The Devolution of Art

"To this new breed anything offered as art merited automatic respect and grave scrutiny. If a new work or style was not easy to like, if it was painful to behold, revolting, even, it was nonetheless “interesting.” Half a century later unless the reviewer finds it “unsettling,” “disturbing,” “cruel,” “perverse,” it is written off as “academic,” not merely uninteresting but contemptible." Jacques Barzan - From Dawn to Decadence

The beginning of the 21^st century wasn’t the worst of times, but we were getting there fast. Our artistic culture had completely collapsed -- it was exhausted. The great majority of "artists" had started realizing they could jerk-off and get away with it – i.e. be taken seriously. The ever-corrosive media was the “jerk-off enabler”. Deep down anyone with a decent brain knew all this so-called art was bullshit, but the media elites were just simply fascinated by artists jerking off, and the big race was to see which artist could come up with the most outrageous way to jerk-off in public.

In little more than a man’s lifetime we had gone from, say, Picasso & Klimpt (above) & Hopper, to some idiot who took a giant dump right in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The great floating “turd” was a real-life dead shark in a thousands-of-gallons-of formaldehyde tank. And though everyone deep down knew it was giant turd, people still found it fascinating to see such a big one in America’s premier museum.

This great avalanche of jerk-off art was emblematic of the overall cultural exhaustion. The elites, infected with political correctness and enamored with relativism, had realized they could profoundly increase their sense of virtue by absurdly claiming things like, say, Maya Angelou’s poetry was right up there with Ann Sexton's or Emily Dickinson's. Nothing one culture could produce would be allowed to be labeled better than another culture’s – even though some cultures could put men on the moon while other cultures were still trying to figure out how to make plumbing work.

And all the young artists knew they were screwed if they tried to go up against a Renoir or a Titian or a Van Gogh or a Mozart or a Melville or a Shakespeare or a Rodin, etc. etc. It was out of the question -- because nobody was willing to pay those kinds of dues anymore. Can you imagine any artist in this day and age undertaking a creative task on a scale analogous to Tolstoy writing War and Peace -- longhand -- or Michelangelo's coaxing out of stone a Pieta? Don't make me laugh. There was only one way to go – that 8-lane Interstate Jerk-Off Freeway. “You think that’s crap? – Look at the dump I just took!"

See Art Absurdities elsewhere in this blog.