What’s Wrong With The World Part XVI —Ugly
Posted on 01 May 2012
Ugly
I had always, even from earliest youth, known that something had gone terribly wrong with the world at about the time of the industrial revolution. Up until about the time of the Victorians, and lingering in every dwindling spots and spasms up until the Great War, music still displayed harmony and melody, poetry still spoke like music, painting looked like what they represented, novels contained matter to delight the senses, inspire the soul, and educate the mind.
Then something happened; Something horrible.
If a primordial monstrosity from a novel by H.P. Lovecraft had risen from the deep and driven all mankind instantly into screaming paroxysms of insanity, the magnitude of what happened could not have been greater.
Something horrible happened. Beauty died.
The first thing a traveler brought forth from the past would notice, if escorted by the Ghost of Christmas Past or the time machine of H.G. Wells into a modern industrial center or modern museum of the fine arts, is the overwhelming ugliness of the age.
If the illustrators of science fiction magazines are to be believed, the happy inhabitants of eons yet to come will dress in toga, cape and tunic, with an eye toward splendor and elegance of dress, just as our Medieval and Ancient ancestors did. Only the modern age is drab and smoggy.
To be fair, the workingmen and slaves of the ancient world dressed in rags, and there is nothing particularly fine to the eye about a hut or wigwam: and yet the particular genius of the modern day is not the accidental ugliness which comes from a lack of craft, but the snidely insolent and deliberate ugliness when pursued for its own sake.
There has never been anything like it in history. It is masochism.
Yes, it is deliberate. Instead of Phideas or Michaelangelo we have this: “A fiberglass sculpture of several conjoined girls, some with anuses for mouths and semierect penises for noses, all naked except for sneakers on their feet” Also “flayed corpses, sliced animals in formalin, a close-up photograph of a gunshot wound to the scalp, and … a scaled-down but hyperrealistic model in silicone and acrylic of a naked corpse.” (These are from a 1998 exhibition of modern British art at the Royal Academy of Art in London. http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html)
As for music, merely turn on your radio, where you can, among the mindless banging noises that pass for rhythm, hear tuneless voices chanting or shouting rather than singing, and, if you can make out the words, you are likely to encounter words in praise of cop-killing and whore-slapping.
As far dance, it is formless and unromantic: mere spastic jerking. Who, these days, performs the waltz? Poetry is as formless and incomprehensible. Modern painting has passed beyond absurdity and visual gibberish into the realm of deliberate self-parody: rows of Campbell soup cans.
In novels, as far as I can tell, the only place real art is being attempted is in genre fiction, particularly in science fiction. Mainstream novels are concentrating on formless stream-of-consciousness depictions of adultery, suicide, dipsomania, and human degradation and perversion so central to the nihilist core of nonbeing that forms the formless heart of heartless modernism.
The first time I saw a reproduction of a Picasso drawing in the home of a friend, I assumed it was a drawing done in kindergarten by my friend’s little sister, hung up on the wall by an adoring parent. Much friend had much ado to convince me otherwise.
Likewise, when an even closer friend showed me a crude and dun-colored plate, I assumed it was an art project done by a fifth grade child, someone unable to spin clay on a potter’s wheel, or unable to select or apply colors. But no, the plate was the handicraft of some allegedly famous artiste, and the lopsided unroundness and the sewage-hued drab of the tint were allegedly not only deliberate, but allegedly sublime. The friend was reduced to tears, because, before I found out it was a work of art, I recoiled from the ghastly thing with a laugh and gave an honest opinion.
Modern courtesy, like modern art, is a mechanism for deterring honest opinions. If no one can tell the difference between fair and foul, and if pompously ungainly or horridly crude waste-pieces are extolled as the most precious artistic treasures of collectors unduly sensitive to criticism, the only polite thing a modern man can do to avoid giving offense is make no judgment whatever between fair and foul. But who would deliberately put himself in such a position, and for what reason? Sane people like pretty things. Who wants to jar his eyes by exposing those delicate orbs, as if to a spray of vinegar, to deliberately unsightly rubbish?
It was, of all people, the vituperative and vehement Ayn Rand who uttered a theory of aesthetics to explain this otherwise inexplicable adoration of ugliness for the sake of ugliness.
Her theory is that art expresses on a concrete level the artist’s sense of life, the same thing that a philosopher expresses on an abstract level. The music and dance and decoration and painting, the plays and songs and stories of a culture display exemplify what that culture values.
The ancient Greek carved and polished statues of men in the heroic mold because the Greek had a heroic view of life, where the purpose of life was arete, virtue, godlike virtue, and the heroes of old were sons of the gods; whereas the ancient Aztec erected monstrous statues of vampirishly bloodthirsty gods with their staring eyes and protruding tongues because their view of life and man’s role in life was monstrous. Art is the representation of the highest values on a sensory level.
