9) CRITIQUE OF MODERN ART
For
years I earnestly strove to “understand” and appreciate abstract art.
To that end I haunted art museums and galleries in Europe and the U.S.
I learned, for example, to tell a Motherwell painting from a Mondrian
and a Lieberman sculpture from a Moore. I later, however, realized that I was primarily motivated by a bourgeois fear of being thought philistine.
I didn’t want to be one of those average persons who readily and
honestly admit that they don’t understand modern art. I finally came to
realize that avant garde writer Gertrude Stein’s immortal description of
Oakland, California tellingly applied to most modern art, “There’s no
there, there.” What became crystal clear to me was the utter poverty of
today’s avant-garde art which deliberately strives to be totally bereft
of beauty, meaning and any appeal to the human esthetic tastes that have
evolved over the centuries, for example, from the beautiful 14th Century B.C. Egyptian portrait bust of Nefertiti to Greek and Roman art, Renaissance and 17th Century Dutch and Flemish art and 19th
Century Impressionism. Dominant art is now, for the most part, pure
gimmickry, usually produced by those of limited ability who lack the
talent, diligence, discipline and craftsmanship needed to produce true
works of art. The art establishment, however, always closes ranks in
support of this so-called art, .and excludes art that would have meaning
to the vast majority of viewers who are dismissed as hopeless
philistines “who just don’t get it.”
Highly
regarded art critic, Robert Hughes, put it best in his book “Things I
Didn’t Know...A Memoir”, when he confessed that he “had lost forever a
belief in the ‘potency of avant-garde….and today, looking at the
ever-more-feeble effort on the part of the art world to designate its
latest products as ‘cutting edge’, ‘edgy’, ‘radical’ etcetera, I am not
in the least sorry I lost it. Some new works of art have value of some
kind or other. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as
such, in art, is never a value.” (From a Washington Post
book review, Sept. 2, 2006) Two fundamental flaws of modern art are
well illustrated by these quotes. “I was cured of the delusion that the
artist’s aim is to create beauty” stated 20th Century’s leading
proponent of dreadfully dissonant atonal twelve-tone (or serial) music,
Arnold Schoenberg (quoted from “Surprised by Beauty” by music critic
Robert Reilly). At a cocktail party in the 1970s, I asked British
leading 20th Century poet, Stephen Spender, “Why does so much modern
poetry lack rhyme, rhythm or reason?” He simply replied, “It’s easier.”
(American poet Robert Frost used to say that writing poetry that
doesn’t rhyme is like playing tennis without a net.) When, a few years
ago I asked my very perceptive ten year old niece, Mele Finau, why most
modern art is abstract, she replied, “Because it’s easier. That’s why.”
Right on, Mele. I like to cite Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian, as an
example of this. His early representational art was mediocre at best.
Then he hit upon the gimmick of the far easier painting of various grid
arrangements of squares and lines and thus became a famous abstract
artist.
As
Rice University art history professor Thomas McEvilley put it, ”It’s
pretty clear by now that more or less anything can be designated art.
The question is, Has it been called art by the so-called ‘art system?’”
(NY Times October 12, 1997) I feel that art has hit its absolute nadir
in being rendered totally reductio ad absurdum
through total minimalism. For example, canvases covered with just one
color. In sculptures we have the monstrous, usually rusting curved iron
plates of Richard Serra whose “Tilted Arc,” a long curved iron plate
fence erected, in 1981, at considerable expense in New York’s Federal
Plaza, in addition to being totally bereft of an esthetic value, so
hindered pedestrian and other movement that it had to be removed in
1989. It is fitting that Frank Gehry’s freakish, misshapen and bizarre
museum in Bilbao, Spain features Serra’s dreadful, overpowering
“sculptures.” In music, minimalism hit its peak, or I should say nadir,
with John Gage’s piano composition 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds performed
by a pianist who sits at the piano playing nothing at all for four
minutes and thirty-three seconds, apparently leaving the audience to
imagine some music.
