Modernism in Austin

Tout Austin (i.e., Austin’s civic and cultural elites) turned out for the grand opening of the late Ellsworth Kelly’s “Austin”, described and depicted here as a chapel of light for “contemplation”. Not contemplation, mind you, but “contemplation”, which must be something akin to “mindfulness“.

Kelly’s “chapel” has taken up residence at the Blanton Museum of Art, which belongs to the University of Texas at Austin. (The prepositional modifier is the official but unnecessary place designator for the intellectual and social blight known as UT).

What does “Austin” look like? This:

Impressive, no? No, not impressive.

About a mile away — an easy walk or bike ride for a contemplative student, faculty member, or taxpayer — is a real work of art, Austin’s Cathedral of St. Mary:

To quote myself:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the various arts became an “inside game”. Painters, sculptors, composers (of “serious” music), and choreographers began to create works not for the enjoyment of audiences but for the sake of exploring “new” forms. Given that the various arts had been perfected by the early 1900s (at the outside), the only way to explore “new” forms was to regress toward primitive ones — toward a lack of structure…. Aside from its baneful influence on many true artists, the regression toward the primitive has enabled persons of inferior talent (and none) to call themselves “artists”. Thus modernism is banal when it is not ugly.

Painters, sculptors, etc., have been encouraged in their efforts to explore “new” forms by critics, by advocates of change and rebellion for its own sake (e.g., “liberals” and “bohemians”), and by undiscriminating patrons, anxious to be au courant. Critics have a special stake in modernism because they are needed to “explain” its incomprehensibility and ugliness to the unwashed.

The unwashed have nevertheless rebelled against modernism, and so its practitioners and defenders have responded with condescension, one form of which is the challenge to be “open minded” (i.e., to tolerate the second-rate and nonsensical). A good example of condescension is heard on Composers Datebook, a syndicated feature that runs on some NPR stations. Every Composers Datebook program closes by “reminding you that all music was once new.” As if to lump Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven.

All music, painting, sculpture, and dance were once new, but new doesn’t necessarily mean good. Much (most?) of what has been produced since 1900 (if not before) is inferior, self-indulgent crap.