Why art became ugly | Philosophy for Real Life (19 of 22) | Stephen Hicks

Now and then, we ask ourselves big questions, tough questions, philosophical questions.

Philosophy for Real Life is a series of 22 short videos looking at such questions as: what is philosophy? do I need philosophy? what is ethics? what is art? what is virtue? what is postmodernism?

Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society.

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[craxd]

The Decadent Movement, where they fully intended on destroying romanticism and beauty in art. The movement was all about destroying the old to bring in the new, which was the socialist movement.

"The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The visual artist Félicien Rops's body of work and Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature (1884) are considered the prime examples of the decadent movement. It first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States."

[RyelSteele]

To think if people had gone on moving towards beauty, empathy, harmony and the goodness of humankind where we might be today. Who do we have as eminent thinkers today? People can no longer tell the difference between the artist and the slop-artist, the musician and the "artist" or the blank canvas hanging in a museum worth millions or the truly gifted painter who will never achieve greatness because she can't "sell herself" properly.

[garygrinkevich]

I think art is a kind of warning about the future consequences of actions made or not made today. Bearing that in mind its not hard to trace a major cultural shift to the close of the 19th century the death of the frontier, industrialization, urbanization, civil rights subsequent gentrification, and now the collapse of 3rd wave capitalism and a global descent into fascism. Its easier to imagine an end of the world than an end of global capitalism and artists are already extremely under valued it makes the prospect of an american dark age particularly unappealing and difficult to build serious support for.

[SaturdayXIII]

Painting Artists with the Broadest Brush by Narrowing World Views with Stephen Hicks

[w.s.soapcompany]

Yeah but how many perfectly executed paintings of ducks can one planet produce before they become absurd as well?

[snoosebaum]

this crap is what happens when have no understanding of art, that is to say understanding it from the perspective of the artist and what they find interesting, what drives them, the challenge they face