Why is Modern Art So Ugly?

"Emotionalism is simultaneously the source and the end-result of both modern art and the heresy of Modernism – ideas and doctrines are reduced to emotionally-stimulating imagery, like mascots and jingles."

From One Peter Five

By Michael Hichborn

The Vatican’s decision to adopt cartoonish, trivialized symbols, such as the blue-haired ‘Luce’ mascot, is a symptom of a disturbing shift within the Church.  The current trend moving the Church away from Her treasury of glorious art to commercialized trinkets is a mere triviality to many, but the history of this move is darker than most realize.

The age-old question of whether life imitates art, or art imitates life essentially asks whether it is the art which impacts society and shapes the culture – and therefore the artist is an agent of change – or whether the artist is merely an agent of expression, reflecting what is already present within the culture.  The partial answer is that it’s a little of both, but what is missing from the equation is that the underlying philosophy of the artist is what drives it all.

The earliest traces of what is today referred to as modern art are firmly rooted in the French Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment, but it didn’t really take off until the late 1800s. Goya’s Romanticism led to Manet’s Impressionism. Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism led to the avant-garde experimentation of Les Nabis, French painters who transformed the medium and laid the foundation for the abstract symbolism of modern art.

Most of art history is focused on the development of technique or style, but what is often ignored is the actual philosophy of the artists themselves.  One of the early progenitors of modern art, a Romantic artist named Eugene Delacroix, said: “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”  As a philosophy of art, it excuses imperfection and imprecision, but as a philosophy of life, it suggests something worse: that one need not seek to express truth and beauty with precision because the impression is good enough, and error is not to be avoided.  While this may seem like a stretch, this notion bears out with each succeeding generation of artists.

James Whistler, the American painter who is best known for painting his mother in a rocking chair, once said “Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.”  What he is saying is that art is some kind of spontaneous energy that supersedes intelligence which – in a manner of speaking – possesses the artist and simply creates.  This notion of art not only discourages the intelligibility of an artistic rendering but eliminates the objectivity of the art itself, which should be directed toward Truth.

Paul Cezanne – an avant-garde, post-impressionist painter – was called, “the father of us all” by the Communist Cubist, Pablo Picasso.  Henri Matisse called him “a kind of dear god of painting.”  In speaking of the origin of an artistic piece, Cezanne said, “A work of art which did not begin in emotion, is not art.”  This was a revolutionary idea and a radical shift in the nature of art itself.  No longer an expression of the good, the true, and the beautiful, an artistic rendering must now be found in the expression of an emotion.

This radical shift in art from beauty and truth to emotive experience did not happen in a vacuum.  The heresy of Modernism rose to prominence at the same time.  Pope Pius IX warned about some of its errors, and Pope St. Pius X condemned them.  And after a close and careful examination of these two movements, one discovers that the medium of modern art is nothing more than a carefully crafted expression of the Modernist heresy.  The underlying ideology of Modernism is the notion that religion is something that wells up from within as an experience or a feeling, while the reformed nature of art – as defined by the modern artists – is that art is the expression of an emotion or an experience that wells up from within the artist.

In his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, P. Pius X pointed out that the Modernists recoil from the establishment of absolute truth, preferring the development or evolution of dogmatic ideas as they are expressed in different ways, keeping them open to interpretation.  The Modernist philosopher and theologian will say that one cannot explain an objective truth but can only suggest emotional and experiential impressions that convey some notion of religion, or a truth already present within.  These artists are no different!  The movement from objective beauty to sketchy impressions and undefined forms, merely hinting at an object or a feeling, is an exact reflection of the philosophy of the Modernists.

Throughout the 20th century, the quiet infiltration of the Modernists in the Church took firm root within the arts so that by the time the New Mass was published in 1969, the radical artistic transformation of the Church could begin.  The music was fundamentally changed from chant and polyphony to guitars and folk songs.  Gorgeous paintings were removed to make way for felt banners.  Magnificent, lifelike statues were discarded, and in their place came rough-hewn, dead-faced wooden carvings.  Stained glass windows depicting the saints were scrapped in favor of disjointed mosaics of color.  Even the architecture was radically changed.  In essence, where we once saw saints and sacred figures, we now see vague shapes and symbols rooted in emotional expression for the stimulation of an emotional response.

This was not a mere movement of the culture, but a dramatic shift orchestrated by Modernist artists and their spiritual superiors.  In short, the intention was to impose upon life an imitation of the art being set into place: the medium became the agent of change.

