The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  Special thanks to my long-suffering wife. Also to Sam Richardson, Holly Hazeltree, Jikke Gruwel, & Alice Cogan. Cover image: Karl Briullov - The Last Day of Pompeii. 1830, Public Domain.

  Amazon Self-Published. 978-1720557852 | MMXVII

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1: Art has been taken from us

  2: Modernist art is a weapon

  PART 1: What is Western art?

  1: Hellenistic origins of Western art

  2: Platonic Forms and the Golden Ratio

  PART 2: How art has declined

  Art in decline, a tripartite assailment

  I: The philosophy of Modernism

  1: Understanding Artspeak

  2: Painting

  3: The origins of Modernism

  4: A truthful time line of art history

  5: Modernism: What is it really?

  6: Modernist movements since Expressionism

  7: Turner Prize: Conceptualist asylum

  8: The importance of architecture

  II: The rise of materialism and the loss of idealism

  1: The average person has lost touch with art

  2. Rise of political correctness

  3: The lie of equality

  4: Relativism: Marxist buzzwords as closed tautology

  5: Who wants to fight for a Modernist world?

  6: Art school - The fantastic joke

  7: Feminism and education

  III: Industrialization, and corporate mass production

  1: Art and science

  2: Digital art, realism, photography & cinema

  PART 3: The path back to a healthy art

  1: Action versus work in a technological age

  2. The power of myth

  3. Spirituality and primordial tradition: Western

  religion and the plane of perfect reason

  4: Hierarchical industrialization

  5: Form and function: the Kaiser and Barnett Newman

  6. Return to the guild system

  7: Return to the atelier method

  Concluding Remarks

  1: Twilight of the Western arts

  2: Can we halt decline?

  3: The river

  Art has been taken from us

  “You’re so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece.”

  - Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, 1987.

  The art we call Modernism is best described as a psychological disease, the goal of which is nothing less than the total destruction of art — which it has more or less successfully done.

  Modernism (or Postmodernism) is a philosophy which now dominates the culture, overshadowing us artistically, spiritually, politically and socially. We are immersed in it constantly, so that now virtually nothing is free from its infectious absurdity. From our architecture to our fashion and our way of speaking, to the very ideas you are permitted to express; it is the victory of the final remaining virtue of non-judgementalism. All other virtues have been discarded. What is worse is that it is based entirely on lies and conformism to foggy, relativist thinking. And all this was achieved not by warfare or political force but by obscuring and changing the definition of art.

  In terms of creativity, Modernism does the opposite of what it proposes: it claims to unshackle the mind to endless potentiality but in reality creates only illusory, fruitless possibilities and then makes us slaves to them. It traps creativity in a fabricated labyrinth of gimmick that blocks the light of truth and beauty. In the name of this illusory freedom, we dubiously welcome Modernism into our attitudes, unsure or unable to see through its masquerade despite our disgust at its works. We are blinded as to how this monster achieved its total victory, dancing triumphantly over our once lofty æsthetic values. We laugh nervously at its outwardly harmless abstract trinkets, unarmed against its weaponised nihilism, confused by its very existence.

  Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Source (1856), Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

  Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky’s first abstract watercolor, 1910.

  We innately hate this alien concept but are trained from birth to believe it is the key that has unlocked historic fetters, that this false new definition is in fact the eternal concept of art. When in truth it is a ruse no older than a century. It arms the aggregate populace against its own best interests with mind-control masked as matronly lenience (a laxness of rules). To this abstract god we sacrifice beauty and tradition, and are rewarded with consumerism and loss of identity. We dismantle our beautiful cathedrals and villages for shopping malls and industrial parks, blind to the destruction we wreak upon ourselves. Moral and intellectual obscurity flow in Modernism’s wake, as our bribed and brainwashed scholars make pathetic excuses for unhealthy and preposterous cultural tokens, if only so they can cling to a masochistic, virtue signalling lie for one moment longer. And not because the lie is comforting but only because they are accustomed to it. Natural beauty, an innate truth, has been repackaged as unnatural and evil. For we unfortunates today, the idea that the man-made world should be beautiful is little more than a distant fairy tale. This was not previously the case.

  Whether it is an imposition or a strange cyclical inevitability, decent, intelligent people must begin to combat Modernism in daily life. Far too much ground has been given already. Modernism is not a fleeting trend but the catalyst symptom of our lingering death by cultural self-devouring. Our books are censored and trite, our music is base and soulless, our fine visual arts virtually non-existent, and our cityscapes an eyesore of meaningless glass boxes.

  From the moment Westerners were duped out of their beauty values, our societies began to lose direction. We gambled with tradition on this promise of a world without constraints, where endless new ideas fell like rain. Of course, nothing could have proven farther from the truth. The world did not immediately burst its banks with endless new possibilities. Instead, a Pied Piper enchanted us down a merry lane where splatter-painting and naked performance art make for enlightened culture. All that remains now is the false illusion of progress gained by extracting shrinking percentages of profit from the dwindling trends spawned from long dead ideas. Reboots and re-imaginings of once vital concepts that now gather dust. The corporate marketing department decrees populist art trends from a vantage of the purest mercantilism. Chain stores will invest heavily in manipulative advertising propaganda to squeeze profits by 0.001 per cent, on what is ultimately a worthless plastic item or cultural token (itself the ghost of a once virile craft), exploiting the remnants of creative forebears who might as well be aliens to these artless marketing gurus. All our efforts are expended uselessly, our artistic output controlled, censored, automated and lifeless.

