Interesting or Ugly? The State of Western Art

Interesting and Innovative or Confusing and Ugly?

This article has been translated from the original in Hebrew and features original artwork from the author.

Art is often seen as a sign of a thriving country. Almost everyone believes that art is important and should, of course, remain important. But if you invite them to an exhibition, how many would actually come? Even more so, if you ask when they last experienced art, how many would answer with something other than “on a trip organized by school/college/youth group/army”? 

This touches on something fundamental. If the importance of art is universally agreed on, why does nobody want to engage with it? My answer is simple: the “art” in the idea of its importance and what is considered art today are two very different things.

In its original sense, art is the attempt to create or document beauty. Beauty is not something practical we can justify logically, but it is something that people desperately need. Often, the importance of art is placed above the more practical needs of life, which explains why it remains crucial. Any artistic field seeks beauty in a particular aspect of life – music is a search for harmonious sound, visual art seeks visual beauty, and literature is the search for beauty in language.

Beauty is the Sublime Above Reality 

People consume beauty for the same reason they turn to religion. Beauty shows us that the world is not just a random sequence of events, but there is harmony in it. For example, the collection of water molecules in the air and light is not just a weather phenomenon – it is a breathtaking rainbow. And despite having seen thousands of them, we still stop what we are doing to look, even for a moment.

Because religion is, above all, the story of forces greater than reality that govern it, art was created to serve that purpose. What better way to convince people that life is not a random series of suffering than to show how harmony can emerge from the seemingly random components of the world?

Even after the Enlightenment and the distancing of Western culture from religion, art continued to focus on beauty. For example, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich does not include any religious symbols, but still portrays the individual standing before the sublime, existing in a complex but harmonious pattern above the simplicity of regular life.

What about Art Today? 

Unfortunately, in the 20th century, a movement emerged that overtook art: Postmodernism. This philosophy argues that everything in the world is relative, and there is no such thing as absolute truth. Beauty, therefore, is arbitrary, with a value equivalent to plainness or ugliness. Postmodern artists embraced this view, and so their work primarily revolved around shattering the traditional concept of beauty and replacing it with ugliness and meaninglessness – not because they want to expand the idea of beauty, but because they disdain it. They want to erase it from the world and from people’s hearts, much like their attitude toward religion. Artists are often drawn to innovative ideas because of their personality, and since art has been focused on beauty for over 4,000 years, inverting its focus to ugliness was the most “innovative” move possible, though not necessarily good or beneficial for art as a whole.

After World War II, Western nations decided to invest government money in culture, but what expertise did they have to allocate these funds? They therefore appointed famous artists to decide how to distribute the money, and since Postmodernism was the dominant artistic trend, all the appointed figures were Postmodernists. They made sure that the only artists who would enter the world of “high art”—or, as it should be called, “subsidized art”—were those who aligned with their ideology.

As a result, “art” became everything that belittles, uglifies, trivializes, and condemns the values that were once accepted by consensus. This is why films that mock Israel are considered successful by the “artistic” crowd. Israel, as a Jewish nation-state, is supported by the majority of people and aligns with noble values – but must therefore be opposed in this cruel upending of art and morality. Similarly, any work that “challenges” the traditional relationship between a man and a woman without additional participants automatically receives praise. Art today seeks to identify everything that is common and important to human beings and then portray it as bad and oppressive. It is an endless cycle of destroying the good and beautiful while crowning the bad and ugly. This is further visible in the political tendencies of people in this artistic world. They bend over backward to legitimize murderous organizations like Fatah and Hamas, which oppress and kill both Israelis and Palestinians, while undermining the legitimacy of democratic and liberal countries that dare to defend themselves, such as Israel.

Returning to our original question regarding the lack of engagement with modern art. When people say that art is important, what they are referring to is the search for beauty, which still remains significant. The reason people do not go to galleries and art exhibitions is because they know that beauty is the last thing to be found there. Instead, the contents instead are a mockery and disdain for all the values that have brought them and their ancestors to this point – values like the nuclear family, faith, loyalty, duty, and the worst offender in the minds of modern artists, allegiance to one’s country.

M.A.B.A – Make Art Beautiful Again 

If beauty is no longer part of art, where is it? It is instead exactly where it was before the rise of galleries and museums – integrated into our everyday lives. People still consume music in the private sector. Businesses spend money on architects to design beautiful spaces. Illustrators are still hired to design book covers so that people are drawn to them and want to buy them. And, of course, we are surrounded by animation series and video games full of beautiful artwork. People are still willing to pay for beauty, sometimes a lot, and it turns out they are not naive enough to buy into the idea that “ugly is the new beautiful.”

So why do the artists of ugliness continue to dominate the field of art? Because too many ordinary people stay silent. Most people are too polite to publicly say that a work of art is ugly. When a normal person encounters ugly art, they feel two things: firstly, a rejection of the work, and secondly, a sense of shame. They are pressured into feeling ashamed that they must be too narrow-minded as the picture – one clearly created by a genius, given its placement in a prestigious setting – elicits disgust instead of awe and admiration. When asked for their opinion, people feel obligated to say “interesting,” instead of “Yuck.” Most people do not feel comfortable telling the truth about the ugliness of art because they truly think it is their fault that they find it ugly. They believe that if they had studied art, they would have the tools to appreciate it.

They are wrong. The ability to enjoy art is something we all have from birth. It is what allows us to enjoy breathtaking landscapes, good music, and captivating stories. Furthermore, there is a special beauty that taps into this innate beauty – a film that requires an academic degree to enjoy is a bad film. And here is another thing about art studies: even if the studies are conducted well (which is rare), students are either taught how to create art or how to think about it ‘academically’, not how to enjoy it. So please, do not feel guilty if you stand indifferent in front of a chain of goat droppings or a painting of a sexual act with a dog and a leather mask (a small part of what I went through in my own studies). Find the courage and determination to say, without shame: “This is ugly and disgusting. It is not sophisticated, it is not interesting, and it is not even original. It is ugly, and there is no reason anyone should want to look at it.” Speak up, and if enough regular people raise their voices, we can bring beauty back to art.