In the last century, the concept of "progress" was often projected upon the arts equally a measurement of quality: "good art" was "progressive art." If an artist did not commit some "groundbreaking" creative deed, his piece of work was considered worthless. While progress in science is a fundamental notion, in the arts information technology is meaningless because the nature of art has nothing to do with progress. At that place may exist progress in terms of concrete means—like the types of pigment used in paint, which became more stable in the last century, or the relatively cheap paper for musical notation that became available with the advent of the 19th century industrial revolution, or the iron fittings in architecture that allowed builders to vault bigger spaces. The discovery of perspective past Bruneleschi in the 15th century was also something like progress, as was the "sfumato" brushwork adult by Leonardo da Vinci, which gave painters the ways to create a hazy atmosphere on the canvass. But expression, artistic vision, the quality of execution has never been dependent upon the concrete means of an art course: Vermeer has not been superseded in terms of artistic quality by Picasso or Pollock, Bach not by Mahler or Boulez, Michelangelo not past Giacometti or Moore, Palladio not past Gropius or Le Corbusier. And nosotros can appreciate the brilliance of the "primitive" masters of Flanders, who lived before the great surge of 16th century inventions in Italian painting, simply as we can the music of Palestrina, who had no clue of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin simply because he lived in an before time.

Because it addresses itself to our nearly sensitive aesthetic receptivity, the successful work of art—the 1 that achieves artistic greatness—lifts itself from its concrete "torso" and becomes "timeless." Because information technology addresses universal capacities of the homo mind and heart, it "speaks" to usa over distances of time and place. Swell art is aspirational: It represents the best of the man species and it stimulates the development of our inner experience of and reflection upon life. Corking art is a symbol for, a mirror of, and a stimulus to the human being condition. Of course, not all art aspires to that height, but the best works offer something of a focus betoken, an ideal, and an musical instrument of quality assessment. Gifted artists attempt to emulate the great works of both contemporaries and the masters of the by and they try by hard work to get the best out of their talents. The serious and gifted creative person will non look at imperceptible fashions, but will attempt to become at the heart of his art form and volition look for the all-time instruments available to realize his vision. It will be clear that all this has nothing to exercise with the intention to be "progressive" or "modern." The artist is already and always necessarily contemporary, whatever he tries to exercise. Artists who try to be "progressive" or "modern"—i.due east., who endeavour to exist consciously and intentionally "of their time"—betray their superficiality and lack of substance, and they beguile their creative efforts as attempts to comprehend-up an empty infinite.

In the aforementioned fashion, serious artists practice non try to be "conservative" as a conscious attempt to affiliate themselves with groups or movements in the art world for opportunistic reasons. J.South. Bach was considered "conservative" in his own time. Other composers at the time were exploring very different paths afterwards they came to consider the "strict" Baroque style to be outdated. Just Bach, about whom there is no testify that he considered himself to be a conscious "conservative," created new music based upon that style, and he plant many new ways of combining things, filtering them through his own superb musical personality and thereby giving them a fullness of life which, with hindsight, looks similar a last overwhelming sigh of the Baroque menstruation in which all strands that made up its language constitute an apotheosis. (Of class, at the time the term "Baroque" as applied to music did non exist; we utilise information technology hither for convenience's sake.) In comparison with his contemporaries, Bach institute the possibilities he discovered in older styles much more interesting than the new, fashionable, and more naive mode of composing—and rightly so. How could he have known the miraculous synthesis a Mozart or a Beethoven would one day create? Their precursors—Bach'due south contemporaries—were interesting, merely what they were doing was far and away less interesting than what Bach was doing or what Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were going to do.