  And through all of this, only a false social barrier prevents us from the raw creativity that in reality sets all human action in motion. They fear this creativity as it is socially chaotic, tribalist, unsafe, uncontrolled and unquantifiable (despite adhering to a stricter order). So, how to reclaim this rightful vitality? The first step would be acknowledging that we are in decline. To stand up to them, to no longer scoff at the nonsensical art galleries privately, but to complain about them publicly. The root may be long dead as the fruit only now withers on the vine, but in death there will be rebirth. So luckily for us, bad as it is, change is inevitable. The only question is how much of the old and beautiful art will be lost in the transition — as surely the cowards who are so blindly committed to their own suicide will wish to take as much of the past as possible with them to oblivion. Destruction is the price of rebirth but rebirth is also hope of escape from a sullied and pretentious system, gone sour with age and misuse. As Heraclitus said: there is nothing
permanent except change. Growth and change are necessary and therefore imminent.

  During the Renaissance, titans such as da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael lived and worked in the same city, and this same coincidence of locality and time can be said of Beethoven, Shubert, Haydn, and Mozart. So could it really be a random happenstance, a quality of the air or water? Or is it more likely that there were social mechanisms in place to encourage and employ a high stock of creative men, nourishing them and directing their labours towards this transcendent genius? An objective goal and standard? How can we say that such a society should not be of pre-eminent importance? And is such an attitude not far superior to that which prevails now? The pursuit of self-betterment has been slandered and derailed, and no new Michelangelos or Beethovens will be ‘discovered’ until certain manipulative philosophies are exposed as reductionist, destructive and crassly materialist. They facilitate the worship of mass-produced trinkets and elevated graffiti. It is a slavery of the mind, resulting in a slavery to rootless economy. We have torn down and nearly discarded a supreme tradition.

  The list of problems an artist faces today is formidable. For roughly a century, the false philosophy of Modernism has allowed the vocation of art to be beset by hordes of untalented hacks, who are then trained to be even worse. The art world has, in fact, been ruled by these people, as the true artist can still be dismissively labelled as academic despite there being no prominent traditional academies still in existence — or a traditional element in the upper echelons of the fine arts at all. It has all been destroyed. The artist has no chance of ascension in the art world without accepting Modernism as his religion. For we see once Modernism’s redefinition of art was permitted, at first under appeals to open-mindedness and charity, this viral philosophy then swarms and kills the host, converging all sanity until nothing is allowed but ugliness and abstraction. But people do not even realise these are competing, oppositional philosophies, they think it all falls under the wide umbrella of art, though they may wonder on occasion why they no longer see any masterful public sculpture or landscape paintings. The very idea that there are two competing worldviews is soon swallowed and lost in the vagaries of Modernist doublethink. Burgeoning genuine artists are laughed at as throwbacks and marginalized to the world of comic books (if they are lucky) or the soulless hell of corporate graphic design. Any exhibition of true talent is an immediate indication that such a person is not a fine artist and not to be incubated in the hard tutelage required to make him great. Our fine artists today are dupes and fakers who make giant blow up sex toys or bland montages of photographs and think they are much cleverer than either Ingres or Phidias.

  As harmless as it may sound, from the moment we allowed a random splatter painting to be called high art, albeit in the spirit of inclusivity, the floodgates were opened and all standards were washed away into the void of relativism. It was a lie, and all glib inclusive talk to the contrary is casting a vote for Modernism. Tradition is the harder route and requires discipline and discrimination. To be anything one has to distinguish oneself from an other. Currently, Europeans are scarcely permitted to acknowledge an identity. High Western art is associated with patriarchal achievement, which is a vast and enriching topic likely to induce a now forbidden sense of pride. Pride butts against the trained Pavlovian guilt reflex of obsessive virtue signaling, which gnaws at the tree of knowledge schizophrenically. When up becomes down, even borne out of humility or kindness to the lower, vulgarity becomes high philosophy and beauty becomes pastiche. It is obscene for being a lie, but that is also its weakness, as truth can only be suppressed for so long. The seeds of lies they have sown are reaping a nonsensical harvest, as we gaze out at an endless vista of bland concrete and see no meaning.

