Recently, in his BBC series "Travels with Vasari", Andrew Graham Dixon pointed out that it was Vasari, in his ur-book of Art HIstory "Lives of the Artists" (first published in 1550), who started the idea that art is a kind of progression, with later artists standing on the mighty shoulders of those who have gone before, and getting better and better through history.  Perhaps it seemed that way in the Renaissance.  Now it would seem that, due to the sloppy, narcissistic thinking of the art establishment de nour jours , going around in ever decreasing circles, has been equated with climbing a mountain. 

Dear Sir,

Your article has given me so much joy! I feel understood in my love of beauty which is decried so often as 'bourgeois', outdated or immature. And indeed, these attacks are very painful to me, a kind of sacriledge, so that I rather not speak of my love for beautiful ballet or opera in public. Nowadays it almost seems to be a "love that dare not speak its name".

With kind regards and admiration,

Reinout Eeckhout, Amsterdam 

This is an astonishingly good appraisal of the current state of art in western culture. There are indeed many (possibly not thousands in the UK at least) artists who are working; in total or near obsurity out of a visual tradition that has existed for thousands of years. But you are right to point to the powerful cultural pressures that are exerting a malign influence over the public exposure of art. In general  art world institutions both public and private operate a discreet form of censorship. 

The art education establishments despite their theoretically declared liberal objectives will not tolerate any ideas that question any part of their ethos. Artists who teach are generally on short term contracts and can be easily dispensed with. I know of one case in the early nineteen eighties where a degree course  set up in a major London art school; to use the visual tradition as a basis for teaching artistic practice was hounded from existence by a combination of internal and external bureaucracies. The teachers sacked and all reference to the course removed from the college's official history.

 Excellent article.

I think the fear of beauty is also an aspect of our fear of expertise. Now there's an expert for every little subject under the sun, and only the expert may speak on it with confidence. What anyone else may say about it is just opinion, protected but basically worthless (and we all know that to be true, except when it comes to our own opinion -- I think). Which is why we say nothing, and therefore think nothing.

It's the same point Mr Dalrymple makes (fear of bruised ego), but from a slightly different angle perhaps.

I'll try to add to the Dr.'s brilliant explanation of why "ugly" art armours the ego, though this properly belongs elsewhere: 

I see the heavy emphasis and desire to create a "style" as a unifying aspect of a modern artist like Koons, especially when work has been created by hand (as opposed to assembled from existing things).   Works are primarily made to hopefully create a style, which is usually only seen in a series of related works, not individually.  This reliance on series demonstrates the reliance on style, and vice-versa.  It is an obvious way for an observer to at least see something, however shallow (and the observer is no different than the artist in this case).  Surface repetition on the level of propaganda is the result, and of course must be pointing to some "truth".

Excellent piece, but of course it's too logical and makes too much sense, which means it will be ignored or dismissed out of hand as "not getting it" or out of touch with "the culture" (such as it is).

Great article!

I seems that the lack you describe leaves a vacuum for a truly great artist to break out.

If art is a true human need, and this need is being abused, won't the populace be bowled over by the emergence on a true artist.

I wonder what the future holds....

Your piece was like water in a dry desert.

Where has the humanism, the grappling with mystery, the argument with God, the struggling with the nature and constraints of our existence--where has that all gone? In the arts, film and in literature, the spoils go to the masters of artifice, style and originality, while the rest of us are left hungering for more.

Thanks for your thoughtful piece.

Reminds me of the expression, "At the feast of ego, everyone leaves hungry."

Hungry for more than this shallow type of art can ever deliver. Bravo.

 All of this is precisely why I started The Emerson Institute for Freedom and Culture ( www.emersoninstitute.org ). We need to fight for beauty and bring it back into the world. Many of these comments remind me of the work of Frederick Turner. I hope everyone here has heard of him. His work, properly understood and spread through the culture, would radically transform it for the better. 

I wrote an essay on this very topic for Godspy, an online magazine. (Though I confess the good doctor's clarity and perspicacity shine a brighter light on the issue than I did.) I wrote the piece because, as someone just out of college, I was struggling to reconcile my yearning for beauty and transcendence with a beauty-squelching postmodern curriculum, which reflects culture's larger impoverishment. In the essay, I quote the exchange between Charles Ryder (a painter) and the truth-telling Cordelia in Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited':   

"Charles," said Cordelia. "Modern art is all bosh, isn't it?"

"Great bosh."

Does this mean I am no longer banished? Will I soon be able to express a love of life in all its forms without being ostracized by the free and enlightened thinkers? Oh my. I think I will throw a coming-out party. It probably won’t need to be catered.

