Modern Art: An Artful Swindle

An extreme example of minimalism.

The first and most sweeping swindle perpetrated
upon the West by its enemies was the obfuscation of the definition of Art.

Starting with Kandinsky’s ‘Expressionism’ and bolstered by Clement Greenburg’s
‘Artspeak’ criticism, this new abstract creativity overwhelmed all tradition in
art. Swept away in this nihilist flood were traditional art tutelage, inherited
skills dating back to prehistory, high culture, good taste, standards or
hierarchy, naturalism, symmetry, decoration, technical merit, self-determination
and ‘becoming’ in art. Styles in painting, sculpture, architecture that had
evolved from European antiquity came to a crashing halt on the pages of ‘art
theory’ criticism – a ridiculous construct of universalism that tried
(successfully!) to embrace pure abstraction as progressivism in art.

Irony
became the vogue. Random splatters of paint, intentionally awkward, ugly forms,
and childish primitivism became the preferred modes of intellectual culture, via reams of this
irrational wordsmithing. True progress was hijacked and perverted by cultural
Marxism. This later would be the same brand of relativism they found could be
successfully applied to all aspects of western tradition and taste, beyond just
the false edifying of abstraction as intellectualism, but as a means of attacking
every aspect of European culture. The self-eating snake, wracked with guilt,
wallowing in weakness and trembling with pity. Their success in art criticism
and art theory not only paved the way for total degradation, but the ongoing
artlessness of our western world remains and enormous obstacle in allowing us
to rediscover our true self-becoming. 

Today we have ‘conceptualism’ and
‘abstract expressionism’ ruling our art academies – one may take a lazy
preamble into any ‘modern art’ gallery to see what kind of mindless,
indefinable childishness this results in. Literal piles of garbage, arranged sex
dolls, people standing in animal suits, you may find pretty much anything other
than, ironically, actual art. Many voluminous rants about the imagined merits
of this perpetual stream of anti-art are printed and spoken of in modern art
academies and critical literature. But not a word of it amounts to anything
more than liberal guilt, juvenile self-hate, and profuse obsession with human
failings and  perversions. Nothing that smacks of beauty of positivity or
self-affirmation can fall under this new modernist art definition. All serves
to remind us that grandeur is an illusion, human affairs are nihilistically
limited, and we are not worth saving.

Indeed, we deserve ugly, lascivious paintings
rendered childishly – they are an attack against elitism! But this view is itself a
construct, relying upon egalitarian tropes, as evil and false as a lie can be.
True art is not the all-encompassing cloud of pure creativity where
permissiveness enshrines the freedom to announce anything you desire as art.
Modernity exists upon a platform of hating true art, or all art before
modernism, which they couch in snide blanket terms like ‘realism’. There is no
foundation for modern art abstraction other than proving that the public will
accept whatever you tell them to accept. After all the long years of Pollock’s
and Picasso’s and Duchamp’s, a cursory Googling of contemporary art definitions
lays bare this bizarre and poisonous foundation. 

A definition of abstract
expressionism reveals that its basis is ‘A school of painting that flourished after
World War II until the early 1960’s, characterized by the view that art is
nonrepresentational and chiefly improvisational.’ If this revelation about art
is true, that means that Michelangelo, Raphael, Phidias, Singer Sargent,
Turner, Rubens, Titian, DaVinci, and every artist before this movement were
completely wasting their time actually learning the craft of painting or
sculpture or architecture. They should have been practising random
improvisation, freeing themselves of talent and technical prowess. They should
have been splashing paint about like the moronic Pollock, or painting three
stripes endlessly like the con Rothko. The average person assumes that public
art comes to them courtesy of respected, talented academics and institutions
devoted to furthering and bettering society. They can not fathom or assume that
our art ethos is an enormous lie eroding western civilization with hubris and
hatred.  

Modern art cannot exist in the same
world as traditional art. Modern art can exist only as a hate-filled backlash
against the superiority of that which came before it. Neolithic cave painters
could not decide their time would be better spent refusing to paint anything as
a statement of conceptual anarchy, or creating abstract ‘installations’ of
arranged animal hides and straw. If something appears to have no point should
one dig deeper until a point manifests? Does it not remain ultimately
pointless?

