The Harvard Salient -- 12 February 2007

On Modern "Art"

Will beauty ever again triumph?

The moral health of a culture can be accurately measured by looking at its creative output. After only the most cursory glance, one can clearly observe that our modern age fails miserably to measure up to the standards of the past. And through the conduit of the depravity we refer to as "Modern Art," the disease is spreading.

Long departed are the days when contemporary art elevated our moral and aesthetic senses. The Gothic cathedrals, Baroque sculpture, and Neoclassical painting of yesteryear have receded and been ignominiously replaced by the most hideous and vulgar inanities. Throughout most of human history, art symbolized the beauty and truth incapable of being expressed by words or comprehended by description. Art was once, and properly should be, an ecstatic experience: plumbing the depths of human emotion through a powerfully evocative visual or aural sensation.

The veritable trash that today occupies "Modern Art Museums" consciously renounces the traditional understanding of art's purpose, and in so doing, reflects the poor state of our society. Modern art, just like modern culture, recognizes no standards, enforces no values, and inevitably conveys no meaning.