Beauty and the permanent things

A few years back, I read an exciting essay in The American Enterprise that explored the neorealist trend in modern painting. Turns out that Jacob Collins, one of the artists featured in the piece, ran his atelier not far from where I lived in Brooklyn. I went one cold winter afternoon over there with some friends to see the work of Collins and his students. The atelier was dark and cold, but the work these students were doing was phenomenally beautiful. I could hardly bear to leave it, but in truth, it was so frigid that we couldn't handle staying. I left thinking: these people are relatively poor, but they know what beauty is. This is a good place, I thought.

Back on the street level, a friend who was with me was attracted by the warm glow from the windows of an art gallery next door. It was posh and inviting, so we went in. The art was grotesque, horrifying. One of the main pieces was an installation involving dismembered baby dolls with bloodstained dresses and rubber body parts. Despite the light, there was so much darkness. This is an evil place, I thought. We couldn't wait to get out of there.

I got to thinking about all that just now when I saw that Roger Kimball of The New Criterion discovered a similar atelier in Harlem, and gave a talk there the other day. He reproduces it on the mag's blog. Well worth reading. Here's a quote:

The serious art of today tends to be a quiet affair. It takes place not at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, not in the Chelsea or TriBeCa galleries, but off to one side, out of the limelight--at The Harlem Studio, for example. This is because real art tends to involve not the latest thing, but permanent things. Permanent things can be new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured less by the buzz they create than by the silences they inspire. In other words, the future of our artistic culture is not in the hands of today's taste makers, but those whose talent, patience, and perseverance will ultimately render them the taste makers of tomorrow. I mean, of course, that the future is up to artists like those who congregate around the Harlem Studio and other such outposts of civilization.