Art is falsely taught as an unexplainable feminine concourse of ‘raw creativity’ (actually uncreative non-judgemental chaos). In reality, the pursuits of art, music or philosophy are of equal importance to and consummately related to the study of mathematics, biology, history, geography, etc. The architect should have some understanding of sculpture, the geometrist of music and all of them of drawing.
Of polymath architects, there are few more notable than Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), one of the most acclaimed in English history. Wren was educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics and was an anatomist, astronomer, geometer and physicist — but he is best remembered as the architect responsible for St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Architecture specifically was once a pursuit widely accepted as a branch of applied mathematics, implicit in the writings of the father of architecture, the Roman engineer Vitruvius. Wren understood well the power of building as a unifying outward pronouncement of a people’s identity and intent. In his own words:
“Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth…. Architecture aims at Eternity.”
Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, figure on plate 609, & Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, interior of the dome.
This was well known to Wren and others in his time, although this wisdom is sadly discarded today — leaving our scrawling Modernist ant-hives to display our dedication to the rejection of the realities of Wren’s statement and any other ideas that whiff of national identity. Like a spreading disease, this new non-nationalist architecture says only: we are dying now.
And so in the varied abilities and classical education of a man like Wren, we have an example of what was once the standard paragon of European education – the Renaissance man, so called for reason of the apparent abundance of polymaths during the Renaissance (a supposedly barbaric period). Like Wren, these men were cultivated in tradition, excelling in art and science equally as disciplines engaged in the pursuit of truth and beauty (which they understood as one and the same). They were also generally expected to have some skill or experience in the arts of warfare, the science of strategy and manly arts such as dueling. There was no limit and their time was not wasted on domestic concern.
To elucidate the depth and variety of Wren’s scientific and mathematical interests and achievements alone: he created a transparent beehive for scientific observation, an artificial eye, a rain gauge, a weather clock, studied and improved the microscope and telescope, experimented on terrestrial magnetism and longitude navigation, made observations on Saturn, mathematically discovered the length of an arc of the cycloid and constructed a highly detailed model of the moon for the king. But that is not all. He also studied and made some advancements to meteorology, agriculture, ballistics, hydrology and optics, and performed medical experiments — and yet his primary legacy is as the artist of St Paul’s. Such a person does not seem to exist today and yet history shows us such a person is possible.
The widening gap between art and science rends the premeditation from our endeavours, robbing art of reason and science of beauty. Contrary to what modern atheists might say, there is no science without background belief, there is no attitude dictating that we must study the world without a certain moral underpinning. Conversely, there is no art without the same, or without a science of methodology. This schism between art and science steers us down avenues of tastelessness and vulgarity. For example, a few years ago NASA highlighted the scientific milestone of landing of a robot on Mars by having the complex landing vehicle broadcast music from the planet’s surface, the first music of any kind heard on the Red Planet. This was a latent desire (likely subconscious) of those responsible to inject art into the achievement, signifying our arrival on a new world. For this monumental event NASA did not choose Beethoven, Bach or any of the heroic and undisputed musical titans, the artistic legends representing the very best of the people (Europeans) whose achievement this was. No, with heads down, they chose a forgettable pop artist’s song in a cheap appeal to egalitarian urbanites who do not and will never appreciate space exploration. When the Curiosity Rover broadcast Reach for the Stars by former Black Eyed Peas frontman ‘will.i.am’, it undeservedly marked his name in the history books, for the first song, so far as we know, ever played on an alien planet. Historic. It is like encountering aliens and instead of showing them our greatest cultural achievements, having them watch a reality TV program. It proves that despite our high technology, we have enslaved ourselves to a vapid and pathetic self-denigration – cowardly plebeian appeasement, nonsensical and unnatural. The Western youths who were actually excited by NASA’s achievement could only be insulted by such goofy platitudes. But thanks to this uncharacteristic short time preference decision-making, this is now forever the first song of the Red Planet, the paean announcing our Promethean declaration to Mars. That is not the behaviour of people who are proud or deserving of the achievement and it is an insult to long dead but unsurpassed classical musicians of the highest calibre that were overlooked. It is the remittance of the meek and defeated – even in an hour of triumph.
And what is the reason for such a poor choice, a choice that would rankle both Arthur C. Clarke and Richard Wagner? Likely, it was a PR move by a gaggle of useless but heavily educated marketing and HR people, trained in corporate managerialism and equipped with a social and superficial understanding of art and music. The Modernist or liberal answer to such questions is simply: why not? As though to suggest our best and bravest musical foot forward is discriminatory. Here, we see the hidden trap of equality-language in contemporary discourse. The ‘why not’ has a hidden sting. We can no longer tell the difference between high art and trash. Therefore, by reductionist principles we have nothing but trash. Modern man, proclaimed free and equal, is ultimately reduced to the sum of his lower drives. This technological marvel that can put robots on Mars cannot assert itself confidently enough to express an actual will to live but apologizes like a slave every step of the achievement.
