I think the others who replied to your post did a pretty good job answering your question. BTW, I never said Florczak’s arguments were “stupid”, but that they were conservative ideas that have been around for a long time. I also never stated that “modern art mattered”.
I think some contemporary art is awful, and I think some of it is awesome, too, but it’s not because it doesn’t or does adhere to some subjective set of standards or depict someone’s idea of “dignified and beautiful” subject matter. It’s either because it moves me emotionally or intellectually, or fails to do so.
Gotta love the art “quality” graph that dips ever downward after the Impressionists, and then plummets to “0” around 1955 or so.
There are many good critiques of modern art, this is not one of them. I’m actually pretty surprised to see BB running this, due to its sweeping reactionary nature, and the numerous dog-whistles for cultural conservatives (the dismissal of street art, for example) embedded in it.
First of all, I think it’s great that you are part of the art viewing public. I applaud you for stepping into galleries displaying difficult, obtuse, or incomprehensible objects. Many people don’t even bother. I respect your opinions and do not intend my response to convince you that all modern and contemporary art is worthy of your attention. I hope it will help you to see where some of Mr. Florzak’s critics are coming from.
I believe Florczak’s argument suffer from a misunderstanding of the relativity of taste, which is a historical fact. Take one of his examples, Rembrandt, whose I assume you enjoy based on your post. Rembrandt did not follow the techniques and guidelines promoted by the French Academie des Beaux-Arts. As a result, his paintings were harshly criticized throughout the eighteenth century, when the Academie was at the height of its influence. The French Academcian Roger de Piles scored Rembrandt very low on his quantitative system for judging the quality of paintings. Rembrandt only entered the canon of great painters in the nineteenth century, when artists critical of the Academie, such as the Barbizon school, sought out alternate models for artistic production. )There’s a wonderful book on this topic, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt by Alison McQueen, which I highly recommend.) To track the rise and fall of Rembrandt’s reputation is to acknowledge that taste has always been in flux.
Secondly, and most importantly, it is dangerous to select the artistic style of one group of people and hold it up as the universal standard of quality. To do so is to implicitly denigrate the cultural production of everyone else throughout all of the history for which he have a material record. As you may have noticed, Florczak illustrated his argument only with paintings and sculptures by European men. Surely the mode of expression they developed and nurtured is not the only one, even if it’s the one you like best.
In the same vein, this critique of modern art does not actually attack the substance of modern art or addresses why it doesn’t matter. So how can anybody defend modern art against this argument?
Its not that modern art is good in an objective sense, its just that saying its bad is not the same as saying its meaningless or irrelevant, it is clearly not irrelevant.That it is relevant matters. That why it matters gets dismissed as (And this is how I take it he means it) “people are stupid”, makes this argument a non argument. (After all, people have always been stupid, if in the olden days they liked realistic depictions of the human figure, it must have been because they were stupid).
That the argument in the video boils down to “Modern art is bad because pre-modern art is better” skirts around defining good and bad and makes a relativistic claim about what is beautiful.
In the end, any criteria you use to measure modern art in order to assess its validity as art must necessarily be applied to anything that calls itself art. In defining that criteria using a specific art style, you’ve run up against a problem, your criteria is biased and therefore easily dismissible by anyone that doesn’t share your bias, but of course, acceptable to those who do.
The meta problem then becomes that you like what you like, and saying that what you don’t like is unworthy of being considered in the same category as the things you like is a categorical error.
To then turn around and say that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is nonsense, is… its the sort of thing people say when they come up against the blind spots in their biases.
I mean, alright, Andy Warhol’s campbell’s soup can is not art, now what? Do I stop appreciating it or find meaning in it? Do I stop looking at the clouds so I don’t see unicorns, toasters or Campbell’s soup cans?
Is Pollock’s artistic license going to be revoked?
It doesn’t matter if he’s dead, Van Gogh got his posthumously.
Wait, isn’t “modern art” rooted in the search for universal objective standards, accessible to white male midcentury art critics, focusing on pure aesthetics and stripping away distractions like meaning?
P.S. “modern art” meaning the movement within visual art, rather than all art that happens to be modern.
When he showed the Pollack he asked his students to praise, my immediate reaction was “That’s not a Pollack.” Turned out I was right. That this guy claims he can’t tell the difference between a stained smock and a Pollack tells me he either is unable to engage with Pollack, or is uninterested in trying.
Exactly, anyone fluent with Pollack, or Abstract Expressionism, would suspect Prager was taking the piss. That “gotcha” was pure theater, and I wonder if his anecdote actually happened. Also, why would anyone but a jerk even do such an exercise?
I know I missed the thread but this guy is like a comedy fascist art critic in a paul verhoeven movie. I know without even looking that his own work will be technically excellent but uninspired, because they’re all like this.
That’s completely unfair, Rob. Surely only reason he hasn’t had more success in the art scene is due to the obscene cultural relativists that don’t value his profound, inspiring beauty.
I used to teach elementary school, and i always made sure to swing by the 12 to 1 to 1 special education classroom after they went on a field trip. Those kids could could make you feel polar bear at the zoo.
The only good refutation to “i don’t get modern art” is to show them more amazong modern art. Dorothy Robinson did some graphic design worl for my company. I like her graphics work, but when i stumbled upon her paintings…mind blown: http://dorothyrobinson.net/artist.php?aID=1&iT=4
Having looked, I actually dig Florczak’s illustrations. He’s a skilled painter and his style is basically retro 1970s fantasy art displaced into mundane subjects: think “Roger Dean Fabio Portrait”.
Spatial relationships are avoided the way Rob Liefeld avoids feet, but there is also profoundly obsessive detail. Like a mall portraitist, with unexpected magic provided by context.
Which is funny, when you think about him hating modern art for Prager University.
I suspect that the limitation to transcendent subjects is why traditional artists never painted flowers, food platters or whoever was willing and able to pay them.
