The spiritual in art. Is it important? Is innovation and form enough? Traditional images had outworn their time, but did it mean that a maturing spiritualsm had to be discarded as well? That an invisible, transformative energy had to be killed off or transformed into insolent and envious caricatures filled with the grotesque and the vulgar. To be consumed by light or to cover it in darkness?
Quite a damning critique of Picasso, but Donald Kuspit always backs up his positions plausibly, agree or not with his views. ( see link at end):
Read More:http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/84/nihilism.html ---The horrors of the Second World War, especially the Jewish Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompted another existential crisis among artists. It seemed impossible that “civilized” society was capable of committing the vast atrocities that were revealed when the Nazi death camps were opened at the end of the war. It was equally incomprehensible that humankind could possess a technology capable of destroying all life on earth. In the postwar years, artists often expressed horrified anxiety at the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.---
Picasso said that it took him a lifetime to learn to paint like a child; a child sees reality in a distorted way. He remained a malevolent child at heart — the kind who tears wings off butterflies, as many of his pictures of women suggest. They’re often battered beyond recognition, which suggests that he was a sadistic bully. It is also the reason he is a bad painter. Children can’t paint very well. Their art has the freshness of a false innocence, not the dignity of seasoned experience. Picasso’s art in general is over-rated; he appeals to our unconscious aggression, not to our mature perception. He was an arrogant child; Bion argues that arrogance is an expression of the death instinct. Picasso was an innovator, but innovation is not everything in art. The question is what motivates it, what attitude it expresses. The artist’s mentality finally counts for more than his method, however unusual (until it is assimilated as the latest novelty).
Picasso never outgrew the caricature, suggesting that his art is a case study in arrested emotional development. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/lyonel-feininger-at-the-whitney-7-12-11.asp
Read More:http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/PullingBacktheCurtain/pullingbackthecurtain.php ---Modern and Post-modern Art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous, vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming bulk of its would-be audience, who can find nothing with which to relate. It has been called exciting and cutting-edge, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous.---
ADDENDUM:
There are only 826 Bouguereaus and about 465 Tademas in the world. Do you know how many Picassos there are? Can anybody here guess? There are 80,000 of them, and the balance between supply and demand has faltered, and like the dot com stocks of last year they will soon come crashing down along with hundreds of billions of paper profits lost in the dust of history. Like the tulip bulbs in the 17th century, or Tokyo Real estate in the 1980′s, investors will be decimated. If I owned a work by any of those “Abstract artists” I would be racing to cash it in before the fall, and that has been my recommendation to dozens who have asked me. Read More:http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/PullingBacktheCurtain/pullingbackthecurtain.php
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