Why are Art and Architecture So Ugly?

When truth becomes relative, truth dies and takes beauty with it

This photo is a real fountain in Vienna, Austria, which was a town where Mozart once performed. Gustav Klimt (“The Kiss”) was a Viennese artist who worked in a saner era (see below). Vienna was once a city of culture and beauty.

The weird fountain was a project that was commissioned by the city of Vienna and taxpayers picked up the tab. The city took tax money to purchase “public art.” It seems like a joke, except it isn’t. This fountain is being inflicted on the citizens of Vienna, who do not deserve such punishment.

Why is everything so ugly now? Not just this fountain—our architecture is ugly. Art is ugly. When is the last time you heard of a great novel or a really ground-breaking film? So much modern music is annoying. A bunch of neo-musicians are making opera into a form of auditory torture. Why are there no new art forms? What happened to serious poetry? Why is twerking more popular than ballet? Why do so many performers perform either naked or in Satanic postures or both? What has happened?

The uglification of American (and also Western culture) has clear and discernible roots. It started with something called “relativism,” which is a sort of philosophy wrapped in a grift wrapped in a lack of critical thinking, which maintains that people all have their own perspective and all perspectives are equally valid.

I do buy into the first half of this idea, namely that everyone has his or her own perspective and the right to an opinion. But not all opinions are equally valid. In politics, for example, some people have well-reasoned ideas, some people just parrot the latest talking point they heard on Morning Joe. Some people have researched specific issues, like COVID and the vaccine, other people just say whatever they heard somebody else say. But the notion that every individual opinion is equally valid goes beyond preferences, such as vanilla or chocolate, coffee or tea… it extends to ideas. Take the Southern border of the United States. Some people like it the way it is, others want to implement changes. Different opinions. If you arrive at your ideas through facts, discussion, consideration, and evidence, it is helpful. If you just go with “the feels,” then you’re not a serious person. But in our current world, both of those approaches produce opinions which are treated as equally valid.

This is the reason that thinking people find contemporary political discourse so maddening. When people reach intellectual decisions on anything from politics to art to religion to social systems, some people look at facts, other people just scream their emotions. If you imagine a large mixed group of such individuals having a conversation, you have a pretty good grasp of social media today.

For instance, take climate change. Everybody is entitled to have an opinion, but some views hold greater validity and intellectual strength than others. A Swedish high-school dropout screaming into a microphone at rich guys in Davos (Greta Thunberg) is not nearly as convincing or weighty to me as a highly educated reporter who has analyzed the facts and data from multiple sources, distilled them, and found them wanting (Michael Schellenberger). But whether you’re on Team Thunberg or Team Schellenberger has more to do with whether you are a relativist (all opinions are equally valid so I go with the person I think is cooler) or sane (some opinions are better reasoned than others).

Recently, some opinions have become more equal than others, namely scary things that demand radical globalist solutions get right of way over more mundane issues. For example, climate change gets more hype than school choice, although school choice has more real-world impact on the lives of everyday people. But school choice isn’t scary (well, unless you’re in the Teacher’s Union), and climate change could demand a worldwide lockdown and globalist world control or else we’ll all die, apparently of a one-degree change in temperature. Climate changes used to be a prime example of the “my truth” world of emotion over intellect.

That ended. Climate change carries all the alarmist cachet right now of Y2K. Been there, done that, wasn’t real. So we need a new bigger fatter scarier global crisis to cause all of us to run headlong into the arms of the globalists. That is now artificial intelligence (AI) with a touch of space aliens. I’m still not sure who will win: UFOs or AI. The narrative always says: people, be afraid; time is running out; we have to DO SOMETHING; you have to give up all control and money to the elitists who will rescue you!! There is no other hope!!! But the way out is never made clear except with weird stuff like vaccine identification cards (I thought voter ID was racist? Vaccine ID isn’t?) or central bank digital currency. And taxes, of course, much more taxation. And I guarantee it’s going to be us little people paying the price, not the elitist overlords. So the people who are trying to scare us are the ones who promise to help us… Any fool could see through that agenda in a world where facts mattered. That’s why part 1 of our global takedown is to make sure facts don’t matter.

