 Thank you, Morgan, for both helping me put this together, but also for encouraging me to do a talk on art. I talk often on art on my show and informally, but I haven't done too many actual talks on art, so you're gonna have to bear with me a little bit in a sense that this is first. Usually, for those of you familiar, I give talks on economics, politics, morality on a lot of different things, and I am open in the Q&A later to answer questions about anything you want, so the world is in a peevill, people have questions, happy to comment on anything you would like. I don't think I'm gonna go an hour, we'll see how long it takes, so and then we'll just do a Q&A for as long as we go. So the question I wanna pose this evening is whether these two things fall into the same category. If we think about concepts, if we think about the words that we use as denoting something specific in reality. When we say chair, we can imagine a whole variety of chairs, but they all have something similar and that's why we call them all chairs. Furniture is furniture, and even when we go very abstract, love is a certain category of emotions we feel, of feelings that we have, but they all are similar. And if we bring in something that's completely different than it poisons, I think, the term that we use and it makes it very, very difficult to communicate, and I think more importantly, it makes it very, very difficult to think because words, concepts are the tools we use to think. And if you think about each concept as a little file folder, if that file folder has in it things that don't go together, then we become cognitively confused. Do these things go together by what standard, how? I think any five year old who would look at this would say what? No, I think anybody, anybody who hasn't got a advanced degree in art or who hasn't gone through any kind of training in art would say no, these two don't have anything in common, one is what we traditionally have always called art, and we'll talk about what that means and what that is, and that is, well, I don't know. Maybe some of you can enlighten me. But it might be pretty, it might be aesthetic, it might be something that we think is as nice curves and reminds us of something, but does it fit into the same folder, into the same category, into the same cognitive idea as Michelangelo's David? That's what I want us to consider today. And in doing so, I'd like to present to you a hypothesis about art, about its role in human life, about what it actually is. This is Ayn Rand's view of art, so I encourage everybody to read Ayn Rand's romantic manifesto, which is a book she wrote about art. But also I inspired, we're gonna do today, we're just gonna show photos of sculpture just because it's easier just to focus on one form of art. I'm happy in the Q and A to talk about other forms of art, some I know more about, some I know less about, sculpture I know a little bit more than the rest, that's why I chose it. I also think it's easier in a sense that sculpture is very immediate, it's very visual, it is three-dimensional, but you don't always need to experience it in three-dimensional to get the effect, although you do it to get the full effect. So it's, and it's simple, right? Painting is much more complex in a sense because painting tells a whole story. Sculpture typically has one figure and that's it. And whatever that figure's conveying, whatever that figure means to you, that's all there is. Painting, there might be trees and mountains and landscape and color and sculpture, there's no color, again, simplifying, right? Although Greek sculpture probably did have color, but we don't know what it was. So for all purposes, sculpture has no color. So sculpture's much more bare bones, it's one of the most bare bones of all art, maybe the most of all of them in its simplicity, in its directiveness. So we're gonna do just sculpture. I benefited, another recommendation I would give you is an essay called Metaphysics in Marble. Metaphysics in Marble, which was written by Marianne Seuers, who was a friend of mine once, and it's up on, if you Google Metaphysics in Marble, it comes up because it's up on the web for free. So what is art? Why do we need it? What purpose does it serve? Why is it that when we look at human history, you know, tens of thousands of years back, we found, find human beings dabbling in what we consider art, in storytelling, in little drawings on caves, in trying to communicate through this medium something, trying to reveal something about the world that they live that is around them. Art seems to be something that we all crave, that we all need, that we all want, that is somehow essential to the human experience, somehow essential to living a good, fulfilling, satisfying life. What is it? It has to do with the kind of animal we are, the kind of being we are. Human beings deal in abstractions. We deal in things that we can't actually see. Love, justice, heroism, any one of these concepts, and you can find hundreds, thousands of these concepts that are abstract, that we don't see a concrete manifestation of them. And in deal, most of our thinking, most of our advanced thinking, in whatever profession you're in, most of our thinking is done in an abstract form. And we hold certain beliefs, whether it's religious beliefs, whether it's philosophical beliefs, in a very abstract manner. Human beings are, you know, we'll see examples of this in the Greeks, human beings are heroic. Well, what does that mean? And I need to remind myself, because this is important to me. I really believe in this. What art does is it provides us with that concretization, that bringing it to the perceptual level so we can see a hero. Yes, that's the kind of person I'm talking about. That's the kind of life I want to lead. That's the kind of world I want to live in. And you know, today we go to the movies and we watch superheroes, right? Pouncing around and they're incredibly popular because people need that concretization of things that they believe in, things that they aspire to, things that they want to believe about the world around them. That the world is made up of these kind of people, that that is possible. So, art is a way to bring to the perceptual level that which we hold as an abstraction and that which relates to our deepest evaluations about the world around us. So what do I mean by the deepest evaluations around the world around us? We all have, whether we make it explicit or not, whether we can articulate it or not, we all have answers to question-like. Is the world knowable? Or is it just one big mystery that you can never know anything, right? Are human beings good or evil? It's the essential nature, the essential character of human beings, good or evil? Can you be successful in life or are you gonna fail? Yeah, you probably know some people maybe there's some in the audience today who it doesn't matter what happens, they're always gonna say we're gonna fail. Nothing's gonna work. It's always. No matter how many times they succeed, they always go into an assignment assuming they're going to fail, right? So these very fundamental values that we have, the way we look at the world and the way we look at ourselves, art reflects those back to us. Art affirms those to us. In a, to a large extent, the way you respond to art is very revealing about your own psychology because the way you respond to art is a reflection of your deepest held beliefs. It's a reflection of what you really think. Oh, what is guiding at least your subconscious, your emotional state. So how you respond to actual art is incredibly revealing and based on this art has to have meaning. It has to reflect back to you something. It has to make a statement about the world. So according to Rand's definition of art, Rand's definition of art is art is a selective recreation of reality based on an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Metaphysical value judgments are these kind of values that we talked about. What kind of reality do I believe exist? Am I capable of knowing reality? What kind of being are human beings? Are they capable of knowing? Are they capable of doing well in reality? Are they just losers all? Is, are we all doomed? Is everything just gonna collapse upon us? Is life, does life suck? That's a metaphysical values question, right? If you think life sucks, you've made a metaphysical statement. Art reflects that back to us. And you know, you can go and there are plenty of modern movies, for example. Movies is something that everybody experiences, sculpture less, that portray what a world where life sucks. And you know, if you like that, it's something worth introspecting. Or if you like the movies where everything's fantastic. You wanna introspect, why do I like these things? What is it about me that like these things? It's something, it's your value response to the artist's values that is interesting, right? And this is beyond whether the art is good or bad in terms, you know, and I would evaluate art as good or bad. Based on how well does it do that? How well does it reflect the values that the artist is holding? So again, the definition is a selective recreation of reality. So according to Rand, there has to be reality there. It has to be something. Because otherwise, what are you gonna respond to? A circle? There's nothing to respond to. There's no story. There's no characters. There's no values there. There's just a shape. Shapes are not creators of values. Here there's values. You can't be neutral to that. I mean, you could, but you know what's going on here. Now, a slide does incredibly injustice to David. So you should all go to Florence at the academia and go and see it for yourself and then tell me if you can be indifferent to it. I don't think anybody who goes into that room is indifferent to it, right? Because it's telling a story. A story we can respond to, and even if I didn't tell you as David, if I said, if I didn't give you the name, you would know what it's about. You would know what it represented. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna go through the history of sculpture. Crazy thing, but we're gonna cover the whole history of sculpture, or almost the whole history of sculpture. We're gonna do it very fast, so we're not gonna go very, very deep. But one of the things I want you to see, one of I think the best ways to see how sculpture does this is by looking at different cultures and seeing how different cultures through Western history at least have reflected their ideas about the world. They're fundamental beliefs about our values, about the values that you should care about in their sculpture. Now, for everything I'm gonna say, there gonna be exceptions within a particular culture because cultures don't produce art. Who produces art? Individuals. And not all individuals are gonna have, obviously, share the same values, but it is interesting to see that there are cultural similarities, that is between different sculptors during similar periods of time because they're influenced by the same ideas, by the same cultural attitudes. So for everything I say, you probably find an exception. That's great. There are always individuals who are different. But these are the dominant trends within those cultures, within those time periods. So let's start with the Egyptians. Egyptians are the first to really do sculpture on a significant scale. And what do we see with Egyptian sculpture? What is it static? It's very little movement. Not particularly anatomical. Very little anatomy, very little sense that these people could get up and move. They're not quite us. They're always fun-facing. There's no back. They're not three-dimensional. In many respects, they're only two-dimensional, although two-dimensional plus a little bit of depth. What do they look like? Do these look like they're alive and vibrant and excited and they're going out to conquer the world? Not conquer, not brutal sense, but conquer the world in terms of achievement. No. They look half-dead. They look like they belong in a mausoleum. They look like a celebration in a sense of death. And if you know a little bit about ancient Egyptian culture, it's a culture obsessed with death. It's a culture that for thousands of years progressed very little. A culture that built pyramids. Why? I mean, there's magnificent buildings that nobody to this day know exactly how they did it. For what? Why did they build them? To bury somebody inside. Not to achieve anything. Not even just to work, not even as a temple to the gods, but as a place to bury. It's a static culture. It's a culture that basically answers the question of how do we know? We know because the gods tell us. We do what the gods tell us to do. And the gods are a myriad of different creatures and you can see it in other sculptures. You can see the different snakes and cats and alligators and they're all gods of some form or another. This is a culture that really has no individuals. Faces are very similar. There's no individuation. There's no emotion being expressed. These people are not living. They're not alive. They're not striving. They're not particularly suffering and they're not particularly enjoying themselves. They're just flat. They're half dead or living dead or waiting to die, which is what the culture of Egypt was all about. It was all about this idea of what happens afterwards. You know that the kings were buried with all their treasure. One of the reasons treasure hunters always go to pyramids because they need the treasure in their afterlife. There was no caring about the people you're leaving behind. It was all about what happens on this journey into an afterlife. And this culture reflects that. And they got, this culture became, it's not that they necessarily couldn't figure out anatomy. Any more than, we'll see in a minute, the Greeks could. It's that they chose not to use it. They chose not to do it. And if you look across Egyptian culture, it's almost all the same. Never in the round, never in three dimensions, always flat, always fun facing, always like, like a, you know, it's like somebody dead in a casket, right? Facing up, that's the kind of perspective you get on. Of course, very different once you get to the Greeks. Suddenly you have movement. All kinds of poses. The Egyptian sculptures are always left leg forward. That's it, static hands. Anatomy's bad, anatomy's very static. They connected somehow to the column behind them. Here, freestanding, three dimensional. They could walk off. There's a sense here. A power of confidence. A sense here. A people who could, of reflection of the values of competence, ability, heroism. And if you think about Greek culture, what is Greek culture all about? You know, Greek is the first philosophical culture. It's a culture where they discover the reason, where they believe in the competence of human beings. We can achieve things. We can do things. They are the first scientists. And of course, they worship the human body. Another thing you will see in Greek sculpture that you won't see in Egyptian sculpture. Nudity. The nude. There's a penis there, staring you right in the face, right? You'll see later on, as we go through the history of it, that's, at some point, that goes away. But the Greeks believed that the human body was a beautiful thing. And it should be revealed. And it should be celebrated. And it shouldn't be hidden away. That sexuality was a positive thing that should be celebrated and embraced. That sensuality was. But also strength and power and athleticism. There we go. If you look at the discus throw, one of the most famous of the Greek sculptures. I mean, look at the movement. One has to wonder, just, you know, this is carved in marble. I mean, just the skill. The skill to do that. And again, think of that circle that we saw in the first slide. Just think it was a skill, right? You could probably do that with a power tool. Can't do that with power tools. And the beauty of it, the symmetry, the form. One leg is almost off. He's almost just standing on one leg. The tree stump in the background was there to support the marble because the marble could easily break. Or look at Lancon. Now, this is a tragic story, obviously, right? But look at the struggle. Look at the emotion on the face. These are not just everybody's the same. We're just waiting to die. We're just accepted death. We've just accepted life as it is. We're just waiting for the gods to tell us who we are. What are the gods for the Greeks? The gods for the Greeks are perfect humans in some regard. And here what you get is struggle. The attempt to live, the emotion of that struggle. You get an individual who's not like everybody else. Greece is culturally the first time in which individuals are elevated, heroes are elevated. We identify with those heroes. Athletes, because the mind, the body, are beautiful things according to Greek culture. And win victory, of course, that would be an abou of a ship, at least in wood, right? And you can't really appreciate it here, but again, the artistry, the craftsmanship of being able to create the clothes draped over the woman's body, almost transparent, the sensuality of it, and at the same time, the power and the strength and the determination. There's no face, and yet, because the head's gone. But yet, you get, I mean, again, you can't look at that and not get the emotion. There's a sense of excitement. There's a sense of conquering the world, of being able to dominate, in a positive sense, your life and the world around you. This is not some, yeah, life sucks. This is life, I can attain it, I can go for it. And that's kind of the metaphysical value that it projects, and that's the emotion it evokes in us. So this is Greece, and then we go to this. This is the Dark Ages, this is the Gargoyles, the dominate Dark Ages, sculpture, monsters, scary stuff. Why? Well, again, it's a reflection of the ideas of the culture. This is an era dominated by mysticism, by a view of the world, just waiting for catastrophe, waiting for the end of the world, waiting for judgment, sending you to hell, if you don't like Gargoyles. I mean, wait a second, oh, we get it. So this is a world in which, again, individuals are gone, look primarily at the your left, which is the Middle Ages now. And what I'll do is I'll compare, and then actually slides compare kind of the Middle Ages with Renaissance sculpture, and you can see the differences. Renaissance is Renaissance of what? What are they bringing back? Greek, they're bringing back Greek after a period of Gargoyles, after a period of darkness, after a period of pessimism, after a period where you can't trust the human being, you can't trust the individuals, and there are no individuals. And look, life expectancy was below 30, it was not a good period to be alive, and that's reflected in the sculpture. So when people saw this, they recognized their world in it, their horrors in it, their values in it. You can see already with the Renaissance, you can see a difference. Here the Jesus has no muscular, has no real bodily form, he's just a pile of suffering. On the right, which is of course 150 years later, it's already the beginning of the Renaissance, you're seeing muscles, you're seeing form. If you look at the face, you actually got character, you've got emotion, you've got suffering. It's reflecting back what really is involved. This is not a happy portrayal of the world, but it's individuated. It's not that everybody's the same, that was certainly in Egypt, but then you get the same thing in the Middle Ages. Conformity, sameness, these are the kind of sculptures that were being produced during this period, of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages. Very little shape, no anatomy, look at the one in the middle, that's Eve. There's no anatomy, there's no laws of physics, they're not really working there. It's of course not the dimension, there's no in the round again in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages. There are no sculptures in the round. All the sculptures have got a wall behind them, so you only see them up front. Again, going back to Egypt, it's interesting how these things cycle and how we go backward, but this is very similar to Egypt, anatomy's wrong, there's more motion here than the Egyptian sculpture, there's more angst, but look at the distortion figure, that's Isaiah, of Isaiah over there. There's no, again, no sense of what's actually going on other than it doesn't look good. There's ugliness, a lot of ugliness, and this is all art, it's all reflecting something, well all their values here, they're not positive values, they're negative values. This is the world crumbling, this is there's nothing really worthwhile living for, and that's reflected in the fact that human beings are not being portrayed, and this is, you know, there's some lost skill here, but it's interesting how somehow in the Renaissance they rediscovered the skill, so it was just a question of when they could rediscover their