As a writer who believes that the way forward is backward through the tradition, I have thought a good deal about the on-going rejection of the beautiful and the fallacy of progress in art. It is difficult to praise a time that does not nurture what Hawthorne called “the artist of the beautiful.” Perhaps there is only this consolation, said of a poet but also applicable to visual artists: “A poet is liable to be a kind of exile in his own country or time:  the consciousness of difference, and the effort to communicate it, may provide his motive power as a poet.” That comes from a 1956 William Plomer essay on Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.  What Plomer says of Thomas’s poems of rural life invokes a world where the beautiful and the transcendent are alive: “Round the obscure, small village spins ‘on slow axis’ a world ‘vast and meaningful’, everything matters, the transient is seen in the light of the eternal.”

Ah beauty! Ever elusive, and like pornography, everybody knows it when they see it. The artists of the Renaissance knew it and coined the term "gothic" for the horrors that came before -- horrors like Chartes and Reims. Look, we live in a late age; enjoy the tumult. A well-turned compost smells kind of good and imagine what spring may turn up. Like Moses and King we may not get to see bliss fulfilled ourselves but that's no reason to tie yourself in knots. Find something sweet out there. I studied with Mark Rothko, by the way -- a very gentle and thoughtful man. Alas, one man's ineffable struggle with transcendence is always going to be another's vapid gasbags.

Just what the world's been screaming for: another bloviating poohbah holding forth on truth, beauty and its strangulation at the hands of cynical egotists.

Jeff Koons, some anonymous art students and a generic group of critics, none of them named? How bravely does the author slay the evil dragons of the contemporary art world... Shouldn't The Iconoclast (talk about ego!) actually take on some icons?

An excellent essay, this has provoked a number of excellent responses as well.  In my own discipline, music, we have been treated to a century of ugliness on a variety of modernist and existentialist grounds, but in the past two decades or so it has once again become acceptable to write triads and other consonances. 

Minimalism is, as one responder said, mind-numbing, to a listener who expects excitement.  (Personally, I'm fascinated by the subtle shifts of sounds in much of it, and at least it does not make me ill.)  But if you want to hear the best neo-tonal music, listen to the movie soundtracks: Chariots of Fire, Snow Falling on Cedars, etc.  (I know: others will not find those particularly appealing, but find your own then.)  Film composers are not afraid to have harmonies and melodies, although the exigencies of movie production deny them the opportunity to develop those materials as, e.g., a Mahler could.

Beauty is not dead, but, like God, is out of fashion.

Excellent! My background is classical music and composition. I was an orchestral musician. The same charlatanry exists there.

I once composed a song performed at a students  composers workshop. One of the lecturers in the audience  asked "why [did you use] major seventh chords [in the accompaniment] ?" Had i asked the pianist to ball his fist and do tone clusters  that would have been taken for granted. I was taken aback by the question

As it is the pressure to be "original" I found crushing. Having internalized it I can no longer compose. My thanks for confirming my own thought, that the emperor is indeed naked and a fool, and for showing i am not alone in my love of beauty and contempt for artistic frauds

I recently had a Paul on the road ro Damascus reverse conversion experience. I had just visited the new, highly touted,Surrealism museum. Blah. What began with Marcel Duchamp's Urinal/ for R. Mutt seemed suddenly foolish. I was back astride my horse as a suddenly deconverted Saul, deeply skeptical. As coinicidence would soon clarify, my next stop was an exhibition of a certain Renaissance painter, Sebastiano, of whom I'd never heard in my provincially specialist camp as an Am Lit professor. I was wholly beguiled! This is what I later figured out. Begin any historical analysis of Modernism with Voltaire's shriek against the Roman Catholic Church,"Ecrasez l'Infame." It became easier and easier, if illogical, to replace that hated ego suppressing institution with the closest thing handy, one's own ID.Koon's is a puppy dog. Sick Transit Gloria Artibus:" And Damien's is a shark. U.s.w. The saddest part is the way art historians and critics fell for this trash. At least the galerists's moves are understandably venal. The eggheads gratuitously made omelettes of their brains. Patrick D. Hazard.( For more such anti-modernist palaver, wallow in my blog,)

Dalrymple goes after some very soft targets.  I don't say he shouldn't go after them at all, since these charlatans make a lot of money with their junk art, but really it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

My bigger complaint is that I cannot find where Dalrymple has vindicated his friend Scruton.  Yes, the cult of originality is pernicious and the analogy with science is false.  How does this affirm the puerile view that we need to return to the good old days of  spiritual, religious, transcendent art?