Frank Gehry’s costly architectural monstrosities, which now deface
several US cities, illustrate what is intrinsically wrong with much
contemporary American architecture. Many en vogue designs
today demonstrate how far architects have strayed from the credo of a
father of modern American architecture, Louis Sullivan, who declared
that “form … follows function.” I.e., the shape of a building should
reflect how it is actually used. This led to unadorned structures,
while excessively austere, were practical and less expensive to build.
Now in the interest of being on the “cutting edge” of avant garde
design, architects resort to gimmickry which ignores normally accepted
standards of beauty or symmetry and the human needs it should be
serving. In eschewing all tradition they resort to costly design
features which serve no useful purpose nor, in its elitism, would have
any esthetic appeal to the majority of those who use those structures.
This avant garde approach is encouraged in most schools of architecture.
Even less extreme architects like I.M. Pei can design terribly
impractical buildings like, for example, Washington’s East Wing of the
National Gallery of Art which wastes an enormous amount space and
devotes far too little space to the galleries where most of the art is
actually exhibited. Budding architects would, however, be well advised
to emulate contemporary architects like, for example, Washington based,
now deceased, Alan Rider who designed President Kennedy’s grave site in
Arlington VA, the imposing and impressive Fermilab
near Batavia IL, most of the modern buildings at the US Naval Academy
in Annapolis MD and several university libraries, including the one at
Georgetown.
Unfortunately,
modern gimmickry has also defiled some fine classic operas. For
example, Peter Sellers’ TV production of Mozart’s marvelous Don Giovanni
was staged in modern dress and set in the ugliest, most desolate part
of New York City. Another example of opera uglification was the 2008
Washington [DC] National Opera production of Puccini’s La Boheme
was also in modern dress with Musetta dressed as a sadomasochistic
dominatrix dressed in leather and carrying a whip. Rock bottom was
struck by the Virginia Opera company’s 2011 total desecration of that
lovely opera Hansel and Gretel
set in modern California with the two children being bullied by school
children and both the witch and the mother played by an obese woman.
Opera staging is even more perverse in Europe these days with some of
the worst examples presented at the annual summer Salzburger Festspiele.
Then there is choreographer and director Twyla Tharp who raised clumsy
and awkward dancing to an art form. Sad to say popular music has also
gravely suffered. For example, rock introduced in the 50s and 60s,
produced some pleasant, if not pleasurable, music, notably the Beatles’
tunes. Rock has, alas, now degenerated into primitive assaults on the
aural nerves masking the paucity of musical content with ear-splitting
and deafness-inducing amplification, setting yet another milestone on
the path of western cultural decline. Also more than sad is the near
absence here of the treasure of beautiful Catholic music. Despite the
Vatican II Council’s clear promotion of Gregorian Chant, what we now
hear in most Catholic churches is banal, unsingable and generally
dreadful 1970s pop hymns against which Pope Benedict XVI has inveighed
in vain. Even the music at his April 2008 outdoors mass in Washington
was appallingly bad, a, perhaps unintentional, slap in the face for the
Pope. Fortunately, our parish (Holy Cross
in Garrett Park, MD) uses a hymnal that features the best traditional
hymns, both Catholic and Protestant, but this, unfortunately, represents
only a small minority of parishes in this country.
