roof has always been practical for shedding water or snow. But...

...in some cases, they don't.

Ruh roh. The origins of architecture are practically driven. Secure space for various functions. Forms depend on materials, climate, purpose, and any aesthetic or symbolic cultural values shapes and materials have.

The inductive abstraction - [classical architecture] or [architecture theory] is based on local preference. Any "higher truth" expressed in the forms is manifesting abstract or spiritual realities in arbitrary form. L+T.

One of the biggest weaknesses of fake history is real history. Enlightenment secular transcendence requires a situationally specific form to be the "pure" expression of whatever general function architecture was invented to do. Otherwise figments of cultural preference can't claim to have ontological foundations [Note - to reiterate for emphasis. Without metaphysics - and materialism literally is no metaphysics - there's no "higher" Truth to manifest - it has to be an emergent property of the material in material reality. Hence Nature with a capital N. Some systematically undefined transcendent property of a secular materialist ontology that makes cultural preference True. Seriously. No matter how many times we reiterate this, it never stops being shocking]. Unfortunately, the technological advancements that actually did come with the Enlightenment include archaeological and historical research techniques. Like historical forensics. And the expanding academic industry did bring the rest of the world under the microscope in the endless search for new topics. And it's past obvious that architecture didn't naturally produce Classical architecture as Truth.

Schaezlerpalais Banquet Hall, architcture by Karl Albrech von Lespilliez, ceiling by Gregorio Gugliemi, carving, mirrors, and gilded stucco by Simpert and Franz II Feichtmayr, 1765-1770, Augsburg

The problem they faced was a result of their own inversion. Enlightenment Europe had very refined culture. All the material goods, all the arts, social mores, etc., philosophers blathering about aesthetics, high-level mass entertainments like novels, even rules of war. Reflective high-culture people in that would would obviously see their achievements as holistically superior. The old Philosophical Bait and Switch [for newer readers, that's when something temporal and contingent is passed off as timeless and universal. In newer terms, it's follows a general inversion of ontological priority order - effect for cause]. 

The relevant Enlightenment retardisms here are universalism and rationalism. The second is the keystone inversion for secular transcendence and the beast system that followed. That human reason is capable of Ultimate Truth by its own power. And all the fake "Laws" and utopianisms that followed. Since this is ontologically impossible, the Rational Truths! proved untrue, but this didn't matter. The form had changed. The right microphone [making up random nonsense an claiming it true] became the source of authority.

It doesn't matter if claim X was wrong. We now "know" reason can achieve anything and we're not there yet, so we just have to progress harder. The point is that there is nothing beyond human reason eventually [note - this is essentially the Langan position in the CTMU posts. We identified the inability of logic to precede its own ontologically necessary conditions but it didn't occur to us to connect it to the Rationalist myth until just now. Probably because processing his structure is such a load that there's not much bandwidth left for real-time creative association. But it is still all the same [man as measure of reality] configuration. Which reduces to do what thou wilt]. The problem - a problem - was that Enlightenment rationalism was also materialist. Which literally means "no metaphysics". We went into this in detail at the start of the Band, so no need to rehash. It's where secular transcendence came from. Basically that these auto-idolators wanted to pretend they could replace God - all is material! - but keep all the cultural wealth that was built on a Christian ontology.

Johan Joseph Zoffnay, The Academicians of the Royal Academy,  1771-72, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust

Nothing about this says "meta-supernal ontological authority".

Obviously this is impossible. Like wanting all the comforts of a tropical cruise, but without the boat. As noted many times, cultural momentum and individual morality could keep things going for a while. Just not indefinitely without some steady force to counter entropic moral corrosion. Reason logically and self-evidently can't subsume ultimate reality. So everything downstream becomes make-believe. These were bright people with a high moral culture, so they tried to be logically consistent from their nonsense starting point. But they didn't have to. There was no reality to serve as measure or check. Lies could be declared "true" and when they proved otherwise, forgotten and replaced with new "truths". Until the House of Lies is formed.

Think of the Form/Content posts or constinction diagrams.

Two levels - the formal system level where the content is possible and the content level that makes up the ideas in the system. The nonsense level and the coalescing beast socio-culture where the nonsense takes place.

The socio-culture has to change enough for the nonsense to be taken seriously. Meanwhile the nonsense works to change the socio-culture. Even if the nonsense gets proven nonsensical, the socio-culture has changed. Far more likely to get more nonsense than return to reality. Especially if the nonsense if based on Progress!. Hence the parade of nonsensical theories and movements in Modernity.

As always, constinctive representation is fractal. Concepts of art are reflective of and shape artworks in whatever medium.

Note the inversion. "Art" as a theoretical concept derived inductively from art as an organic practice. But then it centralizes and claims to have authority over what artistic practice should be. Philosophical bait and switch - the contingent and historical as the objective and timeless.

We realize that referring to a concept as fractal can be unclear for come readers. What it means is that the same pattern repeats on different scales. Just like a fractal graphic but with conceptual relations instead of visual ones.

An imaginative way to think about it. What it important on any level is the two-way arrow shape. Constinction points out something easy to over look - practice and theory are symbiotic so long as techne matters.

The narrative attempts to control art. But it needs artists to develop to keep it going. Next big things can shift direction towards new movements. Because the narrative is fake, logical contradictions are irrelevant. There is no objective Abstract reality being represented. And because of FTS-2 fruit fly tier memory, none of the poseurs remember the old Truth anyhow. Or never knew it. This "art" sticks to the same terminology even as the concepts change. The illusion of continuity from the last post fits here.

Anyhow, secular transcendence lets you to play Lucifer while enjoying Western culture. Just pretend that all the metaphysical inputs needed to build the Good, Beautiful, and True reside qua themselves in the entropic, temporal physical world. The transcendent in the secular. They were already there on the human side with Reason and the universal power of Mind. Now they just needed to make up a source for Ultimate ontological ontological Truths this "Mind" transparently perceives. The answer was an equally transcendent-capable Nature.

The argument literally is take physical, material nature, spell it with a capital N, and all the metaphysical necessities that materialism categorically excludes appear there.

 

Mother Nature, created by Anzonie

It's kind of a cool image. It's also not a real person. We aren't just being facetious. Refusing to account for metaphysical explanations for metaphysical things leads to all kinds of absurd impossibilities.

Band readers know the test for retard fantasy - just account for the internal logical and empirical ontological consistency. How does your fake faith align with fundamental questions of origin?

And here's Reynolds bringing the rigorous cogency worthy of his lofty title. The emphases are ours...

My notion of nature comprehends not only the forms which nature produces, but also the nature and internal fabric and organisation, as I may call it, of the human mind and imagination.

Ontological confusion. There is no concept of natural reality that "the human mind" isn't part of. It's a constinctive subdivision of reality with representational-epistemological implications. So start with a false dichotomy to retain the unique nature of an ensouled body while denying souls. Faux divine spark meets faux divine creation with no empirical or logical foundation.

