“Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.”

— Donald Kuspit

"Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art" http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/reconsidering_print.htm, Blackbird (2003).

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American art critic 1935

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“The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.”

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“The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world”

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