StJohnOfPatmos
9mo ago
I have to respectfully disagree with the specific examples you chose - as someone who has worked in public facing art institutions and museums interacting with throngs of tourists and casual museum-goers, Picasso is an absolute hit with the hoi polloi and by far one of the most common name drops for people who aren't aficionados or professionally involved in the art world.
Fra Angelico on the other hand blends into almost every single other "old" painting in the general publics mind, which they can as a whole barely distinguish or situate aside from famous pop culture classics like the Mona Lisa. I tentatively agree that if you were to drill them with questions about which artist has more beautiful formal output or better technical mastery, they might begrudgingly agree to Fra Angelico - but they like Picasso because they think it has a specific coolness, edge, and doesn't leave them feeling confused and uneducated as to the subject matter (the average lowbrow museum visitor couldn't even tell you what an Annunciation Scene is, it all just melts into "old Christian art"). Picasso has also been subject to a vast marketing campaign and has become a pop icon in his own right - and the masses love a celebrity, always.
Now, if we would ask the hoi polloi to choose between any kind of Old Master painting and some overly discursive conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth or actionist performance piece by Herman Nitsch, I definitely agree they would go for the former - and it IS true that modernist art has become a hermetic, jargon-and-discourse-heavy scene that often uses very nebulous and downright non-artistic criteria to evaluate contemporary art. What I'm disagreeing with specifically is that modern art is inherently bad due to elitism and that the central focus of Western art pre-modernism was its craftsmanship.
Also, calling avant-garde artists emasculated when it was quite literally their absolute time in the sun is so pitiful - it was pretty much the apex of the Artist as a public influence on society, a historically unparalleled prestige position that was gradually lost in the post-war Era.
Also, Monet and Van Gogh are some of the biggest crowd-pleasers out there and it's not even close.
StJohnOfPatmos
9mo ago
Why Modern Art is so awful
I'm not gonna engage with the other articles, but since I have a background and career in Art History, I feel compelled to comment on this essay.
In brief, I find it completely uninteresting and uneducated. He engages in the typical knee-jerk mystification of art that revolves around fixing some specific tipping point in History as the moment when things went from good to bad, and ascribes this turn to a form of malice or stupidity. Unsurprisingly, he can't really offer any concrete examples, quotes, dates, works, exhibitions or discursive shifts and needs to rely on completely nonsensical vibe-based generalisations that are by and large provably false.
There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century when this changed for worse. Art became perceived as elite and snobbish.
This is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the development of the public reception of art in Western Society. On the contrary, the turn of the century saw the downfall of the Salon, with its highly academic selection process and extreme emphasis on complex, highbrow subject matter (being able to "read" a painting and divulge its mythological, historic or religious contents having been a key element of art discourse and prestige since the Renaissance), and the ineffable rise of the Gallery, which classed taste and value by means of the free market without institutional gatekeeping.
The Impressionists are of course the eminent example of an art movement rejected by the academic elites and their official Salons, only to be such a spectacular success among the general population that Napoleon III saw himself pressured to form an entirely separate Salon just for their work.
Of course, his claim doesn't hold for the avant-garde period either - the 20th century begins with the Fauvist and Cubist movements, both of which draw their names from extremely negative press reviews by the established art circles in Paris ("fauve" meaning savage, and "Cubist" meant to deride its lack of depth beyond its visual formula). Once again, the elite art snobs from illustrious collector families and high positions in art academies were the main push against the early modernist movement. If one has an absolute minimum background knowledge pertaining to the history of Art Academies, this is obviously unsurprising, since elite Academies historically always initially resist stylistic and thematic shifts in art - the same thing happened to David's early paintings, which were Neoclassical at a time when Rococo was still the academic style of choice. It's just the nature of institutions to become resistant to change once their power and status is entrenched.
The actual critique he could have made, but didn't, is that on the contrary, the democratisation of art and art criticism that happened in the 19th century with the proliferation of journalism and literacy, the inauguration of public museums, and the rise of a new class of bourgeois art collectors is what led to the crisis of modern art, which lost clear formal and narrative criteria necessary for its evaluation. Does he seriously believe art during the Renaissance was not an elite, snobbish affair? Pretty much every single painting you will see in a museum up until the 19th century was either commissioned by the Church or the Aristocracy, with more humble social classes contenting themselves with mediocre family portraits and decorative still lives which have largely been lost to time due to no one caring enough to preserve them. The very right to own and perpetuate figurative depictions was considered a noble duty not suited for the common rabble.
Modern art became an elitist affair the moment it became entrenched within the institutions and academies that produce and manage artworks, same as every successful art movement before them.
