Art in decadence?

[Anomalocaris]

I have been getting into paintings lately, and I am inclined to believe painters nowadays lack the mastery, elegance and symbolism of the masters of old, such as Vermeer.

Perhaps the same can be said about literature, with writers such as Dante still unmatched?

Is this a subjective perception, or can it be objectively proven?

The arts were very much affected by the Kantian "Copernican Revolution." 

Prior to this change, it was thought that the objects of our perception were unproblematically presented to our consciousness. If we looked carefully, we saw what was there. 

What people thought art was for followed on from this basic epistemology. So for example many people thought that a good artist was one who could very accurately represent the appearance of the object. This is clear from Ancient Greek stories about painters, with the story of Zeuxis' grapes being the most famous illustration. This artist and Parrhasius had a contest to prove who could paint the most realistic picture. Zeuxis painted grapes, and they were so realistic that birds flew down to eat them. Sure that he had won, he tried to lift the curtain that was covering Parrhasius' painting. But it turned out that the curtain was painted. So Zeuxis admitted that Parrhasius had won, because Zeuxis had fooled the birds, but Parrhasius had fooled Zeuxis. 

Anyway, the point is that trompe l'oeil style realism was the goal, at least in this case. 

Styles and goals varied, but it's largely true to say that an artist's goal was to select a worthy subject and to present it as attractively as possible. What they deemed "worthy" of course could vary, but subjects were usually royalty, other elite people who could afford a portrait or who were deemed to deserve one, or religious subjects. They might depict famous battles or inspiring events from history. 

As you know, Kant changed our ideas about how we perceive the world. He taught us that there is no pure mirror-like reflection of the object in the mind, that what we create is an interpretation, with a more or less tenuous relation to the thing-in-itself. At this point people's idea of the artist's role changed. Instead of accuracy being a goal, the individual artist's mental interpretation became the focus. You can see this most clearly in poetry, probably. Before if a poet wrote about flowers, he wrote about characteristics that the flowers have, their symbolism, etc. But when you read Wordsworth you can see that the subject of the poem is not the flower but the poet's reaction to the flower. What it calls up in his emotional world. 

This is how Romanticism got started, and it's still pretty much the framework we're in today. After the change, what became important was not the great quality of the object depicted but the great way in which the artist depicts it. Van Gogh can paint worn out work shoes, and this painting is deemed as important or as beautiful as a Bouguereau Madonna. (Not to everybody of course -- tastes differ -- but the fact that the shoe painting is deemed to be historically important at all is due to this change. 

The same trend extends into the 20th century, when Surrealism makes the activity of the artist's mind the only real subject of the work. And of course real greats like Picasso are all about HOW they paint, not WHAT they paint. Their mind's interpretive style is the subject of the work. 

When we talk about a proposed drop of the arts into decadence, this history is crucial. Before Romanticism, the arts were expected to reflect and celebrate the values of the culture. These were often thought to be transcendent values -- that is, not changeable by fashion, and not the production of the artist himself, but facts about the world. So of course people had likes and dislikes, but these were seen as secondary to the timeless values which the artists strove to show. 

Being a modern guy myself, I am in no way opposed to the Romantic change. I value very highly the unique way of seeing that each artist uses -- often the more unexpected the better. So for example Lucian Freud painted nudes who were not gods or goddesses, but regular people, usually shown in extremely unflattering ways. And he painted them in a way which no one had quite done before. A lot of people are put off by his way of seeing, but there's no denying that as a viewer of nature he has an interpretation which surprises and shocks -- those of us who enjoy the frisson of this shock can admire the extreme attention he has given to seeing the world. 

But you can see the danger that's also inherent in the post-Kant change. If art is no longer supposed to depict those values which society holds to be transcendent, then there is a danger of it falling into mere personal taste. This certainly isn't inevitable -- I can cite good reasons why the idiosyncratic viewpoints of everyone from Gericault to Picasso do in fact embody important, non-personal values. But the expression of values is no longer built in. 

And this leads us to an art world with a very weak foundation. If transcendental values are no longer recognized or depicted, then we really are left with just every-art-lover-for-himself. "I like it" need not be justified and cannot be argued. 

And then, as you can see, we're in the world of consumerism, where we buy it because we like it, and what gets famous is what sells most, and fashions come and go as quickly as they do in clothing. 

When art is no longer expected to do anything other than please the customer, then decadence is inevitable.

Bel still bitterly bemoan the demotion of transcendental delusions and lies by the Copernican revolution which revealed them in their true natures,  and detest the decadence of the freedom to be curious and experiment, and to be critical and rigorous, that added so much to genuine knowledge.

He thinks his view gains in respectability proportional to the instances of name dropping and the word count in his posts.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

‘Anyone can look at a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A great artist can look at an old woman and make you see the pretty girl she used to be.’ - Jubal Harshaw

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

somewhere lost in confusion is the artist who sees and describes an entire life in how the pretty girl or old woman really looks.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

somewhere lost in confusion is the artist who sees and describes an entire life in how the pretty girl or old woman really looks.

No.

