"WOKE" Degradation of Western Art

Chinese, African, and Indian cultural traditions are still treated with curatorial respect, their works analyzed in accordance with their creators’ intent. As soon as a critic turns his eye or ear on Western art, however, all he can see or hear is imperialism and white privilege. It is a perverse obsession. We are teaching young people to dismiss the greatest creations of humanity. We are stripping them of the capacity to escape their narrow identities and to lose themselves in beauty, sublimity, and wit. No wonder so many Americans are drowning in meaninglessness and despair.

Don and Joy Veinot, Freedom vs Coercion – Will the True Cult Stand Up?

Art or Entertainment?

For centuries the upper crust had an appreciation for the arts. But to enjoy the arts required person to think, to meditate, and to engage the mind and the soul. This new brand of entertainment, increasingly being enjoyed by the masses, was mindless. It was “about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.” 

In other words, they new forms of entertainment gaining popularity with the ordinary man were nothing more than senseless fun—and loved for just that reason. The elite hated entertainment for the same reasons that the working class delighted in it. The elite loved art, Shakespeare, excellent, thought-provoking literature and classical music while the masses were swooped off their feet by dime novels, ear-splitting music, and trash of all kinds.

Gary Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market, pg.25

Rock Music

Rock music is cacophony, clashes and discord.  It is perversion, not art.  True art has beauty: at its center is the idea of balance and of congruity.  There is no beauty apart from that.

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Power of Music

Music by way of symbol and referent is capable of transmitting human feelings and ideologies, some of which have deep ethical implications.

John Makujina, Measuring the Music, pg.19

Young People Are Starved for Beauty

Our young people are not only starved for nature.  They are starved for beauty.  Everywhere they turn, their eyes fall upon what is drab or garish: their schools, their music, new books for sale, the fast-food joint, a baseball stadium (where you can hardly talk to the fan sitting next to you, for the noise roaring out at you from the loudspeakers), and, of course, their churches.  Saint Paul wanted to be all things to all men, to save some (1 Corinthians 9:22).  We have applied this dictum to what surrounds us.  We are drab with the drab, garish with the garish, inane with the inane, and we save nobody at all.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.37

The Difference is Seen in Art

Mankind’s immense artistic talent is visible in the paintings on the walls of the Cro-Magnon caves of Lascaux.  The sublime heights to which that talent can rise in the midst of a great Christian civilization can be seen in the works of the Italian and Flemish masters.  The debasement of that talent by the rejection of the very springs and origin of civilization can likewise be seen in much of the work of modern artists.

Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God, pg.146