Osho,
What do you say about modern art?
I don't know much about modern art, and I don't want to know much about it either. It is not much of an art. In the past art had a totally different quality: it was beautiful. Modern art is ugly. It is very rare to find something beautiful in modern art, and I can see the reason. The modern mind is boiling with repressed sexuality, anger, hatred, violence. Centuries of repressions have become accumulated; it has come to a crescendo and it is erupting. The volcano is erupting!
Modern art is more like a catharsis, more like vomiting. It is not art. One just wants to get rid of all kinds of poisons that have become accumulated. The same is true about all dimensions of art; music, poetry, painting, sculpture -- they all have become ugly.
Modern man is suffering, is in immense misery and hell and that shows in modern art. Modern art is a reflection. Art is always a reflection, it is a mirror, because the artist is the most sensitive person in the society, hence he is first to become aware of what is happening; others take a longer time to become aware.
The poet is the most prophetic because he becomes aware of things which are going to happen, he becomes aware a little ahead of time, hence he is never understood.
Modern art is psychotic -- it reflects humanity. It shows that something has gone wrong, very wrong: man is falling apart. And modern art is representative art. In a way it is very realistic; it is not creating a dream world, a fantasy. But it has lost the artistic touch.
Amrita, just as modern man needs a new birth, modern art also needs a new birth. But that is a secondary phenomenon. Unless a new man arrives on the earth a new art cannot arrive, a new poetry cannot be born.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Is Osho advocating for art that is mainly about visual beauty and visual pleasure, only about joy and happiness, and the creation of escapist fantasy worlds apart from the real challenges of daily life in the world? Is that the artistic touch that has been lost?
What about Sanrio, or that cute octopus below?
Wouldn't art that is primarily about beauty, rather than truth, encourage even greater repression in the culture?
If you compare Osho's words to Hitler's ideas about modern art, you might find them to be in strong alignment in their intolerance of work which challenges the viewer to see beyond his or her own prejudices, to question what he is certain he already knows.
Actually recent art in the past decade in the arena of social engagement/relational art is about audience participation, community and collaboration, harmony, and not about vomiting or ugliness.
And it doesn't subscribe so readily to past notions of the artist as superior being, condescending to viewers who are presumed to lack what special insight and gifts the artist posseses (the NY Times article on Polke feeds this long-standing mythos as well).
At least in certain quarters, contemporary art today is moving in a more democratic, less hierarchical, less narcisstic direction than that.
i've been watching and participating in wafaa bilal's audience participation project and it seemed to me that for the most part it was all like vomiting.
wafaa felt nauseous and if you kept watching the shit people were writing on the chat (vomiting!) it made you feel nauseous too.
It's been pretty ugly. people need to be brought closer to beauty again. if artists only keep holding up mirrors, people won't start loving more, they might get even more ugly.
an artist should lead the way, live by example, show beauty. by that i don't mean create fantasy world, but true visions that humanity can adapt and identify with and ultimately pursue.
it can have a healing effect, like someone loving you truely and unconditionally. that is transformative and may wipe out all ugliness you have ever experienced. if we only focus on the bad, we will only perpetuate the bad. if we believe in the good, we may bring out the good in humanity.
people want love, joy and inner beauty and peace. not conflict, constant intellectual overload so that you can't sleep and shut your mind off at all.
the wafaa bilal project was all conflict and no harmony. people were getting so extreme, the art was provocative and people were deeply provoked. even wafaa had to realize that it was not about physical pains, it was a mental game that he created. i doubt anything positive or truely transfomative is coming out of it.
the artist is more sensitive in my opinion. that also brings the responsibility to be very aware and careful with what the artists shows to the world.
anyone can become an artist although the way is often painful and requires being open, receptive and vulnerable. so many artists couldn't handle it...kust look at how many artists died young.
i agree that art should not be hierarchical but it should be respected as a profession just as being a doctor or a lawyer. it benefits society and ideally the artist should be getting a salary for his work, maybe by the government (taxpayers:)) because art is needed and important.
i agree with the value of beauty in healing transformation, and that ugliness without transformative potential is misguided. at the same time, how to measure actual transformative outcome remains elusive, if even desirable.
one of the most powerful pieces i've seen in a long time was a video installation by brit artist phil collins (NOT the sussudio guy from genesis), consisting of people in istanbul singing karaoke of smiths songs from the album "world can't wait." the title of the piece was that album title translated into turkish, something like "duniya dinleyimor."
there was something of the humanity and love captured in the singing of these songs by people who showed up in response to posters on the streets, their earnestness, sincerity, humor and pathos, that for me was healing and reaffirming, exceptional to what the (corporate consumerist media) culture usually tells us about ourselves and our neighbors.
it was such a relief from art that can be so punishing, even violent towards the viewer.
for me, there was something much more alive and contemporary about that simple video installation than the huge anselm kiefer retrospective that was going on downstairs at the same time (sfmoma).
but moments like that are rare, precious, and often overlooked by those applying traditional criteria to valuing contemporary art. and to create that kind of work does require an uncommon awareness that intellectualism cannot access.
the problem with the osho words is their generality, which risks simplistic recklessness in a way that often accompanies fundamentalism.
it's important to note that osho admits to not knowing much about modern art, but at the same time is clear about not being open to it, not wanting to know about it.
to me, that's not the approach of an enlightened mind. that's just plain aversion, a form of ignorance, displayed in blanket judgment of the entirety of modern art. again, that kind of closed-minded judgment recalls fundamentalist thought.
if you read that linked article by steve winn about what art does to consciousness, there's a part about that big rothko painting at sfmoma. i've stood before it and had a similar reaction.
it's anything but vomiting or ugliness or psychotic or wrong. This and the Phil Collins piece are but two examples, and I'm sure you can come up with others.
Osho might refer to these as rare examples among a greater ugliness that is modern art, but I'd argue that throughout history, great examples of art have always been rare and special, and that the culture and mind of today are not so different than any other time of the past, when we look critically at the reality of human existence over the ages.
The sexual repression, anger, hatred and violence that he refers to are all products of human ignorance that have been with us throughout time. We are fooling ourselves to believe that art and the human condition were less ugly prior to modernism.
to me, premodern art of the past that censored the reality of, or even celebrated, the structures of dominance hidden behind the apparent naturalness of social relations, during times of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, caste systems, and so forth, is no less ugly than wafaa's, and far more revolting in their politics, however visually beautiful they may appear.
indeed, the thing that Osho seems to be missing is the value of modern or contemporary culture over that of the past: that now there is room for honesty in representation as well as beauty, that now plurality and multiplicity are valued and accepted, that now there is room for all kinds of art, and not just one fascistic Kantian notion of what counts as beauty.
Post a Comment