So, if I understand this correctly, you don't like deconstructivism. As for the other pieces you cite, such as Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow, I see no reason to call it art except for a lesson was taught in a history of art class in college. Mondrian did it and that makes him an artist. Briefly, here is the lesson as presented in the form of a short film shown in a basement classroom: A man, I'll call him Bob, lived in a house on a lake shore with a dock that started some distance back from the water and extended out, meaning he could stand on the dock and look down at his beach. In the film, Bob got a sheet of plywood and put it on the shore. He then took random cans of paint, presumably left over from house renovations, and from the dock poured and splattered the paints in completely random fashion on the plywood. Once it was dry, he cut it up into smaller rectangles and framed it to be sold as art. Here it comes. The question was posed thusly; if anyone could do it, was Bob an artist? The professor said the answer was yes -- not because of the final product, but because he did it and that made him an artist when others either never thought of it or did but never did it. I have the ability to draw straight lines and fill in spaces using different colors, but I don't do it. On that basis, Mondrian is an artist and I am not. If being an artist is, instead, determined by the output, then who's to say? It is entirely subjective and if you get the "right" people to endorse you, you're an artist. Alternatively, you are an artist for being creative just, possibly, an unknown one even if just as talented as the famous ones.
Where does all this go? I think for a walk. It's a nice afternoon.
Hi Josh, Good to hear from you. If I understand you correctly, your musings are along the lines of What is Art? My essay is along the lines of What is Beautiful? Have a great walk. Mine and my wife's walks around Manhattan 20 years ago are one of our strongest holiday memories.
What is art? What is beautiful? I think what came across is some overlap of the two, that you don't see deconstructivism as art as you do other architecture you deem beautiful. Can art be ugly? Can the ugly be art? Were the examples you cited as art beautiful or were they art because the establishment has certified them as art? In discussions of art, I suspect the questions will always outnumber the answers, if by answers we mean points of common agreement.
Late to the game here. What I take from it is that deconstructivism is not just ugly but ostentatious. It is dicking about with form for the sake of it, to demonstrate they can, and to emphasize they are more sophisticated than those from the past.
I think the difference between them and your own example of a non-artist becoming an artists because of output is the architects of the examples listed were probably quite capable of producing something less horrible but chose not to.
I am not an architect, but a literary equivalent would be using big words to impress a reader or intentionally rearranging the chapters of a novel to make it unnecessarily difficult to make sense of.
No, I make no such claim. I know that I am fortunate to have some ability, but I don't think that makes me a writer or it means we are all writers. Similarly, I don't think of myself as an artist, just a woodworker having fun in my shop.
If you write with any amount of frequency, you are indeed a writer. But you may not be an author. An author is writer who has been paid for his/her writing. In the art world, there is no additional term for an artist who can sell art. If you make art, you are an artist, they say, in a similar vein that someone who writes is a writer. But what is an artist who actually makes money selling art? Still artist. Perhaps we say “successful artist” versus “starving artist” for the amateur, but I think this lack of distinction is part of what makes the art world so bizarre. Bad writers tend to not get published, yet bad artists someone become the most successful artists. Perhaps it’s because any one who makes someone like your imaginary Bob can market himself as an “artist” whereas writers tend to get more traction once they can officially market themselves as published authors.
Just a thought.
Also, I think intention matters. I don’t like artists who seem to have the sole intention of shocking their audience or pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. To me, that’s not what art (or architecture) should be about. However, if there is some intention to try a new technique of painting, for example, or work with a new medium in a new way, I can accept the somewhat bizarre outcome as “art.” I actually like some abstract art and even some deconstructist architecture, but certainly not all of it. For abstract art, there is a certain beauty in the chaos, but it’s very difficult to find that line and not cross over to simply ugly. I find a lot of subpar abstract trusts that cross this line regularly and seem to ruin the idea of good abstract art for everyone. For some of the deconstruction in architecture, I appreciate that late least those buildings are interesting to look at, rather than the straight concrete boxes of many earlier “modern” architecture. Those are just plain boring.
