Lost art: despite modern culture's "anything goes" attitude toward defining art, any "art" that has lost its center in the beautiful has, in fact, ceased to be art.(CULTURE)(Book review)

The perception of likeness and unlikeness generates the whole of "rational" or "necessary" truth.

--Will James

Two books hit the bookstores recently featuring what their editors anoint as the major art and artists of our times, focusing mostly on the past couple decades. As a "contemporary" artist, I was intrigued and proceeded to do a cover-to-cover review of the images Art Today and Art Now parade before the public as art.

One volume claimed to be "a concise selection of the very best art of the past two decades," the other, "a comprehensive guide to contemporary art." Page after glossy page projects images of vicious violence and death as art; gross tastelessness as art; technology as art; cleverness as art; human degradation and perversion as art; goofiness and parody as art; excrement and guts as art; piles of rocks and junk as art; paint slobbering as art; madness and blackness as art; alienation, angst, and anger as art; chaos and incoherence and just plain ugliness as art; and everywhere, politically correct polemics all being paraded before the reader as the important art of today.

Instead of feeling uplifted and inspired as when looking at so many of the old masters of past centuries, however, I just felt dirty, degraded, and disgusted--perhaps the way one might feel on leaving a madhouse or a slaughterhouse. Few images on those pages except an occasional pretty color would have ever led to the development of the idea of aesthetics. There was little evidence that the primary motive of much if any of the work was the good, the beautiful, and the true--never mind the elevation of the human spirit.

The editors of these publications celebrate their inclusiveness. Unfortunately, "inclusive" to the publishers of these volumes clearly means that anything can be called art, except, oh, amazingly, the large body of contemporary work that continues the tradition of the beautiful and the true. In fact, knowing that many if not most of the successful artists working today are still painting beautiful landscapes, portraits, and the like, it becomes clear that little work in that direction was even considered. These volumes represent a seriously biased selection of today's art that furthers a peculiar, limited, and historically novel-definition of art.

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