Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name's David Barn with me as always. It's my good friend Alex, pretty very doing Alex. Okay, pass so humbly, Gordito.
Speaking Spanish today, this is a Spanish team. Oh, I got it. I see. Chirizo.
Yeah, but yeah, but oh, I can do a Spanish. We're talking about we're taking a set and these from Spain. Alex and I were making jokes, I think more commonly associated, like Mexican banditos. But Greg, how are you doing?
My good friend. I'm doing well, David. Thanks. Happy to be here.
Alex had a story. You want to tell us a story time? I did. I just want to point out Greg's loud call.
He's been cursing on us via text about how much he eats, you know, shift the I'd Spaniards he says. Not my words. And you know, whoa, whoa, I dated a Spaniard for four years. These are?
I'm sorry for you. Yeah. I still don't forget what they did to my people. Spain?
Yeah. You don't, you don't, you don't, Preppy, white kids from Maryland? Ooh. What did they do?
What did they do to your people? Did they stop saying my father's fear, suck, or short? My father's telling them. My father is retiring in Barcelona, so I'll be spending a lot of time there.
Don't you know about that, Lana? Yeah, it's actually exactly what I mean. Yeah. So who's supposed to go there?
I was also... So I have this kind of model in life. You know, you want to make a virtue out of necessity, right? And I'm a bold man as a Zargest tonight, Daniel, Daniel.
Well, once I do it a moment. And so my plan has always been to, as I'm losing my hair, is to think, how can I view this hindrance as an opportunity? So I thought, you know, one day I could go to a party wearing, like with family and wear a toupee and embarrass them and my parents or my sister would be like, that's a toupee. I mean, you know, it's not my real hair.
I would just be like, blonde, like whatever. But so now that I have kids, I'm taught like two-year-old Penelope to say bald whenever she sees me, a bald when she sees... So she sees like an octopus, a picture on octopus. She goes bald like daddy or she sees a layup with like a round, like change, she goes bald like daddy.
So we're sitting at dinner at the table next to this bald woman sits down because my whole plan has been she would go up to a bald guy and be like, bald to the sky and make him feel bad. And it would be like a fun, fun little treat for me. But I didn't want to make some woman feel bad. And she was just staring at this woman.
So I was doing everything I could to distract her. What's bald in Spanish, David? Pellowtoodle? Okay.
All right. No, your story is totally holding up here. What? He says he's half-spangled.
Oodle, then. Maybe a downward. It's gobbled. Our guest tonight, our guest tonight is a L.O.
Doodle is a f***hole. Oh, I knew I knew I couldn't cut word. Did you tell somebody to hold a f***hole? Don't have hair.
No, I just said Pellowtoodle and that means f***hole. But I must have been in my brain because Pellow is hair. Yeah. I only think on that note, I forget 50% of my words.
On that note, let's introduce the man of power. Right. So thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed making it through that.
Usually the opening is only about a minute that was Jake. I'm sure I'll have a feeling of this. But tonight, our guest is a friend of mine, Dan McDonald. He's a professor here at Ashton University where I work where he's been since 2006.
He's an art professor. We tried three times to record this episode. Twice David slept through it. One time he just did show up.
The fourth time we actually recorded it and it was garbage, so we threw it away. And I was talking to Dan as we were wasting heavy waste over our head. And I said to him the article, he had some strong opinions on it. So I thought, well, it might be fun to have Dan on.
Dan's an art professor. I mentioned he's works in sculpture. He works in bronze steel plastics, video and other materials. He is a consultant and designer for Ring Drop Products, Incorporated here in National High.
And he was the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences last year and the best dean I've ever worked for. His BA is from Brigham Young University in French literature. He also has a BFA in sculpture from the Saint University and an MFA in Fine Arts from Clemson. He's from Idaho, the Boise foothills to be exact.
He has ten children in his family. And I asked him for the precise number of cousins. And he ran out of fingers and toes and hairs and so a lot. He spent four years laying for instance Switzerland as a missionary.
Then a student. Then a professor. Wait, hold on. You were a missionary.
It was to bring civilization. It wasn't in the missionary. David, I know you peaked as Curie Gossie really quick there, but he was an actual missionary. Let's go.
Sorry, I think a French joke. He told me. Oh, sorry. Take my French joke.
I messed it up. I'm serious, man. No. I was talking about bringing it to your opinions.
Dan's probably one of the most interesting guys I know when he's my dear friend and he's here to discuss. Jose or Dega, you got set tonight. Yeah, I'm so nervous. Why?
I'm just so I can't. Smartly. You actually do. You actually do stuff.
Yeah. He's actually the most handy guy. I know. Remember my shed?
The picture of my shed? He's the guy. He's the guy. Oh, you're the Christian rube.
