[By James Perloff] It’s long been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Decades ago, my mother was visiting my sister and me in Boston. As my mother was a professional artist, as well as an instructor in art history at private schools, she wanted to visit the art galleries on Boston’s famed Newbury Street.
I will never forget our collective chagrin at some of what we saw. One “painting,” priced at thousands of dollars, consisted of nothing but seven or eight small ballpoint pen marks that seemed to have been stabbed on the canvas randomly. What really stunned us, however, was a painting that was just a blank canvas—no marks or brush strokes whatsoever. It was entitled “Snow” and was priced at thousands of dollars. As we departed the gallery, my mother made a subtle wisecrack to the receptionist.
Were we wrong to be disgusted by this art? Is a canvas, with paint splashed haphazardly over it, as good as a Rembrandt, because beauty is just subjective, depending on “the eye of the beholder”? Or are there some objective criteria by which we can measure art?
The rich, of course, have long had financial motives for investing in modern art. They can buy a painting by an inept artist, later have it evaluated by a friendly appraiser as being worth millions of dollars—rather easily done since beauty is “subjective”—then donate it to a museum of modern art, erasing their entire tax liability through this “charitable donation.”
But I think it transcends finance. The satanic Deep State, as one division of its never-ending war on humanity, has striven to uglify the arts, be it painting, cinema, architecture or—as this post explores—music.
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