abstract truth

Peter Schjeldahl, resident visual art critic for the New Yorker stated while reviewing a MOMA exhibit of Abstract Expressionists from the fifties, “They embraced abstraction as the shortest route to universal meaning and significance.” It’s a patent absurdity, one that undermines our culture, our thought, and our integrity.

Visual art, like music, has been a manifestation of human expression since the beginning, and while flutes and drums have been lost to time, paintings still survive on rock walls. Visual art preceded writing by millenia, encapsulating and conveying meaning, and representing us, one to another. It isn’t tool-making that separates us from the rest of the animals, but the making of art, and these days, it separates us from the machines, too. Only humans make art, and only humans recognize it.

Abstract art is a negation of meaning, and its early practitioners were nihilistic, disappointed because art is difficult, and because life is hard -- lessons learned at the open end of a bottle. Suicidal drunkenness ‘in’ isn’t going to yield anything pleasant coming ‘out’ – abstract expressionism is ugly. The rise of abstraction paralleled other fundamentalist reactionary movements seen since, and the destruction of the twelve hundred year old sandstone Buddha by the Taliban embodies the early abstractionist’s attitudes toward the foundations and heritage of visual art.

After a devastating purge, life usually returns chastened and different, brighter and with new vigor. Time to jettison the whole mess – the enormous state apparatus of schools and grant agencies, the celebrity status of cynical hustlers, and the gallery system with its dollar rankings based on some invisible consensus and sheer mystery. Time to wake up. Time to start over.