To pose the question “Is Abstract Art Tosh?” is already to have surrendered to the most enfeebled species of philistinism. The interrogative itself is unworthy, an ill-bred mongrel of tabloid cynicism and barroom banter. One might as well ask, “Is mathematics mere scribbling?” or “Is music mere noise?”—for such queries betray not so much scepticism as cognitive bankruptcy.
The word tosh, that dismal monosyllable of Cockney provenance, is particularly ill-suited to the gravitas of aesthetic discourse. It functions here as a rhetorical cudgel wielded by those incapable of recognising that abstraction is not the negation of art, but rather its sublimation: the Aufhebung of mere representation into the pure realm of form, colour, rhythm, and metaphysical inquiry.¹ To denounce abstraction as “nonsense” is tantamount to castigating Pythagoras for preferring numbers to potatoes.
Consider the lineage: from Malevich’s Black Square—that silent icon of metaphysical negation²—through Mondrian’s theosophical grids, to Rothko’s numinous fields of trembling colour. Each gesture, far from “tosh,” is a deliberate confrontation with the limits of visibility, a hermeneutics of the void.³ To reduce such ventures to “gibberish” is to reveal one’s own incapacity to see, to think, indeed to feel beyond the merely mimetic.
The question also rests on a false presupposition: that the measure of art lies in its resemblance to nature. But was not Plato’s cave a parable against such slavish imitation? *Ars non est natura servilis, sed natura transfigurata.*⁴ To demand recognisable cows and teapots on every canvas is to regress into aesthetic bovarism, a craving for pretty trifles over ontological revelation.
Furthermore, the sneer “tosh” discloses a profound insecurity: an anxious defence of the everyday against the incursion of the sublime. For abstract art dislocates; it unsettles; it ruptures the soporific continuum of bourgeois existence. To dismiss it with a grunt is not critique, but cowardice—an argumentum ad timorem.
One is reminded of the Athenians who mocked Socrates for his ceaseless questioning, only to find themselves the objects of his irony. Similarly, those who deride abstraction unwittingly display their own unexamined assumptions. The true scandal is not that abstract art exists, but that so many persist in responding to it with clichés scavenged from pub chatter.
Is abstract art “tosh”? Only to the incurious, the intellectually malnourished, the spiritually tone-deaf. To all others, it remains what it was from the beginning: a theatre of the infinite, a cryptogram of Being, a silent liturgy painted upon canvas.
Notes
1. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), on the dialectical supersession of immediacy.
2. See Bowlt, J.E., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism (1976), for the theological implications of Malevich’s icon of non-being.
3. Compare Rothko’s letters in Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (1993), wherein colour fields are described as “dramas.”
4. “Art is not the slavish copy of nature, but the transfigured nature.” A maxim attributed, dubiously, to Alberti.
About the Author
Dr. Severinus Archimandrite, D.Phil. (Leintwardine Polytechnic)
Adjunct Professor of Aesthetico-Metaphysical Hermeneutics,
Institute for Obscure and Rebarbative Studies, Luxembourg.