What does modern art represent? It represents modern values, which Ayn Rand (in my judgment, correctly) identifies as: vulgarity, unreason, malformation, meaninglessness, mindlessness, morbidity.
This horror that has overwhelmed the arts is not an accident, nor an attempt to carry out some bold new theory of aesthetics. It is a consequence of the same rules of aesthetics that have always obtained, merely, now that the moderns have lost sanity and conscience, their love of goodness and their sense of humanity, the moderns can only portray the vomit and dung sticking to the floor of the dungeons of hell.
Some small traces of goodness and beauty remain among popular art, in genre novels, in movies: the closest thing we have to a symphony are the musical scores of John Williams, for example. The best drawings of the human figure I have seen recently were in a comic book, not in a museum of modern art. The work Maxfield Parrish for magazine covers and commercial advertisements are superior in technique and genius than a entire body of work by Picasso.
Modern art is excrement.
Literally. Modern art includes a painting that consist of canvass with daubs elephant poop stuck on, or a crucifix in a jar of urine.
Philosophy cannot cure this: the whole of modern aesthetic theory consists of the simple slogan, empty yet endlessly repeated, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is as much to say, beauty does not exist.
The sentiment is not an attempt to explain the nature of beauty, but to explain it away. It is the asseveration that beauty has no nature. Like the polylogists saying logic is arbitrary, or the Political Correctors saying words are arbitrary, or relativists saying ethics are arbitrary, the claim here is that what is found beautiful is merely arbitrary. I have dwelt on these errors and insanities in other paragraphs, and need say no more here except to mention that the beautiful symmetry is repeated.
The sentiment that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is not only false, it is a sentiment all find ugly, including those sick souls attracted to ugliness find it so (albeit they rejoice rather than vomit at its practice, because their passions and hence their tastes are objectively disordered). Therefore even if this ugly sentiment were true, it could be condemned on the ground alone that is it ugly.
In the same way that education in the passions was once meant to train the unruly passions from their crude and natural and to more noble dispositions, education in music and poetry was meant to train the tastes, so that students would learn to love the fair and fine and abhor the foul or vulgar.
In the modern day, the goal and ergo the methods of training the taste serve the opposite: our culture seeks to condition the young to admire the foul and flee the fair. This will give the young in later life the ability more easily to tolerate and pursue ugliness on the moral plane, which is called vice, perversion, abomination, and the ability to tolerate and accept asymmetry on the intellectual plane, which is called unreason, doublethink, hypocrisy.
Those of you who have read C.S. Lewis’ THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH will recall a scene in the ‘objectification room’ where the main character was introduced to an environment where everything was subtly or grossly wrong-sighted, arbitrary, meaningless, asymmetrical, or grotesque. That image is the image of a modern museum of fine art.
I expect never to see any return to the good and the beautiful in the fine arts while Western Civilization endures: there are some things, once broken, that no human power can put right.
Yet another beautiful post, if even on an ugly subject, elucidating many of my own thoughts on where we went off the rails. Thanks for this, Mr. Wright.
“Who, these days, performs the waltz? ”
What? Waltz is an awesome spectator sport: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoErge3GZe0
And there are even semi-pro teams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyCaocHObNM
The remark about the ugly, hand-made plate suggests to me a slightly different reason for the shift in aesthetic taste you note: As a culture, we have become profoundly suspicious and disdainful of technique. Because we live in an age of such technological prowess that we recognize it no longer takes (at least in a good many cases) significant personal artistic skill or time-investment to produce something polished, balanced, precise, detailed, symmetrical, harmonic or well-arranged – and perhaps more grievously, that such beauty can often be technologically reproduced en masse even if its first creation still required such skill – we have come to condemn such precision as “artificial”, “manufactured”, “engineered”, “hollow”, “soulless”, etc. etc.
Thus, the ugliness of the hand-made plate becomes “artistic” precisely because of the lack of this craft, the rawness and crudeness of it. The punk song’s atonal, noisy, two-chord cacophony is more “artistic” than the superbly-polished boy-band five-tone harmonics precisely because the punk rockers disdain the boy band’s advanced computer technology, musical theory, and painstaking production values. The use of elephant dung in art is more “artistic” than the use of paint precisely because the dung is disgusting and base, showing the viscerality of the artist’s passion and intended to provoke a visceral response from the viewer. All these things (so the thinking goes) create a uniqueness and irreproducibility to the experience that is no longer perceived in technique-based art. Novelty becomes more important than quality simply because it is novel (a reaction I have seen in a number of film and music critics). And so on.
