Modern art and architecture

Modern art and architecture is considered by many conservatives, such as Roger Scruton and to represent a decline in standards from 'classical' art, which usually includes much of the Romantic period in their judgment. 
At first glance, these conservatives would appear to have a point. Compare the works of or the later works of to those of the nineteenth-century academic artists such as or and a decline in both craftsmanship and simple draftsmanship would appear to be present. Compared to the carefully rendered and idealized figures of the French academicians, Picasso and Renoir seem cartoonish and sketchy. The stereotypical rejoinder of incomprehension is that 'a child could draw that',Technically, this is true because a child has drawn that several times. But it is involuntary when a child does it because a child has not learned craftsmanship or simple draftsmanship yet, whereas Picasso and Renoir have made a considered creative decision to do it. or that Modern Art is what happens when Art Schools stop rejecting applicants.
This judgment, however, is superficial and fails to take into account the vast and complex background of why modern art is what it is (and this is speaking only in the western context, as many other cultures have long emphasized abstraction over photorealism, such as East Asian artists).
==Origins==
People that complain about modern art's emphasis on abstraction tend to ignore the complex influences and history that paved the way for what we see today. What has influenced the rise of modern art in "the west" includes the following:
*Technological advancements including the invention of photography and video (which encouraged artists to observe how light works and interacts with color), paint tubes (which allowed artists to paint outdoors with oil paint and observe how light and atmosphere influence a scene), and new synthetic paint hues (which allowed varied and improved expression and emphasis of color) have vastly contributed of the move toward abstraction. Improved transportation and communication to other countries allow new ideas to influence western artists (such as Japonism's emphasis on essence of form and silhouette rather than photorealism reaching Impressionist artists). The value of scarcity of particular objects the elite possessed was threatened by the rise of these technologies, which enabled paintings to be reproduced with high accuracy and added the confidence of a purely mechanical process to portraiture; and lithography, which threatened to put near perfect copies of classic works of art on anybody's walls for pennies a print. 
*Art has become more affordable, where it can reach a wider audience and be expressed more widely rather than serve as feel-good idealized propaganda for rich patrons, while patronage and commissions by the elite have diminished or at least changed. As realized, despite the veneer of Marxist orthodoxy on display in his famous essay on Avant-Garde and Kitsch,Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Partisan Review (1939) the prestige of classical art was founded on the rarity of art objects, which enabled aristocratic patrons to control access and depiction to the unique items of beauty they owned. In this technological environment, the snob appeal of classical art was threatened.
*Huge philosophical movements were underway as part of the consequences and awareness of socio-economic hardships including income inequality (the in the late 19th century showed a more realistic depiction of harsh realities of the working classes) and war (World War I and World War II in particular) that convinced artists to move away from the idealist and romanticized academic art, though not necessarily away from the recognizable subjects of this art. Scientific discoveries especially including light properties causing people to challenge and question what is "real" as well as what is "art". Hence, Impressionism, one of the foundations of modern art, has been more focused on exposing the artifice of art such as showing raw brushstrokes and paint texture as opposed to hiding them in traditional academic art (modern art developed further by emphasizing even more on color, spacing, shapes, and textures); it also emphasizes the fleeting and in-flux nature of light and color in observation rather than capturing a still image in a window as in academic art. A famous piece of work called exemplifies this move toward challenging convention such as the frame size, perspective, the then-common techniques of disguising artifice, and idealization. helped push the idea that everything in art is representational and artificial. Some examples of philosophical movements are later discussed in the article, such as Dada's importance in contextualizing art and showing how we affix labels and meaning to objects. It has been argued however that two of the forerunners of impressionism, Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Monet, were influenced at least in part by the realism of pollution since their styles noticeably changed towards impressionistic as air pollution got worse in London and Paris respectively due to increasing coal burning from the Industrial Revolution.Smog influenced impressionism’s dreamy style (March 25, 2023) Science News.Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution by Anna Lea Albright & Peter Huybers (2023) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120(6):e2219118120. doi:10.1073/pnas.22191181.
Nonetheless, despite the democratization of art, this hasn't stopped the snobby elite for inventing means to exclude. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of artistic modernism, one solution presented itself. Rarity and abstruseness of taste could be made to substitute for rarity of art objects since that horse had already left the barn.
