The Decline in Art

Winslow Homer, American, 1836-1910 In this 1894 watercolor the theme is straight forward: Man, God, and Nature.	Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Untitled",1982 It sold for $110.5m, acrylic and spray paint, depicting a crazed face shaped as a skull. The Brooklyn-born Basquiat died in 1988 of a heroin overdose aged 27.

 The Museum once seemed to be replacing the Church as the spiritual center of American cities during the last century; and the churches unable to fill the pews turned to television to reach an audience. The museum became the venue of new movements in art, aided by the university systems, and museum endowment  funded by the wealthy. In past generations the well-to-do purchased pipe organs and stain glass windows for churches.  The belief of social improvement through art helped fund the construction and endowment of museums across the country. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is a fine example. It was established in 1936 by Kay and Velma Kimbell, and gained wide support from the entire community. Both the building and the works inside the building compose a beautiful shrine for the visual arts.

The ideal of social renewal by cultural challenge  lasted a hundred years, and its passing marked the  end of the unconsummated  vision of art's  relation to life. That age, like the age of Pericles, has entered history. We now face the void of wholly monetarized art, with the mandarins of the art world touting their vacuous offerings as a "new  development".

The 20th century seemed to promise a renewed world, but there can be only a few of us at the beginning of the 21 century with anything in our hearts but scepticism and dread. Our ancestors saw expanding cultural horizons, we see black storms on our horizon.

Will the storm pass?  I think not. Unlike Titus Livy who wrote in The History of Rome, "we can neither endure our vices, nor their remedies," I see no remedies and we celebrate our vices. My position is more like that other Roman, Ausonius, whom I mentioned earlier, peacefully retire to your country estate and cultivate your garden.