He said that he just keeps the Christian rubes into building his shed by something like selling them indulgences or something like that. And I mean, I really feel bad for you and buy into that, did you? Yeah, because he says that he says David, I wake up at 5am to exercise with quote unquote Christian rubes, so they'll build me a shed. And how do we read about that?
Did you build the shed? Well, I built him the shed. Apparently, Duke, he's on the Christian rube thing. Well, you might as well do come on the quality of the shed you built and you can take out nails every now and again.
You won't notice that. I hope you installed some spy camps to see what Greg does with those dogs in the shed when nobody's looking. Right. Well, I did let a cat in there once just to see what it would do.
But you're the one with that cat in? You son of a kid. And I'm damn, that's cool. So while we're talking to you, what is that?
What's that behind you? It's a broken work of our jacket. Okay. It's a thing.
It's got my face in it. So it's mostly forgettable. You're saying how you're nervous. And I was saying how you should be very nervous because our dozens of listeners will really judge you.
Right. That's not what we're worried about how you guys judge me. Oh, no. Okay.
Well, the two smart guys in the new, but who's you? He'd stop me. No, he's talking to me. Yeah.
No, Dan, we actually have a more sizable following than just dozens, but they all have the senses of humor. So you have to understand the low, they appreciate the high and that's right. Yeah. And you'd be surprised to listen, actually.
So today, I don't know actually how we put them into being our guest. It's great. We have an actual artist to talk about or take a good sense essay today. Before we go into that quickly, he was born in 1883, died in 1955.
He was a Spanish philosopher, which seems like a contradiction in terms. But here we are. He used to actually be quite popular in political science departments in the early and mid 20th centuries. His most famous book, and this is the book that was commonly assigned, was The Revolt of the Masses, which was actually published in a series of essays in El Sol, which was a newspaper in Spain.
He's commonly associated with the right in Spain. He's going through something of a renaissance here in the United States, but still, he's somebody who was immensely popular and is kind of faded. And Alex was actually the one who discovered this essay that we're discussing today, which is called by Alex. It's called the dehumanization of art.
I did not discover it, but it was recommended to me by a friend in graduate school, Jonathan and Jonathan listening. Thank you and I love you. But the essay, just to give a kind of quick glimpse of what it's about, it's an attempt to give a sociology of the new art or of art generally. But sociology of the new art, most people I think which is called modern art in a kind of loose way.
But he starts with the sociology, because he notices that this kind of art, this new art, is deeply unpopular and even anti-popular, not unpopular in the sense that it's just not loved yet, but that it is incapable of being loved by the masses. I wonder whether that's true in the long term, but sending that aside. What year was it published roughly or do we know when we're speaking? Like the teens, is that right?
Something like that. 2930. 2930, okay. Yeah.
So, oh no, no, no, forgive me. That was for Volta the masses. I'm not sure. 1922.
1922, that's why Danzier. Good job, Danzier. Yeah. It's not an art for the people.
It's an art for artists. And it's an art for artists in that it's instead of, you know, you look at a beautiful painting of like a mountains and peasants working and you don't see all the work that went into it as an ordinary person. Right? You just see that picture.
You don't notice all the technique, all the things that are involved in that in that process. But this new art as an art for artists actually thematizes the artist's role. It removes the popular parts by which he means the human parts, the things that are recognizably related to human beings in their world, which means natural phenomena, she actual human beings and social phenomena and so on and focuses rather on what the artist is doing. So there's an inherent tendency in modern art, he says, away from the human.
It's not that it obliterates the role of the human altogether, but that it focuses on this remove. So one good example is something with a Picasso, right? Where you can see there's a face, there's not like there's a nose or whatever, but it's pulling away from that in a way. And so, and he says different movements within this trend are going to go in different directions and there's going to be different techniques involved in this, but he's looking for the common basis and it is this moving away.
I'll leave it at that. There's some interesting stuff about the motivations of the new artist, which new art, which we could go into and how it's a reaction to the Renaissance, where there was a overemphasis of the human and sort of related human things. But I'll leave it at that and say that's kind of the general thesis that he's presenting. Yeah, so I'll speak it back and we're saying page four, he says, all modern art is unpopular and it is so not accidentally by chance, but essentially by faith.
So modern art is actively trying to be unpopular or anticoppular. It's probably we're pointing out that he's speaking about specific mediums. Top of that page four, he says, he's speaking about the arts that are still somewhat alive in the Western world, music, painting, poetry, and theater. And so then that leads me to think about what arts have fallen out.
And then the other question I would have, and maybe this would be better at the end. This just occurred to me. If it is the case that he's right in his account of modern art, have other arts risen up to fill this popular void, of course, they're not like popular music, television, movies, that kind of thing, the kind of thing that bloom, for example, within a tour effort. Yeah, so this is what we're talking about, painting, poetry, theater, and music, that they're aiming to be anti-popular.
Yeah, I'd love to just, as an actual artist and somebody that teaches art, how does this essay just in general strike you as sometimes philosophers will tackle things that they understand theoretically and then really widely miss the mark? I just hear initial thoughts on curious. Well, first off, I missed the mark. It's from 1925.
