In 1926, the renowned American social critic H.L. Menchen wrote a famously acerbic essay The Libido for the Ugly in which he wonders if there “is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake”..... ask yourself this question: how many people if shown – say - Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring would think it a great work of art even if they didn’t know it was famous and valuable? And now ask yourself (hypothetically of course) how many would think that about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon if they’d somehow never seen – or even heard of - Cubism or any other type of abstract painting? And now ask yourself if you would know that Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow - is a great work of art if no one had ever told you so? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
The history of Art and Culture in the modern age is the story of a palace coup orchestrated by the eunuchs in a harem, the eunuchs being "theorists" and "critics" who replaced beauty, craft, and rigor with stilted verbiage and pseudoradical jargon, where the artist, the viewer and the work are supplanted by whatever social and political theories can be added like handles for easier carrying (and where the incentives somehow always magically align w the personal and career needs of the theorist class).
Once Art could be anything it became nothing, and once being an artist didn't involve talent, skill, technique etc it meant anyone could be an "artist", which explains such 21st-century masterpieces as the guy who canned his own shit or the female "artists" who consider exposing their unmade beds or breasts and genitals "art".
Once Art became about theories, causes, interpretations, social and political positioning, once every artwork came with a long explanation larded with guild jargon, its inevitable end was to be another luxury good or academic franchise where a priesthood of theorists play their status games while pretending it's all about "Progress" "inclusion" "Equality" or whatever else is the trendy slogan du jour.
Our theorist class are the termites of civilization, chewing to pieces and getting fat by destroying all they could never create. I'm not so sure "artists turned away from beauty" as much as they were bullied away from it, as the theorist class are masters of punitive moralism and personal denunciation.
This is really interesting. I'd like to look at the question from another angle.
For me, it's a matter of exposure and revelation. I interviewed David Fincher for a film I made, and he said "If you think you [meaning: anyone] can hide who you are, as a filmmaker, you're nuts."
I agree. So I think that the acid test, more or less, is how much the artist tries to hide behind an idea, a concept, a position, a theory. Or, in the case of hacks, of which there are many, indifferent "professionalism." Being an artist, no matter what the medium, is not a "job," even when it gives you a living wage.
In the case of the art world as it is now, there is this monstrous intermingling between conceptualism, criticism, money, an extremely debased idea of politics and a very, very strange idea that painting itself is "over," or something like that.
So Jeff Koons, of whom Arthur Danto was a big fan, if memory serves, holds zero interest for me. That is a question of commerce, not art. On the other hand, Anselm Kiefer, whose work is also very "expensive," seems to me (and many others) to be a great artist. The difference is that Kiefer does what all artists I care about do: he risks revealing himself, realizing his own vision and showing it to the world without alibis or theories or explanations. In comparison, I don't find Jeff Koons' work ugly so much as absolutely without interest. He's not offering anything, at all. It's the most cynical stance I can imagine.
Regarding Pinker's comments about the evolution of art, I think the same distinctions apply. Musical and literary forms changed in the late 19th and early 20th century because the composers and writers felt like they needed to explore new forms: the old ones felt exhausted to them (Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould both address this point with great eloquence). I don't think that there's anything inherently bad or "ugly" about 12-tone music: I deeply love a lot of Schoenberg's post-1921 music and some of Webern's music. On the other hand, I've heard a lot of indifferent atonal music in my life, composed by young men lost in their own theorizing, who let the "system" do the composing for them. There are great "stream of consciousness" novels and not great ones, for the same reasons. In cinema, the films of Godard or Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet are, while sometimes maddening, very beautiful and in many cases stirring. The British structuralist films of the 70s and early 80s? I'd rather pull nails out of the floorboards with my teeth than look at another frame.
I fully agree with you that the whole idea of beauty being "in the eye of the beholder" is nonsense - it's like those conversations about a film or a novel that come to a stop when someone says, "Well, it's all basically subjective." But I think that beauty, vitality, truth, and revelation are all interconnected: one mysterious, powerful whole. The enemies of beauty are systematization, exploitation, opportunism, pandering.
I have such mixed feelings about Danto -- at least he valued beauty! But what a low bar.
But does anyone still think painting is over? The art market is currently in some kind of crisis that I'm not following closely enough, but painting has been outselling other mediums.
The true, the good, and the beautiful certainly have so much overlap.
