Philistine-boy wants an explanation of abstract art. By that, I mean the things that look like “what’s that” or “a kid could do that”. Sometimes it’s a picture of 3 shapes labeled “Untitled” (which appears the artist didn’t even put any thought into it).
So, here comes the age-old question: What makes it art? Why does it appear in art museums? For instance:
If the answer is “who’s to say what’s art or not”, that’s fine. Or even “if you weren’t such a layman, you would see that the visual and literary production and psychoanalysis intersect at infinitely many points and within infinitely many domains, and that the oscillation among such fields fecundates all frontiers reciprocally.”
What makes a curator look at a picture for 3 rectangles called “Untitled” and deem it worthy for inclusion?
I used to always think that too. But about a year or so ago I was walking around the St. Louis Art Museum and really looked at all that art that I used to say a kid could do.
No they can’t.
A lot of that simple stuff is a lot harder than it looks. Go try and replicate those pieces, see how they look.
I can’t really explain why say, Jackson Pollack’s giant splatter paintings are hanging in museums. Maybe because there is feeling behind that art that comes out in it? A lot of people can paint like Bob Ross, but you don’t see that junk in museums, you see it at craft fairs.
Maybe I’m talking out of my ass, maybe I would be fooled by your kid’s crayon drawing in a museum, but I think there is some validity to what is hung on walls and what’s not.
The answers to those questions are worth considering - and the information is out there. If you do the research on those people, you’ll gain an understanding of the value of their work.
There isn’t one single, perfect answer that explains all of those artists’ inclusion in museums.
That’s like saying every person in the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame should be there for the same song.
If you want to know why it is that you, personally, don’t understand the artwork you linked to, it’s probably because you didn’t have the benefit of good art instruction. That’s not to say an education would cause you to LIKE every piece out there, but you’d have a better idea of its value.
We’ve flogged this sort of question a few times, if you want to search. The usual invested parties are probably a little worn out already. But perhaps a whole new set of dopers will arrive to take up the question.
I recall one in particular from when I was a kid at the Columbus Museum of Art. I’ve looked online and can’t find it (mostly because I’m probably remembering the name wrong) I see to recall that it was named West Wind or something like that. It was a white canvas with two long black brush strokes. One was pretty much straight down the left side and the other about 2/3 of the way up the canvas from left to right. That was the entirety of the work.
Unfortunately for those of us who are not pretentious jerks, the only deciding factor is that somebody decided that it’s art. Are you the curator of an art museum? Then what you choose to put in there is art. (After all, it’s an art museum!) Are you an art collector? Then the stuff you collect must be art. (Because you’re an art collector!) Are you a pretentious postgraduate art history student? Then what you say is art must be art because you said so and, after all, you know all about art history.
That’s it, basically. Anybody who attempts an actual definition is fooling themselves.
But don’t let that dishearten you. Everybody likes different stuff, and if you like something, you’re free to consider it art. Even if the person who made it doesn’t. Nobody’s going to stop you. And if you think something is beyond stupid, nobody will stop you from doing that, either.
So art is whatever you think it is, and everybody thinks it’s something different.
You’ll never find an artist in a museum who has only created the one work you’re looking at. Typically, they have a body of work, and while a single item might not hold up to your particular standard for inclusion, the individual piece might have resonance or significance in the artist’s larger body of work.
Most museums also have guidebooks and tour notes, so sometimes reading them may not convince you of their worthiness, but it gives you some justification for what the museum was thinking in making its decision (Hint: It’s never just for a wank).
So, could a kid do it? Maybe.
But could they do it 20 times and have something larger speak from those 20 works? And could they articulate what they were going for in those 20 pieces effectively enough to convince someone who sees lots of really bad art every day?
No. No a kid couldn’t. Hell, even I couldn’t do anything like that. I wish I could paint something that looks like that. Great composition, beautiful use and choice of color, controlled, yet rhythmic strokes. I don’t even know whose work that is but it’s stunning to look at. Looks like something that would have been made in the abstract expressionist period of the 20s-30s. I have a hunch it’s something modern (as I don’t recognize it as the work of the abstract expressionists), and thus a but passe, but still beautiful.
If you can find a kid to replicate something like that to my satisfaction, I will kindly pay you for that art. No joke.