It's off by three years. I apologize. It's the hell I do. I feel like I need to go.
I have a hard time getting through the first half of this because it feels so strangely either presumptuous or ignorant. And I have a hard time figuring out which one that leans to the most. But I feel like he is making assumptions that no normal person should make. First off, that the notion of masses, not liking something assumes that there's always been a massive group of people that could even go and admire art.
They were able to attend things like operas and the theater on a regular basis. The first museum opened to the public, opened at the end, and only 1670, something like that, in Basel, Switzerland, actually. So that's the first one open to the public. Anything else in the public saw how to be publicly displayed or was maybe in the churches.
There's such a huge change right there in the middle of the 19th century. Well, I guess at the beginning of the 19th century, with all the different revolutions taking place, the whole model of the patronage is gone. And so now you're waiting for the state to maybe pay for artwork to be made. There are a few wealthy folks out there, but it's not the same.
And so the market for getting worked out changes dramatically. And so you start seeing a change in the type of work that's being made. Best evidenced by, no, this is a slightly different pathway to this, but why is the Northern Baroque so different than the Southern Baroque? Because the churches aren't buying stuff anymore.
So all of a sudden, the people in the North are doing a bunch of landscape paintings, things that people would maybe put in their homes. And they're not going to put some giant painting of Mary and child in there. But I was confused at who he thought these masses were. Because I think the art world has always been divided by the elites and then the rest.
And it's only in a fairly recent period of time that the rest has had access to that artwork. And I don't know if that's still curated by the elites. Sure. Sure.
Can I press that just a little bit? I think that's great. But one of the things that maybe this is not his terms, and maybe I'm arguing not quite on what he's doing here, but even though it was the case when he's a elite in the past, so the church, for example, wanted depictions of Mary and child like this. And so the artists complied.
They did sort of what maybe I'm not getting at this very clearly. The elites had kind of vulgar tastes, maybe as a way to put it, or popular somewhat. Even though they weren't other masses, they kind of had popular tastes. Maybe that's not a fair thing to say.
But once they became the class, they were no longer the class paying for it. The artists were no longer catering to these vulgar tastes of the wealthy. And they began to sort of do art for the sake of artists. So they're not, I mean, is he writes as far as the audience for art, Alex already said this, I think, the audience for modern art is artists.
Whereas the audience for pre-modern art, or whatever we want to call that. Was someone else entirely, even if I think you're right about that, I didn't realize that the first public museum opened in the 17th century, that's kind of sad. But it makes sense, I suppose. Is that question?
Is that my redeeming middle all or? I agree with him on many of those points. And I think there's also a simple historical chain of events that kicks in in the 19th century. So if you have folks who are following the academies and they're making work that represents what one might see around them, right?
Something very important is invented right there in the middle of that century. That changes entirely the usefulness of the artist. And so when you have photography and you're just trying to represent something that you see in life, well, there's a machine now that does it normally better than most, missing some color, but that comes around soon enough. And we can follow that trajectory.
As soon as you get moving pictures, all of a sudden the idea of trying to capture something that couldn't be captured in a camera, like an impression, for example, is again irrelevant. You can start capturing moving images and you can capture something changes from something to something else. And that could lead to where someone's saying, what can the camera not do? Well, can it show a fourth dimension?
Can it show an overlaying of multiple images? Can it start to show maybe just the pure emotion and not the image? And so you just change from that. But he's writing this in 1925.
One of the most horrific things ever that we can kind of think about World War I hits, right? People are still doing paintings of the things around them, women, the environment, animals, whatever. And then you have so many folks who now have witnessed their friends die from some invisible sort of gas that wanders into a trench. They're just in their body and all of a sudden twitching and then they die.
And how do you represent that in imagery? And some of the expressionists, the German expressionists in particular, he would be aware of that, I assume. They're trying to represent that. So you start seeing these drooping faces, this melting flesh where folks may not connect to that the same way.
Without a patron, you don't have to, you aren't making commission work anymore. So that idea following what you were suggesting, art for the artist, because the artist isn't making commission work anymore. So they're having to trigger some sort of appreciation from the artistic elite. Saying this person is touching on something that others haven't touched on.
And that's what makes it special. Versus I want you to paint something that looks exactly like I'm describing. And that patron comes in and checks on the work and makes sure it's done the way they want it. But as we could go in later to think that we're more accustomed to World War II hits and all of a sudden, that faceless death has a face.
And neighbors are turning in neighbors knowing that they're going to be killed. That sort of arrangement, all of a sudden people just stop making images. And that's where you get your color field paintings and your drip paintings. And sculptures, they're just cues that you describe as steel, as steel is.
