Death of Art?

Some people complain that art is dead, or dying, that it is being killed by the people making money on the ignorance and lack of taste dominating in the richer layers of society. Vulgarity and primitivism, random impulsiveness pretending to be the only source of art, abominable and disgusting things claimed to be the true artistic revelations --- all that is overflowing the arts nowadays, and, judging by the statistical frequency only, one could even conceive that it constituted art itself.

However, true art can never be dead --- nobody and nothing can kill it. Art is universal and it pertains forever once it has been produced. Any human activity carries an aesthetic message in it, and this message is bound to pass through the millennia to the future generations of conscious beings of any kind. Of course, there can be no thing that is "pure" art --- any thing combines various levels of existence, just a few of them being associated with the artistic side of human creativity. Though some things may be considered as the "articles of art" today, nothing prevents them from loosing this exclusive meaning in the future, so that some other aspects would gain the dominance in its cultural attributions. Still, the syncretic universality which is the distinctive feature of art will always be present in such things, and the people of the future will always be able to appreciate it.

However, the world changes, and the arts change with it. Therefore, one does not need to revive anything, or invent the criteria of beauty for all times, thus setting artificial limits for the aesthetic development. Rather, a new discovery will become yet another contribution to human spirituality in general. Art, science and philosophy do not exhaust it, and an honest life of an ordinary individual may be in no way less significant for the unity of the Universe than most profound reflections.

Let us have Renaissance every moment of our lives, and in every respect, including beauty, of course. And then we will have right to proudly call ourselves spiritual.

The complaints about the death of art are somewhat exaggerated. The very existence of beauty in the arts, albeit rare and almost imperceptible, can serve as a counter-argument. And we still have a few true artists living among us. Yes, every historical period knew numerous bootleggers of any sort. But, in a sense, their existence provided a necessary background for the prominence of true art.

The cult of ugliness and self-destruction cannot be separated from the economical nature of capitalism, and one can hardly hope that capitalism has already expired every possibility for its development. This means that we will have to observe perverted pseudo-art for quite a long time, and few people will live to the dawn of the new era, when there will be no need to produce junk in order to have a chance to sometimes make really valuable things.

Still, one should not be too sad. Just distinguish the words of the people from their deeds. Do we need to consider as art everything that is claimed to be art? The "officially established" art is only a social institution, a trade like any other, and every trade is mainly craftsmanship, with the intrusions of art. There are few people who make art the focus of their life and activity, and they are so unique that one cannot judge about the overall development of the arts by their works only. So, we could speak about artists, who are never representative of their time, and all the rest, who only pretend to be artists, being mere craftsmen --- though, of course, nothing prevents a craftsman or any other person from incidentally producing true art. Thus understood, art will never die, and one could consider the ratio of art to craftsmanship an important indicator of a historical epoch, which becomes low in the regression periods, drastically increasing with every revolutionary jump.