FROM BEAUTIFUL TO UGLY ART. WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

– Corrado Gnerre

Dear friend, I greatly appreciate your editorial choice to insist on the beauty of a certain type of art. In fact, I am convinced that art serves a lot to get closer to the truth, and therefore to God. Obviously when art really expresses beauty; not like the contemporary one that is distressing and not understood. Precisely on this point, I would like to receive an answer from you; why has painting changed so radically throughout history? From beautiful to behold and comprehendible painting, it has become an incomprehensible and ugly painting. I think there have been complex reasons for causing this change. Is that so?

Dear …, you must know that reality is much simpler than we can imagine. In the end, two plus two makes four, even in the so-called “non-exact sciences,” such as the humanities. You wonder what complex reasons there may be in the so-called contemporary art, that of the “blessed-who-understands–something-in-it” to be clear. And I tell you that the motivations exist, but they are not complex at all. In the sense that they are much more intuitive than we can think.

I come to the point. Up to a certain period of history, you must know that the method of philosophy was the realistic one, that is, according to which the truth is in the adaptation of the subject to the object. And not by chance. In addition to a reason for common sense, because obviously, this is so, in fact, the truth cannot be without observation, there was also an anthropological reason. Philosophical realism is the result of the conviction of being limited, dependent creatures. Realism, in fact, leads to the observation of how small we are and how we cannot change our finite nature. But, at some point, things started to change. We went from realism to rationalism. A “certain” Descartes (“certain” so to speak) made a real philosophical revolution. His famous phrase, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), is not just an effective phrase that many students repeat like a singsong without understanding it (because they don’t make it understood), but – as I said – a real and own philosophical “revolution.” To make a long story short; it was no longer an objective reality that guaranteed the existence of thought, but the opposite, it was a thought that guaranteed the existence of reality. It was the transition from objectivism to subjectivism. We are not yet in relativism, but the so-called “turn” was taken to get there. It is obvious that such a passage also had anthropological motivations. Since the essence of modernity is a sort of radical anthropocentrism, in order to substantiate the delirium of human omnipotence, it was necessary to make pieces of reality and to promote a sort of omnipotent subjective will as a criterion.

Now, dear …, all of this has had of course some reflexes in the field of art. As long as philosophical realism dominated, description pictorially imposed itself. Then when philosophical realism, with attached metaphysics, was eliminated, the descriptive element was gradually abandoned to make way for imaginative delirium, until the birth of complete abstractionism. In short, what matters is no longer reality, but what thought sees, imagines, creates and eventually destroys.

Dear …, like it or not, behind every mistake – and we can add; behind every ugliness – there is always a bad philosophy … and also bad anthropology.

But, dear …, I also want to add another thing. In this way, art (self-styled as such!) has become a great mystification. How do you say whether a work is beautiful or not? Without objective criteria, aesthetics has completely passed into the hands of critics, who obviously, according to their interests, make good and bad, whether at will … pardon; the good and the bad picture!