"Young artists should not be encouraged. Their encouragement yields only misery and inferior products."
This made me laugh so hard. I've been in and around the "arts" since the 80s and the replacement of actual talent, imagination and beauty with the weird modern mush of politics and therapeutic narcissism that everyone calls "Art" is hilarious and infuriating, a combination of Emperor's New Clothes and one of those Christopher Guest movies.
All the pale copies of something that was tired when Yoko Ono did it 50 years ago, the heavy chunks of text, the unmade beds, the juvenile Identity games (a black Founding Father! Virgin Mary is gay!), the victim porn and voyeuristic photos of cancer patients or slum dwellers, the random hunks of steel called "sculpture", the random shapes and colors called "painting" etc—all of it nurtured, created, curated and sold by a modern class of artist and teacher who've been drowning in shit for so long they no longer have any ability to discern or discriminate, but just rubber-stamp the next trend and treat the idea of Talent like the Evil One who may never be spoken of.
Gómez Dávila said: "Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes." And the same goes for art—now that everyone is creative and loves "Art" and wants to live near an "Arts District", it's become almost impossible to find any work in any genre that is startlingly new and alive, that can stand on its own two feet without social commentary.
I fear that our age is just too sterile, affluent, hedonic and image- and sensation-saturated for any work to cut through the noise and show us life in a new way or for any artist to have the necessary separation and solitude that's required to dream these things up and sweat blood creating them—but at least we have Alice Gribbin. I wish I were rich, I'd start my own imprint just to publish her.
Agreed! And thanks for the reminder that "Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes." I wonder what the rise of Substack might portend.
Art is an expression of its particular culture and time. We appear to be living through a rather bad patch and the art we produce reflects just how bad things are in the West. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're done. It would be so interesting to live for a really long time just to see if we have it in us to heal, rise, once again, and become a thriving civilization producing brilliant art. Sigh.
Thank you so much for your insights and well written essays on our current crisis of meaning and depth in our time. Art and culture has just become more and more superficial and in many ways degrading. A power struggle,shame and blame game... I too feel there may be something missing to the relationship between mind and body. Iain McGilchrists work in his books, : The Master and His Emissary, and more recently, : The Matter with Things, are wonderfully enlightening.
I'd say what is lacking sorely is not only history but any sense of well-honed skill, technique, an' a well-trained eye... in brief, we're seein' crap as crap can be produced without much effort--it kinda (pardon the crude here...) just comes out. Then "it" gets an "ahrt skool" petty-gree. Thus, we now witness, at best, artistic equivalent of HoJo's clam roll. Some of us cannot stomach it, others seem to have adapted to this as our (expected) "sad American diet."
Yet... within the hallowed "cult of beauty" we have always had "ugly" masterpieces --but they have not been diagnostic--they're more like what I'd call "belle laides"--immensely attractive ugly women--well executed, disturbing, darkly poetic--such as Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Sebastián de Morra or, say, Caravaggio's Salome with The Head of John The Baptist... I have a good appetite for this type of well-honed, skillfully rendered "ugly," especially when paired with a side of nourishing beauty, rarely served raw, typically presented "au point."
As they fire the informed (but not appropriately diverse) long-in-the-tooth museum curators who comprehend--at very least--the once universally understood purpose of a museum (or just bloody their foyers until duly humiliated) we must looks elsewhere for art and the dignified place it once held in American culture...
I daresay the Russians (who still insist on rigorous classical training, studied technique & painstaking copy work, regardless of subject --and these would include my daughter's current and former octogenarian instructors who still, bless 'em, remain sharp--and vertical!--and teach art like it's 1971) might have the answer. That is, at least, if the "peecee" crowd would kindly cease banning all things Russian because of "Go Ukraine" -- truly Gogol would be laughing his a_s off at "us." I'll toast with a swig of borscht to that!
not sure how I started following this fascist aesthetics blog but wow... wild ride... 'hygiene' you say? 'beauty,' ill-defined but set against systems of democratisation and funding of art production, you say? regarding contemporary culture as bowed down by mediocrity, superficiality and a misguidedly acute sense of 'the ethical'? wow wow wow. can't wait to read your futurist verses and later read about you supporting whichever revanchist political project is your most local. absolutely buckwild!
Fascists tend to like their prose readable, like with proper punctuation and capitalization. Democratization tends toward incoherence and noise. Not everything can be conveyed clearly by indulging in automatic stream of consciousness.
You write very well but overall it's a mishmash of rather academically minded references that don't always unite so well with some of the more caustic or, rather, insistent statements about how things "are". High and Low have always existed and their relative importance has been squashed by digital media allied with Capitalist greed on steroids. I agree that these are times of mediocre art and yet being truthful to one's art is not limited to academic histories or theories but, rather, what is actually in sync with a multitude of brain/body functions as they interact with what is.
You are quoting Pound at length in this essay, yet never say that you are word for word quoting Pound. Why no attribution, or at least quotation marks?
"It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But the wisdom of the present is freedom from history. For the living to cultivate their discernment would be needless: Art is good when it makes us feel good in ourselves and about our opinions."
"Young artists should not be encouraged. Their encouragement yields only misery and inferior products."
