Postmodernism as a word is more high verbal intelligence propaganda, as modern means in the current fashion but yesterday’s modern is today’s old news, so the term modern art is technically out of date. While it seems obvious that we should refer to whatever we are doing now as modern, technically modern art refers specifically to the first half of the twentieth century and thus they prefer to use Postmodern to describe the art of today. The terms contemporary, modern, and postmodern are interchangeable definitions for all post-Expressionist abstract art. Here is the official Wikipedia definition of Post Modernism:
“Postmodernism is ... largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. In essence, it is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. In contrast to modernism, postmodernist thought often emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism and scepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding.”
So as we can see, pretty much more of the usual Artspeak. This is the jargon that founds their anti-reality, when Hellenic idealism is put into reverse. Postmodernists war with a concept of the academic, though they have themselves been the academy for close to a century. There is nothing left to rebel against, a traditionalist art movement would be the only true act of rebellion left available.
“Their unobtrusive perfection (past masters), a logical component of what they were aiming at, has been greatly derided by painters whose talent made them unsympathetic to those aims This misdirected derision has subsequently been amplified and used to discredit beautiful execution in general so that, in the minds of the many, fine workmanship has become synonymous with smugness and painstaking stupidity. At the present time any semblance of neatness in the application of pigment may cause a picture to be contemptuously dismissed as academic. To any one who has tried to emulate the workmanship of the great academic painters such an appraisal will seem strange indeed.”
– Twilight of Painting, R.H. Ives Gammell
As mentioned, Postmodernism is nothing more than a lazy attempt to pretend there was an ongoing creative evolution beyond Modernism. Everyone knows what we mean when we speak of modern art — we mean bad taste, confusion and shock value. There has been no art style evolution, almost no genuine vocation of art, since we embraced Modernism, because it is a rat-maze. Its variances are all equally insane and it is those we must now look at for a clear understanding of the history.
Modernist Movements
since Expressionism
It goes without saying that allowing the initial abstract absurdity into the house of art only accelerated a stampede of mediocre exploitation. How could it not? To this day, every splatter painting that sells for over a million excites a non-artist to try their hand at painting with a cry of: “I could do that!” Once we have established a philosophy of meaninglessness, the way lies open to anything that can provide further shock value. Exactly how relatively few artists, critics and academics pushed through an ethos of anti-art so quickly does seem astounding. One of the Modernists weapons certainly since the world wars is that appeals to traditionalism or order can be shouted down as authoritarian, due to them involving rules and standards. Traditionalism is not open minded enough in regards the flowering of new absurdities.
1) Dada (1917–1950): Intentionally ‘ridiculous’ art, supposedly exploring the unconscious.
Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 1920. The figure hanging from the ceiling is an effigy of a German officer with a pig’s head. From left to right: Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Otto Burchard, Johannes Baader, Wieland Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, Otto Schmalhausen, George Grosz and John Heartfield. Heavily political and overtly leftist from the start.
Dadaism was probably one of the most foolish and melodramatic of all modern art movements. The definition of Dadaism is slightly more antagonistic than Postmodernism, though it is basically the same muddle, if not even generally more obtuse and lazy:
“Dada: a nihilistic art movement (especially in painting) that flourished in Europe beginning in 1916; based on irrationality and negation of the accepted laws of beauty.”
Marcel Duchamp, by introducing in 1917 a urinal as an object of art in a Parisian gallery, relativised art by supposedly stating that beauty, or truth for that matter, is only in the eye of the beholder and that the question of whether an object is a piece of art or just a piece of junk depends on the social context and our readiness to accept that context as art.
Extremely meaningful stuff, if you are a teenage anarchist. For those unfamiliar with Dada, yes – it was quite simply a urinal. Astonishingly, contemporary art history was to prove him right. Duchamp’s gesture has since been repeated a million times in installations all over the world, in various incarnations of the same meaningless, relativist principle.
Dada was possibly the first adroitly populist anti-art movement and rapidly garnered a certain following (of the usual bored bohemians). Duchamp was an opportunist and a charlatan made famous for his wilful flaunting of shock tactics. In addition to displaying a urinal as sculpture, he made his name by painting a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa. He continually claimed to be able to “paint like a master impressionist” although no evidence for this was ever exhibited. Nobody seems particularly interested in trying to seek it either (even his defenders probably know it is a lie) and his genius is taken as rote. Indeed, his piece The Large Glass (1915-23) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection shows no indication of any painting skill whatsoever. When the piece was broken in transit (it is indeed painted on glass) he claimed it looked better broken before slapping on his usual exorbitant price tag. This latter gesture is perhaps his only true genius — the audacity of the price is of tantamount importance and encourages the listless wealthy to compete over invisible clothes of intangible value.
And so Duchamp really seems the ideal candidate for title of the original modern art fraudster. Where Kandinsky might have been very much the same, we cannot be sure he was not just slightly touched. There is every chance he was Duchamp’s equal in chicanery but we should give him the benefit of the doubt, considering he at least had the decency to actually learn how to paint reasonably before opting to peddle nonsense – as opposed to Duchamp, who produced nothing tangible, ever, apart from egotistical boasts.