I
am also quite upset about the appalling decline of poetry, most of
which today lacks rhyme, rhythm or even reason. A prime example of what
has happened to poetry was, for example, the bumbling, pedestrian and
confused poem read at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. And there is
the new US Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s dreadful “ best poem” with the
cryptic gimmicky title “They Feed They Lion” (Washington Post
August 10, 2011). My generation had to memorize a large amount of
poetry -- which is now out in schools because of the current prejudice
against “rote” memorization. Also modern poetry must be difficult to
memorize. I have, however, always been extremely grateful for having
been encouraged to learn poetry in school. To this day, I cannot enter a
forest without thinking of the opening lines of Longfellow’s immortal
narrative poem Evangeline,
“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock…”
Whenever I go to the beach and see the ocean I always think of
Masefield’s Sea Fever,
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky…” When
I find myself in the countryside at dusk there always comes to me the
opening lines of, what is to me and many others, the greatest poem in
the English language, Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
The
race to the bottom in art can, in my opinion, in large measure be
traced to Marcel Duchamp’s “Ready-Made” conceptualism introduced in 1917
by his sculpture Fountain
which was nothing but an inverted urinal signed “R. Mutt.” Duchamp’s
personal conviction that life is meaningless and absurd was well
reflected in this last phase of his career. He actually did have some
talent as reflected in his well known 1912 Cubist-Futuristic painting Nude Descending a Staircase No.2.
What this has led to is well exemplified by two 2008 acquisitions of
Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum from the collection of Italian Count
Guiseppe Panza di Blumo. Here is how they were described in the Washington Post
(November 4, 2008). “Look at…the five glass cubes that Joseph Kosuth
presented in 1965. All are much the same (forty inches on a side), and
all are made of greenish glass so that one looks both at and through
them. Five primary structures lined up in a row – what could be more
minimalist. But the artist doesn’t stop there. Instead forging on, he
adds block letters to each one. The first cube says ‘Box’, the second
says ‘Cube’, the third ‘Empty’, the fourth ‘Clear’ and the fifth
‘Glass.’ “ Wow! What originality! Here is a description of Lawrence
Weiner’s 1970 work “REDUCED” which, the Post
describes, “is just that single word …red and floor-to-ceiling.” The
reviewer at least had the gumption to declare, “All it does for me is
lead my thoughts to mush.” To think that the Hirshhorn actually paid
good money for these two and other similar “works of art,”
For
those who think that art actually hit rock bottom with a British art
museum’s display of soiled nappies (diapers), let me introduce you to
the world of animal art. The Washington Post’s Kid Post
page (May 8, 2007) described art produced by elephants, a sea lion, an
Indian rhino and an orangutan. It reported that in 2006 a large mural
painted by six elephants sold for a record $35,000. At the bottom of the
page were four paintings and readers were invited to guess which ones
were painted by animals. One was obviously a Jackson Pollack. I guessed
that the one done by an orangutan and the one by an elephant looked more
human-produced than the fourth one by well-established American artist
Helen Frankenthaler, who died in 2011. The Washington Post
(June 22, 2005) reported that an American collector bought at an
auction three abstract paintings by chimpanzee “Congo” for $26,352. An
unintentionally hilarious description of cat art can be found in Why Cats Paint
by New Zealanders Heather Busch and Burton Silver (Ten Speed Press,
Berkeley CA 1994). Described is the art work of one cat: Torn up
venetian blinds labeled “Bad Cat,” described as a “work clearly alluding
to the containing effect of man-produced products on the contemporary
cat’s freedom of movement.”
Here
are the styles of cat painting: Spontaneous Reductionist,
Neo-Synthesist, Elemental Fragmintist and Psychometric Impressionist.
Then there is meaning looking cat “Bootsie’s” Trans-Expressionist
painting “Hands Up, Mr. Rooster” which sold for $15,000. This cat had
five exhibitions which had netted him over $75,000. He won the Zampa d’Oro (Golden Paw) award at Exposizione dell’ Arte Felino
(Exposition of Feline Art) in Milan in 1993. Famed cat artist “Minnie”
had a kitten that sold an Abstract Expressionist painting in Japan for
$20,000, twice as much as Minnie ever got for a painting. (I’m not
making all this up.) (Some assert that this book is actually a spoof, If
so, it is an accurate one.) What I’m trying to is to demonstrate here
is the extent to which modern, non-representative art has been so
completely dehumanized that even animals can produce works of art that
could easily have been produced by human artists.