skill set, but here there's no anatomy, no skill, no three dimensions, and again, nothing in the round. In a round makes you an individual, in the round positions you separated from the group, here everybody is just a collective, a mass. I like these three pietars because they're pretty reflective. So the left pietar is a Middle Ages pietar, and you can see, I mean, there's anguish, there's grief, there's no beauty, it's ugly, purposefully ugly, there's horror, and that's what's being reflected. In the Middle Pietar, again, definitely worth going to see, it's at the Vatican Museum, unfortunately behind glass because somebody tried to shoot it. Shoot it? Yeah, shoot it. So they had to put it behind a boule of hoof grass, he can't get close to it anymore, which is just tragic, but this is Michelangelo's pietar, I think maybe one of the top three, just in terms of evoking, and in terms of the ability, one of the best sculptures ever. It's tragic, but you don't get the sense of horror. You don't get the sense that the world is over, that everything is horrible. It's a mother and a child, a grown child, she's mourning his loss, there are no tears, but she's clearly in mourning. He is a robust youth, he's muscular, he's strong, and yet she's holding him on her lap. It's beautiful, sad, but beautiful. It gives you the sense of the potential of life. What kind of life could this man have lived if he just stood up and went about his business? He's, it's real. It speaks to you. I mean, this speaks too, of horror and death and destruction. Even though this is the same story, depicted in two different ways, you get a completely different effect. So it's not the story that's doing it, it's the way the story is communicated to you. And part of what I think is interesting and tragic is the third pietar, because the third pietar is the same guy who did the middle one, the same Michelangelo. It's, what is it, 50 years later, 60 years later? It's incomplete, so it's not finished, so we don't know what it would look like if it was completely full, but we get a sense of what it's gonna be like. And I don't know how much you know about Michelangelo's life, but Michelangelo was super religious, probably homosexual, and really struggled. He starts there in a sense, full of promise, full of optimism, full of the positivism about life, full of energy, full of excitement. And you can see in his sculptures, if you see his sculptures, if you go see the dying slave in the Louvre, and you see the slow change in his attitude towards these metaphysical values, in his slow growth of pessimism, depression, a lack of excitement and energy about a future, he sculpts, he's sculpting into his 80s, right? I mean, he lives a long time for the period. And you can see that in the last pietà. There's none of the, you know, Jesus is being held up by Mary in the back, drooping figures, there's none of the vitality, the energy, the strength of the middle pietà. You can see just the evolution of Michelangelo's attitude towards life, and if you've read biographies about Michelangelo, it reflects what he actually went through in life. Sculpture does reflect your values, it reflects your attitude as a sculpture, and it reflects your attitude as a viewer, and it definitely reflects the attitude of a culture. The middle culture is a culture of a renaissance, of a rediscovery of reason, rediscovery of science, rediscovery of heroism, rediscovery of the ability of man to change the world, to have an impact, right? Now, I don't need to tell you this as David for you to say, to know what about this young man. He's strong, he's powerful, he's unbelievably confident. He's engaged in some heroic activity, even if we don't know that he's facing a giant. Now, what's cool about this sculpture is it is a giant, right? It's enormous. And yet, imagine Goliath. Goliath is much bigger, right? He's got a sling, so we know he's preparing for battle. He's got a rock in his hand. He's looking, he's got a bit of a frown, he's a little anxious, he's a little worried, he's entering battle in some form. But he is a beautiful specimen of a man with all the rigor, with all the confidence of a human being that believes that they can be successful in life, that reality is not against them, that reality is with them, that they can win, that they can succeed. And this is the spirit of the Renaissance. The spirit of rediscovering reason of starting to dabble in science. The rediscovery of that human spirit that they learned from the Greeks. There's nothing here that reminds us of the kind of Christian middle ages of depression and, you know, incompetence of man, and there's no original sin. He's nude again, just like the Greeks. There's no shame, there's no embarrassment. Again, this is Michelangelo in his youth. This is Michelangelo in his early 20s, if I remember right. He wouldn't do this in his 80s because his attitude to life has changed dramatically. So it's static in a sense, right? He's got a foot forward, but you don't get a sense of static. You get a sense of motion. This guy could walk off. He's going to walk off and fight Goliath. We know that. Again, whether we know the story or not. One thing important about art, I think, you shouldn't have to read an explanation. You should be able to look at a piece of art and know something about what it suggests. The explanation is always helpful. I always like to do that after I look. First, I want to make my own evaluation. I want to look, experience it, see how I emotionally react to it, see what I can understand about what's going on in the artwork. Then I want to see what the context is and what the history is. If there's a story, what's the historical context for the story and all the rest of it? It adds, but it can't be the essential. If you need to read to understand a work of art, be suspicious about whether it is art. Art should be able to be understandable at least at some level to almost anybody. From the Renaissance on through the 19th century, we just get more motion, more dynamism. Bernini is famous. I mean, look at what he does in marble there. The fingers are pressed into the skin and you can actually see the pressing of the skin in marble. I mean, this is rock, this is stone. The ability to do that, the perfection when it comes to anatomy, the explosion of movement, the explosion of character is just stunning. I mean, that is a different version of David. So if you compare to Michelangelo's David to this David, you could actually do a whole series just on David because there's so many sculptures of David through history. And in different moments, Michelangelo's David is unique in that he's not yet acted. It's the anticipation of action. Here he's in the middle of action. If you look at Donatello's David, it's after he's cut off the head already and he's standing there proud and of one. You could find different Davids in different stages. Usually the Davids are after the battle. The things I like about Michelangelo and Bernini is Michelangelo's anticipation, this, the dynamism, the determination, the muscles as he's pivoting, you get that total concentration on his face. This is power, this is efficaciousness, this is confidence, this is the kind of world I at least want to live in with people who can do this who are able, not sling rocks, because that's not the point. The point is the abstraction. The abstraction is efficaciousness, ability, strength, strength of character, the willingness to stand up to a giant. You get these amazing portraitures. This is Franklin Washington. You can also find he's got an amazing Voltaire. Also, he's probably the best portrait sculptor I know of. But what you get here is character. What you get here is, I mean, you've got to look at Franklin and go, yeah, I know this guy. He's got that little smile on his face. You kind of get a sense of who he is. He's an individual you might want or not want to meet him. On the other hand, Washington, serious guy, right? More determined, reflecting his career and maybe his character. So you get real individuals with real characters reflecting real values back at you. Not just nothing. They're not all the same. Yeah, I should have put up a Voltaire because Voltaire is kind of really, he's got full of character. He's got that, you know, I guess what you'd expect Voltaire to look like more even than Franklin in a sense of a smile and in a sense of a little mischief, right? There's a little mischief in it. You get the 19th century. I mean, this is one of my favorites, Spartacus. It's at the Louvre Museum. Again, I don't have to tell you the story because this sculptor has given you all the clues. He's obviously just broken shackles. He's freed himself. He's got a broken sword. He's got the pieces of the shackles that he's just broken. This is, he's got this immense look of pride. He is not going to be enslaved. He is not going to tolerate slavery. He is a rebel. He is going to stand up for himself. Whether it's Spartacus or anybody who's done that in life, whether it's literal slavery or anywhere else that you've rebelled against authority, you rebelled against somebody trying to shackle you, that's the spirit and you get that. You respond to that. And it should, if you're a rebel, fill you with, yes, I want to be like that. Does that to me at least? I'm a rebel. So I encourage you to go, if you're ever at the Louvre, to go see it. Well then, again, goes a little bit through an evolution like Michelangelo, though it happens much faster with him. He starts out creating beautiful young men, or young men in a beautiful pose, full of again energy. This is a sculpture which, these are my photographs, or my wife's photographs. These sculptures are in Copenhagen, the sculptures in Copenhagen. And I love this. This is one of my favorites again. Look at her face. She loves playing the violin. And she's good at it. And she knows she's good at it. And she's in the moment. And she's being swept up by the music. This is in the Glyptotech Museum in Copenhagen. I think maybe the best sculpture museum in the world, or one of the best together with the dossier in Paris. So a gorgeous, gorgeous sculpture. This is in London. This is at the Leighton House. A man of action, facing up to a massive snake, always the symbol of evil, right? Snakes since the Garden of Eden, or the symbol of evil. And it looks like he's going to win. Well, at least he's got a shot. He hasn't given up. Snake's not swallowing him. I bet you you can find from the Middle Ages a sculpture