This is typical of hidebound conservatives: create a caricature of contemporary art based solely on its excesses and fatuities, and then give me a choice between the hideous present and the glorious past.  But I want a third option.  I don't want to return to the good old days of chattel slavery, serfdom, feudalism, divine right of kings, unceasing sectarian bloodshed, heresy trials, and genocide even if this provided an ideal climate for Raphael to paint his Madonnas.  I also don't want to be taunted with the inane accusation that if I say I don't want any more Raphael Madonnas, this must mean that I want to see crucifixes soaked in urine.  Dalrymple is right about modern art as far as he takes it, which isn't very far; he does nothing to make me believe that I have to take up Scruton's childish postulates as my only alternative.

I remember being told years ago "you cannot break the rules until you understand how to use them".

Being original is fine, but unless it is anchored somewhere on what has gone before, and executed with finesse, it is just a random, meaningless gesture.

I have never felt better about the art school (high school) in which my daughter is enrolled. As a freshman she takes two full year classes: a drawing class that insists upon the ability to make representational forms, and an art history class with a global scope, but a focus on the western traditions. There is no pleasure quite like hearing one's 14 year old come home from school talking excitedly about the Minoans. Year two calls for a a second drawing class and a sculpture class, again focusing on representational forms. In the junior and senior years, the classes branch out and students can take AP, photography etc. But at least they have not only a background in technique, but also a respect for technique.

My daughter may or may become become an artist (whatever that is), but she has already absorbed from her teachers a contempt of anyone who cannot draw well and wants to be called an artist.

I will share this article with her this evening.

The obvious response is to simply state that transcendence is an illusion and the search for it more a symptom of mental illness than creative impulse.  Mozart is more appealing to the ear than some poor urbanite banging on tin cans because our nervous system processes it that way.  It is not a question of what is "better," but of what is more pleasing.

There is bad Mannerist art and the viewer recognizes that it is bad instinctively.  Its value to the viewer is not improved either by age or subject.  The triangle is too perfectly balanced, the features are just enough out of alignment, the pespective is off. And there is bad contemporary art.  Tom Lynch has had some really bad days as well as some very good ones. 

But in the end, the genius of the contemporary world is that we have done away with the notion of authority in such matters.  It does not matter what Scrunton thinks.  He has no impact on either the work or the marketplace for it.  No artist is going to care.  And no consumer of art is going to care very much either.  And the same is true of any other critic.  The works, in the end, stand on their own.  The unshackling of art, of the creative process, from all external criteria has been the greatest blessing imaginable to the human spirit.

Tradition, in the end, is nothing more than mold on the bathroom wall.

Koons isn't the only exemplar of the Decline and Fall of Western Art.    Consider the Turner Prize:

<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/1698032.stm">Creed lights up Turner Prize</A>

[In 2001] Creed collected 20,000 pounds for his  controversial installation, which centres around an empty gallery with a pair of flashing lights."

Not too long ago, Turner officials were red-faced when the janitors threw out a load of rubbish, not realizing that it was a "work of art".

 EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT ARTICLE.

As a high school senior, I have grown up with this idea of originality as the highest form of artistic advancement for most of my life. I have soaked in that which I have been taught about the artistic culture around me- mainly, that art and writing and music are inner expressions of what is felt by the artist. I have also grown up looking at the so called "individuals" and recognizing how they are simply another version of the people around them. The one who started the rebellion is only original, if there is one at all.

Modern art has absolutly no relevance to the modern world anymore. The culture cannot relate to its vague and abstract paintings and the ideas behind them. Modern art is simply a collection of vegetated, processed thinking. Art must be understood. It should not need complex explainations from the artist.

The idea of beauty and the role it plays in our lives has interested me lately. I've come to the conclusion that beauty is the highest form of attainment in our world. Romantic and ideological beauty and its search is the human question that we live by. If we really want to find answers through art, we must not focus on the trivialities of modern culture or the constant ideal of that which shocks the viewer. (For, in fact, we have become so jaded that we expect art to shock us, thereby negating the possibility that it will. Instead we will embrace that which we expect will shock the generation before us, and do the exact same things as that generation did to the one before it.)

At the end of things, the solution can only come from mediating the ideals of two extremes. We should not revert to making art simply for the purpose of making something beautiful, nor should we be trying to constantly be avant-garde and original. In other words, we should try to focus on the now instead of the past or the future. It is such an obvious ideal, but it is so overlooked by those who want to be something important.

