Modern Art Is Collapsing: Jonathan Pageau & Andrew Gould on What Comes Next

What happens to art after modernism runs out of steam? Can beauty actually call us higher, shape our cities, and renew the life of the Church, or are we doomed to live forever with blank white boxes, brutalist churches, and bananas taped to gallery walls? In this wide-ranging round table, architectural designer Andrew Gould, icon carver and storyteller Jonathan Pageau, and host Matthew Wilkinson sit down over whiskey to wrestle with the future of beauty, sacred art, and architecture. (Pursuit of Beauty Podcast Episode 32)

We start with pirates and sea shanties, then quickly slide into Jackson Pollock, Rothko, oil slicks, marbled end-papers, and the problem of modern art hung in the wrong place. Is Pollock really just a giant piece of marbled paper ripped from the inside of a book and nailed to the wall of a museum; does it only work as a foil in a room full of great classical paintings; and why does the same abstract piece feel spiritually weightless when it ends up in a hotel lobby or generic office tower? From there, they ask what happens when the entire art world becomes a game of shock, novelty, and irony rather than a discipline of love, meaning, and service.

Andrew and Jonathan both argue that modernism is what happens when a long, rich tradition becomes fragmented and hyper-specialized. They compare Rothko’s color fields and Pollock’s rhythm to bark on a tree or the shimmering colors of an oil slick on water; there is a real beauty there, but it makes sense only when it is framed by more ordered and more meaningful.

That question leads naturally into liturgical art, applied art, and architecture. Andrew argues that the only real future of art lies in applied arts; things that serve a social purpose: church buildings, icons, interior decoration, good rooms, and good furniture. Oil paintings used to be “applied” in this way; they were made to hang in beautiful houses, to honor a patron, to decorate a dining room, to stand in as an “icon” of a king or bishop. Once painting is made only for galleries and commentary, it begins to eat itself. Jonathan pushes the conversation further and claims that liturgical art is the ultimate applied art. Icons, church architecture, and sacred music do not just distract you after work; they shape your life, your sense of honor, your memory, and your relationship to God and neighbor.

From there, the three of you turn to cities, localism, and the built environment. Using Charleston as a case study, Andrew explains how historic districts, design review boards, and legal language originally intended to protect “historic styles” can be slowly re-interpreted to bless modernist glass boxes. You talk about shame, honor, and love; how a developer begins to think differently once he has to live in the town whose skyline he has altered, and how truly beautiful buildings quietly pressure people to dress differently, dine differently, and behave with greater dignity. Along the way, you touch on Greek islands that restrict ownership to locals, empty second homes in historic neighborhoods, and the way a truly beautiful room can transform a dinner party of ordinary college students into something solemn, joyful, and unforgettable.

The discussion widens into the metaphysics of beauty and love. Drawing on the classical “transcendentals” of truth, goodness, and beauty, and a provocative list of “satanic transcendentals” such as fashion, sentimentality, and cruelty, you explore the difference between genuine love and mere infatuation. Fashion shocks; it trades in novelty and quickly becomes dated like shag carpet or yesterday’s architectural fad. Real beauty, by contrast, remains loveable across generations, which is why Baroque, Gothic, and classical buildings can be revived again and again, while certain “cutting edge” styles age badly within a decade. The same questions are applied to Orthodox iconography, mannerism, elongated figures, realism, Caravaggio and Rubens, and the danger of making saints look like glossy fashion models rather than members of the Kingdom.

You hear concrete examples: Rublev’s Trinity as a bold yet deeply rooted innovation; Gothic portals where elongated saints grow up into the architecture like living columns; Father Silouan’s icons that quietly borrow from modern color theory and postmodern composition while remaining immediately venerable for a village grandmother; Russian attempts to integrate turn-of-the-century realism and Art Nouveau into church painting; and the tragic history of smoke-darkened Byzantine churches repeatedly repainted until the original brilliance vanished beneath cheap overpainting.

We talk pirates and sea shanties, Pollock and Rothko, Rubens and Caravaggio, Charleston and Greek islands, Francis Bacon and Schiele, fashion and transcendence.