A healthy system of education teaches fitness, art, science, metaphysics and world purpose in equal measure and as a single positive principle. Though we have interesting technology like the internet, seeing its application to people versed in proper æsthetics would be interesting, because as much effort would go into the beauty and æsthetic connotation as the function. Books will always be sacred and should return to their status as individual art objects, not cheaply mass-produced soft-cover (plastic) trinkets. To unify and wield knowledge in this Renaissance fashion, with the power of hindsight and a purposeful avoidance of quantity over quality, would be formidable.
We should have already expanded out into the solar system, to carve giant Hellenic faces in meteor-rock and to drift in vessels like great bronze whales along the rings of Saturn. Without our historic marriage of art and science, intertwined in a culture of self-overbecoming, we are restrained from being as nature intended: proprietors of an expanding biosphere.
Digital art, photography
and cinema
Modernists exclaim that everything is art, they believe they are undoubtedly right and have no problem foisting their view in a totalitarian fashion.
But why do we need art galleries if everything is art?
Many may disagree but none will assume there is a golden age of the visual arts just around the corner. We have also diverted a great deal of technological progress into facilitating new art mediums — not out of need or advancement but for the usual huckstering reasons of quantity consumerism.
Of the popular newer mediums, computer imagery is an offshoot that is commonly used in illustration and concept art. It might be said to have its merits but it also strikes the eye as somehow lifeless and there is a reason very few people hang these works over their fireplace. Such works can have no comparison with traditiona
l art and will never fill galleries. It has something to do with their inorganic foundation — they are really more an exercise in technology. In creating digital art there is a convenient aspect of being able to take back mistakes all along the way, quite easily. Do not ask me how, but things like this are sensed in the finished work. It is digital, ephemeral, it can be interesting with its backlit tones but it is not engaging. There are fewer barriers between the humanity of the real brush stroke than the mechanized artificial layers of the digital pen; the human charm, foible, and chance becomes lost in translation in that computational jump to the world of pixels. The digital work may show skill, yet invariably it feels inorganic, something to be glanced over, not kept forever. There is just an indescribable sense of lifelessness when compared with a painting — and while digital art may have its uses, it will not be replacing real-world art. It lacks the naturalism, the basic use of natural materials, the unpredictable charm of a real brush stroke, the flawed, visceral earthiness of organic pigments. When the power goes out, so does your digital art.
Digital animation (or CGI as it is commonly known) is equally dead. While interesting from a purely technological point of view, its application outside material sciences to general corporate media seems another misdirection. The creation of animated computer graphics, as seen in films, involves incorporeal technological processes, not conducive to a painter’s style of creativity. It involves programmers more than artists. There is always something lacking the further away art gets from the direct work of human hands. The effect of CGI is really its total lack of emotional effect, which it swaps for a kind of strange but erroneous appreciation for digitized faux-realism, something that is incidentally overly fluid and also does not look real. The older film effects may not have looked real either but at least they felt like the real world, and the direct human touch of ingenuity. The effects of those films bear the mark of a maker’s hand, and created the feeling that ‘I could do this too with household items and hard work’. We subconsciously register the presence or absence of direct human handicraft, both in irregularities and personality, which in truth are the things that make life and culture worthwhile and exciting. The computer-generated inability to illicit proper emotional responses is similar to our inability to properly define music, in that it insinuates that real art and meaning are something closer to a metaphysical issue than a material one.
Photography is a trickier subject that involves a more graduated response. While there is a certain art to photography, photographers should not be called artists in the same sense as painters: photographers are capturing, not creating.
The two are as alike as real plants and fake plants. A painting’s key feature is that it is unique. A photographer is an artist in the same way that a baker or a carpenter can be called an artist, photography not being in the same realm of raw creativity and mental vision as a painter, sculptor, musician, architect or writer, all of whom create entire worlds from nothing.
This is not intended to hurt photographers’ feelings, as it is certainly an applied and interesting craft. But with the muddling of fine art definitions, photography has been cockily branded on equal footing as painting and other visual arts. Ultimately, you point and click a camera — yes, you need to know a few tricks, such as keeping focal point off-center (an aspect of the golden ratio) but that is merely one of about a hundred of the other skills required in painting. To make a Rembrandt requires a depth of ability and understanding that boggles the mind (of both novice and expert) and this inspires the spirit. Photography can never reach that level because it is more largely a technical process that does not involve the creation from scratch of a personal world of light, representing an illusion of three dimensions in imagined or invented colour, tone, shading, perspective and painterliness. The same can be said of sculpture, the process of which is far more involved than the retinue of skills even the best photographer can employ. This is also sensed in the results, despite all the usual appeals to relativism and subjectivity.
Painting has time dimensionality as well, where the man hours of creation are woven into the fabric of its being, which are perceived subconsciously, if not consciously, by the viewer — through things like multiple transparent colour glazes, or courageous and deft paint-strokes of perfect tone. All of these record the skill, imagination and the soul of the artist. Painting resolves before the viewer in a series of human levels that photography cannot emulate. Photographers do their best despite the condensed limits of the medium, which they try to make up for with clever staging, costumery or post-processing tricks that merely faintly mimic the painter’s methods. Good photographers are honest about this distinction and it does not take away from the specifics of their trade. The irony of the photorealist trend in painting, which is the most deserving of the label Postmodernism as it is a cheap reaction to Modernism, is that they generally paint hyper-real subjects from photographs, almost of photographs. And the irony of stylish photographers is that they are usually making photographic versions of paintings. Irony is fine for a quick laugh but the irony loses its effect after 50-odd years.