Boru

[Angrboda]

Ceci n'est-pas une jeune fille.

[Belacqua]

I have been getting into paintings lately, and I am inclined to believe painters nowadays lack the mastery, elegance and symbolism of the masters of old, such as Vermeer.

Perhaps the same can be said about literature, with writers such as Dante still unmatched?

Is this a subjective perception, or can it be objectively proven?

Another significant reason why the arts are getting worse has to do with the speed or pace involved -- the amount of time we spend with a work.

The extreme case of this would of course be Dante. Reading the Comedy one time is barely reading it at all. It is a lifetime project. As we live and grow different aspects of the work become available to us. Then as we begin to gain familiarity with it, we see its sources and meanings in earlier works. For example reading the Nicomachean Ethics after reading Dante is out of chronological order, but in fact makes the Ethics easier and richer, because Dante has provided so many memorable visual ideas which embody the much drier abstract language of the original. Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius, etc. etc., all of these are subsumed into Dante's system and made richer and more memorable by his symbolism. 

Then looking the other way, so many writers and artists who come after Dante are relying on him that once you know the Comedy well the later work, from Milton to Blake to Shelley to Eliot, unfold into greater meaning. 

So the Comedy is inexhaustible, and always repays re-reading. Having it as part of your mental furniture enriches your life. 

And as I say Dante is an extreme case, but there are many shorter poems, or fictional characters, which, if they stay in your mind, clarify and beautify experience. Shakespeare's characters, for example, become something like archetypes through which we can read the sorts of people we encounter in real life. 

So if great art stays with you for a lifetime, then we can say that art which barely stays with you at all is unlikely to be great. And this, I'm afraid, is the case with most art today. It's the sound-bite, commodified, consumable approach. 

For me Banksy is an extreme case of the instant consumer art work. There is absolutely no depth to a Banksy painting. The drawing is banal, the symbolism is as obvious as it can be. There is one and only one value to a Banksy: it's cool. You see it once, you say, Oh, Cool! and then it's over. Nothing is later revealed, nothing remains. 

This is the kind of art which consumer society leads to. It has what package designers call "shelf appeal." The way it looks on the shelf attracts the buyer, and the producer's job is done if the customer carries it to the cash register. After that no more is required. Maybe the customer says "I like it!" maybe they even pay a lot of money for it, but it remains nothing more than a sort of token, exchangeable for nothing. 

The most famous artist in Japan these days is Yayoi Kusama. Many many years ago she was an experimental type who did wild sculpture and installations. Not my taste exactly, but you could argue that she had ideas. For the last few decades however she has done one and only one thing over and over: she has put polka dots on pumpkins. There is a big fiberglas pumpkin with spots on it at a modern art museum, which is sort of the mother ship pumpkin. If you have money you can buy smaller versions in S, M, L, or XL. The other versions are available as we go down the income scale. Lithographs of spotted pumpkins. Posters of spotted pumpkins, coffee mugs, T-shirts, tote bags. The pumpkin is as meaningful as a brand logo, like Ralph Lauren's polo player. And it has value in the same way: it shows you buy into the image and are willing to spend for it. 

The pumpkin has zero meaning or value, but people project onto it. It is cool because it's art, and because the artist appears on TV wearing magenta-colored wigs. Her PR team claims she's crazy, but she always manages to show up to the TV studio at the right time, and you can be sure that she keeps a carefully sane eye on her income statements. 

When the object itself is empty, but people project qualities onto it (say, coolness, or sophistication, or some kind of avant garde progress) this is the exact definition of a fetish. 

Famous art in our time is largely a fetish -- an empty commodity onto which we project certain qualities that aren't really there.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

(Didn’t care to quote the whole thing)

@Belacqua

When the object itself is empty, but people project qualities onto it (say, coolness, or sophistication, or some kind of avant garde progress) this is the exact definition of a fetish. 

This is also the exact definition of ‘value’, which - like art - is an entirely subjective appreciation.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

Hmmm....so it's art only if it takes a long time.

Being an art snob really isn't all that interesting. But, I'm quite sure Bel's impressed with him or herself for all the deepities.

[Rev. Rye]

I have been getting into paintings lately, and I am inclined to believe painters nowadays lack the mastery, elegance and symbolism of the masters of old, such as Vermeer.

Perhaps the same can be said about literature, with writers such as Dante still unmatched?

Is this a subjective perception, or can it be objectively proven?

I love me some Dante, but I don't think his work is necessarily unmatched.

But when it comes to stuff like painting, well, let's face it: the reason there's no more Vermeers in the art world is because they don't need Vermeer. Why spend so much time painting a scene as meticulously realistic as Vermeer did when you could probably get the same effect with a camera?


Photo by Ralph Eggleston.

I'm inclined to think that, once photography hit it big, the sort of realistic detail prized in, say, the old Dutch masters, became obsolete. The objective became obsolete, and, for better or for worse, painting became about the subjective.

[Neo-Scholastic]

That's your subjective opinion.

Subjective does not mean arbitrary. Anyway, the visual arts have been in decay IMHO since Marcel DuChamp. Too self-referencial.