The aesthetic vacuum

Art moves me, and contemporary art moves me to tears when I think of the hundreds of years of glorious, moving work tossed aside in favor of ugly monstrosities with neither beauty nor power.\nI pondered this during break while visiting one of my back-home haunts, the Art Institute of Chicago, where the paintings are arranged historically so that the viewer can see Western art improve, flourish and then suddenly descend to a level below Paleolithic cave paintings.\nPerhaps I don't understand modern art, as pretentious readers might think. To them, I say I understand modern art perfectly. It is best summarized by the poet John Ciardi when he said, "Modern art is what happens when artists stop looking at women and start looking for meaning."\nModern art is about interpretation, not visual pleasure. The passing "connoisseur" who has never met the artist and can never possibly know the feeling behind the work must see an emotion in every splotch of paint, ink or excrement.\n"Why is one red square a work of art worth $100,000, while another red square, indistinguishable from the first, (is) just a red square?" asked the author and critic Roger Kimball in a Jan. 12 interview with Mens News Daily. \nWhat sort of emotion can be put into a red square? What was the artist "feeling?" Pain? Was he bleeding?\nSuch reaching for interpretations reminds me of an amusing story from one of my high school teachers. In college, he had to do a contemporary artwork for a final project. An hour before it was due, he entered the woodshop, threw random scraps of wood down and fastened them where they fell. In class, he made up what his "artwork" represented. He received the highest grade in the class.\nIt appears that any idiot (sorry, Mr. Howe) can throw together complete nonsense without any technique, talent or meaning whatsoever and have it praised.\nAnd what if the value of contemporary art comes from my own interpretation, not the artist's, as is the postmodern way of dealing with things?\nWhen I look at a painting, I don't want to muse about what each brushstroke means. I want to feast my eyes upon its beauty and have it inspire me. I don't want to think, only to be moved. \nI think too much already. I'm a chemistry major -- I spend a good deal of my time interpreting Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy printouts that look, for all the world, like modern art themselves.\nWhen I experience a painting, or any other artwork, I want it to remove me from reality and present me with a more beautiful, more perfect world. The world we live in is hard and cruel. Contemporary art only focuses harder on its cruelty and ugliness, for that is what it does by having us interpret it in the context of our own lives.\nWhat began a century and a half ago with the impressionists was a quest for a new way of depicting objects. The quest for novelty eventually spun so out of control that the only way to achieve true novelty is to shock and offend the viewer. And even then, shock, offense and bewilderment are anything but novelties in the art world. Contemporary art is and has been stale.\nSo why does it flourish? Its pretense makes it attractive to those with money who wish to appear "deep" and trendy. And the artist is a charlatan who can attribute any meaning he wants to make the sale.\nI know I'm not alone in this opinion. If this is how people truly feel, then nothing can stop us from reclaiming the lost heritage of visual beauty that the old masters captured.