Of course, contrary to our training, the question is valid — indeed, the sentiment is completely true. It has done away with all objective standard, it cannot be judged by any quantity of merit, it is chaos. It is not better than a small child could do, obviously. At some point in early education when we make this comparison for the first time, a status quo Modernist teacher is ready at hand to laugh and tell us why up is actually down.
But how indeed can a painting that could have been done by an infant be considered genius? Or, equally, the painting of a monkey? Despite reams of relativist Artspeak, there is no clear rebuttal to this. Genius is literally measured by how much beyond the work of children or animals your work ascends on a rational tier. You can hire a three-year-old as a Modernist painter – but not as a doctor. But how can this then be genius, if it requires no higher thinking whatsoever?
The first step in identifying the problem is to identify that there is a problem.
“A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.”
– Marcus Aurelius
It would not have been possible for Neolithic cave painters to decide their time would be better spent creating ‘conceptual installations’ of randomly arranged animal hides and straw. I suppose they could have but what would be the point? What is the point of it now? If something appears to have no point, should one dig deeper until a point manifests? Does it not remain ultimately pointless?
There is a reason why during the Renaissance they did not celebrate artists making random splatters of paint on a canvas in the Uffizi — that is because it is stupid. It is patently on its face idiotic – for the reason that a child really could do it. Turner or Rembrandt did not have to compete in the creative arena with someone traipsing around confidently arranging mannequins or leaving unmade beds in the gallery and having it taken as serious art. That is because it takes a society existing, as we do, at a sustained level of luxurious stupidity to even conceive of transmitting such obvious lies.
The Rothko (famous for painting three stripes in variation) can only exist as a rebellion against classical art and its values. It has no other point, it would be laughed at and discarded in any other context. All of the Artspeak defending Rothko will point to this conclusion, that his art exists simply to daringly get away with existing. It is brave and bold for being so stupid. Our cultural handlers have manufactured an undying victimhood complaint, thriving on the eternal envy of excellence. Our safeguards are removed and all because the concept of art is tricky to define, and therefore easy to hijack. Marcel Duchamp is allowed to bring a urinal into an art gallery and before long we have lost beauty as a concept. If you lose the discipline to safeguard standards, you lose what they uphold, like slacking on your personal diet and exercise – energy must be exerted in order to have good things. Westerners have now grown accustomed to art galleries being awful and pointless as a rule.
The galleries are pointless because everything is potentially considered art. More malevolently, by pretending that virtually everything belongs under the umbrella of art, as a variety of options, Modernists confuse and disarm critics. This means they can include the undeniably inspiring catalogue of traditional art under the greater wing of their ‘everything is art’ theory. They pretend to meet tradition halfway: they too enjoy the Renaissance artists, for instance. Some will even agree about the sad state of contemporary art, sensing that the absurdity has indeed gone too far. But soon after this appeasement they will never fail to add that we must allow everything to be art, ultimately.
There is no surmounting the programming for some. To suggest standards be set and met is tantamount to a great evil in the perfectly formatted modern mind.
Indeed, many are as likely to go so far as to admit Modernism is worthless, to be outraged by it. An easy admission, this allows the emotional thinker a kind of pressure release, as an increment of truth snuck into their arguments relieves the stress of continually lying to themselves. However, invariably, after this olive branch they will simply add the caveat that we dare not set real standards on art. It does not matter that allowing art to be anything counters the possibility of measurable quality. In their minds, we cannot break the new laws of permissiveness. In a sense they are correct, everything should be art — but in truth not their art. Everything we see should be considered artistically and æsthetically with beauty values, and not their clownish reverse, which is to lazily call everything as it exits art. Modernism and traditional art are polar opposites, they are warring ideas. Therefore, pretenders who claim to like both have simply failed to understand either. Modernism and true art are natural enemies to the end and any glossing over of this fact acts in aid of Modernism (as the current prevailing paradigm). Which, again, encompasses everything it surveys as it spirals around the drain. In this way the cards are stacked against us, in that nothing less than a total rejection of accepted art conceptions from the last century is required to save art — half-measures and compromises will only ensure continued degeneration.
While the tentacles of Modernism claim everything as art, there are ironically no actual new art movements. There might be a few different names: Conceptualism, Constructivism, Brutalism, de Stijl. But they are essentially all one and the same. The identical root philosophy is at play: shock value abstraction promoting materialist nihilism. Each of our former great styles would transcend medium, now we just have one style in different mediums.
This will remain true for as long as the globalist and corporate powers keep their moneyed noose on the definition of art.
If it was possible once, it is possible again. There is more energy wasted in maintaining and imposing Modernism than traditionalism, which is the natural state of art. But we are all about wasting energy these days. An optimistic future requires nothing more than a self-belief.
The subconscious price of Modernism.