Duchamp’s name is, of course, spoken of in hallowed whisper in modern institutions to this day, though any description of his process is meaningless, convoluted and laughably contrite. His sole trick seems to have been in taking advantage of the encroaching popularity of relativism after the First World War as a way to stick it to the bourgeoise, as it were. Which he did with psychopathic zeal.
2) Cubism (1905–1920): Depicting subjects from multiple viewpoints at once.
The Chicago Picasso, a 50-foot high public Cubist sculpture. Donated by Picasso to the people of Chicago. Lucky them.
The modern artist adores Primitivism, such as most Cubism, as its lack of overt excellence allows for guilt-free admiration, like adoring a sickly underdog, and their mediocrity is inclusive, as it requires no elitist special intelligence. The very idea of ‘lesser culture’ is a misnomer to the cultural relativist where every idea, person and civilization are magically the same.
Braque and Picasso are the two most notable Cubists and despite Picasso’s fame, Braque was actually the better Cubist (laughable as it is to bother distinguishing) in that he was not quite as simplistic or reliant on shock value. Of course, for both their artistic goal was obediently Modernist: to attack the foundations of Western art. In their case this was done by applying the gimmick advantage of Modernism to abandon painterly retinue, namely the perspective and illusion of depth by always emphasizing flat, planar surface. It was pure gimmick.
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Picasso was a con-artist. One look at his vulturous mug tells you that — it is that smug, over-earnest stare that Modernists practice so hard, daring you to challenge their random boxes and splashes, defying reality with haughty airs. He simply looks corrupt and his kiddy paintings are not much worth talking about. It is notable that he had some good early works, not great genius but not bad, and along the way he caught wind of Modernist trends and realized he could sell paintings just as well by not finishing them — indeed, by reducing them to a gaudy simplicity, which has the same ‘look what I can get away with’ impact as Duchamp’s urinal. The only good thing to come out of Cubism was, somewhat strangely but worth mentioning, a style of cartooning and animation in the 1950s and 60s which had a certain faux-Cubist styling and always reminds me of the that era.
Again, merely look at Picasso’s most famous works and ask yourself: what exactly is so good about this? Picasso was the first and possibly most widely known celebrity Modernist and the go-to painter for the affected credulous desiring to signal leftist abstraction-worship (cultural masochism). In 1944, Picasso joined the French Communist Party and was handed a Stalin Peace Prize by the Soviets in 1950. He was, until his death, a loyal member of the Communist Party. Picasso stated in a 1945 interview: “I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.” Many of Picasso’s early champions were doing so for political reasons, like Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s pictures. Blunt, later a convicted Soviet spy, would claim that Picasso was a greater painter than Sir Joshua Reynolds.
3) Abstract Expressionism (1940s–present): Pure abstraction for its own sake.
Though arguably spawned in the rebellious absurdity of Expressionism and perfected in Dadaism, there is a movement that perhaps best encapsulates the ‘soul’ of the contemporary art we are likely to witness in our present-day galleries and media. This movement is the final summation of all the above listed epistemologies and their narcissistic deconstructionism. This, coupled with its extension Conceptualism, is the dead end of abstraction in visual arts, where you cannot get any farther away from classical theory and technique. It is a graveyard trap of mental cynicism that we have yet to find a way out of and is commonly known as Abstract Expressionism, which can only be considered a broadening of the scope of allowable bad taste. It is an expansion of Modernist non-ideas that breaks down barriers between Fine Art and exploitation. In many respects thus the defining creed of Modernism in all forms, the Miriam Webster definition of Abstract Expressionism is as follows:
“An artistic movement emphasizing an artist’s liberty to convey attitudes and emotions through nontraditional and usually nonrepresentational means.”
On its face, this sounds somewhat scholarly, ubiquitous and certainly not sinister. But however innocent it sounds, its true meaning and intent is malevolent, it wilfully defies description as it is nothing more than a simple play on words, conveying only the sparsest interpretation of real meaning.
Artists of the abstract movement seek to exist on a platform of nothing more than rebelliousness. Thus, the definitions of these various movements have, through time, become increasingly vapid, bolstered childishly by mere verbose tautology. However flowery its language may be, Abstract Expressionism is a deeply irrational ethos and ultimately a truly disastrous sentiment. Let us examine what their manifesto really means and why it is absurd on every level. To start, the whole premise of this movement’s existence is apparently based on protecting an artist’s ‘liberty’:
“Liberty to convey attitudes and emotions through nontraditional and usually nonrepresentational means.”
While this is very democratic of them, in terms of art it describes the artist’s liberty to do what? The answer is to do whatever he wants – to control the definition of art himself and, thereby, for the rest of us. And not just at a personal level but in terms of the limits of his success. The artist insists on being recognized as an artist no matter what he does. He is conveying attitudes and emotions, as they like to say — nothing but a muddled and narcissistic sentimentalism.
