The Death of: Taste - Rebarbarization and The Rise of Moscato

 Destruction from The Course of the Empire by Thomas Cole, 1836.

Welcome to my second installment of "The Death of" Series!  Today I intend to prove that taste is dead.  I was prompted to do so after reading the following passage from Albert Jay Nock's 1942 Memoirs of a Superfluous Man :

"Whether by some means or another, I was somehow prepared to see, as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions were monstrously over-extended.  They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than right reason would assign them.  On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated."

I very much agreed with this, and was struck by the thought that, if in his time he felt taste was undernourished, then surely by our present time it must have succumb to starvation.  I will, in the usual fashion, further this idea by presenting actual cultural episodes, and providing brief analyses to show that such episodes are incongruous with a world in which taste could exist.

I first concern myself with television programming:  It is a stampeding orgy of disgrace.  I'm not sure this even requires further extrapolation or defense; at this point, it's basically a truism.  The fact that we have made television executives and "reality" "stars" so wealthy speaks volumes to our lack of discernment.

Then there is the moscato phenomenon.  Moscato is a dessert wine, and has justifiably never been the object of much critical acclaim.  NPR and WSJ reported earlier in the year that sales of moscato over the course of 2011-2012 have exploded-- this is very difficult for me to comprehend.  Moscato is the ketchup of wine; it has its place, but the context and beneficial uses are extremely limited.  The flavors tend to teeter on the edge of overripe, and after a glass or two, I find I can't really take any more.  Quality of course varies greatly from producer to producer, but for the highest-selling brands, this has been the case.  When people heap excessive praise on this wine, I react in much the same way I would if I saw someone asking for a digestif of Four Loko at a Michelin-starred restaurant.  In spite of all this, the popularity continues to surge-- such unprecedented increases in sales have been attributed to the hawking exercised by such Oenological heavyweights as Waka Flocka Flame, Kanye West, Drake and NeNe Leakes.  I should remind the reader that this is the same Kanye West who is party to a duet about extraterrestrial rape.  If I weren't so certain both of these things were deliberate hoaxes being perpetrated on the English-speaking public, I would unquestionably be mourning the irreversible death of civilization.  A world in which moscato has become a renowned stand-alone wine is a world far down the road to barbarism.

The state of fine art is and has similarly been in precipitous decline.  Admittedly, I cannot speak with much authority when it comes to the fine arts.  I have a reasonable understanding, I think, but have not been educated in Kant's or Hegel's theories on aesthetics (or lack thereof) which seem to be the driving philosophies behind modern art.  I can only speak from my own, perhaps vulgar, conceptions of aestheticism.  Nonetheless, below are what I would characterize as two very typical examples of contemporary art currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA):

Untitled by Blinky Palermo, 1970.

Blinky Palermo (no, this is not a penile pet name) is a German artist, for lack of a better term.  Above, you can see one of his many works bearing the name "Untitled."  I too would be at a loss for inspiration after playing around in MS Paint for only six minutes.

Proteus by Cy Twombly, 1984.

The above is a piece by Cy Twombly.  He called it Proteus.  I call it a fussy shart-o-gram.

I look at these pieces and I have almost no reaction.  I am reminded of a passage from Australian art critic Robert Hughes's  latest book - which I highly recommend - Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History.  In this passage he discusses the nature of The Eternal City:

"It makes you feel small, and it is meant to.  It also makes you feel big, because the nobler parts of it were raised by members of your own species.  It shows you what you cannot imagine doing, which is one of the beginnings of wisdom."

This is precisely how I have felt when standing before the art of other eras.  I implore everyone reading this to, at one point in your life, find your way to the Galleria Borghese in Rome.  Once there, ask someone to direct you to il ratto di proserpina by Bernini.  Now just stand there and look at the thing, and recall that it was once just a hulking slab of marble; it inspires dumbfounding silence.  

Close-up photograph of il ratto di proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622.

One can feel similarly humbled looking at the works of Caravaggio:

San Girolamo in meditazione by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1605.

These works of art make it easy to understand Hughes when he says, "[i]t shows you what you cannot imagine doing."  Conversely, the works of those lesser men inspire a near opposite reaction.  In fact, I have been struck so profoundly with such a reaction that below you will find my own art, which I have created for the purposes of this argument, and of course, profit.

Here I have "Highwayman", as inspired by Blinky Palermo:

And, here is "Angry Fucking Toddler" as inspired by Cy Twombly:
 

 I have authorized 200 prints of Highwayman, and am selling them at the very reasonable price of 500 dollars a piece.  Angry Fucking Toddler is a unique work and price is available upon request.

I will gladly suffer the tourists, their clacking sandals and their neon fanny packs, their grating voices and their proud ignorance, their tempest of flashes and dutiful insistence on checking this and that museum off their meaningless lists;  I will suffer the raised eyebrow of the insipid fart quaffers when I announce my intentions to visit The Frick and confess my indifference to MoMA; I will do all of this and more if it means I can enjoy the artwork of eras in which talent and aesthetics apparently mattered.

There are countless other reasons why taste is dead, but I feel satisfied to conclude my argument here, lest it devolve into idle rambling.  I do want to close on a quasi-hopeful note, however:  There is a living artist of dizzying technical skill, who, according to his website, is "[i]nspired deeply by Baroque painters (especially Caravaggio) and other Old Masters of Romanticism, Academism, and Symbolism."  This Italian painter, Roberto Ferri, ably marries this nod to a masterful past with a very dark Surrealism, which I rather like.  Whether he will attain notoriety from The Artistic Community is doubtful, but it does beg the question:  Should their approval even be sought?  Should they who have led us down this path to rebarbarization be the arbiters elegantiarum?  I posit that they should not be, for they have not created a blog proclaiming themselves such.