Art Goes to Seed

“In the sensate style, techniques become elaborate, complex, highly skilled, often showy. They are designed to impress, even to stun viewers. The means used to produce sensate art are varied and enormous in scope. Often a work’s mere size—its hugeness—passes for quality; the bigger a statue or building, the better it is thought to be. Sensate art takes its subjects mainly from the secular world . . . The style draws humanity away from the realm of the spirit and into the world of the flesh. It lowers the lofty, debases the noble, deflates and debunks the grand and virtuous. All subjects are seen from an earthly point of view: as pretty, stunning, romantic, effective, sensational, salable. Nudity abounds in sensate art and generally is sexual, voluptuous, seductive. As sensate culture develops and enters its overripe stage, the topics of its art turn picaresque and perverse, vulgar, ugly and evil, macabre, pathological, disgusting.” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, pp. 271-272).