This made me laugh so hard. I've been in and around the "arts" since the 80s and the replacement of actual talent, imagination and beauty with the weird modern mush of politics and therapeutic narcissism that everyone calls "Art" is hilarious and infuriating, a combination of Emperor's New Clothes and one of those Christopher Guest movies.
All the pale copies of something that was tired when Yoko Ono did it 50 years ago, the heavy chunks of text, the unmade beds, the juvenile Identity games (a black Founding Father! Virgin Mary is gay!), the victim porn and voyeuristic photos of cancer patients or slum dwellers, the random hunks of steel called "sculpture", the random shapes and colors called "painting" etc—all of it nurtured, created, curated and sold by a modern class of artist and teacher who've been drowning in shit for so long they no longer have any ability to discern or discriminate, but just rubber-stamp the next trend and treat the idea of Talent like the Evil One who may never be spoken of.
Gómez Dávila said: "Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes." And the same goes for art—now that everyone is creative and loves "Art" and wants to live near an "Arts District", it's become almost impossible to find any work in any genre that is startlingly new and alive, that can stand on its own two feet without social commentary.
I fear that our age is just too sterile, affluent, hedonic and image- and sensation-saturated for any work to cut through the noise and show us life in a new way or for any artist to have the necessary separation and solitude that's required to dream these things up and sweat blood creating them—but at least we have Alice Gribbin. I wish I were rich, I'd start my own imprint just to publish her.
Thanks so much!
Agreed! And thanks for the reminder that "Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes." I wonder what the rise of Substack might portend.
Art is an expression of its particular culture and time. We appear to be living through a rather bad patch and the art we produce reflects just how bad things are in the West. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're done. It would be so interesting to live for a really long time just to see if we have it in us to heal, rise, once again, and become a thriving civilization producing brilliant art. Sigh.
actually I believe art is an ALTERNATIVE to our culture and time. Otherwise it is just another time-capsule relic.
Thank you so much for your insights and well written essays on our current crisis of meaning and depth in our time. Art and culture has just become more and more superficial and in many ways degrading. A power struggle,shame and blame game... I too feel there may be something missing to the relationship between mind and body. Iain McGilchrists work in his books, : The Master and His Emissary, and more recently, : The Matter with Things, are wonderfully enlightening.
I'd say what is lacking sorely is not only history but any sense of well-honed skill, technique, an' a well-trained eye... in brief, we're seein' crap as crap can be produced without much effort--it kinda (pardon the crude here...) just comes out. Then "it" gets an "ahrt skool" petty-gree. Thus, we now witness, at best, artistic equivalent of HoJo's clam roll. Some of us cannot stomach it, others seem to have adapted to this as our (expected) "sad American diet."
Yet... within the hallowed "cult of beauty" we have always had "ugly" masterpieces --but they have not been diagnostic--they're more like what I'd call "belle laides"--immensely attractive ugly women--well executed, disturbing, darkly poetic--such as Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Sebastián de Morra or, say, Caravaggio's Salome with The Head of John The Baptist... I have a good appetite for this type of well-honed, skillfully rendered "ugly," especially when paired with a side of nourishing beauty, rarely served raw, typically presented "au point."
As they fire the informed (but not appropriately diverse) long-in-the-tooth museum curators who comprehend--at very least--the once universally understood purpose of a museum (or just bloody their foyers until duly humiliated) we must looks elsewhere for art and the dignified place it once held in American culture...
I daresay the Russians (who still insist on rigorous classical training, studied technique & painstaking copy work, regardless of subject --and these would include my daughter's current and former octogenarian instructors who still, bless 'em, remain sharp--and vertical!--and teach art like it's 1971) might have the answer. That is, at least, if the "peecee" crowd would kindly cease banning all things Russian because of "Go Ukraine" -- truly Gogol would be laughing his a_s off at "us." I'll toast with a swig of borscht to that!
not sure how I started following this fascist aesthetics blog but wow... wild ride... 'hygiene' you say? 'beauty,' ill-defined but set against systems of democratisation and funding of art production, you say? regarding contemporary culture as bowed down by mediocrity, superficiality and a misguidedly acute sense of 'the ethical'? wow wow wow. can't wait to read your futurist verses and later read about you supporting whichever revanchist political project is your most local. absolutely buckwild!
If this essay is obviously fascist, so is owning a german shepherd. Thank goodness not all our brains are this melted.
Fascists tend to like their prose readable, like with proper punctuation and capitalization. Democratization tends toward incoherence and noise. Not everything can be conveyed clearly by indulging in automatic stream of consciousness.
You write very well but overall it's a mishmash of rather academically minded references that don't always unite so well with some of the more caustic or, rather, insistent statements about how things "are". High and Low have always existed and their relative importance has been squashed by digital media allied with Capitalist greed on steroids. I agree that these are times of mediocre art and yet being truthful to one's art is not limited to academic histories or theories but, rather, what is actually in sync with a multitude of brain/body functions as they interact with what is.
You are quoting Pound at length in this essay, yet never say that you are word for word quoting Pound. Why no attribution, or at least quotation marks?
"It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But the wisdom of the present is freedom from history. For the living to cultivate their discernment would be needless: Art is good when it makes us feel good in ourselves and about our opinions."
YES!!!
'Aesthetics are concerned with depths.' yes!!