I think this is a briliant article because I heartily agree with what it says about the place of beauty and art in the world today. When will the money changers be kicked out of the temple?

There are some flowers growing out of the mud though: Timur Akhriev is one painter I found out about recently whose work seems to be both traditional and new. It does not "invite us to confront notions". I am no critic, but his colours are natural and beautiful (at least on the computer screen), and there is an effortlessness about his ability. He's also only in his early 20s I think. Jay Greenberg, the young NY composer, also has this effortlessness about his work that transcends any bogus criticism: Influences, statements about the world? Who cares! it's just what he does, and it's beautiful.

But there is another factor. Artists turned to ugliness in reaction to cheap sentimentality, which today flourishes in TV sitcoms, Hollywood movies, soft rock and AOR, Thomas Kinkaid paintings, and above all in advertising. (And all of the first items in this list ultimately become subsumed under the category of advertising.)

Today's pop song is tomorrow's car ad. Monet is used to sell luxury condos. And so on.

Great essay... 

Afterall, would anyone propose that the nascent violinist should avoid taking violin lessons?  That an architect should forego Physics or his engineering courses?   

Then why in the sam-hill aren't art students made to learn to draw? Most don't/can't.

I could hang a fifth grader's art project in the museum of modern art... properly matted and framed it could stay there forever... what does that say about the current state of fine art?

Bingo--also, Unreal City... I've come to think that aesthetics--significant form--"unity in multeity" (and such) are as essential to artistry, as "the germ theory of disease is to medicine; evolution is to biology." But what a disconnect now...

 The really sad and disturbing thing about Lichtenstein is that his paintings  are so markedly inferior to the comic book art that he used as a source.

It is no coincidence that authentic art, which evolves from tradition, captivates and enraptures (and strikes fear) by the beauty of the All. True art, like prayer, is not foreign to everyday reality, rather it calls us to nurture that reality to coax it to grow so that it might bring forth fruits to elevate us all.

Indeed, how powerful the art, how powerful that symbolic communication--that joins heaven to earth--any of it--image, poetry, music,--Motherwell, Donne, Coltrane--that lifts us all to the truth of the All!

We need our asses kicked. It has been centuries since our last purging. Life has been to good to admire beauty. We have grown weary of our desires and now look for masochistic confirmation for our excess. Let a good pandemic burn our arrogance away and beauty will again be our tainted mistress.

This is a compelling article with many good points. However, I think there is more to say about the shallowness of modern art. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker recently published a book called "The Blank Slate." Its subtitle is "The Modern Denial of Human Nature." In the book, Pinker argues that humans are born with a number of innate dispositions. Morality, for example, is an evolved trait, not an arbitrary social construct. Google "the moral instinct" if you want more detail on that. Recently, however, there has been a tendency for people to DENY that humans have any innate dispositions--that the human mind is a blank slate (hence the title of Pinker's book). Socialism, for example, is based on the premise that human nature is completely malleable and that it can therefore be perfected through social conditioning. Similarly, many people now adhere to moral relativism (popularized after Einstein's theory of relativity was experimentally proven in 1919). The moral relativists claim that all moral principles and value systems are relative; they are all based on arbitrary cultural and personal experiences, and thus none of them are true. Naturally, relativism's main offshoot is multiculturalism, which postulates that all cultures deserve equal respect, because each of them is equally arbitrary; to value one culture over another would violate the dogma of the blank slate. The recent cultural movement known as post modernism corresponds to this dogma, and thus in the artistic sphere all conventional notions of beauty have been DENIED! Modern art is shallow not because people are scared to admit to each other what they find beautiful, but because people are scared to admit to themselves that they find anything beautiful! I believe, like Pinker and many other cognitive scientists, that there is a concrete set of human universals, and beauty is one of them. If humans continue to deny their own inborn conceptions of beauty, then the shallow of modern art will persist.

Next to Dalrymple, "Spengler" from asia times online said it best:

You pretend to like modern art because you want to be creative. In fact, you are not creative, not in the least. In all of human history we know of only a few hundred truly creative men and women. It saddens me to break the news, but you aren't one of them. By insisting that you are not creative, you think I am saying that you are not important. I do not mean that, but will have to return to the topic later.