Confusing subjective perceptual consciousness of reality with reality [what we see] vs. [what is] opens the way to moral relativism, personal "truth", and  do what thou wilt. In short, the House of Lies. It also doesn't work long term.

The terms beauty, or nature, which are general ideas, are but different modes of expressing the same thing, whether we apply these terms to statues, poetry, or pictures. 

This is patently false. No argument is needed or possible. For beauty to be more authoritative than subjective preference, it has to tie to an ontological foundation. Which material reality by nature can't be. Unless we move into pure self-contradiction and pretend the temporal is eternal. Secular transcendence is like art styles. Easier to grasp when there are examples with the explanation. We now see that Reynolds is redefining common terms in order to hide a fake and pernicious ideology beneath reassuring familiarities. Treating Godless clods of dirt as if Divine Creation to supplant God. Where does it come from? In more modern terms, we may call him a pompous turd.

Deformity is not nature, but an accidental deviation from her accustomed practice.  

At this point, what is he even talking about? We don't want to lapse into incredulous slang, but wtf? Where's the standard coming from? Thus is structurally the same as Magic Dirt. The natural, material world ascribed magical powers with the qualities of a) not being logically or empirically evident and b) creating my desired outcome.

Jacob van Ruisdael, Three Great Trees in a Mountainous Landscape with a River, late 1660s, oil on canvas, Norton Simon Museum

So the deformed trees aren't nature. What about the ones that were nicely formed but got blasted by lightening? And how much deformity is allowed? Since absolute precision is materially impossible, what's the standard and permitted wiggle room?

Cue up the capital N... 

This general idea, therefore, ought to be called Nature; and nothing else, correctly speaking, has a right to that name.

And the coherence...

But we are sure so far from speaking, in common conversation, with any such accuracy, that, on the contrary, when we criticise Rembrandt and other Dutch painters, who introduced into their historical pictures exact representations of individual objects with all their imperfections, we say—Though it is not in a good taste, yet it is nature.

Dutch painters? That's Ruisdael's music! 

Jacob van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields, around 1670, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

A little younger than Rembrandt, but a fellow master of the Dutch Baroque and influenced by him. And a profound influence on Romanticism, including the Hudson River School.

So it is nature. Just in poor taste. There's a high probability Reynolds was a gamma.

Disregard the powdered wigs and affected speech and try to imagine this taken as objective cultural foundation by pretty much every credible stakeholder. Imagine, as in define his logic in a coherent way. His blather creates the impression of self-assured authority and partially covers how each sentence contradicts or problematizes the previous one.

It's that chain of unrelated things ordered like an argument or narrative from the last post. 

Only the things are contradictory and self-deifying instead of random.

It's actually irritating to read these termites spew their pompous, intellectually facile pantheism. We wouldn't go over it in such detail if it weren't an archetypal example of the secular transcendence that inverts the West.

Here comes another perennial lie used to justify systemic and population degredation. That giving idiot masses leisure leads to some sort of self-actualization. And not sloth, vice, and literal degeneration. It's always been the inverted argument for destroying human anti-fragility with free vice. Obama phones unlocking underclass creativity was a comical recent example. GBI is the apotheosis. It requires willful disregard of human capability and proven nature.

...it is therefore necessary to the happiness of individuals, and still more necessary to the security of society, that the mind should be elevated to the idea of general beauty, and the contemplation of general truth; by this pursuit the mind is always carried forward in search of something more excellent than it finds, and obtains its proper superiority over the common senses of life, by learning to feel itself capable of higher aims and nobler enjoyments. In this gradual exaltation of human nature, every art contributes its contingent towards the general supply of mental pleasure. Whatever abstracts the thoughts from sensual gratifications, whatever teaches us to look for happiness within ourselves, must advance in some measure the dignity of our nature [156].

Literally self-deification. Transforming spiritual growth - progressively habituating objectively moral behavior - into imaginative projection. There's only so many ways to say it. No matter how well-intentioned the facade, there's no guiding Truth without Truth. And without an apprehensionably real objective corrective, entropy ensues. If "pro-West" secularist husks had any idea how fundamentally, invertedly evil the Enlightenment was, listening to this liar should make it clear. 

The mind is continually labouring to advance, step by step, through successive gradations of excellence, towards perfection, which is dimly seen, at a great, though not hopeless, distance, and which we must always follow, because we never can attain; but the pursuit rewards itself; one truth teaches another, and our store is always increasing, though nature can never be exhausted.

Joshua Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, between 1763 and 1765, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago

Restoration era upper-class English culture was really refined. Sophisticated cultures tend to be - Japan and Persia jump to mind. Lots of connotations in carefully coded behavior. It's not intrinsically virtuous, beyond the material qualities needed to support such intense r-selection. 

But cringe LARPing and allusions to poorly understood historical practices and looted treasures is not a mind "labouring to advance, step by step ... towards perfection".

It's a nice painting though. Reynolds was a very talented technician.

First of all, the mind doesn't continually labor to advance. Good golly, look around us. The retardation to available resource quotient has never been worse. More directly, if minds did intrinsically continue to labor, someone in the position of Reynolds or his lickspittles wouldn't be blathering such nonsense.

Pietro da Cortona, Vision of St Francis, 1641, oil on canvas, Vatican Museum

Bloviating watered down Neoplatonic image theology, just with dress-up in the sculpture gallery instead of God. Rococo painting as mind's road to God platitudinous solipsism. The ascent model only works if there is something to ascend to. Finitude is finite. Reynolds pretends otherwise "nature can never be exhausted".

The lack of any argument at all suggests no engagement with the sources. Probably skimmed from the second-hand Renaissance auto-idolatry on his tiny theoretical reading list.

Like any apparatchik on the dole, he closes the sale with a pitch for the greater good. 

the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without imparting; but which he is yet so far able to communicate, as to raise the thoughts and extend the views of the spectator; and which, by a succession of art, may be so far diffused, that its effects may extend themselves imperceptibly into public benefits, and be among the means of bestowing on whole nations refinement of taste: which, if it does not lead directly to purity of manners, obviates at least their greatest depravation, by disentangling the mind from appetite, and conducting the thoughts through successive stages of excellence, till that contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony, which, began by Taste, may, as it is exalted and refined, conclude in Virtue. [Pg 157]

Hindsight makes liars obvious, but only after the damage is done. This turd had the steering wheel of the Royal Academy. His bleatings were their ideology. Now look at England today and tally up the promised aggregate disentangling of "the mind from appetite" since he got tasked with setting cultural policy. 

Joshua Reynolds, Anne Dashwood, Later Countess of Galloway, 1764, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

An innate appreciation of beauty does correspond to capacity for moral discernment. But discernment doesn't compel choice without an incentive. External morality compels the slipperiest character out of fear of damnation or whatever other ultimate reckoning. Disconnected discernment compels nothing. 

