The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  The truth is, a great swathe of the success of Modernism in recent decades has been its easy appeal to women and their ever-increasing say in society. They seem to have a greater tendency to succumb to social cultural edicts from perceived authority, especially if the message is enclosed in a story of compassion, inclusivity and acceptance. They will approach problems socially, which means the edict will not be questioned on its own grounds but judged on its perceived acceptance among peers. When a message is couched in terms of ‘acceptance’ or ‘tolerance’, in terms of doing away with discriminating standards, this will find an appeal to many women. In this tricky way, Modernists and corporatists can sneak into the culture many horrific, culturally destructive fads. Women are far less likely than men to question, on any grounds, concepts handed to them from authority. Many men have been themselves feminized by the gynocentric culture and their opinions are indistinguishable from the female.

  Authority figures today are essentially seen to be the TV, media outlets and the college professor, each equally devastating politically correct nightmares. Women are less inclined as a group to sport opinion that has no social rewards. This too makes them very prone to the phenomenon known as virtue signaling – essentially, displaying political correctness for rewards in the form of social currency. The more astute women who are clued in to this inclination or have directly felt its ill effects will admit this.

  Much of our modern populist media, music and consumer culture has been targeted increasingly at women – it has become more feminized, which means more emasculated. They are the ones buying the ‘products’. Some 90 per cent of advertising is aimed at women and this is obvious when you look at any of it. Thus, as principal consumers of our fading culture, they are the largest target audience for the marketers and manipulators. Not only do women support these bad ideas economically, they are now largely creating the concepts, managing the marketing (actual production of goods takes place in India or China) so from start to finish it is a controlled, all-women feedback loop. They carp about equality and want to be in the workforce but not in the coalmines, sewers or foundries, so they seek work in managerial media and marketing roles, abetting the creation and sale of soulless cultural flotsam to other women. More often than not it is sold on the premise of equality values, appealing to vanity. “You deserve I” and “Just do what you want”, etc. Media and marketing are popular social, faux-philanthropist jobs low on physical labour that feminists migrate into naturally and the result is that feminists (which the majority of Western women still identify as) really control at every level, from production to consumption, this awful cycle of gelded pop culture. But even worse than the product of their labours is the manipulated distraction from their more vital employment: family and motherhood. And the further result of this is disastrous below-replacement European birth rates, which are setting us on a trajectory to a demographic disaster worse than any war.

  The fact that the vast media apparatus has lost all vitality seems now beside the point. Women do not fare well when faced with conundrums like no-win situations, where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, rationally. Compassion is a biological reality of their lives and nobody expects differently from natural caregivers.

  Women are indeed not the naturally creative gender, which is the opposite of what modern education tells us. What creativity is has become confused in the philosophy of Modernism that says all art is a subjective, random expression of emotions and not at all about practiced structure with standards and beauty values. Russian feminist ‘art’ group Pussy Riot say they do “anything for art” — they think there is creativity in simply getting naked or speaking about sex. There are many such cases. Largely, a woman’s tendency for security does not lend itself to an artistic vanguard and her emotional way of interpreting the world does not fit consistently with any of the sciences (true art being a science). There have been some notable women artists, of course. But everything has exceptions (outliers) and, overwhelmingly and as in other fields, it is men who push historic art movements and accomplishments. This a natural limitation, as natural as men not being able to give birth, which is really the greater responsibility around which all the culture-creation orbits. Indeed, one of the main roles of the culture and all it produces is to facilitate the security of women and the future of the tribe with new generations. Men produce the culture but the women are the very material flesh of that culture, their role is innate and deep-rooted and to attempt to unbalance these gender roles is to go against nature, which is to invite death – and that is what we have done.

  To quote a sentiment by Arthur Schopenhauer:

  “One need only watch the way they behave at a concert, the opera, or the play; the childish simplicity, for instance, with which they keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks forbade women to go to the play, they acted in a right way; for they would at any rate be able to hear something.”

  To modern ears this sounds cruel — but is he lying? Who has not experienced this? Women have a more important role than that of cultural marshals, to which they are not apt, and tend towards an irrational hyper-egalitarianism. They chat at the opera because, for healthy biological reasons, the social aspect is what is most important to them, not the art. Motherhood is the most vital role in human society, something that is a strictly female domain: motherhood and matriarchy of the home.

  The world’s population is too high, to be sure, but viewing that problem with altruism is unrealistically self-deprecating. The will to survive, the reality of struggle that we are divorced from by modern convenience-illusions, becomes suppressed by the bored luxury of technology. We who invented the modern world are likely the only ones with the keys to saving it. If you doubt that women are ruinously over-represented in cushy but controlling art and media careers, then simply scan a magazine rack or turn on the TV. Nothing but peer-reviewed catty celebrity gossip and social henpecking. As the late BBC astronomer Sir Patrick Moore aptly quipped:

  “The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn’t have had that in the golden days. I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC — making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching. I would like to see two independent wavelengths — one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men.”