Modern art criticism from the likes
of Clement Greenburg is the only truly creative aspect of modern art. He
pioneered the style of criticism that found praise in the wilfully
‘unrepresentational’. This opened the floodgates to endless reams of eloquent
bloviate about ‘redefining art preconceptions’ and all the typical modernist
buzzwords we have come to associate with generic attacks on western values.
Vagaries about progressiveness and old ways that are tired and  ready for
the dustbin of history. Thus, over time, the idea of craftsmanship becomes
denigrated – as the painter becomes the illustrator, the true architect becomes a
restorer, a traditional fashionista a set designer, and naturalism pastiche. There is a reason that during the Renaissance you didn’t have
celebrated artists making random splatters of paint on a canvas in the Uffizi -
that is because it is stupid. It is patently on it’s face idiotic. Because a
child really could do it. Turner or Rembrandt did not have to compete in the
creative arena with a Tracy Emin type character who traipses around confidently
arranging mannequins or unmade beds and touting it as art because it is
‘pushing boundaries’. That is because it takes a society existing, as we do, at
a sustained level of luxurious stupidity to even imagine philosophizing such
obvious lies. This confusion, this morass of universalism, was the cultural
Bolshevik victory that opened the door to all the others, and right up to the
present remains their strongest stranglehold upon the mass mind. Very few
people care about art any more because it is so nonsensical, generations come
and go just  flippantly saying they don’t ‘get it’. And all because the
concept of moving art is difficult to define, and therefore easy to hijack. The
day Marcel Duchamp succeeded in bringing a urinal into an art gallery was the
day up became down. What seems an innocent trifle morphs into a tremendous
evil: Modern Art. All of modern art, and thus modernism (including
post-modernism), is based upon the flimsy concept of being wilfully bad, to
prove ‘anything is art’. Even now, it persists, when we have grown accustomed
and actually expect art galleries to be awful and pointless. 

Today not just our galleries but
every aspect of western society has been poisoned with this relativist dogma. A
wilful anti-æstheticism is the furtherance of ugliness for its own sake. From
music, to fashion, to furniture and architecture, we have been tricked into
making our world unseemly. Our cityscapes (save for a few untouched historic
city centres such as Paris) are a ruinous, mocking tribute to a lack of
defining style They are purposefully disjointed and asymmetric, or woefully
boring tower blocks: testimonies of straight lines, undecorated concrete, and
plastics. Occasionally where decorative, stylish historic buildings exist they
insist upon ruining them with modernist growths (such as the Toronto art
gallery). These monolithic monstrosities serve to remind us of the inescapable
horror of modernism, as a entity encompassing those values of ugliness and
vapidity. No beauty can prevail in the vacuum. No organic shapes, no natural
materials, classical motifs, no traditional sculpture, relief, or Euclidian
perfection are permitted to exist. Misshapen and exploitative, we scurry about
this landscape of misery feeling deep down we are part of something that has
gone wrong, which does not deserve to be survive. We escape the confines of
drab office cubicles to walk in a courtyard of pointless and garish corporate
sculpture. Under the shadow of cheaply made buildings of cyclopean drabness.
Unnatural, uninspiring. If in our hearts we come close to the realisation that
modernism at it’s core is a trick or a joke, we are pushed back into
complacency by the all-powerful tyranny of the modern art definition, which
hides behind a supposed inclusiveness, where everything is potentially art and
every one an artist. Except, again, real art or artists.

And where modern architecture fails
to dissuade, we have modern fashion. This incredible bulwark of stupidity and
laziness seems to endlessly combine themes of leisure wear and graphic-designed
sweat shop fabrics. Gone are the mens suit, leather boots, fine tailored hats
and coats, detailed 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, sweat pants, t-shirts, oft inspired by an
endlessly repeating phenomenon of slutty pop stars based upon the model of the
careless, free-wheeling whore perpetually giving the finger to a patriarchal
history. 

All of modernism is a pit, into
which beauty must be eradicated. Tragedy must not exist. Art is a kind of
self-mocking joke. Judgementalism is the only true crime and is not permitted.
The moderns are incapable of seeing that to like something is to pass
judgement, and requires the disliking of something else. Perfect egalitarianism
does not exist in the universe, and is impossible in the art world, in nature,
or in human affairs. The galleries will never again discover genius like
Leonardo or Breker so long as they contain trouts nailed to walls and
televisions playing static. They exist within that vacuum of intellectual
nihilism, from which there is no escape. Perpetually pushing invisible
boundaries like hamsters on a wheel. If, as I believe, we are not actually
doomed to this abstraction as part of a long-suffering demise, as Spengler
would have us believe, then a revision of style is possible. There are still
those that might break through this obscurity,  rediscover beauty and the
perfection of idea that comes from the mind of a single man, acting on
instinct. Cut away the useless fat of a hundred years and start again from
where Art Nouveau and to some degree Art Deco left off. But at this late stage
it involves a courageous negation of hubris. Those lone warriors must strive
for those ideas that can be retrieved from the perpetual wellspring of true
creativity, that flowed about the great minds of antiquity like a raging river.
Ideas and work that is not abstract or indefinable, but natural, primordial,
and the product of intense labour and a devotion to an orderly æsthetic.