The Death of Art?

The other day my beloved and I went to Port Credit to drop off a packet for the Port Credit Art Walk, an event where local businesses host specific artists for a certain period, drawing visitors to their shops. The place where I was to leave my application was in a lighthouse which flashed merrily on the dismally white, rainy, Canadian spring day. We parked the car and discussed the best way to enter the building. I insisted we take the stairs up. I was right of course and we found the door to the building. But when we entered we were told that we had driven a long way for nothing. They were no longer taking applicants for the Art Walk.

It seems that businesses who wanted to host artists’ works were few and far between. My dearest was incensed (he had made up the beautiful packet) but because he is Chinese you could not tell. I, being Indian, thought “oh well, such is life” and we left. We sat in the car where my love informed me that he was incensed, then pointed out a loon or merganser floating in the choppy water of Lake Ontario (he can never stay angry for long). We sat there watching an abundance of geese and ducks float by the dock, and a little old lady feeding a swan from a cup.

There we began to discuss what is happening to the art world today. We concluded that we are entering some kind of Dark Ages where the humanities, those things that make us human like art, poetry, and the study of language and beauty, were going by the wayside. And that in the future many generations from now our progeny will look back and say: “My Goddess, those were bad times! The movies were derivative, the books and poetry were contrived and inept, and the art was psychotic and ugly. And what they didn’t do to the environment!” So to those future generations I say shut up. It is easy to see in hindsight. Stop tooting your horns, I saw it first.

But seriously, something is going wrong with our culture. The humanities are barely being taught in schools, funds for the arts have a slow leak, and mastery of the language and grammar are nil. How can we call ourselves humans if the only thing that differentiates us from the animals is the fact that we are sometimes bipedal when we are not hunched over the computer terminal like primates, rapping out what is essentially a bunch of grunts and nonsensical signs which rarely produce anything remotely like a sentence? I mean, even a monkey will eventually spell a word if he hits the keys with his bottom long enough, that does not mean it is good writing or should be published.

The same applies to the visual arts. All because a person calls him or herself an artist and balls together some scraps and says it represents the ethical determinism of the human race does not mean that ball of scraps is art. And in there lies the problem. In the art world I have found that the King has no clothes but everyone involved in the art world is afraid to say it, and everyone outside the art world just wants to avoid such a kingdom of fools. Thus the lack of merchants wanting to show art, the lack of buyers for it, the diminishing support for it, and finally the lack of people who care about it.

Art is the only profession in which one does not have to show any skill or aptitude in order to call oneself an artist. All you have to have is a new idea and a lot of indecipherable rot and you are a genius. I wish other jobs were so forgiving. It would be nice to dress up like a surgeon and walk into a hospital and start collecting $100,000 a year because I look good in greens. Or maybe I could walk into a NASA and get to go to the moon because I want to.

A lot of people say that that is what is nice about the art world--it is democratic; it is not judgmental. It may not be, but the rest of world is and it has judged art today to be a failure. Nobody wants to go a museum when a new artist is showing because they know it is going to be terrible. People go to see the Old Masters because they were good at what they did, and even though they had less than we have today and lived and died in worse ways, they still managed to leave behind beauty. What they made did not look like a three-year-old did it. They had skills. Look at the legacy they have left us. Look at the legacy we will leave future generations, cold sculptures of twisted metal, a fifty- foot flayed virgin Mary, glasses of urine with religious paraphernalia in them, portraits made of feces, and so on. The future will call us crazy and maybe we are, after all look at what we have done to the environment.