Or this is modern because it uses plastic and construction materials, because that's what that stuff's good for. Difficultur, just sculptur about Edna when you have that sort of baggage. I think that's worth thinking about when we think about why artists might make things. But that flies in the face of some of the other things that he talks about a little bit later.
Just talking about the reason why especially that scene where he's describing the the guy dying and his wife and the artist just sits there, emotionless, lacking all empathy. Just going to depict it in some way. And I think that's pretty far removed from the way we look at artists today. We often identify the artists as the overly sensitive one, the overly motive one.
Like you. And but they, sure, like me, it's my cry all the time. And I'm actually getting the thing. Serena Williams said on Twitter today that some people don't cry because they're weak, but they cry because they've been strong for so long.
Now, if you're crying a lot, Daniel, that means you're just weak. But it's been a long time since you last cried. You're strong. It's been since Tuesday.
So let me add a piggyback on what you were saying about World War I, because I think there's reason which that jives with what he's saying and that he doesn't. He talks about how Renaissance art was a reaction to Gothic discipline. Call it talks about a Renaissance cornucopia with a torrential fecundity that threatens to flood all space with round right fruits. So it's this kind of explosion of beautiful forms and relatable, as opposed to like, Gothic paintings of like a weirdly adult looking baby Jesus or something like that.
And lack of perspective that there's a, but in any sense, there's like this emergency. So even if you take a Gothic painting that has like good perspective, it's very like precise and restrained, whereas a Renaissance painting that has like, you know, a dead bird and some fruits and flowers and an actual cornucopia, there's something just kind of naturalistic and occasional about it, but very relatable. So I think one thing one might want to say is that the new art is decidedly unpopular. It's not because the old art was decidedly popular, but that it had other reasons for focusing on relatable things or humanly direct things.
This turn from sort of sacred art, you could say, towards a very human art focusing on people and their lives and then this places in which they find themselves. The second thing, I think this is related to the World War one point, which is that when he gets occasionally dips into the psychology of the New Art, he talks about how artists seem to have a kind of guilt and not want to impose their feelings on other that they're withdrawing and making their art unpopular as a way of avoiding that over celebration and over connection. So I wonder, and this is more of a question from like an art history perspective, I'd like to hear. I do get the sense that like when it comes from everything from like, design to architecture to actual art, what we're looking at is a kind of rejection of embellishments and a rejection of the celebration of the human and a move towards asparanism, minimalism, austerity, that kind of forces you not to look around and see everything as beautiful, but to impose a kind of, I don't know, with the words, but I think you know what I'm getting at that.
There's a kind of pulling back from this renaissance flourishing. What do you think the psychology of that is that right? And then, because I think it is in reaction to what's wrong, and you see a lot of this happening in literature, is that an attempt to sort of go back to the human being in its ugliness, looking at man as a being that needs to be restrained and not wanting to encourage him to celebrate himself too much? Could that be what he's calling dehumanization?
I'm trying to wrestle with that sort of connection. Sorry, we're going on too long. Yeah, that's for me. I'm thinking of the Bauhaus school, for example, the idea of just whittling everything down to its function, its utilitarian purposes.
And I've always viewed that as a reaction to what folks had to be feeling after dealing with World War I. And I don't read as much as I should, but what I did read from that period and what I understood from it was this notion of separation and a detachment from others, a detachment from purpose. And that seems rational to me. Why do we need to embellish something when there's really no point to doing so?
Let's find a basic essence of something and deal with that. And if we can find a simpler way to do it all the better. I mean, maybe it's rational, though, if human life is beautiful and we're celebrating. Maybe it's rational.
I think it's understandable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It would be understandable that given circumstances, Alex. Yeah. No, I think I think you were saying that it's reasonable simply, right?
That it's there's no use to it. Or I don't know. I'll tell you the same as it was understandable given what they had come out of. Yeah, that's my point.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. But so we can historicize the tendency.
And that's what we're taking a set once to do. But I suppose I'm asking whether I mean, when I read this essay, almost seems like he's saying, artists have abdicated their throat. You know, Shiller would say you are the legislators. The poets are the unacknowled legislators of the world.
And the modern artists would say, I'm not a legislator. I'm going to do something unpopular here. I don't feel so that house can be reasonable as a reaction. You have to wonder what the most reasonable reaction to that would be.
And that's a sort of historicizing tendency. But I guess I'm wondering what you think those those deeper motivations are. I mean, it fundamentally you get a kind of economic explanation earlier about who's paying for this art. But I'm wondering whether there are deeper tendencies apart from patronage or who's paying.
And then, you know, what's reasonable as a reaction, but sort of deeper motivations, I guess, about the place of the artist and society. No, I don't know if there's a simple answer to it, really, but trying to find events that signal that none of these things happen in a vacuum. And in some ways, that's what I feel is missing. There's this sense in some of what he's writing that the artist just decided to do something different out of the blue.
