By Marcelle La Cour

How do I see most Modern, or Contemporary Art? As little as possible, as you may imagine from my title. Now, I’m sure I am going to offend quite a few people, but I do believe that I yet have a right to have an opinion just as it is the right of anyone to admire anything they see fit. Most Modern Art though, in my view, simply is not fit, especially for public consumption. It is a rather unsettling meal.

Contemporary paintings and sculpture and many other new iterations are too often constructed (note the word “constructed” as opposed to one I might have chosen, such as “created”) employing pointless composition (or none at all), unnerving patterns, color, lines and angles that have no concourse with humanity. Just to address one aspect. No conscience is another aspect. Art whose purpose appears to be to take one’s expectations in art for something wonderful and transcendent and break them upon their alien forms and nonsensical, even disgusting objects; to send us away distanced and confused. This is supposed to be art?

Too many years of this "Art" has been pushed down our throats, too many meaningless works thrust upon our naiveté, leaving too many of us with no option but to discover, or accept, or have thrust upon us by art authorities reasons to like them or risk being thought gauche, uncultured, not with it.

I believe the tides are turning. As the people of our time question more and more the senseless and frantically spinning pace of lives, and the destruction the materialism and technology of a century has wreaked upon our weakened sensibilities, we will grasp for those things that mean real life and communion of spirit. Elements that inspire or provoke our humanity will become the truly important, and the dross, the technological toys and traps, the meaningless and the ugly will fall discarded like broken shells buried in the sands of these receding tides.

So, beat me over the head with that metallic thing welded out of car parts and pornographic paraphernalia, that thing Modern Art finds so "important" and "significant" – I can take it! I can take it and I guess you know what I will do with it, too! But I’ll give you something back, in exchange. I’ll give you my uttermost best; the most beautiful, moving and meaningful art works I can possibly create, my whole heart and soul poured into each stroke of paint; works that I hope will draw you into the path of life and hope and new realms of possibility.

© 2002, Marcelle La Cour. All Worldwide Rights Reserved

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