I once heard Dan Bongino talk about some zombie movie. I don’t watch zombie movies but he said in this particular movie, the movie characters ran into a prison for the sake of safety. What would make a person voluntarily go to prison? Fear. These people had been whipped into a hysterical panic over zombies, and prison seemed better than being eaten by zombies. Same principle. But fear has a tough time when it collides with truth, so the elitists needed to kneecap truth.

It’s why wealthy overlords could take private jets to Davos to recommend that we serfs give up our automobiles. They don’t even care about the blatant hypocrisy, that’s how much their “power” has gone to their heads. Their business isn’t saving the world; it’s scaring us into neo-feudalism.

Part of this nosedive into relativism is moral relativism. This is the idea that all moral standards are equal. So if one guy’s morality allows for, say, minor attraction (formerly known as pedophilia), then that’s perfectly fine and valid and the same level as a person who is attracted only to adults of the opposite sex. Drugs, sexuality, criminality, all of these things are moral issues but everyone is allowed to have a unique view and all views are valid. If I think adultery is acceptable, then it is.

Why do we allow rampant shoplifting even in our upscale iconic stores? Because the people shoplifting think shoplifting is morally acceptable and their views are just as valid as the views of people who do not think shoplifting is moral.

It’s why abortion has been amped up to an issue about “women’s rights” and no one wants to discuss selling body parts or how they dismember a living baby in the womb to extract it. Some people think abortion is moral, even good, and that’s just as valid as any other opinion.

From this has emerged the strange concept of “my truth” as opposed to “your truth.” Leftists are fine with the notion that I may “possess” a truth that is not the same as your truth. This is absurd.

Nobody owns truth; truth is truth, the same way light is light and gravity is gravity. You can’t say “my gravity is better than your gravity.” But with truth, we’ve decided that we can not only own it, but we can call something “our truth” that is not really a universal truth. In other words, in the bizarro universe of modern Western culture, my truth can be diametrically opposed to your truth, but both of us are right.

Truth is universal. It has to be. Personal truth is not truth at all, it’s opinion. And some opinions are good and some are stupid. But our new world view, held largely by liberals, progressives, and people who think they are smarter than the rest of us, is that truth is individual, personal, maybe even private. In this worldview, truth can change, morph, grow, and contradict itself. Some woman’s truth may be that she is a wolf. So she howls at the moon and we are told to honor her truth. Some 60-year-old man may hold that his truth is that he’s a five-year-old girl trapped in the body of a 60-year-old man. In this brave new world, it’s all valid. All equal. All true.

This brings us to art. If everyone has a private and unique truth, then everyone has a private and unique sense of beauty. The poet John Keats once said that beauty is truth and truth beauty. If you have personal truth, you have a personal sense of beauty. And all opinions are equal. If I think a blank canvas is beautiful, it is. If I declare that fingerpainting is more beautiful than Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, then it is. Just because my idea of beauty is not the same as Da Vinci’s, does not mean Da Vinci is better.

That is why we have Philip Glass operas and Jackson Pollack paintings and ugly buildings in our cities. It’s why we have dopey fountains in Vienna. When we have billions of individuals, we have billions of separate truths and billions of standards of beauty.

It means I can spit on a rag and call it art. I can paint a canvas black and declare it art. I can record my cat snoring and say it’s music.

This has been going on for decades; it took years for the world to get this ugly. Back in the 1980s, I went to an art exhibit where the artist arranged about 20 large granite blocks in more or less of a circle. I knew some of the museum people—the “exhibit” was difficult to install because it was so heavy and they had to spend money reinforcing the flooring to keep the “installation” (that’s what they call stupid art) from ruining the building. The stones were not cut or in any way altered; they were just little boulders, maybe 80 to 100 pound each, like the kind you’d find on a mountain trail. And they were arranged haphazardly. I went to the opening of this joke of an art show and the artist got roaring drunk to the point that the museum people had to take him somewhere to stop him from falling down in the gallery or vomiting on the patrons. But, in retrospect, if the culmination of your life’s work was a bunch of rocks in a museum in Dallas, maybe you’d get drunk, too.