You have your heart set on being creative because you want to worship yourself, your children, or some pretentious impostor, rather than the god of the Bible. Absence of faith has not made you more rational. On the contrary, it has made you ridiculous in your adoration of clownish little deities, of whom the silliest is yourself. G K Chesterton said that if you stop believing in God, you will believe in anything

In their urge toward self-worship, the artists of the 20th century descended to extreme levels of artlessness to persuade themselves that they were in fact creative. In their compulsion to worship themselves in the absence of God, they produced ideas far more ridiculous, and certainly a great deal uglier, than revealed religion in all its weaknesses ever contrived. The modern cult of individual self-expression is a poor substitute for the religion it strove to replace, and the delusion of personal creativity an even worse substitute for redemption.
 

I suppose it's possible to draw an analogy between the peasant labor that build Versailles and the army of studio assistants that produce Koons' work - linking the hollow and pretentious over centuries. If we can look on Verailles and weep for the peasants, why not look at Koons' work the same way - tens or hundreds of low-paid (lower than Koons) artisans thrilled to be working for the art monarch, proudly listing it on their resumes.

Feudalism/capitalism: not so far apart.

But is it art?

Well said, Theodore.  I especially appreciate the lack of skills being taught in schools.  Originality is important but so is the craft.

 A serious musician is expected to do 10,000 hours of concentrated work on developing musical skills before even getting to music college. If today's artists spend 10,000 hours in the process of becoming fledgling painters and sculptors etc, how do they spend those hours?

Certainly there was progress from cave paintings and early Christian art to 19th century realism. In that time many techniques and new mediums (such as oil paint), printing techniques and linear perspective were discovered. The use of live models became acceptable after Medieval art etc.

But we have been going backwards for some time (since the impressionists) My art school experience contained much less schooling on technique than I would have liked. That means every graduate is still left on their own to attempt to learn what the masters knew from books and peers. 6 years later I am still working on what I thought I should have been taught in school.

The idea of "talent" itself is a myth and leads to economic problems for artists. So many people believe that because one has talent that creating a finishing painting is quick and easy. Because the artist enjoys it it should not be considered work. The truth is it takes plenty of instruction from an expert is one can find one, as well as years or learning, practice and growth. Even then it does not sprout fully formed from one's mind, matching the picture in the artist's head and goes through many stages before becoming complete.

I might also suggest that the general public likes art that is easy to understand and the elite like art which only "seems" to be complicated or which they can believe is highly intellectual, when in reality it may be a blank white canvas with a few squiggles of paint.

My wife and I are collectors of original contemporary fine art (that is work by living working artists). Technical mastery is very importants to us, as well as a strong personal positive artistic vision.

We have recently opened our home in Acton Ontario as a free public art gallery for guests to see our collection. The response has been extremely positive and gratifying.   Many people clearly thirst for and appreciate the kind of art we collect. They are tired of most of the art created in the 20th century.

I would like to take this opportunity to invite any readers here to visit our gallery. Some of our artists include, Gerard Priault, Tony Mascardelli, Quing Zhang, Michael Pape, Dennis Wojtkiewicz, Louise Dandurand, Tiffany Hastie, and Robert Rollings. You may not have heard of any of them but they are all contemporary masters, for whom beauty is not a dirty word.

contact me at philhdtaylor@yahoo.com

AS an interior designer, we were required to study the history of art and architecture in the western world for 3 years.  It has been invaluable to my practice of interior design - a true source of inspiration.  As well, I can appreciate Flemish Madonna Art in a historical context, but would not want one in my living room.

I constantly reference childern's fairy tales, ' The Little Red Hen, Beauty and the Beast and of course The Emperor's New Clothes as referenced in the article.  I enjoyed the article very much.

No offense, but the conclusions reached in this article are laughable. We're all just having a big pity party out here because the monied, depressed and medicated leftists are spewing the trash in their minds on society. Ain't millions of those leftists rotting in the ground and remaining perfectly silent as we speak? ha

His points are incorrect as they are  based on the notion that we see everything that has happened in the past with the same detail as we see things today, which is patently false.

secondly, he takes his information about arts training from one sophomore student to judge a WORLD of current students? nice. In that same vein, since I have read only this blowhard old fogey, I deduce that all Iconclast writers and readers are old, ill-educated elitist snobs who fear the future. true? probably not. Personally I had 3 years of study in art technique before I could even think of experimenting and I can say that at the school I went to 400 graduated with me so I know that there are at least that many graduating EVERY YEAR from one institution with a similar background and I assure you that we did not even see a Lichtenstein until Junior year and that was an elective.

The fact of the matter is this person has not figured out that history cleaves out the poorer of artistic endeavors over time which is why all the old art is 'good' art. When you look now you see everything (good and bad), when you look back at say impressionism, you now see only 6 or, if you do a little research, maybe 12-18, artists. I am sure there was an army of egotistical art slobs making crappy art just like today, only now we don't remember them, as well as an army of critics dismissing them out of hand for every reason and lamenting the better, older stuff.