IMO what is art comes down to teleology. Art brings out the good, true, and beautiful in some way. If the ‘artist’ says this is supposed to “challenge your notions” or “resist capitalism” or some other nonsense, they are proclaiming that what they did was create something other than art. I remember in music school having debates about Jackson Pollack and Ornette Coleman with my friends along similar lines but I had never heard of teleology back then.
It is been said that art is an expression of worldview. If one believes in beauty and purpose, divine or otherwise, one is likely to pursue that in his art. If one believes that the world is random and without meaning, her art will follow.
In either case, it seems telling that by deconstructing something beautiful, a building or a human, the deconstrctionist finds something ugly. Why? Perhaps it comes from within the artist.
Yes, unfortunately, some human beings are compelled to live or work in or merely be exposed to the inner ugliness of these particular artists. There are limits to how free we can be of the perceived toxicity of such architecture. No one is compelled to participate in the ugly manifestations of any other form of art, literature, painting, music, etc. We don't have to care about their worldview if we don't feel the same way. The question pertains to the *duty* of the architect as one who imposes his / her vision on an unwilling public. I don't feel at all offended aesthetically when I encounter an ugly painting because I am capable of respecting the differing tastes of others. But I do when I see a particularly ugly building, I feel my environment has been degraded in some way. And I do not think it works the other way. Can a 'deconstructionist' honestly say their environment has been aesthetically 'degraded' by such as Chartres Cathedral? I doubt it.
Some of what I see reminds me of the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" Those who are inclined to go along 'see' what they are told is there. Those who trust their own direct observations, know he's naked. Today that fable is expressed as 'Mass Formation Hypnosis'.
The history of Art and Culture in the modern age is the story of a palace coup orchestrated by the eunuchs in a harem, the eunuchs being "theorists" and "critics" who replaced beauty, craft, and rigor with subjective verbiage and pseudoradical onanistic nonsense, where the artist, the viewer and the work are supplanted by whatever social and political theories can be added like handles for easier carrying (and where the incentives somehow always magically align w the personal and career needs of the theorist class).
Once Art could be anything it became nothing, and once being an artist didn't involve talent, skill, technique etc it meant anyone could be an "artist", which explains such 21st-century masterpieces as the guy who canned his own shit or the many female "artists" who consider exposing their breasts and genitals "art".
Once Art became about theories, interpretations, social and political positioning, once every artwork came with a long explanation larded w jargon, its inevitable end was to be another luxury good or academic franchise where a priesthood of theorists play their status games while pretending it's all about "Progress" "inclusion" "Equality" or whatever else is the trendy lie du jour.
Our theorist class are the termites of civilization, chewing to pieces and getting fat by destroying all they could never create.
Theorist Class...I like that phrase. (On a parallel track) there's another verbiage termite heap: The Training Class....I wince every time I hear on 'The News' how someone in the people/caring professions failed to perform their duties with basic common sense or basic humanity because they hadn't been given enough 'training'.
I think of the theorist class as taxidermists of the beautiful or as insects who can only digest something after they vomit their foul sterile jargon onto it. If I had a nickel for every art show or "installation" I've had to endure that was 10% creativity and 90% stale sociology...
And as for the training class aka the Controllers, it's an article of their faith that there is no human or human issue that couldn't be solved or saved by re-education (Ted Bundy just needed to learn about empathy!) or by a team of social workers parachuting down to start an emergency healing circle.
Post-Christians are in so many ways much more Christian (and religious) than their ancestors.
You will find this same aesthetic maneuver occurring in many different areas where such considerations matter. For example, fashion has, for decades now, moved in the direction of deconstruction and "challenging traditional notions of beauty". Perhaps this attitude prevails so widely today because it requires less of a student in the field; much harder to build than to tear down, and so they're offered an anemic artistic perspective that is suitable for mass producing undergraduates.
Buildings that look like they are ruined, crumbling or about to fall down make people depressed and agitated. The pictures above of those horrific buildings…the architects must hate us all.
