It sucks and is stupid.
It sucks and is stupid.
Anyone doing modern art should be tested doing an actual painting before being allowed to do modern art. Then I might believe they actually have talent.
The main quality required to be a modern artist is the ability to talk bs about their art.
The ops example is typical of the dross this movement produces.
It just looks a certain way wrote:
It doesn't have to be understood in an academic way. To me, that's a cool painting just because I like looking at it. As for why I like looking at it, that's where all the theory and explanations come in. The colors, the arrangement of shapes and lines, etc etc all work together as a visual object. When I look at this visual object, I like it. I find it interesting to look at, and I want to look at it more, and look at it more closely. It makes me feel a certain kind of way.
That's all modern/contemporary art (or art from any time period) has to be, really. Just something that, when you experience it, it makes you feel a certain type of way and makes you want to explore your feelings for it further.
How do a bunch of badly drawn shapes makes you feel anything?
Winning wrote:
Modern art is like and based off of postmodernism, which is a philosophy that says that nothing has any subjective meaning.
well no, post-modern art is based off of post-modern concepts. Modern art is an period of art from roughly the early 1900s through to the '60s. Within that time period there are numerous different movements from impressionism to abstract expressionism to minimalism. I think the thing that confuses people is that it signaled a break from visual art being a mimetic, representational art form. You probably have just as little understanding of Renaissance art as you do about modern and contemporary art, you just aren't as uncomfortable with it because it's representational. There are plenty of books about it, but I assume you're just trolling.
I received a framed print of Spray of Leaves by Matisse as a birthday present in 1971 (thank you Ms James). It currently hangs on a hallway wall as it has everywhere I've lived since then. I never have, and suspect I never will, walk past it with out consciously looking at it. I have no idea how many times I've asked myself ...what is it that attracts me to this image-- surely 10 thousand times . I've never come up with an answer.
http://images.worldgallery.co.uk/i/prints/rw/lg/3/7/Henri-Matisse-Spray-of-Leaves-379200.jpg
The emperor’s new clothes wrote:
I think is an emperor has no clothes situation. This art doesn’t mean anything to anyone but the sophisticated types are too embarrassed they don’t understand the meaning so they act like they get it. Of course everyone else just pretends they get it too so they don’t look stupid. But nobody will break rank and call out this farce. And they’ll spend millions to keep it going. And the so called “artists” are laughing their way to the bank while talented artists struggle.
Ugh. It's like listening to illiterate people talk about words on a page and say it's all gibberish because if they can't understand it immediately then it must be. And "Modern" art is a period of art that ended in the '60s. If you're going to complain about abstract and conceptual art then at least get the terminology correct. Yes, some of it is crap, just like some books are crap. But someone who can't read really has no business trying to determine that.
It’s not like illiterate people looking at a page and thinking “it’s all gibberish.” It’s like literate people looking at a page typed by monkeys and thinking “this doesn’t mean anything.” Except everyone acts like it means something and nobody wants to admit it doesn’t mean anything.
What's to explain? You look at it, you like it or you don't.
Do you listen to music and say, what is this, it's just a bunch of noises. It doesn't even sound like anything in the real world.
Sure many people in the art world are insufferable, but that does give you carte blanche to dismiss all art that you don't understand. All art references art that came before it. It also reflects the time in which it was created. It's a progression of ideas and whether or not you understand it, the world around you is shaped and informed by it. But I guess the world needs normies. I just ordered you a Thomas Kincade throw pillow off of Amazon. Enjoy.
I am sympathetic to the trouble people have with modern and contemporary art. Art used to have a much more prominent place in our popular culture. In the 40s and 50s, lots of people had a record album with Caruso belting out arias and a Picasso poster on their wall (we had a Don Quixote poster when I was a kid). Art was easier then because it was identifiable. Most everyone could pic out a Dali from a Van Gogh. The modern art movement largely sought "liberation" from all that came before it by moving to abstraction, the aleatory, and making innovation a priority over communication. For a while, this was very exciting. Audiences would pack auditoriums for John Cage's 4'33 (a piece that was four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence) on the same program as Stockhausen's early forays into electronic music. Galleries would be packed for the opening of shows featuring Pollock's drips and gaze at Calder's giant mobiles spinning from the ceiling.
But the movement was not sustainable because eventually the emphasis on innovation took over and became commodified by the art collectors, critics and academics. Anyone who did not produce the edgiest art or composing the most out there music would not even get into a second tier art school or conservatory. The art and music world became very insular and was only concerned about pleasing wealthy collectors in major metropolises. At the same time, pop culture completely eclipsed the art world. Now, very few people have any exposure to the art world. And when they do, contemporary art understandably leaves them cold.
