Anti-Climacus

QUOTE:

"My own benchmark for thinking of the uses of painting derives unabashedly from 19th Century bourgeois life, as a somewhat elevated form of decor, one-of-a-kind works, executed within certain technical conventions, for invoking beauty and truth in small discrete doses. I am not being facetious about this, either. Truth and beauty are powerful forces and middle-class people busy operating on spleens and probating estates can only be expected to take so much of them in their leisure.
But there is a general complaint over recent decades that art has forsaken altogether the invocation of beauty and truth as its governing objective. In the train wreck of culture and authority that the twentieth century represented, all the previous sortings of human meaning were left smoking in the ditch of history, and what we have been left with is a trade in debris. That a lot of the artifacts look like debris is therefore relevant -- I am thinking specifically now of a Whitney biennial of the 1990s, which included one "piece" that was a gigantic blob of fabricated plastic vomit, of the kind that used to be sold in Times Square joke shops when I was kid, only ten times bigger. It was an exceedingly political show, with the angry women rampant and anathematizing all other modes of expression except their polemic. "

-James Howard Kunstler, as published in The American Enterprise