Great Art for a New Time: Treatise on Art in 3 Part, Part 3

continued. . . .

Regardless of the pervading trends of narcissistic nihilism, the necessity and need for the participation in Beauty and Great Art has never gone away. As expressed by the Symbolist writer G.-Albert Aurier in the early 1890’s,
“The most noble faculties of our soul are in the process of atrophying . . .We must react. We must recultivate in ourselves the superior qualities of the soul. . . We must learn to love, the source of all understanding. . . Let us become mystics of art.” (12).

The mystical element that Aurier referred to is the experiential power of Great Art, the golden fleece that both the artist and critic continually longed for throughout the theoretical undulations between high idealism and disillusioned indifference. Despite being grounded in a vastly different contextual framework, these sentiments bubbled to the surface in various manifestations, but always possessed strikingly similar flavors. Perhaps equally relevant to our own age, Leon Trotsky wrote in 1923,

“Our age cannot have a shy and portable mysticism, something like a pet dog that is carried along. . .Our age wields an ax. Our life, cruel, violent, and disturbed to its very bottom says: ‘I must have an artist of a single love. . .’ The new artist will need all the methods and processes evolved in the past, as well as a few supplementary ones, in order to grasp the new life. And this is not going to be artistic eclecticism, because the unity of art is created by an active world-attitude and active life-attitude.” (13)

This unwavering faith in art, especially in the aesthetics and Beauty available to the painting medium as a mode of transcendence, has always held a following akin to a religious devotion. Yet, it is precisely because of Great Art’s ability to pass on a tangible qualitative experience that, more often than not, it has been described with a spiritual or mystical terminology to attempt to convey both its essence and its power.(14)

This experiential quality is the perception and contemplation of Beauty. Beauty is a subtle simultaneous realization of our fleeting essence in this world coupled with a sense of something eternal that can last far beyond the transitory experience of each passing moment. There is a sense that, as Wilber writes, “Beauty is . . .a profoundly deep manner of knowing” and when we come face to face with this phenomenon, we are momentarily and perhaps even imperceptibly stunned out of our normal way of being. There is a brief suspension of frantic thought and regular activity and just for a moment the only desire that exists is to continue in that contemplative state, a timeless if only fleeting, understanding of the perpetual Now. (15)

It is this quality that Great Art seems to inherently possess, a pictorial representation of a visceral understanding of what makes us human. Therefore, in a world that might need a reminder of our collective humanness, a “return to beauty is the only way out of decadence. Aspiring to beauty is the only alternative to postmodern cynicism.”(16) Mastery of the painterly craft, a technical level of deliberate articulation and intricacy brings the narrative of the concepts in a work to life, conveying a visual language that is perceived as Beautiful. This kind of art gives unselfishly to the viewer by opening up an appreciation for the fundamentals of life through its aesthetics. It is through this multilayered and textured intelligibility that Great Art comes into being and it is this potential that the myriad of artists today painting in an Old Master style are courageously flirting with.

New Old Masterism, as exemplified in the works of Julie Heffernan, David Ligare, Odd Nerdrum and many others, is a style that boldly affirms itself as the love child of tradition and conceptualism while maintaining academic recognition.(17) Wielding the palette of traditions in the spectrum of Old Master aesthetics, the New Master painters are firmly grounded in the strong conceptual base provided by the history of the avant-garde, transmuting this amalgam of historicity into the common language of Beauty to effectively communicate meaning through the subtler channels of experiential understanding. However, while it is true that “the spirituality and humanism of the Old Masters and the innovations and criticality of the Modern Masters. . . is an attempt to revive high art in defiance of post art,” it doesn’t quite reach the extensive global perspective or worldview that is needed for a modern Great Art. (18)

The Sacred Art/Visionary Art movement, categorized as a fringe phenomenon, is best exemplified by the works of Alex Grey, Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann. It too is a revival of the Old Master techniques and traditions in art, utilizing depictions of environmental and social issues, global shamanic iconography and everyday experience, to speak in a historical and deeply human visual language that effectively communicates cross-culturally. Being outside the realm of academia and regardless of the supreme technical mastery that accompanies this form, it is all but ignored by the quintessential “Art World” as outsider and dismissed as a passing phase. Nonetheless, artists in this genre are able to bridge the gap between white-walled gallery exhibitions and popular culture, communicating both to a refined aesthetic awareness as well as a visceral sense of comprehension, infiltrating the modern mainstream more than ever before, reaching far beyond its current manifestations of neo-tribal and techno-hippie followers. Harkening to the marketing prowess and media diversification of current pop-culture artists such as the iconic Takashi Murakami, there are many parallels that can be drawn between them by their intrinsic embodiment of taking the art to the people. Not only are they tremendously profitable, the effectiveness with which these art forms embed themselves in global culture, whether through product development or multi-media interactive events, ground them firmly and intelligently within the intersubjective background of the vast contextual web that makes them relevant and accessible to anyone that wishes to participate in them. Does this make them Great Art, or Great Painting for that matter? Getting close, but not exactly.

