[MD] The Quality of Art ( Gas on the Bonfire of the Vanities )

[beauteak4u at aol.com]

May i suggest a little book by Tom Wolf  The Painted Word (1975)
 
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/709
 
Google it first to get a taste of what it's about. But here is one page and a few excerpts:
 
The case is that, just as each of us has always secretly suspected, modern art is crap.  In fact, not only is it crap, it is intentionally so, more or less as a calculated insult to our middle brow tastes.  Indeed, while most of us would consider it the purpose of art to convey beauty, modern artists consider art to be merely a tool for political expression.  Logically then, since most of them are, and were, opposed to our middle class, democratic, capitalist, protestant values, modern art is antithetical to virtually everything that most of us believe in.
 
But the reasons for the sorry state of the arts are most clearly explicated in Painted Word.  The essay therein was occasioned by a Hilton Kramer review of an exhibition of Realist artists.   On the morning of April 28, 1974, Wolfe picked up the New York Times and read the following by Kramer: 
"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory.  And 
    given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to 
    lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our 
    understanding of the values they signify."

Kramer's words brought about an epiphany: 
All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how 
    very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. 
    Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely 
    literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.
 
And it is upon reaching this final state of pure theory that C.S. Lewis pessimistic prediction in The Abolition of Man comes to fruition.  When we as a people, no longer capable of forming coherent judgments about quality, no longer confident enough to differentiate what is good from what is bad, end up being forced to accept any old garbage that is hailed by the critics and forced upon us.