Mark Rothko - Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art

10 posts

Ash

I posted that piece precisely because it seemed to fulfill the criteria for art that you like, and because that is the kind of art that is defended in the article - not your Kinkade straw man.

I think you're reading a lot into a word, 'uplifting', though it may be ill-chosen. People like Scruton are certainly not defending Hallmark-card tweeness. You are arguing against a fantasy of your own creation.

Artists are just 'makers', craftsmen, not the oracular demigods you portray. They are an elite of a kind, but only insofar as they are the highest voices of aesthetic expression for an ethnic collectivity. This is quite different from a sneering elite which delights in ugliness and transgression and then mocks the people for the kitsch they quite naturally choose instead.
Trajan
Much of great classical art, even art esteemed by academic bourgeois like Roger Scruton, deals with themes that are far from uplifting...war, betrayal, murder, the crucifixion, etc. There's a criticism of modern art I'm willing to get behind, but this ridiculous pouting about the 'negativity' of modern art isn't it. It's pollyannish and effeminate. The reason why the modern art establishment fails at producing art that inspires or even elicits any interest at all is because their bag of tricks is completely empty -- nothing shocks anyone anymore, everything has been tried and done. At this point, returning to representational art would be avant garde .

When I say 'true art has always belonged to the elite', I mean that artists have traditionally relied on the largesse of small, powerful groups, whether aristocrats, the wealthy, etc. Now that lowbrow tastes are profitable, thanks to the revolt of the masses, this is starting to change, sadly. But don't pretend that the people are only forced to like Kinkade or Jurgen Scholz cat paintings because their alternatives are Mark Rothko or Damien Hirst. There are plenty of excellent artists still out there that one could turn to. They just genuinely like this crap.
Ash

Why have you fixated on that one word? It was probably not the best choice. So what? Is that the only thing you can remember from skimming the article before you decided it wasn't as cool as you are?

Anyway, the word has nuances you're not admitting. Maybe in Orange County lingo it always implies an I'm OK-You're OK attitude, but to say that Benton provides uplifiting portrayals of rural American life can also simply mean that he reveals beauty and dignity in it.

There's obviously a huge difference between art that deals with suffering and tragedy and art that revels in ugliness, banality and transgression. I don't know why you insist on conflating the two.

As for the rest, well... this gets into bigger questions about the whole modern, as in post-mediaeval, conception of art. I'll wait and gauge the atmospheric chimping level before getting into that.

Bob Dylan Roof

It seems that the greatest traditional artists have merely taken the truths created by the elites of society and dogmatically run with them. In a few cases (perhaps with the Renaissance painters or foundational poets like Homer) some of the artists succeeded in pulling double duty, but for the most part artists have been parasitic on the fruit of theologians, philosophers, and statesmen. With the triumph of mass democracy the aesthetic potential of new truths begins to decline along with the quality of traditional sources of truth: demagogues, pop-philosophers, and internet forum personalities. Ugly concepts (the gaze, feminism, manowar transitionalist nihilism etc.) translate into ugly conceptual art.

The only exception to this rule I can think of is the heroic realism of artists like Breker, Thorak, and Speer, which reflected the stillborn attempt by democratic NS leaders to generate a new classical myth and ennoble the masses of Europe. I suppose this qualifies as kitsch and reflects my poor taste.

Niccolo and Donkey

I must defend my avatar.......just give me time.

Trajan
Hurry up.
Porkchop Holocaust
I think the article author's shortsightedness is specially obvious here. He consents Greenberg's point of kitsch serving as a tool to pacify the masses by creating a reality where they have no form of rebellion, as well as denying art its purpose of uplifting the masses. However, where for Greenberg the cause of decline and its corresponding panacea lie in the non application of international socialism, for the author the problem revolves around Jewish influence and the rejection of, presumably, white nationalism or some form of white identitarian politics. It seems to me that the ideological framework of both viewpoints is extremely similar, a conclusion corroborated by their shared inability to identify kitsch with the taste of the masses, not only in its tentative approximation by an opportunistic elite, but in its essence, its only possible outcome. The modern mass, whether homogenously white or not, whether it has surrendered to international socialism or not, is going to prefer kitsch over other forms of art.

That this is true can be easily proved by the influence of American pop culture in all parts of the (modern) world, independently of their ethnic composition or form of government. In places where cultural barriers prevent the unobstructed imposition of American culture, like in East Asia, equally abhorrent forms of kitsch are produced for the local populations.
Trajan

"The modern mass, whether homogenously white or not, whether it has surrendered to international socialism or not, is going to prefer kitsch over other forms of art."

Yeah, this is what I was saying. The masses adore kitsch because kitsch is direct , like a shot of dopamine to the brain. They don't have the patience for real art. In kitsch there is neither subtlety nor pretense, just naked sentiment on exhibition, like porn in a sense. It's hilarious -- these white nationalist morons really think that on the day of the rope, Peorians are going to exchange Kinkade for Caravaggio and start going to Wagner concerts. Ideology makes you retarded.

Ash

The 'masses' (peasants, proles, sudras or whatever you will) are to a large extent the passive element in society, receptive to whatever is impressed upon them. I am not concerned here with any idea of the nobility of the masses which may have been falsely attributed to me, but rather with the intellectual and aesthetic responsibilities of elites.

This question of the tastes of the masses is no doubt an interesting one, albeit something of a red herring with regard to the OP, which made no mention of popular kitsch but rather contrasted the European and Euro-American painting tradition with conceptual garbage passed off as art.

However, if I defend these fine art traditions it is only to defend the not-so-bad against the truly dreadful. The whole concept of art as an autonomous dimension of society, producing objects solely for people to stroke their chins at in museums, is perverse. We can go back to the Renaissance and even to the West's ambivalent attitude toward the Seventh Ecumenical Council in search of the roots of our impasse, but a more proximate cause is the industrial revolution and the attendant death of the crafts, which sealed this division between mass-produced everyday objects and the idiosyncratic productions of a frivolous elite.

Trajan

The masses have ceased to be the 'passive element' -- they have revolted. The industrial revolution made low culture profitable, indeed more profitable than high culture, for the first time in history. That is why hacks like The Painter of Light (tm) are worth millions while visionaries like Ugarte (whose artwork I posted in another thread) languor in obscurity. Hirst and his ilk are rich, too, but their overpriced readymades are as lowbrow as any kitsch painting. As Gasset points out, our elites are no less 'mass men' than the proles in the streets.

But I don't fetishize high culture, either, after the manner of status-striving SWPLs and canon-obsessed traditionalists. Valuing high culture for high culture's sake is an autistic overreaction to the proliferation of schlock. An artist needs to forget about 'culture' altogether and focus on expressing an original relation to the universe, in Emerson's famous words.

As for your second point, I think I can guess at the tack it's going to take -- we need to return to medieval artistic anonymity! -- and I think that's just an anachronistic fantasy. The West is bound up with individualism as part of its Faustian destiny...you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Besides, I disagree with this 'organic', neo-feudal conception of society, where nothing can ever be truly autonomous because we are all linked like the body parts of some great organism, part of a whole, etc. Modernity has taken atomization too far, but the divisions within society will never go away. There will always be elites versus proles, religion versus philosophy, art versus commerce, etc. This was true even in the middle ages. Better to just accept this and move on rather than pine for a harmony that never was.