Creepy Art, Melancholic Art, Dreadful Art…
There’s an increasing popularity in these sinister paintings. On YouTube,
some of the most popular videos on art have creepy art as a subject, on my own channel,
my most viewed videos are the ones depicting the darkest paintings…
And don’t get me started on the amount of people that want me
to cover Zdzisław Beksiński. One day I’ll make that video… maybe…
I’ve always wanted to know why these art subjects are so popular today,
especially online. The answer I found requires us to explore the very origin of art,
the purpose of art and, finally, the conditions of our modern lives.
This video is brought to you by my patrons over
on Patreon.com/thecanvas. And don’t forget to catch the stream after this video. Thank you!
You all know cave paintings. There’s a lot to say about them,
but, to stay on the topic of this video, I want to look specifically at their purpose.
The purpose of this prehistoric art is up to debate and probably always will be. We simply
don’t know why people 40,000 years ago made them. However, there are some pretty compelling
arguments to support the fact that these had a religious or, at least, a spiritual function.
Either it be shamanistic, depicting visions or communicating with spirits,
or related to beliefs of fruitful hunts, these paintings could have had a religious purpose.
And if we pick these theoretically religious paintings as a point of departure to look at
the broader purpose of art in the following millennia and centuries, we might be able
to find a pattern. In his essay The Meaning of Art, Herbert Read makes this conclusion:
“It would seem, therefore, that the artist, to achieve greatness,
must in some way appeal to a community-feeling. Hitherto the highest form of community-feeling
has been religious: it is for those who deny the necessary connection between religion
and art to discover some equivalent form of community-feeling which will, in the long run,
ensure a historic continuity for the art that is not religious.”
Read makes us realize, and we already know this, the strong connection between
religion and art. It’s not only that art might have started with religion,
it’s that, historically, art has been made with religious purposes.
Prehistoric Art, Egyptian Art, Greek and Roman Art, Medieval Art,
Renaissance Art, Baroque Art, Islamic Art…
Whether it be mythological, spiritual or religious,
these subjects seem deeply and almost inherent to the concept of art.
But Read disagrees with this assumption. In the quote I mentioned, he says religion
has been used through art to appeal to a community-feeling, religion being the
highest form of community-feeling we know. It’s up to us, people who don’t believe in
the necessity of religion in art, to find an equivalent form of community-feeling.
Art has often been connected to a broader community, a kind of art that touched a
sensitive thread that linked all of us together. Historically, this sensitive thread was religion.
Of course, you’d still have genre paintings and portraits of the upper class,
but religious paintings were the ultimate form of art, the one that spoke to everyone,
that made everyone relate to one-other through a shared religious experience.
This, perhaps, is an essential purpose of art.
However, as religion lost its power, art still appealed to the community-feeling.
Herbert Read , in 1931, says that we need to find an "equivalent form
of community-feeling” to religion, but I’d argue that it had been found a long time ago.
The 1789 French Revolution came with a dechristianization campaign. Art
from the first French Revolution, and other French revolutions, didn’t hold
religious principles. What tied everyone together, or at least the revolutionaries,
was the revolution. Their combined struggle in applying the ideas of the enlightenment in
governance was the unifying factor, was what tied everyone to this art, was that community-feeling.
Other forms of community-feeling emerged throughout the centuries
and these not only tied people together, but tied them to art.
Think of many historical paintings, or paintings that linked members of a nation together through
the depiction of their common nation. Nationalism can be another community-feeling that will tie
everyone in a specific group to art. Though religious art and revolutionary art has a
harder time to create community-feeling today, art resonating through nationalism,
though it’s not that popular with contemporary artists, still resonates. Many Polish people
still comment on my video on Stanczyk and many Americans still admire Washington Crossing the
Delaware (though, if you’ve seen my video on it, you know it’s a German painting).
But then came modern art.
Modern Art, at least for the purposes of my argument, is an art that,
instead of seeking community-feeling, turned in on itself. It focused, not on creating or
contributing to social cohesion through the depiction of commonly held values or feelings,
but it focused on itself by looking at its own materiality, its own status, its own expression.
