Great video here from Prager on why modern art is so bad. But it applies to the question of truth in general.
The loss of an objective aesthetic in art has led to a loss of the meaning of beauty, the celebration of the scatalogical, and the move, as he puts it in the video, from the transcendent to the trashy.
Art is a window to the human soul, which we peer out of to see visions of what could be or peer into for pictures of what is. In either view, the aesthetic of of much of modern art offers nothing of real substance or meaning because it is not grounded in any objective standard of what is good, excellent, or beautiful. The loss of an objective aesthetic is not merely a matter of art, then, but of culture’s understanding of truth in all it’s forms.
The highest ideal is no longer the nobility of the transcendent but the expression of one’s desires above all else. Here, then, art has become a progressive, intellectual, and secularized society’s own golden calf. Except this time, the calf looks like us and it’s neither excellent or beautiful.
The truth about society, marriage, sexuality, gender, or the meaning of personhood itself has followed precisely this same trajectory as classical art. There are no standards, no objective reality. Nothing except the sum of one’s feelings about, well…whatever.
In this sense, as a window (or mirror) of culture, modern art’s obsessive navel-gazing and deification of self-actualization both reflects and helps feed the slow death of society.
