I am reading a book called "OUR CULTURE, WHAT'S LEFT OF IT" by Theodore Dalrymple. I don't agree with all his opinions. Some of them are shot from the right wing of the British classes, but I can't agree more with some of his opinions. I loved the article " A Lost Art" and advise everybody to read it and write their opinion here. In it he writes about the demise of modern art.
Personally I think he is right here. Art is art as long as the artists create it for the people not for each other. When it is created just to impress your peer and the media, and to sell, unfortunately it is distanced from the really great art. It becomes ugly. It becomes "SHOCKING" instead of beautiful. We have forgotten that there is a difference between Shocking and beautiful.
And it seems that the aim of many a modern artist is to be more "SHOCKING" than his fellow artists. If you are not shocking you can't be recognized and known, and you can't sell. And the race continues. So each new artist should be more shocking than the previous one. And then we reach the point when you cut a cow in half and put it in Tate Modern as art, because it is shocking, and the critics praise it because it is shocking, and the public pretend they like it because they don't dare to say what they really feel, which is, "Oh my god, how ugly it is". You create ugly music that is a torture to listen to, but the overly refined art connoisseurs sit through it because the critics have praised it and it is fashion and you have to pretend you like it. You create ugly sculptures. you put a likeness of a guy shitting while stooping with his turd 4 meters long in the middle of the Museum of Modern Arts in New York and everybody gathers around and praises it as art. You put up a completely bland canvass on the wall as painting and critics dare to praise it. Art turns into words. Critics words. Without the words written to give it meaning, it is meaningless because it is ugly in itself. It is not like works of Bach or Michael Angelo that talk for themselves and don't need a word on paper to praise them for people to understand them.
I am an architect and see it quite clearly among architects. Architecture nowadays have turned into a race among architects to impress each other, not the public. They don't design for the public any more, but for each other. So each work should be more shocking than the previous one, otherwise you risk being forgotten and never mentioned in the architectural journals and that means death to an architect. As an architect, I find some of these works impressive(I don't use the word beautiful here), but then I ask common people what they think of it, and I don't get positive remarks. I go inside these buildings and again I am "impressed" but when I think of the poor “end user” who has to live and work in this building, I pity them because I know very well that "function" has been sacrificed for the sake of the "SHOCK" effect. The building shocks, the critics write rave reviews, the architect becomes famous and sells, but nobody thinks twice about getting back to the building one year after it is finished and ask the occupants how they feel about the building.
I believe you should cut the name of the artists from the art piece and then look at it and see if you like it or not, trust your feelings, not what critics tell you. Whenever I go to a museum or gallery, I try to avoid looking at the name of the creator, I just trust my senses, what do they tell me. I don't trust words by others to tell me what is good and what is bad. It reminds me of an experiment done sometime ago by a reality show. They put some paintings by 5 year olds in a big famous museum. The works were signed as Picasso and other famous painter's works. Not even one person there dared to say they are childish. The interviewer was asking the viewers and all of them were praising the works. He even asked a few critics and they were praising the works and then when he revealed that these were done by 5 year olds, many people would not believe it. The funniest part was that even one of the critics was insisting that these are the works by Picasso and other famous painters after he was told about the ploy.
What has happened to art that childish paintings by 5 year olds can’t be recognized as what it is and differentiated with great art? Something has gone horribly wrong in 20th century.
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