While the concepts of "progressive" and "bourgeois" take thus no meaning in the arts, it is nonetheless true that the fine art forms adult and were in abiding flux, under the influence of many diverse creative personalities, circumstances, social contexts, and the similar. The current situation in both the visual arts and in (serious) music is not the effect of a linear, "progressive" development in the various art forms, but of the flow of a broad delta that spread its many streams since the stream banks of traditional art gradually lost their more or less stable grade after the demise of the Ancien Régime. The liberation of the bourgeoisie brought with it the liberation of the artists. Patronage was gradually replaced by the market, and in the enthusiasm of costless exploration—ofttimes against the constraints of bourgeois tastes—the arts found their stasis afterward World War II in the diverse forms of modernism. Concept fine art and concept music (atonal music: sonic art) became the established forms of "new art" in the Western world—in Europe supported by the state and the educational institutions, while in America private funding took on the role of Maecenas. And in the 20th century, it has been the myth of "progress" that has propelled these developments, like a air current blowing the many little streams of the delta upon a barren coast of stone and sand where the bounding main of oblivion would wash abroad their products—products that were often just the wreckage of creative failure when viewed from the heights of the achievements of the art of the by. Modernism and conceptualism in the arts (including its watered-down progeny) never strove after creative greatness; this explains the gradual disappearance of greatness from both the visual arts and music.

We can likewise interpret the term "progress" as "innovation." Artists who seem to invent something that has not been before are often considered "greater" than artists who seem to have been content with available materials and styles. But this is a relatively new miracle. In pre-revolutionary times—say the 18th and 17th centuries—there were no discussions nigh "innovation," "progress," "exploration," and the like. They popped-up during the 19th century and got riotous in the 20th. But did those earlier artists not explore and invent? Of course they did, but non intentionally so. Invention and exploration where theresult of their creative efforts, non a conscious goal. They tried to create skilful fine art, and if they had something of a personal signature, they automatically transformed the available materials and styles into something personal. That is why nosotros immediately recognize the personal styles of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Velasquez, and Caravaggio even though they used the same visual "language." Innovation had e'er been a natural role of the artists' craft. They did non need to plow it into a banner or a marketing device. And so not bad fine art is always innovative, but non in the way innovation has pregnant in science: in art, innovation is personal, temporal, and not part of a movement, of a communal enterprise where the boundaries are explored as part of a common endeavour to liberate the arts from dominating restrictions.

The myth of progress and conscious innovation as it raged in the terminal century had the unfortunate effect of giving teeth to the philistines: People in establishment positions used it to make distinctions in terms ofquality which had nothing to do with real artistic quality, resulting in the nonsense of concept art (where an unmade bed well-nigh wins the Turner Prize) and of sonic art (where indigestion noises are dressed-upwards as music). Information technology also had the effect of reinforcing suspicions most art, which all the same adhered to older notions of artistic value and meaning: They were seen as expressions of an elitist and bourgeois civilization attempting to suppress the tastes of the masses, as remnants of undemocratic and unjust times where hierarchical thinking led to authoritarian, arbitrary violence. To many people, the notion of artistic quality became tainted by associations with totalitarian regimes, crime, and injustice—particularly since Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia showed how classical art could exist misused every bit instruments of legitimization past criminal governments.

And hither we have arrived at a very sensitive problem and the paradox of the arts today. According to the official establishment, modern fine art and modern music are supposed to reflect our gratis, modern age, occupying a dissimilar infinite than those occupied by pre-modernistic art, which is safely locked-up in museums and in concert halls and opera houses defended to classical music. What is considered "classical" fine art nowadays was hardly ever considered and so at the fourth dimension of its conception. Information technology has become "classical" since modernism became the "official" new art of the 20th century every bit a way to define the difference betwixt that whichwas, and that whichis—the art of former generations who suffered in a hierarchical society, and the fine art of today, created by us, we who are liberated and enjoy the luxury of a progressive, egalitarian guild where everything is valued past its ain intentions and where hierarchical qualitative norms have been banished because they are elitist, oppressive, so on. And yet, a great majority of people have adult enough artistic sense to empathize and capeesh the smashing fine art of the past. They flock to the great collections enshrined in grand museums similar the Louvre, the National Gallery, and the Uffizi and to concert halls and opera houses to feel the thrilling creations of dead white males from undemocratic ages. This "sometime fine art" did not naturally develop into the modern art of today, but forms an altogether different world of sensibilities. The upheavals of two world wars and industrialization, together with central cultural shifts in society, play a crucial part in the appearance of this rift in creative thinking, the roots of which can be institute in the 19th century. Eyes and ears educated in the best that whatever art course has to offering will not neglect to see and hear the deviation betwixt "old art" and "new fine art." This is not "conservatism," since that does not be in the arts, just a normal observation supported past experience. And a preponderance of "new art" is, by whatsoever standard, simply not good—at least, it fails abysmally in comparison with the all-time art of former ages.

