Turn toward realism?
Realism is becoming popular once again in painting studios. This development is welcome but it’s also sobering. Looking at the growing number of realists demonstrates how much has been lost. Much of it is Impressionism-adjacent which is not a good path. And for many new realists, Sargent has an oversize influence, which is also a wrong path.
An artist creates a work of art by mimesis, which means imitating nature rather than copying it. Before the Progressive Era, people understood that the job of the artist, poet, and musician is to mimetically imitate nature. During mimesis, if the artist successfully combines emotion with order, the result is called beauty. Too much emotion or too much order diminishes the beauty of a work of art.
With the advent of the Progressive era and its Year Zero mentality, the Classical understanding is forgotten. Progressives question nature’s role in art and without nature mimesis is forgotten. Of course, we know that there is neither realism nor beauty without nature.
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Living in the Progressive Year Zero relieves us from knowing details about the past. After all, we know the most important thing; everything in the past was designed to produce us–the crown of creation. It’s the perfect just-so story. Besides, we have the best porn and weapons ever, and humanity’s greatest creation: propaganda. With propaganda, we can make the truth false, and the false true–even rewrite the past. Truly amazing! Of course, I am only telling you things that you already know.
Year Zero frees artists from the oppressive burdens of talent and ability, both relics of the racist and patriarchal past. Artists are free to pursue celebrity by concentrating on themselves. This is natural enough but do you see the problem? What happens when every artist represents the end of evolution and is a genius–who gets the attention?
The contemporary art world’s answer is to award celebrity based on identity: race, sex, and health. Identity is a powerful filter but it still leaves the field hopelessly overcrowded.
The next-level filter is novelty. The art world thrives on novelty. In Year Zero, novelty turns out to be dead easy to produce: simply avoid producing anything shown during the last two seasons. You get bonus novelty points if your work upsets the non-museum-visiting public. It’s also a prized achievement to actually outrage this group.
The next level–the final boss–is junk obsession (genital obsession). While we’ve seen a lot of gender-related breakthroughs, junk obsession remains a rich field for novelty. I expect we’ll soon see public exhibitions of junk-obsessed activity with persons who in the Past were thought unfit to participate in such artistic activities. These artists are bound to gain widespread celebrity.
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Compared to the exciting time in the Year Zero contemporary art world, the turn toward realism seems timid and unambitious. Hold fast my realists friends. Aristotle believes that beauty, truth, and the good are convertible; beauty leads to truth and to the good.
Different people have different opinions about what constitutes beauty, though. My heterosexual father, for instance, had practically no clue about the beauty I perceived in the male body and male-male interactions. He asked me about my perception of male beauty once, asking if I felt that Mel Gibson’s body in Lethal Weapon was how I defined it (an example of an ideal male) — as he said he was under the impression that women felt his body in that film was a sort of standard. (And, for some, it is.) His questioning showed me that he couldn’t comprehend what physical cues result in the homosexual male mind (mine, at least, in terms of my particular taste) defining something as both highly beautiful and strongly erotically appealing. Gibson in that film was not ugly. His body was somewhat attractive, but only somewhat. He was too old and even when he was much more attractive (e.g. in the first Mad Max film), he was certainly not among the most beautiful examples of maleness. I can see why a heterosexual male would be inclined to view him favorably, though. Qualities such as toughness and ruggedness are frequently assumed, by hetero males, to be qualities that gay men find paramountly attractive, simply because many hetero men find those qualities appealing in a Platonic manner. Some gay men (probably a minority) like those qualities more than other qualities such as youthfulness and prettiness. I think research shows that most people, regardless of orientation, favor those in their physical prime. For males, that’s around the age of 18–19. Research also shows that good skin is very important to beauty (regardless of one’s orientation) and guys Gibson’s age do not have the soft smooth skin of an 18-year-old. Their skin sags all over their body and they have lost muscle tone. So, the mismatch between my father’s guess and reality is due to a merely Platonic standard being substituted for a fuller one that includes the erotic component.
