Every time I go to a museum or gallery, I am always struck by the consistency of themes in the art displayed–it’s always something to do with racism, feminism, environmentalism, or some other ‘who-done-me-wrong-ism’ that is usually connected to either politics or oneself.

For example, I recently saw the ‘Monuments’ exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. (presenting support by the Mellon Foundation), which featured Civil War-era monuments that were torn down or desecrated during the George Floyd Riots. Part of this exhibit was a video installation having to do with black and queer (I think?) identity in the present-day South set to a soundtrack of very loud southern hymns.

A few months later, I went to the Menil Collection in Houston, and what do I see and hear? What appeared to be the very same video with the same type of music! I say “appeared to be” because it is entirely possible that these were two separate works of art, because so much art looks the same everywhere, no matter who made it.

While this particular politically-charged social commentary style of art may have accelerated with George Floyd (which, I think, comes only second to the World Wars in damage to our culture), it actually started much earlier with the cementing of modernism as the official style of the state well over 100 years ago. I am including ‘post-modernism’ when I say ‘Modernism’ because it’s really all the same, no matter how hard the academics try to argue otherwise (Warhol’s silk-screens may be figurative, but they’re even FLATTER than the Abstract Expressionists!).

Why is there such a clear, repetitive agenda serving us pornography, race issues, and kitsch at every important white-wall gallery across the world just as reliably as you can get the same frappé at any Starbucks from China to Alaska? Because while the modernist revolution of art aimed to overthrow the constricting chains of formal academism, all it did was give us the flipside of the same controlling coin, as a new power nexus was formed in the post-War world.

A new structure of governments and corporations (which have almost one and the same agenda), universities, foundations, financial elites, and academics, has coalesced into what is tantamount to a new academic system forbidding true creativity, free thinking, and most importantly of all, beauty, which is their greatest threat. The result is a rote, one-note art scene.

The way out of all this and back to real artistic innovation is to return to what existed before the academic dogmatism of the Academies and the anarchism of Modernism–to return to the Roman Catholic Church. 

Before the creation of the modern art Academy, the main patron of the arts was the Church, from their ascendancy (artistically speaking) in the time of Charlemagne to their height in the early 16th century. The art and architecture produced was radically genius, and trail-blazed what art even was–Giotto alone made the large leap from a somewhat primitive painting to what is still some of the finest painting we have. But the painting and architecture coming from those great innovators of the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries was not at all created by rule or convention, but was channeled from a place of almost mystical vision. They were connected to God from their hearts, and their love for Him poured into their work. The result was a revolutionary and totally unaffected beauty; it was the real avant-garde before that term ever existed.

And then in the 15th century, Leonardo and Michelangelo took painting and sculpture to new heights that are to this day almost unbelievable. These Catholic artists were radical channels for God, and their work brought, and continues to bring, thousands of people to Him.

During their lifetime, the great artists of the Renaissance were elevated above the rank of mere craftsmen, which led to the creation of the first modern Academy, the Accademia del Disegno, in Florence in 1563. This Academy was founded by the world’s first art historian, Giorgio Vasari, and was under the patronage of Cosimo l de’ Medici.  

The date of creation should be noted as very significant because it closely followed the Protestant Reformation, which dealt a major blow not only to the Church but to art itself. The Reformation brought a period of iconoclasm as it questioned the scriptural admissibility of art entirely (on the Protestant side), but more importantly, it was the first major step towards secularizing the world and art. From there, art would begin its decline under the stewardship of the academies.

While the Accademia was mostly about raising the social profile of artists, an incredibly important role it ended up serving was as a model for the academies to come.

Like the foundational changes that would result from the World Wars (which we will get to), the Reformation was a shock wave. Even though many kings maintained an appropriate veneer of religiousness, we’d undergone the transition towards complete secularization–from the kingdom of God to that of man. While the Church used art to evangelize the public and bring them closer to God, kings used art to aggrandize themselves and cement political power.

In the late 17th century, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was established in Paris under the patronage of King Louis XIV, followed by the Royal Academy of Arts in London under King George III. Soon, nearly every important European country had an Academy acting as its official bureau of fine art.

This is when all that artistic trail-blazing of the 11th to 15th centuries in the Catholic world began to taper. Yes, there were great artists part of the academic system: Gainsborough, Rubens, and Turner, to name some, but much fewer than when art came from the Church. This is because Academies implemented a rigid set of rules, essentially mandating what good art was, what the most valued subjects were, and how they were to be painted.