Years before, painters might painstakingly dedicate hours on end to producing a mural or simple portrait which could easily be appreciated for the skill of the craft.
Furthermore, he places an emphasis on craft being the guiding criteria of pre-modernist art, which is such a hilarious spit in the face of the artistic Western tradition since the Renaissance, which explicitly, insistently and desperately wanted to elevate itself about the status of craftsmanship and join the realm of "high arts" like poetry and literature, whose value is derived by ingenuity, singularity, and formal application of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. Dürer instantly comes to mind as the artist who constantly insisted that no, he was not a craftsman, but something more akin to a visual poet. If he had read some first semester Art History 101 literature like Vasari's Biographies, he would see that this division between craftsmanship and artistry was a foundational concern of Western tradition since the Renaissance and quite literally defined the process and output of many Old Masters.
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
I recommend anyone to take a look at André Félibiens lectures on painting, which took place during the founding days of the Royal Academy in Paris and explicitly seek to lay out a hierarchy of values and criteria for critiquing painting - unsurprisingly, complex mythological and religious scenes were considered the high watermark, with still lives and landscapes at the very bottom of the list.
The simple yet decisive invention of the color photograph served as a functional coup de grâce for the niche that the more laborious method of hand painting depictions of scenery had formerly filled.
Thus modern artists, many of which with feelings of effective emasculation, had been outdone by their craft.
This is only vaguely applicable to the highly figurative Academicist styles that emerged from David's Neoclassicism and were the elite style of choice in the mid-19th century, placing an emphasis on lifelike details well suited to recuperation by photography. Most Old Masters were obviously interested in expressive and psychological visual effects that go beyond just being lifelike - Mannerism's dreamlike serpentine, elongated bodies, Rembrandts' emotive spatial distortions, Goyas grotesque, writhing faces, the list goes on and on. Not to speak of the expressive caricatural tradition of Dutch miniature painting found in Bruegel or Bosch, nor the exaggerated and bombastic compositions of Baroque art, which was Europe's single most durable and lasting artistic tradition since the end of the Middle Ages.
To reduce Western painting to its technical ability to render figurative depictions on a flat surface is to essentially say that Western art peaked and concluded with the Ghent Altarpiece in the 15th century and had no meaningful developments since.
Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts. How one can look at the extreme fervour and dynamism of the early avant-garde, its fanatical Utopianism and avowed quest to create forms of expression that resonated with normal people's lives under rapidly changing social, technological and political conditions and come away thinking it was due to the artists feeling "emasculated" is just the boring, vindictive anti-intellectualism of someone who has a bone to pick and lets his emotional resentment get the better of him.
I could go on picking apart more of this essay - he packed an impressive amount of bullshit into one single page - but I think I've largely made my point. Don't read this if you're looking for good criticism of modern art - watch the Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes or Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. They actually know what they're talking about.
StJohnOfPatmos
10mo ago
bikes should just fully share the sidewalk with pedestrians
I see where you're coming from but what you're effectively asking for is the adoption of the Third World's model for traffic, where everything flows chaotically and you're just supposed to improvise your movements without a clear structure for who can circulate where. Unsurprisingly, every single country with this kind of laissez-faire traffic mentality has horrendously high accident rates.
Here in Vienna, our main shopping street was transformed into a pedestrian zone about a decade ago - initially, the plan was for large swaths of the street to have a hybrid system where both bikers and pedestrians could share the street without any dividing markers. This had to be amended very shortly after its inauguration because it made the street experience too hectic and demanding for everyone involved, especially on a shopping street where people want to leisurely stroll and window-shop, not constantly be on the lookout for bikers trying to swerve around them. For the bikers themselves, the system sucked too, since they couldnt just bike down the street in a straight line, but had to constantly change their direction to avoid pedestrians standing in their way. It was a lose-lose situation for everyone involved and the quick addition of bike lane markers on the ground largely erased the problem overnight.
StJohnOfPatmos
10mo ago
The Netherlands would be the obvious case study. I'm not sure how exclusive their bike lanes are in relation to cars and pedestrians, but the bicycle is by far the fastest way to get around most Dutch towns and is the primary method of commuting to school or work for around a third of the population. Even the countryside has very polished and accessible lanes: since the country is geographically small, casually biking from a village to a major city is completely doable for many people.
