Is art dead?

Few years ago I wrote in an article about my artistic journey into discovering the beauty . That article is reproduced at the end of this piece. Few weeks ago I read an article by Judy Singer in the National Post, which motivated me to create this thread. You will see that article and its introduction by me next. After publishing Judy Singers article both on my face-book page and here on my Blog a friend posted me a BBC video essay called 'Why Beauty Matters' by the Philosopher Roger Scruton . To my delight Scruton makes exactly the same point that I tried to make few years ago -- albeit he makes those points much more eloquently than I. I am attaching that video here. I am reasonably certain that by the end of this century all the garbage stored in our museums will be cleaned up.

Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part I)
Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part II)
Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part III)
Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part IV)
Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part V)
Why Beauty Matters, by Roger Scruton (part VI)

My February 20th Blog Introducing Judy Singer's Article.
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I am delighted to read the Judy Singer article in the National Post, on February 19, 2010 . I have copied Judy's article here together with my own article that I wrote on my own website in 1995( please see: 'About My Work' at the Articles section of my website ). It is so refreshing that this issue has finally came to the forefront.

Is art dead?

Judy Singer

Posted: February 19, 2010, 9:30 AM by NP Editor

In an article announcing the National Gallery of Canada’s 2010-11 season (Not into Koons? Try Canadiana, Feb. 18), Vanessa Farquharson contrasts the upcoming “slightly predictable” shows of classic artists with the summer blockbuster Pop Life, a collaboration with the Tate Modern in London. This exhibit will showcase works from the 1960s onwards: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, etc. I can’t imagine anything more predictable than the flock of curators who continue to showcase this work, which is overhyped and, frankly, of very low quality.

With Barbara Kay’s Feb. 3 column, “The Artist Has No Clothes,” which was a thoughtful response to scathing reviews of Damien Hirst’s most recent exhibit, I continually wonder why the scandalous lack of standards continues to persist and thrive in the art world.

Andy Warhol - Campbell's Soup (1962)

Assistant curator at the National Gallery Jonathan Shaughnessy states that this exhibit looks back to the 1960s, to Andy Warhol and how Warhol influenced today’s artists. I contend that they haven’t gone far enough back into art history, where one can quickly determine that this art is not so original, that the so called “raising of the most vexing and controversial questions of our time” has become a boring exercise in self aggrandizement and puffed-up egos.

Although many scholarly works have been written over the millennia on the topic of what art is, it was not until the early 1900s that the Dada movement, led by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, challenged traditional definitions with “anti-art” art. The Dada artists rejected all premises of modern painting. As they stood on the eve of the First World War, one can, in sympathy, understand their feelings about the absurdity of being concerned with aesthetics when the world was in such a state of chaos.

Artist's shit - Piero Manzoni (1961)

It was within this milieu that Duchamp not only wanted to “put painting at the service of the mind” but, also, wanted to create something that was devoid of aesthetic interest. Hence, one of the things he did was to choose “readymade” objects, sign them and declare them “art”. An example of one of these “Readymades” is called Why Not Sneeze. It is a bird cage filled with sugar lumps into which a thermometer has been thrust. The value of this work lies in throwing into doubt previous definitions of art. Interestingly, Duchamp himself had to have a clear definition of what art is in order achieve his goal. This dissociation of the object from its title became a habitual way Duchamp disturbed viewers in their perception of his work; and this very tactic is one of Hirst’s favourite borrowed practices.

Ships of Redemption (2009) - Derek John and Julie Collins

The Dada artists were also the first to create what we call installations or happenings; combinations of art, poetry, theatre, etc., pushing the limits of the absurd to shake up ideas of what art could do. It was in the 1960s that these Dadaist techniques were resurrected by The Feminist Art Movement in pursuit of their feminist platform. They felt that as the great art of the past (mostly painting) was male dominated, then, logically (or not), painting was a male medium. They therefore generally avoided painting as their media and instead focused on happenings and events.

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Personally, I have found the medium of paint to be genderless. Nevertheless, men continue to dominate the art world and in my opinion, feminine sensibility and imagery is still struggling to find its place in our accustomed way of looking at all art; an art made primarily by men.

Simultaneous with feminist art, Andy Warhol exhibited his first Campbell’s Soup Can in 1968 and this movement, called Pop Art, was another challenge thrown at the notion of what art is. Pop Art was a declaration of art as social commentary, a stab against art esteemed for its aesthetic value. The Abstract Expressionist movement that triumphed in New York, with its stunning, sublime, abstract paintings, the most beautiful and challenging paintings since Cubism, was its target.