of a snake swallowing a human being. You don't see that in the 19th century. Human beings are efficacious. This is one of the main things that sculpture projects. Ability to deal with nature, ability to deal with the world, ability to stand up for our values, ability to be heroic. Beautiful moment of tenderness. Again, from the Glyptotech. Joan of Arc. Very individuated. Again, you get that sense of devotion. You get her looking up a little bit, right? Anatomically correct. Beautifully postured. In the round, all these sculptures are in the round. You can go around them. They're just as well done from the sides and the back and the front. Beautiful expression. An expression you'd expect of Joan of Arc. That's French. And that's also at the Glyptotech. Both of these. Although that one, you can find copies of it in different museums. And then this is what happens to Rodin. That, towards the later part of the 19th century. Early part of the 20th century. He goes ugly. Because that's spirit of the Renaissance. That's spirit of Greece. That's spirit of man as heroic, man as efficacious. The spirit that believes in reason, can solve problems. The spirit of the scientific revolution. The spirit that animates art from the Renaissance through the mid to late 19th century. It changes. It changes among philosophers. As the German Romantics, undercut reason. Undercut individualism. Elevate the collective. Denounce heroism. Denounce individuality. Denounce success. As we become just one of the masses. As life is portrayed. As hard. As suffering. Full of anguish. Full of horror. As sculptors start reflecting that back to us. We start seeing ugliness. Enter the realm of art. It's depressing. It's futile. There's nowhere to go. It's still art. Because you still get that. You still got figures there. You still got a story in a sense. You've got values there. It's just different values now. These are negative values. These are values about the world. About the decay. The corruption. The fact that human beings again are not competent, efficacious, able to discover, explore, change their world. More of without a head, without arms. There are dozens of these from then to later. From middle to later periods. Of just ugly people. Ugly beings. And look, they're ugly people. This is not a reflection of they shouldn't be ugly people. That's not the point. The point is, what do you want to reflect back to you? What do you want to say about humanity? What do you want to say about what we are core human beings? Not what you want to say about any particular individual. Do you want to say human beings are a beautiful thing? Human beings are capable of great things. Human beings are efficacious in the world. And if you want to say that, you go with beauty and with strength and with competence. Not no head. There's a lot about reason. You know, you see a lot of torsos from Greek sculpture. Sculptures with no head and no arms and no legs. Do you know why? Because they broke off. Nobody sculpted that way in Greece. Nobody would imagine of taking a sculpture's head off. That would be bizarre. They broke because they stick out. And what's left is what we found. And we'll take it because it's so beautiful. It's better than nothing. But Greek sculptors would never do that. And they would look at us admiring their torsos as bizarre. Because it's a human being without a head and arms and legs. It's not a human being. It's not what they wanted to convey. But for sculptor to purposefully make a sculpture have those features tells you a lot about what he's trying to say about humanity. What his values are. And then of course we get to Giacometti. That's supposed to be a gazing head. Now maybe there's something there. But that's a gazing head. She's beautiful. She's gazing. That is mine. Not mine that I did it. Mine that I bought. So I have that in my house. You know she's reflecting of beauty, contemplation. There's a certain strength to that gaze. This is nothing. It really is nothing. The fact that you put a title saying gazing head doesn't make it a gazing head. It's a rectangle with some dents in it. We'll take this more Giacometti is my favorite. I mean you could so argue this is art in a sense that these are figures. They're ugly figures. They're much more reminiscent of dark age figures. They're not trying to give us anatomy. They're not trying to give you a complete human being. It doesn't have a head again. That seems to be a theme. Headless human beings. No reason, no mind, no senses. Just animals. Versus that. Again, beautiful, gorgeous, sensual, feminine, mysterious. That too is that they're dlyptotech in Copenhagen. These might still be art but not very good. Look at the skill level. Imagine putting these things together. Sometimes it's true that the notion of if a 5-year-old could theoretically do it maybe it's not art. But those are still something. This is a crucifixion. 1950. Okay, again looks like something. You get something out of it. Not a lot. And it's really depressing. That's supposed to be a human being. Maybe after he's been burnt at the stake, a charred, I don't know. And there's no way to go after this. Right? Other than to have another renaissance. Because the only way to go after this is to nothing. To shapes. Now shapes can be pretty. They can be smooth or rough or whatever. But what does any of this mean? Nothing. It's just shapes. Just somebody putting together something that he thought was shapey. And I'm sure people have written dissertations. University dissertations. About what this means. It's a lot of pseudo-intellectual gibberish. Because there's nothing here. There really isn't. There's no story. There's no values. There's nothing to reflect back at you. Now it gets scary. Spiders. Sharks. Outside my hotel, here in Edinburgh, there are two giraffes. Pretty bad giraffes. Giraffes wouldn't like these giraffes. But why? What are you trying to say? What's the value? It's not pretty. It's not beautiful. This isn't beautiful. It's just ugly. And it's not reflecting anything. Maybe scared. That's a value to anybody. And of course, everybody knows it's a joke. They know it's bankrupt. They know there's no there there. They know this is garbage. So they put a urinal in a museum. I mean, I don't think Deschamps... I don't know Deschamps, right? Maybe he thought this was really art. I doubt it. His whole point is a nihilistic point. His whole point is if anything can be art, then what? Logically then nothing is art. This is pure nihilism. This is an attempt to destroy all art and all our ability to enjoy art and destroy it. And Dali, who is famous to having fun at these kind of things, you know, a lobster on the telephone. Okay? Not sure exactly what to do with that. But again, it's ridiculing. Ridiculing what? Ridiculing us for taking him seriously. For thinking this is meaningful in any kind of sense. It deserves maybe a smile, but mostly just ignoring it. Art is a truly important experience for human beings. The more I think you experience art in a funny way, the better you become as a thinker. Because the better you become at dealing with the abstractions because you now have them in some way concretized for you. They are spiritual fuel. They should motivate us, inspire us to continue in life. To pursue our dreams, to pursue the challenges. Life is indeed difficult. It sometimes even sucks. But I don't need somebody to tell me, yeah it sucks. I want somebody to inspire me and remind me that it doesn't suck for a long time. That I can overcome. That I can change. That I can make choices that make it better. Great art is art that truly inspires. It's art that reminds us of what is possible in the world. If I listen to a Beethoven symphony, I get energized. I want to go out and do stuff. I look at Michelangelo's David. I get a very similar feeling. That's the life I want to live. That's the kind of people I want to hang out with. That's the kind of world I want to be in. I want to be in a world of Davids. At whatever activity we're engaged in. When I look at what's called modern art I get nothing. I don't even get the negative of, you know, the depressing you know, I don't know, dark European movies that, you know, delve into how much life sucks. I don't even get that. I just get nothing. What upsets me about modern art is not what they do because it's nothing. What upsets me about modern art is that people build museums and host it in them. Then we spend public money to subsidize these artists and host them in museums and intellectuals and then what happens is that the common person, most of us who are not art specialists who now have this nonsense in their mind as art lots of stories of janitors throwing out sculptures in museums because they thought it was trash. Literally they thought it was trash and it turns out that it was an art piece. But when we associate trash with art, then we lose just in art and we lose what art can actually provide us. Now some of us maybe won't but many people do. So if an average person who doesn't know much about art who hasn't taken the art classes or hasn't listened to intellectuals walks into the Tate Modern and looks around their response is going to be this is stupid. It is. You just go ask them. And then he's going to say that is stupid. And they're going to miss out. They're going to miss out on what art can provide them. Holding those things together, those two together, is incredibly damaging for us for our ability to enjoy the great art. So let's stop calling modern art art. It's modern, if that word means anything, but it's not art. It's something that can come up with a new term for it. I don't know. But art reflects values to us. Art tells us a story. Art tells us something about the artist's values. And it tells us most importantly about our own values. Art is a way to learn about yourself. Experience lots of it. Good art. And you'll become a better human being. And you'll become a better introspector in terms of knowing yourself. And you'll have a lot more fun. Thank you. Oh yeah, let me do it. You can say that. So you've got some stuff in front of you just quickly. One of them is free books. The Iron Man Institute is giving away books, Iron Man books. If you scan the barcode there, you can choose which book you want. So it's an electronic book and you'll get it for free. So one of those books is the Romantic Manifesto. So if you're interested in Iron Man's three-year-of-art and delving deeper into it, I highly recommend the Romantic Manifesto. And it's