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. Decolonisation would prove some of Spengler’s ideas correct after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire saw the peak of global European power, but the World War that followed might be blamed on those that took Spengler’s 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 busy making paintings from formless colours and shapes. Combined with the primitive African and Native American styles of dress celebrated by the leading designers of the day, this seemed to Spengler to signal the beginning of the end.
Today, the art of our time easily brings to mind the same feeling. A hallmark of any great civilisation is its art, and the art that Western civilisation currently produces can appear self-indulgent at best and purposefully degenerate at worst.
Take for example the young American artist Jennifer Weigel, who claims to be exploring feminist themes of gender identity by making paintings using her menstrual blood. Or the acclaimed painter Carroll Dunham, whose work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is best known for his paintings of cartoon vaginas.
Jennifer Weigel
Carroll Dunham
Anyone who thinks these are a few one-offs should consider the winners of the Golden Lion award for Best Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, arguably the most prestigious contemporary art award in the world. The 2017 winner was the artist Anne Imhoff, whose artwork was a room filled with semi-naked performers, crawling and chocking each other. And masturbating, among other things.
The judges claim that, throughout history, artists have always pushed boundaries of what was considered acceptable, and were not appreciated until after their lifetime. What this really means is that the worse the artwork appears to the ordinary public, the more it can be said to be “pushing boundaries”.
The real question is not why are people making such deranged things. There are always strange people with queer hobbies, but why are there so many rich people willing to sit on panels, give awards, run galleries, and buy such incredible nonsense?
The answer may be that our society seemingly does not create great art today, because we no longer have the cultural values that allowed us to do so.
To illustrate this, consider what the greatest artworks of all time actually are, and then consider the kind of society that created them and why they did so.
The wonders of the ancient world. the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, or the Acropolis, are awe-inspiring but required the sacrifice of millions of slaves to create them. They were also often simply vanity projects of the rulers at the time. While we can enjoy the splendour of the ancient world, it would be immoral today to think that to enslave hundreds of thousands and make them endure back-breaking work to create stone structures, however “worth it” that might seem.
Even today if one goes to the Taj Mahal, you will hear that the workers repairing the walls are part of a long line of craftsmen and that the same work would have been done by their parents, their grandparents, and great grandparents. While this is told as a point of pride by the Indian tour guides, one can’t help think that a young man born into such a family might feel somewhat short-changed, his only option in life to grow up a stonemason.
What about the incredible Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe? English art critic John Ruskin in the 19th Century argued for the superiority of Gothic architecture over Greco-Roman because of the slave mentality that was required in the features of classical temples that had to be copied in exact detail, while Gothic architecture allowed many craftsmen to contribute their individual work towards a complete structure.
While the cathedrals of Europe may rank among some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, they were built with the money from the ruling nobility of the time to pay penance to the Church. The cathedrals and palaces of this era aside from their incredible aesthetic value; represent the billions of dollars (if adjusted today) that were spent on architecture rather than public facilities.
The same is true even for the great masters of the Renaissance. Many of the sculptures and paintings by the great artists were made possible by the funding of corrupt Popes, and the Mafia-like family of the Medici. The towers of Florence today show the competition between the powerful families of the city over who could build the tallest structure.
Cantebury Cathedral, England, UK
In our modern societies, such vast expenditures of public money must be justified on the grounds that they are, at least, useful, like an office building that will benefit the economy by creating more jobs. This is one of the reasons that we find it difficult to create great structures today, as we no longer morally justify spending money on extravagance that could be better spent on immediate human needs. The other problem, is one of values.
What we remember the Renaissance for is not just vast architecture but the incredible life-like creations of painting and sculpture, shown by such works as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Leonardo’s The Last Supper.
Towers of Florence
Most of the great works of the Renaissance artists, with some exceptions, are representations of stories in the Bible. And it’s easy to forget that there were very strict rules in place about how Christian subjects could be painted. The idea of painting at all in Christianity, warned against by the second commandment to “not create graven images”, had only been allowed since Pope Gregory the Great’s declaration that art would help the illiterate understand the Bible. The achievement of the Renaissance was not only the rediscovery of realism which had been lost after the fall of the Roman Empire, but also the ability to combine this realism with sacred values and embed them with meaning.
While some of the Renaissance artists were still living, it was possible for painters to be called before the inquisition and accused of heresy for not treating religious subjects with sufficient seriousness, as happened to Veronese in 1573. Michaelangelo was also later accused of immorality for his paintings of nudes on the Sistine Chapel wall, so a law was created after the artist’s death to cover the genitals with fig leaves.
