Roger Kimball on Modern Art

"..as the egalitarian imperatives of the Sixties insinuated themselves more and more thoroughly into mainstream culture, the very ideal of aesthetic excellence came under fire. Adulation, not connoisseurship, was the order of the day. Many commentators - even many artists - rejected outright the pursuit of aesthetic excellence; they saw it as an elitist holdover from the discredited hierarchies of the past."

Quoting Clement Greenburg,
"The middlebrow in us wants the treasure of civilization for himself, but the desire is without appetite. He feels nostalgia for what he imagines the past to have been, and reads historical novels, but in the spirit of a tourist who enjoys the scenes he visits because of their lack of resemblance to those he has come from and will return to... In his reading, no matter how much he wants to edify himself, he will balk at anything that sends him to the dictionary or a reference book more than once."

Quoting Karsten Harries on "kitsch":
"The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare, when desire lies dormant and needs artificial stimulation. Kitsch is an answer to boredom. When objects cannot elicit desire, man desires desire. More precisely, what is enjoyed or sought is not a certain object, but an emotion, a mood, even , or rather especially, if there is no encounter with an object that would warrant that emotion.. Thus religious Kitsch seeks to elicit religious emotion without an encounter with God, and erotic Kitsch seeks to give the sensation of love without the presence of someone with whom one is in love."

"The most delicious news to emerge from the art world in 2001 came in October, courtesy of the BBC. Under the gratifying headline "Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation", the world read that,

'A cleaner at a London gallery clearered away an installation of artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.'

I hope that Mr. Asare was immediately given a large raise. Someone who can make mistakes like this is an immensely useful chap to have around."

"..the Andy Warhol museum reminds us that Pop Art represents an infantilization of art and culture."

On avant-garde art:
"Having won battle after battle it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on established taste."

"The assualt onthe human form (i.e. portraiture) - above all the assault on the human face - has epitomized the progress of paintings dehumanization."