on there, but you can also get Adler Shrugged and The Fountainhead and her other philosophical works. So free book to anybody who just scans that barcode. The second is a conference. Just some information about a conference we're having in two weeks in London. I'll be speaking there. There'll be a number of other intellectual speakers from the Iron Man Institute speaking there. Again, if you scan the barcode, you can get quick registration and register for the conference. So hopefully some of you will consider coming down by train, by flight and enjoying a weekend in London. It's going to be a lot of fun. There'll probably be about 200 young people there. So I think it'll be a great atmosphere. With that questions on anything. Let's start with arts and then go to other stuff. Is that okay? I can call it. So I think like everything, there's probably good stuff and there's probably lousy stuff and I think probably mostly lousy which is always the case. And like with any new art form because I do think it can be an art form and whether it is or not is a question but it could be an art form. It's going to take time to figure out what exactly are the characteristics of this art form. What makes for great graphic art, digital art, if you will. What doesn't make for great... I think we're still early in trying to figure all this out but there's nothing to say that it can't be a great medium for art. I mean some people even argue that video games are art and art that's kind of immersive because you're a participant in it I'm not convinced but there definitely is the story element and there is a lot of visuals that can be very artistic but whether it is an art form I'm not sure. But I think digital art is something that will evolve into something substantial. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Dali is playing with reality, right? But every element within a Dali painting is something you recognize. It's just... I like some Dali and I dislike others and the more absurdist he becomes I don't like him but I love Dali primarily for his style. The sharpness the clarity of everything is beautiful. I also find something just interesting and fun so I think he's having a lot of fun which is nice but the values that he's projecting back I mean one of the things I didn't discuss is part of the way you project values is through style. So because you're saying something about human senses you're saying something about ability to comprehend reality so when things are sharp when things are smooth you're saying the mind is clear we can understand the world we can see the world the world is there and Dali has that but then he messes it up so I think everything then that he's still using staircases you can identify them it's just they're going no way so it's like science fiction science fiction is reality in a sense that every element is real and even the things that they're imagining like time travel are based on something are based on human beings and invented technology but they're not nothing which is what so much of modernism is why would you say that so many people particularly artists are drawn to modern with the capital NR and what does it say about our culture in the world? Well I think our culture is being decaying slowly for the last for a long time for 200 years because for about 200 years we've had bad philosophy now it takes a while for philosophy to actually get to the culture but it has been chipping away at the culture particularly over the last 100 years 20th centuries with few exceptions the two erasions and the quality of our culture and the quality of our art so what modern art is a reflection of the kind of culture that we have you know if you think we live in a schizophrenic age it really is amazing there's immense dynamism and vitality and excitement in certain realms of our lives technology for example entrepreneurship people building and making stuff particularly in the material world there's a huge dynamism and vitality but when it comes to intellectual pursuit we've lost confidence in the human mind in our ability to navigate the world to understand the world with cynics and skeptics there's no certainty nobody wants to stand for anything we're all middle of the road is we're proud to be centrist politically because we don't want to stand with anything or we're just nihilists politically which nihilists of the left and nihilists of the right doesn't matter but there's a huge amount of nihilism I think we live in a time of real cultural decay I think we don't treat each other particularly well I think we if I look at things like architecture if I look at things just the way people live it's not individualized it's not individuated I've spoken about this you drive through a city like Denver or Suburbia in America and you see these big homes of people with money they have money very big homes they all look the same they all look the same they're not ugly but they all look the same I want to live in a home that's kind of mine that has my stamp on it and you'd think we'd develop a technology that made it possible to build homes with an individual style without making them super expensive the great architect was working on that was doing that and they were all different but they're all similar in some way but they all have the upper because they were designed for you we don't live in a world that individuates much or if it does it individuates in the direction of again nihilism we're much more comfortable with disintegration and everything breaking apart rather than with real values and you can see it in the music we've gone from Beethoven to I don't even know the names of the rappers but that's total disintegration there's no there there it's still music but it's Bailey and you can't part of a culture is one's ability to have a bit of what do you call it span ability to concentrate for more than three seconds or three minutes in the case of rap it's easy to do the three minutes because you've got to beat constantly imagine you have a whole symphony without a beat just stay and listen to it for 40 minutes quietly because you don't want everybody else who's trying to listen to it for 40 I mean that's just not an experience of modern life anymore but that's a spiritual loss it's a kind of experience that we've lost culturally and it's hard to get back when you get into the every second there's something different and that kind of constant stimulation so I think we've lost a lot culturally deteriorating and modern art is a reflection of that just like the goggles are a reflection of the middle ages we somehow have bifurcated our culture so that we're still materially advancing while spiritually declining and you can see it everywhere you can see it in the quality of our leaders the quality of our intellectuals the quality of our politicians the quality of debate the fact that there's cancer culture today some people advocate I mean this event because I've said stuff on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that might have upset somebody I'm fine with having a discussion about stuff but we can't even talk which is part of this culture of non-intellectualization we chopped up our heads I mean yes you had your hand up sure one is the place of the office the place of creativity in art and society has been lessened over the years and things like home but all the same there's no appreciation of the art of the architect coming in there but what I was really keen to talk about or understand from you was this idea that you seem to appreciate figurative art against abstract well I don't think abstract art is art it's not an issue of it I don't think they're in the same category from that is Henry Moore for example is double local well I love Michael and George David I love his piazza you mentioned they were both sad or it was sad, real and expressed love absolutely the double local from Henry Moore expresses sadness, love, duality all sorts of things I can walk around it and I can see it in two dimensions I've seen Henry Moore's in the landscape in the gallery, they're beautiful things in the landscape so I get something from it you don't, where is it all going there's talk I think it's about the U of N I'm interested is there going to be another set of David's coming out another set of Greek sculptures with heads on maybe with heads is that the end game here I've seen a lot of Henry Moore's my mother loves Henry Moore and I grew up in a house full of Henry Moore-like art I think you can read stuff into it and there's certain aesthetic to it that is it's pretty there's certain beauty to it some of it's ugly but there's certain aesthetic to it but there's nothing objectively there that projects all the things that you said you get out of it it's what you bring to it it's not, but art art is supposed to bring something to you I think it is, I think that's the difference between decorative subjective pretty things and art and I don't think Henry Moore is pretty and as much joy as some people get out of it I don't think it's art, I think it's something call it something else it's not the same category as I put it up it's not telling you anything you can't see anything objective you can't literally explain you can't actually explain why you're seeing why you're feeling what you're feeling other than the certain patterns in the world make you feel a certain way but there's no value there it's just an emotion it's a pretty emotion I mean I have decorative art at home I have beautiful vases I have pretty things in the house but they're not art they're decorative things and they please me and they maybe relax me and they're nice and they cause a particular emotion to them but they're not projecting values to me there's no sadness there's no heroism there's no metaphysical value judgment there's no I can do something what next? I don't know what next because things it depends where the culture goes but what would I like to see? yes I'd like to see another David it doesn't have to be David and it's not like you have to innovate beyond the human form because the human form is the human form we're not monsters with six arms so we don't have to change that but you'll tell new stories you'll tell new adventures you'll project new things you know maybe maybe we'll interact artistically with technology in ways that we haven't in the past they're going to be new art forms the technology makes possible but I think they need to be representative of something so I think they have to recreate something