In her most recent book, Glittering Images, Camille Paglia delivered some real talk about the state of modern art:
One reason for the marginalization of the fine arts today is that artists are too often addressing other artists and the in-group of hip cognoscenti. They have lost touch with the general public, whose taste and values they caricature and scorn. A majority of American artists, like a majority of American professors, are liberals who have little or no contact with those of opposing views. But the firebrand, antiestablishment, free-speech liberalism of the 1960s (with which I strongly identify) has evolved into a utopian dreamworld of the comfortable professional class, with its vague philanthropic impulses and strange passivity toward a bloated, authoritarian government. A monolithic orthodoxy has marooned artists in a ghetto of received opinion and cut them off from fresh ideas. Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.
I couldn't help but think of that passage when I read a Washington Post story on this piece of "art" making the rounds through DC:
The bullet-riddled bus, at first glance the remains of some unspeakable tragedy, is an art piece, one that received its first U.S. showing on the back of a flatbed tow truck driving through the streets of downtown Washington this weekend. ...
Artist Viktor Mitic created the work, titled "Incident," last fall after a spate of gang violence in his home town of Toronto. It involved Mitic buying a small used school bus, taking it to a rural Canadian location and inviting several well-armed compatriots to blow thousands of holes in it, raging from .22-caliber plinks to shotgun blasts. ...
"Incident" resonated after the mass shooting in December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and Mitic was invited to show the piece as part of a D.C. show, "Newtown Project: Art Targets Guns." It is also being shown Monday through Wednesdayat George Mason University’s Fairfax campus.
From The School of Athens to The Bullet-Riddled Bus: 500 Years of Decline!
This is why the average person doesn't take the art world seriously. Stuffed shark corpses, crucifixes dipped in urine, shot-up school buses: these things are not art. They're not even particularly interesting non-art. And the fact that they're treated seriously by the doyens of the art world inspires not deep contemplation by the masses but mockery and laughter. The response is justified—and it's killing the world of fine art.