On the Absence of Beauty
By: Thomas Sanfilip
It is difficult to know where to begin a serious reappraisal of the arts as they evolve into the 21st century. There is no question a paradigm shift has occurred that bodes serious consequences for the future of Western culture. What those consequences are and how to deal with a shifting aesthetic that threatens fundamental notions of the human experience demands closer attention. We are fighting in truth an insidious form of dehumanization, and the artist—whether we choose to believe it or not—reflects this struggle. The new metaphor we cannot escape is decay and death in some form, created whimsically or in violent resistance, out of complete passivity or self-negation.
Purity is a concept alien to the current brand of today’s creative thinking, for what is produced and paraded as art is infected with such extreme artificiality from its inception, it wallows in nothing more than spiritual toxicity. It induces only reactive emotions—humor, shock, angst—and though merely of temporary duration, what remains afterwards is a persistently overwhelming sense of depression. One can conclude that contemporary art is nothing more than the expression of the darker, more extreme margins of distorted emotions. This comes from nowhere else but the artist’s soul that in turn affects everything they endeavor to recreate—objects, images, textures, ideas. The world exists only as an endless series of decaying images that offer neither solace nor redemption, exploring nothing more than extreme limits of mind. The purity of the human experience is never really actualized. Divorced from the poison of decay and decline, authenticity is forbidden and alien, lost and obscure, like a cloud on a distant horizon impossible to predict how it will ultimately congeal.
If modern art is an attempt to transcend such thinking to achieve transcendence over reality, I contend that nothing of modern art is an example of such transcendence. By transcendence I mean an experience or work of art that rises above disparity, and in so doing achieves higher form greater than the non-aesthetic elements of its parts. In the end, true authenticity of artistic expression achieves true transcendence via the realization of beauty, specifically, harmony by the very nature of its expression; yet the duplicity or absence today of any logical criteria of judgement has shifted to a preoccupation with process and data. The creative moment does not revolve around an end-product, but misrepresents itself as merely a production method. This embrace of methodology-as-art as opposed to redemptive vision makes sense only in a society that has de-evolved into backward forms of expression and outright distortions of the real world.
It would be as if the tools Michelangelo used to sculpt the David were somehow more significant than the David itself, that the methodology Michelangelo used as an artist superseded the result of his labor. One might ask what aesthetic standard is being met having such concern for methodology.
Now consider the “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” from “La Familte de Belamy,” a2018inkon canvas, rendered by computer and sold at Christie’sfor $432,500. Early estimates peaked its top sale price around $10,000. The Belamy series was created via machine-learning by the Paris-based arts collective known as Obvious. They inputted 15 thousand portraits into an algorithm, programming into a computer portraiture technique practiced in the 18th century. Scanning fifteen thousand portraits, the data analyzed patterns until it was able to produce a series of criteria that defined the portraits, establishing a collective pattern that ran between them. The program then juxtaposed two algorithms one to the other, one that produced images based on the criteria, and the other determining whether the series of images met the other’s criteria. The result was a series of 11 images known as the fictional “La Familte de Belamy.” In November 2019, another in the Belamy series, “La Baronne de Belamy,” sold at Sotheby’s, though without the same success. “La Baronne” sold for only US$25,000, just slightly more than its estimated value.
Objectively, the “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” is, in fact, no more than a pictorial image generated by an algorithm. No human was involved other than the programmers. The whole process mimics human consciousness, no human hand was at play, but what was derived from information fed into the computer from pictorial renderings derived from an amalgam of paintings from the 18th century. It is in reality a non-portrait without essence, and merely mimics portrait painting. The inauthenticity of the image leads us nowhere, having no actual definition, but is presented simply as a pictorial imitation that can claim nothing but inauthenticity. Except for the algorithm creators, it cannot justify its own existence as art no matter how freakish or absurd the outcome of the algorithm. One can assume current efforts used to produce such art are indicative of an actual collapse of the creative process, proving that all that is created is not necessarily art by definition, claim or outcome. Calibrating to a distortion of reality is exactly what it is—a false assumption of originality.
What most modern critics seem to miss is that—apart from the exaggerated value put on modern art for sheer investment purposes—contemporary art in the 21st century derives its soul principally from depression and formalizes it in endlessly futile ways. There are other reactive emotions that work their way into its expression—humor, shock, angst—but these emotions are temporary. Nothing lasts beyond ennui and depression, crushing everything the artist attempts to represent or deconstruct. Having striven for complete separation from the human experience, having achieved its desired goal of erasing completely any aesthetic value whatsoever in form and shape, it successfully flounders from piece to piece, wallowing in a peripatetic quest for relevancy.
Paradoxically, in losing itself to nonsense, it achieves its self-professed goal of self-negation. And so, we must assume contemporary art’s success lies ultimately in its full embrace of the grotesque, the meaningless, the outright stupid, non-sensical, downright ugly, vacuous, pointless, and pretentious in its assumptions and juvenile appeal as it engages in entropy as a continuous state of mind. One might even say that proposing an aesthetic around entropy and death has reached its nadir, yet all of Western culture seems to have drifted in that direction. As a result, we are thrust into an endless malaise of doubt and uncertainty as to anything that claims actual aesthetic value. Our classicist grounding has been subverted for so long, having taken on such a false cultural presence that we are left nowhere and everywhere at the same time, scared at the outcome of our own thoughts and feelings of the world.
Thus, truth for an artist should not only imply the courage to face chaos, but natural order, and by facing such order bring us closer to the implicit oneness of nature that in the end reflects the ambiguity and profundity that awakens us to the genuinely lived experienced that ultimately can never be subverted.
