The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  There is specifically a tenet of the cult within mainstream architecture that abhors decoration of any sort, seeing it as either decadent or unnecessary. The forerunner to this trend began arguably with Adolf Loos and his essay Ornament and Crime, published in Vienna in 1910. While he was railing against the intricate and floral (I believe ‘cupids’ are mentioned quite often), it is ironic to examine Loos’ own works, like the Looshaus in Michaelerplatz, Vienna, which while quite stoic in comparison with the Baroque is by today’s standards positively brimming with neoclassical decoration and design flourishes. He would no doubt view our architectural activity of the past 60 years with great sadness and be ashamed by trends he might be said to have inspired. Loos was further expounded upon by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, a competent but opportunist architect whose reverence of simplicity further opened the floodgates to that which followed.

  Wright is quoted as saying: “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” Perhaps there is truth in that. The spaces we occupy shape the spaces within, and vice versa.

  Our contemporary architects profess to love the bland angles of these plate glass monoliths and flat concrete walkways devoid of interest or charm. But worse are those whose untalented egos force bizarre and obtrusively coloured, bulging aberrations into architectural design. Some, no doubt, enthusiastically believe in Modernism out of some mental weakness or conformism; others are more culpably aware of both their own shortcomings and the devastation their exploitation leads to. Many are merely taking advantage of a populist and wealthy occupational trend, others confusedly meander out of architecture education brainwashed and offered no option but to aid in their culture’s ruination. The corrosive decline of Western values permeates the very functionality and sacred symbolism of our daily lives. The grand and doomed experiment of the cult of the individual rules tyrannically over now-outlawed Renaissance values and is no more naked before the eyes of the world as in our dwellings and high rises.

  Among modern critics, art students, professionals and architects, every excuse is made to hardwire the view that classical values in architecture are somehow racist or undesirable. It was all very nice but supremacist and anyway, we now have the shiny new end road of Modernism: plain box dwellings with straight-angle concrete. The conquering manifestation of the rise of Evola’s lowest caste, the values of the valueless — art made by the artless to combat inequality. It is not just the death of romance but of the possibility of humanity as a worthy custodian of the planet.

  The chic futurism of the Sixties, perhaps the dying gasp of Art Deco/Art Nouveau, now considered retro-chic (generally falling under the interests of whimsical romantic fetishists along with gothic revival, neoclassical, etc), did have a recognizable beauty æsthetic and a catchy self belief. A sort of spacefaring future lounge style that, while inferior to its predecessors, retained a certain accomplished harmony. Basically it still had a desire to be visually pleasing. And that brief oeuvre was the very last recognizable European style not wholly based on Modernist abstraction or utilitarianism. There have been some more recent attempts at an organic or green style of architecture, which can be stylish or pleasing in a natural way. But sadly they are also too often weakened by reliance on tired Modernist tropes: blundering shapes and flat surfaces which ‘draw attention’ to the materials. A truer root style that is respecting of tradition and new could be achieved by discarding gimmick for sacred geometry, using all-natural materials as a matter of course and not starkly to ‘draw attention to their texture’ on a flat plane, while most importantly drawing ideas from observing the designs and patterns of nature in depth. Keep your creation pure: stone, wood, clay, lime mortars, metal, etc.

  I have seen a very few examples of potential new art styles that showed promise but stalled and withered in the Modernist atmosphere. An example was the blossoming organic and quite original interior/exterior home designs by the painter Roger Dean. His little-known foray into architecture, particularly regarding interiors, has always struck me as a unique effort that is Art Nouveau-ish and unique but sidesteps the jarring disharmony of Modernism altogether. No small feat. There are similar examples of discarded ideas that could blossom into whole new art avenues for exploration that are æsthetic and optimistic. Sadly, they have not been supported and encouraged, as we have been too busy managing our decline.

  Nothing halts the destruction of beauty on the march to the bottom. We can look forward to more structures of the finest glass boxes, where the starkest concrete must be at odd angles with flourishes of garish, state-protected ‘graffiti art’ – or even on occasion some Mondrian-inspired stacked blocks, which never quite ebb in popularity as the child-like Modernist mind delights in their primary colours. But rest assured, if some new avenue of architectural disfigurement can be achieved, we shall see it.

  It is a perfect economizing of materials, principles and design that have narrowed our architecture into this squalid, urban horror. What is worse, a large swath of our populace are trained from birth to accept these juvenile and backward principles, and tout the miracles of modernist architecture. They think they live in some bright future-world worthy of past envy, only without the optimistic space travel. Their minds and lives are adapting to the architecture instead of vise versa and they are becoming smaller.

  We could not now easily erase the indelible mark of this terrible architecture as it involves the utter abandonment of large tracts of our major cities. Not to say I do not secretly believe, beyond hope, that a great razing will eventually be at hand. Does that sound harsh? But what other result could we possibly hope for? We have been erecting structures for 50 years that have no value. We must correct the mistake or become that planetary parasite we have feared of ourselves in our darkest hours.

