I hope this doesn’t sound hopelessly pretentious to you, but here’s a try…
Traveling around Europe as a tourist, I’ve visited a lot of old churches and cathedrals. The artistic intent of this architecture is obvious: these buildings are meant to be majestic and evoke feelings of awe. I think we can agree that one of the characteristics of art is the ability to evoke an emotional response.
Anyway, I bring it up because the art I love evokes in me the same feelings. Standing in a Serra sculpture or before a Rothko painting makes me (a nonbeliever) feels something akin to how a 12th-century European peasant must have felt in one of those cathedrals: in the presence of the divine.
Yes! I was going to link to some of the shite on his site, but just couldn’t bear it. Truly trite shite.
He reminds me of a lot of people I know, who inspire a lot of head-nodding and respect because they just sound so authoritative. So a lot of people think such people really MUST know what they’re talking about.
The answer to “My four-year-old could do that” is, “You’re right, they absolutely could. But you can’t.”
That’s what Klee was getting at, and, in an anthropological sense I guess, Picasso, too. Gotta break through the accumulated inhibiting … stuff … of growing up and get back to creating the way a child (or “less sophisticated” culture) creates.
Robert Hughes, in The Mona Lisa Curse (available here and here), made a case for purity, or at least deplored the entanglement of art with the art-market, which diminishes how art is produced, collected, and experienced.
“Most of his work, like all good art, is dense with meaning. It’s not some vacuous exercise in picture-making, meant to sustain the boys at Sotheby’s or Christie’s with a big price. It’s entirely born of experience. It isn’t born of the market. Some think that so much of today’s art mirrors, and thus criticizes, decadence. Not so, it’s just decadent, full stop. It has no critical function. It is part of the problem. The art-world dutifully copies our money-driven, celebrity-obsessed, entertainment culture. The same fixation on fame, the same obedience to mass media that jostles for our attention with its noise and wow and flutter.”
His grilling of Alberto Mugrabi, starting around an hour in, is not to be missed.
I still can’t get over the backlash to Chris Ofilli’s Madonna. Here we have a modern artist actually dealing with the spiritual in art – and people want to shit all over it. So to speak. Throw paint on it, literally.
There’s an over-quoted, but very apt Picasso quote about exactly this.
When I taught preschool, there was work those students made that I found legitimately beautiful, interesting, dense with meaning, and extremely inventive in its strategies of representation and organizing thought and sight. I didn’t enjoy it in some patronizing “Good for you, little Suzie!” way, or in some qualified “It’s good for a preschooler” way. It was legit GOOD art. And art by grown-ups that gives that same (or a similar) sense of engagement, inventiveness, investigation, and considered organization is almost always art that I enjoy.
It’s of course not the ONLY kind of art I enjoy, because only a closed-minded nob-job would impose restrictive prescriptive limits on the kinds of art he is willing to engage with…
I think there’s a lot of shitty modern art out there, but there’s always been shitty art. One problem with our own ability to judge contemporary art is that we see everything: the masterworks, the passable, and the utter garbage. Museums don’t preserve the two lower tiers (mostly), wealthy collectors whose stocks supply museums typically deliver only the works that are close to masterworks. This means that our view of the art of the past is a view of only the survivors.
So, are we really even able to ask the question: was the great art of the past greater than the great art of now?
Second, one of the great benefits of modernism is that the movement has completely changed the notion of what it might mean to hold a universal standard of quality in art. Since at least the 1870s, this has meant that the standard must not rely on an artwork’s ability to reproduce a recognizable image of the world, that the artist’s ability to disguise his hand in fluid brushstrokes or polished marble is no longer relevant, and that the job of documenting the world is no longer the work of painters, sculptors, and other fine artists.
Here’s my universal standard of quality in art: any great work of art must transcend its medium, any great work of art must ask you to reconsider your world in some way.
This standard applies equally to great masterworks of the past, such as The Night Watchmen - it transforms oil paints and medium into a totally immersive streetscape, group portrait, and study of light; simultaneously it makes a statement about life and social class in Amsterdam. The same kind of thing can be said for Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm.
Yes, I know, these are two examples using established masterworks, but the point is, any standard of art that’s worthwhile will focus on the elements that have nothing to do with the artists ability to create subjective emotional appeal (beauty), or with their skill in manipulating their medium (virtuosity), but it will look more at the artwork itself.
I regularly visit my local contemporary art gallery (usually with my kids). I’m uneducated when it comes to art; some of it I find dull, crass or pointless, but some is stunning.
I don’t hear it stated often, but I think what happened was that the camera was invented. Realism suddenly became a whole lot less special.
I also don’t get why many find a lot of modern art to appreciate. So they don’t show realistic images or people. Neither does architecture, fabrics, furniture, or any number of items that are commonly appreciated for their aesthetic, form, or feelings they invoke.
His argument is essentially like saying that we should appreciate this bridge only for the difficulty of it’s engineering and it’s ability to get cars from one place to another, and that we should utterly ignore the awe created it’s form, shape, and aesthetic because it’s just a bunch of simple straight lines forming triangles.
