Surely THAT is Not Art

I sometimes wonder whether I am missing something, as I'm often frustrated by current art and literature. Post modernism has been taken to the extreme . . . squares of paint on a blank canvas, pictures of toilets, jumbles of words masquerading as poems, rambling, incoherent pieces.

Art may be subjective, but I just don't like what is currently being called art.

I honestly fail to see the talent present in these pieces. Maybe it's the creativity that should be praised, but surely it takes more than creativity to create masterpieces. Otherwise, I could fill water balloons with different colors of paint, tape them to my body, and fling myself against a white wall to produce my own creation. It sounds creative, but it's probably already been done. Or I could just put a starving dog in a room and call it art.

I've always seen art as something untouchable, something I wish I could do but that I know requires a talent that I lack. Renaissance paintings with their incredible level of detail. Photographs capturing images at that perfectly lit moment. I don't think our time will ever have talent like that of Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Renoir, or Raphael (Or if we did, these people would find their work to be passe and unpopular). Even Picasso and Munch, whom some call postmodern, could work magic with their brushes. I love to stare at these paintings, marveling at the perfectly placed brush strokes, the textures, the shadows; such paintings strike me as almost unworldly because their creation just seems so impossible.

I often feel the same way about poetry - Victorian poets such as Hopkins, Browning, Tennyson, or Hardy, epic poetry by Homer or Milton, or anything by Dickinson. These poems have musical rhythm, vivid images, and originality.

So while much, but far, far from all of the world moves deeper into post modernism, I will continue to find most of my satisfaction in art and poetry from a previous time.

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

            The Darkling Thrush
              By Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
 Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
 The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
 The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
 Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
 Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
 The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
 Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
 His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
 And I was unaware.