Like a magician’s audience, once we are shown how the trick is done we yawn thereafter at seeing the trick again no matter how flawlessly executed, and we will only applaud for the comedian who parodies magic by deliberately bollixing it for our amusement.
My wife and I learned to waltz last December. We went to Vienna and attended a ball for our New Years’ holiday. I’ll admit that two hours of learning the basics does not make you good at waltzing. Still, the dance is popular enough that there are people who make a living by teaching it. Perhaps you just go to the wrong sort of parties?
I hate wordpress, apparently my log in time has expired and I lost the whole thing I wrote. So after my rage died down, I decided to give you the spark notes instead:
*Spot on! You said better what I have thought for years, long prior to my conversion.
*You neglected to mention other fine examples of modern art, such as
-Two water cups sitting side by side on a table, with a thin piece of cardboard over top the two, and it’s supposed to be a tree
-That wonderfully hip “Can of Sh*t”, literally a tin can full of the artist’s excrement (honestly some of these are so bad you have to laugh in disgust)
-And let us not forget the Mona Lisa of Mona Lisas’, a photo of an artist’s semen, mid-flight, post ejaculation
*Last but not least, your final quote in the end there, how depressing! I recall in an earlier post you recalled your questioning why of all eras were you born in this one? Well I too have asked that question. Unless by the grace of God sanity is readopted by the west, things look like they will only get bleaker here. And given my youth, I can only imagine what new idiocies they will come up with in my lifetime. Yay me.
Actually, Picasso was capable of lovely, accurate, even classical paintings, particularly of women he was in love with. What Cubism indicates is that he was breaking up with a woman.
“No, I don’t think they’re trying to be ugly. Chagall has some particularly lovely use of color.”
Indeed? What do you think, precisely, they are trying to do? If the images will display in your browser, please explain the following contrast to me:
I think – and I am not an art critic so I freely admit to potentially talking out my hat here – that the contrast is not meant to be between “beauty” and “ugliness”, but between “familiar” and “unfamiliar”.
It is the great curse of human nature that we can get accustomed to, and thus take for granted or stop paying attention to, even the most beautiful of things, like a mother and her children. Perhaps, by deliberately distorting colour and perspective into surreality, the image is meant to make us look again at the painting’s subject as a concept rather than an image; to make us realize that a mother and child is a mother and child, regardless of how alien and strange a particular example of such may seem to us.
One of the oddest artistic experiences I had came from watching an amateur, experimental film produced by an acquaintance of my wife’s, a home-made animation piece called “The Adventures of Jesus”. To give you some idea of the production quality, Jesus was “played” by a He-Man action figure, and the film took over three years to complete, with voice actors almost constantly changed because the director couldn’t keep a cast together for longer than a shot or two at a time. At one point, Peter is depicted as weeping by showing his action figure lying on the ground with a hose gushing out water underneath it, and the heavily-accented narrator (one of at least a dozen) says, “Pee-tarr wept… pee-tarr-lee!” (i.e., “bitterly”). A more inept and clumsy piece of work would be hard to imagine…
…except that at the moment Jesus’s death on the cross was depicted, the filmmaker just held a long, still, backlit shot on the little crucified He-Man figure, and I suddenly found a lump in my throat. And it brought home to me the idea that some things are just so powerful it’s nearly impossible to depict them in an “ugly” way, and at the same time that the surreality of a particular style can make us see something we’re used to with fresh eyes.
My primary objection to this school of artistic theory has always been that it depends far too much on an extremely steep diminishing-returns curve of shock value, and on “burning through” the traditions built up over time far faster than that capital can be replaced (subversion stops being effective once all your traditions have been broken up). But in extremely sparing and judicious doses, I think it has its place.
But would you feel the same way when looking at this bizarre thing a second time? There are works of art who depict things ugly in themselves, like the torture of Jesus, but they are meant to raise the right emotions: pity, love, repentance, desire to set things to rights in oneself and in the world. You never tire of such works. Same for music. There are so many classical works that I know I will never tire of. There is always something new to discover in them. There are also popular songs, when they are really poetic and the music is good, that I can hear very often without being bored.
Yet you probably do not listen to them in a continuous loop of music all through your waking time; if you did, you presumably would get bored with them. So when you say “I will never tire of X”, there is an unspoken assumption: That you will carefully manage your exposure to X in such a way that X is reasonably fresh every time you encounter it. Thus your statements do not in fact contradict what you quoted: All you’re saying is that the classical works require much less exposure management than the outside-view works. Which, indeed, is exactly what Stephen was saying when he called for a “sparing and judicious use” of nonstandard art.