Even sadder is that they were saying this same thing about Picasso, Monet, and most certainly Van Gogh ( who was essentially crazy for the better part of his art career) in their present time, yet this is cleaverly NOT mentioned, showing the sort of tunnel vision that this writer sees the world through.

If the writer would actually do his due diligence and research these artist which he finds to be 'real' artists, he would find that nearly all that he has heard of could put the ego's of the current generation to shame.

If he is comparing science to art to show that there was some sort of godless, hack schism occurring in this century, then he is clearly pointing out his own ignorance and perhaps better said, stupidity. All art stands on those who have come before and is strictly an evolutionary system, much like science. If one were actually to compare the progression of art with science you can see the speeds of evolution to be on pace with each other, if not the art community slower.

Sure there is 'ugly' art as there was 'ugly' science in history and when we look back with the necessary distance, the most important will be remembered, just like with science. Do we remember Tesla's theory of Ether? or the theory that cold was some sort of item of mass? No, we certainly do not.

Further, I postulate that the real core issue here is that the author has reached a point where he cannot accept new things. All people reach this point and unfortunately this one has a soapbox that others happen to read.

Mr Dalrymple provides an outline to the beast the postmodernist theory has generated. Simply put - Chaos everywhere therefore Chaos is acceptable, indeed Chaos is the norm; individuality without any awareness of the artistic tradition or technique. I agree that every good work of art is an attempt to do something that has not been done before, but the corollary is not correct, i.e. anything done differently is good art. Yes, there has been a paradigmatic shift in the way we look at the world post the Wars, but does that mean we do not read or appreciate anything that lies on the other side of the chasm. And, of course, all this is true for literature as well. 

We are today beating one another to call our mistakes the work of 'Genius'.

I think what TD is groping for (in trying to explain the reasons for modern art's move away from tradition, and beauty) is not so much the embracing of pseudo-scientific ideas of progression (though there may be some truth in that) but its embrace of Historicism - by which I don't mean the basic "use of older themes in today's art", but rather a theory of history (as defined by such as Herbert Butterfield and David Watkin) by which an irresistible, necessary process in history creates a fresh "spirit of the age" for which only certain kinds of art, etc., are validly the true products "of our age". Historicists might agree that Rembrandt and Pre-raphaelitism were appropriate, and valid, as expressions of their age, but no such thing (and thus expressions of "beauty", etc.) could be appropriate or valid today. Hence, aesthetic value is destroyed (a major achievement of modern art theory), and so the only "real" art must be "expression" of our society, etc. (yep, it's Marxist at root). Once aesthetic (or formal) values are destroyed (no more teaching of drawing), so is any concept of good or bad, real or unreal, etc. Thus, all is/can be art. Art is now free to embrace ugliness-for-its-own-sake - and it has (Scruton obviously didn't go far enough); now art is just one more product of the Culture of Death we all live under.

Dalrymple is becoming irrelevant...

There are some new artists exploring the transcendent. Try Matthew Burrows - he explores many religious themes in his work. ( http://www.matthewburrows.org/index.htm )

At last Theodore Dalrymple has had the intelligence and courage to disrobe the Modern Art World. I find the art dealers and artists similar to our bureaucrats in Washington that get paid well for producing nothing but rhetoric.

Sometimes we get the feeling that contemporary art is getting nowhere. Most artist maintain themselves apart not only from history and culture but also from all other fields of study.

Cience is basically  being use to improve the forms but we're not working  to modify the structural basis of knowledge.

There are many spaces in between art and the other fields that can generate new mental spaces and art should work here.

New connections, new points of view, but trying to generate changes in the structure of knowledge nor just in the forms.

Thank you, Mr Dalrymple.

I knew the late Clement Greenberg, who was a friend and champion of my work. He consistently spoke about these very issues and his collected writings are there as a record. Karen Wilkin continues to write and evaluate art with what I would call an advanced aesthetic sensibility.

And I know full well how these words can illicit snarky remarks from some who follow the dada-influenced traditions.

Every culture discriminates within itself. Historically, there are better times and lesser times for culture. How one knows this, is perhaps, a mystery.

Great article. Would be good in an art appreciation course.

Any art collectors out there - Good to great art is out there but - sometimes step outside the fashionable official galleries...to find it. Don't buy what is fashionable (unless you are just playing the market) unless the fashionable art truly is also good art.

