Art is the salvation for the talentless

I don’t call my work art. The reason is simple: all fields that the ideas of Art have touched, have crumbled to dust. From modern architecture, modern concert music, to modern paintings. All have embraced the art-concept of “originality,” which, taken to extremes, simply means bad looking, ugly and alien.

“New” is the new religion, and all kinds of atrocities are done in its name. None of the old masters cared about originality. They knew that the world either improves or stagnates. They chose to improve, building on knowledge from the past. “New” is an excuse for not improving oneself.

Art is the salvation for the talentless, for the Platonist, for the modern universities. It is an intellectual game that tells us to reject our nature. That tells us that every time a new shoe-box building shows up in our city, we should learn to love it. If a new classical building is being built on the other hand, we are told not to like it. 

It’s kitsch they tell us, it’s a pastiche. 

But how can nature be our enemy, when we ourselves are nature?

Kitsch is the salvation for the talent. For while art shows us something “new”, kitsch shows us something familiar. I know there exists bad, even awkward kitsch. That is the nature of a natural hierarchy. I choose kitsch because I am not afraid of embarrassing myself, I am not afraid of improvement. I choose to satisfy myself, my nature and my eternal soul.

Kitsch does not represent the dichotomy of representational versus abstract painting, but rather that of the passionate versus the disinterested epxression.

— Jan-Ove Tuv, kitsch painter