in reality my very first day at art college I was a student of an easel and the guy decided to do this abstract drawing of the model that was sitting over there and he came over and said when you can draw that well then you can abstract it Picasso is a beautiful figure to draw he's a literal figure to draw he abstracted his artistic journey was abstracted it's a beautiful abstraction I don't think they're beautiful so I think that's Picasso's deterioration so I think Picasso had the technical skill to draw beautifully and then had horrible values which manifested in the fact that he took reality and shattered it because what is cubism it's the shattering of reality it's the projection back to you of chaos of shattered reality of a reality where you don't see things clearly of an epistemology of an epistemology that doesn't see reality as it is reality is broken and shattered and if you read about Picasso and what he thought about the world he did not have a positive view of the world and that comes across in his art yes and he's very good at projecting Picasso is still an artist because he's still using reality and he's recreating reality he's recreating reality in a way that I don't want to experience it I don't like Picasso but I appreciate the fact that he is an artist Kandinsky is not an artist splashing paint on a canvas is not an artist I can splash paint in a canvas doesn't make me an artist did Kandinsky have a particular flair with his arms in terms of splashing the paint that made him an artist and my splashing of the paint is not art no it's just not art it's a con game now you could look at a Kandinsky painting and say it moves me there's colors yes maybe but there's nothing objective there there's actually no there there there's just splashes of paint on a canvas so there's abstraction and there's abstraction sure you can take a human form and abstract it I don't particularly like it but you're saying something, you're doing something you're recreating reality Kandinsky is not recreating reality and Warhol taking photographs and making collages of photographs not I mean yes they sell for $200 million so who am I to argue but it's just meaningless it's just a gimmick yeah sure but it's not art it can be anything it can be a reflect part of what's reflected in the period is that people view this nonsense as art that's what's interesting in the period that's what I find interesting the fact that we would contemplate you know you go into a museum I find this stunning you go into a museum and there's a piece of canvas that's all white and it's called white on white and you're supposed to take this seriously I mean seriously you're supposed to take this, this is great art it's in a museum, on a wall somebody paid a lot of money for that white on white that's a con it's over you there's no there there it's white on white just like the wall around it there's nothing special about the fact that somebody painted it white except to reflect the fact that he is smart because he's made a lot of money doing it but there's no values there there's no essence there other than it's one all of modern art in my view from the splashes to the lines to the drawings the fact that a museum would put a urinal on the wall or the fact that a museum would put a painting called white on white on a wall says that they're in on this con game that they're participating on it it would be one thing if all they had was Picasso's because I see skill, I see something there's something real there the emotion comes across and I forget the the massacre you get that because but you put that next to white on white it's the meaning to Picasso but that's what they're doing everything is white on white if you walk into a modern it's white on white some of it's got a blue streak through it it's a blue streak through white it's silly and it should be ridiculed and you know you get mangled metal on the ground there's no there there it doesn't say anything it doesn't mean anything it doesn't tell you anything I mean more at least has forms that are pretty right the forms that relate to human beings right it's decorative but the mangled metal doesn't even have a decorative purpose yeah no I mean I had a good childhood there's nothing traumatic about my childhood no I mean I never quite got it as a child my parents liked it no but now I've got it now I've got it now I know it's pseudo-intellectual BS yeah intellectual masturbation is apparent in a lot of modern art but what do you think about the post-modern art how would you do still has a lot of thought yeah but it's a nihilistic statement to undermine art that's not art putting you in a museum is not art this thought which is the purpose of that thought is to undermine the concept of art he was ridiculing the whole idea of art but that's not art but it was just ridiculing a certain circle of people but then they put it up on the wall and he thought he was an artist because he went up on the wall so no I don't think there's any thought that goes into that that's just nihilism for the sake of nihilism and yes post-modernism is worse than modernism but it's all in the same trend of anti-human being, anti-conceptual anti-values and a ridicule a fundamental ridiculing of what art really is and I think post-modernism is just worse modernism it's just but I don't think the modernists once you get past the Picasso's of the world once you get into the complete abstraction nothing there it's nothing and sooner we accept that it's nothing the sooner we have a chance at some real art I mean there's no accident that the most popular form of art today is the one that's most commercial it's movies because there's something there it might not be very good and we might all complain about another superhero movie people actually desire is to experience the heroic the interesting the exciting the thrilling they want that and painting and sculpture don't do that anymore to some extent popular music does modern classical music doesn't because some of it is just noise she can't even tolerate it it's literally painful it's why they stick it between two good pieces of music it's always the middle piece because they know if they do it first everybody will come late and if they do it last everybody will leave early but there's a reason everybody leaves because it's obnoxious it's not art now music is complicated but it's not art it's noise with this monastand it's time to call what it is to call it what it is and that is the hope of doing something better and again movies are popular because they can't afford to be completely detached from reality the few attempts at that have not gone well yep with the state there's not really much of a kind of improvement on the black one sculpture and so if you're talking about so I'm wondering what is he what did the pre-aculates kind of bring back the the word but they're going back to the Renaissance yes I'm not convinced there has to be progress in art the Renaissance is a great period because it brings back Greece now I think it improves because technically they can do better they know anatomy a little bit better certainly when you get to Bernini and that kind of movement the Greeks technically I'm not sure they could have even achieved that but yeah I think as you mentioned they are technically if you will the same but they project different values they project different ideas and it's like saying you know writing novels a novel it uses words and they use words in grammatical sentences not James Joyce but good novels actually tell a story actual sentences they're conveying a story but there's no end to the number of stories so mangling up the words which is what James Joyce does and then we think it's advancing I don't think it is it's retrograding it doesn't solve the problem we need us to tell more stories we need new stories we need different stories our experiences are different we live in a modern world today maybe that's how we know how to reflect that in sculpture but we can project new things in sculpture but the fundamental building blocks of sculpture shouldn't change it's the stories that change just like the fundamental building blocks of a novel don't change it's a story change I mean I wish there was another Victor who would go today telling us more stories in the style of the great romantics right instead we have to suffer through modern quote literature because they don't have a story to tell but we need better stories and I think for a long time from the Renaissance through the mid to late 19th century people had stories to tell and they were interesting stories they were exciting stories and they were inspiring stories and today they don't even try to tell stories they just mangle metal but it doesn't engage people it doesn't engage anybody almost nobody goes to modern art museum of their own free will almost nobody almost nobody I didn't say nobody I said almost nobody they're empty and people don't know anything about art God what a beautiful world that would be it would I mean one of the things I love about one of the things I think we are today is I think we're super rich right materially super rich materially unimaginable even a hundred years ago how rich we are materially and we're unbelievably poor spiritually unbelievably poor we don't surround ourselves with art not good art not inspiring art not art we think superhero movies either that or I don't know I don't know who does artistic movies these days Igmar Bergman is the last the guy I remember we think that's the be all and all people don't focus on beauty they don't think about beauty they don't think about spiritual values they don't listen to classical music or long-form music and really immerse themselves in it we listen on the radio we listen with our headphones we listen to pieces of nothingness that doesn't really move us and doesn't really get deep inside of us I would love to live in a world like ancient Athens where the roads were filled with sculptures davids everywhere in everything and every building people thought about what the architecture meant and how it would convey and you went to plays in the evening and you know it was a real culture that looked deep into the values that were meant to be human I don't think you have anything like that today the architecture primarily is boring it's not offensive particularly it's just boring the music is instant gratification nothing more than candy on pod candy upon candy and that's all there is and our movies are just candy