Restore the metaphysical dimension of art

Art realizes the needs of expression, creativity, harmony and beauty. It's essential to man. "Otherwise, but not little than satisfying hunger or uncovering shelter. It is surely a essential component of civilization and culture" Władysław Tatarkiewicz: ("Parerga", PWN 1978 p. 93).

A test of art is to respond to it as delight, emotion or shock. past of the concept of art dates back to ancient times. For centuries, it meant producing according to the rules, covering fine arts and crafts. The evolution of this concept led in the 18th century to the discrimination of architecture, painting, sculpture, music, dance, beautiful literature, which resulted in universal designation that what characterizes them is beauty. specified a concept of art survived until the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Ibid., p.84 et seq.). In time art was defined as reproducing things or constructing forms, or expressing experiences. “The arts themselves, that is, their practice, have been said to have no progress. It was said, and rightly, that Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy are not above Ajschylos and Homer, that Michelangelo is no better than the Greek sculptors, that Rembrandt is no greater artist than van Eyck. Artists are different, arts have different forms and styles. They change a lot. There are changes in them, but there is no progress" (Italian Tatarkiewicz, “The Way through Aesthetics” PWN 1972, p. 221-222). In his opus magnum "Currently six concepts" (PWN 1975, p. 9), Tatarkiewicz emphasizes, among others, that beauty since Plato's time has been considered 1 of 3 alongside good and truth, the highest values.

From Art to Degradation

In the book “Contemporary Art. Anatomy of Fall’ Prof. Roman Konik Analysing the evolution of art (plastic waste) over the centuries and its novelty, even scandalous and shocking audiences (as a fresco with nakedness in the Sistine Chapel in the imagination of Michelangelo's Final Court, examples of the works of Paola Veronase, Caravaggio, Goya or Velazquez) emphasizes, however, that it was implemented in the conventional art framework.

The fundamental for Europe was the period of improvement of Latin civilization, shaped by Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian religion, erstwhile the man surviving in it functioned in a very expressive and readable strategy of values, knowing what is good and bad, who the enemy is and where to find his asylum. It was his spiritual matrix. It was this civilization as 1 of the first to see the uniqueness of all man as an individual and to appreciate his spirituality, which was superior to what was available regular in the material world.

The publication presents a consistent process of breaking up with conventional knowing of art and its degradation by the failure of aesthetic sense: sensitivity to beauty, harmony and order in the creators and its consequences in its recipients. "The time of clarity on values was undermined in the early 20th century, erstwhile a large communist revolution enters the planet stage, which the individual degrades to a insignificant component of the large collective..." (p. 115), as illustrated by the words of Włodzimierz Majakowski's poem: "a unit of zero, a unit of nonsense..." The revolution struck all aspect of life, including the sphere of art and its binder, the sphere of religion, aiming to make a fresh man, whose planet of art will not be amazing and strengthening, will not be an oasis of security, explaining issues eluded by discipline or religion. It's conventional art and religion that stood in the way of the revolution. The author resembles the “death” of God by the execution platoon of red-armists firing at the sky after the “issue” of the court organized by the national education commissioner Anatoliy Lunakzarski at the command of Lenin in late 1922, following a conference on cultural policy, attended by Georgy Lukacsa from Hungary.

In the West, panic was turned into “brainwashing” methods, that is, telling minds by people like Antonio Gramsci or György Lukácsa, that the culture so far forms false bourgeois consciousness. Therefore, religion, conventional art and demolition of the household must be rejected, due to the fact that they are based on the strength of Western civilization, and anyone who criticizes progressive art deserves the name of fascist... It was Gramsci who made the Leninist revolutionary conflict from the sphere above all economical moved into the sphere of culture in the West, and its effect was the gradual acquisition of power not so much political, but organization through the consistent march of neo-marksists by media companies, education strategy and art centers.

The intellectual background of this cultural revolution in the West was the Frankfurt School (Social investigation Institute), which dates back to 1923 and whose most celebrated representatives were Max HorkheimerLukacs, Herbert Marcuse (later ideologist of the 1968 student revolt), Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm. After Hitler comes to power as individuals of judaic origin, they emigrate to the United States, where universities besiege, including Columbia University and the University of California....

