But I think it went much deeper than this – and frankly, American Abstract Expressionist art was not really much better than the art coming out of Soviet Russia. In the early part of the 20th century, there was a concerted effort by a nefarious cabal, which included Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and which operated under the guise of the Institute for Social Research – otherwise known as the 'Frankfurt School' – to destabilize the very foundations of art, and what could accomplish this more thoroughly than the deposing of Beauty as the highest aim of art?[16]
If the above-cited "conspiracy theory" pertaining to the Institute for Social Research is nothing more than naïve conjecture, then so are the assertions that beauty has no purpose and that ugliness is beauty – which destructive false hypotheses are founded on, and reinforced by, pseudo-academic mumbo-jumbo or hearsay inherited through murky channels from mock-counter-culturalist, agent provocateurs, bankrolled[17] revolutionaries and art-murdering critics such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Bataille.
Aestheticism
Fortunately, we have solid historical records of the mid-19th century art movement which overtly championed the creation of beauty as the noblest human endeavour, and as the highest human ideal: the Aesthetic Movement.
In his Phaidon-published book Art Nouveau, scholar Stephen Escritt writes:
"The Aesthetic Movement, which reacted both against industrialisation's ugliness and Arts and Crafts' social moralizing, made an equally important English contribution to Art Nouveau. Attracting support among a fashionable stream of English upper and middle-class society between the 1870s and 1890s, it promoted the supremacy of beauty and the notion of 'art for art's sake', a philosophy that often spilled over into the kind of hedonism characterized in the lives of the playwright Oscar Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. It was in fact a Frenchman, the poet Theophile Gautier, who coined the phrase 'l'art pour l'art' when discussing Symbolist poetry, but it was in England that this religion of beauty was most widely applied to the visual arts."
He goes on further:
"In 1873 Walter Pater, an Oxford don and mentor of Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, famously invoked the aesthetic spirit in his Studies of the History of the Renaissance. Pater wrote of 'the desire for beauty, the love of art for art's sake'."[18]
So what happened to English, American, and European art between 1873 and 2015? Beauty was murdered. Striving for beauty in art was replaced by striving to excise beauty from art. Most artists and critics still refuse to see what is staring at them in the face: that they have been hoodwinked. When beauty was removed from its place as the primary purpose of art, art lost its purpose. Pure concept was foisted upon art as an impossible substitute, which was bound to spiral down into the chaos and nothingness we have as "art" today.
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