Thanks Tim for your compliment.
David, maybe this will help you understand, it’s the best I can do.
Hi Michael Kelly, Thanks for your words of appreciation.
Don't be too hard on Namesake (my pet name for Michael Newberry). There are many intelligent apologists for this garbage and way too many people in our culture who do consider it art. Someone has to fight it on the intellectual/artistic level.
Again, I don’t know Michael Newberry, and the following comments are aimed at his comments not him personally. Also, I’m writing this more to clarify what art is not to argue whether Post Modernism is art.
Until Ayn Rand, the concept art had been a catch-all of virtually any product that was the least bit creative, skillful, beautiful or almost anything that had no utilitarian value. After her clarifying definition and her accompanying essays, art is slowly being distinguished by Objectivist’s who understand and use her principles. We realize the value and purpose of art in human life. We want to keep it distinct and important.
Most people I talk to have no definition of art. Most, even when given one, protest with the comment; “Who are you to say what art is.” It can be confusing growing up, being pounded by the intellectuals out there, as most people are, with the idea that anything in a museum is art. Until I had Ayn Rand’s definition I was confused as to what art was. (In fact I still struggle a bit with whether some things belong in the concept art; some photographs, some fictional biographies in movies or books, some portraits, some still lifes)
I am not an authority on Post Modernism, who would want to be? But PM has been clearly shown by others to be Fart (false art) or anti-art. Like nihilism, a PMist’s purpose was not to bring a new quality or skill or composition or style nor was their purpose recreation of reality much less selective recreation nor was it to express their soul or metaphysical value judgements. A PMist’s purpose was not to concretize abstractions nor reduce them to their essence nor was it integration or understanding. Their goal was precisely the opposite of these things. Their goal was to take all of these attributes of art and invert them. Their goal was to negate these important human values.
Ayn Rand said it best in “The Romantic Manifesto”;
“Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man's conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.
To reduce man's consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to "moods," of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.
But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates—by the negative means of an absence—the relationships of art to philosophy, of reason to man's survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence.
After centuries of the philosophers' war against reason, they have succeeded—by the method of vivisection—in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull.”
Michael said he hoped others wouldn’t short circuit with his comment but what do you expect from intelligent people who have tried to integrate the principles of good art. I don’t think Michael is some neophyte to Objectivism who might have an excuse on such an error. He’s an artist, an Objectivist artist, (I think) for crying out loud. Michael’s comment was not “shock value” it was well… post-modernist, it was anti-conceptual. It was also the promotion and sanction of PM into the discussion and realm of art.
There is no art without its defining characteristics, there is no integration without reason, there is no “artistic integration” without art or reason. And Michael Kelly, Michael Newberry may not be an apologist for PM but to use two of the worst PMist’s as a standard, a superior standard no less against Lanza, a real artist, maybe a great performing artist, regardless of how you judge his artistic integrity, is more than egregious it’s unconscionable. It’s no wonder Mr. Lindsey short circuited, obviously, so did I.
Michael, I’ve read some good words you have written about art, about your purpose, so for the sake of all that you hold sacred, reconsider your comments.
Sam Axton
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