And I think there's way too many things connected that he scaps over. I'm thinking of his ad or I don't know if he's actually admiring romanticism. He tends to talk it up as that art movement that everybody loved right off the bat. And that it was easy to put oneself into.
And the one bit that I always remember, because I don't really care for that, work very much myself. But I think of like Turner and Tin But Turner is very clearly, he's not trying to just create his face. He's trying to touch on the divine and believes that that can happen to nature. And even signaling that nature is eternal, that will, you can always rely on it, right?
The abi is falling apart, the manmade God features falling apart, but the nature itself can provide kind of an eternal reliance that you can go back to. But admitting that there's no way for him in any form to capture what he is feeling in that moment and expressing that to someone else. So viewing everything that he makes as a failure, because it can't happen through these separated experiences from the one that he had initially. I think that's actually pretty heavy.
And it's not a matter of just creating an environment that people can think about vacationing to. And so maybe people like it, because that's as far as they go their interaction with the work. But the artist is still suggesting that they are thinking on a higher plane than anyone's going to be able to experience simply by looking at their work. So that would suggest to me that the romantic artists were also maybe overly pious and felt themselves to be elites over the folks that were.
I had to Google image the painting you just mentioned. It is striking. And I'm going to try and tease out some argument between us because when I read the Ortega piece, I liked it. And on page six, I'll read a passage here in just a moment.
Or take a capture for me, how I feel when I look at a lot of modern art. And I'll just read it. This is from page six, about halfway down the page. When a man dislikes a work of art, but understands it, he feels superior to it.
And there is no reason for indignation. But when his dislike is due to his failure to understand, he feels vaguely humiliated. And this wrinkling sense of inferiority, must be counterbalanced by indignant self assertion. And I just confess that I feel like a lot of the modern art that I see feels like it's trying to tell me you're too stupid to understand this.
And it makes me feel, yeah, I guess, a wrinkling sense of inferiority. And so I try to balance that with my self asserting indignancy. Yeah, I was able to amplify my anger. No, no, no, I mean, I do with Greg and he's just screened at a rough go.
And he goes, why can't you just please them? Damn dogs play poker. I'm a normal artist. Right?
This is like, you're saying and bail yourself to me. Well, it's the velvet. But I want to I want to push back on this notion of it's not I don't think he's saying that the artists did not see themselves as elites. But they did see some of their they did paint things that could be recognized more easily by the ordinary person.
And the subrind is an interesting example, because I mean, to go by how Kant defines it, which I think is a pretty good definition is, you know, it's like looking over the ocean and imagining how long it goes on and trying to measure that with your reason and trying to understand it and then feeling your reason fall or thinking about the universe and trying to think about what is the end of the universe and you go a step beyond that, that's more universe. And all of a sudden, you have this sense of the infinity of space that just kind of breaks your brain, your consciousness for a second, and you just you then feel your human finitude in that that is an experience. I think most people can have that in some way, like when you're kid thinking about how high you can kind of realize you can't actually finish it and you're like, whoa, you have this weird feeling. I think there is a and so that might be that a popular takeaway from the artist from the work of art, but it seems like something a person can appreciate from their experience.
That might be more difficult than when you see that when you read proofs and you're like, would you just shut up already? Because proofs is what he uses and my mom's always talking to me about proofs. So speaking from experience, but when he just reads like 10 pages of nothing, and like just granular detail with any out of any pair of purposes, they come on me and this is too long. So it's not, it doesn't tax you in the same way, it doesn't frustrate you immediately.
It's the more popular art is popular in the sense that it's more inviting to the average person, whereas the modern art I think Ratega is saying is immediately forbidding in a way. I don't know if that addresses what you're thinking about, but that would be sort of a way of defense. No, I think that makes perfect sense. I'm curious though, to hear what Gregory believes identifies as modern art.
I don't know stuff I see in the place where you got to pay and think there's a guy there and I was saying, shush, you know, you've got to stand in line and everybody's nodding and I'm like, it's a wall, it's blue or I don't know, or you just drew a mustache on Mona Lisa. It's just some squares. It just looks like you threw paint on a wall. This is what we're dealing with Dan.
This is the sophistication. I understand a country. Everything he just described came after this article was written. Yeah, I know that.
We actually made that mistake on the last bit. Cubism didn't though, right? And Cubism is kind of... Cubism was right around there.
Cubism was probably about... Cubism was probably probably around his course. But we talked about... No, he didn't even get to see the stuff that comes later.
There's stuff that I'm talking about. Oh, no, right. Like a toilet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like a toilet and a piss-price and a towel. So you're right. I mean, it's... Yeah.
So he's talking about the impressionist and then he's talking about the focus. He's talking about maybe some of the futurists and obviously a cubist. Okay. I like the impressionism.
Yeah, of course you do. That's what most people like the most. Are you calling me a little vulgar? No, I just...
I do think that there are some stages where because of these changes in the way and the reason people made work, it's viewed differently at the time. And then now we look back and we... Actually, that's the stuff we like. So I grew up in the Mormon church.