The later periods of art, Baroque, Neoclassical, and Romantic all expanded on the idea of beauty and realism that had been captured in the Renaissance. And as the subject became broader, the reason for creating artwork had to change.
During the Enlightenment, it was recognised that art should represent the virtues of a society founded in its religion, the same virtues that could also be found in other philosophies inherited from the Greek scientific tradition. The following rejection of religious art led to paintings of philosophers and the Roman armies that inspired the revolutionaries of Louis XVI’s France.
The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David, 1787
The Romantics added the idea that value in art came from its ability to inspire emotion, and that the same awe-inspiring aspects of religious art could be found in nature. And so Romantic artists went to the country-side to find ancient ruins and capture the overwhelming power of the natural landscape.
The thing that artistic culture was having to respond to was that the audience for artworks kept expanding to include more and more people until, eventually, it included the whole of society. The audience for artworks moved from the King’s court, to the ruling families, to the landowners, the middle classes, and then, everyone.
The onset of modernity, and the mass movement of people into the cities, eventually fused art with a kind of mass-market that was driven by the fashions and tastes of consumers. The technology of the time, not just in photography but in printing and cheaper paint, meant that any kind of depiction was available. Impressionism was the first example of such deviation. After it was gone, the value of what made a good artwork, that had previously been subject to a strict hierarchy, was now decided by anyone willing to pay for the privilege.
The end of impressionism created a demand for an ever-increasing multitude of styles. Post-impressionism spawned symbolism, fauvism, cubism, orphism, futurism, constructivism, expressionism, and every topic and style of painting that could possibly be thought of. Because the subject of the painting was now infinite, the basis on what made an artwork good became the unique vision of the artist and their ability to interpret reality in any way they saw fit.
While the idea of the artist as a unique individual existed as far back as ancient societies, it would find its most forceful expression in Van Gogh, a severely mentally ill Dutch painter inspired by the dreaminess of Japanese prints and impressionist paintings. He pledged to make his paintings as if a common worker had made them. It is often thought because of his style that Van Gogh painted from his imagination, but the idea of art as imagination was only just starting to present itself at the time. The famous argument between Van Gogh and his friend Gauguin, which led to him slicing off Van Gogh’s ear, was over this exact point. Gauguin thought that the artist should experience reality so that he could imagine new things, whereas Van Gogh was adamant that the artist should always paint from nature to capture real emotion.
Today, far more people have heard of the sad Dutchman than of Gauguin, but it’s interesting that Van Gogh actually lost the argument in the end. During the 20th Century, art would come to be defined by its imagination, proving Gauguin right.
This change was solidified by a very different type of artist, Pablo Picasso. The Spaniard painted in many different styles throughout his prolific career, finally turning to the primitivist art of Africa. The shapes and flatness gave him and his friend George Braque the idea of using them to make landscapes and still lifes, which were then mocked as “cubes” by the French press. Cubism, as it was later known, was given the attribute of revolutionising art by showing objects from multiple different perspectives at the same time. Aside from the fact that most cubist paintings don’t actually do that, this was a fad that quickly disappeared. It was only given that feature later by Picasso’s associate critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
Picasso and Braque themselves had called the style “synthetism” because, as they saw it, they were using basic principles to construct entirely new objects in art. But by the time Picasso and Braque were exhibiting in the 1910s, the whole idea of “newness” had become accepted alongside a rapidly growing entertainment and fashion industry. Just as the roaring 20s saw demands for new fashions, new films, new cars, they also demanded new art. Picasso was the artist who found a way to satisfy this demand.
Cubist Still Life Painting
The problem with basing artistic merit on the individual genius of a single artist is that it begs the question: If Van Gogh was simply an ordinary person with no mental difficulties who had produced the exact same style of painting, are the paintings equally as good?
The second problem, as the artists of the early 20th Century realised, was that there are only so many styles that could be dreamt up by a single person.
Perhaps then it was inevitable that there were those who would reject the role of the individual entirely, and try to make art into a style that would encompass not just the gallery, but all objects in society. Futurism and constructivism were two such movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Both tried to expand the definition of art to include everything from theatre, architecture, furniture, fashion and even cooking. Both of them also embraced totalitarian governments that would lead to most of the originators of the movement either censored or in prison.
