Modern art is the resentful destruction of beauty

Originally published via American Thinker:

My cosmopolitan-minded wife forced me to visit an old colonial-era Catholic hospice/orphanage in the center of Guadalajara, Mexico recently. The aged murals depicting hell and redemption and such existential concepts were breathtaking.

What certainly wasn’t breathtaking, but rather unsettling and despair-inducing, was a series of feminist modern art exhibits littered across various corners of the property -- out of place and contrarian as they could possibly be in such a setting.

One such exhibit was titled “Anatomia Intima,” featuring grotesque, distorted, and viscerally unattractive depictions of the human form. Similar ones with similar names did more of the same.

It was an orgy of ugliness.

Here’s the third-wave word salad used to justify one such exhibit we found:

“The works gathered here allow us to appreciate the plastic and visual experimentation of this artist marked by an immense chromatic, luminous, and expressive vitality enveloped by an unspeakable lightness or fleetingness. The contrast of intensities and temporalities not only operate on a perceptual level but also from a narrative and intellectual approach in which drawing and painting merge in the same field of action.

The representation of the female body stands out in disfigurements and scenarios that refer to the coven, the occult or profane, but also the grotesque, erogenous, and caricatured. Heresy as an emancipatory process for women, as a struggle against ecclesiastical and male oppression in the Middle Ages. In this respect, the Italian writer, feminist, and activist Silvia Federici points out… ‘in the transition from the prosecution of heresy to the witch-hunt, women become more and more clearly the figure of the heretic’. The fire that does not produce, is the fire that gathers and congregates, that conspires and attempts the established order and its terrible consequences.”

This is the same kind of anarchic glee expressed via the destruction of beauty and/or anything considered traditionally sacred that informs the “crucifix in urine” genre of art -- to the extent that’s what it can be called -- and, in fact, all manner of creative expression sponsored by the governing authorities and disseminated through pop culture.

The alleged masterminds that produce this tripe are deranged adult children with arrested development, throwing their spaghetti at the wall from their high chairs and passing off their vandalism as enlightened criticism of the Patriarchy™ or whatever, and passing themselves off as brave, subversive truth-tellers.

The kind of person who would produce “Piss Christ” is afflicted with a pathological hatred for life itself; why is a question for someone with more insight. At any rate, because bitterness is not a redeeming quality, this individual attempts to launder his pathology through the respectable veneer of artistic expression, gaining social prestige for himself among similarly minded peers.

If this genre of “art” were more honest, I wouldn’t dislike it any less, but I would respect it more.

I can't help but think that such phenomena as face tattoos, “Wet Ass Pussy” pop musical productions, “body positivity,” transgenders pantomiming -- and in the process desecrating -- the feminine form, “Just Stop Oil” protesters desecrating beloved paintings as a form of Social Justice™ activism, etc. are products of the same pathologies.

Is there any popularized, heavily marketed form of modern art that approaches anything like beauty or transcendence?

Call me a conspiracy theorist (they have a solid recent track record, in any case, and so I don’t mind), but I also can’t help but believe this is an orchestrated campaign to dumb down and demoralize the public ahead of the consecration of the modern dystopia.

If nothing is sacred and, by extension, beyond defilement, what is then the “referent object” -- the term used in securitization theory to refer to that which must be protected against threats -- whether it be a cultural artifact, a native population, or civilization itself?

Worthy art pursues transcendent, redemptive beauty in whatever form it can be found.

If everything is ugly and hopelessly so, why not let it burn?

Why not actively endorse civilizational suicide?

This is the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, mocking the sacred and promoting the profane.

Related: Lil Nas X: The Anti-Climactic Dead-End of a Nihilistic Pop Culture

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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