Subject matter and narrative — historical figures, literary figures, idealized scenery or people — were disdained. The critics thought that people liked pictorial art because it told a story. The subject matter was important to the masses. The theory held that people liked pictures and statues of George Washington and Jesus because they liked George Washington and Jesus. They looked at paintings of historical figures and traditional narratives from history or literature and liked the paintings because they brought those figures and narratives to mind. These popular approaches to popular art were arbitrarily judged (Is there anything here but pointless snark and arrogance?):
 
What was needed to keep out the riff-raff was to make the art obscure, hermetic, and needing a complicated education and complicated explanations before it could be fully understood. Once scarcity of art objects was threatened, rarity of taste became de rigeur. This gave rise to works of art that could not be fully appreciated without background knowledge that only a few ladies and gentlemen of leisure could be bothered to acquire. A taste for such art meant that you were the kind of person with money and leisure enough to learn to like it. By this artifice, the snob appeal of art was saved.See generally, Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1975).
This core belief of artistic modernity is itself problematic from the viewpoint of esthetic philosophy. You can jettison the literary, historical, and mythological references that informed classical and academic art. Understanding of these things, too, required knowledge; knowledge that was devalued by modernism. In order to keep contemporary art the bailiwick of an elite, the modernists succeeded only at replacing one kind of education needed to appreciate fine art with another. One result was an art world that was given to curious fads and phases, such as the odd concern with that was thought quite important during much of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The heavy-handedly ironic movement of flowed out of the flatness craze. Bringing back recognizable subjects, but with a nudge and a wink, the Pop artists offered depictions of objects like flags, comic strips, and soup labels that were inherently two-dimensional.
==Dada==
 
Dada was perhaps the first politically-inspired art movement, formed during the years of World War I, against war, bourgeois, nationalist and colonialist interests.Richter, Hans (1965) Dada: Art and Anti-art, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0500200394. Some of the more prominent members included and George Grosz was later to be among the artists in the Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition (see below).
==Surrealism==
 
The Surrealist art movement grew directly out of Dadaism in the 1920s, including Dadaists Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara. Surrealists drew inspiration from Marxism, Sigmund Freud, Pacific Island art (e.g., and André Breton), as well as quantum physics (e.g., "Figure Pandynamique") and Relativity (e.g., "The Persistence of Memory").Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology by Gavin Parkinson, Yale University Press, 2008, 294 pp. ISBN 9780300098877.A review of Surrealism, Art and Modern Science by Chiara Ambrosio (2010). Some of the other prominent Surrealists included and 
==Degenerate art==
It is one of history's many ironies that the concept of "degenerate art" was introduced by a Jew and prominent early Zionist, In 1892 Nordau published Entartung (English title, Degeneration.)Max Nordau, Degeneration. English translation, 1895.. 
Nordau based his hypothesis upon the theories about eugenics and forensic phrenology by the Italian criminologist whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were "born criminals" whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics. Lombroso and Nordau accepted the social Darwinist hypotheses of who held that 'ontology recapitulates phylogeny' — which is to say that every organism passes through the evolutionary states of its ancestors in the process of being born and maturing. Haeckel's theory raised the prospect that some people get stuck on an earlier stage of development and become 'atavistic' evolutionary throwbacks. From this basis, Nordau sought to criticize the modern art of his day as the result of similar processes of biological degeneration. A number of artists and literary figures, according to Nordau, had been so corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. 
He attacked in English literature and described the mysticism of the in French literature as a product of mental pathology. Explaining the painterliness of as the sign of a diseased visual cortex, he decried modern degeneracy while praising traditional German culture. The chief effect of Nordau's screed was to compile a pleasant anthology of some of the most interesting literary works from writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, and Stephane Mallarmé; Nordau's ranting commentary about the degeneracy supposedly manifest in the masterpieces he anthologized only adds piquancy to the collection.
Despite the fact that Nordau was Jewish and a key figure in the Zionist movement, his theory of artistic degeneracy would be seized upon by German National Socialists during the Weimar Republic as a rallying point for their anti-Semitic and racist demand for Aryan purity in art.
===The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition===
In 1937, the Nazi regime ran an art exhibition of , featuring works confiscated from the collections of several museums and from prominent Jews. The exhibition was organized by but the arbiter of what constituted 'degenerate art' was Hitler himself. The exhibition included work by a number of well-known artists, including and These works were displayed accompanied and partially obscured by political slogans such as "Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule", "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul", "An insult to German womanhood", and "The ideal—cretin and whore". The event began in Munich but later went on tour to Dusseldorf, Berlin, Vienna, Weimar, and Salzburg. 