even the better movies are candy movies of this magnificent potential art form that blinds every other art form into this amazing emotive medium and we make the same movie over and over and over again the same stupid romantic comedy we have no great artists the thing about spiritual poverty is you don't know you're poor 99% of the people don't know they're poor because they've never experienced it nobody teaches them instead we teach them to abstract appreciation you can teach people to appreciate art my wife's experience in art school was exactly the opposite when did she she went to art school in the early 80s and she was basically told we don't do the figurative stuff there's no point even starting don't even attempt it you know she basically had to leave the sculpture faculty and go and do photography because it was the only art faculty that would allow it to do something related to reality so the premise was you've got to start with the classics they've got a great collection of great sculptures you can start with those human beings but I think that's the mistake there is no moving forward what is sculpture sculpture fundamentally is the study of man sculpture fundamentally is about the nature of human beings the nature of man how we relate to reality if you don't have a human being I mean you can do animals but sculpture and animals doesn't really work sculpture is about the human form it's about the world yeah, Nikos yeah I mean it's good because it's an example of superficiality and shallowness in terms of its art I didn't have an example of one of these strong socially realist soviet or Nazi because they're very similar sculptures next to Michelangelo's David the difference immediately in terms of primarily individuation the soviet sculpture and the nazi sculpture had no individuation they were all the same they had the same expressions there was no real individuated anatomy it's all abstract so they project strength and nothing else because that's what they want they want to project power it's art, it's very superficial art it's very shallow art there's no depth in it but it is art it's doing something but to really get sculpture to really dig deep into sculpture one has to look at what makes the David the David and it's not just a guy with a story it's something about what Michelangelo does and how he positions him and how he sculpts what he sculpts it gives you that effect of a David so they're not going to be two Davids every one of those sculptures along the boulevard is going to be different and inspire you in a different way and affect you differently because they're telling you a different story they're projecting back to you slightly different values but I'm fine with being surrounded by positivity and optimism about the future I know that in modern times the two things that are considered high art high art means intelligible or depressing that's reality you look at every art critic out there I want to see an art critic give a favorable review to something that's intelligible and positive it just never happens now I'm not saying everything intelligible and positive is good there's a lot of garbage most of it 99% of it is garbage but I'd like to see somebody review something made in the 21st century and the Times review gives it a positive review they don't do it because that doesn't count as high art high art has to be intelligible because it's an elite art it's only the sophisticated understanding this is my comment about if there's a long essay next to it and you don't understand what the hell is the art is reflecting unless you read the essay it's garbage it's garbage it's for the elite they treat us like we're just simpletons art is not for us and that's something wrong there and then of course when it is understandable like I don't know certain art movies it has to be depressing it has to be dark life is horrible because that's real life life is horrible that's the whole message but that's the culture we live in so we're getting what we pay for we're getting what we believe in culture deserves but I want a culture of positivism of heroism, of success of achievement not superficial superhero type nonsense but of real achievement, spiritual achievement mental achievement people doing things that are important in life that's the kind of art I want I'll get to you, I'm sorry the artist that you showed us as an example how conscious do you think these artists are all the high deals and the values that they're representing? most of them are not most artists are not conscious of explicitly of what it is they're representing a lot of times an artist will tell you something about a piece of work and it's not even what's there because what really is being expressed is what we call the psychopistemology the the deep values and the way those the most deep values are affecting the way they think about the world so you know I think for example Impressionism is you know they're saying something about clarity, about ability to perceive the world about what it's like to perceive the world and are they doing that, if they study philosophy do they understand that they're making an epistemological statement, not necessarily but the fact that they want to do that that they want to blow it that they want to shade it away that they want to make it no hard borders and stuff, no clarity says something about their soul says something about their soul even if they couldn't put it to words, I think we can that's an accurate, they were cloudy because they were reacting to photography at the time which was, had motion in it because they had slow shutter speeds so they were influenced by photography and they painted what they saw in photographs I know they were, well they're not seeing what they saw in photographs they're taking the theory of color and the theory of light and saying in reality what exists out there is not these sharp lines everything's blurry and everything is so on yes that's the explanation they give for it, that's what the pointillists and the impressionists, that's what they explain but what you get, what is the effect you get the effect that you get is a blurry reality and they thrive on the blurry reality and that's what you evaluate not the excuse for why they do the blurry reality, it's the question of do I want to live in Monet's world no, it's unintelligible, yes they're pretty, I love the impressionists, I'm not saying I don't like them but it says something negative about their view of the world and I can abstract away the things I don't like about them and still enjoy them but there's something wrong there it's taken away the sharpness the vividness of the world as we see it, they're saying don't look at the sharpness art focuses you it tells you focus on this focus on the fact that everything is nothing is clear, nothing is something more deep about that morality is not clear science is not clear life is not clear, it's all shades of unintelligibility and Picasso takes it to the next level where he's fragmenting reality completely and he's telling you, your mind is not capable of really understanding what's going on in the world because everything is fragmented now let's say that epistemological deep level where I think Picasso is smart enough what he was doing but I don't think most of them knew what they were doing yeah you seem to make some very nice stuff through David when he was young it was clear he did youthful, he was juvenile which is something we all have when we're young when we're young this gets dissipated sometimes something dissipated might find it was in 3000 I wonder if you have a point of view I definitely do I definitely do have a point of view and I have a point of view about what it is about all of us that dissipates it I'm getting old and I'm trying to hold on to that youthful whatever it is with Michelangelo it's clearly Christianity it's religion, religion is oppressing him and it's also the times that he's living in he's not an artist who can do what he wants to do David the city of Florence said here's a piece of marble do what you want with it nobody else could do anything with it so he did what he wanted with it but later on he's forced to paint the 16th chapel he doesn't want to he escapes, he tries to run away from it they send the army to bring him back he wants to do the tomb of Julius the sculptures for the tomb of Julius but nobody will pay him enough to do it so he keeps getting dragged to do other things that he doesn't really want to do and again he's probably a homosexual who doesn't act on it because he feels guilty about it and he's riddled with guilt about his homosexuality Christianity we're talking about the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation so we're talking about the Inquisition now and there's Inquisition around him towards his later part of his life so he has to be careful and the people around him, his friends, have to be careful because they're not exactly strict Catholics and this is oppressing him and then on top of that he is a believer so Michelangelo unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci basically said to hell with religion and he lived his life the any way he wanted to and he didn't care and the two didn't get along one of the main reasons they speculated they didn't get along is Leonardo was probably a kind of an atheist to the extent that you could be in those times Michelangelo is a devout Christian and that ate at him think about original sin think about all the guilt that Christianity puts on you it's why he does so many pietas it's why he does so much religious symbolism when it is youth and if you look the more meaningful one is if you look at the dying slave at the Louvre maybe one of the most heart wrenching sculptures you'll ever see it's gorgeous, it's beautiful but it's sad, it's so sad it's Michelangelo, it's a life not fulfilled it's giving up dying slave is giving up, David is not and that's the transition he goes through and I think it's a burden of religion tormenting his soul everybody telling him what he cannot do it's an artist not living under freedom it's why politics is important yeah what are the art forms which one do you think is in the worst state and which one do you think is in the best I mean I think that the more sadly the more expensive the art is to produce the better it is because it has to cater to quote the masses and therefore it has to at least be understandable so I'd say that and the ones that are most subsidized are the ones that