By Selwyn Duke

Today’s topic is definitely one of the more amusing things I’ve treated.   Oh, it’s not fall-down-on-the-floor-and-rupture-yourself funny, but it is deliciously, give-the-phonies-just-enough-rope-to-hang-themselves, smirk-inducing funny.    

I have never considered modern art to be true art and have always known the art world to be populated by delusional poseurs who will ascribe value to anything that runs counter to tradition.  Of course, they simply behave as people with their political leanings will (I think you know what ideology prevails among them).

It’s not that I’m an art aficionado; no, not by any means.  Growing up I was a typical boy, in that drawing and painting weren’t my strong suit; I was more of a builder.  But I can appreciate a beautiful Greek statue or some other striking work.  And my standard for judging art is simple: If I, with my unsteady hands and terrible penmanship can create it, it isn’t art.  Now let’s get to the story.

Freddie Linsky is an artist who recently found himself in some demand.  Although his works look like simple daubs, a collector in Manchester, England, paid 20 pounds for one of them.  Not only that, a gallery in Berlin said that it wanted to showcase his work because it was of a "high standard." 

Here’s the kicker: Freddie is two years old and his "works" are simply splodges that any toddler might make while playing with paint and having fun getting dirty.  Why, some of his creations were rendered in ketchup while he was perched on his high chair.

It seems all this began on a lark when his mother, an art lecturer and critic, billed him at "Saatchi Online" as "an art critic and a familiar face at major exhibitions."

As the piece puts it, she then sang his praises with "ludicrously overblown captions to his offerings."  The article describes the works and Estelle Lovatt’s (the mother’s) characterizations,

One creation of random red and green splodges called Sunrise was
captioned: ‘A bold use of colour. Inspired by the ‘plein air’ habit of
painting by Monet, drawing on the natural world that surrounds us all.’

And his black scrawlings in a work entitled The Best Loved Elephant are captioned:

‘The striking use of oriental calligraphy has the kanji-like characters
stampeding from the page, showing the new ascent of the East. It is one
of Linsky’s most experimental works.’

Freddie is said to favour the ‘spot and blotch’ technique pioneered by
the American abstract expressionism movement in the 1950s.

The young artist is said on Saatchi Online to have ‘dedicated his whole life to art’.

His mother wrote: ‘Freddie W R Linsky paints over and over, making us curious to know what is going on.

It seems that one stroke is being repeated – the same stroke or one
very close to it, hence the possibility of the infinite opening up of
the structure of time.’

If this doesn’t expose the sham that is modern art, I don’t know what does.  These "experts" couldn’t differentiate between the by-products of a two-year-old’s play and bona fide works.  And for good reason.

There essentially is no difference.

I know what some may be thinking, and this may shock you, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  I consider that thinking — and fruits of it such as modern art — to be relativism as applied to art.  In other words, just as with morality, there is no universal and absolute yardstick with which we can measure the quality or validity of an idea or thing.  Assessment of it then becomes purely subjective, a matter of taste, as with ice cream.  Do you prefer chocolate or vanilla?  Murder or valuing life?  The Mona Lisa or a twisted, sado-masochistic image?  All these questions are the same.  What tickles your fancy?

I reject this because whether we’re speaking of morality or art, God is the ultimate beholder.  Just as He has given us a standard for morality, I believe He probably has some ideas about what constitutes beauty.  I think it’s safe to say there would be a big difference between images from Heaven and those disgorged from Hell. 

Also, think about what "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" implies." We might mock the duped art experts here, but if art is all subjective, we must dismiss all art experts.  For, in point of fact, there then can be no such thing as an expert.

You can only deem someone an expert in a field if he has achieved expertise, but that is only possible if expertise exists and can be defined.  And if it is all subjective, if one conception of art is as valid as any other, we cannot then say that one particular conception is superior and thus constitutes "expertise."

It’s much as with mathematics.  We can say that a person can be an expert in the field because we have defined what constitutes correct math.  But if 2+2 could equal 5, 7, 11, 23 or anything else — if there were no "answers" to problems but only opinions — how could we label a person with one set of opinions superior to others?  Perhaps there’s a reason why the words Truth and beauty are often found in close proximity. 

The Truth here is not so beautiful.  Since liberals are completely disconnected from it, they wallow in confusion and dumb-down standards in all aspects of society.  Modern art is simply a by-product of a spiritual disease, one that has given us "situational values," the new math, "creative spelling," and a multitude of other relativistic abominations.  When you cease to believe in Truth, everything is a matter of interpretation.   Then you can’t discern the difference between art and the daubs of a toddler any more than you could that between an unborn baby and an unviable tissue mass.

I could randomly write words on a piece of paper and they would hold as much meaning as modern art.  Of course, you could read meaning into them.  Hey, you could believe there really is a man in the moon, too.

Perhaps a reader who left a response under the article in question said it best.  I’m sure he’s no one famous — he is "Dave" from Warrington — but he certainly is someone wise.  He wrote,

"Art is a method of representing man’s interpretation of his environment
and communicating that interpretation to others. As such, all art has
to be intelligible. It’s freedom of stylization is limited by the
requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible
subject, it ceases to be art."

More proof that, like common sense, the common man is not all that common.  It makes you wonder who the experts really are.