1.

There were three centuries of great art followed by three centuries that   produced little of greatness in the arts. Quatrocento through seicento were very rich in greatness in the arts.XVIII,XIX and XXth centuries were epochs of technology,sciences,social developments, while the quality of visions expressed through the arts has diminished.  What artists proposed as content was increasingly insignificant, lacking powerful nourishment; pleasing or decorous at best, insignificant as contestants in the marketplace of human ideas.

I don’t believe that the parting of the art and religion was the cause of that diminishment. It could have been just the opposite: that this parting could have resulted in huge augmentation of the meaningfulness in the arts. It happened to literature, it could have happened to visual arts as well. Literature reached for gravity and for penetrating inquiry  into human condition, while painting was falling into insignificance of mere pleasing.{And pleasing was the better, the successful time, whilst so much of the XXth century of art was not even successful at that, managing merely to state "I am here", like a large highway sign "Wrong way".}

2.

Most pernicious to the art was the idea that art participates in progress, the way that sciences do. Surely, it is right for the scientist to attach himself to the newest state of knowledge  about the physical world, but it is not so for an artist, a poet, a thinker, a writer, a visionary.

What Cezanne saw in simplifying dizzying complexities of forms of the world was not obliging to the rest of the artists at all. Once Leibig discovered metabolism it was absolutely and universally obliging to all wishing to think about processes of living organisms to apply his revelation. The idea that all forms can be seen as variations of a sphere, cube and a pyramid is only proper to Cezanne’s work and does not extend to any other view of reality. Art is not a progressive discipline. Cooking, carpet weaving and sex are not progressive activities either.

3.

Think of the vastness of the exclusion by the modern art of the visible world. Modernists exchanged the immense content of the world for a few geometric forms and splatters, believing that painting is about painting. Painting is about the world. Poetry is about the world, literature is about the world, and philosophy is about the world. Painting that is about painting becomes instantly irrelevant, and    that certainly modern artists accomplished for painting in XXth century. What could ever be more irrelevant than Joseph Albers’s painting? In a way it is an accomplishment, an achievement a rebours. Albers and Hoffman; these two influential figures were more pernicious to the art than even Warhol. He came in the door when the merrymakers were already praising each other expurgations as elixirs.

4.

Modern art invites to lowering the standards of expectations. If one is looking for fun, ease and gratification without applying attentiveness or skill, modern art is just that kind of activity. Finger-painting taught to children promises fun without effort, a happy game without failures. The tedium connected with any achievement is blissfully removed. Modern art is a finger-painting for grown-ups.

Elements of art that are absolutely irremovable from its definition, like study, skill, refinement and thoughtfulness - all requiring decades of schooling and self-improvement- they are all removed at the broadly open, democratic gates of modern art. The Peoples Art. Anybody can do it! No aptitude? No problem: none required. No drawing skills? No worry; just manipulate somebody else’s images- it’s a collage, art of the skill-less. No original ideas? Plagiarize and we shall call it acquisitions. No sense of color? We need to be more open-minded and include the crude, the ugly, the toxic and the haphazard color to free our aesthetic sensibility from the tyranny of conservative expectations.... As the Russians like to say: the worse, the better.

5.

Modern art is instant art. Instant meals, instant fun, instant sense of self-worth and two minute intercourse are all figures of the same social dance. A folk-dance, clearly. Modern art gives a chance to everybody to pretend that they too are creative, and it happens without the hideous tedium of long learning. One just steps up and in minutes something is splattered or glued together, something appeared and who is to say that it is necessarily trash; is it not all very relative and very subjective? "Fun" is the key. You kick it just once and it pops open for you. No sweating, no encountering obstacle-forming archipelagos of insufficiencies inside of yourself that would have to be overcome to create a piece of serious art. Instead: you slide into ease and instantaneous childish pleasure.

6.

Look at the XX century architecture, and not at all of it; just at the lauded, most commented products. They look like a cube, a concrete box, a bomb shelter and the glass aquarium and a fridge. These are the designs copied over and over, awarded, praised, emulated. The intention was that these buildings would look like future, like Future-Now. Those visionaries saw future where people that look like unisex replicants move about in tight coveralls surrounded by simple geometric forms of primary colors and would communicate by monosyllabic exchanges:" Luna, do you copy? Push the pound button if you do. Over and out." "Hand job’s twenty but the Dow is up. Three strikes and you’re out. Don’t worry be happy." For these exchanges we’ll need only tom-tom drums or a keypad and a mental life of a reptile. Appropriate to such standards of humanity would be sub-architecture – a new field that reconceived what architecture is. People need drawers. People have to be containerized. Their lives have to be simplified, else we have problems. They should do what drawers- for- living allow. Between drawers they should move along straight lines and turn 90 degrees and go straight again. If they should meet let them pass each other on the right shouting:" Have a nice day". Sometimes, feeling particularly effusive people could thrust their right arms forward and point to the gigantic smiley face on a side of the nearest concrete bomb-shelter. That would be nice. Nice and quick. And quick is even better than nice. Though nice is certainly better than kind. Kindness takes time. Nice is faster. We need that saved-up time to network with millions of strangers by sending them with a click of a button a smiley face.

7.

