A formative experience with modern art
Beauty is declared irrelevant by those incapable of creating it. It is decried as a white man’s jingoistic fantasy, rather than what it truly is: food for the human spirit.
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To stand against what passes for art these days is to live something of a recurring tragedy. For one who values beauty so much, walking around a majority of large urban areas in Great Britain makes for a trying and depressing task.
It is no secret that a great crime against beauty was committed against this country in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The metropoles which once embodied imperial grandeur and the eternal sunshine of Pax Brittanica, have since been whipped and degraded into something resembling a satirical amusement park; which asks the question ‘how far can a nation fall before it is simply no more?’.
I often wonder how far this rabbit-hole goes. To what extent is the aesthetic tradition of a proud, two-millennia-old civilisation going to be vandalised before serious retributive actions are taken? Even if such actions were taken, would they even succeed?
The public bodies tasked with protecting our aesthetic tradition seem at best utterly uninterested in the objectives of continuity, and at worst actively opposed to them. The National Trust seeks to ‘decolonise’ Britain’s many wonderful country houses; by colonising them with American racial politics and continental radicalism. The schools of art and architecture, which incubate the next generation of British culture seem only to fixate on the vacuous scrawl of contemporality, with its tendency to provide an essay-length justification for the piece, rather than let the piece speak for itself.
Beauty is declared irrelevant by those incapable of creating it. It is decried as a white man’s jingoistic fantasy, rather than what it truly is: food for the human spirit. Everywhere one looks - with a handful of exceptional exceptions - ugliness reigns supreme.
Beauty is simply out of fashion.
Ever since I've been aware of art, I've held a parallel disdain for its contemporary output. In school, I was drawn, like a magnet to metal, by the renaissance works and romantic meditations on nature and the senses. In my formative years, the gulf between my responses to classical and contemporary art made little sense, or at least I struggled to articulate just why I felt this way. That was until I was twenty-one years old and in attendance at an art show, held by my university to showcase the best of the BA Fine Art program. The winning piece was a blue circle on a white canvas, presented, arrogantly, alongside a long justification, citing the various go-to’s of bad artists attempting to justify bad art. Racism, intersectionality and the divinity of the woman (undefined, of course).
Since that night, half a decade ago, I’ve often cast my mind back, and asked myself just why I found that winning piece so revolting. I believe the answer is this; if given paint, a canvas, and twenty minutes, I could replicate the piece with a like-for-like accuracy. So much so, that not even the original artist could tell them apart. There is no wonderment, no bafflement about how such a picture was created, no awe. Just crudely simple, slap-in-the-face ego, justified post-hoc.
Perhaps there is hope in the future. Perhaps the human spirit is always, ultimately triumphant. And one day, beauty may be an inherent part of the creative process once more. But, until then, I am braced and prepared for more blue circles.