Dec 24, 2023·edited Dec 24, 2023Liked by Graham Cunningham
Hey, there! I'm 17 years old. I've decided I'll be a self-indulgent dick and tell you a brief story about myself:
When I was eight or so, my mother took me on a historic home tour in our community. The reason? Because I had been begging her for weeks. We toured lots of houses, some far better restored than others. On the last stop of the tour, we met an architect. I had never met an architect before - he was tall and very imposing. Naturally, being a self-indulgent dick, I wanted to impress the man, and so I started telling him everything I loved about 19th-century Second Empire architecture. Partway through the spiel, my mother put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Give him a chance to talk."
He smiled at her and said I obviously knew more about the Second Empire style than 90% of architecture students.
So, that's my story. Arrogant or what? I obviously want you to know what an architectural genius I am. But that's enough of that... at least for now.
Your article is... shockingly on-point. It hits the metaphorical peg directly into the metaphorical hole when others hit it a metaphorical mile away. I once penned an article very similar to yours - only it dealt specifically with the most abhorrent kind of deconstructivism. Rather than tackling new construction, (terrible in its own right) it examined deconstructivist renovations.
Now, I know a lot about Classical and Gothic design. I've read Palladio's the Four Books of Architecture... at least most of it. Why am I telling you this? Because I'm a self-indulgent dick... remember?
No. Actually I'm telling you this to illustrate a point: that even someone like me - who, at the age of 17 arguably knows more about Classical design than 90% of American architects - would never dare remodel a building of historic significance. Is that telling you something? I sincerely hope it is. I hope it's telling you that these so-called "visionaries" who decide to put a glass-and-steel spire on top of Notre Dame for no reason other than to make a political statement are ultimately and unequivocally unqualified.
While new construction is bad enough, I think our real battle to pick is with that kind of individual - the kind who can't tell a Corinthian column from a Composite one and yet has the ego to "modernize" a historic structure with trendy (and likely irreversible) design features.
All this is to say that Deconstructivism - and really, any form of "modernism" - is a complete and utter scam. But then, you already knew that - in fact, it was the whole subject of this post! So, what does this prove?
Thank you for this.... I do think you are a little hard on yourself. Will you be going to architecture school? I guess you'll have to, even though I suspect you will come up hard against the modernist groupthink that dominates there. I hope you will take a look at some of the other essays on my Substack and see if they strike a chord too.
Are you familiar with Ted Gioia's substack, The Honest Broker? He just released an excerpt from his book about the shamanic, transformative roots of music that I read immediately before this, and the parallels were striking (highbrow literary Theory-based architecture that disregards what came before vs. the spoken music approach that lives in tradition)
Lots in there that's interesting - I can't remember how I found it, lots of it's the sort of stuff that I wouldn't have thought would appeal to me but it's really worth a read. The chapter on 'were the first laws sung?' would match this model really well, I think.
I can't remember the exact post but that would be his sort of thing. I'm interested though - I'd object to (what I think is) your view that if art is subjective it isn't important. 2 arguments I'll keep as brief as possible:
1. Video ergo sum - we perceive and are affected by art subjectively. Not necessarily individually (the reactions of those around us are important), but to the extent that art can have objective merit, the perception of that merit is an inherently subjective process because there has to be a subject to do the perceiving.
2. If there's no subjectivity to what makes good art, that suggests that the production of great or even perfect art is just a matter of insufficient resources. Take AI as an example - will we get to a point at which the ultimate artwork, containing all the good and only the good of every other artwork that's ever been produced, has finally emerged after uncounted trillions of probabilistic derivations? Or could it be that the perfect artwork already been produced, and we just don't have the objectivity needed to discern that fact?
Interested to know your thoughts. For my part I'm happy with a theory of art in which an artwork bears the same relationship to the transcendent as a finger to the moon it points at.
Not at all, and you should put more effort into your thoughts (and the the typing that you do). 'There must be objectivity or else we collapse into the swamp of relativism and degeneracy' is a fragile argument - who decides whether or not objectivity is achieved? You neglect WILL.
I object to vile pseudy crap because it's bad, aesthetically and morally. I can say that because I have good judgement, not because I read some sperg's book about what is and isn't good art. The standard by which I judge is as close as I can get to objective; my judgements are entirely subjective because they are my response to the art or 'art' set in front of me.
An interesting discussion this. It seems to me that you and Tom are not so far apart on this as appears - more a different way of formulating essentially similar thoughts.
