Modern Art and Its Fear of Beauty

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple looks at modern art and discovers that the emperor has no clothes.

And, I agree wholeheartedly. The good doctor magnificently diagnoses the disease at the heart of modern art in the West.

He starts thus:

A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it. The result was a terrible impoverishment of our art.

The same magazine had published, shortly before, an article about Islamic art in which the author said that such art was inseparable from the religious ideas and beliefs that it embodied. This passed without remark: no one wrote in angrily to say, ‘So much the worse for Islamic art.’

Professor Scruton’s suggestion that western art had become impoverished as a result of its radical repudiation of anything transcendent in human existence in favour of the fleeting present moment, however, exasperated and infuriated the professional art critics of Sweden – as, indeed, it would have done the art critics of any western country. They reacted with the fury of the justly accused: for it is the professional caste of cognoscenti who have consistently applauded the trivialization of art and its relegation to the status of financial speculation at best, and a game for children showing off to the adults at worst.

What he says about the West applies to us as well, for we too are children of the West.

What is it precisely that we have done wrong?

In a manner of speaking, we have committed the sin Solzhenitsyn accused us of committing. We've forgotten God.

Let me elaborate. When I say we've forgotten God, I'm not saying that we've failed to depict religious things in our paintings, our novels, our movies or our music. The religious stuff is still there, if only because religious icons tend to make for striking visuals and religious backdrops make for intriguing settings.

Despite this, we've lost the transcendent. We've lost truth. G.K. Chesterton once said that if man loses the big laws, he does not get anarchy. He gets the little laws, which are far more restrictive and far more suffocating than the big laws. When we lost the big Truth, we did not get the Big Lie. We got worse. We got the little "truths", that little fragment of truth we declare we possess that we use to justify a plethora of little lies.

When we lost the Truth, we got the Ego in return. We cannot talk about God, the world, love, honor, justice, or any of these eternal themes with any proper depth or meaning because we are far too busy subordinating these First Things to the self-important task of glorifying our egos. We've lost God because we were too busy worshiping the Imperial Autonomous Self.

No amount of religious iconography in our art will ever cover up our egregious failure to talk about anything other than ourselves. We've even subordinated them. For example, in a scene that made me gag, the lesbian protagonist of "Rome and Juliet" finds justification in her quest to break a straight woman's impending wedding from a cloistered nun, who gave the usual little "personal truth" about Love as the fulfillment of all our emotional desires. A nun! How in God's name is a cloistered nun (who tend to be more conservative than those nuns who threw out the habit) supporting what the Faith calls a moral disorder? She should've known better. We can't even depict religion properly anymore. In our art, it is just a prop, rather than a stepping stone into discussing the Eternal and the Sublime.

The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.

This is the sin of many of our auteurs and artistes. Just look at our indie filmmakers for example. The intellectual masturbation and self-congratulatory posturing that characterize most of that inbred little group has led to such puerile work as the disgusting "Serbis" and the maddening tedium of any Lav Diaz monstrosity. (Not that our mainstream filmmakers are any better.)

The task is not so much to criticise as to understand: that is to say, to understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west.

No such question can be answered definitively; but I would like to draw attention to two errors that have contributed to the triumph of shallowness. The first is the overestimation of originality as an artistic virtue in itself; and the second is the false analogy that is often drawn between art and science in point of progress.

Dr. Dalrymple goes on to explain the second point first: that the analogy of art as science leads us to believe that just because it came later, it is somehow an improvement over anything that came before. So, our artists, in their quest to hoist their egos up there with the immortals, break with the past in order to get their newer, presumably "better" works recognized by the pantheon.

This fallacy, I believe, is what is behind many local artists decrying regulatory bodies like the MTRCB. Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind and Casablanca were made when the far stricter Hollywood Production Code was in force. Our local windbags believe that they can do so much better, if only we remove anything even resembling a Production Code (because it's *gasp* old), even the MTRCB. Any wonder why their work compares with the greats like a bag of dog poo compares with the Pieta?

As for the good doctor's first point, he is criticizing the Holy Grail of modern art.

In a sense, everything that human beings do is original, for even if they want to they cannot exactly copy one another. Like M. Jourdain speaking prose, most of us utter completely original sentences by the dozen every day, effortlessly and not knowing that we are doing it.

This is not the kind of originality that is valued in the new art ideology. What the new art ideology means by originality is that which has the power to shock, especially the bourgeoisie (if it still existed). Only the rebellious is original and creative: Norman Mailer, for example, in his essay The White Negro, equates rebelliousness and creativity, by contrast with ‘slow death by conformity.’

Unfortunately, deliberately setting out not to conform results in a conformity of its own, one indeed that has become a mass-phenomenon.

Sound familiar? Originality seems to be the only standing criteria by which to judge modern art as "good". Just ask our local artistic literati. *cough* Alexis Tioseco *cough*

Non-conformity for its own sake cannot be the source of true or valuable originality, therefore. The only kind of non-conformity that leads to worthwhile originality is the unselfconscious kind, that arises because the person has something new to express that is transcendently worthwhile, sub specie aternitatis as it were, and that might or might not lead him into conflict with others.

How can we discuss "sub specie aeternitatis", when it would only detract from our self-preening? Look at my five minute boob shot! I'll bet nobody's done that before! (Eh...)

What does all this have to do with a fear of beauty?

Beauty, in its highest form, is a transcendent value. Achieving beauty takes a painstaking look at eternity. Beauty invokes something that resonates in the human soul, and not just the human appetite. If we have nothing "sub specie aeternitatis" to say, we cannot create anything beautiful. Even the music of child prodigies like young Mozart are merely clever; Mozart did not achieve anything truly beautiful until he acquired the insight to do so.

Anybody can, say, paint in a new way. Even a gorilla. It takes man, in the fullness of his humanity, contemplating God and his own little place in the universe, to create beauty.

And nothing so scares the modern artist than the requirement that he ought to have something transcendent to say.

Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable, and very easy to achieve. (How easy it is to look bad, how difficult to look good!) By espousing the ugly, we make ourselves invulnerable too; for when we espouse the ugly, we are telling others that ‘You can’t shock, depress, intimidate, blackmail, or browbeat me.’

All the modern artist can do, like Sauron, is mock what is beautiful by glorifying the ugly. Trapped in his ego, he cannot create beauty on his own. So, he compensates with sheer vulgarity.

Modern art is a sham.