Precious Roy wrote:
I am sympathetic to the trouble people have with modern and contemporary art. Art used to have a much more prominent place in our popular culture. In the 40s and 50s, lots of people had a record album with Caruso belting out arias and a Picasso poster on their wall (we had a Don Quixote poster when I was a kid). Art was easier then because it was identifiable. Most everyone could pic out a Dali from a Van Gogh. The modern art movement largely sought "liberation" from all that came before it by moving to abstraction, the aleatory, and making innovation a priority over communication. For a while, this was very exciting. Audiences would pack auditoriums for John Cage's 4'33 (a piece that was four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence) on the same program as Stockhausen's early forays into electronic music. Galleries would be packed for the opening of shows featuring Pollock's drips and gaze at Calder's giant mobiles spinning from the ceiling.
But the movement was not sustainable because eventually the emphasis on innovation took over and became commodified by the art collectors, critics and academics. Anyone who did not produce the edgiest art or composing the most out there music would not even get into a second tier art school or conservatory. The art and music world became very insular and was only concerned about pleasing wealthy collectors in major metropolises. At the same time, pop culture completely eclipsed the art world. Now, very few people have any exposure to the art world. And when they do, contemporary art understandably leaves them cold.
This is a pretty good summary of the trouble in which the contemporary art world has found itself, and, believe me, artists, art critics, and art historians spend plenty of time gnashing their teeth about it. But the OP is still a troll. I'm sure there's no representational art--portraits, landscapes, scenes, and illustrations--that he or she knows jack-squat about or spends any appreciable time contemplating. Like it or not, the art world, like the world itself, is not going back to 1850. And if you don't think motifs, color schemes and patterns, and aesthetic philosophies of contemporary art don't seep out into the general culture in terms of design, fashion, taste, style, and sensibility, you aren't paying attention, but it does so at the level of influence among other creative types, not mass popularity.
Winning wrote:
Modern art is like and based off of postmodernism, which is a philosophy that says that nothing has any subjective meaning.
You've got that wrong in every conceivable way. Where did you go to school?
My father, in his time, was the youngest artist ever to win the Prix de Rome. (Google it.) He became a moderately famous painter, but nobody you've ever heard of.
His paintings were almost all what you might call nature-inspired. (He didn't paint people.) He was sometimes compared to Matisse, sometimes compared to other painters. He showed many times at major Manhattan galleries. His paintings had an element of abstraction, and later in his life, after he'd spent time with the Tiwi people in northern Australia, he got somewhat more abstract.
His mother, my Jewish grandmother, used to say, "Why do you paint like that? I can't tell what it is."
Some of the derision I hear here sounds like my grandmother. But that's just me.
Here's a little more:
Yeah- it's surprising (sometimes amusing), thought-provoking and interesting. How'd you like that simple explanation?
Hey Kudzu... if that's really your father, that's cool as hell. When John (you?) is being interviewed, the piece in the far right corner of the frame really appealed to me. I have no idea what it means, or what your dad was thinking about at the time, but the colors and shapes are just fascinating. I can't tell if the middle shape is a portrait of sorts, if the head in encircled by a crown, or what. Anyway, it's awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Context, context, context..One way to help interpret art is to look at what historically is going on in the region and or world at the time of its creation. There is usually a connection. Since around the 1880 or so, "avant-garde" art has begged the question "what do you consider art?", and stripped away convention after convention until not less and less if left, depending on your perpective.
That's not modern art. And modern art cannot possibly be based on postmodernism, since the post- in postmodernism means, in part, AFTER. Finally, postmodernism does not say that nothing has any subjective meaning. Relativism says that everything is subjective. Postmodernism, if relativist, then would seem to say that everything is only of subjective meaning and nothing of objective meaning. however, postmodernism actually argues that subjects and objects are merely grammatical fictions, constructs, without independent existence in the world. So, art has subjective meaning, meanings held by subjects, but that is nothing external to historical modes of determining thought categories.
icandigthat wrote:
Hey Kudzu... if that's really your father, that's cool as hell. When John (you?) is being interviewed, the piece in the far right corner of the frame really appealed to me. I have no idea what it means, or what your dad was thinking about at the time, but the colors and shapes are just fascinating. I can't tell if the middle shape is a portrait of sorts, if the head in encircled by a crown, or what. Anyway, it's awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Agree- I was admiring the repeating motifs and colors in many of the pieces. It would be interesting to know if he used microscopes to visualize the specimens he painted. Several of his works look like close-ups of something you'd see in a microscope field. Cool stuff!
John Cage's 4'33" is not just four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. First, it is a performance and has the campy character of the silver-haired pianist looking guy who sits at the piano with a stopwatch. Second, the piano is not played but the ambient noise of the restless audience is what you hear. Cage was interested in making, among other things, ambient sound an explicit part of the world of music/sound. Many movements in music since then have made use of street noise, machines, etc., influenced by Cage.
RIP: D3 All-American Frank Csorba - who ran 13:56 in March - dead
RENATO can you talk about the preparation of Emile Cairess 2:06
Running for Bowerman Track Club used to be cool now its embarrassing
Great interview with Steve Cram - says Jakob has no chance of WRs this year
Hats off to my dad. He just ran a 1:42 Half Marathon and turns 75 in 2 months!
