Modern art’s value deficit

“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.”

Oswald Spengler, 1918

A hundred years ago when Oswald Spengler wrote those words in The Decline of the West, the downfall of Western Civilisation was self evident. The highpoint of European control over the globe would come a few years later after Britain and France took over the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Later decolonisation would prove some of Spengler’s ideas right. Though this can largely be blamed on the following world war brought on by a government that had taken his book a little too seriously.

The clearest evidence to Spengler of the decline of the West was of course its art. The legacy of Renaissance art in Europe was now being replaced with monstrosities from the Fauves and the Cubists who were making paintings of formless colours and shapes. Combined with the primitive African and Native American styles of dress being celebrated by the leading designers of the day, this seemed to Spengler to signal the beginning of the end.