When I was eight years old, this courthouse burned to the ground.   It was such a huge monument in my young life along with grandparents’ home by the County Fairgrounds and my grandfather’s Rexall drugstore on the Square, I could not imagine it was destroyed in one night.  I was distraught and inconsolable.  I tell this story because it was an early hard lesson in loss and how much architectural structures affect our lives even when we don’t think about it.

Martin Gurri is on my short list of smartest people alive and this is his take about art.  Now I know that most folks here are busy and not particularly concerned with the way their environments may appear on a daily basis.  It takes a lot of work to live, but Gurri titles his essay The Artist As Tyrant.  It is 1991…

I had never seen the museum before and although I knew what to expect, the sight of it left me scratching my head. Here was a tangle of metal guts and pipes, rusting in the moist Parisian air. The ugliness, being intentional, could be a case of my not getting it: Chacun à son goût. But what surprised me was how old-fashioned this architectural monster felt. It had been finished only 14 years before and was hypermodern, but the modern, at that twilight moment, had become out of date.

Inside, the feeling returned in force. Not wishing to appear a dunce, I tried to decipher the enigmatic canvases and obscure sculptures, reading their titles with growing perplexity, until a sudden conviction seized me: None of this will last. French academic art in the 19th century produced thousands upon thousands of works, all stored in museum attics today. The same will happen to most productions of modern art. They are an affectation, a pose rather than a style, and affectations can’t last beyond the circumstances that made them socially intelligible.

Have you ever driven into a small town like Lockhart of Jefferson and been immediately affected by the beauty of the buildings ?

Caldwell County Courthhouse, Lockhart, Texas

Insofar as art has a moral function, it is to embody and make real the abstract ideals of the community—its beliefs, history and traditions. Yet an avant-garde sees itself quite differently: Its moral mission must be to eradicate, by whatever means, the community’s love affair with the past.

Modern art declared war on tradition, on convention, on morality, on historical Western notions about the place of beauty and human dignity in artistic production. Styles were invented or imported from alien cultures, never consciously evolved from the European masters. Modernism, like Leninism, wished to bully rather than seduce the community into a better future.

Martin Gurri critiques modern art, but the same principles apply to our public architecture.  I still to this have a visceral reaction to this Brutalist Architecture monstrosity.

Austin County Courthouse, Bellville, Texas 1961

Recognized artists and popular architects have a profound effect on how we perceive our culture, our purpose and ourselves.  Their work is either in our faces or subtly bleeding into all the images we see in advertising, labeling, consumer design and popular imagery.

The modernists wished, like God, to create out of nothing, but human beings lack that much imagination. They abolished tradition, and in doing so aborted themselves. They sought to improve the species with their private visions of the future, but art is a language, not a religion or a political platform. It gives reality to values, relations and ideals forged in the community at large—the living and the dead. Divorced from the community and hostile to its ideals, modern art was from the start morally hollow, and within a generation became a series of empty poses and gesticulations turning back on themselves…

Behold the Pompidou Center museum in Paris.  It is the lifeless dead end…a mortuary for beauty.