Has art jumped the shark after WWI?

[Alex K]

The old masters in music, painting and sculpture... those were the days! Whatever happened in the 20th century, that instead of magnificent Rembrandts and Michelangelos, we get scribbled pencil lines on 10 foot wide white canvases. Can beauty be outdated? Has art jumped the shark after WWI?

I still think this is beautiful in its own way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8496Rk-Kl8

but will it ever hold a place like a Bach or Händel? And it is positively traditional compared to what came a few decades later...

[thesummerqueen]

Erm....do you subscribe to art sites? Because I see people making amazing art every day.

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PS - just because it isn't the style you prefer doesn't make it "bad".

I personally don't get horny over classical music for the most part.

[Alex K]

Erm....do you subscribe to art sites? Because I see people making amazing art every day.

I'm not saying that people today are incapable of creating beautiful paintings, but I wonder how much their style isn't an imitation of things that has been developed centuries earlier. It's just that what is considered high art, the stuff that gets displayed in important museums, seems to be far away from that.

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PS - just because it isn't the style you prefer doesn't make it "bad".
I personally don't get horny over classical music for the most part.

[thesummerqueen]

Dude, all art is an imitation and expansion of the past.

[Alex K]

Well yes, and it's only considered innovative if this extension in imitation really discovers new aspects of expression.

How is Jackson Pollock, Mondrian, comparable in skill to Rembrandt or Michelangelo? That's the stuff that was and is considered hot by "big art".

[thesummerqueen]

You should ask someone who is really into that style of art. I find that's the best way to figure out why something is important. It's not my particular favorite, but then neither is Michelangelo.

[DeistPaladin]

I was a music student in my younger days as was my wife. I focused on classical while she had a broad education in musicals, jazz and various forms of pop.

I remember my History of 20th Century Music class. We never studied George Gershwin or Scott Joplin. No mention of Aaron Copland. Certain not a peep about John Williams! These were all too "pop" for the tastes of the Ivory Tower and the professor obliquely mentioned the phrase "movie music" contemptuously at one point.

Who did we study? Schoenberg, Berg and Webern for starters and it went downhill from there. Frankly, a bunch of names that we pretended were so important for the professor that I probably couldn't recognize today if you told me who they were. Igor Stravinsky did get a mention. Paul Hindemith and his neo-classical style of quartal harmony was one I remember.

At the end of the class, the professor asked us, "where do we go from here?" I didn't say this outloud but I thought, "does it matter? We've locked ourselves away in an ivory tower and the world has moved on without us."

I remember thinking how if I moved outside the building that housed the School of Music on a distant corner of campus and went to any number of schools in other fields, Poly-sci, International Service, Business, Law, Physics, even History, and asked any of the professors "What do you think of Arnold Schoenberg?" the answer probably would have been "I know he's just an action movie star but I liked him in 'The Terminator'." The most educated among us would likely not recognize any of the names I had just spend a semester (maybe two, perhaps) studying and pretending were so important.

I came to later find my wife, who was also a music student, had never heard of Arnold Schoenberg. Her emphasis was in performance, not theory or composition, and she had a more diverse education in many music forms. It only underscores my point.

At the time, I was sure that music history classes would look back on the 20th century and study The Beatles, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, etc. Classical composers of the 20th century would likely include Gershwin, Joplin, Copland and yes, John Williams.

I felt then as I do now that there was a schism around WWI between the "pop" and "classical" styles of music, one which had never existed prior, with the latter locking itself away in an ivory tower and looking down on the former. The Ivory Tower became obsessed with abstract theory and making theory guide the music instead of the other way around which is how it's supposed to be.

[Alex K]

I felt then as I do now that there was a schism around WWI between the "pop" and "classical" styles of music, one which had never existed prior, with the latter locking itself away in an ivory tower and looking down on the former.

As do I. This is where the spirit of my OP lies.

The Ivory Tower became obsessed with abstract theory and making theory guide the music instead of the other way around which is how it's supposed to be.

My dad studied music in the 60s and he always told me how his old professors scoffed at anything remotely "pop" in music and infinitely glorified academic music at the same time, and he as both a classically trained singer and huge Beatles fan was always underwhelmed by that. In the same sense I was referring to other types of art, although I know my way around music better than the others.

That you can have music education and never hear of Schönberg is strange to me, we did him in 12th grade in high school along with Berg, and were assigned to write some 12 tone music. Maybe it's because around here the curriculum is more eurocentric. Gershwin was mentioned a bit. The most avantgarde thing we covered in HS was John Cage.

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I adore John Williams' music to no end. There's barely a day when I'm not humming is melodies at some point. But wouldn't it still be fair to say that he basically adapted romantic period composition to his needs and indeed added his huge talent for epic tunes, but without really developing anything conceptually new?

[thesummerqueen]

I have to come at this from more of a literature perspective, because music isn't my passion.

Take H.P. Lovecraft.

Lots of people write him off because he was published in pulp magazines, because of the content he wrote, because of his florid language, etc. But the man is a nexus. He distilled all of the creepy, horrific, and cosmically stunning things that came before him (he was incredibly intelligent and deeply self-educated) in science and literature into stories that continue to influence sci-fi and horror authors today. "The Rats in the Walls" is, at its heart, nearly a rip-off of "The House of Usher", yet completely transcends it in creep value. "The Dunwhich Horror" is practically a rip-off of Machen's "The Great God Pan," but manages to take the elements one step further. The man affected our perceptions of ghouls and cosmic horror for generations to come, yet often gets dumbed down to "that guy with the tentacle stories" because of Cthulhu, and only treated by followers as a pioneer in the burgeoning field of science fiction, and a linchpin for horror. "The Call of Cthulhu" is a well-crafted Russian nesting doll of individual stories leading from personal terror to ultimate horror at the insignificance of humanity against an alien being so incomprehensible it turns men mad. There are people who would say he couldn't possibly compare to Poe, yet even though he copies him to an extent, he makes it his own and made it accessible to other people, spawning stories and movies and music that Poe never did. I'm sure people could argue that he 'cheapened' the themes he borrowed from Dunsany and Poe, but I don't think so. I think he just reframed them for the modern world, which was all of a sudden larger and at once more disenfranchised after WWI. To me this makes him infinitely more valuable than most other horror writers.

So what then makes high art? Stuff that's been around for centuries? Stuff that's been imitated by others? Stuff that builds on certain principles and speaks to the human condition? Stuff that follows a strict set of rules?

[Alex K]

I have to come at this from more of a literature perspective, because music isn't my passion.

Take H.P. Lovecraft. [...]

Awesome example. I really need to read Lovecraft at some point...

So what then makes high art? Stuff that's been around for centuries? Stuff that's been imitated by others? Stuff that builds on certain principles and speaks to the human condition? Stuff that follows a strict set of rules?

Well that is the question, isn't it. My point of view is that so-called "high art" (as was intended in the thread title) has given up on beauty and being fun in the widest sense and has therefore divorced itself too much from the audience, much like what Deist Paladin also says. At the least, I would say high art should do more than epigonism copying nice things from the past, but should bring some innovation to the table, should somehow be authentic, but at the same time involve some level of skill or virtuosity.