The launch of a new series of Remodern America videos. Number one is a video about British Conceptual artist Damien Hirst, memento mori, and vanitas paintings. Unlike the inspirational art of the past, the current establishment contributes to our destruction by replacing art with icons of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual deterioration.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I did not watch The Office during its run. I do understand it was a popular culture phenomenon. It’s still used as meme fodder.
Recently I have watched some snippets and seen some funny stuff. And also, this poignant little moment.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Francis Bacon was one of the great painters of the 20th century. An encounter with one of his works was instrumental in me becoming a painter.
In 1966, Bacon gave an insightful interview on his artistic ideas and practices. It’s interesting to hear him describe his dark practices in such a posh, upper class accent.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
My wife, artist Michele Bledsoe, found me this video. The old TV show Columbo is a comfort to us. The audience was shown right up front who committed the (usually tastefully presented) murder. The mystery was how would Lt. Columbo catch them.
The perpetrators were always elitists. Powerful people who thought they could get away with it. Columbo kept them off guard by coming across as a befuddled little working stiff, overly polite, clueless. Until he found his angle.
Just when the villain thought they were about to be rid of him, Columbo came back to ask, “Just one more thing.” This inquiry was always the beginning of the end for the murderers, who realized too late this funny little guy was not what he seemed to be.
Peter Falk was incredible in this role. I hope they never try a reboot, it could not be done without him.
It turns out the actor also enjoyed making art. This video displays a collection of Peter Falk’s drawings, set to the opening music from the old Mystery Movie of the Week.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Norman Rockwell created iconic scenes of American life in the 20th century. As a commercial illustrator, he had to work fast, so I forgive his use of a projector to do his drawings from photographs. As this video notes, he originally worked from life, so I have no doubt he was an amazing draftsman on his own. And he could tell such stories in a single image, something I often strive for.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Neo Rauch (born April 18, 1960 in East Germany) paints massive, ambiguous figurative scenes.
Here is a silently contemplative video showing Rauch at work.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
“Elitists crashed our culture, assuming they would rule over the ruins.
That’s not going to happen. “
Richard Bledsoe: A Remodern America Video
Art
The great culture warrior Andrew Breitbart once observed, “Politics is downstream from culture.” This brilliant statement is a paraphrase of a pronouncement made by visionary English artist William Blake: “Empires follow art, and not vice versa…”
Before our elites swamped us with fake news, they undermined us with fake art. I’m Richard Bledsoe. Welcome to Remodern America.
A funny thing happened during the Twentieth century. In the Modern era, the timeless human practice of art as the communal communication of significance, order, and beauty found new modes of expression that created intense artistic experiences. However, these dynamic developments were ultimately derailed by Leftist partisans. The art world establishment colluded to promote muddled and meaningless experiments previous generations would have recognized were not worthy of the name of art.
By the 1960s, the inadequate art created as the Modern era was corrupted paved the way for something far worse: the lies and delusions of Postmodernism. Postmodernism is the governing philosophy of the globalist scheme we are currently suffering through. Its practitioners are trampling reason, truth, and competence, all in pursuit of unaccountable power.
Postmodernism a systematic effort by the New Aristocracy of the Well Connected to switch off the Enlightenment, so they can rule over a New Dark Age.
Elitist Postmodern culture does not produce art, but artifice-phony substitutes which not only don’t fulfill the purpose of art, but actively block it.
The traditional function of art was to encourage humanity to think and feel deeply, It gave us the opportunity to recognize the eternal in a tangible form. What do the Postmodern culture industries give us instead of this uplifting experience today?
Irrelevance.
Carrion.
Excrement.
Debris.
Pornography.
And especially, propaganda.
Junk like this is what you get when you deny that God is the center of existence. Our self-aggrandizing ruling class is trying to remake the world in their own rotten image.
Marxists need cultural destruction. Tainting the arts was deliberate. And if you think this stuff doesn’t matter, that this is just stuff safely contained in galleries and museums, guess again. The contamination spreads. If we’ve going to fix this situation, we need to fix the arts first.
Art shows us who we are. Art shows us what we can become. Art shows us how to be.
As the critic Theodore Dalrymple noted, “To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
Those elitist lies which served as the foundation of Postmodernism didn’t stay isolated in the fine arts. Today Postmodernism is the sick agenda which dominates government, corporations, entertainment, academia, and especially the media. Once we came to tolerate their fake version of art, all the other cultural institutions were infiltrated, and fell to the long marchers.
Postmodernism would have you believe reality is shaped by the powerful’s manipulation of language, They’re using the global media to try to prove this theory.
We are living trapped in a carefully scripted fake news world, where nothing is allowed that contradicts the invented narratives. This fraudulent world is becoming increasingly dangerous, lashing out at anyone who does not submit to it. But how can we break this spell of delusion and falsehood?
It’s already begun. And it started the same way that Postmodernism did. The change in direction began in the arts.
In 1999 two English artists, Charles Thomson and Billy Childish, launched an effective replacement for Postmodernism, when they first described Remodernism.
These two idealistic men recognized the need for a populist art movement to counter the elitist fraud of Postmodernism. Remodernism is the open source art movement for the 21st Century. Remodernism is a spiritual renaissance in the arts, the return of art as a revelation. No more elitist virtue signaling. Remodernism supports art which enables us to connect with ourselves, each other, and our Creator.
Remodernism is the latest iteration of the American character: ordinary people working as explorers and inventors, optimistic, self-reliant and productive. The Remodernist artist formulates expressions of personal liberty in pursuit of higher meaning and significance. Remodernism is the pursuit of excellence. Imagine a creative class dedicated to celebrating this country, instead of trashing it. Art can bring us together.
The frontier is the natural environment for an American. And today, we stand on the threshold of a new wilderness-the wasteland that has been created by the failures and betrayals of our credentialed Postmodern classes.
Elitists crashed our culture, assuming they would rule over the ruins. That’s not going to happen. Remodernism reboots the culture. We will build again, stronger than ever.
Our Creator provided us the gift of art to give us a means to communicate ideas that can’t be reduced to mere language. Art is a powerful resource for human betterment that has been sidelined by elitist malfeasance; it’s time we took it back. And art is fun! It’s entertainment that rises to the sacred. Enduring changes start in the arts. Renew the arts, and renew the civilization.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The art exhibit Under Television Skies has been a wonderful event. But during the January Third Friday reception, a whole different form of the arts will be represented when First Studio presents “Don’t Touch That Dial,” an evening of spoken word performance.
Once upon a time network television was the dominant force of media in this country, monopolizing communal communications and perceptions. Such limited choice seems quaint these days. Participating poet Shawnte Orion mused on how times have changed. “Before internet reduced the wide world to the convenient click of a mouse, we were tenuously connected to people on the other side of the country who also liked and followed the same television shows we were watching at thirty instagrams per second,” he observes.
Making use of the historic studio floor of the space, the performers of “Don’t Touch That Dial” will pay tribute to the vanishing age of television. The poets include: Manuel Arenas, Richard Bledsoe, Bill Campana, Jack Evans, Jeff Falk, Neil Gearns, Heather Smith-Gearns, Judy Green-Davis, Philip Haldiman, Trish Justrish, Deborah Berman-Montano, Joe Montano III, Ian Murdock, Shawnte Orion, Tracy Thomas, and more!
Although mass market TV tended towards lowest common denominator entertainment, every now and then a genuine work of art would slip in. Here is one of those moments of unexpected grace from 1959, when author Jack Kerouac performed accompanied by Steve Allen’s piano improvisations.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 