Readers sometimes ask me why I don’t post so-called “conceptual art” here at NOT PC. My simple answer is to say it’s not art. The longer answer involves explaining what art is (it's the technology of the soul, of course). The middle step involves ridicule and a few pointed home truths. This is the approach taken by Don Boudreaux in a letter to the Washington Post about an alleged artist they profiled who uses human bones in his “conceptual” anti-art. [Hat tip Tibor Machan]
Dear Editor:
Benjamin Kelley says that his art "represents the dehumanization of modern society" ("An artistic body of work's bone of contention," July 16). I'd like to ask him which aspects of pre-modern society he believes to have been most humane. Was it a life-expectancy of about 30 years? How about mass illiteracy? Maybe Mr. Kelley longs for the odors, lice, and scabs that regularly adorned human bodies that seldom bathed and that slept on dirt or straw?
Possibly Mr. Kelley regrets that the homicide rate in modern society is far lower - as much as ten-times lower - than in pre-modern societies? Perchance he laments modernity's liberation of women from the oppressive dominance of men? Maybe he finds fault with modern humans' greater skepticism of tales of witches and sentient volcanoes? Or perhaps Mr. Kelley is upset simply because modernity has eradicated slavery?
Being only 26 years old in modern society, Mr. Kelley has many decades left to reject his fashionable romantic nonsense about a past Golden Age. Were he born just a few generations earlier, however, not only would he have been unable to earn a living as an artist, his own stint in humanity would have been much shorter.
Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030
Below is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Working in Marble. You can read about it here and here, and enjoy it here:
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