# Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten - Real Title: Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten ## Highlights ### id234441623 naturalist art vs abstract art is a historical cycle > Phil Getz goes…[a](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457) *[lot](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457)* [deeper than I was expecting:](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457) > > I've been exploring the question you're asking for the past several years. I haven't got a well-organized answer yet, nor time today to say much. But this isn't an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill. > > > > - The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized). > > > > - The stone "goddess" idols of Europe circa 6000 BP were more realistic than their artistic descendants, the highly abstract, smooth, angular stone "idols" of the Cyclades, ca. 5000 BP, which were strong influences on modern art. > > > > - Minoan and Mycenaean art (circa 2000 BCE) were both much more naturalistic and sophisticated than the highly abstract Greek art of the Geometric and Archaic periods. > > > > - Ancient Egypt produced extremely skilled naturalistic art, and very stylized, abstract, and seemingly less skillful art at the same time. Check out the art of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who briefly introduced very naturalistic, realistic art, and was erased from history after his death. Note that most Egyptian wall paintings are Cubist. > > > > - The representational art of Western Europe, starting with Constantine, and throughout the Middle Ages (with the exception of the Frankish court and some Byzantine art), up until nearly 1300 AD, seems to have been very deliberately bad, and in many times and places it was banned entirely. This was probably due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art (which fear came straight out of Plato). Note much medieval art was also Cubist. > > > > - 19th century African art, which is what everyone today thinks of as "African art", is nearly all highly abstract and anti-naturalistic (and was also a big influence on modern art). Yet the very few pieces of pre-colonial African art (pre-1500 CE) which we have are more naturalistic and technically sophisticated, including a few (from present-day Nigeria) that were more skillfully made than their European contemporaries. I've even seen a series of statues made in Benin, from IIRC 1400 to 1900 AD, which show the gradual loss of realism and heightening abstraction. > > > > Don't think of this as "progress". We also see change in the opposite direction; e.g., the gradual naturalization of Greek art from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic era. Art around the world has always cycled between the poles of naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism. The former tends to appear in times of wealth, safety, sea trade, and intellectual freedom (e.g., Athens, Venice, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Masters, Elizabethan England); the latter, in times of great crisis. I think this is because abstract art is, seemingly without exception, more spiritual in its motivation. > > > > These two opposing types of art are based on two general opposing philosophies, one which takes the physical world as real versus one which takes the transcendent as real. Many artistic features of each recur consistently. For instance, abstract art is often linear, with clear black borders between solid (unshaded, unmixed) primary colors, cubist in perspective, & uses size and distance to denote spirituo-political rather than physical truths. > > > > The underlying opposition is not so much stylistic, as about the "purpose" of art. "Spiritual" art comes from the point of view that one already possesses absolute Truth, and the purpose of art is only to indoctrinate (as in Plato). Nazi and Stalinist art both used "naturalistic" representational techniques, yet were spiritual in nature: they used art for the same propagandistic purposes as religions do; they always presented images of either the ideal or the demonic; they are generally images of power. Art that is naturalistic "in nature", by contrast, is made by people who are studying nature and trying to understand it, as opposed to people who scorn messy, "imperfect" nature in favor of their beautiful abstract "Truth". Naturalists don't see everything in terms of propaganda, power, and conflict. > > > > The rise of modern art is well-documented. The motivation for its abstraction derived originally from Plato--modern art is supposed to be the artist-as-prophet providing humanity with a more-direct vision of Plato's transcendent forms; the argument for why representational art is bad comes straight from Plato's Meno. (Though many of the early modern artists got their Plato indirectly, through Christianity or Hegel; and Romanticism and the decadents were also major influences.) Those other periods of abstract art I just mentioned which were just then being discovered were also influential, as was medieval art. > > > > But analysis of the rise of modern art has been hindered by the fact that it was an ideological movement which still controls academia and Western art institutions, and it has always been in that movement's interests to revise the past in order to blame its failures on its enemies. For instance, you'll commonly read that modern art began as a response to the horrors of WW1. The truth is quite the opposite: proto-modern artists were demanding a great war from about 1906, and got quite psyched up about WW1 (see eg Ezra Pound's BLAST). They believed Western civilization was systemically corrupt and needed to be utterly destroyed before they could create "true Art". (They used phrases like "a clean sweep" and "a great burning".) Albert Gleizes, one of the founders of Cubism, hoped for the complete destruction of cities and a return to a more pastoral, spiritual, community-oriented medieval lifestyle. The artists now paraded as "modern" to give the illusion that modern art was some sort of peace protest movement--e.g., Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen--weren't modernists at all; just read their poems. Not a single modernist technique among them. - [View Highlight](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4MDc2ODE1LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MjAzMDM2OCwiXyI6InpOWllYIiwiaWF0IjoxNjMzMzk4NjQ0LCJleHAiOjE2MzM0MDIyNDQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.xqwzUyP-IQVgK3JzUiys2QREEVmH7XP8uaSwgcFUdh8&__readwiseLocation=0%2F69%2F0%2F2%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F1%2F1%2F0%2F1%3A0%2C0%2F11%2F70%2F0%2F2%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F1%2F1%2F0%2F1%3A1157#:~:text=Phil%20Getz%20goes%E2%80%A6a%20lot%20deeper%2Csingle%20modernist%20technique%20among%20them.) ### id234441961 creative fields often prioritize novelty > Prestige within a creative field is so tightly bound with novelty that it’s pretty much inevitable that ambitious new works must abandon older forms, even when many of the artists and elites may prefer them. - [View Highlight](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4MDc2ODE1LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MjAzMDM2OCwiXyI6InpOWllYIiwiaWF0IjoxNjMzMzk4NjQ0LCJleHAiOjE2MzM0MDIyNDQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.xqwzUyP-IQVgK3JzUiys2QREEVmH7XP8uaSwgcFUdh8&__readwiseLocation=0%2F0%2F102%2F0%2F2%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F1%2F1%2F0%2F1%3A0%2C1%2F102%2F0%2F2%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F1%2F1%2F0%2F1%3A0#:~:text=Prestige%20within%20a%20creative%20field%2Cand%20elites%20may%20prefer%20them.)