Few not-modern notes on humanity…

Quite recently I’ve got an inter­est­ing, half-an-hour talk about noth­ing. It hap­pened to be focused on mod­ern art, mod­ern human con­di­tion, place for beauty and ethics within it and, after mak­ing a heroic round in escap­ing its inbuilt vac­uum it came to the point of an incep­tion — to a rather corny remark that “non­sense” seems to be a sur­name of today’s exis­tence. How to make art in the mod­ern chaos and to remain sane? Although Louis Bour­geois wrote in her paint­ing that Art is the war­ranty of san­ity she wrote also I’ve been in Hell and back, and let me tell you — it was won­der­ful. Going to Hell is the con­di­tion of the mod­ern artist, whether s/he comes back and is ready to admit that it was won­der­ful is a quite another, usu­ally very per­sonal story.

Since my part­ner in the above-mentioned chat was far from being an aver­age, junior, intel­li­gent guy who finds “fash­ion­able” to talk post-modern slo­gans (no mat­ter how out of place they are), we’ve man­aged to make a way for some deeper obser­va­tions. Yet every­thing seemed to slip through our fin­gers — any sense, any under­stand­ing of each other. Why is it so dif­fi­cult to com­mu­ni­cate on a level, where any social game must to dis­ap­pear in the pres­ence of truth? Why in the age of gutsy exhi­bi­tion­ism, omnipresent “dis­play” of human “val­ues” we are mute and/or extremely ama­teur­ish when it comes to for­mu­late, under­stand and con­vey basic reflec­tion on our exis­ten­tial con­di­tion? I won­der what was that ancient Greek spoke about, or peo­ple of 18^th cen­tury France, or even con­tem­po­raries of Hem­ing­way, Kafka, Dos­to­jew­ski? Have they been taught the art of com­mu­ni­cat­ing one­self to oth­ers or maybe times they lived in encour­aged it in the most nat­ural fashion?

So we talked about beauty which became some­thing ter­ri­bly old-fashioned, neglected and mis­un­der­stood. After Picasso and the mod­ern rest ridiculed clas­si­cal rules of har­mony and plea­sure it seems to be quite trendy to make art that dis­turbs, wipes out smile and joy; art of dark colours, sad faces and delib­er­ately non­cha­lant in appear­ance. Even if beauty occurs it’s very often acci­den­tal, has noth­ing in com­mon with beliefs and aspi­ra­tions of an artist. Major­ity of work in my col­lege is like that, my own work oscil­lates between “blue” and dark­ness of being alive here and now… What a waste of a pair of healthy hands. Why not to aspire to be the next Cezanne or Canova? Why not to aspire to make the hap­pi­est, the most beau­ti­ful paintings/sculptures ever? Why even these ques­tions sound ridiculously?

It was the eter­nal beauty of art in Paris that grabbed my mind and heart. Who knows — maybe it’s the right time for a new Renais­sanse, for redis­cov­er­ing once again value and sense in our human con­di­tion? That could be even interesting…

Just for the clas­si­cal taste, few shots of The Louvre’s trea­sures I took dur­ing my trip to Paris: