(November 4, 2022 at 12:41 am)Macoleco Wrote: 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.