It is a error to run into criticism of modern art as a bourgeois defence reaction confronting modernity, since the bourgeois society which protested against the impressionists and against Debussy and Schönberg no longer exists. If we could not criticize "modernistic art" in our own day, there would non exist whatever bad modern art. Without criticism, how could we know it? Therefore, we should feel free to criticize inferiority where we find it, trusting that indeed in that location are general, objective norms and standards for creative quality and talent, even if they cannot be precisely formulated. All nifty art of the past has been created on this supposition, thereby empirically proving the fact. (That these norms change over time does not abnegate the idea that indeed thereare norms.) In the same way, we know that something like "beloved" does indeed exist, although information technology is impossible to formulate the phenomenon in such a way every bit to go far at an objective, testable description, as in scientific discipline, and in spite of the different forms in which dearest manifests itself, in other places, other times, other cultures. We also accept an inborn sensitivity to artful quality, which is (to proper name an example) otherwise expressed in the intentions to create our living areas in such a way that we feel comfortable therein. Beauty—which had always been a natural part of any piece of work of art—is not persé kitsch or Adorno'south "false consciousness" (how could he know?), but an indication of a higher vision of life, and therefore of import to what we all-time phone call the human condition.

"Former fine art" and "old music" all the same "speak" to us, because they have universal qualities that transcend time and place. That is the reason backside the iconic value conferred on the great "old" collections in the museums and on the "sometime" repertoire fêted in the "traditional" concert halls and opera houses. In fact, this "old fine art" is not one-time at all, but contemporary forever considering its nifty qualities tin can be interpreted again and once again by every generation. There is an interaction happening between the living generation and the voices which come to united states from the past—a dialogue. And this dialogue is e'er new. Concept art and sonic art, whenever attempting to exist serious, could create a similar dialogue, simply this dialogue would exist unlike in its character because these art forms have different "messages." Often these messages reflect a negative outlook upon human life, upon gimmicky times, and upon human nature. No doubtfulness, these criticisms have a rightful place in our society, but they should not exist seen every bit natural descendents of the art of onetime times. Concept art and sonic fine art are somethingactually new—similar photography developing aslope painting in the 19th century. To call concept/sonic art the effect of progress and thereby implying that it is merely the old fine art but developed towards and into modernity is to deny the newness of these new fine art forms altogether. Let it be new, only don't permit information technology be art in the sense of fine art of former times. The fact that "old art" and "old music" are still of great importance to us keeps them new and presents them equally an alternative to what is now institution-sanctioned modernistic fine art and music. Would it not be not bad if gimmicky artists would try to emulate the "old art" and option upward quondam artistic values and norms to develop them according to their own insights and life experiences (as Bach did)? And indeed, that is already happening and has been at present for many years: New figurative painting is enjoying a renaissance, every bit is new tonal music based upon "traditional" values. These are not conservative movements but fully modern, contemporary fine art forms that give the lie to the outdated myth of progress and innovation for their own sake. Are these art forms slow, imitative, derivative, nostalgic recollections of times which take long past? By no means. In contrary, compared to the modernistic art and modern music of the establishment they are a breath of fresh air, since they explore techniques, values and aesthetics which—as we accept seen—are not restricted to time and identify and are thus universally valid and renewable.

