Camille 🦋⃤♡⃤🌈⃤(🧚‍♀️)

Great art is not "moral." It is not interested in a trite, sentimental version of "beauty." Yes, Rembrandt is beautiful, but not the type of beauty that these modern conservatives think of. If you look closely at Rembrandt, especially his portraits...his mark making has a certain rawness, and an "ugliness." He literally would put sand in the paint to give it texture. His self-portraits in later work have this tender rawness, and when you look at the paint up close, he allows it to have this frayed, worn quality by his use of the sand. But when you step back from the paintings, all of this abstraction and ugliness comes together to form something that is richly beautiful I met my wife at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. For a short time we were security guards there. One of the greatest privileges of this job was to guard the Francis Bacon retrospective there and talk to a friend of Bacon, Michael Peppiat who wrote his biography. Bacon said, "you learn by looking, not by being taught." I spent hours staring at and analyzing Rembrandt's greatest painting, "Lucretia." Now this painting is far from technically perfect. He really struggled with Lucretia's hand holding the knife she used to commit suicide. The expression on her face is a spirit. This was not created by Rembrandt, it was something he conjured. This painting is not an "illustration" of a person or an event. It is a sensation done with mark making. The subject matter is secondary. Great painting is the mark creating an emotional sensation. When one sees this painting in person, and when one looks at the actual paint marks on the canvas, one will notice just how perverse and ugly this painting really is, and how it goes beyond beauty and beyond ugliness into what is called the sublime. We see in Rembrandt an existential anguish coming forth from the spirit of female that exits in the center of the Universe. This is a dark spirit, born of the Other Side. One time when I was working and staring at the painting, an old man said aloud. "You're feeling it aren't you? That painting is more alive than any fucking person walking around in this museum." The gods always talk to me in this way. This painting is not realism. It is Surrealism. It is more than real. It comes from the Other Side. It's a distortion yet a mirror of our reality. The woman in the painting goes beyond being the wife of Lucius defending her honor after being raped by Sextus. She represents existential anguish. Pain that is transcendent. She is both fragile and powerful, more than human in her suffering. When I first saw Kiki Smith's "Tail" in art school, I felt the same existential anguish, not of disgust, but the same eternal existential anguish of the female. Why that young woman who saw the piece in that gallery it gave her the same existential horror that Rembrandt delivers in "Lucretia" but by different means no less sublime. What she saw in "Tail" is the reason why all the horror in the Universe exists. She looked into the same Void that someone who self-mutilates does. She looked into the Void of the subconscious where female perversion exists. She looked into the Void where absolute self erasure exists. Though the materials of Smith's work are seemingly brutal, when you see "Tail" in person, there is an inexplicable delicateness to it. The piece itself is very fragile. It is my view, that the materials itself that make the sculpture of "Tail" have the same, deliberate, tactile ability to show suffering as beauty and the sublime as Rembrandt's Lucretia. There are some that say Kiki Smith's art is "communistic." No. Socialist Realism is communistic. The realist illustrative art that the Right obsesses on with some of the fantasy art has actually more in common with Socialist Realism than Kiki Smith's existential pain. Surrealist art is a communication from the Mauve Zone, the zone between sleeping and waking. from the place of Non-Being. Art is a shamanic way of dealing with pain and existential crises. It is a form of problem solving. The obsession on a sentimental form of beauty meaning "uplifting pretty pictures and realism" is not art. Art doesn't uplift. It shakes the world to its foundations. It's beauty is in its ability to look deep into our most beautiful and our most dark dreams. It is Dionysian. This is something the Christian worldview in the modern world cannot comprehend.