“Draughtsmanship and craftsmanship are discouraged. For maybe 50 years the established art world has been in a very loose form of abstraction. It’s like an absolute revolt against anything to go with a graphic language. When I went to art school in the Sixties, the predominating art of that decade was Abstract Expressionism, which was, to me, a very limited thing. To a lot of people it was a free form of revolution, but to me it was like a very confining thing. You were limited to working with a small pallet of earth colors and maybe blue.
“Draughtsmanship and craftsmanship were really discouraged. When I entered art school my head was full of EC images, Salvador Dali, and other things that put a stop to you right away in art school. My peer group pressured me, referring to me as an illustrator. It’s very derogatory to refer to someone as an illustrator. For maybe 50 years the established art world has been in a very loose form of abstraction. In the last 10 or 15 years it’s just been ridiculous. It’s formed itself over into situations like minimalism and conceptualism, and it’s got further and further away from a graphic language. It’s like an absolute revolt against anything to go with a graphic language. So in my generation, and two or three generations before me, people who were technically capable stayed out of fine art. They went into illustration, movie posters, and this whole variety of other sub-arts.’”
We have only to re-read the Abstract Expressionist manifesto to realize it represents the fact that art has become anything other than art. Not just the public but many working artists today do not fully grasp that this is the modern art concept. It is easier to accept superficially simply because it has been the norm for so long. Why or how people in the heyday of Western art never had to face competition from the guy with the unpainted canvas or the crudely constructed sculpture of masturbating hobos, I am not sure. I imagine those classical artists simply would not feel our democratic urge to plumb those Godless depths. But since this awful idea, this ugly-worship has taken hold, it is with us until we take pains to stamp it out. What we might hope to achieve, without having to rewire everyone’s mind, is to topple Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism from the top of the art institution hierarchy and place them in a different non-art-related discipline, where they deserve to be. Not that they deserve to exist at all but if some people really want to waste their time on anti-art, maybe closeted avenues should be provided for malcontents and misanthropes to worship each other’s colourful splatters and straight lines.
And if you thought the unpainted canvas was as low as the art establishment might dare stoop (I will not at this time go into the many variations of human excrement art), there is the bizarre incident of animals selling work — and not at insubstantial prices. Invariably their ‘work’ falls into the unadulterated genius of our darling Abstract Expressionism.
No doubt every barnyard is a potential Rothko studio. You should know there have been both elephants and apes praised for their ‘paintings’. For example, as a hoax, a zookeeper exhibited paintings by a monkey called Peter, under the name Pierre Brassau. A prominent critic at the opening was quoted saying:
“Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”
Lovely Artspeak. When later confronted with the revelation that the artist was a monkey, the critic replied: “Still the best painting in the exhibition.”
A monkey is pronounced a painter and we are to revel in the ironic absurdity, or delight in ourselves for being so free of discrimination. We have our 10 minutes’ hate towards tradition and profess love for our new Western values by lauding a painting by a lower primate. Crowned in a court of insanity, it proves nothing can stand before the manufactured plebeian opinion machine at hands of audacious maniacs – those who, in their rabid relativism, are willing to praise as genius the paintings of an animal that has no clue what it is doing, while demeaning the creative work of painters who strive in the classical tradition. Surely the animal painting must even be demeaning to the abstractionists? The ones who aren’t charlatans but actually think their random splatters are masterstrokes? Or does nobody actually care and we are all being open about our lies?
So that sums up Abstract Expressionism. Beyond that point there is truly nothing, a void. Though there are labelled movements that we will cover, it is a lawless terrain where nonsense, ugliness, weaker human frailties, perversions and European guilt are even more pronounced. The tear in the fabric between the past and the present only widens. There is left to us to cover now only the naked, goofy, schizophrenia-party that is Conceptualism.
4) Conceptualism (1960–present): Concepts take precedence over traditional æsthetic and material. Essentially Abstract Expressionism but with even less need to actually make anything.
“All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.”
– Sol LeWitt
“I thought conceptual art was a joke.”
– Gian Carlo Menotti
Abstract Expressionism evolves on our timeline into a few
equally nonsensical children, the most notable being Conceptualism, which suffers from even further inflated pricing and narcissism. As with all Modernism, it has the same basis in attacking true art, and the official definition of Conceptualism is pretty much the same as Abstract Expressionism, only expanded slightly as follows:
“Intermediate between nominalism and realism, that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality. A doctrine that is concerned with the intellectual engagement of the viewer through conveyance of an idea and negation of the importance of the art object itself.”
