Why is Modern Art so Bad? | 5 Minute Video
For two millennia, great artists set the standard for beauty. Now those standards are gone. Modern art is a competition between the ugly and the twisted; the most shocking wins. What happened? How did the beautiful come to be reviled and bad taste come to be celebrated? Renowned artist Robert Florczak explains the history and the mystery behind this change and how it can be stopped and even reversed.
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Script:
“The Mona Lisa”… “The Pieta”… “The Girl with a Pearl Earring.” For a score of centuries, artists enriched Western society with their works of astonishing beauty. “The Night Watch”… “The Thinker”… “The Rocky Mountains.” Master after master, from Leonardo, to Rembrandt, to Bierstadt, produced works that inspired, uplifted, and deepened us. And they did this by demanding of themselves the highest standards of excellence, improving upon the work of each previous generation of masters, and continuing to aspire to the highest quality attainable.
But something happened on the way to the 20th Century. The profound, the inspiring and the beautiful were replaced by the new, the different, and the ugly. Today the silly, the pointless, and the purely offensive are held up as the best of modern art.
Michelangelo carved his “David” out of a rock. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just offers us a rock, — a rock — all 340 tons of it. That’s how far standards have fallen. How did this happen? How did the thousand-year ascent towards artistic perfection and excellence die out?
It didn’t. It was pushed out. Beginning in the late 19th century, a group dubbed The Impressionists rebelled against the French Academie des Beaux Arts and its demand for classical standards. Whatever their intentions, the new modernists sowed the seeds of aesthetic relativism — the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” mentality.
Today everybody loves the Impressionists. And, as with most revolutions, the first generation or so produced work of genuine merit. Monet, Renoir, and Degas still maintained elements of disciplined design and execution, but with each new generation standards declined until there were no standards. All that was left was personal expression.
The great art historian Jacob Rosenberg wrote that quality in art “is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree . . . objectively traceable.” But the idea of a universal standard of quality in art is now usually met with strong resistance if not open ridicule.
“How can art be objectively measured?” I’m challenged. In responding, I simply point to the artistic results produced by universal standards compared to what is produced by relativism. The former gave the world “The Birth of Venus” and “The Dying Gaul,” while the latter has given us “The Holy Virgin Mary,” fashioned with cow dung and pornographic images, and “Petra,” the prize-winning sculpture of a policewoman squatting and urinating — complete with a puddle of synthetic urine.
Without aesthetic standards we have no way to determine quality or inferiority. Here’s a test I give my graduate students, all talented and well educated. Please analyze this Jackson Pollock painting and explain why it is good. It is only after they give very eloquent answers that I inform them that the painting is actually a close up of my studio apron. I don’t blame them; I would probably have done the same since it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between the two.
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Gonna recommend a video essay about modern art. It’s called “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Facism” by Jacob Geller. It’s one of my favorite essays and I recommend it highly.
That art piece Fountain is the best piece of “modern art” I’ve seen
Your chair looked nothing like a JP. Your students must be dumb
Wow, PragerU predicted the future! Raygun was the ice-skater!
It's not bad, you're just uneducated and fail to understand it lmao
There are great artist. Photorealistic artists Norman Rockwell, Richard Estes, and Ralph Goings just to name a few.
W for PragerU
If money laundering wasn't a thing then modern art would have to be good. If you disagree then explain why a rock is supposedly worth 10 million.
You people don’t even know what Modern art is
Oh dear boy, I know you wish, you hope for universal truths, but alas, you are a speck of dust in an infinite void
Is he talking about contemporary art? Modern art includes artists like Picasso and Matisse . This is a genuine question.
Say it with me. “Reductio ad absurdum”
i absolutely hate modern art as the artists are pompous over potentous jumped up little freaks
I acknowledge that this man will never read my comment but I have a strong criticism for this video. He's main evidence for the reason why modern is so bad, are abstract works that often mock classical art. There are contemporary artists who use very deep knowledge, intuition and skills for the creation of their artworks. Another thing this pRofeSsor, tries to leave out if his video is that not all art has to be good. Some art is good, and some art is bad. What he's failing to acknowledge that despite that both are still art. People like him, shiver at the idea that art can be bad, and subsequently try to diminish all of modern art just because they saw a bunch of ugly works.
This is a beyond dumb take. There are tens of thousands of incredible realist painters and sculptors creating beautiful art today.
But you know what. It's been done for centuries.
It's good people are trying to innovate. Create something new. I thought you capitalists love innovation. You don't like it? Go buy some photrealistic art then.
Also, he's talking about the Impressionists like people didn't absolutely hate it back in the day too, the modern art of its time.
This man Is a real Art teacher 👏 ❤
The jealousy of those who lacked the talent it takes to make great art is what drove this pathetic meaningless movement.
I think this "art" reflects two types of people: the lazy, and the immature, who want to "rebel" against any norms just for the sake of it, even in cases where such norms are beneficial
You said what I was thinking all along.
I think the main factor here is the market. Since impressionism, modern art has been pushed to attract rich people, not as something 'artistic', but as an investment. When you hear a modern piece is sold by millions, that hasn't been sold to a particular that is going to show it at home for pleasure. That normally is an investment for a society or a company, an asset. It's like a piramidal scheme. We as regular people can demand and actively reject bad art, but don't expect short term results, if the stablishment remains affirming that that art is good and valuable, it will retain its price. Anyway, time to look into the past and make a new Renaissance.