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to utter one of his deepest convictions: “Few things are
more bogus than modern art.” The cause of this dereliction
is the playing of games with everything that comprises
the human being, the face and the body, the setting
and the landscape. The artist is informing you that
character and moral judgment are unimportant, and all
you need know is how clever the artist himself is.
It would make a good subject for a book to try to
pinpoint why and how and when the arts all lost their
human dimension: Painting went non-figurative, music
forsook melody, poetry abandoned rhyme, architecture
meant building machines for living, and so on. It’s a
hundred years since the Dada movement reduced men
and women to absurdity, which may perhaps have been
a pacifist sneer of superiority to a world waging the First
World War. I suspect that Picasso and Cubism have a
lot to answer for, as well. Soviet realist art showed men
and women as mere cogs in the machinery of Five Year
Plans. At the same time, the art of the Old Masters has
been effectively dismissed as irrelevant. Anyone who
might try to follow the great tradition would be mocked
as a romantic, a dupe engaged in meaningless beautification,
a grievous fault in the view of the politically
correct. The world has become horrible and frightening,
runs this line of thought, and art should therefore reflect
it. The new does not succeed the old, but degrades
and throttles it. Trying to invent organizing principles
that would garner status in academia, critics confect
whole categories and movements of uglification, such
as Brutalism or Minimalism. Conceptual art is the outcome
of the kindergarten teacher’s encouragement that
everyone is an artist just because they say they are, and
there’s no need for all that tiresome preparation.
Not long ago, I found myself in Bilbao and took the
risk of visiting the Guggenheim Museum there. Supposedly
a showpiece of Modernist architecture designed
by someone very famous and much applauded,
the museum is an assemblage of irregular caverns in
which you immediately become a disconsolate wanderer
in search of order which is not there. Up on the
third floor, as I recall, the caverns were more like warehouses
in which were stacked huge and oddly shaped
but overpowering red lumps, the work of someone else
very famous and much applauded. Leaving this museum,
you could only conclude that art and humanity
are dead, laid out in a mortifying Kafkaesque setting.
CAVERNOUS The Guggenheim Bilbao, universally acclaimed as one of
the contemporary art world’s great museums, strikes some visitors as
Modernism on a dehumanizing scale. Guggenheim Bilbao photo
See a video about
the Bilbao museum
at artenol.org.
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