“Make America Great Again.”
This rallying cry, for the new president of the United States of America, has sparked controversy and debate worldwide. But that’s not the movement I’m here to discuss…
Instead, I’m talking about a different movement.
Welcome to the new MAGA - “Make Art Great Again”.
It’s a call for a new renaissance to artists, craftsmen, creatives, collectors, viewers, and you… who’ve watched in horror as the art world descended into the soul-crushing abyss of meaningless conceptualism and shameless shock-value works.
MAGA is about the very future of human expression.
The truth is that modern art has become an abomination to the human spirit. It’s a form of soft bigotry, lulling us into a false sense of enlightenment while sucking dry our souls one conceptual art at a time.
The state of contemporary art today is trapped in a never-ending cycle of photorealism and conceptual shocking art.
The goal seems to be nothing more than stirring more disgust - conjuring up strong emotional reactions for the sake of reactions. But is that great art, let alone art?
These contemporary artists simply want to offend the public.
They presuppose that we, the viewers, are little more than wild beasts - too brute to appreciate anything beyond our most base sensory stimulations. They assume that we’re incapable of transcending the material world, that we’re chained to the tyranny of our senses. So they pander to our primal instincts, mistaking our gag response for artistic genius. Why? Because of their nihilistic metaphysics (See my essay here).
For centuries, art was a gateway to the divine - a means of initiating the viewer into union with the Infinite. Paintings, sculptures, and other works were imbued with deep symbolism, in a way that words couldn’t fully express. You just had to stand before a work of art to sense the awe.
So the artist’s role (I’m speaking of craftsmen and artisans as well) was not to shock, debase, or offend but to illuminate truths that lay beyond the reach of language.
But now, in our age of technological supremacy, we’ve somehow decided that we no longer need such aspirations.
Beauty is dismissed as useless. Meaning is scorned as inconsequential. In their place, we’ve erected new galleries and museums - modern temples - where the artist’s greatest achievement is to make us question whether we’re even capable of understanding “art” anymore.
This is the tragedy of contemporary art - a world where the Infinite has been reduced to the merely sensational. Where the sacred has been profaned by the ugly. It’s a world that has lost its way, that has forgotten the power of art to elevate the human spirit and connect us to something far greater than ourselves.
The Reinassance movement, for example, in the early 14th century paved the way for the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment that followed. So without the Renaissance artists’ insistence on rediscovering classical antiquity in art and architecture, we may not have seen the flowering of reason, humanism, and empiricism that defined the Enlightenment.
This is the power of art and her ability to shape the very foundation of human thought, culture, and experience that makes its current debasement so tragic. When art fails to inspire, enlighten and transform, when it substitutes shock value for substance, it destroys society.
We stand upon the precipice of change. We either continue down this path of nihilism or fight back to make art great again.
So the MAGA movement isn’t a call to wallow in the past but a plea to reclaim our future.
It’s a call for us to rediscover the true purpose of art: to inspire, to enlighten, to transform, and to give meaning. It’s a call to artists, collectors, and creatives everywhere to rise above the nihilism of our age and remember the timeless power of beauty, truth, and wisdom.
In the end, art isn’t about shocking or debasing our senses. Instead art is about elevating our senses towards the divine - a process of deification. It’s about touching the Infinite, about glimpsing the One through the multiplicities, about reaching the non-dual through duality.
Art is about transcending our material limitations. It’s about the whole human experience. It’s a journey we must take together, as artists, collectors, critics, and viewers, if we are to restore art to its rightful place in the human experience and steer us towards a new renaissance.
Make Art Great Again.
Peace,
IJ Makan
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