I was in a Nietzsche seminar with a guy finishing his MA in Philosophy before heading off to do something in Theology before becoming an Anglican minister. It came out that we were both big fans of Beethoven's symphonies but that whereas I was loving working through the difficulties of the late quartets he found them "less than beautiful". Something about needless complexity and too much dissonance.
I proposed the "modernist" thought that maybe Beethoven was finding it necessary to move away from more conservative notions of "beauty" because, after all, so much had already been done.
Inevitably this led to a debate concerning contemporary (this was 1982) musical developments. He insisted we had strayed so far from "beauty" that nothing was worth listening to.
I took the composer's side and asked my friend if he thought we could just keep creating Beethoven's symphonies over and over till the end of time.
My problem with "the question concerning beauty" boils down to this: when Chardin was doing his still lifes and Matisse was making windows out of canvases and letting color riot, they were neither of them repeating formulas or styles that had been exhaustively explored for decades or centuries.
Can a painter working in a "beautiful" register today be working in an original style or are we doomed to the eternal return of nostalgic recycling that does seem to characterize so much "art" today?
Art is syncretistic. For all of history, each new aesthetic has built on and transformed earlier ones. You can never predict what the next one will look like, but I trust the process. I don't think humanity has run out of beautiful ideas, even if we've also come up with ugly ones in the past century of art history. Yes, a painter working in a "beautiful" register today could be working in an original style.
I think your argument with the philosophy student suggests a false premise -- why would beauty require repetition or stagnation? Even now, the postmodern malaise has not struck down every original artist. Personally, I love a lot of 80s music.
We should distinguish between lower-case "m" modernism, simply meaning of the modern era, versus capital "M" Modernism as a cluster of ideological movements, often accompanied by manifestos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism ). Art Deco, jazz, Matisse, Cézanne, etc are all modern with a lower-case "m," and I cherish them. In my recent essays on beauty, I'm challenging capital "M" Modernism, and its Postmodern and contemporary inheritors.
I guess I will have to read the other essays in your series to get a sense of what you mean by "art is syncretistic", because syncretism in my understanding refers mainly to religions or perhaps "cultures" that incorporate elements from other, different traditions in religion or "culture".
Suggesting that aesthetics "build on and transform earlier ones" sounds more like progressive evolution within one "system" rather than the blending of elements from different "systems".
Buddhism, as opposed to Christianity (although I suspect that using Paglian analysis we could come up with a syncretic Roman Catholicism) and Islam, is syncretic: everywhere you go in the Buddhist world, local animist traditions have been incorporated into Buddhist practice and going from a Buddhist temple to a Hindu shrine or a Shinto shrine on New Years Day is utterly normal for Buddhists.
Neither Christians nor Muslims routinely incorporate elements of paganism (again Paglia) into their worship routines without thoroughly "laundering" those alien elements so they become part of the religion itself.
So when Picasso incorporated elements from African art in his work or Van Gogh repainted woodblock Ukiyo-e as oils, you could easily argue Modernism was syncretistic.
The move from early Renaissance to High and from High Renaissance to Baroque was less syncretic than progressive or evolutionary.
When I called my thought a "modernist thought" I was referring to Modernism, one tenet of which was a firm belief that previous styles or aesthetics were "done". And I suspect Van Gogh and Gaugin and Picasso were reacting to that sense of "exhaustion" when they acted *syncretistically*.
Postmodernism, beginning in architecture, is obviously syncretistic and would tear down the barriers not only between High and Low but between the West and the Rest, thus gobbling down the planet and all its history.
My "America was supposed to be Art Deco." piece uses Art Deco vs the International Style to explain the difference between what I meant above by "m"odernism vs "M"odernism, syncretistic vs a manifesto:
Being a child of the 60s, I eagerly took up the fad for loving all things Art Deco in the early 70s. We had some beautiful examples in Hamilton Ontario and I vaguely recall experiencing a kind of bliss visiting the old TH&B railway station around that time.
Hamilton is also blessed with numerous examples of amazingly beautiful 19th and early 20th C houses in a range of styles. Where I did my undergrad, Guelph, is practically a living museum of an even wider range of styles of great beauty.
So I am neither indifferent to nor inexperienced in the value of “traditional” beauty in architecture.