Television as a medium is an interesting invention, mostly known as an extremely effective pre-internet tool for mass brainwashing. TV is crowd control, a broadcast mass-deceit of illusory progress that soothes the social conformist into feeling good about the projected morality. Every seemingly innocuous advertisement is a seconds-long propaganda film selling you an instantaneous false world identity. Endlessly portrayed hyper-happy modern mixed-race people sell us worthless convenience objects — almost always under a message of individualism. ‘You get to choose’, ‘do things your way’, etc. The libertarian dream-illusion of individual freedom is packaged and resold endlessly with an intellectually insulting universality.
As a tool for defending and maintaining the illusion of Modernist art, nothing has been more effective as trusted and respected documentaries from so-called educational channels. For many decades, the TV has presented mocking and deriding accounts of our greatest historic artists, relics and civilizations, while continually espousing that the art timeline only gets interesting after Modernism. Presenters in art documentaries can be nauseatingly smug and more and more appear to be slovenly dressed feminists injecting gynocentric re-evaluations of history into their sermon. Even those who at first claim to be critical of Postmodernism will feel obliged to include condescending remarks about how a classic historical artist or movement was ultimately just a lead-up to the unsurpassed genius of the Conceptualists. Even those presenting specific programmes on Art Nouveau or the Baroque will show this taciturn obedience to their abstract cultural masters. In their world, an innovative historic artist’s prime appeal is in their invented allusion to predating Modernism with some messy or unfinished work – which they leap upon greedily, crying: “Abstraction!”
The victory of egalitarian culture is largely in its self-censoring. You simply will not know any better if you cannot get information on Art Deco, Impressionism or Romanticism without arrogantly alluding to them as mere irrelevant ‘steps on the ladder’ towards a superior modern art, which happens to be a crucifix in a jar of urine or an unwashed pile of teacups.
Unfortunately, this dishonest behaviour is a tactic that has had tremendous social success, mostly from the broad sense of authority mediums like TV command. None of these overconfidently opinionated TV presenters and supposed experts have the faintest clue how to even begin to replicate a painting by Turner, Ingres or even Cezanne. Nor could they sculpt a Canova, Phidias or Donatello, despite their disrespectful attitude of superiority over these great men. Worse, they feel a cowardly impulse to criticize the masters for not sharing modern values, as they can so easily be labelled racist or sexist, or generally not of the morality of the now.
Luckily, much of this legacy media is falling out of fashion, the internet taking over from television as an education tool. While the money power is currently working to control and censor net education, for now reading th
e negative comments on articles about modern art exhibits is most gratifying, in a way that was impossible when the only option was screaming at the TV.
Cinema is a different matter altogether, a complicated craft involving many different disciplines all at once (writing, storytelling, photography, music). I think there have been many fine filmmakers with great ingenuity and that unlike digital illustration, it is a practice that must be considered its own art. However, it too has either run its course as a medium or been misdirected into avenues of stagnation. Most noticeably, a truly sickening political correctness ruins modern films, in a horrid I-am-being-brainwashed way that is impossible to circumvent. Indeed, it must be said that Hollywood, with its now notorious sordidness, has been rather suspect arm of degenerative propaganda for really a very long time.
Though film is not a traditional medium, it has in the past employed the use of many traditional arts to create emotional impact. Classical music, matte painting, model making, hand animation, make-up and visual effects, storytelling, drama, etc, have all been mixed together to great effect. But sadly, many of these crafts, which became developed in a film-specific sense all of their own, have succumbed to the materialistically cheaper but ultimately lifeless computer replacement.
There is no real love or appreciation beyond the temporary trendy kind for these imposters. You know the stop motion monsters in the Ray Harryhausen10 film are not real but you love him for what he has done. For bringing the cyclops and the dragon and Medusa and Pegasus to life in a way that felt accessible to anyone with a lump of clay. If you are a child, it inspires you to try it because there is an intuitive simplicity to it and if you are an adult it reminds you of your childhood. There can be no improving his work with CGI, to even consider that robs his oeuvre of its innocence and excellence. It is like comparing the original Star Wars films to their awful money-grabbing ‘prequels’. The latter efforts are boring and uninspiring, an exploitation of the earlier successes, while the former are alive, made with artistic devotion and human depth: muppets, real sets, carefully detailed models and animation done by hand. It may not look totally real, whatever that means, but it looks enjoyable and artful. You can appreciate or feel, without understanding why, the time depth of masterful and long-hour work that went into its crafting, the work of artists, not machines. There is no way to describe the audience reaction other than it is sensed. And we encounter the opposite in the prequels and newer films: a shiny, overly-fluid, lifeless corpse created by an endless series of zeroes and ones, which we view with a sense of numbness and boredom.
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 14