W(h)ither

Just a little stream-of-conciousness rant after listening to Paul van Nevel's time-stopping rendition of Brumel's Missa et Ecce Terrae Motus:
Without wanting to walk into the pitfall of some Luddite ‘it’s all going down’-stance, the sheer beauty and splendour of this 500 years old music, compared to a lot of what’s going on in music today, both in the composed and the popular world, did make me wonder where we have gone wrong. The same question arose a while ago as I walked through the Centre Pompidou, watching such impressive masterpieces as a heap of rusted metal wire, half a cabbage on top a pile of bricks and a piece of ‘video art’ consisting of a 40 second loop of a man falling of a building… To me, it seems undeniable that art is in a deep crisis. The old values of Beauty, consolation and confirmation seem to have all but disappeared, and even high modernism’s quest to be a 'windowless monad’, shedding light into the sublime depths of existence has come to an end. 

Art has lost the religious function from which the whole phenomenon of ‘art’ arose in the first place. What began as romanticism and evolved into modernism reached its logical conclusion and inevitable endpoint in both the Black Square by Malevitsj and the 4’33" by Cage. The pre-occupation with doing something "new" is a form of insanity.

Only a culture whose notion of time has degenerated to the point that is considered to move forward only in a linear direction, toward a future that epiphianizes right and shits out wrong, could deign to reward us exclusively for our "stunning originality" and "newness", "freshness" etc. And only that kind of cultural/cosmological time-paradigm could result in the 'liquidation' of the creative aspect along horizontal lines. Even when an artist finds connection to supernal sources outside of time, if that artist has any 'success' by the society's standards, it is for his/her "fresh take" on something old, or for the stunning "newness" of something that has simply been forgotten, or rather is an ever-present reality across all time --- which in fact generates time. But if all that is forgotten, anyone who 'remembers' it or any small part of it is either rewarded as a 'pioneer' genius or a madman. We see here one more familiar and fetishized false dichotomy, which is nothing less than a cliche resulting from the blinders placed upon time by the marching cult of progress.

This form of insanity is the scourge and death of all the arts, precisely because it is the scourge and death of that vector of human consciousness itself --- the part that stands on time's Horizons and yet perceives it's share of the Limitless, the un-time-bound. The source of all Art. Everything simply rots without it. And no amount of desperate grappling for "newness" will ever reconstitute it. That is simply not the way. (Unless the way is regression and death).

So, now that art has largely been cut-off from its religious source and postmodernism has put an end to high modernism’s pretentions as some ersatz-religion, what’s next? Can great music/art still be made in our time, or are the only options left to us to play with the debris left by the Masters, or to have art be nothing more than a mirror that reflects our agonised, jaded and tired existence? 

Or have I just been reading to much Roger Scruton and is the situation nowhere near as bleak as it seems to me?