For example, history painting was at the top of the hierarchy of genres over portraiture, genre scenes, landscape, animal painting, and still life. The vaunted category of history painting featured scenes from past history, and contemporary history, including “subjects glorifying the ruler,” mythology, or the Bible and notably placed sacred scenes on equal footing with profane ones (Boime, 211). These paintings were given the largest scale format (to fill the walls of government buildings or palaces) and brought the most laud to the artist. 

As late art historian Albert Boime points out in his essay The Cultural Politics of the Art Academy, academies especially utilized strong teacher-pupil instruction (something much less common at Vasari’s Accademia) to inculcate the official style. He says, “students…are educated in the principles of ‘high art’ to produce material artifices for the glorification of the sovereign, prince or patron” (Boime, 204). High art meant careful imitation of the classical and Renaissance masters and led to a paint-by-rule style wherein artists were “mere accessories called up as witnesses to the real prestige that accrues to the prince or patron who sponsors the institution” (Boime, 204).

Academic art fell into a very stale and repetitive style because the entire system was not set up to allow artistic innovation. So it was endless allegorical, historical scenes and a lot of venuses, similar to how we have endless ready-mades–think even of just the countless renditions of the toilet: Duchamp, Levine, Cattelan, Gober…

The firm hand of the state on art was bound to cause a Revolution–but which way would it go? Back to freedom and the pursuit of beauty, or towards a further profaning of the arts? You can guess which way it went, but before we get there, both sides must be explained. The positive revolution against rigid academism coalesced in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the PRB).

This group of artists formed in London in 1848, a mere 80 years after the Royal Academy was founded, and consisted of seven members–most importantly, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These men were fed up with the hackneyed academic look that was dark, overly bituminous, and “sloshy,” typified by the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom they called “Sir Sloshua,” the first president of the Royal Academy.

They advocated for an art that was kaleidoscopically vibrant, intensely detailed and sharp, and especially featuring religious or medieval themes. They were for full-fledged truth and beauty. They wanted, as their name suggests, to return to an art pre-Raphael, and although the PRB was not Catholic, pre-Raphael would be a time of only Catholic art and before the existence of any Academy. The PRB’s art was sincere and in deep devotion to beauty, and not fabricated by any affectation. For example, Hunt’s ‘Christ and the Two Marys’ remained incomplete for 50 years because he felt he did not have the proper personal faith to execute the religious subject justly.

Outside of the PRB, a one-off example of a sort of rebellion against academic convention was in the later life of the great J.M.W. Turner. Turner enrolled in the Royal Academy at age 14, first exhibited at age 15, and became a full academician at the age of 27. He was a genius, but as his works became more atmospheric and free (as they actually became better and better), the more intense criticism he received from the official art establishment.

These men, the PRB and Turner, are now England’s most treasured artists.

But cross the channel over to France, where quite a different scene of anti-academism was to unfold. In 1865, a work titled ‘Olympia’ by Édouard Manet shocked the public for its overt mocking of the typical ‘odalisque’. This work was a parody of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but Manet’s girl was shown as a prostitute stripped of all transcendence and beauty. Practically every contemporary pornographic, mocking, subversive, and intentionally ugly work of art can trace its genesis to Olympia. While academic art was in total decline, marked by increasing disconnect from reality and an almost perverse idealism, especially seen in French academic such as that by Gérôme and Bougeureau, we had two paths laid before us and didn’t need to pick this one. But Olympia came with such force that the die was cast. Modernism was here, and we jumped from the pan into the fire.

What is Modernism? As it relates to art, modernism is a “self-conscious and deliberate break with the past and a search for new forms of expression in any of the arts” (Merriam-Webster). Key point being a “deliberate break from the past,” because soon the perfect global societal conditions were coming to cement Modernism as the new style of the state. How fitting that event should be war?

The World Wars were, generally speaking, a clean break with the past. Everything was different. Many kings were replaced with democracies or dictatorships, people lost their faith in God, morals were all but gone–the things that were the bedrock of our great civilization were obliterated or greatly damaged. We were (and are) living in a post-civilized world, and as Walter Benjamin, quoted by art historian Hal Foster, said, “modernism teaches us how to survive civilization if need be” (Foster, 1).

Help us survive civilization…I am not sure if modernism does that. Yes, civilization was destroyed, but not in a void. There is a real force of power that perpetrated the destruction and came out on top afterward. Modernism was adopted as the official style and cultural building block of their new world. This world would be a sort of civilization, but it wouldn’t be civilized.

Thus, the hegemonic United States promoted abstraction, a CIA agent co-founded the Paris Review, the Rockefellers founded MoMA, and the major American universities hired all the modern architects away from Europe (which was no longer the cultural, corporate, or financial center). The new nexus of power, consisting of the elites, their money, their corporations, and the politicians they control, needed a new brand, and the ‘avant-garde’ perfectly fit their purposes. But as what happens, Biome notes, with any power, even the avant-garde, it “congeals into an absolute system reminiscent of the traditional academy” (Biome, 213).