“The more minimum the art, the more maximum the explanation” observed New York Times
art critique Hilton Kramer in the late 1960s, when the term “minimum
art” was en vogue. No truer words were ever spoken. Art critics go to
extraordinary and risible lengths to explain works of art that clearly
can have no meaning. In the 19th Century, English painter J.M.W. Turner
and French artist Claude Monet both produced paintings that, at first
blush, seemed to be abstracts, but terse titles could make them clear to
any viewer, for example, with the former “Storm” and the latter “Water
Lilies.” These were true artists. As Professor McEvilley explained, what
is art is determined by the “art system.” In the same 1997 New York Times
article quoted above, Professor of Art History at NY University Robert
Rosenbaum wrote that it was up to the “informed people” of the art
system, that is: artists, art schools, curators, dealers and collectors
to determine what is “good art.” The problem with this is that, with
exceptions here and there, this establishment generally exhibits a knee
jerk opposition to representational, (i.e., comprehensible and
human-oriented) art. To them, for example, popular artists like Norman
Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth produced “kitsch” (the ultimate put down) that
could appeal only to the most incurable philistines. . I love the
observations on abstract art by the cartoonist creator of Lil’Abner, Al Capp, “A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”(National Observer July 1, 1963)
I had a number of conversations about this kind of art with leading
American sculptor, the late Frederick Hart, who produced the fine Three
Soldiers statue at the Vietnam Memorial Wall and a moving addition to a
portal of the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Hart was quite bitter
about the stubborn opposition of the art system to representational art
and its obstructing and discouraging talented young artists who want to
produce such art. It would be tolerable if non-representational art
were just confined to galleries, museums and private collectors. What is
deeply disturbing, however, is the proliferation of ugly, meaningless,
abstract sculptures in public places paid for by taxpayers. The “Tilted
Arc” mentioned above is one of the worst examples of this. Then there is
the monstrous, black, oppressive, depressing, thistle-like, and no
doubt very expensive, sculpture by the late Alexander Calder that fills
and overwhelms the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. These
sculptures are no doubt tolerated by those who feel they must be lacking
in art knowledge not to appreciate them and are approved by various
board members who don’t want to appear philistine and “not with it” and
simply accept the recommendations of representatives of the art system,
whom they believe “must know best about such things.” How these public
monstrosities are financed is exemplified by a law passed by our
Montgomery County Council in 1983 requiring that one percent of public
project construction to be spent for art. I need not mention what kind
of art got financed this way. I would fervently hope that someday
someone much younger and more energetic than I will launch a nationwide
campaign to Ban Ugliness in Public Places (BUPP) aimed at the dreadful
sculptures that deface the landscape.
An interesting new approach to art was the 2009 book The Art Instinct
by New Zealand professor Dennis Dutton (Bloomsbury Press, New York) who
views art as a result of Darwinian evolution of human art tastes. While
I do not share this approach, he does come to some interesting and
revealing conclusions that explain why most humans are turned off, for
example, by abstract art, atonal music and “random word order poetry.”
He states that “Human nature, so evolutionary aesthetics insists, sets
limits on what culture and arts can accomplish with the human
personality and its tastes. Contingent facts about human nature ensure
that not only some things in art will be difficult to appreciate but
that appreciation of them may be impossible. Earlier he had quoted 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume:
“The
general principles of taste are uniform in human nature.” In fact,”all
the general rules of art are founded only on experience and on the
observation of the common sentiments of human nature.” He goes on to
declare, ”Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago is
still admired at Paris and at London.” Dutton began his book with a
fascinating survey, the People’s Choice project
,commissioned by the Nature Institute, of artistic preferences of
people in ten countries as varied as Iceland and Kenya which ended in “a
reliable report on the artistic preferences of two billion [sic]
people.” The Project, conducted by two experienced painters, was to
determine “the most wanted and least wanted painting for every country
in the study” to be painted on request by the two artists. “The people
in almost all nations disliked abstract designs.” “The most wanted
painting was a landscape with water people and animals” and the
“overwhelmingly favorite color in the world turned out to be blue.”