My father said that males being intimate is something he had seen in erotic videos and it was repulsive to him. He also erroneously believed that homosexuality was the same thing as being transgendered. (Ironically, heterosexuality and transgenderism are more similar to one another, as gays like their own sex and thus the state of their bodies in terms of that.) I am not an expert in heterosexual opinions of beauty, although I have some clues. I also do not become excited/satisfied by seeing females being intimate. I don’t find female genitalia aesthetically appealing. Although I can recognize female beauty, I do not find the female body erotic nor do I consider its qualities as beautiful as those of the most beautiful males. It is the maleness that is a requirement for the strongest positive impression, even though aspects of maleness can also be unappealing. For example, facial hair and body hair are associated with maleness but generally I prefer that neither be present. (Faces are more of a different matter when compared with bodies, being more about pure Platonic aesthetics rather than relying upon an erotic component. Despite that, of course, having the erotic component be present makes a face impactful in a different, and more intense, way. One can appreciate the beauty of birds and flowers, just like beautiful women, without the erotic component. For bodies, though, the erotic component is more important, I have found. I can recognize a significant amount of the things that make the female body ‘most female’ and fathom that those qualities are what are erotic to so many males — and some females. However, this is a level of abstraction and it does not reach the authenticity of a genuine sexual orientation compatibility response to the presentation of compatible beauty.)
The worst university course I took was Aesthetics. When the professor claimed she could function as the “university arbiter of art” (not her terminology, but mine — for her claim), she lost most of her credibility with me. That claim is the most central thing to the field of aesthetics and to have that level of arrogance and ignorance is something, particularly for someone who told students like me that we couldn’t possibly have a useful opinion about philosophy because we hadn’t read enough of it. If circular reasoning is what’s useful, she’s correct. Indoctrination into a whirlpool of philosophical megalomania is something I hadn’t fallen victim to. While it’s true that knowing more in a field typically is better for being able to formulate educated opinions, her claim was proof that education is no guarantor of sound logic.
No one can define art for everyone and the same goes for beauty. As for novelty… “make it new” has been a mantra for a very long time and it’s related to the human desire for scarcity as the underlayment for valuation. “New” things are valued because they were extremely scarce — not existing at all (at least in terms of enough recognition) before they were introduced (i.e. recognized by the right people). Humans have been thrill seekers from the beginning. I recently read a 19th-century book about headhunting cultures from the Myanmar area. The zeal for collecting heads as if they’re Pokémon cards, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch, et cetera was bizarre on one hand and par for the course on the other. The drive to find excitement can propel people into a great deal of warped behavior, yet it can also propel people in good directions.
Some of what is considered beautiful is due to indoctrination, which isn’t always a bad thing. (For instance, Van Gogh’s art is more popular than it would be if it hadn’t become popular with the right people. He couldn’t sell his art during his lifetime at any serious scale.) However, sexual orientation proves that there are also types of appraisals that are rooted in nature directly. Having been programmed with 100% heterosexuality for the entirety of my youth, it is impossible for my preferences in beauty to have been the result of indoctrination. The closest thing to that is how some research suggests people generally have more attraction to those who look similar to them, including family members, even though there is a universal barrier that differentiates that from interest in close family members themselves. That barrier appears to be rooted in evolution not socialization. So, the “indoctrination” in terms of the aforementioned preference is that if a person were socialized in a different racial group perhaps they would be less biased toward seeing their personal racial group as more beautiful. However, that would be best tested by not giving the person access reflective things like mirrors and pools of water — ensuring that they can only see that other group’s attributes for the familiarity bias effect.
In terms of genitalia… male genitalia (I cannot speak for female genitalia, due to my natural bias) can be very beautiful. I think current culture massively underrepresents the beauty of the male body and has for a very long time. We’re even trained to act is if our spirits will be drained/stolen if someone we’re not interested in sees us naked when we’re in our physical prime. It’s ridiculous. Hannah Arendt suggested that this crazy attitude is manufactured in order to get people to substitute sexual desire with credit card purchases and the resulting debt (consumerism as substitute for intimacy). Others have also commented that militarism can be used as a substitute, which can explain why blasting people to bits via Call of Duty and the plethora of similar creations is seen as wholesome Americana, whilst beautiful genitals are considered crass, vulgar, and even ghastly. One returns to the problem, though, of differing standards of beauty. A great deal of what some others believe is beautiful, such as tattoos and piercings, I find unfortunate.
What would be best is for each artist to have the freedom to pursue their conception of beauty, without others interfering. Unfortunately, nearly everyone wants to act like a dictator — functioning as the universal arbiter of art, a position that involves an unclothed emperor strutting around demanding censorship. My homosexuality enabled me to see through this temptation because I had to define my own standards, having grown up in a 100% heterosexuality indoctrination culture. It became entirely clear to me that, as they cannot reasonably dictate to me (as they cannot fathom what I am and need), I cannot dictate to them.