Maggie's Farm

A number of folks have linked to Roger Kimball's piece, Why the Art World is a Disaster. Kimball's ideas have been said before by others, but he is one of our favorite essayists, and it's definitely worth reading.

His point is not a curmudgeonly critique that "modern" art products are ugly, or not really art. His point is that art designed to shock the middle class is predictable, boring, and old hat. Political art, conceptual art, art that attempts "the domestication of deviance" is a tired idea, and was already tired in the 1940s when Orwell wrote:

(The artist) is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

.I learned a few things from Kimball's piece, including the tidbit that Duchamp made art of urinals to mock the avant garde, and found that they took it seriously. At that point, he quit art. Read the piece.

Image: Kandinsky's House in Munich, 1908. Yes, I do love Kandinsky. Maybe my favorite, if I had to pick one artist.