The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  When a person has an emotional investment in an idea, often no amount of logic will prevail over this investment. That is also the root irrationality of relativism, with its lazy morality, that fails to recognize that insisting ultimate truths do not exist is in itself espousing a kind of ultimate truth. How do we want to live? Is this not an important question, asked most ardently by our greatest philosophers? Modernists and progressives think that they have the final morality, the keys to utopia, and are not concerned with introspection.

  Why did Raphael not have to compete for gallery space in Florence with canvases of random splatters? How did we retain standards for so long, when it seems now almost impossible to get them back?

  The power of the progressive/Modernist left lies in the simplicity and audacious immorality of its language tricks, which rest in each assigned word (like ‘racism’) being an inescapable mental maze of superficial accusations, designed to combat healthy, instinctual ideas with accusations of prejudice. They tweak our fears about being portrayed as socially impolite. We all know well the politically correct forms of various descriptions and how manipulative and crass they are. This language creates an artificial dreamscape for your mind to wander in forever, a permanent vacation of fuzzy thinking and Pavlovian manufactured outrage. If you open yourself to this thinking, if you accept the invented language as reality, as with Artspeak, you will be lost in this controlled thinking — forever walking a phantom path like a caterpillar turned into a zombie by the Ampulex dementor wasp.

  I have touched on how the words ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ alone, despite being essentially meaningless, contain enough power of suggestion to permanently destroy civilization itself. The same power lays hidden within most of the art terms I have hitherto listed since Expressionism. Conceptualism? The word has loaded connotation, suggesting an intellectual creativity, concepts, a trendy newness. The cleverness of the name itself proposes and sets the stage, in your mind you are already thinking and expecting ingenuity. What you get is a toilet on a stage. Conceptualism is in reality an absurdity, there are no ideas there whatsoever, just a clever and manipulative name and the money to promote it, nothing more.

  Abstract Expressionism as a name is less clever but its obscure wordiness alone still suggests intellectualism. Its obscurity proposes a mystery. But really, it is just kiddy paintings. Even when they have us on the retreat, their invented abstract art now the norm, traditional art gets further denigrated with the cheap and limiting label of realism. Again we are trapped in word usage that they control because they peddle it in the literature. Realism must now encompass every single artist for all of history before Kandinsky — just stuck-in-the-mud, boring realists. Phidias, Constable, Van Eyk, Vitruvius, all of them.

  No, it is a game, words are tactics in a war and this one we must also reject. Realism sounds childish, tawdry, and unimaginative, which is exactly what Modernism actually is. These are merely parlour tricks from the money-power class.

  As well as rejecting all of this, it is time we began to peddle some new words of our own, some of which I will get into later.

  In relativism, we see exposed the incredibly complex problem of the division of subjective opinion, which is the centre of so many (possibly all) struggles. Because an opinion is forced on you does not make it truer, or better. Nor is it true for being popular, certainly not. A purely objective right or wrong opinion is very near impossible. But the fact is, regardless of it being relative, you must see things from your own point of view and fight to survive based on your strength to force your will upon the world. That requires confidence in your opinion and that opinions like all else will compete, resulting in a victory or defeat. Trying to see all opinions as true all at once is not correct and will ensure you fail and your opinion is removed from the chessboard. Being aware of relativism without getting lost in it only makes your opinion more likely to be balanced, wiser and stronger. But if ever there were an argument for objective excellence in art and culture, the pre-Modernist West would be the example. Tradition kept unity of opinion through duty and the opinion and duty were organically cultivated. Relativism as a cultural weapon is ultimately another example of the triumph of the materialist values of the merchant class. If we follow their path to its final destination, then a fully successful business class will have created a world-society of cattle, kept in total control for the purpose of a perpetual balancing act of soulless, numerical wealth – an unchanging twilight of sterile anti-creativity.

  These are the throes of an overripe culture that needs spiritual rejuvenation. But we are nowhere near that yet and have only begun to feel the strain and discomfort of the looming cycle’s end. For now, mighty paintings, buildings, sculptures and classical compositions revered for centuries are nothing more than tourist attractions, oddities of a fairy tale past, the remnants of a European creativity that has become impossible to continue. Worse than ignored, however, they are increasingly becoming objects of scorn to be attacked and dismantled by the hard left, as we see currently with confederate and other statues across the United States. We crossed the threshold from looking upwards to looking downwards very quickly in recent decades.

  The work of a man should be towards the betterment of his family, foremost, and from there towards long-term reputation with his people. He should be able to take risks and have a wide berth for his personality. Like our ancestors, he should be living in a natural state of competition, obeying the laws of the inward life and meeting fate with such nobility as he can muster. Equality and convenience values are compatible with a safe life but not with a good life. Tribal instinct is not going anywhere, though we do our best to suppress and ignore it. The furtherance and safeguarding of our tribe, as extended family, is the ancestral inheritance we have been entrusted with. That line must also in future be handed down the keys of tradition, to navigate this world, as we cannot experience the world outside the constituency of our wider family. How does this relate to art? It relates to everything. That is the natural love, the love of our parents, children, spouses, community and heritage.

