I may be the only one who feels the need to “prepare” myself for a visit to New York City, at least in my definition of the word. I find the bustling streets exhilarating and the unpredictability of urban society fascinating, so I never prepare myself in terms of interpersonal interactions and observations. Though it undoubtedly lies at the intermediate level, my command of the subway and street systems is not what I bother to prepare myself for either. 1, 2, 3, Lexington, Park, Madison, even streets run east, odd streets run west, and no local in their right mind ever refers to the 1-line as the “red train.” Though on my most recent excursion, which centered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I found myself equipping my mind for some installations’ beauty, while girding my will for the filth of others. Specifically, the filth of the abstract art installation.
I have never liked abstract art. Even before I discovered my fascination for politics, people, and the life of the mind as a whole, the amalgamations that emerged from the mid-century movement always paled in comparison to the beauty I saw in other types of art and parts of society. I relentlessly tore into the works of Picasso, Pollock, and various other masters of amalgamation around those who would throw both calls of approval and cries of dissent my way. I did not care who heard my opinion, and this fact still (and will forever) remain, yet I only enhanced my rationale for believing so at this museum experience.
I was never wrong in my declamations against abstract art. My main reason for disdaining it was simply that it was ugly, and as beings who are (ideally) capable of rational thought, that argument should be enough to convince others. We all come with the ability to gauge whether the strokes on a canvas are of the Beautiful or not. This is why we can all widely agree that the scent of a dandelion field is a far more enjoyable experience than the stench of decaying remains, and why we should instinctively smile at a painting of a vast seascape and scowl at a block of hairy swiss cheese. Yet the latter of the two scenarios is no longer true, nor has it been for decades. Both the seascape and the taxidermied cheese have a place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and because of this, both are (presumably) met with the same level of awe.
In a world free from the bonds of sin and death, my elementary reasoning would suffice. One is beautiful, and one is not, and since it is a work’s beauty that should qualify or disqualify it for a place in our society, one piece should make the cut, and the other should cease to enter the public eye. However, in order to make such sweeping judgements, society has convinced itself that our most fundamental instincts are not to be trusted.
If one, even against a crowd of billions, claims that a piece of art is beautiful, it must be so! We wouldn’t want to risk hurting feelings for the sake of upholding societal order! In order to make defensible decisions, we need standards and definitions, and cannot subject valuable expressions of human creativity and thought to the whims of our desires.
This way of thinking has been a symptom and a cause of this solemn fact: the boundaries that humans once built and the standards humans once observed have, over time, eroded; the intellect that created such a rigid system eventually succumbed to the passions it sought to guard against.
So what is beauty? The true answer to this question has never changed. Socrates wisely pointed out in Phaedo: “All beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful,” not by our fickle opinions. The “beauty” humans have, over time, allowed to pervade societies is the beauty that supposedly exists in a hairy block of fake cheese or androgynous figures whose positions, intentions, and motivations are unclear. This “beauty” turns metaphysical standards into social constructs, but real beauty is not a social construct. It is a transcendental value that humans attempt to imitate in our own creations. Beauty is God Himself, therefore beautiful art must only be art that glorifies God and honors His creation.
The first work of beautiful art, other than Creation itself, is Adam’s naming of the animals that God had brought to him. In Genesis 2, God’s invitation to Adam to name the animals is also God’s invitation to all of us to be swept away by the curious splendor of his creation and glorify what He has gifted us with.
Abstract art does the complete opposite. If a piece in this style does not directly attack, it at least dismisses the glory and necessity of absolutes and goodness in our world.
The duality of the sexes is blended, erased, or derided in Picasso’s abstract paintings that struggle to resemble men and women. Pollock’s Number paintings are void of any visual order and hail skill over beauty. Diego Rivera’s cubist works ignore the nuances and simple pleasures of the natural landscape.
Abstract art characterizes our lack of gratitude for the world we live in, and it acts as a silent cry for help from our souls that naturally long to venerate the Creator of it all.
American author and journalist Tom Wolfe published the book The Painted Word in 1975, which I can best describe as the God and Man at Yale of the art world. Though I have yet to fully immerse myself in its pages, one line from the prologue speaks especially to this issue: “These days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
Similar to Buckley’s treatment of his alma mater, Wolfe does not condemn the modern art movement as a whole, as it has yielded beautiful, if not at the very least, original, artwork. Conversely, he concerns himself with the institutionalization of artwork, postulating that the movement took a turn for the worse when the artists began to create art around narratives constructed by elite art critics, stifling their own individualism and creativity for professional ambition.
“I've known so many examples personally (since I've lived in New York) of artists who quite willingly gave up their own vision, their own best techniques, their own uniqueness of any sort in order to kiss critical ass” commented Wolfe on Mr. Buckley’s show Firing Line in July 1975.
While I agree largely with his premises, I do not pledge full allegiance to the arguments made by Wolfe, for I believe the perversion of abstract art lies more in its very nature (or lack thereof) than in hierarchical control, so I offer one small edit to his former statement:
“These days, without a good, true, and beautiful theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
The issue lies not in the fact that an artist creates a painting with preexisting axioms, but that he paints it with the right axioms that were constructed not by art critics, but by the Ultimate Critic. This is what abstract art will always fall short of accomplishing, as such axioms are simply outside of the art’s nature. I would change my mind if I ever encountered a beautiful piece of abstract art, but beauty is not abstract. I am afraid I must admit to total close-mindedness on this topic.
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