People are suffering a subconscious price for the suffocation of discordant public spaces and the crass environment of endless advertising. Nobody feels a true sense of wellbeing about their society when standing in the shadow of an obtuse corporate sculpture. Occasionally, unimaginative council officials seek to make their liberal mark by destroying the historic buildings with Modernist tourism centre growths, literally grafting a plate glass box on to the sixteenth century castle with insane hubris. Somehow, the horror of this is completely lost on such people and that can only be down to them having no understanding of what history or art actually mean. They think art is just doing whatever. That our civic deciders are so often of this mindset speaks to the triumph of our new materialist managerial class, which knows nothing whatsoever of æsthetics or true moral good, that a sort of trained ape of mediocre clerical skills could be handed the safeguarding of history and effectively ruin it.
The feeling of wrongness that this Modernism engenders feed into the other leftist lies pushing to label Western civilization as being something of no value. Society becomes a macrocosm of the guilt we self-inflict, because of lies told to us about our past and the forced disconnection from our tribal creativity. It is hard to look outside now and see anything but meaningless money-power. History is being revised to make it look multicultural all the way through. These are lies.
There is often little solace from the demented public spaces within our private homes. Our household furniture and accoutrements are no longer parochially crafted with pride but mass-produced junk items we excitedly purchase because they break through another bottom tier of bargain pricing. This sad cycle aids internationalism and free trade against the local and the homegrown. It is the dream come true for the same business class who destroyed the guilds: controlled, unrestricted profit from the free trade of junk goods. Adornments of cheap plastic manufacture, nothing historically relevant to us, litter streets, homes, and eventually landfills. Everything is increasingly toxic,
poorly executed,and spiritually fallacious. Our ancestors held artful objects that emulated nature through tribal style interpretations as being a crucial component to life. We traded history’s accomplishments for a low price tag.
And where modern living space fails to dissuade, we have modern fashion. Just to be sure every last element of daily life is dishearteningly anti-æsthetic. This incredible bulwark of stupidity and laziness seems to endlessly combine themes of leisurewear and graphic-designed sweatshop fabrics. Gone for the most part are men’s suits, dresses for women, or sartorial standards of any kind. The youth are half-naked and in a perpetual cycle of hippy revolution against an unseen sexually conservative oppressor that does not exist. Prevailing cyclical modern themes are garish colours, sweatpants and T-shirts, inspired by an endlessly repeating phenomenon of slutty pop stars based on the model of the careless, free-wheeling whore perpetually giving the finger to a patriarchal history. Again, too, foreign urban culture is worshipped by a brainwashed youth, whose attachment to their own history is blocked and derided as racist and sexist.
There are voluminous tomes of pompous art magazines printed every month so that people can signal intellectual pretence and express opinion on meaningless scribbles and abstract blob-shapes.
How do we raise our heads from this quagmire, while we work pointless jobs and carry out unnatural, unfulfilling routines? Who among us can say they are truly against beauty? What person would say they despise nature? We require inspiration and exultation, we do not require superficial safety, faux individualism or the soul-death of corporate conformism. Western man must awaken the fire inside that survived ice ages, wars, famine and plague, to not be destroyed by this foolishness.
We created this technology and now we are being repressed by the very tools we shared with the world.
“Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry—Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury—Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly.”
– John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson
All culture is currently steered towards materialist goals — artists are now creative advertisers. Cultural decisions are decided in boardrooms by marketing executives, flattened and homogenized by committee decision-making, then washed and rinsed in a kind of gynocentric politburo of pointless Skype conference calls which serve no purpose other than delighting Boomer bosses with a bit of bread and circus communication technology. Political correctness ensures anything resembling a good idea is equalized and voted into its blandest possible incarnation — a nothingness. Mind-numbing routine governs all and everything relates back to faux-individualism.
Still, despite all this trashy decadence, through the fog of false progress, the older crafts still resonate and nobody fails to marvel at and be humbled by the sight or sound of traditional Western art. Upon seeing a truly crafted object, all fall silent in reverence and the fog of modern life is momentarily lifted, a light shines through the canopy. But most remain innocent or ignorant of the fact that the means of creation of these objects is currently lost to us.
Visit the old gallery, view an older film, read great historical minds. People of the past did not succumb to nihilism in times of great peril. It is only the false propaganda that keeps us in this state and that corrupt consensus-morality is a chain that can be broken.
Cherry pick the past and revere nature.
The concept that we might examine history and be influenced by the good and leave the bad seems difficult to express, in our age of all or nothing politics. Every passing day it becomes more difficult just to think of ourselves with self-awareness and objectivity, to ask: is our society healthy or unhealthy? Should we be allowed to make things better for ourselves? With reverence for nature and tradition in mind, new art movements are possible and with them new healthy communities. But there is one thing the Modernists do have right: that you cannot relive the past alone, that a living culture needs to be new. But we must have the facility to recognize that proper evolution is not perpetual newness alone, that when a new thing results in a loss of quality, then it is not worth discarding existing culture for. We must not chase bad ideas down the drain like we currently do, because we failed to discriminate against unhealthy trends.