All of its artwork is impressionist style because that was when they sent the kids from Utah to learn how to paint so they could paint the interiors of the churches and temples. So they were over in Paris when impressionism started to be accepted, 1880s or so. So it was 10 years old. And that's how everybody's paint.
And that has maintained its position in most of American art appreciation. Do you think the same thing will happen to this more contemporary art that I was talking about that in 20 years people look back and with the kind of nostalgia that we now look back at impressionism? No, I think that we... We have too many ways to record it.
Yeah. So I think of some of the great works, say, of music that we have now, everything can be recorded, everything can be saved. How much of this kind of stuff that might feel like noise today or it's felt like noise for last hundred years was also made 300 years ago. But nobody liked it.
So it wasn't recorded. There wasn't some voice or some ear to hear it later to say, hey, actually, wasn't that bad or I can appreciate it differently. Goya fits into this romanticism stuff. Most of what we look at for Goya is pretty gruesome.
But he didn't even show it. It was all found after he died. He just hatted his house. Right?
So there are a few things like David, the center devouring his children. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.
That's right. Yeah. He has a whole series of things like that. We're just founded his house.
He didn't dare show them anybody. But because it was... We were able to find it, how many things that we lost. So I wonder, I wonder how many we will lose through time.
It's why the term modern art doesn't even apply to the stuff that this guy's talking about now. It's a very specific time. And that's why in late 40s, modern art hits it. And then late 60s, 70s, we might get into postmodern stuff.
But those are categories that he's using. It hadn't been codified yet. I do think a lot of stuff is just going to follow it by the way aside. It's really hard for a lot of art historians to deal with contemporary art because how do they go into an art history class and teach contemporary art?
It hasn't actually met the test of history. And a lot of it, I hope will go away. Some of it, I think, will be appreciated later. But I do think we're also kind of running out of those things that we can try to do that the machines can't do.
And the times he's talking about, I think people were racing against that clock and really trying new things for many different reasons, but trying things that couldn't be done through other means. And maybe we're getting to the end of that line. Maybe some big classic, cataclysmic event will hit. We'll start all over again.
We can all pray. Yes. Hey, Dan, I have a question for you. As an artist, reading a philosopher, this is a prescriptive essay.
It's not like he's describing a phenomenon and he just kind of stops. He has his own thoughts and his own evaluations of something that movements that are kind of occurring organically and folding at the speed of their own logic. As an artist, you take umbrage when a kind of outsider comes in and tells you this is the way you ought to be doing art. Or how do you receive this kind of this kind of essay?
I don't really put artists on a special plan or any sort of pedestal. Here's where I probably agree with Greg, even though I do believe he's trying to justify or take us trying to justify the validity of new art despite his distancing for humanity. But I remember in grad school, the guy I never took a class from really, but overhearing him having a conversation where he shared that if you as an artist are not communicating, you are but masturbating. And so this idea that you're only pleasuring yourself, you're not communicating something well to other people.
And the suggestion through here that if people don't get it, if they can't somehow connect with it, then they're going to dislike it and it won't serve any positive purpose, at least for the masses. So you've separated out those that know and those that just can't read those d-leaves. And I do think that as an artist, you have to communicate something where I step back from it, suggesting that there are these very fixed ways that people read things and there are very simple reasons why they would read them the way they do. I also think that sometimes things just look cool and they don't have to look like something.
They don't have to be something or represent something. So a lot of times we'll see a tree and we will find some particular curve in the tree. We're not admiring the tree per se, we're admiring that curve. Well, that's a pretty simple thing.
What if someone just painted a curve? We could still admire it for its curvature. And I think people do that. So they like certain houses over other houses.
What's cool about a house? Most just have straight lines all the place. But people can just like how things look and it doesn't have to tell them something all the time. It just seems to have a simple formula why people make work and why people like work.
I think it's a little more complex than that. Dana coached me on drawing a tree when we were in Italy last summer and he got me to focus on the particular knots. And so that example really, I remember that, you're like, look at that knot, isn't it weird? Yeah, I tried to draw a little knot in the tree.
Pretty cool. So on that last one, yeah, I think he's self-consciously oversimplifying. He makes that point early on, right? He's like, look, I understand different movements.
This is what I identify as the predominant tendency that will look different. So I'm having trouble focusing. You talked about communication and masturbation. I was immediately reminded of what David does during the podcast.
He managed to do both as we get us out. But what is that? Greg's got the picture. We should share that with the folks at home who are listening.
That's very nice. And there's my attempt to draw a little cylinder and a cone and a sphere. That's all Dan. And my favorite, thanks to all of him shading stuff.
The Machiavelli drawing. That's a great one. Yeah. That's a good job.
That's all Dan's coaching. Right? I see you avoid all modernity in your art. It's very, very.
