Creepy Art, Melancholic Art, Dreadful Art… There’s an increasing popularity in
these sinister paintings. On YouTube, some of the most popular videos on art have
creepy art as a subject, on my own channel, my most viewed videos are the ones
depicting the darkest paintings… And don’t get me started on the
amount of people that want me to cover Zdzisław Beksiński. One
day I’ll make that video… maybe… I’ve always wanted to know why these
art subjects are so popular today, especially online. The answer I found
requires us to explore the very origin of art, the purpose of art and, finally,
the conditions of our modern lives. This video is brought to you by my patrons over on Patreon.com/thecanvas. And don’t forget to
catch the stream after this video. Thank you! You all know cave paintings.
There’s a lot to say about them, but, to stay on the topic of this video, I
want to look specifically at their purpose. The purpose of this prehistoric art is up to
debate and probably always will be. We simply don’t know why people 40,000 years ago made
them. However, there are some pretty compelling arguments to support the fact that these had a
religious or, at least, a spiritual function. Either it be shamanistic, depicting
visions or communicating with spirits, or related to beliefs of fruitful hunts, these
paintings could have had a religious purpose. And if we pick these theoretically religious
paintings as a point of departure to look at the broader purpose of art in the following
millennia and centuries, we might be able to find a pattern.
In his essay The Meaning
of Art, Herbert Read makes this conclusion: “It would seem, therefore, that
the artist, to achieve greatness, must in some way appeal to a community-feeling.
Hitherto the highest form of community-feeling has been religious: it is for those who deny
the necessary connection between religion and art to discover some equivalent form of
community-feeling which will, in the long run, ensure a historic continuity for
the art that is not religious.” Read makes us realize, and we already
know this, the strong connection between religion and art. It’s not only that
art might have started with religion, it’s that, historically, art has
been made with religious purposes. Prehistoric Art, Egyptian Art,
Greek and Roman Art, Medieval Art, Renaissance Art, Baroque Art, Islamic Art… Whether it be mythological,
spiritual or religious, these subjects seem deeply and almost
inherent to the concept of art. But Read disagrees with this assumption.
In the quote I mentioned, he says religion has been used through art to appeal to
a community-feeling, religion being the highest form of community-feeling we know.
It’s up to us, people who don’t believe in the necessity of religion in art, to find
an equivalent form of community-feeling. Art has often been connected to a broader
community, a kind of art that touched a sensitive thread that linked all of us together.
Historically, this sensitive thread was religion. Of course, you’d still have genre
paintings and portraits of the upper class, but religious paintings were the ultimate
form of art, the one that spoke to everyone, that made everyone relate to one-other
through a shared religious experience. This, perhaps, is an essential purpose of art. However, as religion lost its power, art
still appealed to the community-feeling. Herbert Read , in 1931, says that
we need to find an "equivalent form of community-feeling” to religion, but I’d
argue that it had been found a long time ago. The 1789 French Revolution came with
a dechristianization campaign. Art from the first French Revolution, and
other French revolutions, didn’t hold religious principles. What tied everyone
together, or at least the revolutionaries, was the revolution. Their combined struggle
in applying the ideas of the enlightenment in governance was the unifying factor, was what tied
everyone to this art, was that community-feeling. Other forms of community-feeling
emerged throughout the centuries and these not only tied people
together, but tied them to art. Think of many historical paintings, or paintings
that linked members of a nation together through the depiction of their common nation. Nationalism
can be another community-feeling that will tie everyone in a specific group to art. Though
religious art and revolutionary art has a harder time to create community-feeling
today, art resonating through nationalism, though it’s not that popular with contemporary
artists, still resonates. Many Polish people still comment on my video on Stanczyk and many
Americans still admire Washington Crossing the Delaware (though, if you’ve seen my video
on it, you know it’s a German painting). But then came modern art. Modern Art, at least for the purposes
of my argument, is an art that, instead of seeking community-feeling, turned
in on itself. It focused, not on creating or contributing to social cohesion through the
depiction of commonly held values or feelings, but it focused on itself by looking at its own
materiality, its own status, its own expression. This does not mean, by the way, that modern art
can’t contribute or invoke community-feeling. The antifascist painting Guernica by Picasso,
the anti-imperial art of Guayasamin, the anarchism of the pointillists and the fascistic
leanings of the futurists are good examples. However, partly due to the advent of photography, a lot of modern art hinged on exploring
new ways of depicting the world, new ways of expressing yourself as an artist
and this led, ultimately, to abstract art. Abstract art is the best example of art turning in
on itself, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing by the way. The subject becomes the colour depicted
in a painting, the process of painting, the relationship colours have together in a painting.
