[tern]

I'm curious how your theory of art deals with minimalism and conceptual art. I suspect you'd have to admit that mid-century we collectively expanded the definition of beauty to include modern ideas – structure, process – and expressions of irony.

[hodwic]

As for irony, ask any art historian with experience in middle ages or late antiquity art. She'll tell you that it has always been a popular device in the arts.

The problem with "irony", where this common myth about its novelty comes from, is that Irony is invisible to generations separated by time and place.

To see irony in a work of antiquity requires a significant amount of education in the circumstances of that work. Irony never lies of the surface of a work. If enough time passes, our appreciation of that irony will often be lost.

How much irony is hidden there in the vase paintings of ancient Greece which we will never recognize, having not the context to see it? Irony, a Greek term, coined by Aristotle, passed on by the Romans, and more recently popularized in the 1500's by the French -- yet could we recognize Irony in any of their works without help?

If the average art critic finds no instances of irony in the art of the past they could be excused for that, their job isn't art history. Those are separate professions.

Where art critics do deserve blame however is when they've been shown countless examples of irony in the works of antiquity, and they act as if those instances are all unique anomalies. If they continue to bandy about the story of irony's novelty to defend the valuations of the works of their contemporaries, that's not fair play.

That's Art Criticism made Marketing, and it's an ugly but extremely common thing.

[tern]

Many thanks for the explanation – you've illuminated a path to a deeper understanding of art history and aesthetics, which I hope one day to possess!

[hodwic]

Before I was just discussing the Aesthetician’s Orthodox.

But here, I’ll answer for myself:

As far as minimalist art, there has been something called “design” which has been considered beautiful since long before modern artists began their war against representationalism.

Beautiful abstract design was the standard throughout all of the areas conquered by Islam, with the arabesques, as well as extremely popular across both Italic Europe and Northern Europe (with the mixture of Celtic Art and Roman giving rise to 10-Century Romanesque).

Abstraction has been highly prized in Europe for thousands of years, just search google images for "Romanesque capital". The Romanesque Capitals are just as abstract and surreal as anything created in the 20th Century, and this lineage of minimalism had at no point died.

Further, the cubists and so on, for their part, were mostly just copying African tribal art. The central thesis that minimalism was New was not historically accurate.

Conceptual art, for its part, used to just be called “Action”, and some actions were considered meaningful and others not so meaningful. Particularly meaningful Actions have always been considered beautiful, profound, transcendental, etc. The figure Jesus is immortalized in the story that he, who said himself God, washed the feet of a prostitute with his hair. You don’t get more conceptual art than that.

The war in the early 20th century was NOT whether design and action had meaning or value or beauty, that has been well established since the beginning of human civilization. In fact, most of civilization would have said that Action has always been more intrinsically valued than Art since it effects something tangible, and certainly Design was through most of civilization more prized.

The war in the early 20th century was over whether CALLING your designs or actions by the designation Big-A Art transmuted them into another stuff and imbued them with intrinsic value that they didn’t already have. I’m not at all convinced that the modernists have won that argument. That line of thinking has always been profoundly refused by the general public, and as time goes on, their central thesis appears to be in decline in popularity with critics, art historians, and theorists.

The irony is that the 20th century modernist’s claims at novelty and intrinsic value all required that one totally ignore the history and value of folk art and design, artful action, and so on, throughout human history and across human cultures. If one takes a more open-minded view of art and art history, the modernist’s claims at originality are laughable at best.