Perversity has many rules. One of the rules by which Modern Art runs and recognizes itself is the all-obliging perversion of meaning. Not a corruption of meaning, which is a domain of politicians {"it depends on what you mean by alone"} but a perversion of meaning. If an encapsulation, a distillation, by necessity crude formulation of rich meaning, largely existing in non-verbal sphere could be allowed of some work of art as "roses are mysterious"- than modern art functionaries would instantly sense that such meaning cannot possibly be modern, cannot be progressive and would be roundly dismissed, denied a place inside of official contemporary art and would have to huddle outdoors, away from the Pantheon of contemporary art. However, if the meaning came as, say, "roses are tractors" than the art police would beckon to let the stupid thing in, because it was appropriately nonsensical, cross-eyed, perverted the chance at communication into a grimace, a burp, a fart, and a prank. Any meaning to be accepted by modern art establishment has to be perverted, and not slightly, not shyly but with bravura of a guttersnipe blowing his nose into the pyx.

The turn, the twist has to be very sharply ironic, as if to give a particularly acrid whiff of sulphur to ward-off any suspicion of even distant association with straightforward meaning, sense making, and logic. The artwork of officially recognized contemporary art has to have the protective chaps insulating it from any will to mean. It should be loud yet without meaning. It may be very large and yet, with all that volume and presence it claims, stay numb. If by some mischance it would start oozing out some oily residue of meaning, it should quickly be rolled away into the shadows, deep into the Erebus of non-artistic Limbo. If an artwork means, than it is considered simplistic, conservative, narrative, naive, sentimental, amateurish, traditional, un-sophisticated, literary, literal, provincial, banal and anti-painterly.

Many fathers have impregnated the skinny loins of modern art, but Marcel Duchamp did more wick dipping than others and consequences were felt over many generations of his following. He did more violent harm to meaning than others and it would stay what it was: a prank, a stupid and dismissible prank of a dilettante, who would have done a greater service to his gifts by working at a toll-booth on New Jersey Turnpike rather than becoming the Modern Colossus looming so tall over the XXth century puddle of art.

Mona Lisa with a moustache, the toilet bowl exhibited as a work of art- those were low-grade, sophomoric, audacious pranks that would not matter at all to anybody if the scene, the art world were sound, sane, accepting only true merit. Had he tried to show these pranks as art at any previous period in art history, it would be viewed the way I see it: as moronic barbarisms proper to teenage punks defacing statues or carving their names onto the bark of ancient trees. But the art-scene was ready to invite perversity and anything that was not attached to the continuum of western cultural heritage was welcomed.

8.

After perversion came extermination of meaning. On this side of the Atlantic the two apostles of it were Joseph Albers and Hans Hoffman: Laurel and Hardy of Abstraction.They came about as close to the elusive meaninglessness as possible, which is very hard to achieve, if you are not careful. But- they were very careful. They fumigated their works, they exterminated any organic traces of residual meaning: it was a success. Albers work is a hostile view of some geometric shapes that slid from his formaldehyde mind. With Hoffman there is an irremovable sense of pretentiousness. Smeary, dirty, chaotic grease is proposing itself as some rarified aesthetic object. Hoffman or some moron defending him would say; at long last it is all about just painting; not about an extraneous to art "meaning" but about painting itself! I would say: no, it contains no painting, he never painted. Painting, you see is what van Eyck was doing. Hoffman is about smearing. Painting consists in an entirely different actions and outcomes. Flatulence emits sounds but is not singing.

9.

Oh, how the modernists are praised for "stretching the boundaries’! The idea assumes that boundaries are confining limitations and any effort to break them is enlarging and daring. The assault on the boundaries of the medium is seen as a mark of greatness, which takes us beyond and uncovers heretofore-unknown territories of human experience. It sounds very good, but it only sounds so well: the truth is that to stay within the bounds of the medium is exactly the task. Swimmers understand that.

10.

Art requires complexity. To be a higher form of anything it has to be complex. It is true for nature, it is true for music; it is true for any human effort that we wish to admire. And, yes- there are objects that are admired for their simplicity, but we not so much admire them as enjoy a paternalistic pleasure in seeing something disarming, childlike, something that has a charm of child’s first utterances or steps.

Art is not made for those that expect to be entertain and wish to be free from any effort in apprehending art .By complexity I do not mean obscurity of meaning, just the complexity of structure: studied and resolved problems that take the elements of an artwork and remove the obviousness, worn-out banalities , discovered and presented   wonders hitherto hidden. Elements of complex whole would bring them together into a new system, new legend, and new meaningfulness.

We wish for simplicity. We try to find simple answers, simple resolutions, simple situations, simple plans and explanations. Yet, what we get upon inquiry are dizzying complexities spreading their mysterious labyrinths in all directions. Nothing is simple; not even moderately complicated! We are facing reality that is complex beyond any measure. Look at the sub-atomic world and the world of a living cell. Consider ourselves, our own body: complexity beyond measure and an imponderable genius of its arrangements. We are huddled on a windowsill of an immense cathedral, peering from its parapet like melancholy gargoyles. Pagans of old simplicity bewilderingly regarding Christian complexity.

                                                                                                                                                            Henryk Fantazos