According to Osho, modern art is largely a catharsis—a psychotic eruption of repressed sexuality, anger and violence—so it reflects modern humanity’s inner misery rather than creating beauty. As a mirror, it is realistic but has lost the artistic touch. Only with the birth of a new, integrated human being can a truly new, beautiful art arise.
Modern art is people dumping their bottled-up feelings onto canvas; when people heal inside, art will become beautiful again.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: OSHO, WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT MODERN ART? I don't know much about modern art, and I don't want to know much about it either. It is not much of an art. In the past art had a totally different quality: it was beautiful. Modern art is ugly. It is very rare to find something beautiful in modern art, and I can see the reason. The modern mind is boiling with repressed sexuality, anger, hatred, violence. Centuries of repressions have become accumulated; it has come to a crescendo and it is erupting. The volcano is erupting! Modern art is more like a catharsis, more like vomiting. It is not art. One just wants to get rid of all kinds of poisons that have become accumulated. The same is true about all dimensions of art; music, poetry, painting, sculpture -- they all have become ugly.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT MODERN ART? Asang, the first thing is, it is not art. For the first time something exists in the name of art which is not art at all. It is more a therapy than an art. Look at the modern paintings and you will be convinced of what I am saying. The painters must be insane; they have poured their insanity on the canvas. It helps them because it releases some tensions inside their being. It is a catharsis, but it is not art. It is therapy through art, but not art itself. If Picasso is prevented from painting, he will go mad. Vincent van Gogh went mad before he committed suicide. And I have been looking into his life deeply and my feeling is he went mad because he could not paint as much as he wanted.
It is just like jazz music, which is insane and cannot be compared to classical music. Classical music has tremendous sanity. It can make even an insane person sane. Just listening to classical music, he may calm down. But jazz -- even a sane person may start feeling a jerk. All that has happened in the modern art, whether it is painting or music or poetry, it is great but yet it is not sane. The statues of Gautam Buddha -- there are thousands in Thailand, in Japan, in China, In India. In China there is a temple which is called the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas -- ten thousand statues of Buddha. Perhaps it took three, four centuries to make it. The whole mountain has been carved. The whole mountain has become the temple. Just sitting there and you will feel a deep silence descending on you.
You implore us constantly to give up memory, to live in the herenow. But in giving up memory I must also give up my greative imagination, for I am a writer and all that.I write about has its root.s in what I remember. I wonder -- what would the world be like without art and the creative imagination that makes art possible? A tolstoy could never become a buddha, but then could a buddha write war and peace?
That does not mean that your past cannot be remembered, because past is part of the present. Whatsoever you have been in the past, whatsoever you have done in the past, is PART of your present, it IS HERE. Your child is in you, your young man is in you... all that you have been doing is in you. The food that you have eaten, it is past, but it has become your blood; it is circulating herenow; it has become your bone, it has become your marrow. The love that you went through may be past, but it has transformed you. It has given you a new vision of life; it has opened your eyes. Yesterday you were with me -- it is past, but is it really totally past? How can it be totally past? You were changed by it; you were given a new spur, a new…
Beloved master, how will your new man express himself? Will he find new ways or will the existing ways just develop into higher forms? What is art and what do you feel is lacking in it today? How will it be connected with the new man? What can we do to create a new beginning?
The new man will not be insane. His expressions will show sanity and will bring you a feeling of well-being, a health, a certain joyousness -- a certain song will start resounding in your heart. And when you will be coming back from seeing a painting or listening to poetry or to music, you will find you are not walking, you are dancing. Something has touched you, something has bypassed your mind and reached your being. But exactly what he will do, we will have to wait for him to come and do it. You are asking, "Will he find new ways...?" Certainly, he will find new ways about everything. He will not have to seek far away; his very being will be creative of new ways, new expression, new art, new forms of poetry, new ways of relating with people -- "or will the existing ways just develop into…