This does not mean, by the way, that modern art can’t contribute or invoke community-feeling. The
antifascist painting Guernica by Picasso, the anti-imperial art of Guayasamin, the
anarchism of the pointillists and the fascistic leanings of the futurists are good examples.
However, partly due to the advent of photography,
a lot of modern art hinged on exploring new ways of depicting the world,
new ways of expressing yourself as an artist and this led, ultimately, to abstract art.
Abstract art is the best example of art turning in on itself, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing by
the way. The subject becomes the colour depicted in a painting, the process of painting, the
relationship colours have together in a painting. In a nutshell, art in itself becomes the subject.
The ultimate example of that is an artwork I keep coming back to because it’s one of
my favorites: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The famous urinal was a commentary on what makes
an object art and how recontextualizing and conceptualizing an object can make it art.
This is the epitome of art taking itself as a subject, of art questioning art, of art on art.
And as I said, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it is, in a way, an “equivalent
form of community-feeling”. But what community exactly? Well, I’d argue the art community.
The philosophy of, say, Fountain was deeply important and made for one of my favorite
works of art, but how often can you present an object and question if it’s art or not? When will
taping a banana on a wall stop sparking engaging conversations and just alienate people from art?
The art world is a snake eating its own tail, to use an image I used in
my video on Art for Art’s Sake, and it has kept turning in on itself to point where,
I believe, it doesn’t have anything to chew on anymore.
Of course, many artists have transcended this question and have transcended art
looking at or questioning art, and there’s now a plurality of artists treating a wide
variety of subjects without belonging to a bigger or broader movement. But,
as lone artists, can they communicate, cultivate or create on their own this community-feeling?
And this brings us to today’s creepy art.
Perhaps, one of the reasons why a lot of art today doesn’t fulfill the role of community-feeling is
because there is no broader community to speak of. Speaking to the art community
can be beneficial to artists, but that’s run its course. Religion isn’t a thread linking
everyone anymore. Nationalism can still work mostly with the right-wing segments of nations,
but with globalism, the internet connecting us to people from around the world and making us
realize that we might share more in common with someone on a different continent than we do with
our own neighbour, this makes art depicting a common nation or a common history less appealing.
Revolutions can be good foundations for making art that would appeal to
the public and materialize the link they share, but that’s neither here or there.
Fukuyama’s End of History, our so-called post-ideological system,
the hyper-individualism which robs us from a community outside of work has
killed the very possibility for art to create a material statement of our community-feeling.
Smaller communities can do it, but more broadly, as humans, or at least as a collectivity,
there’s nothing to celebrate, nothing to aspire to, nothing to underline through art.
This lack of community-feeling which, to Read, seemed essential to art, has been replaced for
individual experiences or feelings of different artists. In such an alienating world we might
find ourselves, as viewers, gravitating around individual experiences which we might connect to.
That brings us closer to a community-feeling in a way. Not around shared values, history or beliefs,
but around shared experiences and angst, an angst provoked by the lack of community-feeling.
Creepy, sinister or dark art is what many people today,
at the very least on the internet, gravitate towards.
I, at first, didn’t find any appeal in creepy art because I thought it was just a cheap and
easy way of getting interest in viewers without saying anything of much substance. But I think
its popularity might stem from the fact that it’s not saying anything, it’s pure angst, it’s dread,
the kind of thing many of you, perhaps, who, just by clicking on this video, might also feel.
It might not be saying anything, but it might just materialize something that many of us can’t
really identify at all. It’s just a feeling, a void, and many of us don’t know how to share it.
Words may be useless in this case, but images may work. They may not understand the roots
of our angst, it may not help us get rid of it, that might be up to words and actions,
but identifying it and communicating it, that might be a task for the artist.
If you want to explore more about this subject, Amor Sciendi made a video
titled the End of Art which I absolutely recommend. Thank you so much for watching,
thank you for liking and subscribing if you have already and I’d like to thank Roman Brandel,
Mike Wex and every other patron for supporting the
channel. If you also want to support the channel, check out patreon.com/thecanvas.