by Alexander Ferrar

Created on: December 21, 2008   Last Updated: December 24, 2008

The art of today reminds me of the typical American college student, who takes money from his parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other, and here's why. Sir Isaac Newton wrote that if he had seen further than others, it was because he'd stood on the shoulders of Giants. Since that time, we as a species have climbed exponentially higher, to heights undreamed of, and now pat ourselves on the back while we stagnate. We have arrived at this pinnacle of human achievement not by our own works, but by those of our forefathers, yet the methods of those who got us here are disdained as outdated and obsolete.

Since fin de siecle and the beginning of the last century, quite a few pompous "manifestos violently rejecting the past" challenged the established values and changed the face of the art world so that people of little or no talent could also be included. Since then we've been inflicted with mountebanks making a pretense of being artists, abetted by charlatans making a pretence of being art critics, all of them playing at a charade claiming that paint splashed on canvases without any regard for form or color or substance signifies some kind of elusive talent. Out of that comes an audience of lemmings arguing the relative merits of different types of drivel and trying to one-up each other in their praise of the Emperor's New Clothes. Anyone capable of free thought who calls this exactly what it is, well, "merely doesn't get it".

These manifestos for defiance of set rules in art, poetry, and literature have been steadily denouncing every guideline there is under the assumption that defiance of rules is somehow new. A generation always disdains the previous one as if the parents are ignorant and the children are plugged into something of which anyone older is clueless.

We claim that times are changing, but examining history shows the same patterns in tedious repetition. What we seem to have forgotten is that those established "rules" came out of millennia of trial and error, that all this experimenting that characterizes the past century was already tried and found wanting, that the reason we are where we are today is because our predecessors knew what they were doing. The ground was broken enough to bring us here, and all subsequent ground-breaking is merely a throwback to primitive attempts that failed and should be forgotten.

And, since the novelty of being avant garde inevitably wears off, we go the way of the jaded. We degenerate and deviate for

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>