What the "Disgusting Art History" talks about
Any art should be viewed from the point of view of the time when it was created, based on the mentality of a particular country and specific properties inherent in the author of the work. This presupposes the presence of not only a huge amount of knowledge, but also the desire to understand the psyche of a person who has lived for a long time at a specific point on planet Earth. And only then can you get an objective psychological portrait of the creator and understand his work …
In 2019, the Eksmo Publishing House published the book Disgusting Art. Humor and horror of painting masterpieces”. The author, an art critic by education, with excellent erudition and a sparkling sense of humor, writes about works of world art from an unusual point of view for lovers of the beautiful.
The history of this book began in the author's personal blog in 2017, under the heading "Disgusting Art Criticism", she published an analysis of the content of paintings of the past, shocking readers, many of which are generally recognized masterpieces of world significance. The author presents the plots of these paintings in a modern language in the manner of lively colloquial speech, without the scientific likeness accepted among intellectuals and the veiling of acute topics that are not accepted for discussion in the cultural space. Under her pen, ancient Greek myths and biblical stories threw off cultural clothes and turned into tales of cannibals, rape, robberies, murders, crimes and all kinds of mutilations that people, heroes and gods, saints, kings and martyrs inflict on each other.
The blog quickly became popular. In 2019, the Eksmo Publishing House published the book Disgusting Art. Humor and horror of painting masterpieces”in thousands of copies. The book became a bestseller. As the author herself writes, the book contains "my trademark stupid jokes about art and bloodthirsty pictures about rape, cannibalism, gouging out a peephole and other delights."
I have repeatedly come across the fact that many smart, subtle, intelligent people are carried away by this phenomenon and with burning eyes absorb stories of "disgusting art history".
In this article, I made an attempt to figure out what the essence of this phenomenon is, who is the consumer of such stories, and whether this content is useful to society. What is behind the "disgusting art history" - the light of knowledge, as the author positions it, or the devaluation of works of world art recognized by humanity? Or maybe the truth lies somewhere in a different plane, not related to art?
Let's start from afar and recall the history of the emergence of art, as it is revealed by Yuri Burlan at the training "System-vector psychology".
In the unconscious of humanity, nature has two basic desires: self-preservation and reproduction. From this come two basic aspirations - to eat, to live, and to continue oneself in children. Therefore, sex and murder have been the main engines of any person's life for thousands of years. And today, people, being in an undeveloped, archetypal state, most of all like to discuss these topics, gossip about them on the benches and watch the movies: who killed or maimed whom and who entered into an intimate relationship with whom.
To preserve the species from extinction, people have established taboos and laws inscribed in our evolution. The second deterrent was the emergence of culture. As a result of a complex and long process of evolution of our psyche, people have learned to sympathize, empathize with another person, love has appeared. Later, the translation of this state in forms and colors became one of the main goals of the artist.
Culture and art became instruments that restrained tension in society, with their help people gave vent to their emotions and refrained from aggression towards each other. How?
Artists at all times reflected in their work the world around them in forms and colors, perceived by them through their especially sensitive organ - vision, and one of the most important meanings of creativity was and remains to this day the emotional component.
To feel emotion, to imagine oneself in the place of another, to feel sorry for the offended, to threaten the offender, at least in thoughts of protecting the weak - this is a feature and ability of those people who are carriers of the so-called visual vector. In the human community, such people are about 5%. Realizing their properties, they often become doctors and artists. A doctor is a person who helps another person, heals his soul and psyche, accepting him, empathizing and compassionate. The artist is the one who motivates the viewer to love with his visual art - because he himself loves.
Culture has developed and continues to develop in parallel with human evolution. At the level of inanimate nature, people were able to appreciate the beauty of forms, at the plant and animal level, they learned to establish and complicate an emotional connection with the world of living beings, at the human level, humanistic ideas of the highest value of human life appeared. The fourth, spiritual level, has not yet been revealed by humanity. But among great artists, real geniuses, whose psyche includes both sound and visual vectors, we can see attempts to translate this theme into creativity for several centuries.
