A Modern Art Criticism
150 Years of Crap
By Dr. Sol Adoni
Modern Art began with the ‘Impression’ of a scene by Manet in 1870. It was heavily criticized and yet, it started the modern art movement of Impressionism. Out of focus art blurring the reality of Realism that overtook the age of Romanticism.
While the first public museum could be considered the Vatican’s public viewing of ancient sculpture in the 15th Century, the modern age of Museum’s began at the close of the 18th Century when the Lourve opened. Within 50 years public museums were springing up in North America and the search for ‘Art’ began by the first wave of curators.
Museums of Modern Art or MOMA’s began to take form in the 20th Century when museums like the infant Guggenheim came under the influence of retired artist Marcel Duchamp, the man that signed a urinal and submitted it as ready made art in a French Exhibition where it was disqualified as art. Thus began the DADA movement, the movement where artists decided what was art. It was a collection of left bank artisans including painters, poets and authors as well as musicians.
One could argue Picasso’s cubism spawned a decade earlier in Paris triggered the DADA movement as much as World War I had.
While Duchamp is heavily credited with being the originator of DADA, he was not that pivotal in creating the movement other than signing a urinal. Many other figures created the DADA movement and to some degree it greatly effected the modern comprehension of what is art.
The pivotal mover of Modern Art is actually Duchamp, who was retired as an artist when DADA began and had started living between New York City and Paris. His patron was primarily the Arenberg’s and their collection that was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the mid 20th Century is a pivotal collection in modern art.
It was also Duchamp who influenced the Guggenheim collection of Modern Art when it opened.
So you had the fans of Picasso and his abstract cubist works and fans of DADA vying to collect the artists that mostly dominated the left bank of Paris in the first half of the 20th Century. This is where the term LEFTIST came to mean a liberal leaning person or politician.
The radical ideas of the left bank was where modern liberalism sprang after World War I.
It was not until museum curators started to collect late 19th and early 20th century painters that many artists you think of became prominent names. Manet, Monet, Matisse and Picasso became names curators chased as well as the works of VanGogh.
Museums had already filled walls with the portraits of the wealthy and Royals that had lined the walls of Castles and Villa’s in Europe, the modern age of Museums waged war in collecting the modern artists that became the vogue of the first half of the 20th Century.
Much of the big museums Modern Art collections consulted with Duchamp who was too busy playing chess by then to actually create a work of art.
As a reaction to the control of Modern Art exhibits in Museums Pollock and Twombly created their anti-art works. Pollock inspired by drop cloths of house painters and bridge workers began to spay his canvas’ with house paint and Twombly began to exhibit found art sculptures or trash as art.
So Modern Art had sunk to the lows of spraying house paint through Pollock’s drippings and the trash of Twombly’s sculptures. No one dared to say this is crap, it’s not art.
Now we have young artists thinking how brilliant their drippings, pours and spins are. I’m sorry people but none of this crap is ART. Art has a message, the artist articulates the message onto a medium and the viewer can grasp the message the artist intended to send.
It is now being realized that many great masters who are known for their realistic works of people and landscapes were early users of technology in using devices to project images onto canvas’s and even walls for murals. Much of the greatest works now in museums from hundreds of years ago were not free hand drawn works of art, they used technology to help create the vivid realism of their works.
Today many artists use a projector to trace the outline of their works to get the ratio correct before they apply paint. Or, they use a scientific grid system to insure the ratio of subjects in their works are accurate.
While the surrealism of the middle 20th Century created names like Dali, and then the 2nd half of the 20th Century saw the rise of Warhol and his factory of artists to create what he conceptualized, a recent admission by a contemporary artist named Damien Hirst who is known for only signing his works created by his staff, admitted he has had no original ideas in art, he merely stole all his ideas.
Over the decades I created art targeting things in my world of influence. I’m an occult figure due to my famous prophecies as SOLLOG and so I created abstract occult zodiac and astrology symbols. If you are an early SOLLOG Fan and purchased an Oil signed by SOLLOG in these areas of my expertise, you won the lottery ticket, they are now all museum level pieces of art.
I also created some works for foundations I formed decades ago, that feature scientific formula’s I created in math and physics. These are now all in a museum.
Then I created some works using ancient lost alphabets that only a small amount of academics can translate into art as well.
My latest exhibit for the TOH Museum was created to show the 32 Cave Symbols found in European Caves from almost 100,000 years ago, my work on the symbols shows they are an early pictograph system for humans to convey a message to other humans. The message used the shape of the mouth to create animal sounds. So this symbol is how a human’s lips form to roar like a bear or a cave lion, etc.
So the oldest cave art in the world was a symbol based system to created a concrete message to other humans that viewed the symbols decades and even hundreds of years later, in this area you can hunt this animal and that animal etc.
Now in 2020, there is no message in most art, the reason is we have had 150 years of crappy art to create a generation of artists too lazy to put a brush on a canvas that now thing dripping, pouring and spinning paint into random non-messages is some how art.
They whole generation of artists lost the idea that art was to send a message from the painter to the viewer, this is what I see, do you see it.
There is some great new artists in the world and the works of hyper-realistic artists is interesting. However, due to the invention of the camera, most artists can no longer create realistic art and earn a living, it’s too easy for the public now to take a selfie and voila they have a portrait usually of some dimwitted young hussy posing for the world to gawk at her fresh skin and bright white teeth in revealing poses her great grandmother would of fainted at the thought of wearing.
As a minimalist dadaist symbolic occult artist, my goal as an artist is to use as little brush strokes to convey a message. In three strokes I can create a vagina. is it art? On a minimalist level it is brilliant if I do say so myself. To me less is more in art.
But that is what minimalism is all about.
At least my work has a simple message about topics I know a lot about, so when I create a work based on one of my theories in math or physics it has academic level meaning very few will get. It’s like having a work by Einstein with E= in the work, however, very few people know he never wrote E= in his famous paper in German, and what he wrote was just words to say M= not E=. But that’s another article.
So what is art?
Art is not a work where the message says NOTHING. If the artist says there is no message then it is not art. Now if the artist can spin a tale of bullshit that this is a vision he had while eating mushrooms in a cave of Socrates whilst watching the flames of Hades cast shadows upon the wall of life of the cave, great, his bullshit will go far in a modern world of art based on BULLSHIT.
Show me the message then I will agree your work is art.