And slavishly following fashion isn't an innate appreciation of beauty. An early sign of FTS-2 outsourcing thought. As for the rest of it, the Enlightenment in a nutshell... We may therefore conclude that the real substance, as it may be called, of what goes under the name of taste, is fixed and established in the nature of things.

 

Enough Reynolds. We went in depth because it's hard for people unfamiliar with Enlightenment thought to understand how pathetically low-wattage it really was. It's sprayed with glitter from grade school, giving the impression of some lofty discovery about the nature of reality. But if you're led to actually read any of the panjandrums in their respective fields and... well... the Fallen nature of humanity gets a tad harder to deny.

This should be enough to understand why we jumped so hard at the Reynolds-Enlightenment comment. It reflects base assumptions that made the entire inversive mess of Art! happen. Those lies crystalize and centralize into something antithetical to Cole's ideals - ontological gibberish & fashion then inversion. The art branch of the House of Lies coalescing and the old values being written out. This is a microcosm. Same big plot, just filtered through the details of BAN.

Thomas Cole, View of Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains, 1827, oil on panel, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The raw, elemental sublimity of Cole's early work comes through here. The dark primordial mass of the hill rises against the unsettled landscape. Yes, natives were there. Their footprint didn't signify to European civilization patterns.

Cole created a unique American art that was in step with but different from Europe. One with high ideals and a recognition of Romantic sublimity in the American landscape. Click for a short essay on Cole and selection of his paintings from the Met.

Thomas Cole, The Return, 1837, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

His mature work shows his real vision. Sublime Romantic landscapes with grand mythic or religious themes that fit the style. This was one of a pair. 

It's this desire for essentially realistic art to express some higher ideal that gives us the tie to Reynolds. That Enlightenment art ideology was based on old Renaissance chestnuts about perfected nature, themselves derived from humanist Neoplatonism. But the Renaissance and Baroque thinkers could account for the metaphysical aspects of an objective beauty by appealing to divine inspiration and Creation. The Enlightenment had fashion and Nature!, soon to be rolled by the opportunistic termites of modernity.

Left out are Cole's uniqueness, nationalist vision, Christian and traditionalist values, and style. Pretty much everything that defines him as a historically significant artist.

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Elegy, painted beechwood, 1945, private; Michelangelo, Moses, 1513–151, marble, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome

Barbara Hepworth is an idealist. So is Michelangelo. It's such a vaguely broad  grounds for comparison that it can support any agenda. Like turning Thomas Cole in to an American royal Academician.

The pest way to think of Cole is that unique form of rustic genius that flourished in post-colonial America. Largely auto-didactic and auto-chthonic, he engaged with Old World ideas idiosyncratically, filtering them through a uniquely American experience and vision. Over the 19th century, as artistic culture was centralized and jacked, authentic logos-based creativity was slowly replaced with theoretical inversion and elite posturing.

Cole's unique vision was too personal to found a movement, and developing 19th century centralization pushed the Thoreaus out of the cultural center. America was booming. Manifest Destiny was in the air, and transition from Republic to Empire was around the corner. You can see it in the architecture.

The Earl of Burlington, Chiswick House, 1726-1729, London

Burlington ushered in English Palladianism with this seminal design. The mix of classical authority, good Taste, and sound geometrical principles suited the early English Enlightenment. A mix of organic and rational that seemed to dodge the ideological exremes of the continent. Neither Baroque absolutist dogmatism nor atavistic state-of-nature retardery.

The actual Scientific Revolution is the pattern template. A synergistic constiction of logical abstraction and empirical material reality. The catch that got Reynolds is that the balancing concept of "Taste" wasn't objective. The system works if everyone shares the same unconscious assumptions. It collapses when they don't. Source: Postmodernism.

Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, 1772-1809

Jefferson's architecture was directly influenced by Burlington's Palladianism. Monticello doesn't copy Chiswick exactly, but there's an obvious homage. That's the point. A system that balances rational principled with organic manifestations is adaptable and creative, not dogmatic and soul-crushing. Chiswick was a get-away, Monticello a more extensive residential complex. Different needs, local aethetics, and building materials accommodated in a coherent frame.

The problem is in assuming the taste for Palladian rationalism is universal. There are other harmonious proportioned configurations. 

William Thornton, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, US Capitol Building, 1793- 1800

Like Imperial Neoclassicism. The ideology of organic application is quickly replaced with abstracted universalism with no concession to time or place. Classical architecture is subtle. It's like a language - common frame but able to articulate radically different things.

Like moving from the interplay of material and theoretical to pure Enlightenment secular transcendence.

Louis Le Vau, André Le Nôtre, and Charles Le Brun, Versaillles. beg. 1661; Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Hôtel des Invalides, 1671-1706

The overall impact feels more like absolutist Baroque France than Scientific Revolution England. One of the overlooked tells of the Enlightenment is how imperial their classicism fetish looks.

Everyone used the rhetoric of "reason" and order. Only the Enlightenment elevated it to false religion. It's a way to align ideology with logical truth. And why we have to pay attention to form over content.

To be clear, we aren't saying the Capitol was consciously intentionally imitating Versailles or the Louvre. What we are saying is that classical architecture is a language. And the message changes from a responsive English colonial Enlightenment to imperial absolutism. 

This isn't our "theory". We're showing the buildings and referencing what actually happened historically.

The problem with the analogy between Abstract Reality and Classical architecture is that the architecture has no actual authority outside cultural preference. It's a manmade abstraction with no inductive or deductive necessity. Abstract Reality is a natural aspect of Creation. This comes around to that issue of the accuracy of manmade abstract constructs in the first part of this post.

We introduced the idea as Unreal Abstraction or Abstract Unreality - something that "exists" abstractly as a representation - like a story does - but may be untrue. Either lacking internal logical consistency or not applying to anything materially real.

All apprehension of abstract - or any - reality is representationally filtered. This means there is no direct perception through which real and fabricated abstractions can be recognized. 

Abstract Reality is ontologically [not material]. So all abstract conceptions appear man-made - naturally-occurring or not. We see manifestations, not the abstraction itself. The distinction [naturally-extant or manmade] is in what the abstract representation refers to.

Judging truth falls under epistemology - how we can know things. Abstract Reality is known by logic, so what we are calling "real" or naturally occurring Abstract Reality is synonymous with the logically true. So representations of Abstract Reality conform to logic and Abstract Unreality do not. You can say a Corinthian order and sculpted pediment are "pure reason" because geometry, but the aren't. Once you pretend they are, you're on a fake, secular transcendent foundation and the whole pretentious edifice can be swept away with a change of taste.

Sir William Chambers, The Corinthian Order, from A treatise on the decorative part of civil architecture..., London, 1791

It's very logical. But it isn't Truth.

Samuel Wale, frontispiece for the first English translation of Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, London, ink on paper.

Lucky Laugier notwithstanding.

It's actually worth considering the mentality behind opening a purportedly factual history of architecture with staffage from a Poussin painting building a Doric temple. It's structurally identical to starting the line of Babylonian kings with Gilgamesh. 

