The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  “The Chapman Brothers (Jake and Dinos Chapman) were given what was generally felt to be a long-overdue nomination, and caused press attention for a sculpture, Death, that appeared to be two cheap plastic blow-up sex dolls with a dildo.”

  That sounds really intellectual and meritable. The Turner Prize got its name from the great nineteenth century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, lending credence to their anti-æsthetic abstractions by stealing his name after his death in the assumption he would be in full support of their radical anti-art. This kind of absorbing or stealing of an actual laudable namesake to ridicule and debase tradition is a fairly standard tactic of progressive zealotry. Turner himself was classically trained, had nothing to do with Conceptualism as it obviously did not exist (and never should have) and was possibly the greatest landscape painter of all time. But of course, respect and reality have never troubled an ardent Modernist. Were Turner around today he would no doubt be filled with abject horror to hear his name used in association with anything even resembling Conceptualism, the very existence of which is predicated on destroying the tradition he exalted.

  This irony is apparently lost on the Tuner prize Conceptualist fanatics, who are best described as a pretentious, uncreative gang of failed, quasi-celebrity degenerates howling and dancing like witches about a bonfire of solipsism. Needless to say, such insanity did not exist in Turner’s time. Among painters of his age, Turner was the most wildly original and famed virtuoso, legendary in his portrayal of nature and technique of painting atmosphere. His craftsmanship was individualistic and styled to the point of a quasi-abstraction (hence their attempts to claim him), but executed with maturity (intensity of style with masterful execution). His work demonstrates painstaking devotion to classical tradition, to the illusion of painting. The use of his name for this modern conceptualist prize should not be permitted but since anything related to art in our woeful era immediately falls into a black hole of nonsense, nobody makes the effort to complain. Using the name of an actual genius after his death to promote something he would undoubtedly not agree with is a perfect example of the audacious fraudulence of our anarchic contemporary artists. As though the ghost of the long-dead master painter Turner presides in spirit over their hysteric proceedings, surveying with brimming pride their motley collection of dung paintings, rubbish bags and TVs playing static. No, it is with the deepest, twisted naïvety, utterly lost on their incompetent adherents, that the Conceptualists have stolen the family name of the most recognized historic master painter in the Romantic tradition. Indeed, this simple act of association accounts for much of their supposed success. Like the countless other leftist appropriation examples, the modern convention is that Turner, who painstakingly created unique and objectively breathtaking masterpieces, and Damien Hirst, who presents found objects in formaldehyde, are of equal merit. They are part of the same tradition because, as we are told, all previous art was merely a lead-up to the pinnacle that is Conceptualism. But in fact it was a malevolent, orchestrated coup.

  “Every drop in the ocean counts. But only art and music have the power to bring peace. I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.”

  – Yoko Ono

  Just listen to those tired, hippy platitudes. The Conceptualist garners his false respect for having broken down the boundaries initially imposed by those, like Turner, who believed the vocation of painting involved learning how to make beautiful paintings (which, to a Modernist, is considered limiting). If Turner were alive today, any work he might submit to his namesake prize would not make it through the preliminary acceptance round. He would be laughed out of a contest bearing his name, precisely for the absurd reason that his work exhibits advanced skill in painting.

  Why, then, do they want to use his name in their contest? That would be because nobody knows or cares about the names of any Conceptualist who ever existed.

  Not even Conceptualists.

  Their names and their works carry no tangible weight and at some level the cult’s adherents know it is all a scam. They are just kind of sharing an ongoing joke, a morbid prank that never ends – or a social habit, because they do not have the capacity for self-reflection. Has anyone, anywhere, who is not a BBC journalist pretending to be art-savvy, ever expressed a genuine positive opinion of Tracey Emin?

  There is no lineage of influence in Conceptualism — not in the same way Turner, for instance, was influenced by the great landscape painter Claude. The most you could say in terms of movement linkage is that Conceptualism is Abstract Expressionist performance art, basically coming off the canvas to broaden the possibilities of debasement. The Conceptualist Hirst is now the most successful artist (monetarily) of all time. Yet he is absolutely not an artist at all and does nothing. He has not ranked in or even met the basic criteria of artistry to become most materially successful artist in history.

  To quote Turner himself: “I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.”

  Hard work indeed – Turner spent arduous long years mastering his craft, not putting found objects in a gallery with smug audacity. Turner would not have had a moment’s time for Damien Hirst and his sharks after working so ceaselessly to bequeath his commission to his people. His is an art that is impossible not to value.

  There have thankfully been some dissenting voices and this ludicrous Turner Prize has become an occasionally mocked and polarizing topic. I think it is fair to say that the vast and sensible majority of the populace does indeed laugh derisively at their behaviour and watch their chaos for spectacle. And of course, all such common-sense dissent should be encouraged.

  Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism are so ridiculous that they actually become difficult to dissect, for when your very core is empty air it is easy to be evasive. In that sense, they are aided by their dullard’s confidence. In Conceptualism, the very act of criticizing or expressing disgust at their work can become part of the art piece itself. This is something I witnessed many times, most recently on a documentary where Modernist works were derided and trashed as a kind of ironic performance, shouting ‘I hate this’ and throwing the art in the bin for the camera as a kind of reverse psychology counteraction. Who can keep track of all this chaos? Who is actually determining that this is important or intellectual? Yet every time you think they have no further bottom to break through, that they will finally get bored of their pretentiousness, they manage a new low. The painting monkey would have been an assumed bottom tier but that was 40 years ago now. One might speculate that they are all earning too much money to care. They invented a bubble world for themselves that is possibly nothing more than a vast money-laundering scheme of bombastically priced garbage, at the expense of the entirety of art.

  J.M.W. Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus,1829 & Dido Building Carthage, 1815. The Conceptualist ‘Turner Prize’ is named after this great artist, under the assumption he would be delighted with that. Moving classical themes, reverence for nature and holy light, inspiring and confident. The exact opposite of the art found in the ‘Turner Prize’.

  Since Modernist concepts of art are taught now in schools at all levels, with little or no resistance, the buyers cannot be expected to know anything about art, or fight with their wallets against this apparently unstoppable tide of anti-art. As with the now infamous example of the top Picasso collector turning out to be blind since birth, all signs indicate the Turner Prize and indeed the Tate itself are just another racket for the wealthy, completely removed from the sacred duty of supporting the arts. It is fair to say then that if the art collectors can be blind, then the visual art is tangibly worthless outside of a kind of auctioneers’ token. You are buying a signature, it has no merit beyond that. Some of the buyers and sellers are laundering money on items whose value can be determined, on paper, to be as high as you want because all objective measure of standard is removed by our goofy new definition of art. Because we have taught ourselves and our children the Greenbergian maxim that the absence of standard is art. The visceral impact of tradi
tional and classical art stands on its own merit and requires no narrative. But Conceptualism and the Turner Prize prove that in today’s world, the artwork itself is utterly irrelevant. They have successfully demonstrated that to be an artist is to get away with doing things that demonstrate a dislike for art.

  Our ancestors did not have Conceptualism or Abstract Expressionism because they had a healthy culture that worshipped order — and from order sprang high culture.

  Turner Prize winners like Grayson Perry, who goes around dressed as a clownish transvestite, win because he is willing to mock his manhood and culture to the utmost extreme. He is rewarded for being a kind of ultimate clown. Conceptualists like Perry are daring us with their effrontery to merely say aloud the truth: that they are pretentious and demeaning, that a brain-damaged person could have created their work and nobody would know the difference. They exist upon a solipsistic hamster wheel of daring us to point this out so they can accuse us of being authoritarian. Lucky for them, the day is arrived when we shall have to take them up on that dare.

  Conceptualists and the Turner Prize are more often mocked than celebrated even in mainstream media, which is normally compliant with Modernism and leftist attitudes in general. I suppose they are just too appallingly absurd to be taken seriously by anybody who is not cripplingly pretentious or part of the establishment. Popular mocking, however, has not been enough to stop their tasteless shenanigans or slow down their escalating and depraved circus of lunacy. It is hard to pinpoint where the ride will stop in terms of continually outdoing the latest shocking art world debasement. How can you out-stupid Conceptualism? Possibly only when their original culture, the negation of which feeds their parasitic frenzy, is forever extinguished — and we have lit a miles-high bonfire of every good and inspiring piece of art that existed before Modernism.

  Before we move on to a description of other cultural trends that feed into Modernism and the solutions found in traditionalism, we must describe the cyclopean parody that is our most tragic casualty: architecture.

  The Importance of Architecture

  “Therefore since nature has proportioned the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme.”

  - Vitruvius

  Perhaps the most unfortunate and heart-wrenching victim of Modernism has been architecture. This is primarily because, unlike avante-garde music or Abstract Expressionist painting, it cannot be avoided or unseen. It is everywhere.

  Nothing in contemporary architecture follows form and nobody pays attention to harmony. Indeed, I believe they have forgotten how. It may be said that even ideas are unsafe. And so it would seem our art traditions are never to return, as we shade ourselves beneath a panoply of monstrous abstract shapes. Our creativity is rendered sterile as we gaze upon the hideous, brightly painted melange of metal beams in the courtyard of the horrifically monolithic plate glass office building where we congregate on corporate lunch breaks, snuggled beneath the wings of these demonic avatars to ugliness and absurdity. We are gelded, unhappy, achieving nothing nourishing. Slaves.

  What would the mighty Vitruvius think of what we have done to our cities? He would decry us as the most decadent and deformed society that has ever existed. Objectively or subjectively, even the Modernist architects themselves cannot deny that being misshapen and grotesque is the rule of thumb, spoken of plainly (though in Artspeak) in their manifestos. Ugliness is their stated aim. Beauty values are supremacy and therefore racist.

  Why are Paris, Rome and Florence still hotbeds of world tourist activity? It is not because of their scant few Modernist galleries and buildings, as nobody travels to see those. Modern art exists to allow the anti-intellectual modern man to vent empty egalitarian shibboleths. Like a drunkard, we are blind to having lost our idealism in this apathy, while we teeter on the brink of a bored oblivion.

  Giovanni Paolo Panini - Interior of the Pantheon, Rome - 1734.