The emergence of Dada and surrealism perhaps represent the individualist strain of the constructivists and futurists. Starting as a protest against the First World War, Dada used the theories of Sigmund Freud to try to free artworks from their previous hierarchy of value. Marcel Duchamp (who had been a futurist) in particular was adamant that the primacy of any artwork was the idea behind it, rather than the materials or the subject. He sought to illustrate this by displaying his Urinal in a Dada show in New York, 1917.
By the end of the 20th Century, the artist had come a long way. From lowly craftsman in medieval times, to genius workman in the renaissance, to imaginative genius of the 19th Century, and finally to an applied philosopher of the 20th, who would use whatever mediums at their disposal to manifest a creative idea.
The obvious question was, of course, once you have no material or craftsmanship as the basis of your work and are left only with philosophy, what exactly are you going to philosophise about? Because it may be true that art can be anything, as the conceptualists claim, but it cannot be everything.
This was the same problem that was posed to Duchamp, the accredited father of conceptual art. A poll of 500 art experts in 2004 named his urinal as the most important modern artwork of all time, overshadowing such things as the paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Dali and Lucian Freud. Public incredulity aside, one can see why The Fountain is adopted as a symbol by the contemporary art establishment. Duchamp was a pioneer of what would become the art of the latter half of the 20th Century that placed the value of an artwork in its concept.
The Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917
When asked in a later interview about his contributions to art history, he stated that he felt he “did not belong there”, and that most of his work was as an outside experimenter and a mischief-maker. The piece was named a great work of art because it predicted what would later become a dominant style. But after occult artist Hilma af Klimt created the first autonomous drawings in the 1890s, later forming the basis of abstract art, his pieces were hardly qualified as the greatest artworks of the 19th Century simply because they were a precursor.
It seems that the legacy of the conceptualists who won out in the 1970s has been two-fold: To push the centre of art towards political movements, and at the same time to create art that is increasingly inward and concentrates on smaller aspects of the human experience.
This is what we see in contemporary art movement: A split between those who want to embrace a collective and social politics, and those who focus on increasingly minute parts of individual experience, a phenomenon that has been called in some sociology and media circles; “hyper-individualism”. The term has been given other names by various authors but usually refers to a nihilistic, self-centered, and isolated form of individualism. It’s what leads Tracey Emin to produce her installations about negative experiences that she had with past boyfriends and celebrated artist Wolfgang Tillmans to create photography “documenting the gay nightlife of London”.
Or you can think of the artist Andrea Fraser, who invited a gallery owner to sleep with her to demonstrate the power dynamics of institutions, and made videos in the form of personal therapy sessions to viewers talking about their issues.
Tracey Emin, Installation
There are other factors at play in the current rut of contemporary art. Because as some artists carry on splitting the finer hairs of individualism, there are others who see art as an attempt to transform all of social relations.
As feminist scholar Camile Paglia has noted, the avant-garde in the arts which saw itself as pushing the ideals of the civil rights movement, had pretty much by the 1980s ran out of steam. The photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, which showed gay men often naked or dressed in bondage gear, Paglia noted, was probably the last such time where art was still plausibly used as this kind of social boundary-pushing.
Since then, some art historians have noted the increasing attempts since the 1990s to try to engage in what writer Claire Bishop calls “social practice art” in her 2012 book Artificial Hells. She documents the strain of artists who try to organise people in a way to raise awareness of the social conditions around them. She points to Thomas Hirschhorn, who creates large installations that offer collective discussion on obscure French philosophers. Other examples are the American artist Theaster Gates and the British collective Assemble, whose art involves creating furniture and building houses for the poor. The most famous of this type of artist is Tino Seghal, who invites audiences to arrange themselves based on who has the most power, or the most money, in the room.
The trends were noted by a French philosopher Nicholas Bourriard who coined the term “relational aesthetics” in his 1995 essay. It described art that blurred the line between objects and everyday life, emphasising the relationship between the viewer and the object. Where this comes from, as Bishop sees it, is the desire that many artists have to not be useless, and for their art to mean something in the real world.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Photography
The conflict that contemporary art finds itself in is one of where to get its value from. We no longer agree that we can get our value from religion, or that we can get it from philosophy, or even natural beauty. Instead, the contemporary art establishment seems to have decided that, because some value systems cannot appeal to everyone, that all value systems have to be abolished. The idea seems to be that once previous value hierarchies are demolished, a new one based on a kind of progressive social activism can be established. To this end, judges on art award panels often try to nominate work that they say will “shock the public”, without realising that the most shocking thing that could be found in a contemporary art gallery would be a well-painted portrait.