  II. The rise of materialism and the loss of idealism

  The average person has

  lost touch with art

  So what do most people really think of contemporary art? How many of them give art any thought at all? Do they feel there is a rational merit to the splatters of an Abstract Expressionist? Do they assume that scholars have calculated its merit and it is not their place to doubt? If it could be demonstrated that there is no merit to this art, that it is smoke and mirrors with a hefty price tag, you would expect public attitude to change. There can be no objective quality to anything if you throw out the book of standards. Conceptualist performance noise art is a hard sell, even with expensive Artspeak. The average guy wrote off modern art the first moment he laid eyes on it and to avoid starting unnecessary conflicts, he was happy enough to say ‘I don’t get it’ in the hope that it would not impact his life. ‘Just get me out of here’ is what he’s thinking. ‘Make art leave me alone.’

  Videos of Pollock working exhibit the unbridled genius of his patented ‘splatter-lunge’. What exactly is the rational reason that this random paint spilling should be considered masterful? He does not appear to ever stop and ‘correct’ a perhaps wrongly flung splatter. The average person is still not so stupid as to fail to spot a boondoggle. It takes a concertedly flaky hipster to really get into this garbage and try to peddle it as intellectual. Pollock rocketed to fame after a spread on his work appeared in Life magazine in 1949, proving again the power of the media over the mass-mind. Deceitful language-magician Clement Greenberg wrote of Pollock:

  “I took one look at it and I thought, ‘Now that’s great art,’ and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.” And can any one rationally explain how or why this would?

  Why the average gallery visitor quietly tolerates the appalling baseness of your typical contemporary exhibit is a bit of a mystery. Dildos and defecation have been an art mainstay for many decades. The truth is a very large number of people have their opinion formed by authority figures and social cues, and the general incomprehensibility of modern art aids in keeping them quiet about its obvious hopelessness, because asking questions results
in incomprehensible tirades of Artspeak. Moreover, a great number of people find the idea of thinking or doing something socially abnormal unthinkable. This fact is an important piece in the jigsaw: what is perceived to be (even guessed to be) the popular opinion becomes the popular opinion. The great majority will suppress anecdotal experience, self-analysis or even historic fact and objective knowledge if it conflicts with majority opinion, or might make things in any way socially uncomfortable. I am not sure this is something that was traditionally true of Europeans, though there has always been a strong sense of civic duty, but it is certainly and sadly true of the scolding, surveillance-heavy nanny-state of today. There are obviously many sound evolutionary reasons for social behaviours, yet social conformism, even apparently to the level of near suicide, remains one of those depressing human facts that certainly leaves any group open to communal manipulation.

  The various elites that pull these societal strings know well how to control this mob mind. Things like TV and corporate news media are priceless resources for the wealthy propagandist in the globalist age. You simply tell people something is genius or great on the TV and they believe it. You tell them what to like, what they want to buy, what to think about public figures — sometimes outright, sometimes subliminally. More recently, the internet has been a great foible for this thought control but they are now trying hard to control that too.

  Newer generations hardly know what to make of art at all. Modernism has been with us so long but still remains so patently false that subjecting people to it is now a strange litmus test for judging how easily you will accept what you are told. Will you join the sleepwalkers? And because art is now divorced from reality, the average person has no concept of its former meaning – or an understanding that it was once inextricably interwoven into all aspects of daily life. The majority of our lost people wander in total confusion through these galleries and either draw the effort to pretend they are being enlightened, or find ways to laugh at it, or write off art as a foreign country. Many striving but browbeaten artists themselves also decide to ‘join the game’ and pretend they can extract meaning from the abstract habit. If one decides to swallow that pill, I imagine there are ways to get into the abstract-narrative mindset, and perhaps extract some fleeting feeling of false accomplishment as an artist. But like a rat that figures out a maze built for him, any accomplishments along Modernist frameworks remain merely parlour games on a doomed vessel or make-up on a pig – an illusion of accomplishment within a mental maze that goes nowhere of tangible value and is ironically antithetical to art.

  But then there is always that impediment or hindrance to total Modernist chaos, in the battle for the minds of individuals. The old works, the real art, still on display – often in beautiful traditional buildings. You can likely not make sane Europeans hate the Venus de Milo for political reasons as it is a self-fulfilling testament to truth by its existence. And tis is despite the harder-left fantasies about joining Islamic State in smashing ‘racist’ sculpture museums with jackhammers.

  Sadly, for most people today, we have reached a state of relativism where objective beauty does not exist, nor is it possible. Nor would people dare to guess that discrimination (as in discriminating between real art and pretentious sophistry) is a necessity of life, in both the material world and the world of ideas — that while now branded an evil, judgementalism is in fact necessary and good, leading to refined tastes and ascending high culture. And to use even more taboo terms, despite all we have been taught, discrimination is morally right – if only because it is an unavoidable aspect of reality and human nature. We discriminate every moment of the day, when we make any decision about anything. It is essential to survival and as unavoidable as breathing.

  But why does a discussion of art require such a vast tableau of issues, enemies and insights? Why must I deconstruct reality and self and culture and say mean-sounding things to describe what has happened?