Moon and sun elements from the Vitrines in the Beuys room in the states gallery Suttgart

Concurrently, the historic separation of intellectual pursuits vs. technical pursuits (e.g., art history vs. drawing, painting, sculpture, etc.) changed when university fine arts departments created visual arts studio degrees in the late 1960s. Art soon grew into a philosophical discipline and by the 1990s, talent and skill was declared irrelevant, and “conceptual art” became mainstream. “Painting is dead” was the new maxim.

Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer (1979)
500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter

Exhibitions were mounted where the visual component of the artwork had to be supported by an accompanying written explanation in order to grasp what the artist was getting at. The visual component merely illustrated the concept, usually one of a social or political nature and of course, the human condition. Art was expected to “mean” all kinds of things. But “art” was not expected to be aesthetic, nor was it expected to have any structure or rules.

“Untitled (to Paddy)”, Dan Flavin, 2008

You might be surprised by the term “visual language” with its implications of rules of grammar and vocabulary. But, in order to perceive or create a work of art with aesthetic value, the knowledge of visual language is an absolute requirement. The visual language of art can be seen in the tensions created through the manipulation of spatial and compositional elements, using colour, line, texture, etc. Sculpture, of course, has the added considerations of three dimensions. To elucidate the way visual language works, imagine the way a gifted writer uses words to craft a poem or the way a composer arranges the notes in a quest to create an enduring piece of music. The artist must know the language, laden with promise of possibility and nuance. And to know the visual language means studying the art of the past.

© Carl Andre The Way North, East, South, West (Uncarved Blocks), 1975 western red cedar 5 units: 12 x 12 x 36 inches (30.5 x 30.5 x 91.4 cm ) each Private Collection

The prevailing art philosophers of the 1990s, by deconstructing art, felt that the idea of quality was a non-issue. Without this burden, art could be anything. Damien Hirst’s work is exemplary of this philosophy, quote “Anyone can do it [be an artist] if you just believe.” I would put forward the theory that Hirst and his colleagues have extended the Duchampian and subsequent Warholian agenda for way too long. I know of no other discipline where standards of excellence are non-existent, and astonishingly, at the same time, this lack of standards is financially rewarded.

Guido Molinari, Untitled, 1964. Image: artnet.com

Unlike the deconstructionists might have us believe, being concerned with standards of excellence in the creation of art is not to be unconcerned with the human condition ­— rather the opposite — this concern leads to an aesthetic experience that can lift the human spirit. To quote Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935), “All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle.”

It takes years of work and great effort to understand and be fluent in a medium and this holds true for both the creator and the observer. By making the effort to learn the visual language, by not just looking at the narrative of the art work, as if it were a chapter of a book, but rather looking beyond, to all the visual relationships of the work, only then will authentic “seeing” happen. This is where the true content of the work lies: in the visual elements, and the resolution of tensions created when those elements interact with each other.

White Painting (Three Panels), 1951, Robert Rauschenberg, In SFMoma

As I stated in a letter to the Post’s editor, “The whole business: collectors, dealers, museums, universities, art magazines have nothing to do with what it takes to make a great work of art. Curators are not the trailblazers that they portray themselves to be, but rather, they are sheep, merely following trends. I challenge them to step out of the mainstream and show art that is great. To do this, they would have to know what it really is.”

National Post

About My Work

Guity Novin, Nude and the horse; mixed media with oil, 2005

I did my undergraduate studies during the late 60s. In those days there predominated in academia a definite penchant for modern and post modern arts. My professors were mostly young Ph. Ds from Europe and North America who admired, and encouraged students to admire, artists like Kandinski, Miro, Mondrian and later on Andy Warhole among others. There thrived a culture that scorned figurative painting and representationalist arts. What mattered in arts was the appearance that could provoke a reaction from the observer. Beauty and the judgement of delight in the beauty were considered tolerable concerns; but the judgement about the generality of delight in the object was dismissed on the ground that it would lead to vulgarity. They questioned the validity of the painting as the artwork and used a plethora of pejorative adjectives such as archaic, stale, or sterile to describe any kind of painting.