And if you can - check outsome of the good to stunning art appearing on the covers & in some childrens; books. Maybe these artists have some stuff you might like. Even if they are scorned by some as "only" book illustrators.

Charles Dickens was "only" a popular writer---but his stuff lives on when many of the "official" serious writers have been left behind.

Perhaps WWI's poison gas,  WWII's deliberate bombing of civilians as legit targets, the "bomb," Vietnam (Algeria for the french and Kenya for the Brits and Chenchia for the Russans), corruption of the world's financial markets to serve the acquisition of wealth at the expense of human beings et.alia...innoculate against tenderness and hide beauty?

To be fair, however, It also strikes me that much of current art is simply rehash of modernists, Surrealists, Dadaists etc. who did it better and more profoundly long ago. So-called post-modernists are still looking for something to say that hasn't been said before now that most people have figured out that  'the center cannot hold."

As for the reluctance of art students to go to galleries to see what has gone before...they share the ahistorical/anti-historical nature of the social order at large...at least in the USA.  ..or could it be that Dylan got it right:  "Inside the Museums, infinity goes up on trial.  This is what salvation must be like after awhile.  Even the Mona Lisa had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles."

An artist can only paint what he sees; a musician, compose what he hears.  Those who see only ugliness and hear noise channel the little they understand. 

The task of the Artist (artist, musician, etc.) is to see beyond, so that we may become aware, as well.  It is an awareness of a higher plane of existence, conceptual in nature, espousing intelligence, beauty, joy, peace, harmony, love, etc.  All of which may be called "divine" qualities, inasmuch as humanity rarely demonstrates them.

Those who are incapable of awareness or who have decided to remain unaware produce monsters which spew out their grotesque ideas the public, unknowing, takes to be "Art."   Many are simply irresponsible.  (The movie "Alien" flashed into my mind, just now.)  Expression, in itself, is not a virtue.

Lucien Freud, as an example: technically skillful, but demonstrating a low consciousness.  Were he able to see more, he might paint something of real (not just monetary) value that might help to illuminate the world.

What Roger said is true.

The process of disintegration began with the Renaissance when the entire basis of Western culture moves from the contemplation of the Divine, or rather the  till then socially prescribed ideas about the Divine, to that of focus on the mortal meat-body human being only---and his (mainly his) potentialities.

It didnt take long in the schemes of things before the very idea of the Divine, and hence a unitary  and unifying formative principal, was discarded altogether.

Even the possibility of a Divine Life was systematically eliminated from our "culture" (how many Illuminated Saints have there been in the past 500 years?)

And very soon we thus had gross meat-body based ego-"culture" only.

Apart from the idealization of beautiful young bodies, how much inspiration can you really generate from and via a hairy primate meat body  which is what re really are.

A meat-body that is genetically programmed to disintegrate and die? Between the neck and the sacrum the body is a fermentation vat, which in and of  itself is quite disgusting.        

That is what we are identified with.

That is what our entire "culture", including our entirely reductionist exoteric religions,  programs us to identify with. 

We bury our dead hoping for a "resurrected" body.

Such a practice reinforces our seemingly  "natural" indentification with the body

And we wonder why everything is so dreadful.

God inspired art.

Human subject inspired art---the idealized version.

Then inevitably  non-art

This reference provides a very interesting and unique understanding of Western art since the late 20th century.

http://www.artandphysics.com

Well,...  Pithy subject, this!   I suggest the first place to seek resolution for people who are asking these kinds of questions and pondering them is to closely examine what they like. If they can answer that question to themselves with honesty, then proceed with further questions. 

These kinds of philosophical musings are desperate pleas for relief from doubt.  Any viewing of history, no matter how recent or how distant, no matter how factually based, is seen through a filter mounted upon a lens that is grimy with fingerprints. When thoughts and snippets concatenate in the mind, they are reifications of reifications. They seem to cohere, but only seem to. This is representation. All else is preference. What you like. That is mimesis. 

This intellectual process is what yields up 'beauty.' There actually is no such thing or condition. It is a Perfect Form, and these do not exist in Nature, at least not on our limited plane of experience at this time.

Inasmuch as having worked under Rothko, feh.  I worked under Hartigan. She had no inkling nor clue about what I was working on. Neither did Rothko have a clue about what you were working on. So that sort of a claim to legitimacy is specious. Sorry.

Greenberg was a tool of the political establishment. He quickly found out what side his bread was buttered on. He had no demonstrable taste whatsoever. He knew what sold. That's different. Add to that his keen ability to weave a tapestry of intellectual argument. He was a deft positivist. Any attorney worth his salt is as able. Greenberg was set upon a mission to select 6 painters to represent the US. It was a commercial venture, and corrupt. 