The degree of development of the visual vector differs among its carriers and determines the artist's interest in what and how he depicts in his work. But basically it is always a keen interest in the depicted. If an artist embodies scenes of fear and violence on the canvas, if he paints self-harm in all the details, frightening himself and frightening the audience, this indicates that his psyche is in an undeveloped, frustrating or stressful state. Such creativity is not useful, does not advance humanity along the path of evolution. It is a dummy.
The leitmotif of "disgusting art history" is the conversation about the scary themes that underlie the plots of many works of art. The author of the book writes in the introduction: “In many museums around the world you can find paintings by famous artists of the 15th – 19th centuries, which amaze with their content. Something bad is clearly happening on them - murders or dismemberment, freaks are depicted or indecent, in our opinion, actions. To understand what exactly is happening on the canvas, you need to seriously delve into history or literature, remember long-forgotten mythical heroes.
And it turns out that many of these terrifying characters - criminals and victims - have been wandering from picture to picture for centuries, from antiquity and the Renaissance to romanticism and modernity. For centuries, artists have retained an interest in these subjects, despite a huge number of other, much more "decent" and beautiful stories. Depending on the era, the reasons for this interest change, but their main source remains unchanged - the need to comprehend again and again what the most terrible can create for one person to another, the need to know the demons of his own soul.
If we summarize the topics the author writes about, we get all the same murder and sex. It is this background that the author of “disgusting art history” reveals in his stories.
Having reached the unsightly essence of the paintings, and in essence - the foundations of human life as it is in our unconscious, the author of "disgusting art history" puts an end to it, leaving the laughing reader with a bitter thought: “So, it turns out, what art is! Sex and murder, violence, crimes and vices of human nature, covered with bright colors and beautiful form. " With this approach, the depiction of the passions of human nature turns out to be the ultimate purpose of art, and the role of the artist is seen as the methods of a jester who entertains the viewer with anecdotes in colors.
Stripping the plot, revealing the mechanism of people's actions, "disgusting art history" devalues art, presenting it as a comic strip of horrible, stupid or funny stories, seen in this way through the eyes of our contemporary.
Who is the consumer of this content? Who likes making fun of heroes, exposing the dark side of human nature? Owners of the same properties of the visual vector. Many of them have higher education, were brought up on samples of classical literature and music, visit museums and theaters. They, with a veil of education, are able to appreciate the beautiful and graceful, but do not experience enough pleasure in life.
Entertaining the reader with a perky style and a fascinating plot, the author does not show the main thing: how these events are interpreted by the artist, how the image on the canvas reflects the artist's point of view and what is his own message to the viewer. And in the recognized masterpieces of painting it is always the same: acceptance, empathy, condemnation of violence and sympathy for the offended.
It should be borne in mind that people's moral values are not constant: at different times, in different countries, depending on the mentality of the people and the mentality of the artist, they may differ. And what is natural and accepted in one epoch may be perceived as monstrous in another. Today, when liberal humanism has elevated the value of any human life to the absolute, any violence against a person is unacceptable, let alone murder and self-harm. But it was not always so.
Let's look at two examples from art history. Rembrandt's painting "The Rape of Ganymede" depicts a plot from the ancient Greek myth, in which the eagle-Zeus carries away a boy stolen from the village under the clouds.
Let's focus on what exactly Rembrandt portrays. The Great Dutchman shows the viewer the suffering and fear of a small child kidnapped by a large bird. According to the aesthetic canons of our time, the wrinkled, tear-stained face of the fat toddler is not the ideal of childish beauty, the thick legs and wide face of the baby will not cause sympathy in every person, but undoubtedly the feeling that the artist, the father himself, has for the child being portrayed. A few precise details - and any mother and father will remember their child in an emotionally similar situation - clutching a bunch of berries in his hand, with his shirt pulled up, peeing in a transparent trickle of fear. What exactly is depicted in this picture? Inappropriate sexual intercourse, as the author of the blog writes about it? Not. Compassion and empathy for a little man who finds himself in a difficult situation.
