AYN RAND wrote in the ROMANIC MANAFESTO that “art is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.”

Ayn Rand never wrote a great deal about the specific art form that is of my interest-—namely painting. She has given plentiful examples of the culture’s current state by citing numerous examples in the field of her specialization—-literature. And it's all dead-on.

But given the above quote, let’s take a look into the visual art field to demonstrate, further, her penetrating and pin-point analysis of modern culture as a "culture barometer." Objectivists know the philosophic climate of the culture, so there's no need to cover that here, so let's confine the this post to its effects on the visual arts:

The art of painting is one of the greatest traditions in all of human history. It is coming under a relentless assault that started more than one hundred years ago. The accumulated knowledge of over 2500 hundred years, spanning from Ancient Greece to the early Renaissance and through to the extraordinary pinnacles of artistic achievement in the High Renaissance, the 17th century Dutch, and the great 19th century Academics of Europe and America--is on its death bed.

These classic traditions, just as they were reaching their pinnacle, seemingly unstoppable—hit the 19th century at full stride, and then fell off into an abyss, devolving ever downwards into a distorted, contrived notion of “freedom of expression.” Every shred of order and standards, with which it was possible to identify, understand and to create great paintings and sculpture was degraded, detested, desecrated and eviscerated. The backbone of the painters' craft, namely DRAWING--was thrown into the trash along with modeling, perspective, recognizable objects or elements from the real world. The ability to capture, exhibit, and poetically express subjects and themes about mankind and the human condition became compost material. The ability to paint representational was branded as banal, mawkish, photographic, illustration, or petty sentimentality.

Serious art students, who are going to supposedly to the finest universities in the world, are being taught by professors with Bachelors or Arts, Masters of Arts, Masters of Fine Arts, Masters of Art Education and even Doctoral degrees, are being subjected to methodical brain-washing and taught to deny the evidence of their own senses. And they have instilled this on an esoteric theoretical paradigm. And all the artists that painted recognizable scenes with depth and illusion had to be discredited. They were discredited with a virulence and vituperation so scathing and merciless that one would think they must have been messengers of the devil himself to deserve such abuse. And to put the final nail in their coffins, all of their art was banished and their names and accomplishments written right out of history.

No student in a school with this kind of dictatorial brain-washing will ever risk exploring or even listening to opposing views, for fear of being stigmatized with some ugly label. Sadly, a very effective deterrent to independent thought. Thus the visual experience of well-drawn representational elements is perceived as a negative.

If we are to accomplish things of true merit and excellence, we must germinate and nurture great masters in this millennium. We must uphold the old masters because they mastered the techniques of the past, built upon them and then opened them up to an avalanche of new subject matter and Enlightenment ideals, that they accomplished the greatest half-century of painting in art history. The abyss that I mentioned, in which art is falling, is still plunging downward---and at some point—-unless reversed—--will eventually hit rock bottom.

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post-note: Take a look at the world’s greatest painter’s work. Google these names: William Bouguereau, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, Frederick Lord Leighton, Ernst Louis Meissonnier, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Frank Dicksee, Jules Joseph Tissot, John William Godward...and many more.

These world-class masterpieces by some of history's greatest painters were willfully written out of history by modernist ideologues.

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