  When exceptionality is trampled in a materialist, egalitarian world, the resulting ugly society seems much less worth fighting for. When poets and laureates spoke of their home countries, represented symbolically by, for instance, the British Palace of Westminster (designed by Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry) or France’s Eiffel Tower (designed by Gustave Eiffel), the symbology was real and inspiring at a tribal level. Identities, as a matter of pride, were visualized in the most impressive monuments to rational beauty, each in a style that spoke to that populace. Who exactly is inspired by a homeland represented by the metal blobs of corporate sculpture, or multi-coloured steel rods in random formations outside a civic office? What soldier dies in battle thinking in his heart how proud he is to be making the ultimate sacrifice saving all that Conceptualist ‘installation art’ for posterity, as opposed to fighting to save the treasures of antiquity, the artefacts in the Louvre, or the works of classical writers?

  Meanwhile, even as we are reduced to this rootless consumerism, with a failing future, we are all terrified of committing the faintest inegalitarian dissent when confronted by the ugliness and stupidity of these gargantuan architectural and sculptural mistakes. We allow our effete art academics to indignantly thumb their noses at the timeless and formerly unimpeachable statuary of Donatello or Antonio Canova (our inheritance) while praising baffling, visually meaningless blob-shapes and blow-up poodles and butt-plugs.

  Our decay is fast approaching its nadir, when we must choose to be self-affirming again or dissipate into nothingness. If as naturally occurring a thing as beautiful art can be taken from us, what other values are next in line before ‘year zero’ egalitarianism wipes away every scrap of beauty and truth? As in every other context, the only defence is reason. To quote Aristotle: “Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.” Will we perish along with our art chicanery, now a vast, materialist money laundering game for our
controllers? Will we let our history, the preeminent history of this world, simply die out in coddled apathy?

  There is a superficially harmless sheen on the idea of abstraction in art but its roots are evil and vast. As we can see, abstract art and classical art are in a war to the death — baseness versus idealism. Modernism is an oppressive and artificial subjugation of thought, which requires vast and expensive networks of propaganda and social control that were easier to consolidate before the inception of the internet. It is very much easier for liberals and Modernists to teach children that our civilization is not worth saving when they see only boring Modernist box houses, soul-crushing industrial estates and bookshelves full of bestselling narcissistic chick-lit. We can only combat this confusing assault on the mind if we understand that the definition of art has been tampered with, and the nuances of an industrialized middle-man system which works in concert to maintain this deceit. There is nothing more baffling to our burgeoning artists who, when seeking their ancestral birthright art education, wind up with an absurd and confusing education in Modernism. Which like most liberal studies today is really a brainwashing in equality doctrine that makes the untalented think they are geniuses and the geniuses question if they have talent.

  Art school –

  the fantastic joke

  “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”

  – Cicero

  One of the most disastrous inroads the baby boomers made into Western societal foundations was the slow but totalitarian infiltration of education. It is now completely dumbed down and restructured around leftist principles of self-destruction — and not just in terms of art. Hordes of post-Sixties revolutionaries went into education at all levels and to this day rule emotionally and without reason over a system that recontextualizes everything around the equality myth. Art school itself is a chaotic whimsy only for the most hardened masochist.

  Students who manage to believe the lies and embrace Modernist art theory can excel quickly in school, providing they stay within the deceitful confines of the abstract game. They busy themselves in the task of finding deeper and deeper gimmick, more poignant social justice narratives to apply to their heaps of garbage and monochrome canvases. When fully trained, these art elites will exude a contempt for detail, exactitude, technical skill, objectivity, spirituality or anything that reminds them of Western cultural confidence. They will exemplify outdated Freudian reasoning for which everyone around them pays a brutal psychological price. They will be the Joycean anti-hero, willingly subversive against a permanent state of imposed ‘slavery’ that is nothing more than basic reality. Eventually it is possible that they will accrue enough wisdom to admit the realities of life, a rare but not impossible event. Yet this will only occur after they have spent their youth damaging the world and attacking their own culture reflexively. And so their supposed education is not just worthless, it is actually so cataclysmically detrimental it requires years or decades to recover from, if at all.

  Avant-garde is a popular art school term used to describe new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music, or literature. It is still peddled today in art schools as the very cutting-edge, though their black turtlenecks are getting worn and their ponytails are quite grey. And their experimental ideas, which were boring and predictable then, are suicidally mind-numbing now.