There is the potential for a harmony in all of this dialectical posturing, a different perspective that can be easily adopted amongst a social climate already heading in that direction. There is a need again for Great Art; not a Great Art that leans on either traditionalism or conceptualism as a crutch, but an intelligent amalgam of these aesthetics. What art must adopt is an Integral Philosophy, a multidimensional analysis of the various contexts in which, and by which, art exists and communicates; namely, the artist, the artwork, the viewer and the world at large. By privileging no single context, it invites all that participate in the artwork, from the artist that created the work to the artwork’s inevitable audience, to open themselves to expanding horizons of interwoven conceptual possibilities. By illuminating the vast network of boundless contextual hierarchies, the boundaries of our isolated selves begin to slip away and the creation of a broader and more encompassing worldview begins to take shape. (19)

Content, context and meaning are intrinsic to an artistic revival, communicating through the visual language and symbols of our current global society, consequently reestablishing the human interest in art that Greenburg once hastily dismissed. Eloquently written in the Manifesto issued by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in 1922, “the makers of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people. . .to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.”(21)

This new art is germinating from several tendrils already firmly rooted in society. From the revival of Old Master craft and aesthetics through New Old Masterism and Sacred/Visionary Art, from the interest and participation of society in an awakened need for Beauty, from the movement toward a broader global view of our inter-related reality, like the roots that firmly support a growing ideology, a grand Integral world tree is growing in the forest of experience. The Great Art of tomorrow, “the ethical and existential avant-garde,”(22) is the blooming global consciousness we are witnessing take shape.

1. Kuspit, Donald, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century, (Cambridge University Press; 2000). 157.
2. Davis, Stuart, “Art and Politics,” Theories of Modern Art, (Herschel B. Chipp; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 466.
3. Kuspit, Donald, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century, (Cambridge University Press; 2000). 150-151.
4. Tzara, Tristan, “Lecture on Dada,” Theories of Modern Art, (Herschel B. Chipp; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 388.
5. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art, (The Pennsylvania State University Press; 1992). 14.
6. Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, (Harper Collins Publishers; 1993). 161.
7. ibid. 159.
8. Shapiro, Meyer, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, (George Braziller, Inc; 1994). 141.
9. Wilber, Ken, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, (Shambhala Publications; Boston, Massachusetts; 1998). 113.
10. ibid. 127
11. Kuspit, Donald, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century, (Cambridge University Press; 2000). 147.
12. Aurier, G.-Albert, “Essay on a New Method of Criticism,” Theories of Modern Art, (Herschel B. Chipp; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 88-89.
13. Trotsky, Leon, “Literature and Revolution,” Theories of Modern Art, (Herschel B. Chipp; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 464.
14. Crimp, Donald, “The End of Painting,” On the Museum’s Ruins, (MIT Press; 1997). 88-94.
15. Wilber, Ken, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, (Shambhala Publications; Boston, Massachusetts; 1998). 133-136.
16. Kuspit, Donald, “The Decadence of Advanced Art and the Return of tradition and Beauty: The New as Tower of Conceptual Babel: The Tenth Decade,” A Critical History of 20th-Century Art, (published serially by Artnet.com, Artnet Worldwide, New York, NY; 2009) http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-25-06.asp
17. ibid.
18. Kuspit, Donald, The End of Art, (Cambridge Press; 2004). 182-183.
19. Wilber, Ken, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, (Shambhala Publications; Boston, Massachusetts; 1998). 134.
20. Kuspit, Donald, “The Decadence of Advanced Art and the Return of tradition and Beauty: The New as Tower of Conceptual Babel: The Tenth Decade,” A Critical History of 20th-Century Art, (published serially by Artnet.com, Artnet Worldwide, New York, NY; 2009)
21. The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, “Manifesto,” Theories of Modern Art, (Herschel B. Chipp; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 462.
22. Kuspit, Donald, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century, (Cambridge University Press; 2000). 157.