More secular transcendence. Blurring history and myth was a way to tie the physical and metahysical. It's why so much of it can be read allegorically, even when it's factually preposterous. It roots human realities in higher Truths. The Enlightenment wants to keep the authority of metaphysical Truth without metaphysics. But keeping the structure means pretending the transcendent exists in the material. There's a reason "preposterous" came to mind.

This is the same mentality behind Reynolds and the Royal Academy. What the catalog wants to connect Cole to when a five minute read with internet sources shows is inverted. The reality is that as art gradually centralizes into "Art" - with secular transcendence and fake authorities - there's no room for Cole's auto-chthonic visions. 

As always, the entropic slope is gradual. Centralization is masqued by daily life and macro societal changes. The 19th century was radically transformative. It's not the specific ideology of the English Academy that's relevant. That accepts the illusory game, where ebbs and flows in the fake construct of "Art" hide the real change - the existence of "Art" art all. The development of a self-conscious social ecosystem guided by critics and institutions that comes to dictate what is possible for artists. Cole wasn't part of a "movement" like this. He was an original creator before there was an American "Art" scene of this nature. In fact, the history of the Hudson River School traces the centralization and secular transcendentalization of American art that opens the door to full modernist inversion.

It looks like this. 

The art market needs movements for the same reason the fashion industry does. Status markers and aesthetic in-grouping. Via outsourcing thought.

There is a benefit in established pathways for artists to make careers. And Academies bring a high level of technical training. But centralization is agar for inversion. And the idea of stylistic or formal dogmatism is not just anti-L+T. It's creatively constipated. There's a more insidious process going on.

At the same time "Art" is centralizing into a jackable structure, it's destroying the range of organic creativity that makes a vital art tradition in the first place. 

So when Cole's visionary new American art is taken up by his greatest disciple, it's transformed into a more categorizable pure sublime landscape. Here's the Met on Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886), another American giant. In some ways he's a co-founder of the Hudson River School, in that he made Cole's accomplishments appropriate for a "movement" within the forming American art scene. This isn't a criticism - being at the start of a movement in a an actual beauty-based art system requires being an innovative creator. It just lets us see what happened.

Asher Brown Durand, The Beeches, 1845, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Durand's vision is gentler and warmer than Cole's. It makes a nice parallel with the clearing and taming of the Northastern US during the 19th century. 

Durand's sublime reflects the optimism of what seemed like the infinitely bountiful land of Manifest Destiny. It also brougth the Hudson River School in line with German Dusseldorf School Romanticism. This movement is an afterthought in BAN and had nationalist connotations that trouble globalists. What's notable is how Cole's overt metaphysical themes are replaced with secular transcendence.

Durand's purified landscapes appealed to collectors and opened the way for the big names of the second generation. These include the two best known members, with the possible exception of Cole. The artists who define the Hudson River School in the public imagination to the extent that it exists there.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) painted huge scenes in his prime that were actual public spectacles. Thousands paid to see in in theatrical displays, according to the link below.

Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

This giant painting measures 66 1/8" x 120 3/16" and packs incredible detail into a sublime landscape. The subject also shows the Hudson River School taking their talents to other parts of the world.

It's actually worth taking a close look at this to get an idea of what this sort of painting was. Our argument is that the nature of art ontologically changes beneath centralizing "Art" squid ink. Anyone interested in the narrative plus a ton of real historical information can read another free publication from the Met.

Kevin J. Avery, Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993

Another example of the Met making their research available to the public. We need to emphasize that we are not bashing them in particular. They really do seem to be trying to resurrect the Hudson River School highlights in the terms of their BAN.

Some closeups for enough resolution to show the details. It's important to see that side to understand Church's paintings. The sublimity comes through in small photos.

1. Church traveled extensively in Central and South America and Europe. Like other members of the Hudson River School, he applied their idealizing landscape techniques to new geographies.

This close-up shows Church's detailed foliage and magic light - evocative lighting was central to the Hudson River School suggestion of metaphysical sublimity. The little wayside shrine captures the Catholicism of the Andean region.

2. This shows how Church's detail holds up through the middle distance. Textured rock formations and foliage rewards the close attention of the paying customers.

The shining water is another Hudson River School feature.

3. This shows the shining waters and rock formations in more detail. All things developed in smaller pictures in and around the American Northeast. 

4. Foreground detail shows Church's techne. Still-life tier foliage painting incorporated into the larger vision. He made careful sketches of plants and other details to add realism to his fantastical scenes. Exotic flora right up front puts the audience into the appropriate foreign mindset.

5. The last cloe-up shows Church's fantastic atmospherics. Sublimity is part of Romantic aesthetics. In landscape, it uses breathtaking vistas with the suggestive lighting and enchanting details to push the mind to metaphysical considerations.

German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was Church's great contemporary and rival for highest paid artist in America. He brings up the connection between the Hudson River School and German Romanticism - something basically left out of the catalog. We'll come back to this because it's a big part of the imposition of a fake BAN.

Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, 1876-1877, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

This Edenic vision is almost as big as Heart of the Andes at 60 11/16" × 95 7/8". Bierstadt's clear bright colors have a primordeal feel.

There's a reason we used Bierstadt to stand in for the Land in our Thomas Covenant posts.

Bierstadt has been critiqued for his relationship to the development of the West. His pristine visions were already blemished by the railways and settlements that brought him there. It's not hard to cast this as papering over colonialist and commercialist exploitation. The Hudson River School were part of the popular image of the West as an empty promised land of Manifest Destiny and milk and honey. It's also reductive. History happened. Whether or not the Western expansion was irresponsible is irrelevant to whether Bierstadt's art is an accomplishment of L+T. 

A more historically responsible commentator would note how the Hudson River School aesthetics helped drive actual environmentalism and the National Park system. Of course were historians responsible, we might not be in the House of Lies. And the last thing atavistic liars are interested in is husbanding the bounty of Creation for future generations.

John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) was older than Church and Bierstadt, but one of the early adopters of the Luminist style of blurring magic light.

John Frederick Kensett, Lake George (Adirondack Mountains), 1858, oil on canvas, private

Lake George was a popular site for Hudson River School painters.

The catalog explains Luminism as a movement in American painting starting on p. 14. The 20th-century critics that defined it show the intellectual poverty behind "Art" pretension. More importantly, we can think of what Cole & co. were actually doing and see how this was replaced with prescribed positions in a fake game. This literally is the replacement of art as vehicle for cultural expression or logos through matter. Here's an excerpt...

We excerpt the full paragraph to give a sense of the epistemological depth and rigor of BAN. The important part for our points is underlined. Pause for a moment and consider why post-Civil War America suddenly has "complex psychic and social needs". The public wasn't calling to have their art replaced by nonsensical vaporing.

