| Take the word "gentleman" for example. The word has lost its meaning. Today we think of a "gentleman" as a "nice guy", but it was once a word used to describe a man who had a title and owned land. Ironically, such men could be complete asses and still be considered "gentlemen."
Sadly, I see this "hollowing out" in art too.
As an enlightened artist, you of course understand that "art" means something. For something to be "art", it must accomplish something. It must be "good" or "beautiful" if it is ever going to be considered good or beautiful art.
But society has tried to force a self-defeating narrative upon us that art is "subjective" and "relative", and consequently "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
But that doesn't quite feel right to those of us who really "get" art,because if art is "subjective" then there can't ever really be a concept of "better."
Once you throw out the concept of one piece being "better" than another, then it really doesn't matter any more what you do with your art. If there's no "better", then every brush stroke you make would be equally as "good" as another.
And if that were true, then asPaul Grahampoints out "You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there's no such thing as good, that would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."
In other words, this false narrative runs counter to our experience.We know down deep in our bones that some art is truly better than others.
Halloween, in it's modern-day incarnation, is sort of the "gentleman" of the holidays. I don't stop to wonder what we're doing or why. I just do it because everyone else is. It's become a reflex because it's lost its true meaning.
It's strange when you consider that Halloween was derived from many different types of celebrations rife with meaning. So, in essence, Halloween is the empty shell of several older celebrations (some of which were good and some bad).
In the western world the most probable parent of Halloween is All Saint's Day, which was a celebration of the Christian saints. We're not naive enough to believe that the celebrated saints were all saintly all the time. After all, they were real people. But that's the point. All Saints Day stood for something REAL. Real people with sins and failures alongside their goodness and triumphs.
AsBill Bonnerwrites, "...regardless of your views on the afterlife, All Saints' requires at least some reflection...on the lives of our forebears, on the challenges they faced and perhaps the lessons that could be learned from them."
But Halloween has become "subjective", just like the powers-that-be would have us think about art. It has become a day that is not "good" or "bad". It's just a day when we confuse our kids by telling them that on this day, unlike the other 364 days a year, it's OK to take candy from strangers.
I think that the underlying "motivation" that causes this "hollowing out" effect is a desire to avoid the ugly or the bad. People prefer that the word "gentleman" mean a "nice guy", because then we don't have to acknowledge that a "gentleman" can be a real ass.
In the case of Halloween, why muck up the works by talking about the shortcomings and failures of real people that we want to hold up as paragons of virtue in a world rife with sin? It's much more fun to dress up and go get some candy!
And in art, why should we have to admit that some art really does stink? It's much safer to simply say it's "subjective" and that "we're all winners." That way nobody's feelings get hurt.
The problem is, of course, that you can't really have the good without the bad. Or, more specifically, you can't have the amazingly beautiful without the real stinkers.
That's because true beauty doesn't exist in a vacuum. It demands a foil against which it can truly shine. So you need both ends of the spectrum to truly appreciate those on the "amazingly beautiful" side.
Just like you can't truly appreciate a nice guy until after you've met a few real asses, the exceptional skill of Michelangelo only becomes apparent when you consider it against some of what we now see publicly (or privately) being labelled as "art" thanks to the hollowing out of the word. | 