This is fairly typical Greenbergian jargon, an empty but colourful use of expensive words — pleasing to those who abhor true philosophy in favour of mysterious, inflated statements. Not completely meaningless but certainly not profound by any measure, it sounds like more rarefied solipsism. The conceptualist movement is the darling of such hopeless luminaries as the hapless shrieking bag lady Yoko Ono, famous for destroying The Beatles and for her terrifying squawking. If you ever walk into a gallery room and are confronted by hipsters involved in a happening, dreary Conceptualism might be involved. Conceptualism’s baffling ethos is somehow defined by galleries of strewn litter and preserved fish. Anything, really, that you might imagine – except actual painting or sculpture. They prefer the trippy domain of what is pretentiously coined ‘installation art’, whereby a viewer is supposedly drawn into a piece via some cheesy and contrived ambience. I should not even use the word trippy as that at least suggest an interesting psychedelic experience, whereas these experiences are trite and drab. An example of a Conceptualist piece is Martin Creed Turner Prize winning The Lights Going On and Off (an empty room in which the lights go on and off). The meaning of this piece was apparently: “To examine the definition in plain terms.”
Life-changing. Move over, Rubens.
Regardless, Mr Creed was awarded £40,000 for that act of tasteless pugnacity. Another petulant example is Tracy Emin’s 1999 Turner Prize-shortlisted travesty: My Bed — which was literally her unmade bed in a room. So to examine this furtherance of Abstract Expressionism, what does the Conceptualism definition really say? Universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality. Pure relativism. This is saying that nothing is guaranteed to exist outside your own thoughts and is essentially solipsism, the root impetus behind much of our vapid and narcissistic modernity. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist and everything else is relative and questionable – including the existence of other people. Life is a psychotic game and the individual is God: patently nihilistic. And what does this even have to do with painting or visual art? Is it even acceptable as a true or remotely valid foundation for anything, let alone an exceedingly expensive universal art movement? If yo
u are going to be vainglorious and indulgent, you really should start from somewhere a bit more solid. For this reason alone, our increasingly shambling art culture should be more widely recognized for what it is: a thing of great embarrassment in the historical sense, producing nothing of value.
Irrational movements such as Conceptualism seem harmless but ultimately work to undermine every facet of society with their whimsical speciousness and lazy loathing. It is the perfect crux of our Modernist culture of me, the loathsome, consumerist false individualism. An impoverished pandering to the least talented persists, whereby someone like Yoko Ono can be considered an art laureate. This Conceptualism is also open for endless reinterpretation in art academies and universities, our socialist bottlenecks for youth demoralization. If you are already managing to exist in a field of total meaninglessness – where the more abstract and unfounded an idea, the more it is lauded – then where lies the talent and sagacity of such a movement for the creative person? What exactly is a young person to do with a degree in Conceptualism? What ultimate good can come of it? They are only fit, if they are lucky, to work spreading the same poisonous message as the teachers themselves.
The message of our entire modern art is that nothing can definitively be said about anything. If I can gingerly put a lump of excrement on a plate and call it art (as has been done) and be hailed as an artist for ‘breaking down boundaries’ or some such thing, then this very act proves that fine art’s relative merit is unquestionable and unchangeable. According to Modernist theory there is absolutely no point in learning the technical skills of fine art. Better to think of some irony you can express in a Conceptualist installation. The reality is that absolutely nobody who is not a pretentious, intellectually mediocre, art institution hack has the slightest moment’s time for Conceptualist installation. It draws much more groans and rolled eyes than it does excitement or praise. Not only does a typical Conceptualist simply have no need for art-related skills, such skills are actually a detriment to them. A rudimentary or ‘primitive’ approach is much more politically correct and will not ruffle any feathers with its uncomfortably occidental attention to detail.
It also goes without saying, as with all Modernism, that the work itself is practically irrelevant. Much more important is the Artspeak that accompanies it, commonly about rebelliously defying or exposing staid cultural norms, or whatever hot topics of the day they care to spin as the work of the evil patriarchal white male and his historic evil society of fabulous art. This diatribe will explain to the credulous how they should feel about the rebelliously feckless installation. The TVs playing static, the random debasing sexual or toilet connotation, the objects that may be part of the work or just have been dropped by a passing gallery viewer. So challenging. The more vague, offensive and seemingly meaningless, the more it is assumed the artist has diligently and with patient intelligence hidden the message. Distressing examples abound.
To summarize this ultimate futility that is the ethos of Conceptualism and essentially that of Modernism itself: because the world only exists within the artist’s mind, the most celebrated examples of modern art apparently exist purely to express that nothing is art, for the reason that nothing much exists outside the mind. Therefore, they are artists simply because they insist. Æsthetics and rationality are vanquished.
The more corporatist-friendly Pop Artists are next on our time line, though they only had a brief heyday before Conceptualism really overtook contemporary art. They were inspired by Abstract Expressionism and consumer design, and were famous for using found objects, similar to the Dadaists.
5) Pop Art (1960s): Art and consumerism.
Campbell’s Soup I, Andy Warhol (1968).