This is BAN formation. The "Art" narrative engineers respond to fake sociological determinants that they invent. Fabricated Abstract Unrealities - pseudo-inductive narrative patterns that replace organic cultural processes. The idea that art has to map the imposition of Empire, globalism, and civnat lies as [natural development process of American culture and people] is the coalescence of the House of Lies. Who cares about modern assumptions about arbitrary post-facto narrative catagories? Or what "Stubbins" thinks about literally anything?

Here's a nice short take on Kensett's actual Luminism. And a couple of observations to keep in mind:

What the public like is irrelevant to the BAN. It starts by distilling an L+T art that's based on appealing notions of beauty and slowly deviates until it determines what is taken as real. What happened after the Civil War was the beginnings of the centralization of the American Empire. This included social indicators like an art scene. And like any social class delineator, there are codes that separate insiders and outsiders. Simple cost is the first circle - the right zip code, luxe lifestyle, and classy interests like art are all really expensive. But once inside that first circle, there are complex hierarchical distinctions. Art is like a cross between fashion and wine connoisseurship. An endlessly deep field to show "expertise" with constantly changing vogues.

The problem, as we've endlessly pointed out, is that this BAN becomes detached from the historical reality of the arts of the West. Because it comes out of that context, its starting point looks like it fits with art as it always was. But like the Enlightenment in the macro, it's an inflection point. A slow deviation from that starting point as moral entropy overcomes cultural momentum.

This graphic from an earlier post visualizes the deceptive specifics of this particular inversion. The BAN starts in real art. It's initial structures reflect that cultural legacy. But over time it gradually deviates. Until it reaches the point when it becomes the complete opposite of that starting point.

The material-temporal continuum conceals the abstract inversion.

BAN follows the larger narrative beats of House of Lies historiography. What was really the replacement of organic Republic with proto-globalist Empire is presented as Progress!. And a centralized beast narrative that serves a social ecosystem hostile to tradition its naturally occurring art. In reality, Luminism is a descriptive term for a gauzy light that adds a visually appealing epic timelessness. It became a fad for a while. But it was never actually more than a technical tool for artists to get a certain kind of effect.

John Frederick Kensett, New England Sunrise, around 1863, oil and canvas, private

Click for a short essay on Kensett and selection of his paintings from the Met.

Serene timeless is central to the sublimity of Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837–1908). He isn't really Luminist at all, although his light is still suggestive of higher things. BAN wants to tie categories to credentialed beast proclamations. "Sources". We don't care if Bricher or Church once wrote a letter to someone using the word "sublime". We only care about Burke and Reynolds and other theorists to get a feel for the ciritcal landscape and terminology. But we are capable of grasping what sublimity means and seeing it in the work of the Hudson River School. It's the quality that ties their different stylists and interests together.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, Castle Rock, Marblehead, 1878, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Whatever we call it, they all strove to celebrate the glory of Creation and to dazzle through beauty, broadly defined. We can see the contradictions and shortcomings of the American experiment reflected in their work because they were part of that historical reality. So why waste hundreds of pages ignoring their actual accomplishment for narrative fluffing?

What is presented as a natural change is actually the development of centralized top-down critical-institutional networks and secular transcendent art theory from "Europe". The "public" went along because they had no choice. If the money men and venues don't want giant painting shows and prefer small [burgeoning gallery and NPC collector market] paintings, guess what the public won't be viewing? Covid taught us you can just take things away and people accept it. And the cultural posturing, jargon, and ever-changing artists and schools put the critics and schools in the now familiar position of telling people what they like. 

Church's The Heart of the Andes on display in 1864 from Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes, fig. 20 after p. 31. There are no surving photos of the original display, but this makes the same point. A public spectacle like this is a fundamentally different visual category than narrative huffers bidding up collectables.

Tbis should at least be acknowledged. Someone interested in art and history would at least ask when and why popular practices changed. What replaced them?

The whole narrative arc of the  Hudson River School's fall from favor and brave restoration by the Met is completely disconnected from the meaning or appeal of Western art. The Arts of the West posts are slowly creeping towards modernism in America, and this jumps the gun a little. But it’s relevant to things the Band does elsewhere and is a different take on how fake abstract ideology & materially real structures work together. It's the same fake post-Enlightenment materialist Progress! ideology that’s moldered into perversion and infantile projection by the time we get to the Watchmen.

We’ve written a lot about artistic inversion in the arts of the West journey and aren’t going to reiterate the big picture here. The salient points.

The basic pattern of the arts of the West that holds up historically and logically is what we sum up as logos + techne or L+T. Logos meaning some aspect of ultimate, abstract, or material truth and not specific rules about style, subjects, or materials beyond some essential truth. All the rest falls under techne -  skilled craft of some kind, depending on the organic preferences of the culture.

Enter the Good, the Beautiful, the True. Logos

The important thing isn't our terms. It's that the arts of the West are not a preexisting, naturally occurring Abstract Reality. They're arbitrary human cultural constructs intended to exress something in a compelling way. This doesn’t mean art’s not real. It means there isn’t some Natural, objective physical definition of it like the molecular structure of a substance.

So “skilled” craft because every definition needs parameters. If art is going to be distinct from the rest of the visual world something has to distinguish it. Postmodernism “deconstructed” a man-made construct by pointing out it’s man-made and wound up with no way to define art other than institutional capture. L+T – a skillfully rendered material manifestation of some truth filtered through organic cultural assumptions. 

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868, oil on canvas, Birmingham Museums Trust  

Art isn’t “truth” qua truth. It’s a material representation that is more or less truthful. 

Techne covers all the material manufacture issues or how it’s made. Physical materials and media, style, technique, subject range, symbolism, even desired effects or why it’s made. Obviously not law of nature-type naturally occurring parameters.

You can see why this is so difficult for the corrupt midwits that haunt the BAN. '

We spend so much time on representation not being reality because it never stops being astonishing. The confusion between "naming" and "creating" is a timeless root of endless category error. It comes from "scientific discovery" referring to synthesizing a new useful device or compound and stumbling upon something for the first time in your circle and declaring it to be called X. In one case, the process is inextricably tied to the reality. In the other, it isn't.

With art, the central category error actually preceded the Enlightenment. It came out of the Renaissance fallacy of applying abstract logical structures to cultural techne traditions. Not to the logos in the message, which can be judged logically. Pretending the culturally determined subjective choices about what to make and how to make it were governed by logical necessity. Obviously, there is no objective empirical or rational basis to this claim, but centuries of art “experts” pretended there was.

To be fair, some artists thrive outside the BAN, selling online directly and through unconverged galleries. The real test there is whether the gallery is connected to the beast money establishment or is a legitimate business that has to sell real works to real people. You won’t make rock star money here, but it is a much more comfortable, stable living for a much larger percentage than chasing beast rings. Of course, it's fiercely competitive on a talent basis, because there are no spigots of institutional resources. It's appeal to customers, which is what art always was. It's only in the House of Lies era of centralization and BAN that art meant "elite" fake globalist atavistic anti-culture. The result, as expected, is a fraction of pampered insiders and clouds of desperate aspirants on the institutional fringes. Academia, with a more exclusive clientele. 