At that place is a good reason why a Jackson Pollock or an Andy Warhol is not hung adjacent to a Velasquez or a Manet or (even) a Dali, why at that place are museums exclusively dedicated to modern fine art, and why at that place are "modern music festivals" and specialized ensembles and concert venues exclusively dedicated to "modern music," which is more often than not sonic art or derivations from pop or "earth music." They grade a dissimilar field of sensibilities and aesthetic values which would rightly exist experienced equally an intrusion from outside within the context of "old" fine art and music. Only new figurative art mixes very well with the "onetime" collections, just as new classical music fits very well into a regular, classical music plan in a classical concert hall. There is a continuum that embraces "old" figurative art/tonal music and new figurative art/tonal music. The chemical element that unites all the unlike forms of these arts ismimesis, the old Greek concept of art as representing and interpreting reality every bit homo experiences it—including the stirrings of his inner life—and which is realized by means that make use of the forms of perceived reality, in the case of visual art, and by means that metaphorically reflect emotional experiences, in the case of music. (Mimesis was first formulated past Aristotle.) But while the visual arts include elements of visual reality, great art never only imitates information technology (equally the many religious works amply attest). In music, the flow of lines and the changes in harmony reflect the movements of the emotions, while never only imitating them (which would result in directionless utterances). In both the visual arts and in music, homo experience is stylized in an aesthetic, imagined infinite, which gives these experiences a meaning and quality on a higher level than what we experience "in the raw." This explains the stimulating effect of nifty fine art: Information technology transcends the earthly level of our life, transporting it to a higher realm, and thus ennobles it—fifty-fifty where the experiences as such are not pleasant at all (like the numerous crucifixions in religious fine art, which tin can exist considered fairly regular human experiences symbolically re-enacted in mythological form). This quality of transcendence can rarely be found in the establishment's "modern art" and "modern music." They have very dissimilar aims.

New mimetic art explores meaning, value, and beauty every bit universal qualities of the homo condition. Information technology exists next to modernism in all its forms—not in opposition, simply every bit a fruitful alternative after more than one-half a century'southward celebration of the negation of universal values. What is progress? In culture, and especially in loftier civilisation, progress is the attempt to make somethingbetter, which implies hierarchical thinking: If there is something better, this means that there is likewise something worse. During the Italian Renaissance, artists strove to make things better, to paint better, to build better, to etch better (read Giorgio Vasari'south The Lives of the Artists). In their time, they were modernistic as a effect of their intention to exist better, and not the other way effectually. And they chose as a measurement of quality the art of antiquity: a thing of the past. Somewhen, in their intoxicating self-conviction, they tried to surpass the art of antiquity—which shows their freedom in interpreting their examples. At the cease of the 17th century, a discussion ensued in France—and so at the forefront of contemporary, modern, backwards looking art—almost whether "the moderns" were better than the "erstwhile" or non—the "querelle des anciens et des moderns." This would accept been unthinkable in the 20th century when beingness "meliorate" was, under the delusion of the myth ofhistorical progress, considered theresult of being "modern."

Of course Vasari was wrong to think that art of ages immediately preceding his own were "less skilful" than the works of his contemporaries: Mantegna is not superseded, in creative terms, past Leonardo or Raphael. It was the means that became available to artists, which got ameliorate, not the qualities of creative vision. The indicate is that developments on the material level are something unlike from the psychological/aesthetic level of art. What a work of fine art "says" is something different from the materials in which it is "said." If "progress" is used in reference to the material level, more possibilities become available to the artist; if the term is projected upon the artistic vision itself (the psychological and aesthetic level), and on top of that is imposed a linear, historical perspective, equally happened in the 20th century, artistic possibilities volition eventually diminish. And that is what we take seen in the last fifty years. The obligation to be "modern" closes off the armory of means that adult in the past, the upshot being that the range of possibilities becomes e'er narrower. And in the stop, all bachelor material means seem to be "wearied," since the artist looks upon the material level as the most important one.

The modernist composer György Ligeti said in an interview that he felt imprisoned between, on i hand, the past, and on the other, modernism—the advanced which he himself had helped into beingness simply which he felt he had somehow to transcend considering "progress" meant to him having to "go forward" all the time on the line of historical evolution. For Ligeti, modernism had become petrified into a mentality which had to be "overcome," had to be "surpassed" along the line from past to future—but in which direction? The artists of the Renaissance (and of later times during the ancien régime) never got into such dead-end street because learning from examples and freely delving into the material ways of the past protected them from a historical, linear perspective. They tried to create good art and, if possible, to emulate or surpass the works of other artists, exist they in the by or in the present. While trying to create good art, the past was ever in that location to help and to support. They never felt "threatened" by the art of the past because their sensation of beingness "modern" was not in opposition to information technology. This freedom of thought made infinite exploration and variation possible.

