The Decline of Art in Western Culture Parallels the Decline of Everything Else

For most of western history art was used as a way for patrons to showcase achievements or propagandize citizens or lionize individuals.  Maybe the single greatest artist in human history, Michelangelo, created his greatest works for patrons of various sorts.  David he created for the Florentine Guild of Wool, the Pieta for the French ambassador to the Holy See and the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica for popes. Art was, in one way or another an homage to something greater than its creator. 

Fast-forward about three centuries and the art world begun to change.  Art as an indulgence of artists, where they would paint whatever they wanted, with or without a desire that someone would pay for it is largely a child of the late 19^th century.  That’s when Impressionism, that distinctly unconventional, non traditional form or painting emerged.  In a very short period of time the world of art went from uber traditional world of Bouguereau to the anything but world of Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.  Suddenly art was no longer a vehicle for vanity or the celebration of greatness or storytelling.  It was something else. 

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, a French artist unveiled a urinal on a wooden box and called it “Fountain”.  A hundred years later art had “evolved” so much that a banana taped to a wall with duct tape (an actual banana… not plastic or paper mâché) would sell for $120,000 in 2019…

It is into this universe of art that we find what is supposed to be cutting edge and courageous, in the form of the Pietà by German designer Harald Glööckler.  The revisualization of the classic piece features a tattooed Christ and a trans Mary.  And what’s courageous about this piece?  It stands up to those vicious, hateful… Christians. 

In the cacophony of 2023, while there are other issues that are of far more import than this, this one might be a bit illustrative. 

Having the “courage” to stand up to Christians and defile Christian traditions and symbols doesn’t actually require any courage… because there’s no danger of anything bad actually happening besides some chastising words from a few of the offended.  No one is going to issue death threats against you, no one is going to put a bounty on your head, mobs of people aren’t going to start riots and kill others because of you, as was shown in 1986 with The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili and 1987 with Piss Christ, by Andres Serrano. Of course there is another religion where that’s exactly what happens if one were to criticize it or its symbols… but of course those “courageous” artists aren’t assailing that religion.

This is a symbol of the bizarro world we find ourselves living in.  Other things that are counted as courageous today include a man announcing that he’s a woman, flaunting one’s morbid obesity in public or wrapping oneself in the flag of victimization for being black or gay or some other category. 

None of those things takes courage in 2023 America where being anything but a patriotic heterosexual Christian white male accords hero worship. It doesn’t take courage to assail someone or something where there is no threat of consequences. 

Heterosexual Christian white males built most (but not all) of the world we live in today.  It’s far from perfect, but no time or place in history has been perfect.  But it’s not their DNA that somehow makes them better citizens or better people. No, it’s the culture they built.

We’re told that somehow western culture is bad because it was not crafted by a multicultural collective.  That makes no sense.  Virtually every culture in human history has been built by members of a single race.  There were not a lot of whites helping to craft the Mali Empire in Africa, there were not a lot of blacks at the center of the Chinese Middle Kingdom, not a lot of yellow people helping to build the Inca Empire and there weren’t a lot of brown people helping to build Russia or the Russian Empire. No, most of human history has been dominated by monochromatic empires, nations and cultures.

It just happens to be the case that on Earth’s competitive landscape the culture built and developed by straight, Christian white males is the one that has generated the greatest increases in freedom, technology and prosperity in human history.  And it’s not even close.  But because not everyone has shared equally in the material gains from that culture, it must be destroyed…

Because that culture largely focuses on meritocracy, accountability, individual liberty and limited government rather than coercion from above, people who have yet to achieve their desired goals have the opportunity to criticize it with impunity, something they cannot do in most other parts of the world and couldn’t have done throughout most of human history virtually everywhere. Yet without the threat of consequence they often call themselves courageous. 

Western civilization, the driver of said unprecedented levels of freedom and prosperity and opportunity in all of human history, today finds itself under attack by those who have migrated to it, have invaded it or whose ancestors were brought to it, because they’ve not achieved their desired goals. This, despite the fact that conditions back wherever they or their ancestors left from are likely far worse than they are anywhere in the west.  But no matter.  These “protesters” use the freedoms accorded by western culture to attack it.  That’s a problem. No culture can survive if there are no shared values.  No culture can survive if citizens don’t have at least a common appreciation for the nations’ fundamental culture and assume it to be a good thing.   

Here at home, if those criticizing America were just a few outliers there would be no problem.  A strong nation can withstand critique, even from within, and that’s why we have a 1^st Amendment.  The problem in 2023 however is that fully half of the country has been brainwashed into believing that the bedrock principles upon which America is based are somehow evil, corrupt or illegitimate.  They got that way because one of the two main political parties has proffered that lie for decades and enlisted its fellow fabulists in the media, academia and the government to reinforce it.

That is simply not sustainable. Like the movement of art from the classical style of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Rubins to the self important renderings of Basquiat, Mark Rothco, Robert Mapplethorpe and Glööckler, the transition from the a nation built on universal God given fundamental rights to one based on balkanization and subjective grievances based on “equity” and victimization promises to replace something great with something absurd.  What’s more, that absurd subjective culture cannot long stand.  Just as we’ve seen with the Democrat party since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at some point groups joined by victim status can and will splinter as their various victim classes turn against one another based on the current hierarchy of victim status. 

