From Divine to Disgusting - Granite Grok

From Divine to Disgusting

Before my marriage, the last time I went to an art exhibit, was when I went to see an exhibit of Gauguin in Sodom by the Potomac Washington DC, but that was only because I was accompanying my parents on their annual snowbird migration to Florida.

They wanted to see it, so – because “culture” and “education” – they dragged me along.

Before then? I suspect it was in elementary school, back in the dinosaur era when I had to evade the local T-rex on the way to school each day.  (Or so my older financial drain & headache creator child tells everyone; “My dad is so old…”.)

My wife has always been an artsy-fartsy type and perhaps a year or so after the first kid’s birth we went to Boston’s Museum of Fine Art where, quite coincidentally, they had a huge exhibit of abstract glass art by Chihuly.

While I’m not normally a modern/abstract art fan, I must admit it was fascinating – to the point where we made a second trip just to see that exhibit again at my insistence.

I was captivated on two levels.

 

 

(Image source)

 

First, as art, it was visually appealing to me.  Each physical piece compelled me to look at it from different perspectives, probably to the disconcertment of those behind me as I took my sweet time looking.  (I suppose some of the pieces that look like tentacles pulled at my fandom of H.P. Lovecraft.)

Second, as someone with a whiff of familiarity with glass-making techniques, I had to admire the sheer skill it took to do each individual piece, let alone make pieces’ shapes and colors consistent.  I can only imagine the learning curve it must have taken to get to that point of mastery.

 

SKILL, PLANNING, KNOWLEDGE, ETC.

Consider the Italian marble carving The Veiled Virgin.  Image from the link.

 

 

Wow.  Just… wow.  Hashem only knows how much thought and planning went into this.  How many hours of work it took, let alone practice trials and the inevitable discarded test pieces as the artist worked towards creating this masterpiece.  The same for many of the 3D Greek and Roman friezes, Egyptian paintings and carvings, and so on.

So too are many of the renaissance artworks.  Or ceramics from across the world, e.g., Persian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.  Never mind the skill and practice necessary to create the varied art forms by myriad techniques.

Just think about the trial and error and experimentation to develop each step of the ceramics, or paintings, or sculptures – the mastery of the medium, the selection of which oils for carrying the pigments… let alone the development of the pigments themselves by people who cannot possibly have had actual knowledge of the chemical structures that created such vivid hues.  Even earlier “primitive” artwork carried with it awe on my part.

And I found it interesting to me how old the lost wax process is, and from a logistics perspective it’s found in Europe, Asia, and even the Americas.  Could there have been communications?  Or were these different locations all independently originating this?  Either possibility is intriguing.

 

BUT THEN… MODERN ART ARRIVES

 

Now let’s be clear – art, in any form, appeals to individuals, and as individuals, we have different tastes.  That’s fair.  I liked Chihuly, she did too but not to the same level; she likes paintings more while I prefer sculptures and ceramics & metals work.  But my wife, modern art aficionado that she is, once gushed about an artist who had his own feces canned; some of his other artworks are equally… con man worthy, IMHO.

Lines on paper sealed in envelopes, balloons filled with his breath.  She enthusiastically showed me other works by other artists… vile, amateurish.  I’d rather own a painting by an elephant!

 

(Image source)

 

Other examples by multiple artists abound.  The latest, to my knowledge, was the invisible statue that sold for over $18K.  I’ve seen piles of junk for sale for huge prices.  Supposedly there was a piece of modern art thrown away by the cleaning staff.  Looking at it I find it hard to fault them for doing so.

As I understand it some of these “artworks” do appreciate and sell for significant gains in value.  How I can’t fathom.  But there we are.  I suspect that owning something shocking & controversial has a lot to do with it.

 

THE PURPOSE OF ART

As I implied above, to me art is something that both appeals to the eye as well as makes one thing – whether on an artistic plane or, in my case, an admiration of the pure skill / extraordinary technology focus.  To me art uplifts.  It elevates.  A really good piece of art, no matter the medium, appeals to the soul seeing a piece of captured beauty on earth.  It makes you wonder; it makes you think.  If you’ll tolerate a religious-based argument: beauty in art (and music) are small shards of the Divine captured for all to admire and be inspired.

