ALEX writes in response to the post on modern art:

José Ortega y Gasset in his essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” alleges that the essential function of modern art is to partition the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. Modern art, he says, is not so much contingently unpopular, as deliberately anti-popular. It acts “like a social solvent which separates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men”. It’s intended to have that effect.

Ortega welcomes the fact, if it is a fact, that modern artists have been following an exclusive aesthetic and social agenda. He goes on to say that the aristocracy of modern art lovers is a “privileged minority of the fine senses” which is distinguished from the vulgar masses by possessing an aesthetic appreciation of art that the common man cannot understand.

If it’s true that, directed by an intellectual elite, a fabrication of what passes for works of art has taken place in order to baffle and antagonize the masses, then it helps to explain why so many intelligible paintings of the 19th century, like Lord Frederick Leighton’s Mother and Child, have been relegated to obscurity.

The ‘ordinary person’ seeks human interest in art. But modern painting, poetry, or even ‘serious’ music is deprived of any human resonance as a condition of being compatible with a theory of the avant-garde according to which, as the cultural commentator John Carey observes, the taste of the mass is always cheap and wrong. Thus nobody on the inside track of modernism would find any merit in Leighton’s beautiful picture. It has too much humanity. It’s too beautiful. It’s too well painted.  It’s too comprehensible.

In a nutshell: Warhol and Picasso are acclaimed by modern art critics because their work will NOT appeal to the majority. Cans of soup and Guernica will puzzle and perhaps even enrage them. Meanwhile what is seen as truly excellent in art, has been dissembled for the delight of a sophisticated minority – who are better described as the enemies of beauty.

Laura writes:

Just a few thoughts, though I haven’t read this particular essay by Ortega y Gasset.

I disagree with what you describe as Ortega y Gasset’s point. While status-seeking and a gnostic sensibility are present among the cognoscenti, modern art is attractive to the elite primarily because it speaks to their values. It affirms a worldview.

By the way, I don’t want to suggest that modern art is devoid of all aesthetic value. For instance, abstract painting, at its best, draws attention to the elemental beauty of color and line. But these are relatively small pleasures. John Ruskin said a painting should be judged by the immensity of the ideas it conveys and modern art, at its best, conveys small ideas and, at its worst, falsehoods, the primary falsehood being that that which is elemental and primitive, including the subconscious, is the guiding force in nature. This respect for the elemental progressively turns from the higher toward the lower, and finds the investigation of human personality pointless. This spiritual understanding is anti-populist because the ordinary person does not naturally think this way. “This is a world that does not have any meaning for me,” said Picasso. Personality was clearly not meaningful to him.

Art expresses faith, and modern art speaks to an innermost faith in pantheistic evolution which gradually mutates into the belief that the human is always in the process of devolving. If character is the descendant of lifeless matter, human striving is a masquerade and the Cubist face expresses what goes for a higher truth: the war of the elements. Not humanity, not personality, not the individual, but the elemental is beautiful. The demonic is beautiful because it expresses the chaos of the elemental. Therefore, a painting such as Mother and Child offends modern elite sensibilities to the core.

Also, in response to Ortega y Gasset’s point, modern art does have a populist streak in its disdain for classical art training and hierarchy in art education. If the subconscious is more meaningful than free will and volition, then the task of the artist is to release what is already there not to tame it. It seems to me that modern art in many ways panders to the masses.

                                         — Comments —

D. from Seattle writes:

An excellent essay on modern art (“Admit it – you really hate modern art”) was written by Spengler and published at Asia Times in January 2007; I believe it will be timelessly relevant to all discussions on modern are so long as modern art is based on the same premise as today and as it has been since its founding. Spengler makes great comparison between music and visual art, i.e. painting/sculpture.

Laura writes:

Spengler’s point that people will tolerate bad painting in a way they won’t tolerate bad music is a good one.

D. writes:

Spengler’s main point is that modern visual art has been very successful in terms of popular recognition as well as financially, whereas modern music has only been successful among theorists but has been a failure otherwise. Many modern painters and sculptors became rich, while modern composers often ended up in poverty. The reason for this, according to Spengler, is that it is easy to pretend that you like modern visual art: no matter how objectively ugly it is, you can put it on your wall and brag about it and show it to people without having to actually look at it much, if at all. Music, on the other hand, is impossible to ignore — you can’t turn away from sound and you can’t carry on a nice conversation with Schoenberg in the background the same way you can in front of, but with your back to, an ugly painting.

Fred Owens writes:

Your thoughts on modern art are balanced and well-received. I am relieved to read that you do not give a blanket condemnation of current forms.

Here’s what I wish, that you would select a piece of modern art that you find worthwhile and show it on your website, along side the traditional paintings that are your preference.

In other words, if you think that some modern art is good, show us a painting or a sculpture that you like.

Laura writes:

Perhaps I will, but I believe there is a surfeit of modern art everywhere. People see enough of it and much of it looks terrible on a screen, if not in reality. A friend of mine is an abstract painter and we have a painting of his in our dining room. It’s just intense color that cleanses the eye.

One piece of modern art that I like is a work in a garden near my home. It is a structure  intended to look like the ruins of an old stone building. There is also a huge water table that (deliberately) resembles a coffin. When I first saw it, I thought it was too stagey and very ugly, but then as the plants grew around it, the evocation of ruins and death intensified. It is all very morbid for a garden, and it’s a terrible place to go with young children for that reason, and yet it’s interesting and dramatic. However, like much of modern art, I believe this “installation” feeds off existing beauty. These ruins would not be beautiful if this garden itself was a ruins, instead of a place with carefully groomed paths, sculptured benches, fountains and flower beds, with an old, meticulously maintained mansion up the hill which calls to mind a life of civility and stability, of years and people passing away and yet something perpetually undying. 

The contrived ruins feed off these surroundings in the same way atonal music feeds off melody.

Alex writes:

A few more observations, Laura.

That modern art has been deliberately dehumanized in order to deprive the common people of any joy in it, and any say in what’s good, bad, or indifferent about it, strikes me as incredible. There will be a number of complicated and subtle reasons which could explain the forms that modern art has taken. But no explanation will be adequate without reference to the spirit of the times by which the art of this and every epoch is inevitably permeated.

So I don’t believe, as is implicit in what Ortega has to say, that modern art is merely a conspiracy against the masses. There is no doubt however that intellectual snobbery is a factor in the distinction between what the cultivated mind wants to place in art galleries and what the general public would recognize as ‘art’.

In the instructions he gives to the players, Hamlet says it’s their business to “hold a mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. Of course Shakespeare was talking about dramatic art which is realized through the instrument of actors, but I think these words have a wider significance.

It could be argued that modern art no longer holds the mirror up to nature – at least in the representational way that Frederick Leighton’s painting does. Yet, for example, we can see by the interior values in both Mother and Child and Guernica that the artist has absorbed something of the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

I don’t agree that modern art panders to the masses. If it did, then plebeian hordes would be waiting in line at concerts of music by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The novels of James Joyce and the poetry of T S Eliot would be selling like the proverbial hot cakes etc.

I hope you will not be tempted to post modern paintings on The Thinking Housewife. Your selection of poetry and 19th century paintings adds quality to your blog, in my opinion.

Laura writes:

The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes intellectual snobbery is rampant in the modern art world. I think much of nineteenth century art would be wildly popular, people would line up to see it, if it were given the sort of billing the Impressionists get.

Jenny writes:

An excellent book on this topic is Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning by Nancy Pearcey. It’s one of the best explanations I’ve read of what’s happened in art over the last 100 years or so.

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