As we march towards what will be the most consequential presidential election in American history, we might want to start suggesting to those who seek to destroy what “white heterosexual Christian males” have built that they take a look around. They’ll not find a better combination of opportunity, freedom and real equality anywhere on earth or in history, particularly as it relates to protecting minorities.  They should, unlike the Gays for Gaza buffoons we see in the streets, consider what happens to them if they actually get what they wish for. 

Life imitates art... Liberals see the world as they imagine it is, not how it actually is

I’ve always been a fan of Van Gogh’s paintings. I similarly like Renoir, and Seurat. Although I like some of Picasso’s early work, most of it I find a bit odd. My favorite artist however is William Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th century French artist whose works are the polar opposite of the impressionists, literally.

From the 1870s his realistic portrayal of the human form was increasingly seen as passé in an art world increasingly captivated by Impressionism – a style which influenced both Van Gogh and Seurat. By the early 20th century Bouguereau’s work had completely fallen out of favor among cultured art devotees, – i.e. everyone except those uncivilized Americans.

Impressionist art was less precise than that of Bouguereau and most artists who came before him. It began a march that has brought us a century of modern art that is often anything but precise… Think Jackson Pollack or Christo.

A challenge of art is that what the artist is trying to convey (if anything) is often up for debate. Take any three people and ask them what is the artist’s intent behind one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles and you’ll no doubt get three completely different ideas.

Such lack of clarity works well in the subjective world of art. Not so much in the not so subjective world of politics and government. It is perhaps no surprise then that the rise of modern liberalism has evolved over a similar timeline and path as modern art.

Politicians on the left no longer look to objective facts to define the world around them. Rather, they look at the world as they would like it to be and interpret it accordingly. How else could one explain the lunacy that pervades the Democrat party today?

Data clearly show that stricter gun laws lead to more crime but that is of no consequence. President Obama and the rest of the progressives who want to pass gun laws that will magically make the world a safer place... as if there were no knives, swords, cars or anything else that might ever be used as a weapon.

Maybe they forgot about Prohibition? It doesn’t take much looking to see the negative consequences of that. Not only did it not work, but it created a paradise for gangsters to grow rich and powerful. Fast forward 80 years and while smoking is not illegal, per se, many states are trying to tax it out of existence… while simultaneously padding the tattered state coffers at the same time. Surprise… it’s not quite working out the way they had planned. High cigarette locales are seeing their sin tax base actually decline as as much as 60% of the cigarettes sold in their states are illegal. Indeed, even in the face of such failure Chicago is planning on doubling down on its bad bet.

Then there are government schools. Could there be a more crystal clear example of government failure on the planet than public schools? Yet somehow the union backed Democrats continue to fight vouchers and school reform despite the physical and intellectual carnage government schools have wrought on American children.

Of course the most important example of the liberal failing to see exactly what is in front of them is on economics. In 2009, just as Canada was beginning to look at free markets to fix its state controlled healthcare sector Nancy Pelosi was crafting ObamaCare to strangle the American people. Over the last four years, just as Greece, Spain and Italy collapse under the weight of their social programs and confiscatory tax rates, the Obama administration has sought to expand government welfare, increase taxes on those who create wealth and further strangle the economy with regulation.

At some point one has to wonder what exactly liberals are looking at that would cause them to make such illogical choices. It makes you think of a doctor who studies medicine with anatomy books illustrated by Picasso. Do you really want that guy operating on you?

Government is not like art. In art, the artist can paint what he wants, the way he wants. He can imbue it with hidden messages, explicit messages or no messages at all. The beauty of art is that anyone can interpret it any way they want and in doing so they don’t impact anyone else’s ability to enjoy it. With government on the other hand, the realities of life are quite different. Regardless of the author of a bill’s limited intentions, its passage almost always presages a reinterpretation and expansion once it becomes law. Do you imagine when the 16th Amendment was passed Americans expected tax rates to quickly rise to 90%? Do you think when the Civil Rights Acts were passed in the 1960s the writers expected white and Hispanic firefighters to lose promotions because no black firefighters did well on the promotion tests? Do you think when Nixon created the EPA he planned on the agency eventually seeking to regulate milk spills, rainwater and lightbulbs? No, no and no!

None of that matters to liberals however, and that’s the problem with government: Government regulations are rarely limited to benign interpretation or precise application. They have real world consequences, most of which are unintended, and most of those are negative. And the rest of us are stuck with them because they rarely get repealed and almost always grow more restrictive.

Taking a page from the Impressionists, at some point the citizens who drive prosperity in the United States will stop operating in the world of realism – i.e. high taxes and oppressive regulations – and opt to do something altogether different. Maybe they will work a bit less or be satisfied with 40 employees rather than adding a few more. That might sound benign right now, but just as Impressionism began an evolution that led to everything from Robert Mapplethorpe to Willem de Kooning to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, government regulations have a way of morphing the world in ways that were unimaginable (to liberals) when they were passed. When America is left with only the dependants and bureaucrats, the wealth and job creators either dead or long gone to places like Switzerland or Australia, the legacy of liberal failure will be complete.

As President Obama begins the second leg of his quest to “fundamentally transform America” we should keep that in mind. Thankfully the Constitution limits his time in office to 8 years, unfortunately the shackles of liberal government he leaves us with will likely last far longer and morph into things even he didn’t imagine. The reality of that hell is one that even Monet would have a hard time blurring.