SUNDAY, 23 MARCH 2025

This week I came across a YouTube vlog entitled Abstract Art Reflects Our SICK Culture by Andrew Klavan. His basic argument is that the modern west is morally sick, and this sickness is reflected in modern Art, and particularly in abstraction. I watched the video twice, and took notes on the second occasion, because Klavan is clearly passionate and intelligent and knowledgeable, and I didn’t want to dismiss his ideas out of hand, but with the best will in the world it seemed little more than a rant at times, or at best a piece of polemic for his personal brand of Christianity, an assortment of pet peeves about decadent contemporary life rather than a structured, coherent argument against abstraction in painting. There is little aesthetic content in his vlog.

My first question to Klavan would be: why focus on abstraction as especially pernicious? I can understand why many people dislike what they see as the ugly distortions of Expressionism or the triviality of Pop Art, the dryness of Conceptual Art or the shallow cleverness of Postmodernism. But abstract art, with its focus on colour and shape, is generally inoffensive; indeed, I would personally argue that it makes more sense to criticise it for its tendency towards the merely decorative rather than to damn it as a symptom of societal and moral decline. I can see why a Christian might dislike Bacon’s reworking of Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X or Serrano’s Piss Christ, but canvases by people like Kandinsky or Klee hardly seem to contain enough discursive content to be agents of moral degeneracy.

Klavan, as a well-educated man, must know that perhaps the most important theoretical work about western abstraction is Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and that other key figures such as Mondrian, Malevich and Rothko also saw abstract art as a movement that strived to express the spiritual rather than merely record the phenomenal. Yet Klavan chooses not to mention any of these people or the ideals that informed their work, but focuses solely on Pollock. I can understand an argument that abstract painting failed in its desire to express the inexpressible because it was attempting the impossible, but not that its intention was malign. Nor can I dismiss a suspicion that Klavan singles out abstraction for criticism because, unlike Pop Art or Photorealism, which are radically materialistic, it is grounded in a different concept of the spiritual from that of his own brand of Christianity, which makes abstraction a more dangerous opponent to the one true faith he espouses.

If Klavan’s main problem with abstraction or the modern world in general is its materialism and superficiality, I share his reservations. As belief in traditional Christianity has dwindled in the West, it is common for people to say that they don’t believe in God, but they believe in something, and the word which often comes to people’s lips in this discussion is ‘spiritual’. But does this word actually mean anything or is it just something we say to console ourselves or to flatter ourselves that we are deeper than we really are? Where I disagree with Klavan is his remedy for this loss of deeper meaning: a return to old-time religion with its dogma beyond question, its cosying up to authoritarian regimes, and its barbarity towards heretics. Christianity has always had a problem with syncretism and in my opinion that makes it far more dangerous than paint dribbled onto a canvas.

In his video, Klavan never discusses the spiritual or questions what it might mean; he just takes it for granted that everyone knows what it is and Christianity alone can offer it as the only cure that can rescue our sick society. For me, this avoids the difficult questions which he skirts around at points but never faces head on. He speaks of a new Renaissance when we combine what we have learned from science with a re-emergence of Christian faith, but this assumption that a revived Christianity will solve the woes of the world seems hopeful at best if the history of the established Christian church is anything to go by. And there is the added question, of course, of what any of this has to do with colours and shapes on a non-representational canvas.

Another concern of Klavan which I share to some extent is the loss of Beauty in painting in the 20^th century, by which I assume he means the work that came after the Impressionists and with the advent of Modernism (he seems to have no issue with basing a lot of his vlog on quotes from the arch-Modernist, Eliot, though, since Eliot later converted to Christianity). In focusing on a painting by Pollock and making it his key example of abstract art, Klavan is being highly selective: rhetorically astute, but disingenuous. Pollock’s work is much more disorderly at first glance than a Mondrian or a Klee, and much more likely to attract comments that ‘my five-year-old daughter could do that’ or ‘it looks like someone has just thrown the paint at the canvas’; if there is beauty in Pollock’s work (and I am not an enormous fan, although I feel it has a clear integral structure and is not just the random splashing of paint and other substances onto a canvas), it does not yield up its beauty in the easy manner of many other examples of abstract art. Elsewhere, contrary to what Klavan claims, some of the most intensely beautiful paintings of the 20^th century were the work of abstractionists, with Rothko as a prime example.

But, like many other topics in the video, this lament about the loss of Beauty is briefly mentioned and then passed over for other, different examples of things of which Klavan disapproves: de Sade, rap music, the ‘idolatory of scientism’, the Hindu concept of maya, feminism that sees being a woman as ‘a social construct’ and aims to make her ‘an imitation man’, transgender activism that believes that ‘men can become women’, art as a product of ‘theory’ rather than of ‘lived experience’. If I interpret Kravan’s words correctly, even Blake gets a rap on the knuckles, presumably because his Christianity edged towards a mysticism which transcends the dogmas of official faith and is therefore perilously close to being heretical. With the possible exception of maya as one of the eastern philosophies which influenced many western post-war artists, I fail to see a connection between any of the things which Kravan condemns and abstract art. I assume that this scattering throughout the video of what he sees as examples of contemporary decadence is offered up as proof for his contention that the modern world is sick, but his argument would be much stronger if it didn’t read like a list of personal bêtes noires.

Like many modern-day Christian advocates I watch on YouTube, Klavan seems to long for a past that exists only as nostalgia. He states that our modern morality is ‘basically sadism’, while never mentioning the horrors of a religion which waged religious wars and burnt people at the stake for the slightest hint of heresy. Klavan wants a future Renaissance and predicts that ‘a new dawn is coming’, but the past Renaissance that he eulogises for creating the greatest of art also paved the way for the scientific revolution and the modern rejection of absolutist Christianity and a contemporary world which he seems to so deeply despise. Ultimately, therefore, I feel there is little in his video that genuinely engages with the arguments for and against non-representational art, what it can and cannot do, and consequently my response has centred on religious belief rather than artistic practice. Kravan’s core concerns and motivation seem religious rather than aesthetic, with the latter used merely as a wedge to slip in a piece of polemic for his personal brand of theology.