If that were not bad enough, the definition of Abstract Expressionism claims this must be achieved by non-traditional means. Again, this is both vague and suggestive, the intonation being a freedom from staid mores, more post-war relativism. This means that the work must be somehow apart from what is considered traditional art, which is essentially stylized representational drawing, design, painting and sculpture. While this rebellion is in fact impossible and undesirable within the context of art (the result being the destruction of art itself), the Abstract Expressionists are in a perpetual state of telling us about their endless rebelling against a tradition. This while all the while never becoming a tradition themselves, regardless of the how many decades they accrue. And while these solipsists rule tyrannically over art itself, the average non-artistic person has no idea that actual skill or talent in painting or sculpture no longer has any value.
For how long can something be considered non-traditional before it becomes the tradition? Apparently, a very long time. This unnatural phenomenon is further proof that Modernism is animated by an inorganic engine of deceitful propaganda. Generations have passed barely cogent of what the original art tradition ever was. The idea that art is actually not a random expression of liberal political belief in chaotic abstract format is a lost notion. Proper techniques in oil painting in particular are all but lost. Modernist movements, particularly Abstract Expressionism, are the establishment itself, the very academic dinosaur they propose to exist solely in contrast to.
In short, the Abstract Expressionist exists only as an effrontery to a tradition that no longer exists (academically or in the accepted echelon and media). So this supplanting tradition, based on only a juvenile rebelliousness against nothing, is indeed its own foundation and to keep its position as the reigning abstract tyrant of the visual arts it continually evades further revolution (which would, in a perfect world, be epitomized by a returning classicism) by increasing its shock value. That is, gradually exhibiting increasing levels of shock, sexual innuendo, childishness, anti-æsthetics, cynically ugly, asymmetrical and culturally hysterical art. Essentially, it just grows ever more horrid and vapid, in irrational attempts to out-think the confines of being pitted against normal and organically occurring staples of art.
Literally ‘increasing the stupidity’ is the secret credo of evolution in our contemporary arts.
When you see a smirking mockery in the face of Modernist artists such as Koons or Warhol, rest assured they have some awareness of their role as wilful opportunists (Warhol in particular was openly cynical). They are the enemy of every child who picks up a pencil and finds an inner faculty or enjoyment in drawing. This new art they represent is a shameful black mark on the book of history and we should be ashamed to have let ourselves come to this.
To examine the Abstract Expressionist proclamation yet further: “Emphasizing a liberty to convey emotions via non representation.” Representation is visual art, in any sense.
So the complex stupidity of this could be reworded as: “It can only be fine art if it is not recognizable as art.”
This is a stupefying statement, brazenly deceitful to conceive, let alone make. So we establish, by the Abstract Expressionists’ own definitions, that true elevated art should defy any preconceived notion of artfulness. It seems conclusive to me, as though witnessing their horrific works were not intellectually insulting enough, that the poisonously lazy and duplicitous literature excusing it is like a secondary slap to the face from another direction. To have allowed into the core of our advanced civilization these obvious lies has been a tremendous and suicidal foolishness. Is it any wonder we now find ourselves a self-loathing civilization, whitewashing its own glorious history? We have entrusted to this effete and nihilist philosophy our very culture, our living spaces, our architecture, our art prizes and our institutions of learning. What awful irresponsible elites can we blame for this lack of proper stewardship? The scale of
the treachery is astounding. Our art exists as a negation of art itself against nature and common sense. Abstract Expressionism is, of all the movements, the perfect summation of this Modernist lunacy at large, the whole of which is nothing more than the manifestation of an imposed self-loathing. It is something that can only afflict an affluent and indolent civilization.
Because there is by its definition no way to define or recognize Abstract Expressionist art as good or bad, that upon the face of it should be an indication to sensible people that it is nonsense. The warning bells that go off when one sees late-night TV psychics and knife salesmen should be blaring.
Very few classically trained artists are brave enough to attack the accepted norms of Abstract Expressionism but it does happen. In the previous century, no less than Salvador Dali (a talented Surrealist, best described as artists with one foot in tradition and one in Modernism) referred to what was happening as: “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.” By no means a conventional or purely traditional painter himself, Dali’s paintings did employ a strong classical skill attributed to his study of the old masters and their techniques. In his book Dali on Modern Art, he launched a vitriolic, opinionated attack and made very negative evaluations of such examples as Picasso and Cézanne. He reserved his praise for the classics, notably Vermeer and Raphael. Other dissenting voices can still be found in the wilderness of the art world, though usually accompanied by grovelling apologies for their heretical views, fearful the egalitarian boot will stamp them out in a crush of media criticism following accusations of ‘fascism’ at any moment. A good example is the glibly self-titled Conceptual Surrealist artist Robert Williams, who has a kind of pulp art style. Here he refers to his own early experiences:
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 7