Ask yourself right now: What do I feel?  You will be beset by emotions about the words I write. You will be correlating that to all that you have stored up and responding on the aesthetic level. It won't be pretty. But it will be real. That is Beauty.

Certain people want artists to cleave to technical mastery. Ok, no problemo. We pay dearly for extensive training. Some even become clever enough to be original. Do you even buy original art? (We do have to eat, pay for life and living.) Not all art schools elide technical training. I have taught art, and have found that students who have not learned to respect art in high school make very poor art students later on. It requires discipline. It has zero to do with self expression. How hard to you fight for art training in lower education? First order of business: fire the art education teachers and hire the artists. (After that, fire the PhEds.) Can't do it if we're expected to use crafts classrooms with tables instead of easels and paint. Art and life is messy. Can't be done. Where do you choose your battles? Do not expect the impossible from an entire culture that strangles learning to be an artist. The only option that's left there is to make it up as you go along for yourself. Don't be surprised if technical mastery and intellectual rigor falls by the wayside; it takes a good 7 years to reach competency in either of those endeavors.

Where is God? Where is Beauty? Where is morality? Why are artists expected to cough this up? Artists are specialists. We specialize in skills and knowledge that is rigorous, very complicated, expensive to acquire, and completely outside the realm of the marketable. We do not have a job structure. We cannot get jobs. There is no one who will hire an artist. An artist's' lateral skills fit no HR job description. Thank you, Science. We have never been included IN society, always at the margin, always pets. We are defrocked priests. Deduce, then, why it is that some artists are disaffected, others rot, and a few are whores of the system of art. 

Why was Koons shown at Versailles? Irony. Because Versailles is but one of a host of butt ugly buildings representing an ugly mindset, is why. There is no beauty at Versailles. Poor example.

And no, Gothic was not an invention of the Renaissance as being ugly. That is false. Totally false. So if you learned that at Rothko's knee or Yale or whatever, you remain deceived. Perhaps you mis-spoke, in which case you're forgiven. 

"Gothic" novels and "Gothic" art of the 19th century is not Gothic. It is a flavor of Romanticism. It has no relation with the ugly, nor the obscene or horrorific. It was and is an expression of the Sublime Terror that we encounter when we are faced with raw Nature. Ask a psychoanalyst (science, again) about that. Associations with Dracula and goth posers is pure fakery and false consciousness.

Postmodern art is baffling. It is intentionally baffling. It is meant to confront you with the pestilence and shit that is the modern civil condition. Art imitates Life. In some strains, it does so through irony. If you are not sensitive to irony, you have not grasped tragedy. Anagnoresis, then Peripeteia. If you have not grasped tragedy, you have not grasped religious experience, and you will be bereft of Beauty no matter where you seek it. It is not the fault of the artist, however. Break the cycle. Stop blaming the victim.

 "There can be originality in stupidity,"  - Charles Mingus

Stunning piece. For some ten years now I have been ill-at-ease with art. I sensed a wilful�disregard�of�history�and the deliberate adoption of a "punk" attitude.�Technical prowess�seemed far less important�than the ability to shock.�Whilst at university I expressed these doubts to students in the arts and humanities but was roundly drowned out and labelled as a boring traditionalist. These doubts�never went away though.�I now�view the whole artistic enterprise with deep suspicion, yet I take care to observe the particulars of the case as it were. We are being hoodwinked. I thought about this in the context of my own life only yesterday. My father and I have designed and built a table cum shelving system cum balustrade in my home (only a picture would make sense). We do not consider ourselves to be artists. We set out to make something worthwhile, useful and attractive to the eye. We tried hard. We think we succeeded. We did not give it a name. It will never be entered in any competition. But we both felt a quiet, honest pride in what we achieved. I think there is a�moral difference in the way we went about things, and I think that makes all the difference in the world. �

Wikipedia spells the uncommentable artist's name as "Roy Lichtenstein."

thank you.

I agree with every word and I am glad you wrote them!

I very much appreciate this article, and wish that it could be made mandatory reading for art students.  How to break this depressing cycle of espousing the ugly, the cutting edge, the avant garde - it seems that many people simply aren't capable of FEELING beauty, feeling goodness, and love often, in only the shallowest of ways.

I am a photographer, and while my photography may lack in technical expertise, I do hope that it has some merit in its endeavor to celebrate the beauty in nature, the goodness in life, the ideal in the commonplace...