Mausoleum of Modern Art
Robert Locke has an excellent piece on modern art, Mausoleum of Modern Art (link).
But they will have to face the truth sooner or later. Grandpa’s Weimar-era clichés are not going to be able to pretend they are the latest thing forever. Worse, the great pretender to the modernist throne, postmodernism, has utterly failed to take up modernism’s banner as the essential cultural expression of advanced humanity. Despite launching wildly histrionic gesture after gesture in the sphere of architecture, in art it has only managed to endlessly recycle technically hypertrophied later mannerist neo-Dada, to use the precisely correct art historical terminology. The Shock of the New has given way to the numbing familiarity of the ceremonial Violating of the Taboos, as if art were an angry pagan god needing an endless supply of sacrificial virgins to be palliated.
I don’t know about you, but I like my art (link) to be (link) beautiful (link)to look at (link). Yes, I know, I know… I am such a traditionalist.