I would like to add that when you engage with my essays on STB to this extent (as you have with others in the past) you should, in fairness, seriously consider taking a free subscription. Particularly given the very large number of other Substacks you subscribe to.
Reminds me of what Edward Abbey said about Geodesic domes another libtard fad, that not only were they ugly and clashed with the landscape, but that they all leaked due to the number of unnecessary roof seams. This looks to be more of the same and much less structurally sound and wasteful of materials to boot.
The bombed-out cities of Ukraine feature some excellent examples of the deconstruction fad mentioned in this essay. Perhaps the celebrity architects could go there have a look at the cut-price competition.
We are all constantly being punished by this, and were for most of the 20th century as well. I self-medicate by looking Palladio's drawings every time I am disturbed by seeing something by Frank Gehry and his ilk.
Thanks for subscribing. I don't knock utilitarian cost-effectiveness! Which bit of my essay are you picking up on here? My essay is all about knocking pointlessly non-utilitarian and hugely profligate, non-cost-effective 'Starchitect' vanity projects....as illustrated. Your comment perplexes me somewhat?
I agree (or at least don't disagree) on your criticism of wacky non-utilitarian vanity projects.
I was (perhaps unfairly) picking out a very small part of your essay: "What he was getting at was this: very few people can look at a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral and not think it beautiful, graceful, elegant. These buildings have a near universal visceral, visual aesthetic appeal. You don’t need any words or arguments to prove that to them. Most people’s visceral reaction to concrete tower blocks on the other hand is aesthetically negative. They need a lot of sophistry and argumentation to persuade them of the putative benefits – rational construction, economic land use, integration with needs of the motor car etc."
This passage reminded me of the "reactionaries" (as I'd call them) like Cultural Tutor on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/culturaltutor), who hates everything modern (not just the wacky stuff, he hates everything), and loves ornate Victorian kitsch, and thinks there must be something wrong with us if we don't love it too, cost be damned. This isn't quite your argument, of course.
Ah, I see and thanks for clarifying. The great post-war fad for clearing existing housing stock and replacing it with tower blocks was not really about cost-effectiveness (although it pretended to be). It was really about the hubristic grand utopian 'visions' of an up-itself intelligentsia ('Le Corsubier' and his legions of architect-groupies). If I were to pick out one bit from my essay it would be this one: The following quote (1934) by English architect Reginald Blomfield, gets - in my view - right to the essence of all this “literature and the written word established a disastrous domination.... which constantly missed the mark, because most of its aims were irrelevant to the art of architecture”.
My Substack is - more than any other thing - about calling out the antics of a lefty intelligentsia. It has been chiselling away at our Western civilisation for near-on 100 years now - entrenched in academia and so not noticed by ordinary folk until the damage was far advanced....As in our current Woke madness (of which 'Deconstructivism is part and parcel).
"The great post-war fad for clearing existing housing stock and replacing it with tower blocks was not really about cost-effectiveness (although it pretended to be)."
That may well be, I'm not an expert on any of this. I'm a liberal economist and policy guy and that's the lens I look at everything through, but I do wonder if the deliberate casting away of old forms is (perhaps in part) reflective of a desire to cast away the politics and attitudes that came with that. (and I likewise wonder if this hankering for old stuff is partly an expression of the desire for the politics and values that went with those times, even if there is no necessary connection between the two... ie: you can be a bleeding heart 21st century liberal and still like Vermeer).
I did like your question though: "If nobody told you Picasso was great, would you think this was great?"
So, if I understand this correctly, you don't like deconstructivism. As for the other pieces you cite, such as Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow, I see no reason to call it art except for a lesson was taught in a history of art class in college. Mondrian did it and that makes him an artist. Briefly, here is the lesson as presented in the form of a short film shown in a basement classroom: A man, I'll call him Bob, lived in a house on a lake shore with a dock that started some distance back from the water and extended out, meaning he could stand on the dock and look down at his beach. In the film, Bob got a sheet of plywood and put it on the shore. He then took random cans of paint, presumably left over from house renovations, and from the dock poured and splattered the paints in completely random fashion on the plywood. Once it was dry, he cut it up into smaller rectangles and framed it to be sold as art. Here it comes. The question was posed thusly; if anyone could do it, was Bob an artist? The professor said the answer was yes -- not because of the final product, but because he did it and that made him an artist when others either never thought of it or did but never did it. I have the ability to draw straight lines and fill in spaces using different colors, but I don't do it. On that basis, Mondrian is an artist and I am not. If being an artist is, instead, determined by the output, then who's to say? It is entirely subjective and if you get the "right" people to endorse you, you're an artist. Alternatively, you are an artist for being creative just, possibly, an unknown one even if just as talented as the famous ones.
