Beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder. True beauty is objective, and everyone can and should strive to achieve it.
On Sunday, I visited the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. I’m a sucker for historical architecture and aesthetics, so this visit was, in a figurative sense, heaven for me.
I was absolutely flabbergasted by what I saw. A vast crypt featuring prayer rooms in the style of the secret early churches of antiquity, sculptures of saints etched into the foundations of the structure, single-room shrines to the Virgin Mary as depicted by every nation, and best of all, a grand cathedral coated in endless Roman-style iconography. It is truly a testament to art.
Immediately after, I headed to the American Art Museum to examine its presidential portrait collection. As expected, such figures as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln preserved the Western tradition of elegantly detailed Renaissance-style depictions, filled with symbolism and historical allegories.
I was caught off guard by John F. Kennedy’s 1963 painting, however, which was described as having an “abstract expressionist style.” Using fewer details and irregular brush strokes, it certainly was a radical departure from the norm. A few more bizarre depictions appeared, such as Bill Clinton’s 2006 painting, which was described as a “puzzle-like abstraction.”
I continued on to other exhibits in the museum, upon which I noticed something disappointing: As the artworks progressed into the 20th and then 21st century, they generally got increasingly uglier. Several exhibits were mangled clumps of garbage or wreckless globs of paint.
This did not grow out of a vacuum. Art reflects culture. As Western culture has decayed and become more relative, so has its art. Art is no longer made to reflect reality and true beauty. Everything is now abstract and expressionistic. Therefore, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even if it is literal trash.
Progressive thought is to blame for the destruction of traditional art. The Left treats tradition as outdated and offensive. Traditional art is representative of that. Therefore, it, like beauty, should be discouraged, demonized, and destroyed.
The favorite pastime of unemployed activists is to ruin art. For the sake of the planet, environmental protesters threw tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Palestinian terrorism supporters defaced Arthur Balfour’s portrait for his “bloodshed of the Palestinian people.” Statues of Christopher Columbus are lucky not to be vandalized with messages like, “Destroy all monuments of genocide and kill all colonizers,” on Columbus Day.
Leftists have devolved to such a point that they even oppose natural beauty standards. They accuse fit and healthy people of “thin privilege,” which means they have an inherently “insidious hatred of fatness and people in higher-weight bodies.”
Eating well is also racist because apparently “foods are classified as healthy not just because of what they are but also because of what they represent and who they have been historically produced and consumed by.” For all the talk of body positivity, they strongly detest healthy lifestyles.
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It would be one thing if progressive artists could at least replace traditional art with quality, but they generally cannot. As perfectly exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, contemporary art is (sometimes literal) piss.
We should stop pretending that relativistic art is the evolution of the craft and return to what has worked since the Ancient Greeks: objective beauty.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner Winter Fellow.