Steven Kozar, Winter Solitude, oil on canvas, 2020s

This American painter is a gifted artist with a successful business. He's also extremely talented. [Weird clothing and acting like a retard] + [adeptness at institutional games] doesn't get you here. And public choice doesn't allow the sort of nepotistic corruption that is - along with unaccountable money - the central pillar of the art world. 

Without the institutional recognition, there's a limited amount of personal art budget to go around.  But you’re painting what you and your customers want, not force-conforming to a perverse, unsustainable, self-consuming darkness.

Most artists aren’t entrepreneurial – the skill sets aren’t connected. They have to be able to run a practice, but traditionally had defined meretricious career paths to follow. Like any successful self-employed modern professional. That’s gone at the moment, and culture is poorer for it.

Those are the salient points. The catalog narrative is the BAN one -  the HRS was pushed out of prominence because younger artists were pushing “exciting” new Eurotrash from France. If you're still with us, it's time to unbutton the shirt sleeves and give this cancerous, stupid, pomposity the fair assessment its intellectual credibility and cultural responsibility merit. From p. 16...

Note how national cosmopolitanism is presented as simply a natural fact, like the weather or time of day. But there's no actual mention of the artists' public appeal, cultural relevance, or how it changed. It’s “critics” disparaging them, and narrative-huffing artists and monied collectors fetishizing European modernism. Consider how irrelevant this is to the Good, Beautiful, and True, to Logos, or to any other higher purpose justifying the production of art.

Now consider the more fundamental question. Why is it a choice? 

In an organic art market - even one with a proto-narrative like Renaissance Italy - choices compete for attention and to meet the range of public tastes. We just did a post on Baroque art where radically different styles could be combined for effect. Or paintings and statues. It's a market. Centralized "Art" has vendors and patrons, but it's more like the fashion industry. The styles are chosen for you and there are some select options to choose from.

False binaries are a good sign of a fake narrative. They have to be. Any clear narrative has to simplify the complexity of the reality it represents. An honest one is highlighting a point that's in itself true or applicable to true things. A fake one misrepresents reality to direct people down preset paths. This can be relatively benign like class indicators, or dyscivilizational, like Art!. Here, arbitrary organic style being replaced by an arbitrary secular transcendent one is presented as an intrinsic natural process. Like the growth of an animal or path of a river. When what it really is is the House of Lies pretending the move from the organic culture of the West to satanic globalism is a priori reality. And a priori reality is essentially True, so the erasure of logos from culture needs no further consideration. 

It's a magical situation for the beast. Forward movement as virtue when [forward narrative movement] is a fake construct.

Back to the structure of fake narrative. Whatever the beast makes up is as assumed to be as true as the passage of time.

This unconscious assumption that a fake string of inverted lies is existential reality is the backbone of Progress!. And why not being a binary thinker is protective. Post-Enlightenment secular transcendence untethers reality from its foundations. But unlike LSD, it's built on the claim that the foundations don't actually exist. It claims to be rational, but as we've seen, actually removes the possibility of rationally addressing ontological questions by pretending ontology is just "the arts". That and trusting the science. And sloth.

This rest of the quote needs no highlighting.

This is the kernel of the beast inversion of art in six steps.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 1. A secular transcendent ontology admits no metaphysical dimension. But since a consequence can't account for its origin, so our very exitance necessitates something "meta" to the physical. They get around this by pretending that human reason/the physical world can subsume the atemporal conditions needed for a temporal, causal, entropic consciousness/reality to exist [yes, this should have rendered Enlightenment "Rationalism" stillborn. Instead it revealed the coercive power of human self-fluffing].

József Dorffmeister, Phidias Chiselling the Bust of Zeus, 1802, oil on canvas, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna

Art channels higher Truth. It's why through the history of the West, when people have considered this, the term "divine inspiration" keeps coming up. The Enlightenment secular transcendentalist wasn't fully inverted and still recognized beauty. But where in the material world could this inexplicable gift come from? The catch-all modern answer - psychology. "The gods" or God is just a vehicle for the infinite, inexhaustible creative power of The Incredible Human Mind™.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 2. Art always manifested immaterial things in material forms. L+T. Abstract absolutes that are real, but transcend the ontological parameters of material reality. Hence the need for art in the first place. Secular transcendent materialism wants images that occupy this traditional prestige role without immaterial things. So they pretend things they make up can replace ontologically coherent reality if they capitalize the noun. It's Nature, Reason, etc. [it's actually very primitive. Intellectually regressive. Constructing a mythology by naming natural phenomena, and giving them reassuring identities. Millennia after the logical inadequacy had become embarrassing].

Alexandre Duplessis, The Apotheosis of Voltaire Led by Truth and Crowned by Glory, 18th century, oil painting, Château de Ferney

The language of apotheosis came from antiquity as a way to show the connection between the physical and metaphysical. This would be off-putting for its hollow vanity if it wasn't so absurd.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 3. Culture centralizes around values, and those determine the nature and authority of art. But there are no "higher values" in materialism, so secular transcendence just credits them to imaginary naturally-occurring transcendental capital letters. Since these don't actually exist, what they really mandate is whatever the person with the microphone wants. And since the masses are functional retards that outsource thinking, they accept the impossible claims and take the imaginings as Truth [the constant internal shock of swapping out one Truth for the next incompatible one is the trauma vector that produces FTS-2. The House of Lies forces a choice between logic and participation. Internalizing it as normal means internalizing virtual psychosis and delusion in order to prosper].

Perfect example of pretending the system is reality. How can anyone look at this, consider infrastructure fragility, and conclude "AI will save us"? To the surprise of no one, he's shilling.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 4. Enlightenment rationalism is truthy, not truthful. It presents the appearance of being logical, but the reasoning is all situational. Grounding or testing truth claims in first principles are avoided. It just pretends its fanciful cultural assumptions are objective. This means it's "bedrock truths" keep changing at the whims of the centralized narrative engineers. But they need enough appearance of absolute, abstract, first principles legitimacy to bamboozle the fruit flies. For the few seconds they can sustain a thought, anyhow - the low wattage of the audience helps explain the flaccidity of the lies. 

Closer Than We Think. comic strip, 1958-1963

This was a wide circulation newspaper strip that stopped running when The Jetsons went off the air. Note how the ingrained boomer trust in science and progress never changes. No matter how nonsensical the old beliefs prove to be.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 5. Fake autonomy is an essential part of the fake ontology of art. In order to be objective in the manner of an Abstract Reality, art can't be socio-materially contingent. This is impossible in fact, but can easily be pretended. And the fruit flies will cluster if it makes them feel special  in the moment. They don't say it's a law of physics that sprung a priori from from the soil. But they act like it is. Otherwise, all these assumptions would be open questions. And respectable individuals wouldn't subject themselves to humiliations rituals like this.