The author emphasizes that contemporary art is the litmus paper of cultural Marxism. The personification of the revolution on the ground of art was its destructive period, i.e. "progressive", as was claimed by changes, which combined hatred of tradition and radicalism in the pursuit of changing the very knowing of art and even attacking its foundations, called the large Avant-garde period (agreements 1905-1930). The industrial revolution, as the author emphasizes, was not the main reason for rejecting conventional art. The main directions discussed here are futurism, Dadaism, conceptualism. "The avant-garde has been the most abominable art, which since Hellen times has been treated as a clever production, in which both the reproduction of nature and the creative fantasy of the artist manifests... Throughout the centuries, specified art has served as a reserve of hope and dreams, due to the fact that thanks to the artist's imagination and his workshop excellence, it has shown what is not available in everyday experience and performed many functions, ranging from teaching, religious, educational, therapeutic to purely aesthetic.”(p.17). The mimesis mechanics involves a skillful combination of what is seen with what is imagined.

Lenin's concept of novelty and progress, which supposedly found its promoters in art, aimed to deprive it of the aura sacrum (when its recipient could pose metaphysical questions) by abolishing the difference between holiness and everyday life, between uniqueness and commonness under the pretext of bringing art closer to life and expected aestheticization of everyday life – on the another hand. Dadaists, specified as Duchamp, gave everyday objects (ready mades), like a shovel, a bicycle wheel, a urinal, the rank of a “ready” work of art, in order to make a sign of equality between the sphere of sacrum and profanum. Created as a star, Andy Warhol from the decoration of the store exhibitions sought to combine art with decoration (pop – art.). The artist's relation – a work of art – was deliberately cut.

Rejection of figurativeness caused the request to exegese the message of works created, to compose treaties and to interpret what is simply a given abstract, incomprehensible composition, what it expresses and what it refers to. Art has been entangled in scandals and provocations, the work has rejected intent for randomness, especially since anyone can be an artist (even a monkey and a pig!) The aim of the play was no longer to supply aesthetic values, but alternatively to entertain the creator himself, and irritation, grotesque and even disgust – the recipient, and besides to abolish the relation of the creator – the recipient (dadists, surrealists), and even the annihilation of art. The spirit of discipline became a manifestation of progress, since nature was rejected. The abstract image is simply a neutral decorum for audiences, likewise in music the ambient track does not have a melodic line, but only sound spots in a loose composition. It was comic to clean out the installation of the neo-avanguardist D. Hirst There's no place like home (a mess) by a reliable cleaner in the fresh York's Myfair Gallery on the eve of the show ...

Between Lenin and Stalin

The legitimacy of avant-garde and intellectual actions about the government of souls at the end of the art was any gnostic strong conviction of having actual awareness of advancement and change that the recipient needs (in 1932 Stalin called literary engineers of human souls). Black Square on White Background (1916) Kazimierza Malewicza in Russia, it is considered 1 of the first works of avant-garde. Marc Chagal “Russia is like ice,” said the folk commissioner for art in Vitebsk. Lenin turned everything upside down, just as I do in my paintings” (quoted for R. Konik p.60). After Lenin's death in 1924 Stalin ends the period of experiments in art, and in 1937 avant-garde artists as enemies of the people meet repression. The author mentions the phenomenon Pablo Picassowith Georges Braque created a geometrizing with simplified forms of the current called cubism (his beginning is the Virgins of Avignon). But his global career began with his accession to the Communist organization of France in 1944. This peace defender proclaimed that painting is not to decorate dwellings, but is simply a tool of war, assault and defence against the enemy (p.70).

Marc Chagal

Futurists fought with tradition, customs and national culture; poesy was treated as a collection, frequently random, of expression—rejecting division into content and form, affirming force by claiming that there was no more beauty but a revolutionary conflict to format a fresh man. Majakowski, Pasternak, Gonczarowa, Liszyc call for Red global search as the front of the left art; in Italy a typical of futurism was, supporting Mussolini influential Tomasso Marinetti.

