All modern art is quite useless
This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ Rudyard Kipling asked in 1890. In those days the modernist movement across the Beaux Arts was gaining a grip on the western world that it maintains in the 21st century and is likely to hold into the 22nd, if there is one. One hundred and thirty years later, Kipling’s question calls for a plain response: ‘If it’s ugly, it has to be art.’ Aquinas defined art as ‘right reason in action’; reason in making. Right reason depends upon a man’s knowing what he ought to believe, desire and do. The modern artist is ignorant of all of these things.