This time, though, instead of each country having their own Academy, there would be one single global force pumping out the party line, and that’s how you get the same exhibits anywhere and everywhere with the same look and same themes. There is one global agenda of feminism, environmentalism, and anti-racism, anti-colonialism (insert any other ‘ism’) in politics, which is then propagated through the arts. Similarly to the academic system, there can be little artistic innovation because this system does not allow for free-thinking, true creativity, or expansive beauty.

Notice how the centers of art are also the capitals of corporations and finance–New York, London, and Basel. Notice the list of corporate sponsors at the entrance of museum exhibitions. Notice how Art Basel, one of the most important art fairs in the world, comparable to an academic salon, began in the central banking capital of the world and was franchised out to every major financial center from Hong Kong to Qatar. Yes, it makes sense that the art goes where the money is, but that does not account for the total lack of variation and originality coming out of these places and the fact that what is produced usually happens to align with corporate and government agendas.

There’s another interesting phenomenon part of all this, which are the “protests” and “resistance” groups that often pop up at museums and fairs like the Guerrilla Girls and Pussy Riot. So far from wishing to take down “the man,” these groups are actually a manifestation of the man because they champion the core tenets of the system in power, just in a more virulent way–intense misandry, environmentalism, and burning whatever may remain of the old world. They also conveniently run cover for those in power by making them appear less extreme by comparison.

So what began as an aesthetic rebellion at the turn of the century has become a stagnated pool continually breeding new disease, never moving forward, while simultaneously proliferating horror after horror. The basic genres of this art are: 1) ready-mades or kitschy spins on some everyday object, 2) race-based or LGBTQ art, 3) violent or sickening performances, 4) hyper-realistic wax statues, 5) classically-reminiscent figurative painting with some transgressive twist, 6) abstract blob painting and sculpture, 7) street photography.

How is stuff like this not only tolerated but even celebrated by “educated” people? I can look to myself for an explanation. Growing up, I was raised around a lot of beautiful art. I spent my summers at my grandparents’ house, who collected Sargent, Monet, and Degas, and even Manet, and I was fortunate enough to be around the living greats like Ed Ruscha and Richard Meier, who often came to The Knoll for events. I naturally gravitated towards and loved all things beautiful, but when I started to ‘learn’ more about the conceptual and academic background of art, the more warped my preferences became.

In college Art History classes, the word beauty was explicitly not allowed as a valid word to apply to art, which cut me off from whatever instinct I had towards beauty and conform my thinking to the official beliefs of the classroom. From there, it became very easy to evaluate a work by Rubens on the same level as a Duchamp. Notably, thinking that a bicycle wheel hammered to a stool is a work of art is just the same as thinking a man can be a woman or any other absurdity.

They may have attempted to destroy civilization, and have done a pretty thorough job of it, but there is one thing that the gates of hell will never prevail against. It is the Rock which, when tapped in faith, contains the living water and well-spring of all creativity and beauty.

This downward spiral began with the secularization of the world and art. The early patronage of the Church was far and above more free and innovative than what came next. Far from prescriptive convention, the aesthetics coming out of the Catholic Church were revolutionary (why else did the PRB want to return to pre-Raphael as an antidote to academic rigidity?), and the atmosphere was much more conducive to the finding and lifting up of artists as society’s most important thinkers and seers.

There is nothing more radical, more challenging, more truly avant-garde than beauty, which is simply whatever reveals the truth of God. The ways that can manifest are as variegated as His own creation and cannot be limited by rules, except those He lovingly sets out for us, that, in practice, only further expand our freedom.

Art history barely began before it was hijacked by those who understood the unique power of art as a shaping force on the world, and they want us to believe it’s all over. But in reality, the greatest works of art are yet to be made in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music–but only if artists choose correctly between glorifying the kingdom of God or the kingdom of man.

Sources:

Boime, Albert. “THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE ART ACADEMY.” The Eighteenth

Century, vol. 35, no. 3, 1994, pp. 203–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41467772. Accessed 23 June 2026.

Foster, Hal. Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg. Princeton University Press, 2023: pp. 1.

Goldstein, Carl. “Vasari and the Florentine Accademia Del Disegno.” Zeitschrift Für

Kunstgeschichte, vol. 38, no. 2, 1975, pp. 145–52. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1481901. Accessed 22 June 2026.:

“Modernism.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. G.C. Merriam Company, 1963.