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"The Mona Lisa"... "The Pieta"... "The Girl with a Pearl Earring."
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For a score of centuries, artists enriched Western society with their works of astonishing beauty.
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"The Night Watch"...
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"The Thinker"...
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"The Rocky Mountains."
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Master after master, from Leonardo, to Rembrandt, to Bierstadt, produced works that inspired, uplifted, and deepened us.
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And they did this by demanding of themselves the highest standards of excellence,
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improving upon the work of each previous generation of masters, and continuing to aspire to the highest quality attainable.
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But something happened on the way to the 20th Century.
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The profound, the inspiring and the beautiful were replaced by the new, the different, and the ugly.
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Today the silly, the pointless, and the purely offensive are held up as the best of modern art.
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Michelangelo carved his "David" out of a rock.
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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just offers us a rock, -- a rock -- all 340 tons of it.
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That's how far standards have fallen.
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How did this happen?
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How did the thousand-year ascent towards artistic perfection and excellence die out?
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It didn't. It was pushed out.
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Beginning in the late 19th century, a group dubbed "The Impressionists"
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rebelled against the French Academie des Beaux Arts and its demand for classical standards.
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Whatever their intentions, the new modernists sowed the seeds of aesthetic relativism --
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the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" mentality.
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Today everybody loves the Impressionists.
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And, as with most revolutions, the first generation or so produced work of genuine merit.
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Monet, Renoir, and Degas still maintained elements of disciplined design and execution,
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but with each new generation, standards declined until there were no standards.
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All that was left was personal expression.
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The great art historian Jakob Rosenberg wrote that
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quality in art "is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree . . . objectively traceable."
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But the idea of a universal standard of quality in art is now usually met with strong resistance if not open ridicule.
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"How can art be objectively measured?" I'm challenged.
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In responding, I simply point to the artistic results produced by universal standards compared to what is produced by relativism.
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The former gave the world "The Birth of Venus" and "The Dying Gaul,"
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while the latter has given us "The Holy Virgin Mary," fashioned with cow dung and pornographic images,
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and "Petra," the prize-winning sculpture of a policewoman squatting and urinating -- complete with a puddle of synthetic urine.
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Without aesthetic standards, we have no way to determine quality or inferiority.
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Here's a test I give my graduate students, all talented and well educated.
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Please analyze this Jackson Pollock painting and explain why it is good.
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It is only after they give very eloquent answers
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that I inform them that the painting is actually a close up of my studio apron.
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I don't blame them; I would probably have done the same since it's nearly impossible to differentiate between the two.
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"And who will determine quality?" is another challenge I'm given.
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If we are to be intellectually honest, we all know of situations where professional expertise is acknowledged and depended upon.
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Take figure skating in the Olympics, where artistic excellence is judged by experts in the field.
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Surely we would flinch at the contestant who indiscriminately threw himself across the ice
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and demanded that his routine be accepted as being as worthy of value as that of the most disciplined skater.
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Not only has the quality of art diminished, but also the subject matter has gone from the transcendent to the trashy.
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Where once artists applied their talents to scenes of substance and integrity from history, literature, religion, mythology, etc.,
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many of today's artists merely use their art to make statements, often for nothing more than shock value.
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Artists of the past also made statements at times,
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but never at the expense of the visual excellence of their work.
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It's not only artists who are at fault; it is equally the fault of the so-called art community:
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the museum heads, gallery owners, and the critics who encourage and financially enable the production of this rubbish.
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It is they who champion graffiti and call it genius, promote the scatological and call it meaningful.
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It is they who, in reality, are the naked emperors of art,
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for who else would spend $10 million dollars on a rock and think it is art.
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But why do we have to be victims of all this bad taste? We don't.
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By the art we patronize at museums or purchase at galleries, we can make our opinions not only known but felt.
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An art gallery, after all, is a business like any other.
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If the product doesn't sell, it won't be made.
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We can also support organizations like The Art Renewal Center that work to restore objective standards to the art world.
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And we can advocate the teaching of classical art appreciation in our schools.
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Let's celebrate what we know is good and ignore what we know is not.
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By the way, the white background you see behind me is not simply a white graphic backdrop.
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It is a pure white painting by noted artist Robert Rauschenberg at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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I'm Robert Florczak for Prager University.