People sometimes say “Art is dead. You can’t do anything new, it’s all been done before.” Whenever someone tells me this I know I’m looking at an idiot. For one, it’s easy to parrot the cliché in favor of an original thought. But also, given the popular perception of what we call art these days it’s the safe bet; and worse, a difficult argument for a dignified artist to refute. Generally they’re baiting me; they barf this pronouncement onto the floor, writhing like a parasite in foamy blood, both ill-equipped to defend it and strangely confident with their position. It’s a fallacy of course, if for any other reason because it presupposes the argument that art has to do something new. But the armchair pundits have a point. When the idiots become brave enough to assault the artist in his own territory, it’s clear they sense weakness and the pack grows more confident and starts to circle. How did we arrive at this situation?

It’s no secret art has become extremely ideologically abstracted. “Modern Art” is difficult for the Jacks and Jills to understand. To them it’s no longer relevant, it’s impossible to decipher without a degree, and frankly it smacks of pretension. There are many reasons this has become our modus operandi, and ironically you’d have to take an art history course to understand why. Or, you could do what I do and blame Humanism.

Humanism is a sacred cow in the world of academics, so how could I possibly make such an absurd accusation? By reviewing a little history and with a dash of common sense, it’s simple. They say sacred cows make great steaks, so here’s the argument:

It’s no coincidence that Modern Humanism coincided with the Renaissance. The Catholic Church, divine texts and providence in one hand, maintained a philosophical death grip over their largely illiterate society in the other. At that time, the collected wisdom of man was painstakingly handwritten (generally in Latin) and in the protective hands of an elite few. The manuscripts themselves were works of art, and owning books was actually a measure of power and wealth. And like any treasure, these were jealously guarded. The Church safeguarded their control with a deliberate policy of cultivating their flock’s spiritual enlightenment in lieu of their intellectual development. An intelligent person is far more difficult to govern than an ignorant one; so the trade-off proved advantageous. It’s difficult to imagine now, but this was so much so the case that the interpretation and explanation of love, marriage, divorce, politics, and nearly every important aspect of a person’s life, became someone else’s job. During this time, the Church used its power and influence to commission the best painters of the day to adorn their places of worship, as both a sign of the opulence of God, and perhaps more sinisterly, as a practical method to dramatize and bring to life the biblical stories their illiterate parishioners could not read. The paintings we now refer to as Renaissance classics were, in fact, part of a propaganda campaign to educate morality without having to teach literacy. It was a powerful use of art to establish and maintain social control and mores.

Rapid advances in technology sparked developments which eventually undermined the Church’s control. The advent of the printing press made the dissemination of writing more prolific. Suddenly, information flowed more freely and there was a reason to learn to read, and owning a book wasn’t an impossible dream. Perhaps more importantly, the benefits of learning and science became immediately apparent to the people. Cannons made defeating your enemies more likely, so warfare became a successful venture. Optics gave us the telescope and let us see farther, meaning more trade ships returned with their cargoes. Medicine meant your sick loved ones lived instead of died. The scientific method provided the populace with an alternative to faith for approaching the mysterious world, and the long-deprived intellectual curiosity of the people exploded. These were tangible, relevant improvements that people immediately desired, and these changes came from education not from salvation. This is where the heroic ideal of humanism comes in.

Humanism rejected the dogma of Church, instead celebrating the new-found self-determination of the people. It liberated us from the dark times, empowered both artists and the common man by replacing blind faith in the supernatural with dependence on the practical potential of mankind. And, for 600ish years, our focus on institutionalized intellectualism has refined and specialized our academic disciplines to the point where it has utterly revolutionized every aspect of our culture. But, as a sad footnote, it has left so much of our art sterile and incomprehensible.

Secular Humanism brought with it a wave of changes, some necessary, some good, some bad. But germane to this line of thinking are two notions about how it changed art forever: 1) The loss of the apprenticeship system and 2) the individualization for the responsibility of creativity. These are fundamental paradigm shifts which artists labor under to this very day. Make no mistake, by accepting Humanism and all its benefits, we also lost something valuable.