Decorative paintings were regarded as insipid, and any further experiment with impressionists' techniques was deemed futile. Since my undergraduate grounding at the Girls College of Fine Arts transpired from a philosophy that took painting very seriously, it was viewed as a liability, and therefore my academic projects had to do without, almost, any traces of technique, harmony and composition in order to be judged among the `avant-garde' works. I came by many `two-with-mention' marks for projects that included: gluing an old basketball shoe to a black canvas and pouring red industrial paint over it, discolouring a canvas by subjecting it to a slow electrical heat from the back and a number of other abstract happening projects. Later on, I noticed that the same kind of attitude prevails among many bureaucrats in charge of evaluating art works for various public or private institutions. These mandarins usually came to be excited from a piece that was provocative or irritating in appearance, and procured it for their institutions. This encouraged many enterprising individuals to produce irksome objects that were usually mundane and frivolous. Later I noticed that when an institution was going through a restructuring process nobody wanted to keep these pieces and they were usually ended up as tax deductible donations. As for me, I have always been certain that a work of art is a timeless and universal piece imbued with a judgement of beauty, and that it would, and should, surpass any particularizing limitation. If one expects, or needs, a provocation or a surprise there is always the option of going to a circus or a carnival instead of an art show.

Guity Novin, Woman with Pears, mixed media with oil, 2006

Expression of Silence', my first solo exhibition after graduation, comprised of thirty five abstract interpretations of urn forms in pointellism style. I set out to convince myself that the painting is the artwork. The exhibition was rather well received, and the number of positive reviews was surprising. Critics were generally pleased with the works -- only one French reviewer was frowning upon them on the ground that their forms were very repetitive. I wasn't happy with the first exhibition either, nevertheless it served to convince me that the painting is indeed the artwork. Now I wanted to do painting, and be fully engaged with forms, with colours and with beauty. In `Posthumous', my second exhibition, inspired by poetical spheres of Shamlou, a humanist poet, I explored the structural intricacies of the human body in surrealistic settings, and to focus on compositional patterns I utilised monochromatic pallets of blue. I intended to study how object art meditates to conceptualism. The reviewers were still very kind, but many were also expressing their concerns about my futile attempts to resuscitate surrealism! In `Tana naha ya hoo'- based on a mantra of Molana, my third exhibition, I was finally able to cast aside the academic wisdom, and to abandon myself in the full sovereignty of forms and compositions. In arriving at this station in my artistic journey I was influenced by Kant's reflection that beauty is not a property of objects but rather a relation between object and human joy, meditated by human judgement. Years later, to introduce Transpressionism with `L'important, c'est la rose', my eleventh exhibition, I wrote: "I am on a mystic exploration in the realm of sacred forms and the music of the spheres. Transpressionism acts as a conduit for a deeper logic. It searches for that elusive Kantian concept, "the thing-in-itself" -- a reality behind appearances and their sensible representations, and a world that transcends beyond the intuition of space and time."


In my Transpressionist works the main emphasis is on the composition, and the harmony of curved spaces which in their dynamics introduce a unifying possibility. I fully agree with Kant that: "In everything which it is to be approved by taste there must be something which facilitates the differentiation of manifold (delineation), which advances comprehensibility (relations, proportions); which makes the taking-together possible (unity); and finally, which makes possible differentiation from all other possible (precision)" (Reflexion 625, Academie edition 15,1, 227) Like him I feel strongly that "the beautiful" is what pleases, because it can also please others. Therefore taste occurs only in society, and that in every case of beauty, particularly in painting, the object must please in itself through conceptual reflection, and not through impression. So I think the preamble to Transpressionism manifesto should include the following: "In painting, sculpture, indeed in all formative arts...in so far as they are beautiful arts, the composition is what is imperative. It is not delight of sensation which establishes the foundation of any characteristic of taste, but entirely what entices through its form. The colours which clarify the motif concur with its appeal; they can indeed by themselves enlighten the object for human sensation, but they cannot impel it to become worthy of intuition and beautiful. A mere colour, such as the green of a farm, or a mere tone, such as that of violin, is declared to be beautiful in itself by most people, although both seem to have only the matter of representation, that is mere sensation, for their ground, and thus deserve to be called only agreeable" (Kant, Critic of Judgement, 14. 224) Most importantly, I believe that beauty is a social concept since beholding the beautiful is an estimation and no mere gratification. And by social I mean the whole society of mankind in space and time -- hence the purport of mythology, music and poetry in my work.



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