  Avant-garde is but another aspect of Modernism, indistinguishable philosophically, that represents the vanguard of shock theory and flabbergasting. The Wikipedia definition of avant-garde is as follows:

  “The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of Modernism Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to Postmodern artists. The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel (The artist, the scientist and the industrialist, 1825), which contains the first recorded use of ‘avant-garde’ in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to ‘serve as [the people’s] avant-garde’, insisting that ‘the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way’ to social, political and economic reform.”

  Indeed, to the avant-garde art is little more than perpetual leftist agitprop. The new purpose of overturning society as opposed to trying to uplift it has become the spearhead of the revolution of the non-creative, whose method of overturning civilization is to bore us to death. Art may seem a passing fancy, an impractical pastime in our late-stage world, but in reality it is the very vehicle of our progress, as its discarding is our undoing.

  Modern art educators probably do not understand themselves that this is the heart of their schooling, that they are merely robots fulfilling a programming. Their opinions are so poor and so objectively wrong they are beyond contesting or engaging with. If asked, they will say the purpose of the avant-garde is to ‘make the viewer think’, a facile and vapid statement that also denies refutation. No reason can permeate the bubble and they are lost on that hamster wheel. And so, no art will be created by them or people they teach.

  Modernists do not just rule upper-level art institutions but all art education from pre-school. A child is not to be ‘limited’ by learning actual practical skills, and so learns nothing.

  Burgeoning crops of actual artists get funneled (increasingly) into corporate work as illustrators, animators, layout artists and graphic designers — none of which are thought of as serious art and are generally low-paid and unfulfilling. More often, they become tradesmen, which in the past was also synonymous with being an artist but is now streamlined to only utilitarian function. In all these cases, any remaining trace of art revolves around advertising and in general, when going to work, it is best to be prepared to put your creative mind to rest.

  With educational thought control in place, modernist dogma successfully masquerades as the culture itself. Modernism is the establishment, perpetually pretending it is the revolution — within its framework anything is allowable except actual art. It is a blockage, sustained by education, wasting the potential of our youth, who pay for education expecting to learn real skills or find a real niche but who get only misdirection, absurdity and lies. When Modernists took over the institutions, they swiftly turned all major art education academies into abstract irony-factories. From there, they have moved to subvert other accepted truths — such as gender, for instance, currently being ridiculously redefined in education and confusing our kids even further.

  Additionally, Modernism in education has gone unchallenged for so long (in elite echo chambers) that most people no longer understand what true creativity really is. People are trusting and believe what their teachers say, and so believe art is random expression and not a serious study of cultural implications requiring style, structure and originality. Art exists chiefly for beauty, even if it is a tragic beauty, or a dark and brutal beauty – but not for the sake of offensiveness, debasement, intentional absurdity or self-hatred.

  “It is austere and profound wisdom that make great painters and great sculptors; one lives all one’s life on this foundation and if it is lacking one will only be mediocre.”

  – J.L. Gérome

  A certain difficult-to-address aspect of art tutelage is the predominance of women in education, particularly early education, but also right through university (thanks to diversity quotas). Part of the problem is that their biologically mandated survival instinct makes them interact with the world in a completely different way than men, who were historically the custodians of art and culture (men were the culture, women were the people themselves, in charge of families and family production). Women interact with the world more socially, resulting in a greater predilection for both social conformism and universalism. They also make decisions for
emotional reasons, as is their remit as biological caregivers.

  Feminism and education

  “To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done with woman whether gowned as wife or whore, Penelope and Circe seemed as one...”

  – Robert Graves

  While it sounds cruel to point out, I am afraid it is also necessary to speak of the female role in modern æsthetics – and while my view may not be strictly true in the case of every single woman, it is largely true as a group behaviour or aggregate trait. It is therefore true. When you abandon political correctness and realize equality is a figment, you come to enjoy ‘sweeping generalizations’ for the reason they are largely true. If they were not true (in the aggregate), they would not be ‘hurtful’. So this is not to criticize the few women fully capable of understanding causality and traditionalist concepts but, of course, they are also the women who understand they are very much the minority of their sex, the others being entirely at the whim of cultural trend and perceived authority, are as cows led into thorny pastures yet happy where they are placed.

  “Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.”

  – Oswald Spengler, Aphorisms

  Men are exceptional at creating culture, at least partly out of nature’s compulsion, to impress women. Exceptional women leaders and thinkers (such as Hypatia or Boudica) who do not interpret the world through the prism of entirely social or hyper-personal thinking are also exceptional enough to rise up within a functioning masculine culture without turning the system upside down to facilitate or ‘free’ their entire gender. Which is what we have done now, so that we might pretend every woman is magically capable of everything men have done, something that proves instantly to be a lie (like a sparrow, quite excellent at being a sparrow, insisting it can do everything a fox does). The saturation of our society at all levels – in politics, judiciary, media and business – with unrestrained female opinion (enforced now by law) has undoubtedly feminized our culture. This is an enormous problem, larger than the art question itself, and you will find very, very few Western women today able to apply a discriminating hierarchy to almost anything, let alone art.