Pop Art seems to have been but a brief foray, though admittedly they were more honest about their exploitation than the Abstract Expressionists. Pop art could be said to have been morally worthless and typically delinquent, but at least openly so. It was also, oddly enough, the first recognition of the much-maligned comic book as fine art in any sense – but only in an ironic, gimmicky way, as Modernists can never break the taboo of admitting frank traditional skill. The king of Pop Art was no doubt Andy Warhol, who can be quoted saying:
“I am a deeply superficial person. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. So the very act of making money, doesn’t matter how, becomes the art.”
Making money is the art. Nothing to do with what he actually creates, just the spectacle of his audaciousness. In some ways, I applaud Warhol for his brazen irreverence as it smacks of an honesty and intelligence not found in Duchamp or Picasso, who raved continually about their own genius. Warhol is glibly famous for having assistants and friends actually paint his paintings. If that does not show his hidden low respect for Modernism, albeit possibly inadvertently, nothing else will.
Again, though opportunistic, his apparent open jabs at the absurdity of the art world and his wanton exploitation of the art opinions of his day seem forgivable. Sadly, his legacy was not to be exploding the paradigm but fuelling its irrational vigor. Warhol existed to mock the establishment, was openly concerned only with making money and had done away with any pretence of being a true artist or creating meaningful work – if ever there were any such intentions to begin with. But his mockery of the art establishment is something I can sympathize with and his irreverence has a certain charm, despite his contribution to art’s degradation. The rest of Pop Art is a largely monotonous gimmick of enlarged comic book panels and cardboard cut-outs poking fun at the nuclear family — low-level agitprop.
End of art timeline.
So we have laid bare the various schemes and patterns woven into this enormous tapestry of lies. I believe my argument is more than sound, that Modernists have dishonestly labelled many art movements as Modernist that have nothing to do with the ‘Modernist approach’. Romanticism (Turner), Art Nouveau (Klimt) and the Pre-Raphaelites (Millais) are by no means a major departure from previous movements philosophically and are certainly not abstract. These movements have been posthumously labeled as Modernist so that Modernists can claim some nice pictures by assumed confederacy – after the actual artists are long dead and cannot complain of course. It is quite clear, and not at all difficult to discern visually, works that have followed the rules of æsthetics and those that have a basis in anti-æsthetics.
So to summarize, abstraction began with Expressionism and gradually spread to prominence not through popularity but more a self-professed fake elitism supported by media and powerful people of the left — marching gradually through the academies, spreading like disease. Industrialized mass production made our daily objects bland ghosts of what they are meant to be and the avant-garde caught us off guard with educational institution trends. The linkages on the timeline I have presented are clear: Expressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism. It is all the same thing, Modernism, a visual art philosophy whose goal is to destroy European culture itself by redefining art as something nonsensical. My personal redefining of Modernism is not an egotistical whimsy. We are dealing with completely different attitudes to art that are incompatible and at war with each other. Postmodernism is not worth mentioning, it is a pretense at being different from Modernism but really once you are in the realm of pure and pointless abstraction as a rule, it is all the same game. People who claim they like both traditional art and Abstract Expressionism are not in full awareness of this. Playing the game of just liking everything to get along is siding with the Modernists, as you have to abandon all concept of standards to meet at their level.
The Turner Prize: Conceptualist asylum
The Conceptualism movement really epitomizes the extremes Modernists are willing to go to in perpetuating their swindle at the expense of our budding artists and our children’s future. But even finding new shocking debasements can become passé. The jewel in the Conceptualist crown today is the aforementioned Turner Prize in the United Kingdom. It is an annual art contest presented by the Tate Galler
y, which started in 1984 and has become the nation’s most publicized art award. The contest is open to all art forms but accepted pieces are generally works of Conceptualism, it being the go-to art movement for exceptionally pretentious materialist elites. As expected, those works involve a lot of crude nudity, arranged mannequins and random toilets.
“Historically art has been both traditional and experimental, the experiments creating new traditions. At times there have been ruptures in tradition, and we experience that today, when Conceptual Art seems to have no connection with what went before – or at any rate since the rupture was initiated a century ago. It is exemplified by what can be seen at Tate Modern and in particular its recently opened extension. In the latest issue of The Jackdaw (copies of which are here for you take), a magazine whose editor, David Lee, is devoted to encouraging traditional art and satirising the new (or in reality the not-so-new), I have suggested a comparison of this with the rare shows of two centuries ago – The Vanishing Woman, the Panopticons and other then modern inventions, and so on. These were described in The Shows of London by Richard Altick. Then, however, fine art exhibitions, at the Royal Academy and elsewhere, were shown separately and as a higher genre. What seems objectionable to me is that the two are now mixed up, when what goes on at Tate Modern has often more in common with acts at Covent Garden than with art as we knew it. Salvador Dali admitted this when he called his museum at Figueres not a museum or art gallery, but a Theatre-Museum. I have suggested that Tate Modern or at any rate its extension should be reclassified not as an art gallery but as popular theatre.”
– The Neglected Importance of J.M.W. Turner’s Bequest for British Culture By Selby Whittingham
To quote more examples of Turner prize favourites:
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 8