NEW MOVEMENT
New classical artists realized that Ezra Pound's modernist slogan "make it new" had led to an artistic arms race in which each new shocking novelty could only bounce the rubble of an already devastated culture; the only new thing left to do was, of course, the good old thing. New classicists are aiming to restore the pleasure of the arts.

One way of defining the new movement is in terms of a return to traditional forms, genres, and techniques in the arts.

In "serious" music there is a recovery of the deep pan-human roots of melody, a renewed interest in worldwide folk music, a focus on the immediacy of performance, improvisation, and the context of audience and performer, and a disillusionment with Schoenberg¹s theories of seriality and the twelve tone row, with the atonality of Stockhausen and his followers.

In architecture and landscape design there is a renewed attention to the classical languages of building, ornament, fittingness to the environment and humane proportion.

In visual arts there is a return to representation, to landscape and the figure, a rejection of the modernist authority of abstraction, and a turn away from the idea of art as the ideological enemy of ordinary human life.

In poetry there is a wave of renewed interest in poetic meter, rhyme, and clear storytelling, a questioning of the role of poetry as therapeutic private expression, and a return to the great public themes of enduring human interest.

In theater there is a renewal of the audience's ability to feel concern about the fate of the characters.

In fiction there has been a swing toward storytelling and "moral fiction", identifiable characters and plot and theme and setting.....

I have a fondness for "clever" art - my mind enjoys being tickled by an idea made real in an often absurd form. But I am also sympathetic to the notion that art should be mean more in its execution than in its conception, and "cleverness" yields little or no spiritual succor.

I am eager to see the "Rebel Angels" exhibit mentioned in the NewKlassical email and see how it stacks up against the works exhibited for the Turner Prize at the Tate. I see it as axiomatic that art designed to shock and provoke - as its highest aesthetic - is doomed to a reductive spiral of diminishing returns, but I'm not sure that a great leap forward into the past is the answer either.