TwentyFirst C Christianity

Art Elites advance the Barbarians' Assault

I have never done a course in art history to match my education in literature. So to my shame I did not even consciously know of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, just one significant French classicist who is now being given an airing in the Louvre. Those that know say, that while not great, he had a 'jaw-dropping outpouring' of drawings alone over some 70 years. He was an obstinate and proud man [as a self-portrait shows well], and strangely, he did not value his many fine and profitable portraits as much as others do now. Even in the early 1800s era he was a stern classicist, but he also did many striking romantic, historical and religious themes. He was eclectic and prolific, commanding all the astonishing traditional skills of his art. He lived in Rome for 18 years, absorbing and reinterpreting all the classicism it had to offer.

I choose him as just one example of a great artistic achiever which our 'enlightened' age hardly knows or cares about. In literature greats like Shakespeare, Austen, Trollope and Dickens can survive in the public mind in TV and film versions, but in art the stern doorkeepers of modernism have banished to obscurity centuries of huge achievement, so that no-one benefits even from an education in them. I am not asking for world student tours of art museums, only for the serious passing on of a serious art history tradition in the same sense as Harold Bloom's Great Tradition of literature. Both are in eclipse. The reason is the usurpation of education by the intellectually barren, anti-cultural marxist left, as can be seen in the terms used quite unselfconsciously below.

Here's what a art contrarian [so on my side] Sebastian Smee thinks of the present treatment of great achievers like Ingres:
""For those embroiled in the polarised politics of art, looking at Ingres can feel like a guilty pleasure. The problem, most obvioulsy, is that he is seen as reactionary ... although painting itself is still alive, and even undergoing a resurgence, the 'culture of painting', of connoisseurship and academic training and all the things that mattered to Ingres, is dead.
...In the art schools painting is associated with elitism, with silly money, with comfort and repose and backwardness, all of which one can presumably sidestep by taking up video art... [A very fashionable US 'kitsch' artist John Currin recently said]: "Museums have come to favour forms such as video art as ....'good for the public' or as 'educational'. Painting itself is not a progressive form.... it has too big a history to be use in this way. ""
Currin himself describes this elite as made up of 'left intellectuals'.. 'the clergy who control who feels ashamed and who doesn't. They are the big shamers...".

This is an example of cultural insanity. Art has for a century now been in the vanguard of the march of the barbarians over everything worthwhile before it. This is like the Romans, say of 300 AD, saying to each other "We know we have more than 600 years of great artistic and cultural achievement to pass on to our young, but it's just too big to be done, so let's ignore it all and promote unconstructive, effortless trivia and profitable dross." And they proceeded to do just that...

This is exactly the feeling I had when I walked [quickly] through the cavernous halls of the New Tate, in an old power station on the banks of the Thames. Not a single 'installation' of modern art captured my eye or my memory in all that space. I also saw little enthusiasm among the other wanderers, mostly the young, who in Milton's famous words 'look up and are not fed'. It was all free to look at, but it also gave nothing of real value back. People sauntered into the 'interpretation areas' for mental sustinence, where pompous statements were made about usually political ideas behind 'art' works that said nothing at all to the eye. Here was an empty hall celebrating great intellectual and moral emptiness, in direct comparison with the Old Tate nearby.

In education we are in the process of denying our young not only the enormous skill, feeling and intellectual education of an Ingres, but doing the same with the history and literature of our great Western civilisation. I was struck by the fact that Ingres, a relatively minor figure, has so much depth and value to communicate easily to anyone properly introduced to him - in my case by a news magazine article. It only takes dedicated teachers, properly trained themselves.

We deserve the barbarians' overthrow as much as the Romans did, because we actually favour their mental vacuity within the halls commanded by our cultural elites.

posted by Barrie @ 4/17/2006 04:50:00 PM