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Roger Kimball, of "The New Criterion," has a lengthy (oh, how lengthy!) piece at this link, which was featured earlier today on Instapundit. I saw it too late for it to be worth commenting there, but I will offer my would-have comment here. Don't worry if you can't finish Kimball's piece; he blathers and meanders all over the place, and while he is most erudite at name-dropping various artists, good and bad, he never really comes to grips with the alleged subject of his meandering screed ("What the Right gets wrong about art"), nor does he offer some---any---sort of alternative. Kimball attempts to discuss the switch from "beautiful" art to "ugly" art a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, and spends a great deal of verbiage talking around this switcheroo. The reason for this can be summed up in three words: The Industrial Revolution. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, "art" was an adjunct to artisanship---whether skill at carving, or painting, or weaving, or woodcrafting, or anything else. The industrialization of what had formerly been hand crafts divorced art from artisanship---indeed, there were serious debates in the 19th century as to whether painting was "obsolete" because photography could reproduce reality better than a painter could. Anyone familiar with the "brownstones"/row-houses built in the late-19th/early-20th centuries knows that they were built on a mechanical, industrial plan; prefabricated wood trim, mechanically-carved stone, mass-produced flooring, and items like ornamental capitals on pillars flanking a fireplace cast from composition rather than carved. The point was to ape, at drastically reduced cost, the look of the hand-wrought amenities of the richer, prior, pre-industrial generations. And thus it was for everything else; machines could suddenly ape the laborious wood-carving (or at least the look of it) that the Old Regime had; wallpaper could ape their painted walls; pressed-glass glasses could ape the blown goblets of the prior generations, etc. When newly-prosperous arrivistes began to be able to obtain possessions that were similar---sometimes indistinguishably so---from the more-expensive originals owned by the former-elite, that former-elite abandoned Victorian frou-frou in favor of the "form follows function" simplicity of the Arts and Crafts Movement (e.g., William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in England, the Stickleys and the Roycrofters, among others, in the US). In other words, "Oh, you can copy us with your cheap imitations? We're going in an entirely different direction!" This made it "cool" to be "avant garde"---and, since "art" had already been divorced from "artisanship," that meant that "artists" could now make up whatever nonsense they wanted to, sell it as The New Thing, and be nearly trampled to death by people eager to get on board. In other words, it is the desire of the old elite to differentiate itself from the new, and the new elite to buy into something that was not redolent of past privilege, that facilitated the leap to the trumpery, cheap, and ugly that we know as "modern/postmodern art." Would that a professional art-blatherer like Roger Kimball gave some evidence of comprehending this.
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JCM
8/11/2024 7:47:44 PM
Kosh's Shadow
8/13/2024 5:29:29 PM