All in all, I think bikeable cities are a no-brainer as long as there's competent central urban planning involved - its cheaper, faster, requires little space, and has health benefits. I personally hate biking in large cities, but I grew up in Vienna where bike lanes where mainly an afterthought and often set up in risky, high-traffic areas. From my visits to the Netherlands, it seems to be a totally different game there, since bike lanes dominate urban planning concerns more than cars.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
I have a strange bourgeois paralysis towards these kinds of small money-saving schemes. I engage in similar lines of thought as you, reading store policies and thinking of how to game their system, but the idea of turning these thoughts into practice repels me - I picture my grandfather, neatly dressed, sitting at the head of his dark wood dining table, drinking his choice glass of wine as he always did, witnessing me run back and forth between my car and the co-op, filling 4 individual tote bags with single items in order to save maybe 20 euros once the whole deed is done. Even though he was a businessman I'm certain he would have found the whole concept utterly indecent and verging on con-man behaviour, not fit for someone from a good family whose material needs are met.
It's not even that I think these schemes are morally bankrupt. Saving money without sacrificing your consumer habits sounds smart and desirable. It's more the implied dishonesty (and I guess some sort of "loss of face" since I immediately think of my family's reaction to it?) and a certain shamelessness that stops me in my tracks every time.
Perhaps places like your local co-op have a large enough customer base with a similar class profile to mine (or one that doesn't even consider gaming the policy to begin with) that it doesn't matter if a very small minority do actually exploit their discount system.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
I don't think there's a single condensed heuristic or rule of thumb that separates good writing from the rest. Different writers seek different things, so their process and manner of attaining them is going to be different, too. Some writers are very interested in people, others in places, and others in emotional sentiments or intellectual concepts. What works for one literary pursuit doesn't need to work for another.
I think if we want to attempt to overcome this inherent ambiguity and actually try to find common ground within good writers that are good in vastly different ways, we could use Marcus Aurelius' creed of "every action receiving its proportionate worth" as a starting point. When I think of the bad writing I've read, it often comes down to the author not being able to create distinctions - all sentences are of the same length, there's a systematic insertion of adjectives before most nouns no matter how relevant the noun in question is, everything is either too descriptive or fully devoid of it, etc. In essence, there's no melody or form (in the sense of structure) to the text.
Good writers may have styles, formulas, even tropes, but can reshape them continuously to fit many different moulds - moments of levity, beauty, tension, fear, comedy, and ecstasy can all be woven into one coherent piece of writing, because the writers know which central ideas and feelings they want to determine the reading of the text, and thus calibrate each action to it's worth in reaching that end. I'm making this sound more mathematical than it is, much of it is intuitive or a matter of practice and can't be "hacked" or "figured out" through an equation.
"The first and perhaps only rule for good style is to have something to say." - Schopenhauer
This Schopenhauer quote can be horrifically misinterpreted if one assumes he's saying that writing/art only needs a "message" to be beautiful. This is obviously not true, and the measly attempts to pass off the promotion of political and activist causes as a meaningful criteria for the evaluation of art speak for themselves.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/arts/design/venice-biennale-review-art-israel.html)
What Schopenhauer is talking about is more akin to a certain cognitive clarity, i.e. "having something to say" about something that one has given considerable thought, reflection, experience, questioning, etc. This is why certain writers can extract wonderful, even lengthy pieces of writing out of the simplest topics or ideas. Herman Melville immediately comes to mind as someone who can seemingly wring every last drop of poetry and insight out of any given topic related to the sea:
"And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales."
There is a certain "knowing" at play here, which doesn't have to stem from actual experience per se (although in Melville's case, he had an extensive experience of seafaring), but can come from a directed focus of the mind towards something. There's something akin to philosophy or rational thought happening there, but there's equally a large space for reveries, poetry, and inspiration being given.
This is completely true, and it's an argument against the point the original essay was making. The democratisation of art has diluted technical and formal criteria by dismantling traditional forms of gatekeeping - not some new-found elitism.
Poetry's downfall in particular which you mention seems to me to be suffering from a similar issue - our elites aren't reading anymore and have little meaningful exposure to the great classics of Western poetry. The Rupi Kaur-style of poetry is successful because it is extremely undemanding to read and easy to consume, perfectly fit for a society that acquired Ivy League Humanities degrees by using Sparknotes and summarized bullet points to interact with a Lord Byron poem. There is a stunning lack of snobbishness even in our most elite universities.
I find the concept of a "golden age of art" overly ambitious and reductive, but it makes for a fun dinner party conversation. Your periodisation leaves out the entire Gothic period and the Renaissance, not to speak of Classical Antiquity and Ancient Rome, so I have trouble getting on board with it as the decisive high watermark of art. I also find much of the 18th Century to be a relative low point in the Western tradition of painting before 1900, but I think that's largely a matter of taste.
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