
The New Old Masters - the-enemy
http://www.city-journal.org/html/new-old-masters-14188.html
======
danieltillett
Not all modern art is devoid of artistic skill. The good photorealists are
pretty amazing [1]. Richard Estes is my favourite [2].

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism)

2\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Estes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Estes)

~~~
entee
Also, it's not as easy as it looks to make "modern" art work. It may look easy
to make a Jackson Pollock, but it's not so easy to not have it turn to mud as
you make it. Perhaps not as technically difficult as an old master painting,
but not necessarily easy.

Beyond that, the skill in composition, understanding the message you want to
communicate, and doing so effectively is very much present in modern art.

That said, I wonder how many pieces in our current modern art museums will
have real staying power. Art is hard to define, but I think to have staying
power it needs to speak in some way to the larger human condition. A lot of
modern art seems to ring only one note, with so much context being required
for understanding that maybe it'll be hard for someone 50 years hence to
relate.

~~~
danieltillett
Leaving aside artistic merit, a lot of modern art is poorly constructed out of
unstable materials. We may not have much of todays modern art in 50 years
purely because the artists don’t know how (or don’t want) to make something
that will last.

~~~
entee
True, not to mention performance art which by definition is ephemeral.

I wish there was some middle ground between the avant-guarde that Collins
decries and some of the more recent ideas in art. I think he's not correct in
wholesale rejection of everything post-1870. That throws out even semi-
representational work like impressionism, fauvism, and surrealism just to name
a few.

~~~
ghaff
>I think he's not correct in wholesale rejection of everything post-1870.

It comes down to taste, of course, but I take strong exception to the
post-1870 cutoff. I actually like a lot of Pollock's work but do find the
artwork that grabs me post-1950 or so at somewhere like MOMA pretty thin.

On the other hand, I can also live without yet another Renaissance Madonna--
however technically proficient it may be.

~~~
douche
Why couldn't we have technically impressive art of modern subjects? I would
agree that I've seen enough Christs and Madonnas and Zeus's (what the heck is
the plural of Zeus?) and other traditional themes.

I'm a philistine, I suppose, but I used to get military history magazines,
back when magazines were a thing, and one of my favorite parts were the ads
for prints of beautiful paintings of P38s and Mustangs dogfighting, panzers
and T-34s squaring off at Kursk, Picket's Charge, and U-Boats running on the
surface in a stormy sea.

Two of my favorite paintings that I have seen in an actual art museum are "In
the Troops' Quarters outside Paris"[1] and "Eisenwalzwerk"[2], both of which
would fail the 1870 cutoff...

[1] [https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/in-
the...](https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/asset-viewer/in-the-troops-
quarters-outside-paris/sgHs0ePrEKaoNQ?hl=en)

[2] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolph_Menzel_-
_Eise...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolph_Menzel_-
_Eisenwalzwerk_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

~~~
ghaff
I assume by "technically impressive," you mean in classical European style.
And, I suppose the answer is that you're probably not going to be regarded as
a leading painter if you follow that path. I'm not saying I agree, but scenes
from Middle East conflicts in a classical style is probably not the way to get
gallery exhibits. Another difference is that we have photographs today and
those have probably reduced the interest in a lot of realist paintings or
illustrations.

[Edit: I'd just add that painters don't generally exist outside of a market--
which comes back to my comment about gallery exhibits. There probably isn't a
big market for large-format expensive oil paintings of modern warfare.]

~~~
douche
I agree with you that it's not "arty" enough, and even stylized reproductions
of reality are not post-modernist or up-their-own-ass-enough to move the dial
in the art world.

But those could be some powerful paintings, if well executed. Even the best
photographs feel somewhat sterile - a well done painting can evoke a real
sense of emotion and life that's on a different level.

~~~
clock_tower
There's still a living tradition of military oil paintings, which have a
symbolic or stylized arrangement of realistically-depicted subjects; this is
well becoming familiar with. (There's some discussion of this subject in a
book on the modern Japanese military by a female German author -- I don't
remember the book's name.)

Also interesting, for modern war depicted in a traditional style: Afghan war
rugs. The classic "red-figure war rugs" depict the Soviet war, but fighting
never really stopped in Afghanistan, and neither did depictions of the
fighting in traditional Persian-style carpets.

------
csense
> you would never find the Collins style in a commercial gallery in Chelsea,
> say, or in a museum survey of contemporary painting...the "current art
> establishment, the so-called gatekeepers, hate the kind of skill and craft
> and vision that an artist like Collins has"...

What's the explanation for this?

~~~
maldusiecle
In general, the art world for the last century has been more interested in
innovative or provocative work than fine technical detail. They don't "hate"
the stuff, they're bored by it, and I don't blame them; it's nothing more than
obsessive replication of an earlier era's works. There are many well-regarded
modern artists who had immense technical ability--Lucian Freud comes to mind--
but they at least developed styles of their own.

------
chippy
What on earth has happened with the browser scroll bar? Has the page re-
invented their own one? Page down doesnt work, and there are elements that
cover the one that appears. I didn't read a single word of the article because
this is what real art is.