  Because you must reach for and be willing to hit that rock-bottom reality, across all possible arguments, in order to defeat the unnatural relativist suppositions that prop up abstractionism. You need to know where you yourself stand mentally, from the first and inevitable moment that a Modernist claims you are an authoritarian extremist for not believing that everything is art.

  Because we are so submerged in a tunnel of abstract and obscure values, the best we can do is obey the instinctive impulse and simply avoid contemporary art as much as possible. This idea seems agreeable, until of course we realize there is no escaping it whatsoever, for as soon as we step out of the gallery and into the street we are confronted by the appalling pointlessness of modern architecture and living spaces. While shopping, we hear the most empty, heartless music ever imagined. We read books to our children that are illustrated by people without a scrap of talent or rendered lifelessly on computers. TV and movies all degenerate further and further under generally accepted misconceptions about what is good or what is healthy, or what is inspiring. The movable bar of morality dictated by the politically correct media barons shifts at will and the credulous follow without regard to goodness or a future.

  Like arguing with a child, the sheer level of oration and argument required to raise these naive people to even a basic level of reality proves an impossible feat of stamina. When one is dealing with indoctrinated sophists, solipsists or liars, only a drastic and time consuming battle of rhetoric will break through their thought process, and not likely even then, considering the various personality disorders that limit self-reflection. So, ridiculously, their egalitarian bombast proves too much effort to engage and the sane man finds no chink in the armour of the fool. Some of the more ardent fools even find it a convincing point, that our disgust at a splatter painting proves the artist has the power to subliminally tweak us emotionally. The idea being that this was his intent, and thus somehow ‘art’ has been performed. This only demonstrates how nebulous and childish the concept of ‘art’ has become. It is accepted as a gimmick that ‘makes you think’, or ‘asks questions’ (while never answering them), with any reaction including dislike vindicating it. What sort of shabby carnival trick is that? What crooked mental gymnastics better prove that we are literally dealing with half-wits?

  Like a myopic pit, this game sucks in all light of reason and throws permanent disorder back in your face. Those without the acumen or effort to combat this Modernist psyche merely move along with a lingering distrust. But apathy and disinterest only fuels them more!

  Found objects can now be expensive art pieces, you just say: “This is art.” The work has thus successfully defied talent, hard work and explanation. No matter what we say or how we respond, it is called a success by the establishment that supports it. The core purpose of nearly every Western institution has been inverted in this way and the real purpose of even having art institutions to begin with (which is the preservation and continuation of art and culture) has been lost. It has become foggy and difficult to recognize and appreciate achievement in an ocean of exploitation, immodesty and chicanery. And so a man who has the pretentious pomposity to put his own defecation in a can (1961’s Merda d’artista by Piero Manzoni) can then sell it at Sotheby’s for £97,250. And nobody bats an eyelid. ‘Art’ has apparently transpired and art fans who are unable to put into words their feeling of distrust become the plaything of these liars. Art then either consciously or subconsciously becomes associated with lies and something impossible to trust and mostly impossible to like. Worse are the mediocre sentimentalists who react with childish rage at any suggestion that art should follow standards and not be whatever any individual claims it to be, the simpering cowards who are so vocal but utterly incapable of action against opposition.

  There are many people who hope against hope that a hidden but extremely qualified person actually has a masterful, honest reason for calling splatter paintings art, and the hefty price tag has been applied to safeguard this fact — that despite all appearances, we are in safe hands somehow. Sadly, this is
not the case.

  There is a tremendous fear of accusations of narrowness of thought, that to criticize the conceptually abstract is a kind of evil notion, an act of personal totalitarianism. However, the critical exclusion of the classical is not held in the same regard. Ultimately, the average person is swayed by perceived authority. Major media outlets control public opinion, largely by presenting themselves as representing public opinion, which instead they are shaping. The average person may grumble about the state of art, architecture, education, etc, but unless they are placed into physical discomfort they are evidently prepared to take quite a lot of punishment before risking any loss in social market value.

  When enough of us tire of the ugly monuments and ruinous reinventions, and the Modernists are finally no longer tolerated, there must be no allowance for their possible return. Their disastrous social experiment has been played out and we now live with the destructive fruit they bear. Indeed, we will be very lucky to ever escape this windfall, as the outlook at the time of writing this remains quite bleak. Rushing to refresh and swell their ranks daily are never-ending waves of newly brainwashed college students, a regenerative army of soft-faced acolytes. Our hard evidence for Modernism being false lies in the fact that it did not exist for most of history, therefore we might presume it is a kind of imposed, unnatural ideology, to which the solution would be to simply stop supporting a bad idea and not entertaining it as a relativist pastime. Despite how it looks on the surface, Modernism is not harmless. It is either a symptom of the death stage of civilization, or (I think more likely) it is the cause of that death.

  One thing remains certain: contemporary relativist morality ensures that healthy ideas are suppressed, and the downward curve of quantity over quality ensures an endless series of collapsing artistic expectations.