After having been well taught artistic discernment (not ability!) by my father - who had been an art teacher and was a decent landscape watercolourist; I have recently learned a great deal from reading Miles W Mathis on the subject of forgeries and fakes in Fine Art, such the B. Awful Not-Leonardo depicted above.
Or the much more famous and quite pleasant looking, but modern and mediocre, Not-Vermeer below:
The idiocy and ugliness of Art over the past several generations is so extreme and unrepentant; that it is explicable only on the basis that the activity is not about art any more.
It is Not Even Trying to do art; nor to teach, display or reward art.
But instead it's about such anti-artistic activities as managed investment, subsidy-grubbing, money-laundering, political activism, and the exchange of bribes.
I don't think there is any great art being done nowadays; just as there is no great classical music being composed or poetry being written.
This is not a golden age for human creativity - nor even a silver one. The major creative geniuses are a thing of the past.
But there are good paintings and portraits done by serious artists - I have bought some over the years, and been gifted others.
Such violation of quality by a perverse and inverted system of incentives; is yet another symptom of the advanced phase of our civilization's collapse.
And the way in which this situation is officially rationalized and defended - even more so.
I am not certain that Miles isn't one of those (scientific) major creative geniuses. I find his models of the nuclei very convincing, explaining a variety of mysteries about the periodic table; and his models of nucleus-to-nucleus molecular bonds make a lot more sense to me than the standard electron cloud models. I think he's correct that electrons have nothing to do with molecular bonds at all; the foundations that have been taught to students of chemistry and physics for a century are complete fabrications. More importantly, he has a replacement for them that is geometric and explanatory. It replaces the woo-woo "physics is not meant to be understood" narrative with actual mechanics.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that no great art is being done today. But I am grateful that so much old, forgotten music has been unearthed and recorded over the last 30 years. Even second-rank composers from 1730-1930 wrote enough good music to nourish me for a lifetime.