That said, my impression of International Style and Bauhaus is not that shared by Tom Wolfe as he turned from his curmudgeonly critique of Radical Chic to crusty old man shouting at the clouds of the built environment of American cities. I was never one to take lessons on pseudo-populism from a cranky old dude who dressed like he was to-the-plantation-born and was an early practitioner of witty invective in the guise of cultural history.
It’s practically a meme on the New Right to take a group of Europeans who fled the Nazis, like the Frankfurt School and Bauhaus, and blame them for destroying the native culture of Americanismo.
This of course is directly in the lineage of all rightwing culture warriors who tend to see these European movements as deriving from Jewish-Bolshevik roots (although the Jewish angle is currently downplayed because Israeli ethnonationalism has moved the Jews way up the charts of right wing hits).
The reality is something quite different and not only was the Bauhaus attacked as antisemitic but it embodied a varied and innovative approach to art and culture. In its origins it took a lot from the Arts and Craft movement a generation earlier.
(Art Nouveau, which was descended from Arts and Craft, was something that Art Deco reacted against by insisting on geometric forms and artificial rather than natural materials. Somewhat similar to the International Style’s reaction against traditional forms and materials in favor of “machined” and “high-tech” materials and styles.)
International Style was being practiced by American architects before the arrival of the Bauhaus version and one way or another it is NOT architects who determine what gets built and where, it is governments and corporations and wealthy individuals and it always has been.
The glass and steel tower is the look of American corporate capitalism, not German-born Bauhaus/International Style. Just as Gropius had had to change his school’s creative emphases in order to attract investors in Weimar Germany when the school looked to be going under, all architects are under the corporate thumb when it comes to designing the big phallic HQs intended to signal the reproductive power of American capitalism.
All you need to do is look at the domestic architecture Gropius and Breuer “foisted” on the Boston suburbs to see that there is most definitely a beautiful version of Bauhaus style.
It’s just not the one chosen by the American corporation to mark its ascendancy over all of life in the American Century.
That simple truth doesn’t fit the Bolshevik narrative preferred by culture warriors on the American right, though.
In 1926, the renowned American social critic H.L. Menchen wrote a famously acerbic essay The Libido for the Ugly in which he wonders if there “is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake”..... ask yourself this question: how many people if shown – say - Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring would think it a great work of art even if they didn’t know it was famous and valuable? And now ask yourself (hypothetically of course) how many would think that about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon if they’d somehow never seen – or even heard of - Cubism or any other type of abstract painting? And now ask yourself if you would know that Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow - is a great work of art if no one had ever told you so? https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
Thanks for sharing, I really enjoyed your piece! I need to go read that Menchen essay now.
Thank you Megan. I'll check out your 'stack again too.
The history of Art and Culture in the modern age is the story of a palace coup orchestrated by the eunuchs in a harem, the eunuchs being "theorists" and "critics" who replaced beauty, craft, and rigor with stilted verbiage and pseudoradical jargon, where the artist, the viewer and the work are supplanted by whatever social and political theories can be added like handles for easier carrying (and where the incentives somehow always magically align w the personal and career needs of the theorist class).
Once Art could be anything it became nothing, and once being an artist didn't involve talent, skill, technique etc it meant anyone could be an "artist", which explains such 21st-century masterpieces as the guy who canned his own shit or the female "artists" who consider exposing their unmade beds or breasts and genitals "art".
Once Art became about theories, causes, interpretations, social and political positioning, once every artwork came with a long explanation larded with guild jargon, its inevitable end was to be another luxury good or academic franchise where a priesthood of theorists play their status games while pretending it's all about "Progress" "inclusion" "Equality" or whatever else is the trendy slogan du jour.
Our theorist class are the termites of civilization, chewing to pieces and getting fat by destroying all they could never create. I'm not so sure "artists turned away from beauty" as much as they were bullied away from it, as the theorist class are masters of punitive moralism and personal denunciation.
Great piece! Cheers!
The "eunuchs in a harem" hahahahahahahahahahahah
It's so true that the theorists and critics bear much of the blame, and deserve endless Tom Wolfe-style mockery.
Appreciate your work and your defense of beauty (sad that we even need such a thing).
Esthetes of the world unite! ;)
Bravo!
This is really interesting. I'd like to look at the question from another angle.
For me, it's a matter of exposure and revelation. I interviewed David Fincher for a film I made, and he said "If you think you [meaning: anyone] can hide who you are, as a filmmaker, you're nuts."
