The Emptiness of Modern "Art"

In one of my hubs, "Sex and the City for Real", I mention that one of my favorite pastimes is to enjoy the art openings in Chelsea on Thursday evenings. Although my primary motive for attending has nothing to do with art per se, I do have some thoughts on the creations (amalgams?) that fill these spaces. Don't get me wrong--the works I see are often interesting... not, however, from an artistic point of view by rather as indices of the climate of modern life. It is a climate that finds its highest meaning in a crude activism in which true value and meaning are reduced to those of a revolt and dissolution. Modern art, and particularly postmodernism, is a REACTION, a nay-saying anarchism. It is not sufficient unto itself, but seeks to undermine, directly or indirectly, any idealism, to deride any principles, to attack venerated institutions, to reduce ethical values--the just, the noble, and the dignified--to mere words and disjointed images. It gives rise to nothing constructive, permanent, or durable. It places on a pedestal the banal and gift wraps it with unintellgible interpretative verbiage, and smugly calls it "art" or "poetry" which the "ignorant masses" could never "understand"! In reality, this so-called art clumsily fills an empty spiritual space.

 In a different epoch, it is precisely in that space that a new "objective" art might have taken shape, in that "grand style" to which Nietzsche referred:  "the greatness of an artist is not measured by the beautiful sentiments that he arouses--only girls can think along those lines--but by the degree to which he approaches the grand style....he forgets to persuade, rather he wills...To make himself master of the chaos that one is, to force his own chaos to become form, mathematics, law--that is the grand ambition.  Around such despotic men a silence is born, a fear, similar to what is felt at a great sacrilege."

Alas, to think this way in the present world is absurd: our epoch lacks any center, any meaning, any objective symbols that could give soul, content and power to this "grand style."  Art in a traditional and organic civilization never occupied the central "spiritual" position that humanism and liberalism accords it today.  Before the modern era when art had a true, higher meaning, this was thanks to its pre-existing contents, superior and prior to it, neither revealed nor "created" by it as art.

The "art" that I see in these galleries serves as a looking glass which reflects a fracture of an ontological character, wherein human life has lost any real reference to Transcendence.