Many of the works displayed here were cynically sold off, to mostly American collectors, after the exhibition, although approximately 5,000 works were destroyed. Joseph Goebbels wrote of them changing hands between U.S. collectors for "ten cents a kilo", although some "foreign exchange ... will go into the pot for war expenses, and after the war will be devoted to the purchase of art."Frederic Spotts, 2002. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. The Overlook Press. pp. 151–68. ISBN 1-58567-507-5. Some 1500 paintings were stolen by an art dealer; the works were discovered squirreled away in his son's several apartments in 2012. "Nazi art treasure trove valued at £1BILLION is found in shabby Munich apartment". Daily Mail. Nov. 3, 2013
==High modernism==
Clement Greenberg's contrast of the avant-garde versus kitsch suggests a mentality and dynamic that opposes elite tastes against popular tastes.Deniz Tekiner, Formalist art criticism and the politics of meaning. Social Justice, Jun 22, 2006. Occasionally, this contempt for the tastes of the masses was noticed by those masses, and drew angry retorts. This elitist conception of modernism has been labeled "high modernism", a label suggesting that this is the most extreme or characteristic form of modernism. Cultural critic has said: 
This conflict between a self-proclaimed artistic elite and the masses has played out on a number of fronts.
===The Soviet Union versus the Second Viennese School===
The is a group of twentieth-century composers who sought to discard tonality in their music. After melodic centers insidiously slid back into their compositions despite their best attempts to exclude them (), they devised the and the concept of musical serialism as algorithms whose purpose was to make sure those tonal centers did not sneak back in. Important composers associated with these movements include and It goes without saying that music composed by these methods seldom sends the audience out of the concert hall humming the tunes. Despite this, some products of the period, such as Berg's opera Wozzeck, have entered the standard repertoire. 
thumb|right|David Smith's Cubi VI, now at the Israel Museum.
During the years after World War II, serialism and atonality became near ubiquitous in Western concert music, which at this point was no longer underwritten by paying audiences or aristocratic patrons but had become a wing of academia. Greenberg's contempt for the taste of the masses was made explicit by composer who in 1958 published an essay given the title Who Cares If You Listen?Milton Babbitt, "Who Cares If You Listen?". (High Fidelity, 1958) in which he dismisses the tastes of his audience and praises the atonal and serialistic styles for their "efficiency".Milton Babbitt, String Quartet No. 2. (1954) Babbitt himself, however, claimed that the title was changed from the tamer "the Composer as Specialist" to be more provocative, without his permission. 
From the 1950s through the 1970s, the academic serialist composers heaped scorn on their colleagues who dared to cling to tonality. expressed a widely held view when he proclaimed that while "the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system, first initiated by Schoenberg, subsequently developed into a world of chromaticism extending far beyond the domains originally envisioned for its use."Anthony Tommasini, Midcentury Serialists: The Bullies or the Besieged?. New York Times, July 9, 2000.Charles Wuorinen, String Quartet No. 1, 1971.
In the Soviet Union, fortunately, some of the commissars were still proletarian enough that they would have none of this. Central Committee secretary, published a manifesto denouncing as These decrees cast a chill over the careers of whose opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was perceived as the offense that triggered the denunciation.Dmitri Shostakovich, Passacaglia from The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Леди Макбет Мценского уезда), 1934. and were also whispered about as potential targets. The Communist party organized a special congress of composers where they were required to disclaim bourgeois formalism and adhere to socialist standards in music. The anti-formalist campaigns slacked off after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; the composers were formally rehabilitated in 1958. 
However ham-fisted this government intervention in the creative process was, it had the result of making post-war Russian music much more listenable than contemporary productions of Western concert music, though not for lack of ham-fisted intervention in the creative process in the West, which, as previously explained, was not the case. The Russian composers whose work was the target of the anti-formalism campaign went on to compose works of abiding popularity, such as Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony in D Minor.
Of course, there were some composers outside the Soviet Union who resisted the strict taboo on classic tonality represented by strict dodecaphony; Copland wrote several pieces which, while based on tone rows, declined to rely solely upon the prime, inverse, retrograde, and retrograde inverse forms of those rows, and instead incorporated fragmented quotes thereof as a means of retaining more familiar harmonies.Listen, for example, to his Piano Fantasy, which he himself argued could be described as having an "over-all tonal orientation" despite "liberal use of devices associated with that [twelve-tone] technique." He also wrote unambiguously tonal pieces on and off until his death. Likewise, Vaughn Williams more or less stuck to his guns until his death (1958), although he did often defy expectations in other ways. While serialism certainly exerted a strong influence over some media/types of ensemble, the then-ascendant wind ensemble continued to develop a largely non-serial repertoire more or less unmolested though arguably this is probably just because the Second Viennese School proper seems to largely have had nothing to do with the smaller wind instruments, and in no area was serialism wholly dominant. 