Where does all this go? I think for a walk. It's a nice afternoon.
Hi Josh, Good to hear from you. If I understand you correctly, your musings are along the lines of What is Art? My essay is along the lines of What is Beautiful? Have a great walk. Mine and my wife's walks around Manhattan 20 years ago are one of our strongest holiday memories.
What is art? What is beautiful? I think what came across is some overlap of the two, that you don't see deconstructivism as art as you do other architecture you deem beautiful. Can art be ugly? Can the ugly be art? Were the examples you cited as art beautiful or were they art because the establishment has certified them as art? In discussions of art, I suspect the questions will always outnumber the answers, if by answers we mean points of common agreement.
I don't know where to go with these questions to be honest. I feel that my essay says what it has to say pretty clearly; I can't do better.
I did not intend to suggest you needed to better, just voicing my own thoughts. I do not expect anyone to answer such questions.
Late to the game here. What I take from it is that deconstructivism is not just ugly but ostentatious. It is dicking about with form for the sake of it, to demonstrate they can, and to emphasize they are more sophisticated than those from the past.
I think the difference between them and your own example of a non-artist becoming an artists because of output is the architects of the examples listed were probably quite capable of producing something less horrible but chose not to.
I am not an architect, but a literary equivalent would be using big words to impress a reader or intentionally rearranging the chapters of a novel to make it unnecessarily difficult to make sense of.
Here's a question. Did that long paragraph make me a writer?
You already said you were....I remember.
No, I make no such claim. I know that I am fortunate to have some ability, but I don't think that makes me a writer or it means we are all writers. Similarly, I don't think of myself as an artist, just a woodworker having fun in my shop.
Super late to this party, but…
If you write with any amount of frequency, you are indeed a writer. But you may not be an author. An author is writer who has been paid for his/her writing. In the art world, there is no additional term for an artist who can sell art. If you make art, you are an artist, they say, in a similar vein that someone who writes is a writer. But what is an artist who actually makes money selling art? Still artist. Perhaps we say “successful artist” versus “starving artist” for the amateur, but I think this lack of distinction is part of what makes the art world so bizarre. Bad writers tend to not get published, yet bad artists someone become the most successful artists. Perhaps it’s because any one who makes someone like your imaginary Bob can market himself as an “artist” whereas writers tend to get more traction once they can officially market themselves as published authors.
Just a thought.
Also, I think intention matters. I don’t like artists who seem to have the sole intention of shocking their audience or pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. To me, that’s not what art (or architecture) should be about. However, if there is some intention to try a new technique of painting, for example, or work with a new medium in a new way, I can accept the somewhat bizarre outcome as “art.” I actually like some abstract art and even some deconstructist architecture, but certainly not all of it. For abstract art, there is a certain beauty in the chaos, but it’s very difficult to find that line and not cross over to simply ugly. I find a lot of subpar abstract trusts that cross this line regularly and seem to ruin the idea of good abstract art for everyone. For some of the deconstruction in architecture, I appreciate that late least those buildings are interesting to look at, rather than the straight concrete boxes of many earlier “modern” architecture. Those are just plain boring.
IMO what is art comes down to teleology. Art brings out the good, true, and beautiful in some way. If the ‘artist’ says this is supposed to “challenge your notions” or “resist capitalism” or some other nonsense, they are proclaiming that what they did was create something other than art. I remember in music school having debates about Jackson Pollack and Ornette Coleman with my friends along similar lines but I had never heard of teleology back then.
It is been said that art is an expression of worldview. If one believes in beauty and purpose, divine or otherwise, one is likely to pursue that in his art. If one believes that the world is random and without meaning, her art will follow.