From 1648 till 1665, Amsterdam built its new, "modernistic" town hall. It had to express the power, wealth, and importance of the majuscule of the United Provinces of the Netherlands at the climax of what later generations called the "Gold Age" of The netherlands. Amsterdam was built of small, individual houses in the traditional gable style in brown brick and/or wood forth modest streets and a network of canals (which would be extended over the years). Just this new, fundamental building had to be unlike and as modern as possible—underlining the present equally something of a college order than the past during which the town had adult—because Amsterdam's celebrity was a thing of the present, not of the by. The style called was Italian classicism, which was seen every bit the most upward-to-date and mod style because information technology was considered to be "the all-time," forming a stark contrast to the other, older compages of the town. So the new boondocks hall was supposed to be "better" than the recent past and the style to achieve this was to hark dorsum to anolder past, as was then the contemporary style of thinking: People could explore the past every bit a treasure trove of possibilities and choose what they idea of as "the all-time." In the Amsterdam of the 17th century, "the best" was represented past an architectural style which recreated the grandeur and spaciousness, and the rich ornamentation, of Roman antiquity; the classicist Italian Renaissance tradition fulfilled that requirement in an first-class way, co-ordinate to the city council and the builder, Jacob van Campen. (It must have been a very expensive undertaking, since the lightish natural rock and the sparkling marble had to exist imported from abroad—Holland being a land of clay and sand.) Following the aforementioned line of thought, in which past and present share a continuum from which art tin be freely chosen, the dome of Rome's Saint Peter was modeled upon the Pantheon, the famous circular temple of Roman antiquity. The building of Saint Peter was, by far, the most spectacular building take a chance of the 16th century and, once more, the virtually "mod" in the old sense. The invention of the opera—a totally new thought at the time—was born from the effort to recreate the plays of Greek antiquity. These rather random examples reflect a very different interpretation of the concept of modernity than has been the custom during the last century—and an interpretation of the earth which did not run into a conflict between past and present. In the place of our myth of progress and modernity was their myth of a aureate age, by which the past stimulated new creation. Information technology was idealistic nostalgia that spurred artistic developments, with innovation as a result of a universal vision of the arts as a timeless continuum where works of art from the past interact with art of the present, and in which examples stimulated emulation and thus created an endless progeny of great works. This continuum is all-time described as "classical"—not in the sense of "old" and "bygone," simply in the sense that information technology indicates an agreement of continuity with the past. It does not hamper new innovation and personal interpretation, but rather stimulates personal creation under the influence of examples which provide standards of excellence. In this sense, new classical fine art is a continuation of the neat tradition of European art of the past, a living procedure of continuous renewal and interpretation, without the delusions of progress and modernity as a goal to strive after consciously.

To what extent is new classical fine art, because of its focus on examples, derivative? What exercise we mean by the term derivative? If we mean thereby an fine art which is a mere false of what has already been "said," the term tin can exist applied to any art, of any time and identify. Only even "derivativeness" should not exist considered a simply negative quality, equally the art of quondam Egypt amply shows, where repetition wasde rigueur. Private freedom of the artist, every bit developed in Europe over the ages, is a groovy good. It created the possibility of multiple variations. Only individuality which becomes so personal that information technology has no pregnant for other people results in the void of pointlessness. Art needs a continuum of works of fine art, which refer to each other to create a framework of meaning, value, and norms against which personal originality can stand up out. New classical art is an attempt to restore something of this framework, which existed before the emergence of modernism, and which now—in the 21st century—offers the best hope for the renewal of the arts. New classical artists, both in the visual arts and in music, do non imitate, but utilise mimetic "languages" to express individual experience, and this experience is inevitably contemporary. That these "languages" freely take their means from traditional mimetic fine art forms is perfectly natural, just equally Renaissance artists looked towards antiquity to develop their skills and personal styles.

Classicism, thus interpreted, may go the landmark of creative innovation in our own fourth dimension: interpretation of the by every bit a contemporary exploration, and a liberation from the restricting myth of modernity in the arts which has created and then much confusion and havoc in the last century.

Republished with gracious permission of the Futurity Symphony Found.

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