Yeah, I'm trying to actually humanize to actually try to humanize. What time was it? I was in a museum with Greg. We go to museums a lot.
This is, yeah. Yeah, it's tricks me. He says we're going to get cracker jacks and watch a ball game. Yeah.
And I end up in a museum. Yeah. I said, we're going to go throw rocks at trains. It's like, there's no tracks like shut up.
We go inside. But we go into this museum. I'm in one room. I hear in the other room, he's a scuffle with the guards and Greg is raving and screaming.
He's going, it is, it is a damn pipe. And he was looking at this Magritte. It was really crazy. I was like, Greg, you don't get it, man.
You dumbass. But anyways, I want to point out one point that's not necessarily related to earlier stuff, but I don't like, wait, sorry, sorry, Daniel, I want to say you're the strongest point raised and objection I have is, but wait, it's been 100 years. A lot of the art he's talking about is popular. Like, I want to talk about impressionism.
That's like on sorority girl, like walls in tapestry things. How would you know for $10 on Amazon or something like that? Like you're telling me this isn't going to be popular? It's like the most now it's like the most trite and ordinary thing.
And so I think, you know, a good response as a would sort of maybe begin from that phenomenon, because that's a direct rejection of his thesis on it's like basic, but it will never be popular. Oh, oh, no. So right. The other point though is that even if he's right about the tendency, maybe the artist themselves are to blame in this, in this, in what actually happens to their word.
I like when he talks about how they're doomed to irony. They seem to not want art to be taken seriously on his analysis. That is just a thing of no consequence, as he puts it. Yet it's, it's very clear that on his analysis, again, this is just his view and I expect you to push back in that the they do take this very seriously, right, that there are sense of restraint comes from like almost like a moral imperative on his view.
And so there's something I think deeply nihilistic about how he or about moderate on his analysis, not that he is nihilistic, but that there's this to just give a quote from the party where he talks about how artists think of no consequence. He says, the aspect European existence is taking on in all orders of life points to a time of masculinity and youthfulness. It's almost like a manifold refusal to take everything seriously, like a courageous silliness or, and so he wonders whether there is a kind of shame on his analysis, but I wonder, I imagine, and I think you'd be right about this, I imagine, is he right? I mean, is he right that this is doomed to irony or that the artists in this movement think that art is unimportant yet they take it seriously or how would you view that part about the seriousness of playfulness of this art or the, yeah, the sort of attempting to remove art from its pride of place in society, that may be an early art, so I'd take it.
Like I always think of trying to create it. We want the lines to get into it. Good, good, good, good, good story. That's going to give, you know, Germany's identity or Sreeah that I'm going to transform the world of my music, right?
These artists and his analysis don't do any of it. And he says basically, he was painting cannot be expected to be extolled as solemnly and as religiously as a statue by Michelangelo. These artists are making jokes of themselves. So yeah, just a, it's hard to see any of these rising to the level of Michelangelo.
Well, he's talking about Picasso to everyone knows about this stage. And I mean, Picasso poked fun at himself from time to time, I'm sure, but I think the only real pushback I would have on that is that almost all of these movements that he's talking about a few that came after he wrote this, they wrote manifesto's. Like you didn't get that from the romantic necessarily. You didn't get it from from the rope painters.
They didn't come out with some sort of overarching theme or aim most of those manifestos spoke to how they would perfect something or make something better or properly represent the world they lived in. So I think they were very ambitious. We capture, we've held on to some of them because they have stood at the test of time in one way or another. Could have also been the advent of the critic that elevated some of these things up and he gets sent out and readers digest or whatnot.
But I think like a pre-rapulites, at least folks were in that romantic sort of era. There were five of them and they wrote a manifesto and like only one of them was still painting anything like that a year later. But they were very serious about trying to do it. These are small groups.
So I, how many cubists were there? I mean, we really only think of two. So what kind of movement was really happening? Everything was happening at the same time.
It was overlapping. So if someone wants to say that these are folks just kind of taking stabs in the dark throwing stuff up until it sticks, I think that would be legitimate. But these folks who did it, even in their small groups, I think they were serious, they were trying to accomplish. They were trying something new because they could, trying something new because what was done before had run its course.
And I think that's fairly consistent through all of those different movements that happened mid-late 1800s, early 1900s. It's great. And I think that was a good time to transition. I think that's the thing that he's trying to do on a maybe two higher basis is this kind of world historical or European history art.
And it loses, I think, the sort of experimental nuance on the ground, I think is in effect. You've taught this piece before, right Dan? Didn't you say it? Or is it commonly taught in art history classes or something like that?
What, or Czechist stuff? Yeah. No, no, this speech piece in particular. I made that up.
Okay. I made that up. Okay. I have a quick lightning round to transition us as we begin to wrap things up.
And this is all members of the recording tonight are going to answer questions. I'll go around the swears. Alex, David, and then Dan. I'm just going to ask, he mentions four particular modes of art, music, painting, poem, and theatrical piece.