  Happily, I feel confident that these deluded art-haters will live to see their horrid works turn to dust, their obtuse plate glass city blocks crumble, their galleries of absurdist objects discarded and junked. As they deserve. There is absolutely no reason to keep them. No spiritual, æsthetic, or philosophical reason of any sort, for us or whomever it may be that survives the inevitable doom-equinox of Modernism and meta-materialism. Nobody, who is not seeking attention as an uber-tolerant, actually wants to hang the painting of smeared bodily fluid in their living room, or place in their hotel lobby the arranged mannequin installation that is indecipherable from random garbage. Outside the insane establishment circles, the works these Modernists create are not truthfully looked on favourably, and the wealthy culture-killers who back them know only money. Modern art is tolerated as a symptom of our culturally mandated self-hate: a permissive folly, or a forced top-down degeneracy which has, over decades of propagandizing, succeeded in creating a mass social support (among lemmings and idiots). Those of us who are aware of what is happening now will need to work very hard to

  preserve what still remains of real art heritage, as Modernism shows no sign of abating its destructive march. Our historic art inheritance is invaluable and not to be profaned but continually learned from. It must be preserved so that we can return to it one day and be inspired anew, when we are free. Nothing will remain of our history, or future, if we succumb to the Modernist acceleration.

  When I speak of Modernism in this volume, I speak of my own interpretation of it, which makes more sense than the current academic one — which is a lie perpetrated by the culture barons. My definition encompasses only the art best considered as abstract and does not include movements like Romanticism (1780-1850) or Art Nouveau (1890-1914), which our art history books claim as Modernism, confusing and conflating movements without relation. There is no rational evolution from one to the other whatsoever but this does not bother them, as they are liars. Romanticism and early Impressionism have nothing in common at all with obscene movements like Abstract Expressionism or Conceptualism, as I hope to outline. They simply began the early modern period and are easily lumped into the text book definition of Modernism (fed to us by its art establishment adherents, of course) to lend false credence to their comparative abstract lunacy. Nor does Modernism imply anything that is new – it is specifically the style of art that is anti-tradition and notable for being abstract and typically ugly. It has a specific philosophy and, unfortunately, a name that most people confuse with meaning recent or fashionable — despite being an art movement now unchanged for more than half a century and getting very stale indeed, even if you claim to be a fan of its early works.

  I do not bother mentioning Postmodernism at all, for the reason that once you excise the falsely attributed Romanticism, Art Nouveau and other non-abstract movements from Modernism, then Modernism and Postmodernism have no sensible philosophical or practical difference whatsoever. Postmodernism as a title is just an invented category to pretend there are art movements evolving beyond Modernism, when it is all part of the same dead end: the chaos, the nothingness.

  The time has come for us to take up the struggle against the materialist and relativist attacks on beauty. The alternative is a world enveloped in a cold, dishonest darkness — with a population waning in imagination and intelligence.

  Modernist art is a weapon

  As you may have already guessed, there is an inescapable political element to this artistic decline that must be made abundantly clear: Modernism is not a natural evolution of art but a manufactured political imposition. Therefore, those readers hoping to learn how to revive high culture without breaking politically correct or leftist taboos might wish to halt here. However, traditionalist philosophy does transcend political ideology and many traditionalists hold beliefs which are typically considered leftist (such as environmentalism, anti-industrialization, anti-capitalism, organic farming, beauty and nature values). Traditionalists are not de facto advocates for Christianity, though they are certainly opposed to the nihilism of atheism. However, we are forced to be austere about the realities of tribalism and hierarchy, so the tradition espoused here is, anthropologically speaking, somewhat of the pre-French Revolution right. That is, it seek
s only plain and realist answers to any question, despite the fact that they may sound mean or insensitive. There is no way to tackle this subject without rejecting outright many popular liberal credos, including that equality is an innate and objective world truth.

  Contemporary globalist capitalism and variants of Marxism have proved themselves twin sides of the same evil coin, masquerading as enemies to each other, but with their only true enemy being high art and culture.

  Weaker elements among us have always been easily riled and mobilized against a natural hierarchy, at the expense of their own ultimate self-interest. Anti-tradition materialism is the core belief energizing both corporate capitalism and Marxism. Bloody communist mob revolutions have occurred at regular intervals since the French Revolution; the eternal war of the castes. The root impulse here (envy) is no longer guarded against as a sin but serves as a perpetual tool of political exploitation. Leftists have a long habit of irrationally attacking anything that is self-affirming. They swarm and skirmish with anything that exhibits high quality or smacks of lofty culture. Their mask is a faux compassion and crocodile tears exhibit their perpetual championing of the underdog. The rise of their mediocrity is synonymous with the long-predicted rise of rule by the lowest strata, predicted by doomsayers like Oswald Spengler as the end road of civilization, or the socialist means of its final dissipation — death by envy and guilt.

  From what is usually posited as the opposing spectrum of the right, we get more materialism in the guise of the free markets. As it happens, this is largely a clever illusion for rule by super-wealthy oligarchical capitalists, who merely buy votes and favour, and can strangely share much in common with revolutionary communists. To corporate or global interests, art has about as much meaning as baroque music does to a modern teenager. Sadly, despite classical American liberalism or libertarianism being a worthy system under the correct circumstances, it has devolved into something worse than communism. No communist politburo or Stalinist ever made a more sustained or vicious attempt to erase their own people and history as our current capitalist Western elites are currently undertaking. Despite our ongoing illusions of freedom and false feelings of superiority.