People who decry the current depraved state of contemporary art, and see it as Spengler did as a symptom of social decay, may actually be looking in the wrong places. For future art historians will not just judge the cultural output of our time on the art institutions, but on every form of media.
Just as the heyday of theatre was the end of the 19th Century, and Broadway became a high art form during the 20th, the medium evolves and is taken over by more advanced technologies. Many mediums like film, radio, soap opera, and synthetic music saw their heydays in the 20th Century. In the 21st, we are living through a golden age in TV dramas and in audio. Video games arguably saw their peak in the mid-2000s, and we may live to see a prominent period of new entertainment technologies like virtual reality. Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli, and game studios like thatgamecompany, have made some of the most beautiful and moving animations of this century.
This is another irony of the current art establishment, which follows a creed that art can be anything, but holds a very narrow definition of art when it comes to the entertainment industries. What is noteworthy is that instead of trying to show the more base and worthless aspects of culture and elevate them to high art, as pop art tries to do, the creators like Studio Ghibli and thatgamecompany actually refine their creations into a medium of real human emotion, away from the more lewd industry that anime and video games started out as.
What is different is that in our time, although we have the ability to create incredible artistry and craft in the realm of entertainment, our institutions have lost all sense of the sacred and are unwilling to produce art that speaks to any kind of shared value. The only value that Western societies seem to hold onto is some vague sense of human rights. The UN and other institutions encourage this slightly by holding art competitions to promote human rights, but it is unfortunately not taken seriously by the rest of the art world.
Medium is undoubtedly part of the problem. The fact that artists today have unlimited mediums to choose from means that art schools have responded by trying to teach students how to develop their own creativity without teaching anything technical. This is understandable, as technologies change too fast for art schools to attempt to train a generation of CGI artists, but the fact is that most art students simply do not have the intense technical training that would allow them to create the works of artistic value that could be created by animators.
Maybe the vague humanistic liberalism is a starting point for a kind of value-based art that could be improved with effort. It is one way to try to bring value back into art. If we had schools and institutions that funded this, our societies could perhaps create great art again. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need, we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.
Peter Doig Painting
The truth is that art needs institutions to sustain it, institutions that can come from public or private funding, but without the ideals of beauty and cultural value, the only thing that is left is social activism, which is what the contemporary art museums and big galleries have devolved into.
But artists can use techniques to capture beauty and talk about meaningful issues at the same time. Such institutions were created during the 19th Century, though today they may have to be formed outside the galleries and art museums that currently exist, which are often dominated by social activists and critical theorists obsessed with deconstructing the world around them
Instead of trying to imagine a perfect nonexistent art movement, we can look at some current contemporary artists, ones that break through the fakeness and obsession with deconstruction to make art that is both beautiful and meaningful.
In the fine arts, one can look at the paintings of Peter Doig, Odd Nestrum, Lucian Freud and Liu Xiaodong to find artists who can still create beautiful paintings. Sculptors Antony Gormley, Olafur Eliasson, and the generative art of Pierre Huyghe are good examples in sculpture. One of the best examples of humanist photographers is Sebastiao Salgado, who was the UN official photographer for many years, and in terms of pure formalism, Anthony Gormely is without rival. Architects that could be imitated include Jordi Fauli, currently finishing Gaudi’s unique Sagrada Familia, and the Thai artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, who constructed the Wat Rong Khun temple in Thailand.
Wat Rong Khun Temple by Chalermchai Kositpipat,
It’s not the case that all contemporary art is worthless, but the only way out of the current predicament of art is to centre art around ideals of humanist virtue, and revive the idea of beauty and craft. This does not mean reverting to the techniques of the past by only painting portraits, still life and carving busts. No, new mediums like installation, performance, generative and video art are here to stay. Artists should engage with new technologies like digital image making, and CGI animation and 3D printing to create new works with value - rather than use it as a form of criticism.
It’s worth reminding people why art is important. Similar to great literature, great art attunes us to aspects of nature that otherwise go unnoticed. Like the art of 100 years ago that Spengler observed, the art of our time may be a symptom of social malaise, but not necessarily the end of our civilisation. Future societies will judge us by the culture we pass onto them. However long it takes us to revive art suited for the problems of our time which encapsulate lasting value, it will be worth it.
Sebastiao Salgado, Photography