The master/apprentice method to teaching, which was popular with trade artisans and artists during the Renaissance, was largely supplanted by the university model. To this day, a typical artist is educated by committee; handed off from specialist to specialist. True to the precepts of Humanism, they are impressively independent, rational and exceptional critical-thinkers. They are exposed to a far greater number of concepts and methodologies than previous generations. It is difficult to argue with the brutal effectiveness of a well-executed modern art education, in the hands of an smart student is a formidable tool. But the system isn’t without weaknesses, and chief among them is the notion of relevance. If you, as an artist, are taught -deliberate or otherwise- to celebrate the tenants of Humanism, it’s only natural for your work to feature some measure of expression of Humanistic ideals. Humanism has become the central axis around which artistic expression now rotates. And a precious few artists are even aware this basic influence. In fact, for many of them, it is the unvoiced reason they became an artist, a source of pride, strength and inspiration. But it has also lead us down a primrose path of defining, redefining and specialization which terminates at our current problem. Modern Art may be the worthy and logical progression of art, but it has finally come full circle in that, as once the Church’s writings were inaccessible to the populace, so too has the narrative of Modern Art become indecipherable to today’s patrons. Universities mass-produce cookie-cutter artists who’s work becomes increasingly irrelevant to mainstream audiences… and like poets, these artists find that the only people that can truly appreciate their work are… other artists. This is an error in relevance, made possible by committee education, because at no time was any single educator made responsible for teaching the discretionary use of the education this artist received. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character highlights this nearly ubiquitous trend when he quips, “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The master/apprentice model of training solved this problem by placing the responsibility of a complete training curriculum on the master; by tying the master’s reputation to the the student’s performance, it acted as a natural selector and safeguard not only for excellence, but also of discriminatory application of craft.

A University education is deemed complete in, what seems like an almost arbitrary length, of four years. Compare this to the master/apprentice system when the education was tailored specifically to the student and the duration lengthened or shorted depending on the student’s ability.

Additionally, instead of a “General to Specific” idea model like we use today, they employed the exact opposite approach. By this I mean apprentices weren’t presented with a holistic exposure to ideas and theory, from which they adapt more and more precise techniques as they sub-specialized, but rather they were taught a very specific craft, a specific set of techniques and set lose upon the world to find a way to define and adapt their expression to what they saw. This fundamental change radically effects the artist’s approach, because the model employed by the master/apprentice system, by it’s very nature, fights to make the subject relevant to the artist, the technique and the viewer. The university system guarantees no such assurances. If you assume the challenge of the artist is understanding or communicating the world around them through their work, and that the work produced by a more modernist university model has grown to where it can only be understood with the presumption of assumed prior knowledge, it has ironically betrayed the principles of Humanism because it appeals to a quality which is now externalized from man and no longer self-evident except thorough the practice of disciplined dogma.

My second point is that Humanism has internalized the responsibility for creativity with each and every artist. This gives rise to a wide array of expression, but just as in the master/apprentice argument, this advantage has also come at a price. Prior to Humanism, the notion of creativity and genius was divorced from the individual. The Greeks considered genius to be a form of madness, because they often observed a more-than-casual relationship between the two traits. They thought these people were touched by the Gods, that the source of their insight was divine. Many cultures shared the notion of a muse, a creative force external to men, who whispered or breathed inspiration into artists. This “channeled” view of creativity was greatly beneficial to early artists, who were free to focus on the role of interpreting instead of editing, observing instead of self-dialoguing. Today’s artist bears the terrible weight of pushing creative boundaries alone, and with less time devoted to observing or playfully manipulating concepts in a manner which doesn’t reflect on him or herself personally. Artists have always been risk-takers and will continue to be, but to what degree? With the modern focus on commodification of artists and their work, the freedom to dissociate themselves personally, to create an environment conducive to creativity -free from the fear of failure- is a luxury that is difficult to afford. And, in fact, what we see now is that the reputation of the artist has grown in importance independent to, and often times more important than, the success of their work. Think about that for a moment: the artist’s masterworks are no longer the fruitful triumph of thought or technique, self-evident in the work itself, but rather emblematic evidence of the process, an extension of his reputation and observable only in the context of all his work.

Creative thinking requires the ability to wear many masks, yet the penalty for creative failure now is so intrinsically linked by Humanism to the artist, that it is a failure not only of cognition, but a failure of person. This new association, placing the onus of creative success or failure directly on the artist is, in my estimation, a large contributing factor to the epidemic degrees of depression and suicide associated with creative personalities. The act of creativity now carries with it an inescapable risk which, when coupled with an incomplete artisitic identity, can lead to a creative chilling effect. So, while Humanism leads to a wide, and often stunningly original breadth of creative expression, the depth of these insights can be remarkably shallow and their pertinence is questionable. This raises some serious questions about the efficacy and sustainability of the system, as well as its safety.

The question really isn’t if Humanism has forever changed art, because it has, but rather what comes next? Maybe this time life will imitate art. If you were to return to our fairy tale, instead of Jack and Jill heading up the hill to fetch a pail of water, maybe they’ll dig a well in the valley where it should have been dug in the first place. Who digs a well at the top of a hill anyway? When the absurd circumstances of art are swapped with the rational circumstances of life, when the metaphorical exchanges positions with the literal, we can learn from Jack and Jill’s fall and art can hint at the changes to come by providing us insight to the way we think and what we choose to do. That, my friends, is proof-positive that it art isn’t dead.

All of this brings me squarely back to some idiot and his ugly, wiggling idea on the floor, lathering itself in its own blood, and the circling pack impatiently waiting for an answer to his profound challenge. I usually look them right in the eye, and I suggest you do as well, take a breath and tell them with a straight face, “Art is dead? I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about art. I’m just here for the free wine and cheese.”