In either case, it seems telling that by deconstructing something beautiful, a building or a human, the deconstrctionist finds something ugly. Why? Perhaps it comes from within the artist.
Yes, unfortunately, some human beings are compelled to live or work in or merely be exposed to the inner ugliness of these particular artists. There are limits to how free we can be of the perceived toxicity of such architecture. No one is compelled to participate in the ugly manifestations of any other form of art, literature, painting, music, etc. We don't have to care about their worldview if we don't feel the same way. The question pertains to the *duty* of the architect as one who imposes his / her vision on an unwilling public. I don't feel at all offended aesthetically when I encounter an ugly painting because I am capable of respecting the differing tastes of others. But I do when I see a particularly ugly building, I feel my environment has been degraded in some way. And I do not think it works the other way. Can a 'deconstructionist' honestly say their environment has been aesthetically 'degraded' by such as Chartres Cathedral? I doubt it.
Some of what I see reminds me of the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" Those who are inclined to go along 'see' what they are told is there. Those who trust their own direct observations, know he's naked. Today that fable is expressed as 'Mass Formation Hypnosis'.
The history of Art and Culture in the modern age is the story of a palace coup orchestrated by the eunuchs in a harem, the eunuchs being "theorists" and "critics" who replaced beauty, craft, and rigor with subjective verbiage and pseudoradical onanistic nonsense, where the artist, the viewer and the work are supplanted by whatever social and political theories can be added like handles for easier carrying (and where the incentives somehow always magically align w the personal and career needs of the theorist class).
Once Art could be anything it became nothing, and once being an artist didn't involve talent, skill, technique etc it meant anyone could be an "artist", which explains such 21st-century masterpieces as the guy who canned his own shit or the many female "artists" who consider exposing their breasts and genitals "art".
Once Art became about theories, interpretations, social and political positioning, once every artwork came with a long explanation larded w jargon, its inevitable end was to be another luxury good or academic franchise where a priesthood of theorists play their status games while pretending it's all about "Progress" "inclusion" "Equality" or whatever else is the trendy lie du jour.
Our theorist class are the termites of civilization, chewing to pieces and getting fat by destroying all they could never create.
Theorist Class...I like that phrase. (On a parallel track) there's another verbiage termite heap: The Training Class....I wince every time I hear on 'The News' how someone in the people/caring professions failed to perform their duties with basic common sense or basic humanity because they hadn't been given enough 'training'.
I think of the theorist class as taxidermists of the beautiful or as insects who can only digest something after they vomit their foul sterile jargon onto it. If I had a nickel for every art show or "installation" I've had to endure that was 10% creativity and 90% stale sociology...
And as for the training class aka the Controllers, it's an article of their faith that there is no human or human issue that couldn't be solved or saved by re-education (Ted Bundy just needed to learn about empathy!) or by a team of social workers parachuting down to start an emergency healing circle.
Post-Christians are in so many ways much more Christian (and religious) than their ancestors.
You will find this same aesthetic maneuver occurring in many different areas where such considerations matter. For example, fashion has, for decades now, moved in the direction of deconstruction and "challenging traditional notions of beauty". Perhaps this attitude prevails so widely today because it requires less of a student in the field; much harder to build than to tear down, and so they're offered an anemic artistic perspective that is suitable for mass producing undergraduates.
Buildings that look like they are ruined, crumbling or about to fall down make people depressed and agitated. The pictures above of those horrific buildings…the architects must hate us all.
It’s Hate
In Art Form
Fear and Loathing something something
In all honesty modernity has become consumed and defined by hate, they are hatred and malice incarnate.
Hey, there! I'm 17 years old. I've decided I'll be a self-indulgent dick and tell you a brief story about myself:
When I was eight or so, my mother took me on a historic home tour in our community. The reason? Because I had been begging her for weeks. We toured lots of houses, some far better restored than others. On the last stop of the tour, we met an architect. I had never met an architect before - he was tall and very imposing. Naturally, being a self-indulgent dick, I wanted to impress the man, and so I started telling him everything I loved about 19th-century Second Empire architecture. Partway through the spiel, my mother put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Give him a chance to talk."
