The Banishment of Beauty

by Kevin Alfred Strom

HERE IS AN AMAZING four-part video series (43 minutes total and well worth the time) by the painter Scott Burdick. Don’t be put off by the fact that Burdick goes out of his way — way, way out of his way — to show traditional Western art, some of it his own, that depicts non-Whites. It’s as if he’s saying “see how non-racist I am,” to deflect attention from the fact the the rising Art Underground he depicts is substantially Whiter than rural New Hampshire. He nevertheless masterfully skewers the modern art establishment and their hatred for beauty — and their literal banishment of it from their galleries, museums, and literature. With calm logic he analyzes the common characteristics of the paintings that are sought out by these culture-distorters, and those that they reject.

It isn’t abstract versus representational art — it isn’t nudity, or the human form or its absence — it isn’t fine-grained versus rough materials; none of these determine what is accepted and what is rejected. In the “intellectual” theories (with Jewish / Frankfurt School roots, though Burdick doesn’t say so) that must be internalized by anyone wishing to rise in the modern art world today, it is beauty itself that must be rejected and ugliness or nothingness which must be praised, especially if the artist pays obeisance to the “intellectuals” and their “theories.”