Another example. In Rubens's painting "The Abduction of Orifia by Boreas" (1715), a powerful man is holding a puffy woman in his arms. In the words of the author of "disgusting art history", he is characterized as "a man committing on this canvas the unlawful act of kidnapping a woman from her place of permanent residence in order to commit regular sexual acts with subsequent detention against her will in another place." Emphasized protocol modern language devalues the depicted, and now the viewer, instead of wonderfully written images of two beautiful people with strong feelings, sees a banal police story.
In many millennia of human history, the abduction of women from a neighboring tribe has been a guarantee of survival. Mixed marriages gave strong and intelligent offspring, protected the tribe from degeneration. From the time when the maternal instinct began to be exploited, the woman was treated as property with no right to her own life. And in the days of Rubens, this was basically the case. The plot of this picture was understandable for the people of the 17th century, and although not from the realities of their lives, it is quite acceptable as an image of the historical past. The measure of the XXI century, which has advanced far in the recognition of the rights of any person, cannot be "judged" by the paintings of artists who lived many centuries ago.
What is actually depicted in the painting by P. Rubens? This is the abduction of a woman by a man for the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the most acute and powerful experience, vital for any normal adult. In the arms of a passionate and strong man, a submissive woman, already with a sensual blush, ready to accept the man who chose her and come to terms with her destiny. There is no suffering or resistance in her posture, this is a premonition of an ordinary and so desired female happiness - to be loved, to be a wife and mother. This is a picture about the union of a man and a woman, about their acceptance by each other, which is love.
In fact, correctly revealing the foundations of human nature, "disgusting art history" puts an end to the point where you need to put a comma and go further, deeper comprehending the process started by the author. The devaluation of the art of the past by caustic, sometimes on the verge of unprintable, in a word, and the assessment of this art from the perspective of a person of the 21st century is absurd and unnecessary. This is tantamount to how an adult would condemn a baby for pooping in his pants and dragging a cat by the tail.
Removing the veils and understanding the essence behind mythological, religious and other subjects in the history of mankind is the first step to a true understanding of art and its role in history.
I would suggest another algorithm for comprehending the essence of art:
1st stage: to understand the plot of a particular work of art, "strip" the plot to its simple essence.
2nd stage: system-vector analysis of the plot underlying a particular work of art.
3rd stage: the study of how the artist depicted the plot with his tools of the painter, what meanings he put into it, what features of the world perception in it are read in connection with the mentality of the people and the mentality of the author of the picture.
Having clarified all the nuances of the depicted story to crystal clarity, it is necessary to return again to the formal side of the work of art and through the eyes of an art critic with the talent of a writer in high-quality literary language to show exactly how the artist fulfilled his difficult and noble mission - he awakened compassion, love in people, overcoming hatred and alienation, as he asked questions of the structure of the universe, he was looking for the meaning of life.
Then many terrible, funny or ridiculous situations captured in painting will be understood correctly by the viewer of the 21st century and will cease to cause idiotic laughter or bitter disappointment in the artist's art and work.
Any art should be viewed from the point of view of the time when it was created, based on the mentality of a particular country and specific properties inherent in the author of the work. This presupposes the presence of not only a huge amount of knowledge, but also the desire to understand the psyche of a person who has lived for a long time at a specific point on planet Earth. And only then can one get an objective psychological portrait of the creator and understand his work.
To find out what is behind the plots of famous works of art from the point of view of systemic knowledge means to get to the essence of human relationships and, through the stories captured in the canvases, to understand literally everything that moves humanity along the path of its development. And then look at a specific masterpiece through the eyes of his contemporaries, through the eyes of the master who created it, and understand what exactly the author portrayed - Rubens, Michelangelo, Kandinsky, Picasso - what message he conveyed to people, and correctly assess what kind of contribution the artist made on the way evolution of humanity.