He smiled at her and said I obviously knew more about the Second Empire style than 90% of architecture students.
So, that's my story. Arrogant or what? I obviously want you to know what an architectural genius I am. But that's enough of that... at least for now.
Your article is... shockingly on-point. It hits the metaphorical peg directly into the metaphorical hole when others hit it a metaphorical mile away. I once penned an article very similar to yours - only it dealt specifically with the most abhorrent kind of deconstructivism. Rather than tackling new construction, (terrible in its own right) it examined deconstructivist renovations.
Now, I know a lot about Classical and Gothic design. I've read Palladio's the Four Books of Architecture... at least most of it. Why am I telling you this? Because I'm a self-indulgent dick... remember?
No. Actually I'm telling you this to illustrate a point: that even someone like me - who, at the age of 17 arguably knows more about Classical design than 90% of American architects - would never dare remodel a building of historic significance. Is that telling you something? I sincerely hope it is. I hope it's telling you that these so-called "visionaries" who decide to put a glass-and-steel spire on top of Notre Dame for no reason other than to make a political statement are ultimately and unequivocally unqualified.
While new construction is bad enough, I think our real battle to pick is with that kind of individual - the kind who can't tell a Corinthian column from a Composite one and yet has the ego to "modernize" a historic structure with trendy (and likely irreversible) design features.
All this is to say that Deconstructivism - and really, any form of "modernism" - is a complete and utter scam. But then, you already knew that - in fact, it was the whole subject of this post! So, what does this prove?
That I'm a self-indulgent dick.
Thank you for this.... I do think you are a little hard on yourself. Will you be going to architecture school? I guess you'll have to, even though I suspect you will come up hard against the modernist groupthink that dominates there. I hope you will take a look at some of the other essays on my Substack and see if they strike a chord too.
Are you familiar with Ted Gioia's substack, The Honest Broker? He just released an excerpt from his book about the shamanic, transformative roots of music that I read immediately before this, and the parallels were striking (highbrow literary Theory-based architecture that disregards what came before vs. the spoken music approach that lives in tradition)
I haven't but your point about the parallels with music is a very good one I think.
Lots in there that's interesting - I can't remember how I found it, lots of it's the sort of stuff that I wouldn't have thought would appeal to me but it's really worth a read. The chapter on 'were the first laws sung?' would match this model really well, I think.
Also, *frozen music, duh.
> Are you familiar with Ted Gioia's substack, The Honest Broker?
Yes, he recently wrote a peace on the importance and power of art; unfortunately, he undermined his own project by accepting the subjectivity of art.
I can't remember the exact post but that would be his sort of thing. I'm interested though - I'd object to (what I think is) your view that if art is subjective it isn't important. 2 arguments I'll keep as brief as possible:
1. Video ergo sum - we perceive and are affected by art subjectively. Not necessarily individually (the reactions of those around us are important), but to the extent that art can have objective merit, the perception of that merit is an inherently subjective process because there has to be a subject to do the perceiving.
2. If there's no subjectivity to what makes good art, that suggests that the production of great or even perfect art is just a matter of insufficient resources. Take AI as an example - will we get to a point at which the ultimate artwork, containing all the good and only the good of every other artwork that's ever been produced, has finally emerged after uncounted trillions of probabilistic derivations? Or could it be that the perfect artwork already been produced, and we just don't have the objectivity needed to discern that fact?
Interested to know your thoughts. For my part I'm happy with a theory of art in which an artwork bears the same relationship to the transcendent as a finger to the moon it points at.
> I'd object to (what I think is) your view that if art is subjective it isn't important.
If art isn't objective than the only grounds you have to object the the various deconstructivist monstrosities is that you personally don't like them.
Not at all, and you should put more effort into your thoughts (and the the typing that you do). 'There must be objectivity or else we collapse into the swamp of relativism and degeneracy' is a fragile argument - who decides whether or not objectivity is achieved? You neglect WILL.
I object to vile pseudy crap because it's bad, aesthetically and morally. I can say that because I have good judgement, not because I read some sperg's book about what is and isn't good art. The standard by which I judge is as close as I can get to objective; my judgements are entirely subjective because they are my response to the art or 'art' set in front of me.