  Sir Patrick Moore signing his book “The Astronomy of Birr Castle” - 1985.

  Arthur Schopenhauer by J Schäfer, 1859.

  Bravo — but we all know that only the women’s station is permissible, the men’s would be labelled sexist. This is the illusory one-way street of surrender to relativism.

  Another noticeable cultural effect of the slow rise of feminine opinion in controlling spaces has been the growing rift between what were once culturally and methodologically united art forms. Because feminism and other degrading trends have been on the rise, the more gynocentric culture is dominant (and still increasingly so) with the most popular TV programmes, pop music, periodicals and often media websites being more in line with whatever feminine themes women as a whole (acting as a shoal of fish) wish to watch and listen to. Largely, you will find it is the usual appeals to vanity, social status dramas and causes to gush compassion over. Sadly, this vanity-media intensifies the negative feminine and not the good feminine (motherhood, true virtue, nurturing, increasing familial stability). And so these largely corporate forces peddle anti-family, ethnic universalism, Modernism to the masses and women, who are again geared towards social acceptance, tend to fall in line. This media gender hegemony generally means that our popular culture is trite, conformist and contains no scary, challenging or self-affirming themes — but is instead decidedly universalist, compassion-driven and based around social coercion (gossip, shaming, etc). Also disastrously, the ‘men’s culture’ that can still be found in consumerist media is increasingly geared towards dumbed-down everyman interests such as sports and c
ars. In this way, the division of culture to exclusively masculine and exclusively feminine æsthetics makes both lose virility and value.

  There is much talk lately of the altruism of Europeans, the near dodo-like innocence and trust levels that allow outsiders and enemies to take advantage. I don’t recall seeing much evidence for this altruism in the history books, before the rise of third wave feminism in particular. We did once bring science and world knowledge to less developed countries but this was not done in an effete, apologetic way that was detrimental to ourselves — and reverse colonization was unthinkable. I believe it is not the world wars that made us suicidally pacifist but the peace since, and we have feminized our whole outlook so completely, with women and female opinion saturating all levels of employment, politics, education, and power, that we now hold compassion so high that we are culturally defenseless. And now a good portion of our men, raised by single mothers and in a feminist culture, are very low testosterone and seem confused, feral and lifeless.

  Whenever anyone altruistically negates their own self-interest, there is this whiff of hypocrisy. When you see a man raving that he is a feminist, we all sense the insincerity. Again, with modern liberalism and Modernism, deceit and pandering themes of victimhood are paramount — they have the same origin and aim. The scope of the problem is very broad, as you can see, though in a way very simple. Most of the people aware of our decline do not grasp that art is a crucial issue, a kind of ultimate cultural weapon that is currently owned by the forces aligned against our future, knowingly or otherwise. Do we believe in ourselves? Can we believe in ourselves again, in our ancestors and descendants? Will we allow ourselves to take our own side?

  And so, our Modernist, effeminate world represents the absolute destruction of every goal considered good by our ancestors. It is a perpetual state of toothless capitulation, until the noose is finally tightened. Examine any bookshelf of historic literature and you will see it is entirely male. Those heroes and philosophers that comprise the entire content of old, leather-bound tomes on dusty bookshelves, unhindered by multiculturalism or feminism. Incredibly intelligent and hard-working historic men who were the very fathers of our culture, of the worldview that allows us to be anything or interpret anything, who manifested philosophy, art, science and culture out of nothingness by thinking, and thinking, and thinking a hole in the ground. Unobstructed, they acted by force of will or divine guidance, with goodness and truth aimed at self-improvement. Those men are truly now to us as titans or demigods, with a scale of achievement that is unprecedented, admirable by any measure, but obscured by lies today and not understandable to self-pitying materialists. Bookshelves of real knowledge are filled with the writing of European men. Again, in our gender-obsessed modern reality, this sounds biased or mean – but this is nature. It is the striving and the labour of men, often in pursuit of impressing or protecting our women, that ever made us great. In this patriarchal past, art was on equal footing with philosophy and science, united in the upward-striving drive. Today, art is a strange, impoverished hobby for retirees and street urchins.

  It might be said there is currently some doubt over whether humanity is an organism worthy of surviving, as we devastate the world with industrialization and soulless (artless) urban crawl. At the same time, Europeans across the West are dying out from flatlining birth rates that are largely due to feminism. The sacred duty of a man is to fight and, if needs be, die as expendable. The sacred duty of a woman is to bear children. It will take a titanic effort, not the least from women themselves, to overcome our group brainwashing and accept the reality of traditional gender roles. While women can be artists, art is, like other vocations, best kept largely the remit of a man, who will keep it tribal, relevant, sacred and rational. There has been exactly zero benefit to us from ‘women’s liberation’ and women today are living in a parallel, nonsensical reality that is the engine horse of our downward trajectory.