Starting during the 1960s, other movements arose as well to escape the domineering strictures of Darmstädter serialism: examples include the minimalist style of Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the aleatoric and chance experiments of John Cage, and later, the spectral music of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. By the 1980's, even a hardline serialist like Pierre Boulez had wearied of the rigors of hard serialism, and integrated the technique into a more fluid, expressive style.
===Was the CIA responsible?===
The revisionist historian Frances Stonor Saunders suggested, in her book The cultural cold war: the CIA and the world of arts and lettersNew York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. ISBN 1-56584-596-X that the Central Intelligence Agency secretly funded many of the Abstract Expressionist painters, serialist composers, and other modern artists in the post-war United States. Via the the CIA encouraged these artists as a rejoinder to the political orthodoxies of and the persecution of avant-garde artists by Communist bureaucrats. 
According to Saunders, the idea was to win the hearts and minds of the Western intelligentsia that followed these issues and turn them into intellectual allies in the Cold War and the struggle against Soviet communism. By publicizing the American artists' freedom to create drippy action paintings, atonal music, and other abstract arts free from any moral or political message, they meant to contrast the artistic vigor and freedom of the West versus political interference by Stalinist bureaucrats. 
This really was a job that called for double-naught spies. A public State Department exhibition of modernist American art drew political blowback, with President Harry Truman scornfully remarking, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot."Frances Stonor Saunders, Modern art was CIA 'weapon', The Independent, Oct. 22, 1996. In this climate, the message that America was a land of cultural vitality and friendly to intellectuals would need to be publicized by clandestine means. The newly formed CIA, staffed with young graduates of elite Ivy League colleges, was better suited for this mission than other agencies of the United States government. Nelson Rockefeller and other members of the Rockefeller family were alleged to have been the conduits of CIA patronage, via their seats on the board of the and other cultural institutions.
Others have dismissed this suggestion as a conspiracy theory. Michael Kimmelman has argued that these allegations are either flatly false or at minimum decontextualized.Michael Kimmelman, in Frascina, Francis, ed. (2000). "Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War". Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Psychology Press. pp. 294–306. ISBN 9780415228664. And to some, like Henry Makow, it really was a conspiracy. The CIA was sponsoring abstract art on behalf of the Illuminati, who used abstract art to corrupt our moral fiber. "Modernism is a solipsism where the bankers' perversityIs this an antisemitic dog whistle or are we already seeing things? becomes the norm. For example, the CIA actively promoted modern abstract art, an art disconnected from human identity and aspirations, an art any child or monkey could produce."Henry Makow, How the Illuminati Control Culture, October 6, 2013. Maybe it really was no conspiracy because, more than these allegations being either flatly false or at minimum decontextualized per se and in one of the greatest ironies of history, the Congress for Cultural Freedom ultimately did nothing but establish political counterorthodoxies of a paradoxical Social Democratic Nihilism more than publicize the American artists' freedom of expression per se. And they were even weak ones at that, never really dominating except at elite Ivy League colleges, whence the Director of Central Intelligence had drawn the staff of the newly formed CIA. To add to the irony, “conspiracy theory” is a fitting description of the motivation behind this brand of artistic modernity that even the leaders of the “free” world officially disliked. 
===The International Style gets in your face===
Bad architecture has a problem. If you don't get serialist or atonal music, you don't have to listen to it. Odds are your classical FM station doesn't play much of it anyways. If you find the action paintings of incoherent daubs, nobody is forcing you to look at them. But the bad, sterile architecture that characterized the post-WWII twentieth century was unavoidably in your face. 
This style was called the , largely because architects planted the same concrete, steel, and glass boxes everywhere, without regard to the surrounding buildings or traditions established by the availability of local materials. And due to the extreme dominance of the style in the architectural community, soon building materials other than concrete, steel, and glass became too costly or unavailable.
thumb|200px|right|Right-wing Fascist architecture: the Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy, 1932 - 1936. Notice the difference? I didn't either. 
The International Style, like serialist music, arose in pre-war Germany and was fostered in the by As the Nazis began to rise to power in 1930s Germany, many Jewish teachers and students from the Bauhaus fled, many to British Palestine, where they built the of Tel Aviv in the Bauhaus style.
A great deal of curious ideology surrounded the International Style at its creation. The most utopian of the founders of the International Style was the French architect who named his ideal vast and austere tracts of whiteness and concrete. The imposition of order on human life was at the centerpiece of Le Corbusier's ideals. Le Corbusier's biggest project during his life was a series of buildings in India. He haughtily addressed himself to future residents who would have to live and work in his buildings, enjoining them from attempting to individualize the buildings or depart from the austere purity of his vision:
Grand claims were made for his vision; he said that his design for the city "puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach." Le Corbusier went on to collaborate with the Vichy regime of France during World War II, while also asking Mussolini to put him in charge of something radiant. 