In a nutshell, art in itself becomes the subject. The ultimate example of that is an artwork
I keep coming back to because it’s one of my favorites: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The
famous urinal was a commentary on what makes an object art and how recontextualizing and
conceptualizing an object can make it art. This is the epitome of art taking itself as a
subject, of art questioning art, of art on art. And as I said, this isn’t necessarily a bad
thing and it is, in a way, an “equivalent form of community-feeling”. But what community
exactly? Well, I’d argue the art community. The philosophy of, say, Fountain was deeply
important and made for one of my favorite works of art, but how often can you present an
object and question if it’s art or not? When will taping a banana on a wall stop sparking engaging
conversations and just alienate people from art? The art world is a snake eating its
own tail, to use an image I used in my video on Art for Art’s Sake, and it has
kept turning in on itself to point where, I believe, it doesn’t have
anything to chew on anymore. Of course, many artists have transcended
this question and have transcended art looking at or questioning art, and there’s
now a plurality of artists treating a wide variety of subjects without belonging
to a bigger or broader movement. But, as lone artists, can they communicate, cultivate
or create on their own this community-feeling? And this brings us to today’s creepy art. Perhaps, one of the reasons why a lot of art today
doesn’t fulfill the role of community-feeling is because there is no broader community to
speak of. Speaking to the art community can be beneficial to artists, but that’s run
its course. Religion isn’t a thread linking everyone anymore. Nationalism can still work
mostly with the right-wing segments of nations, but with globalism, the internet connecting us
to people from around the world and making us realize that we might share more in common with
someone on a different continent than we do with our own neighbour, this makes art depicting a
common nation or a common history less appealing. Revolutions can be good foundations
for making art that would appeal to the public and materialize the link they
share, but that’s neither here or there. Fukuyama’s End of History, our
so-called post-ideological system, the hyper-individualism which robs us
from a community outside of work has killed the very possibility for art to create
a material statement of our community-feeling. Smaller communities can do it, but more broadly,
as humans, or at least as a collectivity, there’s nothing to celebrate, nothing to
aspire to, nothing to underline through art. This lack of community-feeling which, to Read,
seemed essential to art, has been replaced for individual experiences or feelings of different
artists. In such an alienating world we might find ourselves, as viewers, gravitating around
individual experiences which we might connect to. That brings us closer to a community-feeling in a
way. Not around shared values, history or beliefs, but around shared experiences and angst, an
angst provoked by the lack of community-feeling. Creepy, sinister or dark art
is what many people today, at the very least on the
internet, gravitate towards. I, at first, didn’t find any appeal in creepy
art because I thought it was just a cheap and easy way of getting interest in viewers without
saying anything of much substance. But I think its popularity might stem from the fact that it’s
not saying anything, it’s pure angst, it’s dread, the kind of thing many of you, perhaps, who,
just by clicking on this video, might also feel. It might not be saying anything, but it might
just materialize something that many of us can’t really identify at all. It’s just a feeling, a
void, and many of us don’t know how to share it. Words may be useless in this case, but images
may work. They may not understand the roots of our angst, it may not help us get rid of
it, that might be up to words and actions, but identifying it and communicating
it, that might be a task for the artist. If you want to explore more about this
subject, Amor Sciendi made a video titled the End of Art which I absolutely
recommend. Thank you so much for watching, thank you for liking and subscribing if you have
already and I’d like to thank Roman Brandel, Mike Wex and every other patron for supporting the channel. If you also want to support the
channel, check out patreon.com/thecanvas.
