There was a kid in my high school art class that specialized in near-photographic pencil drawings of empty, crushed cigarette packs. They were art-full renderings of
a subject unworthy of anyone’s attention. He imagined the seriousness his Art was evident in his art-full depiction of trash. He was taught this idea.
So were we all.
Those untrained in “Art” think art-full depiction of crushed, cigarette packs are art-less. They believe art should be about beautiful things, beautifully rendered. Ah, but those folks only think that way because they haven’t been properly schooled in the elevated understanding of Art Theorists.
For most of human history art was made to revere what was worth being revered, excellence of any sort would qualify. The point was to honor goodness, truth, and beauty. Prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century, trained and untrained alike were in large agreement on this idea.
Why not? It’s a commonsensible idea.
It takes a long time to beat common sense out of people. One small step the wrong way leads to another. Ideas leach through the social fabric. The notion that low is more important than high begun as social theory.
Years later, the idea polluted aesthetic theory.
Oliver Cromwell famously asked his portraitist to show him warts and all. He supposed this showed his honesty, his commitment to uncompromising recognition of reality.
If his portraitist had insisted on showing him
in a way that didn’t show his warts, would the portrait
be any less real? No, but it would have spared the viewer unnecessary attention to the triviality of his warts.
Cromwell was a reformer. He wanted to replace rule of the elite with rule of the common man. He imagined the nitty-gritty of the lower-classes somehow more real, more honest than the lives of the eminent. He thought showing warts-and-all marked him as one of the people.
His confusion of style with substance continues in art-less thinking today.
Marxist theory didn’t just infect social polemics;
it infected theories of art as well. the art world turned the communist ideal of celebrating the common man into a celebration of lowness in general. Art would no longer be about celebrating the good, the true, and the beautiful, but about celebrating the previously ignored plain, unpleasant, and outrageous.
It began innocently enough but celebration of outré soon outstripped all else.
Fauvists, Impressionists, and Surrealists produced exciting new art, all to the good, but infatuation with the outré eventually led to Dada, Pop Art, Post this and Post that until finally sordid and stupid became accepted as “Art”.
Common understanding was turned upside down. Ugly was elevated beyond beauty as the true concern of the serious artist.
The absurd idea seeped into to all the arts. From painting, to photography, to literature, no work would be taken as “real art” if it’s subject wasn't gritty or outrageous.
Only the unpleasant underbelly of anything was worth a true artists attention; ideally rendered in a style as harshly worthless as greasy trash on a crumbling sidewalk.
Irony waltzing with nihilism became the accepted canon for “real” artists and writers.
So too current delusions of realism: ugly is more “real” than beauty; evil is more “real” than good - beauty and goodness are no longer artistically valid. Unfortunately, this is the assumption canonized by nearly all approved schools of Art and Writing.
I have a friend who tells me my writing would be much improved if I wrote “harder”, with more focus on the warts of society – you know – the real stuff.
I know he means well, but I don’t want to write, “harder”. I don’t want to focus on the warts of society.
I would rather write pleasantly about subjects I find worth musing about.
Some will appreciate what I write, some won’t. It doesn’t matter. I write for myself.
I see the aesthetic value of good writing in clarity, honesty and well-formed sentences about topics worth talking about.
Pretentious toughness and unpleasant topics
I happily leave to those who devote their ambition to commercial success and popular acclaim.
The true test of artful greatness is longevity.
Art that is good, true, and beautiful will be around for as long as people are around.
The hard-and-warty school of art will disappear with the times.
That it exists at all is only because of the thorough indoctrination of mainstream editors, teachers and critics.
The possibility they have it wrong is flatly rejected.
Most of the public agrees.
The brainwashed are never aware of being brainwashed.
It has taken many years to turn common sense into nonsense. The long struggle is now over. Isn’t nasty reality really much more worth the attention of the serious artist?
Celebration of beauty, truth, and goodness is so, “yesterday”.
Art-less has become the new Art-full.
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If produced in modern times, Michelangelo’s Pieta would be dismissed as trite; Rubin’s Suzanne and the Elders; cheesy. Mary Cassatt’s Mother with Child, corny.
When subject and style are confused, aesthetic illiteracy is inevitable.