====The Radiant City brought to earth====
An attempt to enact the Radiant City on an even larger scale was done by Le Corbusier's student and in the plan of Brazil's new capital, begun in 1960. Brasilia was built to a monumental scale, with vast paved areas beneath a pitiless tropical sun, suitable for parading massed troops and tanks, maybe, but not for human beings to live and work in. As Robert Hughes has said, 
As has remarked, the intense orderliness and monotony of the rectilinear designs in an International Style radiant city become disorienting and dehumanizing:
====The arrogance of urban renewal====
thumb|right|The brutality of Brutalism: the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, DC. Currently occupied by The Ministry of Love Health and Human Services.
The International Style, particularly in its later Actually named after Le Corbusier's enthusiasm for béton brut, "bare concrete"; but if the shoe fits.... manifestations, is one of the most generally disliked art styles of history. It is routinely described as ugly,Philip S. Gutis, It's Ugly, And So Is The Fight To Save It, New York Times, February 7, 1987, accessed 02-17-2008 inhuman,E.g., C. Thau & K. Vindum, Jacobsen, 2002, at 65, ISBN 978-87-7407-230-0 (referring to reaction to internationalism as "A Horror of the Traceless, Inhuman Industrial Look") sterile,A History of Architecture, New Internationalist issue 202 — December 1989 and elitist.T. Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, Farrar Straus Giroux (1981), ISBN 978-0-374-15892-7 ISBN 0-374-15892-4 Non-fans include Charles, Prince of Wales, who remarked "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."Jonathan Glancey, Life after carbuncles, The Guardian, May 17, 2004. It is indelibly associated with large corporate clients and government projects. Its most disliked manifestations tended to be the residential buildings built during the heyday of and slum clearances during the 1960s and 1970s. 
As has pointed out in , "slum" neighborhoods often were in fact working neighborhoods, with residents living above streets whose ground floors were full of small businesses. These environments fostered community, of a sort; though the residents may have been poor, the unplanned nature of the neighborhoods and the mix of residential and commercial use put "eyes on the street". Sidewalks and public areas were easily visible and accessible to some subset of the residents. Shopkeepers and residents could intervene in case of trouble. In a healthy urban poor neighborhood, communities took some of the burdens of keeping order off the shoulders of police and other authorities.
The urban planners, confident that their expertise was superior to that of the poor people who lived there, swept away these tenements and removed their residents into vast International Style high-rises. These projects were designed for privacy with hardly any visible public spaces. They were deliberately and intentionally separated from grocers, small restaurants and taverns, and other small businesses that formed part of the former urban mix. Moving the urban poor into these warrens often brought an epidemic of crime, like the ones that befell the notorious in Chicago, and the housing development in St. Louis.
==That said==
Tom Wolfe was generally correct when he wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House that large blank concrete constructions are alienating, and architects need to take into account the people who live and work in the buildings they design. Wolfe's book became a standard text in architecture courses, to discourage architects from repeating the mistakes they were making. It didn't work. With the passage of time, some Brutalist buildings have actually become popular with the people who live or work in them, and many are now regarded as spectacularly photogenic, leading to a revival of interest in the style.Why Brutalist Architecture Is So Hard to Love by Roman Mars (99% Invisible) (Aug. 13 2015 9:27 AM) Slate.
One of the most famous "students" of the Dadaist movement, , would actually become one of the greatest critics of the Modern Art movements. Andy Warhol hated both modern art and the wealthy people who supported it. His most famous works were actually insults to the art world, such as a film of the Empire State Building that's slowed down to make it even more unwatchable when the actual building was literally walking distance from his studio(s) and could be viewed and enjoyed much better for free, or a painting of a bunch of soup cans. He would outright insult his wealthy patrons, intentionally miss appointments or make them suffer through various indignities. Much like the rich courtesans who could never admit that the Emperor was completely naked, the wealthy patrons assumed he had an artistic message far greater than "FU" that they simply couldn't comprehend but would never admit such, Warhol became internationally famous.
==See also==
*Frankfurt School
*Cultural Marxism
*Futurism
*Fun:Dada
==External links==
*Mike Harman, The cultural Cold War: corporate and state intervention in the arts; libcom.org, Sept. 11, 2006. Alleges that the CIA funded serialist composers and abstract impressionist painters as part of an anti-Communist strategy.
*James C. Scott, The Trouble with the View from Above. Cato Unbound, Sept. 8, 2010.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Architecture
Category:Culture