This sort of statement reminds me a lot of self-help gurus. “What do you mean the Magical Pixie Dust System didn’t earn you a million dollars? Clearly, you must be doing it wrong.”
Artists (and, worse, art critics) like to believe there is some sort of objective, rational system by which art vs. non-art can be judged, and if only you were properly educated, you would understand, too.
I’m not saying one should approach art with an anti-intellectual stance. An education in art can help you understand why some pieces that look stupid actually take great skill to create. It can also help you realize that some of it took no skill whatsoever.
That’s not to say that talent or skill of the creator should be a prerequisite. Can’t a really simple piece be art if its place in history makes it significant?
Consider this thing). Why is it significant? Because it was created by a significant person at a significant time in history. Why is that person significant? Because he made some art.
That’s the self-reinforcing delusion of a lot of obnoxious drivel that drowns out the really good stuff.
Actually, I think that’s precisely the opposite of what most artists and art critics believe. That’s pretty much entirly the point behind, oh, say, Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp.
That doesn’t make us musicians, members of Deep Purple, or notable and influential.
Tis the same thing with artists (so, OK, I AM going to come up with One Overriding Reason after all) – the ones you see in museums are (usually) the originals, the ones who came up with whatever avenue they’re pursuing.
Sure, there are some goofs. You see a lot of crappy drawings by famous artists hanging in smaller museums. It may be a lousy Renoir sketch, but by gummit they’ve got one!
The funny thing is, people are skeptical about modern art as though someone were pulling something over on them – well, what, exactly, IS Art “supposed” to look like? How do you know?
In case you hadn’t noticed, drawings and paintings that look like “reality” have been covered. Repeatedly. For hundreds of years. The definition of “realism” itself has changed numerous times.
Then photography came a long and made a lot of it superfluous.
So, yes, artists these days are pushing new boundaries.
Whether that, in itself, is worth celebrating is hard to say; Tom Wolfe said quite a bit about it in The Painted Word almost 40 years ago.
Well yes. It might be hard to imagine, but art students don’t just sit around smoking pot and picking lint out of their navels.
Art can be analyzed by a whole raft of criteria. It has grammar, just like language.
The “skill” thing always baffles me. My dh is of that mind, too - it has to look as if it was difficult to make, in order to “count”. I don’t get that, I really don’t. A lot of art is about seeing, about teaching people how to see in different ways. Sometimes something really simple can be highly enlightening.
That’s the thing - it’s all in the explanation. It’s not for looking at, it’s showing how much the ‘artist’ can BS, what their ‘statement’ is. Art for purposes of aesthetics was thrown out by the ‘art community’ over the course of the 20th century. If you want beauty, go to a museum with a Renaissance collection (or commission something). The art community felt they conquered reality, that there was no more to achieve, that it was futile putting a mirror up to nature.
I have seen really beautiful nonrepresentation art–some of it extremely simple. But it has movement… it has emotion… it has something. A lot of the stuff, such as several linked in this thread, I think is crap. I am an art student. I do my own art. I have studied art history. I am not saying that all abstract or nonrepresentational art sucks or can be done by anyone. But I am acknowledging that some of it does and some of it can.
Some art is. Other art isn’t. For me, art is primarily about the visceral experience, and the artistic statment that goes behind it can only serve to enhance my appreciation for it. But my primary reaction is my visual impression of art.
And I generally agree with the art community in this case. When I want beauty, I go see the Kandinskys, the Klees, the Van Goghs, the Pollacks, the Paschkes, even the Harings. They delight me. I’m not high minded and theoretical about art–it has to strike me visually in an interesting way, and the works of the mid-20th Century abstract artists do. Heck, even more recent guys like Gerhard Richter I find beautiful.
It seems to me that certain people find it inconceivable that folks can enjoy abstract art for its beauty, and on beauty alone–not as a guise for pretention, or a desire to somehow appear more cultured than others. For me, it’s equally puzzling that someone can look at a Kandinsky or Klee or even the second painting linked to in this thread and not see the inherent beauty and skill in it.
There’s plenty of questionable art out there, where the concept is more interesting than the execution, and I don’t like this type of modern art in general, but there’s plenty where the execution and concept meet in showing a viewer something comletely new, something not experienced in nature.