I agree. So I think that the acid test, more or less, is how much the artist tries to hide behind an idea, a concept, a position, a theory. Or, in the case of hacks, of which there are many, indifferent "professionalism." Being an artist, no matter what the medium, is not a "job," even when it gives you a living wage.
In the case of the art world as it is now, there is this monstrous intermingling between conceptualism, criticism, money, an extremely debased idea of politics and a very, very strange idea that painting itself is "over," or something like that.
So Jeff Koons, of whom Arthur Danto was a big fan, if memory serves, holds zero interest for me. That is a question of commerce, not art. On the other hand, Anselm Kiefer, whose work is also very "expensive," seems to me (and many others) to be a great artist. The difference is that Kiefer does what all artists I care about do: he risks revealing himself, realizing his own vision and showing it to the world without alibis or theories or explanations. In comparison, I don't find Jeff Koons' work ugly so much as absolutely without interest. He's not offering anything, at all. It's the most cynical stance I can imagine.
Regarding Pinker's comments about the evolution of art, I think the same distinctions apply. Musical and literary forms changed in the late 19th and early 20th century because the composers and writers felt like they needed to explore new forms: the old ones felt exhausted to them (Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould both address this point with great eloquence). I don't think that there's anything inherently bad or "ugly" about 12-tone music: I deeply love a lot of Schoenberg's post-1921 music and some of Webern's music. On the other hand, I've heard a lot of indifferent atonal music in my life, composed by young men lost in their own theorizing, who let the "system" do the composing for them. There are great "stream of consciousness" novels and not great ones, for the same reasons. In cinema, the films of Godard or Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet are, while sometimes maddening, very beautiful and in many cases stirring. The British structuralist films of the 70s and early 80s? I'd rather pull nails out of the floorboards with my teeth than look at another frame.
I fully agree with you that the whole idea of beauty being "in the eye of the beholder" is nonsense - it's like those conversations about a film or a novel that come to a stop when someone says, "Well, it's all basically subjective." But I think that beauty, vitality, truth, and revelation are all interconnected: one mysterious, powerful whole. The enemies of beauty are systematization, exploitation, opportunism, pandering.
I have such mixed feelings about Danto -- at least he valued beauty! But what a low bar.
But does anyone still think painting is over? The art market is currently in some kind of crisis that I'm not following closely enough, but painting has been outselling other mediums.
The true, the good, and the beautiful certainly have so much overlap.
I was in a Nietzsche seminar with a guy finishing his MA in Philosophy before heading off to do something in Theology before becoming an Anglican minister. It came out that we were both big fans of Beethoven's symphonies but that whereas I was loving working through the difficulties of the late quartets he found them "less than beautiful". Something about needless complexity and too much dissonance.
I proposed the "modernist" thought that maybe Beethoven was finding it necessary to move away from more conservative notions of "beauty" because, after all, so much had already been done.
Inevitably this led to a debate concerning contemporary (this was 1982) musical developments. He insisted we had strayed so far from "beauty" that nothing was worth listening to.
I took the composer's side and asked my friend if he thought we could just keep creating Beethoven's symphonies over and over till the end of time.
My problem with "the question concerning beauty" boils down to this: when Chardin was doing his still lifes and Matisse was making windows out of canvases and letting color riot, they were neither of them repeating formulas or styles that had been exhaustively explored for decades or centuries.
Can a painter working in a "beautiful" register today be working in an original style or are we doomed to the eternal return of nostalgic recycling that does seem to characterize so much "art" today?
Art is syncretistic. For all of history, each new aesthetic has built on and transformed earlier ones. You can never predict what the next one will look like, but I trust the process. I don't think humanity has run out of beautiful ideas, even if we've also come up with ugly ones in the past century of art history. Yes, a painter working in a "beautiful" register today could be working in an original style.
I think your argument with the philosophy student suggests a false premise -- why would beauty require repetition or stagnation? Even now, the postmodern malaise has not struck down every original artist. Personally, I love a lot of 80s music.
We should distinguish between lower-case "m" modernism, simply meaning of the modern era, versus capital "M" Modernism as a cluster of ideological movements, often accompanied by manifestos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism ). Art Deco, jazz, Matisse, Cézanne, etc are all modern with a lower-case "m," and I cherish them. In my recent essays on beauty, I'm challenging capital "M" Modernism, and its Postmodern and contemporary inheritors.