deteriorate the fastest so I would say the plastic arts are the worst the cinematic arts are probably the best opera I haven't seen a modern opera that's worth anything but they don't stage the modern operas that's the beauty of it they don't have museums of modern opera it's only in the plastic arts that we've created these massive institutions spend billions and billions of dollars on them and celebrate them and of course billionaires are bidding up the artwork so there's a huge industry and creating splashes on canvas because billionaires are buying them and their prices only go up in a sense I'm speaking against the markets because the markets usually I'm a market guy and here the market is going against me I'm sure it's all that art and I'm going to lose a fortune so I think probably the plastic arts but again mainly that's because we don't see and we don't experience modern art in other forms as I said I would never buy a CD of modern music classical music concert music and if I go to a performance I have to live through the little segment of it but they can't make money if they do a concert just of that stuff so they have to put Beethoven and Schumann on the program as well in order for us to enjoy ourselves and actually get something out of it because the middle is garbage and then ballet they still do classical ballet so in terms of all the stuff being produced today in almost every realm is bad except maybe in movies but in almost every realm is bad I mean I'm not saying they're no good artists because they are the problem is the good artists that exist today don't sell so I know sculptors who are magnificent there's a guy in Guatemala who's just fantastic and talk about doing new stuff with a form he does new stuff with a form and it's beautiful but who's gonna buy stuff nobody has an appreciation for it again this is the corruption of the concept if you teach people the white on white and the Sistine Chapel are the same thing then people lose interest in the Sistine Chapel as well of the white on white so you have less of an appreciation of art generally in the culture less people willing to buy good art and the good artists not being able to make money yeah I mean I think at the end of the day it's a con because I think nobody can take white on white seriously and yet they do so something is completely wrong there but there is a sense that our intellectual elites if you look at our intellectual elites our intellectual elites are more and more and more dominant but I think it's a con it's a con it's a con it's a con intellectual elites are more and more and more dominated by a form of nihilism by a form of hatred of the world by a form of cynicism and really looking down at the masses in a sense of if it appeals to people then it's garbage so but I think also the money now has certainly made it into a con I mean there's huge money to be made in modern art you don't have to have anybody like it except one critic who writes a good review of it and some millionaire walks in and buys your whole collection and it's self perpetuating in that sense at least until the billionaires wake up and discover that I don't think they hang them on the walls I think they buy them as investments so I do think I think though that the intellectuals out because their philosophy and their view of the world doesn't give them an escape what do we do with it we don't believe in anything so how can we have an art and that I think is the end of the day that's the point is they don't have art because they don't believe in anything postmodernism has basically destroyed the belief in anything anything goes everything goes and postmodernism again tends to create some kind of nihilism nihilism is about destruction not about building you have to want to say something with art and I don't think modern intellectuals want to say much during the lecture you highlighted a couple of great periods I really agreed the Renaissance, the Brogues and then into that there's just a splatter of just a dark age so it's more about cultural questions but when things are so great and when there's a heart inspiration why do things go wrong why do things go wrong because we don't understand why things are right and therefore we don't defend what is right we don't defend the good partially because we don't understand it we don't know so why is Greece Greece did the Romans really understand why Greece was Greece so they just copy it copy the good stuff but they really have an understanding of what made Greece great I don't think so and I would argue that the cause of that is philosophical so the Greeks destroyed Greek the person who destroyed Greece was Plato because Plato's ideas are anti progress they anti success they're anti heroism they're anti all the things that Greeks stood for so 200 years 300 years after so as his ideas are filtered through the culture and you get the Neoplatonist you get Christianity you get the deterioration and it's no accident that the real deterioration happens in the dark ages because that's the period that Christianity dominates Christianity is not a pro-human life ideology so you get anti-human life art and that's the dark ages it's Gaugoyles it's so it's you know we lose the greatness of culture and civilization because we adopt bad philosophies and we don't defend the good Greece in some sense was innocent because they were discovering everything from scratch there was no philosophy there were no ideas before Greece the ideas were all the same they were all kind of mystical trying to explain the world in terms of gods and in terms of symbols and in terms of this the Greeks are the first people to say huh I wonder what explains these things and most of their theories are wrong but they're trying to explain them in secular terms and that's why they gods are so weird and fun and crazy right because they're trying to explain even the gods in terms of human form in his own humanity but so we lost it because of Christianity because of Plato in the Roman era and Rome falls and you get the dark ages and we lost it in the 19th century or into the 20th century I think you know and the real manifestations of this I mean World War 1 or World War 2 don't just happen by accident they happen because of a certain sequence of events they happen because of ideas they happen because of ideas corrupting the soul of the west there's no accident that there was peace between the Napoleonic Wars and World War 1 it's a period of enlightenment it's a period where the world is influenced by enlightenment thinking and by the end of the 19th century early 20th century the enlightenment is dead and it's German Romanticism through and through and German Romanticism is played on steroids it's all the worst things in Plato reflected philosophically and then that's what you get you get wars and there's no accident there's a war in Ukraine and Russia right now they're gonna be more this isn't the end this isn't the be an end all the more we move towards anti-reason more collectivism less individualism less freedom less appreciation for those values the Greek values the Renaissance values the enlightenment values the more wars they're gonna be because those are the things that cause wars so we had it so that's what's happened in the 20th century we've adopted the Kantian you know Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer Marx, Nietzsche Thread it's all about emotion and fundamentally anti-reason even though they use the word a lot somebody I was gonna ask where do you think the change comes from to be intellectual to be sort of what people are demanding from artists so we think it should be from the artists it has to come from the artists because you can't demand stuff from artists art is something that you can either do or you can't you know you can learn certain skills but there's something to certainly to make great art there has to be something that's in your psychopistemology in your thought process and who you are and what you are the one that is able to come up with ideas and how to reflect certain values and then have the skill to actually execute on them you can't teach somebody to be Beethoven or Michelangelo they have to be Beethoven in a sense they're a product of their own choices and actions but they're also a product of the culture in which they rise if there's a Beethoven born today with the same genes he wouldn't write the Ninth Symphony but so it has to come from the artists and you know culture change cultural change happens in a variety of different ways but I think one of the most important ways of cultural change is through art that is artists often lead cultural change if you go back to the Renaissance the artist led that cultural change the philosophers, the thinkers the other intellectuals, the scientists and everything followed it was a philosophical spur which Aquinas I think gave to it but then it's the artist and I think what we need is a Renaissance we need artists to take art seriously to reject real values and they're the only ones who can help turn the world around we're going to a dark place and I think to save us from that dark place we need art that's why I'm so anti-modern art because that's a wrong direction definitely but do you not think it's part of that that are at the level of a mirror to some of the negative society and not just sort of portray this kind of narrative and optimism about it it has to hold it up in terms of the negatives in such a way that we get to the essence of the negative rather than the superficiality of it absolutely, I mean if you look at a sculpture like and I can never pronounce the name but the guy with the snakes and the suns that he's trying to... I mean that's not a positive sculpture that's not projecting all of us deal with our demons and all of us deal with problems and challenges but what it's projecting is the ability to cope the ability to deal with it the ability to stand up to it the ability to fight it or at least the willingness to fight it and that's what's being projected there and that I think you need even when you're projecting holding up a mirror and projecting something negative so yeah I mean there are a lot of really good I don't know anti-war movies that are pretty brutal and pretty dark but there's some there's some alternative being offered and there's something in the way they're portrayed that gives you a positive sense of where the world could go do we have to clear the room? I'll take your question I'll take your question Thank you