What makes great art great? Is it simply a matter of personal taste, with little or no regard for skill or execution? Or are there standards by which an artistic work can be objectively judged? Renowned artist Robert Florczak confronts these challenging questions in the latest short video from Prager University.
Check it out below:
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Modern/”abstract” art was created when many artists in the 20th century discovered that they could not match the great works of the artists of previous centuries.
So they and art critics (who needed jobs too) devised the abstract art hoax telling people that what from the outside looked like a jumbled mess painted by chimpanzees on dope was actually “great art.”
And if you couldn’t recognize the greatness of the doodles, daubs, and smears, you were obviously a philistine.
But they would be there to tell educate you so you could learn to recognize great art too….and hand out bundles of cash to buy the art.
Modern art is basically garbage. Along with atonal modern music they are the biggest artistic scams of the past one hundred years or more.
People pay millions to buy Jackson Pollock’s daubs and droppings on canvas refusing to admit that it’s junk.
Modern Art is hideous, ugly, incoherent, irrational, and nihilistic because of the collapse of philosophy into unreason. Irrational philosophy will result in irrational art. Rational philosophy will result in a rational culture ant its rational art.
“Ancient Greece tore away the heavy shroud of mysticism woven for centuries in murky temples, and achieved, in three centuries, what Egypt had not dreamed of in thirty: a civilization that was essentially pro-man and pro-life. The achievements of the Greeks rested on their confidence in the power of man’s mind—the power of reason. For the first time, men sought to understand the causes of natural phenomena, and gradually replaced superstition with the beginnings of science. For the first time, men sought to guide their lives by the judgment of reason, instead of resorting exclusively to divine will and revelation.
The Greeks built temples for their gods, but they conceived of their gods as perfect human beings, rejecting the cats, crocodiles and cow-headed monstrosities enshrined and worshiped by the Egyptians. Greek gods personified abstractions such as Beauty, Wisdom, Justice, Victory, which are proper human values. In the Greek religion, there was no omnipotent mystical authority and no organized priesthood. The Greek had only a vague idea of, and little interest in, an afterlife.” – Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics In Marble”
“Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods.
The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today’s esthetic mirrors—the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic—you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today’s culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called “art”—not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators.” – Ayn Rand
Disappointing video it does not get to the essential cause of what produces a given era’s or a given culture’s art. It is the dominant philosophy or religion of a people, country, or era that determines its art.
“Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.” – Ayn Rand
Why are there no great Muslim painters, or great Muslim sculpture, or great Muslim music? Because Islam prohibits art with the threat of death, blasphemy, and heresy.
The same is true of Christianity. When Christianity was practiced in its pure form, it produced the Christian Dark Ages. Art became hideous, ugly, terrifying, boring. Music was diminished, stifled, stultified, by the Church to just the basic form of other-wordly, supernatural, monotonous, God-worship of Gregorian Chant. No composer could compose with any new musical innovation without incurring the wrath and rod of Christendom.
“Philosophy is the sculptor of man’s soul. And sculpture is philosophy in stone.” – Objectivist Art Historian Mary Ann Sures
“METAPHYSICS IN MARBLE” by Mary Ann Sures
“The history of sculpture is a history of man’s view of man — of his body and spirit, i.e., of his metaphysical nature. Every culture, from the most primitive to the most civilized, has held an estimate of man and has wanted to see the objectified reality of that estimate. Man has been the predominant subject of sculpture, whether he was judged to be an object of pride or of shame, a hero or a sinner.
A metaphysical view of man is projected by the manner in which the sculptor presents the human figure. In the process of shaping clay or wood or stone into the form of a body, the sculptor reveals his answer to three questions: Is man a being of free will or is he a helpless puppet of fate? — Is he good or evil? — Can he achieve happiness or is he doomed to misery?” – Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics In Marble”
You obviously know nothing of the art and music of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or the Baroque. For you anything is an opportunity to engage in your obsession of religious bigotry.
Perhaps you should look for that job in those 4 links I sent you. But that would take effort wouldn’t it.
You know literally know nothing about Christian history or Christian art. You stand on the shoulders of giants, yet you mock them. Your stunted worldview is just a more regressive form the woke absolutism being forced on the west currently.
Greek civ in it’s late stage empire:Ephiphanes put a pig in the Jews temple—a disordered and vicious act. Also those middle ages Christian monks preserved Greek history culture and language
As a modern artist I paint what like – I’ve had positive responses and negative ones. I’m happy if people like my paintings and not too worried if people don’t like them.
If people don’t like the art currently being produced by others, (and a lot of it doesn’t appeal to me) they are free to produce their own. Unless they live in a totalitarian culture like an I$lamic or Communist state.
The value of a particular artwork varies and a frequent cause of hilarity and disbelief in our house. But what would life be without laughter?
Modern art is a mess back in the days of Rembrandt and the rest and Grant Wood who’s classic work of art American Gothic and Audubon his Bird Paintings are classic the artists today probably started with Picasso