ON FALSE ART
Everything is here to be happy on earth.
We have snow and every day a new morning.
We have trees and rain, hope and tears.
We have humus and oxygen,
animals and all the colours.
We have distant lands and bicycles.
We have sun and shadow.
We are rich.
But what is the avant-garde fool doing with art?
He helps to destroy our existence. He is the slave of a strange group of blind and pale negative intellectuals, a kind of mafia, consisting of modern museum directors, art critics, art theory producers and negative philosophers alienated from nature and humanity.
Modern art has become a freak show of horrors.
The most absurd doings are perfected and worshipped, the doings which tend to frighten and thrill and confuse you most. Love and beauty and simplicity are suppressed by these art makers. The art makers want to stand in the front rank of the destroyers.
But art should be something very great, something religious and infinitely beautiful. Art should be a place where you can pray, where you receive intense spiritual help, a kingdom of peace. Art should help you to find the way you have lost. Art must be precious.
Art must create values and not destroy values. One should feel protected with art as if you were really at home. Art must be beautiful, true and positive. Art must return to simplicity in our more and more complicated world, and find solutions to reduce the problems in which we are more and more entangled, and not create new problems.
But if an artist is looking for the true values he has a hard time. He is considered a backward reactionary.
If an artist refuses to destroy, he is spat upon by this strange mafia of the arts because, according to a blind intellectualism which is fashionable today, there is a strange unwritten but very effective law that all simple and true and beautiful solutions have to be excluded.
For a long time, the artists ceased to be the creators of art.
It is a small international mafia of frustrated intellectuals who wants to dictate to the people what they consider as art. They are frustrated because the broad public ignores their doings which do not satisfy themselves.
They sit, unapproachable and unnoticed by the people on their thrones and speak to the people in foreign words and complicated phrases, just as doctors do in Latin procuring respect for themselves by using the fear of the incomprehensible: pop art, body art, conceptual art, land art, happening, dripping action, action painting, tachism, op art, kinetism, to name only a few expressions out of the avant-garde Latin. First the Latin was French, now it is English.
The painters are trying to please these frustrated art theory makers in the hope to get an exhibition here, an article there or to sell a painting.
Those artists who get famous by these sellouts of their souls, become the false clowns of the establishment.
Modern art became intellectual masturbation enforced as a short-lived status symbol: ugly, emtpy, cold, godless, without beauty, without heart, an art which creates unhappiness. The avant-garde artist, deprived of power, is in reality an executor of mental rubbish. All he does now is to illustrate basically wrong intellectual theories, completely estranged from the laws of nature and from what mankind is longing for.
But the way out of our mismanaged situation can only be beautiful, good and simple, otherwise we cannot follow it.
Why do you not ask your grandmother what is good and beautiful? The absence of Kitsch makes our life unbearable. Without the romantic spirit nothing works. We have lost the sense of beauty.
The average man who prefers well painted landscapes or the Virgin Mary over his bed or garden dwarfs to the fabrications of avant-garde art is not a backward reactionary, but just someone who waits for better days because he cannot find satisfaction and happiness in modern art. But negative intellectuals want to impose absurdities onto him which he dislikes, which he does not understand because there is nothing to understand, because there is no intelligence behind it except the message to destroy.
Modern art has liberated itself. This is not the first time in human history that new evolutions cannot stop or alter their rigid course and became a never ending nightmare, just like, for instance, communism, the use of the ruler and the T-square in architecture, or the use of detergents and sterilizers in our daily use.
Or nuclear energy.
Modern art as avant-garde has missed the target and hit the emptiness. This is stupid self-destruction. Culture is committing suicide. At the end of the last century, they initiated a justified liberation movement to get away from the ties and lies of stucco manierism and optic surface naturalism and to discover and explore new worlds. The important stages of this liberation have been impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, abstract art and action painting. After these purifying stages, a new creation should have started, a glorious era of a creative reconstruction. But nothing positive happened. We are still waiting for this to happen.
Frustrated intellectuals, incapable to create, got addicted to the smell of blood and destruction. Avantgardism at any price is what followed, orgies of destruction, physical and mental and cultural and at all levels, once more and again and again and again, though there is nothing left to destroy.