  “The plague of modern architecture, a plague which sits like a plastic embodiment of cancer over our suburbs, office buildings, schools, prisons, factories, churches, hotels, motels and airline terminals. A totalitarianism that has slipped into America with no specific political face that proliferates in that new architecture which rests like an incubus upon the American landscape. All our buildings have come to look like one another and to cease to function with the art, beauty, and sometimes mysterious proportions of the past. Gothic knots and Romanesque oppressions which entered his psyche through the schoolhouses of youth have now been excised. This new architecture destroys the past. Leaving us isolated in the empty landscapes of psychosis, precisely that inner landscape of void and dread which we flee by turning to totalitarian styles of life.

  “He compared them as the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy. It is the lack of ornamentation, complexity, and mystery in modern buildings that I choose to call totalitarian.. It should be obvious. In 30 years an æsthetic movement can shift from a force which opens possibilities to one which closes them. Once totalitarianism is seen as a social process which deadens human possibilities ...it is not too great a jump to declare that the Guggenheim museum may be a totalitarian work of art...that museum shatters the mood of the neighborhood. More completely, wantonly, barbarously than the Pan Am building kills the sense of vista on park avenue.

  “It is too cheap to separate mafia (commercial) architects with their Mussollini modern...from serious modern architects. No, I think Le Corbusier and Wright, and all the particular giants of the Bauhaus are the true villains; the mafia architects are their proper sons; modern architecture at its best is even more anomalous than at its worst, for it tends toe excite the Faustian and empty appetites of the architects ego rather than reveal an artist’s vision of our collective desire for shelter which is pleasurable, substantial, intricate, intimate, delicate, detailed, foibled, rich in gargoyle, guignol, false closet, secret stair, witch’s hearth, attic, grandeur, kitsch, a world of buildings as diverse as the need within the eye for stimulus and variation. For beware: the ultimate promise of modern architecture is collective sightlessness for the species. Blindness is the fruit of your design.”

  – Norman Mailer

  Architecture is perhaps the most compulsory consequence of our Modernist creative misdirection. We live within and around architecture. It is the waking manifestation of our ideals, the foundation and limit of our living spaces. You can easily ignore or avoid a Cubist painting exhibit as a bad taste choice but you cannot so easily avoid your entire street or city. All such Modernist cityscapes, without exception, are vapid, lacklustre and grotesque. They are the embodiment of the insanely backwards philosophy that architecture must be anti-tradition to be new; that it must be smugly kinky and remind us constantly that we have rejected our roots for an unseen equality utopia. It must go against the natural, instinctual and the beautiful. Modernist architecture is also truly globalist as it is all the same, all over the world: riveted glass boxes, obtuse shapes, clinical straight lines. These hapless architects all believe they are being new and groundbreaking but this ‘style’ has been unchanged since the middle of the last century.

  A summation of this style can be seen in endless, sentimentally Soviet tenement flats, or the Gehryesque disproportional mutations of the vanguard. Both factions can be said to be quite similar, the fancier one will just have a more expensive challenging (Artspeak) feature, such as an off-putting or intentionally chaotic layout. Generally speaking, if it is just a box it is Corbusierian cookie cutter Modernism for the lower class; if it is titanically hideous and undulating, it is elitist Modernism. In both cases, it will feel inhuman. To be seen to be gimmicky and anti-traditional is the essential part to both avenues. We have grown accustomed to the tedious pall of endless plate glass and with it the annihilation of quaint local style, sacrificed for the false mercantile values of globalism — generic, sanitized, soul-crush
ing.

  At the higher tier, beauty is mocked most frantically as fantastic sums are thrown at bloated architectural carbuncles designed as lasting testimony to our pathetic slow suicide. Religion, race, culture and nature have lost significance, as we only wish to see whitewashed commercial temples to our internalized self-loathing. They are castrated consumerist safe-zones where we helplessly venerate a nihilistic materialism like junkies. There is a reason why cathedrals to materialism did not exist in the past. Who is willing to fight and die for their local shopping mall? Idiotic is not sufficiently derogatory to describe these erected follies, which are more like Orwellian monuments to human misery, an affirmation of the cult of the ‘individual’, which has no personality and is outside history. While the mighty Egyptians constructed eternal monuments to their afterlife beliefs, we now construct only the most banal designs to convince ourselves that art and history are meaningless. We wish to express our personal right to like the unlikable – but without irony. Even classical materialism could not sustain such a bleak outlook.

  We must repeat that the only unbreakable rule in this game is that the edifice must not appear to be beautiful, proportional or hold any of the values European architecture is based on. If it is remotely self-affirming it will incite accusations of fascism or comparison with colonialism. By this cowardly reasoning, the laws of Vitruvius are not just discarded but are anathema. Any semblance of traditionalism, or even so much as pleasing decoration, is derided in the harshest possible terms. It is ‘pastiche’, it is not ‘something new’ (by some bizarre, undying definition of newness). As with Modernist painting, plain beauty is regarded as anti-intellectual, because it does not entail the discovery of a self-deprecating story. The pervasive thought crime of desiring refinement is suppressed beneath an insurmountable skyline of horrific industrial superstructure.