Tag Archives: Art

The first sentence says it all. From Fred Reed at theburningplatform.com:

Art is mostly fraud perpetrated by narcissistic academic quacks on a public easily gulled. They should be prosecuted. This is as true of literature as of painting and sculpture. If modern sculpture were placed in a junkyard, art critics couldn’t find it. Most of what we are told are great works are great works only because we are told that they are.

Consider the Mona Lisa, for mysterious reasons regarded an epochal detonation of artistry. Why? She is an excessively round woman who looks as if she is about to spit. We have to be told that she was an astonishment and marvel. Otherwise we would rate her a a pretty fair effort for an art student somewhere in Nebraska.

Yet put her at action with Christie’s and some witless digital arriviste would buy her for the price of an aircraft carrier.

Art has nothing to do with what the thing looks like, and certainly nothing to do with beauty. If it did, an indistinguishable copy would serve as well as the original. But no. The point is not to look at the thing, but to feel superior for owning it, and how can you do that when every mutt in Boise can get an equally good one for $37

I remember reading of a rich woman in New York who had an original something, maybe a Cezanne or Monet or anyway one of those blurry painters with nice colors. She was attached to it. It gave her life meaning. She kept it in a sealed, temperature-controlled display case full of helium, or some such. She probably spent whole mornings appreciating at it. It made her a celebrity. Critics came to her salons and said, “Yes, yes, the handling of the light, the highlights, the expressiveness, ah, only he could do it….”

Then they ran a mass-spec on the paint, which turned out to have been manufactured in 1958. It seemed that only Monet and someone else could do it. The critics stopped coming to visit. Her life was as naught. I don’t know that she jumped from a skyscraper, but it would have given the story balance and proportion.

Is it great art? Only your mass spectrometer knows for sure.

In fact beauty just gets in the way of Art, and constitutes a threat to it. The two are not compatible. Suppose a budding art critic visiting a museum discovers by chance his plumber, who is looking with admiration at, say, David’s Leonidas. This makes sense, never a good thing in art criticism. The Leonidas is a good paining, and looks like an actual person.

The critic is horrified. You can’t be a refined authority with a pince-nez and limp handshake and like what a plumber likes, for God’s sake. To distinguish himself from hoi poloi, he has to like something that his plumber doesn’t. So he starts appreciating maybe Modigliani, whose paintings sort of look like people but, finding that too many ordinary Joes like the guy, the critic moves on to perhaps Braque and Picasso. If you can like pictures of square people with three noses, you separate yourself from most of the competition. Not from third-graders, though, who have always done that sort of thing.

To continue reading: A Treatise on the Nonexistence of Art