New-newer-newest at any price is the slogan of avantgardism, "new" stands for most effective destruction.
The avantgarde modern artist slave of the art mafia is stumbling among ruins and destroyed values, desparately looking for something which is not destroyed, which he can still kill and destroy. So the arts became perverse. This mafia which I have attacked condemns everything which does not fit her, and assumes educational functions with a hitherto unknown intolerance.
Everything that is not propagated by this mafia has no right to exist. Everything that it does not consider as art is not art. This is an intolerance without comparison, an intellectual and cultural terrorism.
This negative avant-garde's claim to politico-cultural power is similar to that of the Nazis during the Third Reich in Hitler Germany. Only the trend is reversed.
The museums of modern art are the hospitals of our exhausted society in which the diseases of civilization are cultivated and preserved instead of being healed. On exhibit are the products of a masochistic therapy, the purulent discharge of our impotence to create.
Art has bever been so artificial, so decadent, so far from nature and creation. Art means creation. The fine arts must be beautiful.
Art is not making dresses which one day will not be à la mode anymore. That is why art is not a fashion. The domaine of art is eternity. True art will not mix up with futile up-to-date issues.
True art will keep distance, it will not intervene with events. If artists intervene they become responsible. The Bauhaus, for instance, is for a big part responsible for the crimes in our rational modern architecture.
The intellectual non-creative masturbation of modern art will be co-responsible for even bigger crimes: nuclear energy, mutations, sterility, chemical and bacteriological destructions, brainwashing, transformation of man into a consumer item, genetic crimes, transformation of the laws of nature and so on.
The impotent artist who follows the orders of the negative art theory producers has become a would-be dictator. He became the blind executor of intellectual theories and mental rubbish, totally ignorant of the laws of nature and of what man is longing for.
The result is an art which gives the art consumer, the spectator, a very bad feeling which is similar to that of a hypnotised chicken.
When we are confronted with junk and garbage art, we are constantly and repeatedly told that it is the duty of art to reflect the horrors of our time like a mirror.
But this is too easy an excuse, a pityful alibi given by those artists who are incapable and impotent to create real art.
Instead of falling into the abyss together with our occidental civilization, the artist should have the duty to save himself, to fight, to find a solution and a way our which is viable for all of us.
But the modern sensible artist acts like a reporter of horrors and reacts with intellectual masturbation to impending disasters, howling like a dog when you step on his tail. This is unworthy of an artist. Culture is committing suicide. This pseudo-intellectual game must come to an end. The situation is too serious. But where is the opposition who warns us? Where are the chiefs and those responsible in art and culture who dare open their mouth and unmask the fake?
Our enemy is really the stupidity of not being able to distinguish the genuine from the false. This bulky rubbish of worthless ruins is now filling our museums, slowly diminishing in rott, rust and dust until it is forgotten.
A museum director must be made liable for his deeds and must be put in jail if he buys rubbish with public money. But this freak show of horrors of contemporary art is still worshipped like the Golden Calf and acclaimed like the emperor's new clothes in Andersen's famous story. And the emperor's new clothes will long be admired, although he has no clothes on, although he is naked.
A structure of lies collapses.
One only has to make light and the nightmare disappears as if you would open your eyes and one is no longer in the dark.
There are painters, thank God, who go their own way, imperturbable, strong and free.
They spread the good and the beautiful.
They have an aura like a dark glowing.
They are our hope.
Extract of Hundertwasser’s speech on the occasion of the award of the 1980 Grand Austrian State Prize for the Arts on 14 May 1981, translated and adapted by Hundertwasser.
Published in:
Fanale der Zeit, Zeitschrift zur freimütigen Erörterung von Lebensproblemen der Menschheit, 13. Jg., no. IV., December 1981, Vienna, pp. 12-14 (German, excerpt)
Schurian, Walter (ed.): Hundertwasser - Schöne Wege, Gedanken über Kunst und Leben. (Beautiful Paths - Thoughts on Art and Life) Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv), 1983, pp. 181-185 and ed. 2004 (Munich, Langen Müller Verlag), pp. 194-197
Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, pp. 79 - 82
Art Souvenir - Hundertwasser, In the Colour of His Brush, London: Gudrun Publishing, 2016, pp. 93-100 (excerpt)