Similarly, Dadaism proclaimed hatred of what was rational, conventional and related to Western culture, proclaiming the cult of ugliness, artistic actions making absurd and accidental, and their symbol was vacuum, nothingness, voidness, black hole, nihilism, and an abject from sacrum anti-art. "The most crucial thing is to be a organization associate than an artist" (Manifest of 1918 Dada Club in Berlin) Marcel Duchamp He preached that the art had ended the process of producing anything, adequate to find any object on the dumpster, exhibit it in the gallery, pay off any enthusiastic critics and wait for reactions.

Conceptualism even questions the necessity of the work itself, because, it matters the idea, the idea, the message, or the carrying out of absurd acts, e.g. the release of an empty volume of poems (Tristans Tzara). Artists like Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp considered performing art to be a shock to the audience, an example of Piero Manzoni, who the balloons he inflated with his critics considered... vanishing works of art ( sculptures filled with artist's breath!). An even more shocking example is 90 numbered cans with its feces, which operates in the art marketplace of Merda d’ artist, presently at a price of approx. 35 1000 euros per can (!), 1 of which purchased Tate Gallery... Belgian Conceptualist Wim Delvoye for the installation of Cloaca was awarded the main prize in Linz at the prestigious art festival @rs. Electronica ... Pornography is frequently associated with blasphemy. In Poland her representatives as “intellectual arts” (Roman Opałka, Ewa Partum, Włodzimierz Borowski, or Andrzej Lachowicz).

Neoavangarda

The 1968 Social Rebellion besides found its place in a fresh form of art, which "extended the area of artistic activities into the field of critical art, i.e. 1 which is not so much a work, but alternatively a kind of worldview" (p.82) rejecting tradition. The artistic genius was considered redundant and removed. Provocation and shock became the key to emerging through the media. The story of an incomprehensible modern creator was created, and everything that is touched by this “holy saint” is an art... Jackson Pollock, for example, practiced biology, i.e. pouring the artist's interior into a canvas in the form of chaos of random colors. Daniel Kuspit In her book “End of Art” she claims that art has made its days due to the fact that she has stopped bringing anything into aesthetics and has been replaced with something that Alan Karrow defines the word ‘post’. This kind of transition from the work to the artist himself – emphasizes Prof. Konik – is 1 of the deepest changes that brought neoavangard (p. 88) .And asks the question: Can 1 put Leonard, Michelangelo or Rembrandt with abstract painters?. He concludes that overproduction of images in which the creator has nothing to say and there is nothing to see – is simply a modern form of iconoclasm – not by destruction, but by overproduction of specified “works” (informel, tachism, actionism, “guerilla theatre”).

Hermann Nitsch (Vienna) the inventor and creator of the Theatre of Orgia and Misteria carried out more than 100 bloody and repulsive performance actions – in order to “enhance artistic practice by destroying the aesthetic habits of Western people” (in 2009 the displeasure of the exhibition in Encouragement). In fact, it was a niche for deviative behaviour,” the author emphasizes. People with sadistic and deviating tendencies can now unpunishedly carry out themselves under the sign and protective umbrella of art, (excesses Chris BurdenSerbs Marina Abramović) self-mutilation and ideas carried out within its own body, specified as the plastic surgery of the French artist Orlan as a performer (criticians say it's... an crucial voice in the feminist explanation of identity), bred in the laboratory of the ear spouse, then transplanted on the creator's own forearm, which is rewarded for shifting the boundaries of art, implanting an antenna into the skull (Neil Harbisson), screaming Yoko Ono, tracking flies by the audience in an empty gallery, Semen and Blood series, Christ Piss – sacral props in waste (Andres Serrano), Artur Żmijewski (not to be confused with the actor) Berek in the gas chamber (the Incentives Collection).

Theoreticians emphasize that the fresh art is connected with impulse, with instinct, not with intellect, so it cannot be censored due to the fact that it would restrict creative freedom... Therefore, any activity, even prohibited or covered by social anathema, can be practiced if the author himself declares that he creates... in the spirit of avant-garde. Repressive tolerance accepts only fresh art and outlines the limits of freedom, and the censor of correctness is the caste of enlightened, conscious and infallible people. "In the sphere of art, the application of repressive tolerance (the creator of it is Herbert Marcuse in the manifesto of the alleged fresh leftist 1965) is manifested in the fact that we are afraid to say loudly present that modern art is simply a specified fraud, that it has neither aesthetic values nor workshop skills, not to mention the talent of the artist" (p. 127). The concept of art ceases to have any meaning erstwhile art can be made even from physiology effects, bodily fluids, window washing or home cleaning, from the remains of mutilated animals, meaning: Is that what this is about? – the Author asks.