Beast Inversion of Art Step 6. The imaginary criteria that fullfil the imaginary first principles of an imaginary autonomous art are "how it's made". Seriously. Art post readers have have internalized this retardery but it is surprising to new readers. The first principle of BAN is not representation, but it's own techne. And if that sounds self-devouring, welcome to modernism from outside BAN. First stylistics - as is the case here. But it's a nonsense imperative. There's nothing to stop metastasis to materials. 

Representing takes a back seat to exploring "line, color, and design". An ontology that reads like the promo for a children's craft group as status marker in the House of Lies. 

Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959, Whitney Museum, New York City

Minimalism was the logical endpoint of defining the ontology of art as line, color, and design. If we judge by the fruits, the the definition is faulty. Yet generations of dolts pay admission to stand portentously in front of this nonsense.

Alternatively, the BAN - Stella "is considered to be one of the most influential living American artists. His striped works and monumental prints revolutionized artistic practices in relation to not only Minimalism but also Abstraction."

Robert Morris, Untitled (1965, reconstructed 1971), Tate, London

It comes in 3D too. Minimalism as an art form could only exist in a fully detached space of cultural inversion. Autonomy...

Some have questioned our assessment of the beast system. How could centuries-old societal pillars like art, science, higher education, etc. be built up over centuries if the base supposition is false? Easy. Industrial production makes abundance for everyone while the brights play auto-idolatrous make-believe. The key was that there was enough cultural alignment with reality to keep things rolling. And to keep everyone invested. Progress! is fake because it's false as perpetual Abstract Reality. But situational material progress in historical contexts is real. The whole reward system incentivized participation on every level. That's only recently stopped and fully inverted. We're seeing the difference between Progress! the abstract ideal and progress the finite life cycle opening for the first time. This isn't a boom-bust cycle in the system. It's the end stage of the system. 

[Ontology of art] = [paint smear] is as retarded as materialist ontology. But in both cases - and many others - vast conceptual towers have been built on them, often by really smart people. If the beast system was an actual organism, this endless pointless complexity seems like a defense. A way to engage talent across the spectrum in a way that incentives never questioning the system itself.

 

What the catalog really shows actually is an amazing shift. We’re seeing an organic art movement develop in a young polity through its appeal then become marginalized - along with the public - as the culture is centralized and jacked. In reality, the entire socio-cultural framework has shifted. But in the catalog, it’s presented as a continual natural process, like a lazy river meandering along. Using the same words to represent different things lays sprays the squid ink of consistency over inversion.

We broke the next excerpt down to show how this works.

It's right there. Sustained, top-down effort by centralized control narrative engineers. The historically interesting development - how American art was one thing then became something else. Met publications are thoroughly researched within their frame of reference, so they lay out how the Hudson River School was read out. Consider the cretinous voices given a microphone and the weakness of their "arguments". Now think about public discourse today. You can see the House of Lies coalescing over a century ago. We provide translations from bozo,

All marching in lockstep, pushing the same irrelevant talking point. It's almost like they have an agenda...

Oh wait...

They're quisling globalist shills. The lesson to anyone trying to reclaim culture and heritage from these parasitic monsters is that they never stop.

Then there’s the self-pwning language. It's ironic that for all their concern over seeming ignorant podunk clods, these US critical luminaries appear to be ignorant podunk clods. The "foreign" and "European" principles are ultimately contradictory. 

John Trumbull, George Washington, 1780, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

This would be the Reynolds Grand Manner by the portrait painters that succeeded before the Hudson River School failure. Technically, it's a hack, folk art tier facsimile, but important historically.

But that aside, its "foreign idea" is the aristocratic academic representation that modernism turned against.

As for Inness, his "European" influence is wonderfully incoherent. In reality he started out as a Hudson Riverish landscapist, then pastiched random observations from trundling around the continent. This was actually consistent with late Beaux-Arts academism, where the Old Masters were authoritative without any reason beyond traditional status. What we think really lights up the cosmopolitan dolts is Inness' interest in the French Barbizon School. These painters had a roughness that came from painting outdoors but are pivotal in the BAN. Their contemporary realism is seen as breaking art from academic strictures, turning art from the past to the (modern) present. In the dance of movements, painting outdoors to capture a natural feel is a precursor to Realism and  Impressionism. 

George Inness, Autumn Oaks, around 1878, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The monumental focus and expressive light do resemble Barbizon's Rousseau or Dupré. The gauzy blurry effect is seen as progress away from the outdated detailed realism of the Hudson River School.

George Inness, Sunrise, 1887, oil on canvas

BAN loves tonalism and increased abstracted blurring. Roadmarks to full inversion. Left out is Inness' obsession with Swedenborgianism, one of those retarded nonsense mysticisms that accompanied modernity. See the higher consciousness?

He also painted softly...

What we're seeing are the fake narrative elements not cohering into a real narrative. The graphic makes it clear. From the surface, the real and fake narratives look like a chain of logically connected events. So people are prone to accept them without a closer look. And how many people take closer looks at assumed authorities? But when the pieces are examined, they tell a very different story or no story at all.

The BAN is based on the French modernism nonsense narrative filtered through Enlightenment nonsense ideology. The gist of it is that a sequence of 19th-century movements - Barbizon School, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, etc. - broke the straitjacket of the French Academy and set art Free!. What really happened was an inversion of centralized cultural assumptions that reverberated across the West. And because it's fake and incoherent, the "pieces" filled in around it have no internal logic or coherent relationships. But they all do support the BAN.

In the macro, it sets up a false binary. Art as either [sclerotic Old Regime] or [satanic rebellion against reality]. The same false binary is applied in the catalog, only to America. Art as [sclerotic organic tradition] or [satanic rebellion against reality]. But the French art scene had a totally unique set of historical developments. Its dicta don't even fit Europe all that well. There was no Old Regime or authoritative French Academy in America. So the story falls apart.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Theory, 1779-1780, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts

Reynold's idealist ideology - and the generic authority of "Old Masters" in general - is exactly what the Barbizon School is celebrated for rejecting. Not that they're coherent - the landscapes of Claude and Ruisdael may have inspired Inness, but they have little in common. Then there's the Tonalist abstraction. Note the false binary construction process - take a bunch of disparate things and identify the irrelevant feature they all share that supports the theory. In this case, there are two. The incoherent art jibber jabber that infested Europe is ontologically "authoritative". And the imposition of centralized globalism is natural and good.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition No. 350 (Hommage à Grohmann). 1926, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Washed out abstraction can be thought of as a step towards the pure "autonomous" formalism of peak nonsense Modernism. The ontology of art as [materials and process]. The inane "spirituality" doesn't fit the materialist idiom, but that can be left out. Just like the Barbizon/Old Master differences.Kandinsky was way more mystically nonsensical and way less talented than Inness, and he became a Modernist hero. Just identify the irrelevant feature - destruction of representation - and instant fake narrative beats.