I guess I will have to read the other essays in your series to get a sense of what you mean by "art is syncretistic", because syncretism in my understanding refers mainly to religions or perhaps "cultures" that incorporate elements from other, different traditions in religion or "culture".
Suggesting that aesthetics "build on and transform earlier ones" sounds more like progressive evolution within one "system" rather than the blending of elements from different "systems".
Buddhism, as opposed to Christianity (although I suspect that using Paglian analysis we could come up with a syncretic Roman Catholicism) and Islam, is syncretic: everywhere you go in the Buddhist world, local animist traditions have been incorporated into Buddhist practice and going from a Buddhist temple to a Hindu shrine or a Shinto shrine on New Years Day is utterly normal for Buddhists.
Neither Christians nor Muslims routinely incorporate elements of paganism (again Paglia) into their worship routines without thoroughly "laundering" those alien elements so they become part of the religion itself.
So when Picasso incorporated elements from African art in his work or Van Gogh repainted woodblock Ukiyo-e as oils, you could easily argue Modernism was syncretistic.
The move from early Renaissance to High and from High Renaissance to Baroque was less syncretic than progressive or evolutionary.
When I called my thought a "modernist thought" I was referring to Modernism, one tenet of which was a firm belief that previous styles or aesthetics were "done". And I suspect Van Gogh and Gaugin and Picasso were reacting to that sense of "exhaustion" when they acted *syncretistically*.
Postmodernism, beginning in architecture, is obviously syncretistic and would tear down the barriers not only between High and Low but between the West and the Rest, thus gobbling down the planet and all its history.
My "America was supposed to be Art Deco." piece uses Art Deco vs the International Style to explain the difference between what I meant above by "m"odernism vs "M"odernism, syncretistic vs a manifesto:
https://www.fashionablylatetakes.com/p/america-was-supposed-to-be-art-deco?r=2vr1o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Being a child of the 60s, I eagerly took up the fad for loving all things Art Deco in the early 70s. We had some beautiful examples in Hamilton Ontario and I vaguely recall experiencing a kind of bliss visiting the old TH&B railway station around that time.
Hamilton is also blessed with numerous examples of amazingly beautiful 19th and early 20th C houses in a range of styles. Where I did my undergrad, Guelph, is practically a living museum of an even wider range of styles of great beauty.
So I am neither indifferent to nor inexperienced in the value of “traditional” beauty in architecture.
That said, my impression of International Style and Bauhaus is not that shared by Tom Wolfe as he turned from his curmudgeonly critique of Radical Chic to crusty old man shouting at the clouds of the built environment of American cities. I was never one to take lessons on pseudo-populism from a cranky old dude who dressed like he was to-the-plantation-born and was an early practitioner of witty invective in the guise of cultural history.
It’s practically a meme on the New Right to take a group of Europeans who fled the Nazis, like the Frankfurt School and Bauhaus, and blame them for destroying the native culture of Americanismo.
This of course is directly in the lineage of all rightwing culture warriors who tend to see these European movements as deriving from Jewish-Bolshevik roots (although the Jewish angle is currently downplayed because Israeli ethnonationalism has moved the Jews way up the charts of right wing hits).
The reality is something quite different and not only was the Bauhaus attacked as antisemitic but it embodied a varied and innovative approach to art and culture. In its origins it took a lot from the Arts and Craft movement a generation earlier.
(Art Nouveau, which was descended from Arts and Craft, was something that Art Deco reacted against by insisting on geometric forms and artificial rather than natural materials. Somewhat similar to the International Style’s reaction against traditional forms and materials in favor of “machined” and “high-tech” materials and styles.)
International Style was being practiced by American architects before the arrival of the Bauhaus version and one way or another it is NOT architects who determine what gets built and where, it is governments and corporations and wealthy individuals and it always has been.
The glass and steel tower is the look of American corporate capitalism, not German-born Bauhaus/International Style. Just as Gropius had had to change his school’s creative emphases in order to attract investors in Weimar Germany when the school looked to be going under, all architects are under the corporate thumb when it comes to designing the big phallic HQs intended to signal the reproductive power of American capitalism.
All you need to do is look at the domestic architecture Gropius and Breuer “foisted” on the Boston suburbs to see that there is most definitely a beautiful version of Bauhaus style.
It’s just not the one chosen by the American corporation to mark its ascendancy over all of life in the American Century.
That simple truth doesn’t fit the Bolshevik narrative preferred by culture warriors on the American right, though.