Friday, May 16, 2008

The Dessicated Groves of Academe

What does "art" consist of in twenty first century America? Checking in at Yale University's art program, we find one Aliza Shvarts extending what we already thought was the reductio ad absurdum in modern art's determination to undercut the very notion of art pointing to anything noble, beautiful, true, or good; to transcendence, in a word. But no expression is too vile, it seems, for those bent on "problemitizing" and"deconstructing" the very culture that produces multi-billion dollar universities, where leisure was once for the purpose of contemplating "the best that has been thought and written", but is now often used in pursuit of the vile, the pornographic, and the ideological. Young Ms. Shvarts has been using her privileged time at university--her parents must be so proud! to contribute her view of human dignity by repeated self-insemination followed by self-induced abortions, all artfully recorded on video. One wonders what the next expression could possibly be. But sad experience has shown there is always something lower yet to come.

There are both internal and external dynamics at play here. Internal to modern art itself, and all of modernity, is the by now familiar pathology of revolutions eating their own children--reason becomes un-reason, art is reduced to ruminations on bodily functions. Nothing true is built on a lie. Externally, this is just another demonstration of the corrosive effects of atheistic nihilism's removal of transcendent meaning in the world. Andy Warhol's soup cans yesterday, reproductive effluvia today.

Roger Kimball, always worth reading, ponders the moral detachment--no, the utter moral confusion or even depravity, of what was once a central pillar of Western culture. The shadows are lengthening, indeed.
http://newcriterion.com:81/articles.cfm/Art---ethics-at-Yale-3828

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hear! Hear!

I say it's time a coordinated traditional arts movement got started. In parallel. Devoted to publicizing and supporting art that we consider worthy. We need rich patrons to support it, and we need to market it so that the regular people (ie, me) can find it and pay to see it, again to support the artists.

Simultaneously we must work tirelessly to remove public funding from the arts, because the system has become corrupt and is in the control of the depraved. By their definitions, the reason for Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile is explained by their new 45-degree view: she's got two vibrators humming away in her nether regions, both sides. THAT IS THE DEFINITION of modern art.