The false binary here is “international authority” / BAN or a localized application of European cultural heritage. An organic art of the West that is also uniquely American. A parallel to America itself as a newly formed Western state with a unique culture and experience. Not the only possible American art, but what should have been one of many paths to express a vibrant American culture. And that gets to what was really driving the later history of the Hudson River School and the replacement of art with BAN in general.

Go back to the false binary. Art as "restrictive" organic tradition or satanic rebellion against reality. Organic traditions aren't really artistically restrictive. They limit subject matter and presentation, but within the norms and codes, there's no intrinsic limit on techne. Durand painted sublime allegories like Cole as well as pure landscape.

Asher Brown Durand, The Morning of Life & The Evening of Life, 1840, National Academy of Design, New York

And the Hudson river School weren't the only successful mid-19th century American painters. The problem wasn't variety. It was a failure to conform to the arbitrary Europeanisms of the cosmopolitans.

There were Grand Manner history painters working in the manner of West, Kauffmann, and the French David. A bit outdated, but suitable bombast for secular transcendent mythopoesis. Note how Leutze even uses the same move from shadow into light motif to show righteousness.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

If that's too stuffy, there's the freshness and energy of the antebellum republic. Why isn't this an example of the contemporary French "Realism" that supposedly harbinged Modernism? Is is the sunny cheer instead of world-weary condescension? The confident Renaissance palette and folk art touches?

George Caleb Bingham, The County Election, 1852, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum

Perhaps formal portraiture with a link to the founding of the Republic and reminder that family is the closest we can come to immortality in this world.

William Sidney Mount, Great-Grand-Father's Tale of the Revolution—A Portrait of Reverend Zachariah Greene, 1852, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Not Grand Manner, but honest, and for historically-minded readers, a glimpse of affluent life in the mid-19th century. It would be interesting to be able to look back and feel that the Macro-Arc is moving in the right direction.

Or everyday life from a less affluent perspective with a moralizing twist. The link says that Edmond was influenced by the old Dutch genre painting tradition, where ordinary scenes were presented with a moral or humorous message.

Francis William Edmond, The New Bonnet, 1858, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Contrast her vanity with the parents' reaction to the bill, her sister's chores or the ignored  bounty of food. We're living the refusal to take this seriously.

The idea that the Hudson River School "monopolized" American art in the manner of the French Academy is retarded. Or that new ideas from Europe were needed to fix this. There were already ideas from Europe. And the lack of technical refinement in early American painting is the result of societal newness. Carving a civilization out of the wilderness with 18th-century supply chains and tech doesn't leave lots of time or opportunity for big ateliers. Art develops over time. But there was nothing in the existing American art to prevent it from doing so. History Painting, landscapes, portraits, genre scenes - these are the classic genres of the post-Renaissance West. Both BAN fables - the Hudson River School was restrictive and American was culturally barbarous - have nothing to do with historical reality. Beyond narrating/promoting the descent of BAN like a noxious fume.

These critics don't want to move to Europe. And actual, historically apprehensible European influence on nascent American art was already present. So what are they blathering about? Translated into honesty, "Europe" refers to the new, Enlightened modern monoculture. The incoherent usage refers to the critics' own provincial ignorance of early Modern European art. But they know Progress!. And American art must leap into the satanic straightjacket that would be used to destroy it.

Reading this with a modern understanding of institutional capture, ticket taking, and fake media world is eye-opening. The Hudson River School had monopolized a new centralized art scene for their fame and fortune. But centralization and media-generated reality are how the House of Lies was built in the first place. And opportunistic founders being thrown from their horses by darker progeny is a recurring theme. Note also how this is presented as if the effects of naturally occuring forces.

The naturally-occurring squid ink makes it harder to discern an old familiar pattern of media lying in the more culturally destructive of the directions.  Media doesn't innocently "misinterpret" monodirectionally and over the long term. Then there's the doltish mouthpiece proclaiming literal nonsense as determinative. Until it wasn't. But by then, the "new men" were too real art-centric.

Once reality is replaced with narrative, narrative conventions drive behavior. This leads to idiocy like pretending “vogue” has ontological significance. That “up to date” or “old fashioned” are viable critique of logos and beauty. They obviously aren't - when put plainly like this, it's patently ridiculous. One more example of changing what something is while pretending the  old words words still apply. It’s the Progress! narrative, where credentialists declaring “novelty” is a measure of essential value. 

Painters like Church and Bierstadt were mass entertainment in ways perverse Art! gammas hate. And Art! is a hive of gammas because its entire fake reality is based on lies and posturing authoritatively over nonsense lore. From that point of view, burning down angelic cultural achievements and replacing them with unpopular niches supported by lies makes sense. They get to be the loremasters and the lack of popular appeal or meritocracy eliminates hated competition. Even the mannered social forms replace conflict with passive aggression and gossip. The ultimate goal is obviously Sorathic atavism as affront to Creation. But Satan was the first gamma.

Anyhow, we already noted that the size and detail were like FX, making it doubtful photography replaced the popular appeal. What they weren't were sops to sociopathic musings about “form” and “color”. Literally analysis applicable to paint-by-numbers.

Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art

It needs a closer look.

This doesn't create an impression of general effect? One of the things to do with beast squid ink is to take it seriously literally. When the gibberish doesn't align with the program, you know that it's a fake game. And more importantly' it's untethered from reality, and has no bottom.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875, oil on panel, Detroit Institute of Arts

Whistler is considered one of the most important American artists of all time in the BAN. Note the title of this studio spill - the ostensive theme is fireworks but the real subject is "pure" color.

It doesn't matter if it's distorted and ugly. It creates a general impression. On the right kind. For now.

The BAN keeps assuring us taste changed – but isn't actually referring to the organic public who'd pay a cent or two to see a mind-blowing painting. It's the newspaper era - the first wave gatekeeping critics with big platforms - and the plutocrats and institutions they represent. And centralized media proved as dishonest then as now. We’ve learned from the House of Lies that the public thinks what its told and taking cherished things away elicits no reaction besides impotent whining.

Actually seeing the formal emergence of an elite centralized art world in the late 19th century and it’s extension into the 1980s through repetition of fake dogmas. It’s interesting this happens right after the Civil War. An argument for the metaphysics of cultural decline comes from how all the trends go in the same wrong direction.

Régis François Gignoux, Snow Storm Threatening, 1854, oil on canvas, private

Winter scenes weren't common among Hudson River School Painters, although the French member of the group was an exception.

The French member of the group? And curiously, the most folk-artish in his figures and space. He's barely mentioned in the catalog, despite joining Bierstadt, Church, Cropsey, Kensett, Whittridge, etc. at the famous Tenth Street Studio in 1844 and being at the center of American art until 1870, when he retired to his native Paris.

What really happened with the Hudson River School?

Part 2 will answer with an eye on unreal abstractions and apprehensible truth. And look at the Trinity through the Ontological Hierarchy, time permitting.

Worthington Whittredge, Kaatskill Creek, 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection