The Purpose of Modern Art Is To Destroy Our Connection With Our Past

Or so says Martin Gurri in his article, "The Artist as Tyrant." He explains:

    Insofar as art has a moral function, it is to embody and make real the abstract ideals of the community—its beliefs, history and traditions. Yet an avant-garde sees itself quite differently: Its moral mission must be to eradicate, by whatever means, the community’s love affair with the past.

    Modern art declared war on tradition, on convention, on morality, on historical Western notions about the place of beauty and human dignity in artistic production. Styles were invented or imported from alien cultures, never consciously evolved from the European masters. Modernism, like Leninism, wished to bully rather than seduce the community into a better future.

    The effect of this rupture with a living tradition can best be observed in the treatment of the human figure. The first truly modern painting was Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907, today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The received wisdom is that it represents five nude prostitutes, three of them with faces modeled on African masks. But consider the painting with an innocent eye. The figures seem caught in the throes of a dreadful transformation. They are shedding their humanity. They are becoming dark, ungainly things.

    What makes the “Demoiselles” modern is the artist’s substitution of a private jargon for a traditional means of communication. Either we follow Picasso blindly or we get left behind: In this respect, the modern artist is a tyrant to his public, as he is over his forms.

    But the dehumanization of art—a phrase coined by Picasso’s compatriot, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset—has moral consequences. The wrenching loose of art from the material culture turns the human figure into nothing more than a subject of experimentation. Modern art becomes a reverse version of Dr. Moreau’s island, where wild animals were converted into bestial people. Nazi medical horrors are not far in the future. We come away from the “Demoiselles” vaguely ashamed of our humanity.   

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