Aping art
The painting in the photo shown below caused at least one art expert1
to ‘shiver with excitement’ when she saw it. She thought it was a great
discovery. Its worth? ‘We’re talking thousands of dollars, rather than
hundreds,’ she said, pointing to a picture on the wall of a similar painting
valued at $300,000, an abstract expressionist work by the Cobra school of painters.
However, the painting below was done by Gypsy the chimpanzee2 (shown
left). Others fooled apparently included a Sotheby’s agent and some leading
Bond Street art galleries.
Does this show a human-like ability in a chimp? We think it shows the tremendous
decline in standards of Western art. This has happened, logically, as people have
more and more absorbed Darwinian thinking (chance is the creator—there are
no absolute values). The exquisite paintings of nature in the post-Reformation period
reflected the intricate handiwork of the Creator, and expressed the creativity of
man created in His image. When people began to see man as a meaningless product
of chance processes, the beauty and integrity of art began to deteriorate.3
In some instances now, art looks more like chance processes have been at work!
Newspaper art critic Robin Simon said of this ‘painting’ done by a chimp
haphazardly splashing paint on to canvas, ‘To tell the truth it looks as good
or as bad as 90 percent of the paintings hanging in some of the trendy galleries
in London.’
References and notes
- Nicola Fyfe, who worked with the London auction house Bonhams, cited in ref. 2.
- Gypsy’s brush with greatness,New Zealand Women’s Weekly, 27
May 1991.
- The late evangelical philosopher, Francis Schaeffer, wrote extensively on this subject.
Some of the typical ‘cubist’ pictures, for example, seem to reflect
the disintegration of man’s view of himself, having been repeatedly told he
is nothing more than a chance collection of atoms.
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