And I just want to get you guys to tell the folks at home what your favorite one is of each medium. I'll start with music. Alex, for you, what is your favorite music? Lately, I've been listening mostly to Mozart.
Very good. It's only many years to not find a boy. Is that right? Okay.
Yeah. Okay. All right. You childish taste.
Fair enough. Dave Barr? Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan.
Danny Donald. I just got back from New Orleans. I've been dealing with second line music. Rockin' Old Baby.
You know, good time. All right. Favorite painting. Where are you, Greg?
David knows that I really likes of American, uh, alternative country, but like, as far as series music, I like, uh, I actually do like jazz, like Oscar Peterson, and I like Vivaldi, which, I know is, I know that the people who really like classical music in the corner, but I like Vivaldi. All right. Favorite painting, Alex Priem? Uh, I, I had one of my favorite experiences at a museum was I saw a Monet sort of retrospective over all the periods of his career when I was in Paris.
And it was quite moving to see how he developed from his earliest works to his latest works. I always kind of didn't take Monet that serious. I thought he was just like something so worried girls put on their wall, you know, and uh, but as I watched him sort of develop from his earlier work to his later on, I realized I saw a man struggling with perception and reality and coming to himself deeper and deeper into a whole of that kind of philosophical quandary and exploring it. I thought, I mean, this man felt very deeply and really struggled with his problem with developing.
So I like that. I like that. How do you do? Far?
I really like any painting by Edward Hopper. Oh, the, the Gillian Nation and loneliness. He's my most favorite American. Okay.
I think my back, my favorite artist is Daniel McDonald's. There you go. Right. Yeah.
He's a sculptor. He's a sculptor painting. Daniel McDonald. This is hard.
Like I'm a terrible art, appreciate your core, but um, because I just, I'm not very good with people's names. I don't usually dig that deep, but I send my wife to the Netherlands to see the Vermeer exhibition because of just the one painting that I saw at the Ricks Museum and that's the milkmaid and seeing it out close is totally, it's just such a different world. The anyway, it's worth, it's worth checking out just the way the man layers his work up. So that process is probably more important to me even than the image that's created after the sorry.
No, that's great. Long answers are fine. I went there as well. Um, okay.
I eat our leo over on like trip to his role one time. I went there once the rest of the museum is great. Um, I'll just go and answer for myself. I actually like Jude Slaying, Holofernes.
I really like that painting. And in general, I was really impressed. Daniel, I went to the leo last time together, just the two of us and, uh, I saw a Caravaggio's paintings, which I had seen them in person just sort of blew me away. Very different experiences with Greg and museums than I do.
And he, when I last time I went with him, he was like, I don't see any happy little trees in this painting. Where's the Bob Rosses? Well, I mean, the direction. I mean, Alex, remember that time where Greg got really into environmentalism?
And we went to that museum and they threw, uh, they threw like paint and weird oil on those really nice old, uh, paintings. We couldn't even pronounce the name of artists. He got a lot of trouble for that. He chained himself to the little like, uh, metal pipes and started screening climate justice now.
Hey, listen, I don't know if you know, we don't, we don't have, we don't have a second home, buddy. We don't have a second choice. There's no plan B. Yeah.
All right. Uh, what's your favorite poem, Alex Priu? Uh, this is one I forget the name got a guy from the entire. So I'm more, more to Limerick, isn't it, Alex?
The limer's the style of poetry. That seems like a fair answer. Dave of our favorite poem. I hate poetry.
So, you know, I don't like poetry either. Yeah, I can't. That's not gonna do it. Okay.
Fair enough to end McDonald's. Geez, I don't know. I remember hating all of Blake's work. Okay.
So the opposite of what I love. Blake is Blake's a spooky guy. No, do you like his paintings? Oh, all I know is, uh, I don't care who made that a lamp.
I don't. All right. What about the actual piece? Alex Priu?
Uh, I mentioned this playwright. Yes. I mean, I was a very, very, really like platonic, uh, leanings, but she's a play called, uh, three versions of a life. It's the same scene three times with slight, I think it would be great for an episode.
Slight shifts and it's a bunch of physicists, uh, who know about flat galaxies and for this region, so the universe had no idea what's going on. Like, is there wise to keep on them and stuff? It's hilarious. It's a great critique.
She alive. Yeah. Uh, like Fusicoy. Uh, yeah.
She's, I mean, she's, she's great. Okay. Very cool. All right.
So, bar, yeah, we should see we can get her. I mean, probably not. Heck, she's like a boss winning amazing. All right.
We're a prize winning. You forgot about, um, most educational podcast in Estonia, 2021, runner up. Are you forgetting about that, right? Don't forget that.
All right. The actual piece. We were shortlisted for, uh, something at the Penn Vodka word. The P.
I can't remember. Yeah. I don't know, great. I mean, obviously there's one big guy that we all like the same.