Whatever Happened To Pretty Pictures?
Whatever Happened To Pretty Pictures?
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, January 07, 1987
AN elderly aunt — until recently an avid art enthusiast — has given up on the new art altogether. Having cancelled her subscriptions to glossy art periodicals, she now views current exhibitions with a great deal of suspicion and not a little disgust. "Much of art today is worse than the tabloids," she likes to say whenever I am within earshot. "It's enough to make you lose faith in the young!"
An observation well made, it is, even more importantly, an increasingly popular viewpoint. A lot of new art just isn't what it used to be.
For instance, whatever happened to pretty pictures? What have they done to those meditative still-lifes, giddy pastoral scenes and inspirational parables? What has become of harmony and balance? And what of sanity and aesthetics? Why must it become more and more difficult to live with art, or even to appreciate it? Why does so much art today celebrate the bizarre, the ludicrous, the unattractive?
It seems less appropriate for one to actually answer these questions than to readdress them within the context of contemporary art's radical change of focus. Whereas classical art was a deliberate transcription of an idealized concept of reality — an intoxicating elixir more aspirational than documentary — much of art today attempts to probe the darkest recesses of the human mind, the banality of human existence, and the deprivation to which man is heir by virtue of his paradise lost.
Far from a whimsical shift in attitudes, today's art is as firmly rooted in contemporary thought as classic art was rooted in the thinking of its day. An almost perverse introspection — mercilessly critical and frighteningly pessimistic — rules the post-Freudian nuclear age. The change in behavioural norms likewise favors the primal impulse, undoubtedly the wellspring of most recent art founded on urgency and compulsion. Where once the view was turned outward with heroic intent, our skeptical gaze plumbs our hidden fears, and spurred on by a manic fascination with morbidity, guilt and self-destruction. The classical man reveled in what he could become; the contemporary man fears not only what has become of him, but also what is yet in store.
The theatre of the mind is a mime of sweltering energy that is the source of all art. Emotion, experience, spirit are distilled into a swirling mystic reservoir that shapes our creative manifestations. That we recognize this fact is essential to an appreciation of recent artistic trends.
Certainly, it would be incorrect to think that any one view of our objective reality is the embodiment of truth itself. We do not all share the same aspirations, the same neuroses. But the view of art is ever-broadening, as it must be and this at least is a reaffirmation of man's godliness. The true, the good and the beautiful takes many forms, and each is but a facet of the whole.
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Whatever Happened to Pretty Pictures?” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, January 07, 1987