To commune with nature and history a man seeks to craft. He moulds from the same clay that sustains his harvest a likeness. Prometheus shapes man in imitation of the divine. Nature provides all and is the summation of all. For Western man, reverence for nature is paramount. As I have said already all true art is craft: making a chair, painting a tree, knitting a scarf, writing a story, all have the same import and impulse. You dig the clay and shape a kiln, then dig more clay and fire a pot. You write down a few lines of thoughts on a paper or tablet. Such was the genius of certain craftsmen that from that simple impulse they eventually elevated the very idea of man and his possibilities — so tremendous was their skill that art slipped from the world of pure craft into the sublime, the philosophical, the metaphysical. This is the normal state of human life. The plastic assembly line item is dead from the moment it is conceived.
Traditionalists who defend Modernism.
There are also many traditionalists who understand the need for spirituality and identity but still fail to see that Modernism and abstract art was the original egalitarian coup. This type of traditionalist wants to discuss art only as it relates to civil or political suppositions, not in terms of pure beauty value or expression of myth or Platonic mystery. Evola himself had a weakness for Dada. Those who are not artistically inclined must be made to realise the art dilemma is of supreme importance, as a root principle and exposition of culture and ethnic value. A return to art will shape all the other flourishings of a healthy society. Applying narrative to art can be good in terms of revealing hidden symbology, for instance, but is not the necessary or primary element. True genius painting, literature or music will transcend description, resonate emotionally and be undeniable, just seek any pre-Modernist art as example. The fallacies of the Modernists can be dispelled in a few rigorous exchanges of rhetoric. These Modernist-defending traditionalists must also be challenged and taken to task over their aiding in this plague of bad taste. More often than not their go-to excuse for liking Modernism is the outlier style Futurism, where the lines are blurred and abstraction is beginning to creep in. The term outlier however perfectly explains this phenomenon, and one can immediately point out to them that the only good thing about Futurist art is the healthy traditionally aspect, and not the forgettable flirting with abstract gimmick. Many traditionalists will also see the light quite quickly once you point out the fudging of descriptions that has taken place (for example, they like Art Deco but think it is Modernist). It is more prudential to remove Deco and other traditionalist arts from the Modernist moniker than to push Kandinsky and Picasso out into Postmodernism. For the rhetorical sake, let all the trash be called simply ‘modern art’.
Weapon-words: combatting Modernism in daily discourse.
Modernists pride themselves on the idea that they are free thinkers, that by practising abstract ideas they have vanquished the boundaries and opened endless vistas of creativity. From their now staid and stodgy output of sameness, we can see that nothing of the sort has taken place. Indeed, philosophically, politically and otherwise they appear to have almost no mental flexibility and are unyieldingly dogmatic in the face of evidence or argument. They have lost the ability to self-reflect and question themselves, their arguments are always smug and quickly become heated. But despite the irritation of their infantile whining, combatting them in conversation and argument must be done. When you are presented with Modernist art, you should fight back.
In terms of actual rhetoric, a simple descriptive word is available to us, one that you may have noticed me using already, which is truthful, simple, and formidably defensible as its own complete tautology (similar to Modernist verbal pro
paganda which is not true yet still defensible as a tautology). Such words are required to break through the linguistic traps set by opposing emotive buzzwords, themselves the children of Artspeak. This word perfectly encapsulates the Modernist ethos and subtly mocks it for what it is, dispelling instantly its laughable intellectual pretenses — and that word is gimmick. Upon this kitschy foundation all Modernist art rests as a bedrock. You cannot present fine art today without a gimmick: some cheap attempt at social commentary, or some missing, abstract, simplified or urban element that ‘draws attention’ to the ‘process’ or the material, or some other goofy thing. Because they are not allowed to express the transcendent Platonic form of Beauty (that would be unallowably self-affirming), they must seek cleverness in ever-increasing layers of gimmick. The gimmick always causes the piece to mock itself and the sensing of this gimmick at work appalls the true art lover and excites the brainwashed Modernist. The gimmick makes the dullard think they are clever by being ‘forced to think’ about the artwork. No mystery can prevail in gimmick-world, all meaning in art must be laid bare and simplified. Even contemporary art made by traditional means and with beauty must sneakily add this gimmick element, ensuring it a temporary accolade and long-term disregard. The manipulation of this idea seems boundless, unless of course you reject its superficiality and philosophical childishness. But Modernists are largely people who will do whatever social pressures demand of them without referencing an internal moral compass. Whoever controls the TV and magazines will control their opinion on virtually anything. In the war of words that materialism wages, with its emotional re-interpreting of descriptions, gimmick is the weapon-word of traditional art lovers that vanquishes at once all their efforts and miserable pretence. Watch them shrivel with shame when your single word encapsulates and makes a laughing stock of their parasitic efforts.
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 22