You Don't Hate Modern Art
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You Don't Hate Modern Art
You hate arts administration
I have to laugh at the cultural critics who always use the same reserve batch of Modern and Postmodern Art to act as examples of “bad art” as if conceptual art is the downfall of aesthetics. It’s true that “Fountain” is not beautiful, but it’s highly likely that all the Twitter posters who complain about the ills of Postmodern Art today would have been drooled over that sculpture at the time it debuted.
Marcel Duchamp is a forefather of Abstraction, Surrealism, and Conceptual Art. He was technically skilled (stop pretending like “Nude Descending a Staircase” isn’t one of the most virtuosic paintings of the 20th Century) and was keenly aware of the West’s movement toward global hegemony. Duchamp is a product of his time, and if he weren’t born in 1887, he’d be a podcaster and poster on dissident Twitter. “Fountain” is an unserious work and, in fact, a commentary/complaint against the declining culture in the art world at the time.
What happened after “Fountain” is Duchamp started making more sculptures out of everyday objects such as a bicycle wheel on a stool, bicycle seat and the handlebars, etc. He called these sculptures “readymades” to refer to the fact that he was making artwork out of pre-fab objects. The practice is an extension of the commentary and parodies the 20th-century art world’s obsession with any commodity that is remotely aesthetic. Duchamp’s collectors and the people who put his readymades in museums were also spiritual posters who were effectively retweeting and quote tweeting Duchamp. The current crisis in bad art is not a direct consequence of Duchamp and his readymades. Rather, it’s the fact that everyone chose to respond and build upon his obvious jokester commentary instead of try to use aesthetics to solve the problems he was pointing out. You don’t hate Modern Art, you hate arts administration that accessions and reifies shitposting.
The constantly whining and complaining coming from the Internet’s “Culture Critics” would have loved Duchamp’s “Fountain.” The reason they don’t love a piece like Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” is because, even though it’s making the same point and joke, it’s not doing anything new in terms of mocking the crass, art-enjoying elite. And “Comedian” was made 100 years after “Fountain,” so it is true that we’re stagnating. Even the jokes are old. At some point (now) the complaints will have to stop. A culture in decline must be built back up.
You Don't Hate Modern Art
It might be nice in the rebuilding, to recapture a sense of beauty and reverence for life but perhaps doing that might require that beauty is taken seriously. For now, irony and cynicism corrupt the moral integrity of the arts that trade for serious money.
That so many people attended Art Basel to see the hype around the banana taped to the wall, the admin decided to remove it from display, to protect other works, is a clear sign of degeneracy; not to mention the copycats and the "hungry artist" who ate it.
This is a separate but related topic/question related to art history. If culture in the Herder and later Spenglarian sense is, as it seems to have been, the expression of a particular people (blood, soil and time period), do you think globalism allows for meaningful art that's actually recognizably beautiful and skillfully done by an artist making paintings and drawings? We can see that the "joke" is accepted and rewarded by our elite institutions of authority, inspiring no end of similar humor. Do you think, excellence and integrity could do the same?
I wish we could cut out the tumor. The “joke” is poisoning everything.
NFT’s, New media etc: I’m sorry but I think all digital/virtual arts are lost to AI. It’s the perfect media and landscape for that.
Fiat world: Are you familiar with the book “The Cultural Cold War”? There’s an old video documentary based on it available on YouTube. In short, I agree with you.
When you say “no one is thinking about how to create work that will satisfy their commissioners and outlast their lifetimes.” I think we’re talking about the art that sells for high prices because there are many artists who think about these things.
I want to be more optimistic but I can’t help thinking of Spengler’s thought’s regarding America (which is driving this fiat engine) as nothing more than a bunch of dollar trappers. I may be less strict in defining the globalist agenda than you are but I see fiat currency and globalism as related.