  A society that moulds and sustains its young men during their high-energy youth will harvest the bounty of their creative output. Sadly, we have been gelding young European men on the altar of feminism and anti-tribalism for a few generations now and we reap no creative rewards.

  Now that I have covered, roughly, the major symptoms of the disease of materialist values, we must examine why myth, spirituality, native religion and metaphysical ideas are vitally important in the first place, how they relate to art and why we must never abandon them.

  III. Industrialisation and corporate mass-production

  Here, we reach the third and final of our triumvirate of anti-æsthetic forces. Industrialization and mass-production have had a huge effect on art and craft – and not for the better. Originally, Art Deco house wares were a response to this dilemma, as items that could be mass-produced but with certain neoclassical values in mind. However, in a consumerist system of liberal democracy and corporatism, the mass-production inevitably pushes in one direction, that being quantity over quality. There are ways to have both modern technology and real art simultaneously but they require a likely aristocratic (hierarchical) society where materialist economy-morality is not considered paramount.

  Art and science

  We have established that all good art is self-affirming, tribal, naturalist, spiritual and maintains instinctive standards. As a discipline of reason, it is also scientific.

  Æsthetic beauty values were once intertwined with all facets of daily life. They were taken for granted as part of the unspoken rules of living in a unifying culture, which was an expression of the group identity. The Platonic ideals applied to all facets of human endeavour and the natural world. If you were a craftsman making something, you imbued it with decoration implying symbolic meaning and style in accordance with your culture. It doesn’t matter what it was, or how utilitarian, one never forewent the æsthetic consideration, if it was so much as a spoon or a plastered ceiling. In this way, art and science were intertwined and an appreciation of art can be felt in strictly utilitarian things such as antique scientific instruments, the handwriting of documents and as an element of their thought and ideas. This is the natural way and this is culturally normal.

  Modernism divorced us from this cohesion because it veered so far away from the rational or even the decipherable. Because art is now this ephemeral nonsense and has nothing to do with practical life or identity, it no longer has this symbiosis with science or utility. These subjects in turn, without art, are rendered dry, atheistic and applicable only to democratic materialism. The upward striving of the unified culture is shattered, where once they were all intertwined.

  It is even further difficult to relate art to the sciences today because the sort of person who works in hard sciences has immediately dismissed modern art as completely inexplicable and worthless, thanks to Modernist theory which merely insists it is intellectual without providing proof. And such hard science people are not wrong, it is a complete waste of time. This analytical personality has no concept of art and craft as the learned, rational discipline anybody can acquire with study and application, the same as any science discipline. They have been told the same lie as the rest of us, that true visual art is an indefinable, effeminate expression of feelings. Of course, the truth is that an atypically great European man, a Renaissance man, is versed in art, philosophy and science equally and neglects no aspect of either as his interest takes him. But today, these worlds do not meet and there is a vast chasm between science disciplines and the artistic, one being rational and the other irrational, and neither then in full service of a united movement of culture. In the same way the artistic gender inclinations became more divided, the curve towards liberalism is not the evolution of upward-striving tree branches but the molecular dissipation of a geriatric nearing the corpse stage.

  Of course, this sad schism is false and unhealthy and is completely temporal. An examination of the past, even the recent past, shows us the previous wholeness of all pursuits, under the guidance of traditionalism and the tribal spirit of o
verbecoming — and how fruitful it is.

  For example, the great Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was one of the greatest physicians in history. What is more, he created all the masterful woodblock engravings for his 1543 opus De Humani Corporis Fabrica himself. And such a feat was not uncommon in his time. In each example, a sensitive understanding of the fundamentals of drawing are displayed, with shadow, tone, perspective and light direction. The woodcuts are considered with as much patience and care as the text.

  This combination of scientific acumen and artistic draughtsmanship would seem an impossible feat for a modern physician (or even a modern artist), mainly because they do not study draughtsmanship to that level, or even have a sense of its value. Students today are not taught that fine art is a rationale that can be practised and learned objectively by anybody, and of equal importance to studying physics or carpentry – that it is in a science of its own and art and science are interrelated in the traditional Western practice of exploration, which is our primordial cultural assertion, or manifest genetic desire. Standardized (and personalized) high-quality drawing and handwriting should be in the retinue of any self-respecting scholar. It may seem like adding an unnecessary layer of work or skill but as I have been saying, it is the grounding force that roots you to the past and to your purpose.