Sacramental demolition

A separate chapter was devoted to contemporary sacral art. With the change of liturgy, the avant-garde virus after the II Council entered the sacral art. The symbolism of the temple has a centuries-old tradition through a Christocentric plan and a profoundly thought-out imagination of sacral art, where there was no area for anthropocentrism. She achieved her apogee in Gothic art by shaping the superiority of the theological program over method solutions or even over the aesthetics of the building itself. The temple architecture enabled us to experience the mystery of Christ's Passover: life, martyrdom, and glorious Resurrection.

As part of the avant-garde aggiornamento, and in this area there has been havoc “Architectors entirely freely plan churches without a comprehensive vision, like secular buildings, public gathering halls, without a mention to verticality, abandoning the mysterious relation of art with theology. This is, among others, the conversion of the altar (sacrifice) to a feast at the Protestant table. This includes all spiritual art, chapels, and even music." (p. 142). This is, among others, the conversion of the altar (sacrifice) to a feast at the Protestant table. On the another hand, modern artistic experiments taking place on the basis of sacral art are a reflection of the process of failure of religion and liturgical confusion. With the abandonment of the Latin liturgy for a certain liturgical freedom, sacral art is subject to the rules of contemporary art, desacralization, in which stone music and even techno (Vienna) are not unique. And he asks the question: can an artist fascinated by avant-garde art, which programically cuts off from the sacrum sphere, make something of value in this matter?

Or is the ugliness of modern sacral art simply a reflection of the spiritual life of the modern Church, which has lost its ability to be like a lighthouse pointing the way among storms to a safe port? Art became a primitive commentary on everyday life, as it was taken from its essence. The avant-garde revolution demolished the art building without giving anything fresh in return, creating a fresh model of the artist – a revolutionary, ideologically dependent (in the West class conflict was replaced with the carrying of democracy). Art as a treasury of imagination and beauty was discredited and thrown into the garbage of history. The founding act of the mainstream contemporary painting is, in fact, to get free of the aesthetic order, shaped by the centuries-old tradition of art as an effective tool for seeking and producing beauty, by striving for “true advancement and freedom”.

Beauty alongside good and fact has become an undesirable term, as it introduces gradations and unnecessary competition on the grounds of the art of absurdity, cliché, contempt and irony.” The avant-garde of the art of the sanctuary of aesthetics made a specified kram in which the art was compared to everyday life, thus making it unnecessary, effectively reduced it to the level of absurdity, and yet to the fact that it would simply disappear."(p 170-171). Avantgarda – summarizes the Author – sterilizes art with its transcendent ambitions and aesthetics and reject conventional art with its metaphysical dimension, its spiritual depth. Therefore, in her place as a sacrum they offer virtually feces.

Let's hope that progressive creators and their intellectual acolytes yet get to Nuremberg, as he erstwhile advocated Prof. Bronisław Łagowski. In fact, the book mentions excesses Piotr Pawlenski against arrest and conviction to stay in a penal colony in Russia, the Pussy Riot group, which defiled the Council of Christ the Savior in Moscow, however, lacked information on the state and nature of the current art and on its relation to the FR authorities, as well as on their relation to the church. For we have read about the construction of tens of thousands of sacral objects in fresh years by the authority in this country (which the author does not mention) respective years ago... The West, on the another hand, not only fights religion, but allows the burning of sacral objects, most frequently historic...

We must end with optimism, due to the fact that there will come a time of contemplation of beauty, which prof. Tatarkiewicz himself profoundly believed: “It is possible, and even most likely, that the thought of beauty will return. But present it is in decline.” (Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “The Way Through Aesthetics”, p.100).

This crucial book with many photographs reads great. It contains a crushing, documented and needed criticism of what has been done with art in the last 100 years.

Halina Ostovich

Roman Konik, “Contemporary Art. Anatomy of Fall”, Wydawnictwo Vectory, Wrocław 2023, ps. 172

Think Poland, No. 43-44 (26.10-2.11.2025)