Art is now anything, and if art is anything, then art is nothing. To the modern way of thinking (which liberals almost all adhere to), beauty and truth can be anything, therefore they are now nothing. That’s why a Dallas museum paid money to lug a bunch of rocks into the museum and call it art. I think some guy even “reviewed” the exhibit in a newspaper.

And that’s more or less what happened to art and architecture.

Back when little Leonardo was a boy roaming around the town of Vinci, you couldn’t just be an artist by declaring it (that’s another thing, nowadays you’re an artist or a writer or a musician when you say you are—there are no licenses or exams or requirements). Back then, you had to train as an apprentice which meant you had to find an established artist with a studio and sufficient business and connections to support your education. He would train you for free, but he also used you for free labor. Apprentices would sweep the floor, run errands, clean the brushes, and when they amassed a little skill would do minor touches on commissioned paintings. They had to struggle to stand out in a competitive environment (big studios often had lots of apprentices) until they got their own commissions. This is how Leonardo Da Vinci made his bones. It’s the way all artists of a greater era learned their craft.

Their art was measured against universal standards. It’s hard to call it objective, but people knew what good painting was and what bad painting was. They knew if a guy painted a cherub if he had talent or not and if the cherub was good art or bad art. Art had goals—it was not random lines on paper. It was to represent something and, in so doing, to arouse an emotional and/or intellectual response. This is hard work, which was rigorously judged in the olden days. Even the massively talented Leonard Da Vinci spent years in apprenticeship.

Today, you don’t need to train. It’s why Hunter Biden is an “artist” although he’s had no formal training at all and only started painting a few years ago. He’s good because he says he’s good, and it’s his standard. It’s his art, his truth.

In this atmosphere, anything goes. It’s why our architecture is ugly, our movies are boring sermons on the pride agenda, we have no decent modern operas, and no one has written a “great American novel” in the last 50 years. And where have the poets gone? We have no poetry.

Truth is hard. Truth has to be earned and learned. Truth has to be evaluated, weighed, considered. Sometimes truth requires digging, sometimes truth forces changes to the way you live or how you think about other things. Nothing can hurt your feelings like a good splash of hard truth. Truth is not easy. To honest souls, truth is recognizable. We have managed, under our communist-inspired would-be world governments, to find a way to live in a world where there is no truth. There is so much truth, truth is now meaningless.

And you need truth to produce beauty. Da Vinci was a great painter (he did not think so, but history says otherwise) because he struggled with it. He learned. He practiced. He messed around—check out his notebooks. He sketched or painted the same things once, twice, ten times. He thought about his art, thought about mysterious things like perspective and the “vanishing point.” He considered balance and composition. He sometimes painted historical subjects, which requires some historical knowledge. I’m thinking here of John the Baptist in particular. Nobody knows what John the Baptist looked like, so Da Vinci painted a visual portrait of a man he knew only historically. Interesting exercise. Look at the painting, and you can see it is good. I am not sure that this is what John the Baptist looked like—in fact, I picture the prophet quite differently—but this is still a masterpiece of art work. It is beautiful. And it poses some questions, like what is going on with that smile?

Of course, this is a lost exercise on many liberals who do not know who John the Baptist was in the first place. When truth goes, so does history. It is why we are removing our statues—getting rid of both history and beauty at the same time. And when religious imagery finds its way into modern art and music, those images are usually blasphemed. When all truths are equal, blasphemy is elevated to religion.

Today, people smear paint on canvas and if they say it’s art, it’s art. It is kind of like gender, you are what you say you are, not what is objectively true. In fact, I do not think a city like Vienna could have an ugly fountain like they do if they had not bought into the idea that men can become women and vice versa.

I await the day when we return to beauty, but to do that we have to return to truth, and to do that, we have to return to God. Without God, there is no truth and without truth, no beauty is possible.