web analytics
Categories
Art

The death of art

The following quotes are taken from The Death of Western Art by Kenneth Lloyd Anderson, which appeared in Instauration Vol. 24, No. 6, May 1999, p. 6-8 (viewable here).


Peter_Paul_Rubens
There is definitely a parallel between accepting virtually anything as art and the interracial, international egalitarian acceptance of all races and all people. A world without borders parallels art with no restrictions and no narrative history.

Six centuries of Western art have come to an end, apparently to be followed by the end of Western man. What Arthur Danto calls the “post-historical” period will be followed by post-white man, since the narrative history of Western Art was essentially narrated and created by white men.

The affirmation of white culture in art ended with WWII. Internationalism and interracialism conquered nationalism. The concept of “no borders” was increasingly reflected in the artistic concepts of unreality and nihilism.

The history of art shows that the affirmation of the sacred—those things which each race holds of divine provenance—has been the formula behind the greatest works of art.

The exciting thing about a racial preservationist movement in art is that it can revive sacred art, which has been buried by the profane art of the modern and postmodern world.

Ellen Dissanayake’s book on the biological origin of art (Homo Aestheticus, 1995, University of Washington Press) suggests that traditional art is concerned with “making special” those things which are considered important, such as birth, puberty, marriage and death.

Modern art does not make special the traditionally important aspects of life, perhaps because survival is far easier now and one doesn’t need to bond people through art for survival’s sake. Unimportant things are “made special” by the commonness and vulgarity of Pop Art subjects.

Reviving or saving a declining or dying race and culture is an exciting cause, perfectly designed for “making special” what is traditionally important—the affirmation of the sacred in art. This has the potential for creating great art.