Ever since that revolutionary paradigm shift, the war between Tradition and Modernism raged on throughout all of Christendom as the Modernists fought with relentless ferocity to eradicate all vestiges of the eternal glory of Christendom!  But slowly and tenaciously, the small remnant of Traditional Catholicism grew and on the verge of flourishing, Pope Francis received the keys.

For the last eleven years, the Church has been forced to endure the embarrassing infantilization of the Church.  Glorious Vatican creche scenes were replaced by bizarre and brutalist renditions that are barely even recognizable as human.  Official Vatican projects are represented by clip-art style icons, Vatican documents are written in crayon-style fonts, and now, an androgynous, yellow-raincoated figure with blue hair called “Luce” is the official “mascot” for the Holy Year of Mercy 2025.  Faithful Catholics rightly wondered if the blue-haired ‘Luce’ was a joke. Unfortunately, it’s not.

The old saying, “the medium is the message” is well applied here, added to it the mission of the devils: “anything but prayer.”  Religious art should lift the soul toward God, not evoke sentimentality.  For the Modernist, however, the purpose of religious art is to shift focus from timeless truths to transient feelings.

And so, for the last fifty-five years, the message of Modernist religious art has been to de-emphasize the sacrificial nature of the Mass by singing about bread, wheat and grapes; to encourage involvement in social justice by depicting the Holy Family as refugees; to discourage horror and sorrow at sin by placing the Risen Christ on the cross; and to inspire a “communal” understanding of the Church by redesigning parishes as round structures.

After decades of exposure to Modernist religious art, many Catholics have lost sight of what true sacred art represents, and there is a reason for this.  The Modernists have long known that the only way to fully implement their revolution is to sever all ties with Tradition.  To accomplish this, the Modernists created a massive generational gap by severing the living memory of Tradition while raising the next generation with Modernist sensibilities.

The Vatican’s recent turn to juvenile music, artwork, and fonts is not an accident.  These are very deliberate decisions, and the message of the medium is “We are trying to attract the youth.”  It’s the same method employed by fast-food executives and cereal companies.  The fast-food industry, looking to attract children and parents, uses colorful fonts and the lure of toys.  Cereal companies put colorful mascots on the boxes and use catchy jingles in their commercials.  In other words – these executives are trying to spark an emotion or experience in the observer.

Emotionalism is simultaneously the source and the end-result of both modern art and the heresy of Modernism – ideas and doctrines are reduced to emotionally-stimulating imagery, like mascots and jingles.  With the idea that emotion is what fuels modern art and the Modernist understanding of religion, it is necessary to use emotion-inducing images and sounds to sell their ideas.  And this is how Luce came to be.

The backlash to the Vatican’s introduction of “Luce” was immediate.  Amazingly, the response to that backlash was almost as swift.  Many conservative-minded Catholic accounts on social media have taken to calling those reacting negatively to Luce as “boomers.”  Why?  Because they grew up on a steady diet of cheap art and have lost the sense of proper comportment regarding religious matters.  Fifty-five years of trying to make the Faith “fun” and “relevant” to the culture has dumbed and cheapened the Faith so much that a cute, non-threatening figure like Luce is seen as an appropriate symbol of the Faithful.  Worse still is the fact that so many Catholics fail to recognize that an institution like the Church holds such a high place of dignity that it is entirely undignified for it to produce trinkets such as this.

As the rallying cry of Hell is “anything but prayer,” the new artistic Modernism in the Church instills a sentimental emotion within the viewer while avoiding any kind of inspiration to pray.  Modernist artwork like this is designed to actualize the Modernist philosophy that religion is a sense that wells up from within, and as long as an icon like Luce causes the observer to develop a sentimental sense within themselves regarding the Faith, that’s all that matters.  This is why World Youth Day is essentially a big party with some religion sprinkled in.  Provided the revolutionaries in the Church can keep the faithful rooted in the idea that art is an emotional expression, they can continue to push the narrative regarding LGBT ideologies, divorce, false religions, and diverse liturgical expressions.  Why?  Because if life is an imitation of art, then the philosophy of art is what will inform the observer, and the agents of change can continue to manipulate the members of the Body of Christ into believing what they want them to believe.  And if art is an imitation of life, then the revolutionaries can point to the artistic forms and say that this is the will of the Holy Spirit, and those who refuse to embrace and accept that are the heretics.

A new paradigm is coming, but Our Lord gave us an anchor.  Our Lady is the one who holds the other end of the Rosary, and she has promised that those who pray the Rosary faithfully will not be lost.  Our time is growing increasingly more perilous by the day, making it even more imperative that we pray the Rosary with faith and fervor.  Pray often, pray well, and please God, when the storm passes, we will all be found at Our Lady’s feet with the chains of the Rosary in hand.