But then we have the *cough cough* “art” with menstrual blood as the medium.  And leave us not overlook the infamous Piss Christ, or the Virgin Mary depicted with pornographic images and elephant dung (links removed):

On a yellow-orange background, the large painting (8 feet high and 6 feet wide) depicts a black woman wearing a blue robe, a traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary. The work employs mixed media, including oil paint, glitter, and polyester resin, and also elephant dung, map pins and collaged pornographic images. The central Black Madonna is surrounded by many collaged images that resemble butterflies at first sight, but on closer inspection are photographs of female genitalia…

All praised, of course, as “edgy” and other laudatory terms, the main appeal is not artistic merit – at least, not by the metrics of how I define it.  The cultural ion thrusters I mentioned here, a term I coined on my old blog, apply.  Shock value seems to be the primary focus, with subsequent works by other artists determined to push that edge further; X shocks, to create a similar shock one must go to X-prime, X having already been done.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Remember the furor over the clearly-deliberate upskirt-view to an actresses panties some years ago?  Then it seemed like every actress was doing it.  After that shock value went away, it moved to outfits with a built-in set of underwear to give the appearance of no underwear.  And then, actual flashes of exposed “lady bits”.  The edge moves in clothing for shock value, and thus notoriety and fame.  Consider these edgy outfits from the Hollyweird Red Carpet set.  Et tu, #metoo?

So too does the edge move in art in the quest for the next edgy.

Again, in my mind art should be about uplifting the spirit.  Of seeing beauty.  The same for music.  I recall one time, visiting my parents during Christmas vacation from college, and they had some piece of choral / Christmas music on the TV in some show or another – I broke down, seeing this magnificent rendering of some classical music piece which was pure and melodious… and then comparing it to the crude and bitter world about which I was reading in the news.

 

RUINED AND TERRIBLE

Over the years since my re-introduction to art this phrase from the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has come to mind each time I see such horrible drek passed off as art.

Do you know how the Orcs first came into being? They were Elves once. Taken by the Dark Powers. Tortured, and mutilated. A ruined and terrible form of life.

— Saruman

Yes, modern art is beauty that has been taken by the dark powers – tortured and mutilated to its utter ruination.  Shocking rather than uplifting; negative rather than positive.  Consider the controversy over the new Amazon-sponsored Tolkien production.  From various sources, it looks to be something virtually unrecognizable as anything JRR Tolkien created.  There are rumors – unconfirmed as I can find – of contracts with actors regarding explicit sex scenes.  Supporting, however, here (links and italics in original, bolding added):

According to TheOneRing.net, the casting agency for the series put out an open call for actors who “must be comfortable with nudity.” In addition, Amazon Studios has hired an “intimacy coordinator,” and the writer and producer from “Game of Thrones,” Bryan Cogman, has officially been hired as a consulting producer. 

The left is already cheering on the beginnings of the presumed assassination of Tolkien’s legacy. The leftist “NY Magazine” ran a story this week headlined, “Give Us the Horny Lord of the Rings Show We Deserve.” “Are we sure that an overwhelmingly erotic Middle Earth experience is such a bad thing,” read the article. “Make the elves get a little freaky. Allow the hobbits their fun. Give a new meaning to the inscription on the West-door of the Mines of Moria: Speak, friend, and enter.”

Anything decent and good and uplifting, the Left is determined to ruin and tear down.

 

 

THE LEFT IS MORGOTH & SAURON

Let’s not absolve the Right – there are elements of ruin here too, but broadly, what hasn’t the Left attempted to twist, break, and mutilate… and celebrated when they do?

Traditional marriage.  Childhood innocence.  Creation of posterity and a future.  National sovereignty & pride.  Character, not race.  Individualism.  Merit.  Law and order.  Religion and morality in general.  Beauty in art and music.  I could go on and on.

So here’s a challenge: look at anything the Left espouses.  Then work back to what was, before the Left took it and changed it.  My bet?  You will find a thing of beauty.  Of purity.  Of wonder.  Ruined.

“Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin [what] good forces have invented or made.”

— JRR Tolkien

A society that has lost its roots, and had its principles and traditions and virtue destroyed, is ripe for remaking.

 

(Link to AZQUOTES per their policy.)

 

And this is the real reason for their work to corrupt all: their Marxianic vision of a one-world Socialist Utopia.  Remember, this does not need a central planning committee to push directions out.  Merely having some simple rules.

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