John and y'all: I was a bit disturbed by the article from Roger Scruton, which Platt recomended earlier. http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html Maybe I was disturbed because I recently watched a documentary about Hitler's taste in art and Scruton's similarity to that old Nazi kinda creeped me out. One of the first things he did was gather up all the modern art he could find, the kind Scruton condemns and which is pictured beside the article, for a great exhibition. He wanted people to know what "decadent" art looked like before he destroyed it all. Scruton almost mentions this... At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in expression. This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms. We find this posture overtly adopted in the art of Austria and Germany between the wars—for example, in the paintings and drawings of Georg Grosz, in Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (a loving portrait of a woman whose only discernible goal is moral chaos), and in the seedy novels of Heinrich Mann. And the cult of transgression is a leading theme of the postwar literature of France—from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the nouveau roman. dmb continues:The modernist painting produced in Austria and Germany "between the wars" was exactly the kind of stuff Hitler hated too. He was into the Rockwellian "fugurative painting" that competed with it. In fact, I'd characterize Scruton's example (below) as Hallmarky schmaltz. And the whole idea that painter are supposed to uphold social moral codes strikes me as quite wrong, reactionary and even a bit medieval. As I see it, Platt's recommendation just shows that he has a fascist's taste in art. > > Here is another example: it is a special occasion, when the family unites > for a ceremonial dinner. You set the table with a clean embroidered cloth, > arranging plates, glasses, bread in a basket, and some carafes of water and > wine. You do this lovingly, delighting in the appearance, striving for an > effect of cleanliness, simplicity, symmetry, and warmth. The table has > become a symbol of homecoming, of the extended arms of the universal mother, > inviting her children in. And all this abundance of meaning and good cheer > is somehow contained in the appearance of the table. This, too, is an > experience of beauty, one that we encounter, in some version or other, every > day. We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home—the place > where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home > through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction > with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right—through > decorating, arranging, creating—are attempts to extend a welcome to > ourselves and to those whom we love.
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