> You neglect WILL.
Whose will? I'm sure the architects of those monstrosities willed them to be like that.
> I object to vile pseudy crap because it's bad, aesthetically and morally.
So you admit there is such a thing as aesthetic goodness and badness.
An interesting discussion this. It seems to me that you and Tom are not so far apart on this as appears - more a different way of formulating essentially similar thoughts.
I would like to add that when you engage with my essays on STB to this extent (as you have with others in the past) you should, in fairness, seriously consider taking a free subscription. Particularly given the very large number of other Substacks you subscribe to.
Reminds me of what Edward Abbey said about Geodesic domes another libtard fad, that not only were they ugly and clashed with the landscape, but that they all leaked due to the number of unnecessary roof seams. This looks to be more of the same and much less structurally sound and wasteful of materials to boot.
The emperor’s new clothes comes mind.
The bombed-out cities of Ukraine feature some excellent examples of the deconstruction fad mentioned in this essay. Perhaps the celebrity architects could go there have a look at the cut-price competition.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Durkheim had it right with "anomie" and "alienation".
We are all constantly being punished by this, and were for most of the 20th century as well. I self-medicate by looking Palladio's drawings every time I am disturbed by seeing something by Frank Gehry and his ilk.
I wouldn't be so quick to knock utilitarian cost-effectiveness. We can't all afford to live in Gothic cathedrals.
Thanks for subscribing. I don't knock utilitarian cost-effectiveness! Which bit of my essay are you picking up on here? My essay is all about knocking pointlessly non-utilitarian and hugely profligate, non-cost-effective 'Starchitect' vanity projects....as illustrated. Your comment perplexes me somewhat?
I agree (or at least don't disagree) on your criticism of wacky non-utilitarian vanity projects.
I was (perhaps unfairly) picking out a very small part of your essay: "What he was getting at was this: very few people can look at a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral and not think it beautiful, graceful, elegant. These buildings have a near universal visceral, visual aesthetic appeal. You don’t need any words or arguments to prove that to them. Most people’s visceral reaction to concrete tower blocks on the other hand is aesthetically negative. They need a lot of sophistry and argumentation to persuade them of the putative benefits – rational construction, economic land use, integration with needs of the motor car etc."
This passage reminded me of the "reactionaries" (as I'd call them) like Cultural Tutor on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/culturaltutor), who hates everything modern (not just the wacky stuff, he hates everything), and loves ornate Victorian kitsch, and thinks there must be something wrong with us if we don't love it too, cost be damned. This isn't quite your argument, of course.
Ah, I see and thanks for clarifying. The great post-war fad for clearing existing housing stock and replacing it with tower blocks was not really about cost-effectiveness (although it pretended to be). It was really about the hubristic grand utopian 'visions' of an up-itself intelligentsia ('Le Corsubier' and his legions of architect-groupies). If I were to pick out one bit from my essay it would be this one: The following quote (1934) by English architect Reginald Blomfield, gets - in my view - right to the essence of all this “literature and the written word established a disastrous domination.... which constantly missed the mark, because most of its aims were irrelevant to the art of architecture”.
My Substack is - more than any other thing - about calling out the antics of a lefty intelligentsia. It has been chiselling away at our Western civilisation for near-on 100 years now - entrenched in academia and so not noticed by ordinary folk until the damage was far advanced....As in our current Woke madness (of which 'Deconstructivism is part and parcel).
"The great post-war fad for clearing existing housing stock and replacing it with tower blocks was not really about cost-effectiveness (although it pretended to be)."
That may well be, I'm not an expert on any of this. I'm a liberal economist and policy guy and that's the lens I look at everything through, but I do wonder if the deliberate casting away of old forms is (perhaps in part) reflective of a desire to cast away the politics and attitudes that came with that. (and I likewise wonder if this hankering for old stuff is partly an expression of the desire for the politics and values that went with those times, even if there is no necessary connection between the two... ie: you can be a bleeding heart 21st century liberal and still like Vermeer).
I did like your question though: "If nobody told you Picasso was great, would you think this was great?"
I rarely see modern art that is anything but annoying—presumably I am meant to feel annoyed?