Page 2 of 2 Admit it - you really hate modern
art By Spengler
opera
Wozzeck, something of a compromise between
Schoenberg's abstract style and conventional
Romanticism. His biographers report that the opera
gave him a "comfortable living".
After
decades of philanthropic support for abstract
(that is, atonal) music, symphony orchestras have
given up inflicting it on reluctant audiences, and
instead are commissioning works from composers who
write in a more accessible style. According to a
recent report in the Wall Street Journal, the
shift back to tonal music "comes as large
orchestras face declining attendance and
an
elderly base of subscribers. Nationwide symphony
attendance fell 13% to 27.7 million in the 2003-04
season from 1999-2000, according to the American
Symphony Orchestra League."
The
ideological message is the same, yet the galleries
are full, while the concert halls are empty. That
is because you can keep it at a safe distance when
it hangs on the wall, but you can't escape it when
it crawls into your ears. In other words, your
spontaneous, visceral hatred of atonal music
reflects your true, healthy, normal reaction to
abstract art. It is simply the case that you are
able to suppress this reaction at the picture
gallery.
There are, of course, people who
truly appreciate abstract art. You aren't one of
them; you are a decent, sensible sort of person
without a chip on your shoulder against the world.
The famous collector Charles Saatchi, proprietor
of an advertising firm, is an example of the few
genuine admirers of this movement. When Damien
Hirst arranged his first student exhibition at the
London Docklands, reports Wikipedia, "Saatchi
arrived at the second show in a green Rolls-Royce
and stood open-mouthed with astonishment in front
of (and then bought) Hirst's first major 'animal'
installation, A Thousand Years, consisting
of a large glass case containing maggots and flies
feeding off a rotting cow's head."
The
Lord of the Flies is an appropriate benchmark for
the movement. Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor
Faustus tells the story of a composer based
mainly on Arnold Schoenberg, whom resentment
drives to make a pact with the Devil. Mann's
protagonist cannot create, so out of rancor sets
out to "take back" the works of Ludwig van
Beethoven, by writing atonal lampoons of them that
will destroy the listener's ability to hear the
original.
Many critics maintain that
Picasso's famous painting originally named "The
Bordello at Avignon" (Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon) was the single most influential
modernist statement. In this painting Picasso
lampooned El Greco's great work The Vision of
St John. Picasso reduces the horror of the
opening of the Fifth Seal in the Book of
Revelation to a display of female flesh in a
whorehouse. [1] Picasso is trying to "take back"
El Greco, by corrupting our capacity to see the
original.
By inflicting sufficient
ugliness upon us, the modern artists believe, they
will wear down our capacity to see beauty. That, I
think, is the point of putting dead animals into
glass cases, or tanks of formaldehyde. But I am
open-minded; there might be some value to this
artistic technique after all. If Damien Hirst were
to undertake a self-portrait in formaldehyde, I
would be the first to subscribe to a commission.
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