I was about 14 and didn’t put much thought into his art or abstract painting in general when, of all places, I saw the light in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
The youngest Indy is having some adventures with Picasso in Paris and at some point he tells him he doesn’t understand his paintings, Picasso replies along the lines of “when I paint a wild horse you may not see the horse, but you’ll feel the wildness”.
It really made something click inside of me, and I haven’t seen art the same way since then.
Ditto, (apart from the busker) I was fairly “meh” about them, considered them plodding prog dinosaurs until my late twenties. I think French and Saunders did a comic relief sketch about learning the guitar and various great and good of the guitar world came on for a cameo of their greatest riffs, Clapton, Knopfler et al, then came Dave Gilmour “who’s this accountant?” I wondered. He then proceeded to elegantly wipe the floor with everyone else. “oh shit” thought I, “time to re-assess”.
Also Van Gogh, As has been mentioned elsewhere you really need to see great art in the flesh before you dismiss it. “sunflowers, how interesting can they be?” well, when you see the real thing with it’s 3d layering and audacious agricultural application of paint it is a different beast altogether.
If you are ever in London and you do nothing else, walk through Trafalgar Square, into the National Gallery and turn to the galleries on your right. To my mind the best free show the world has to offer.
I worked very closely with a Serbian gentleman for several years. He played Serbian music at his desk just about every day. At first I thought it sounded like someone was torturing a goat, but one day something just clicked and I began to understand it. I’ve visited parts of Serbia, back when it was Yugoslavia, and when I linked the place with the music in my mind, it suddenly made sense. I’m not sure I’d seek it out any time soon, but I’m pleased that I can now appreciate it.
A little different from the other posts here, but for me, it’s Death Metal, or any form of Metal with harsh vocals. I’d been a fan of Metal most of my life, having been turned onto it at a young age by my exposure to Judas Priest. I was always looking for new bands and all, but as I got more exposure into some of the better known bands that used growling, it just struck me as bad. Eventually I started delving into the underground scene, and I picked out a lot that I found that had great singers, and sometimes I’d even tolerate harsh vocals if I liked the music behind it enough, but I still thought it’d have been better with either clean vocals or nothing at all.
But that all changed when I finally saw a great band live, Opeth. They used those vocals intermittently with clean vocals and, whether it was just because they were that good or because of how they used it to punctuate particularly intense portions of songs or maybe it was the energy of the live performance. Whatever it was, it finally clicked and I “got” it. They started the performance off with a bang, heavy and growling from the get go, and I went from an adamant resistor to an ardent fan.
The best thing was, once I got it, many of those songs that I begrudgingly listened to, despite their vocals, I had a whole new appreciation for, and could now enjoy through and through. And it opened the doors to so many other bands and subgenres I now love that I never would have even tried to listen to before, and my musical tastes have continued to expand as a result, even into other genres, having broken through that one hard barrier. There’s very few genres now that I can’t at least appreciate a well done song from.
Thomas Hardy. I had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a high school class and just hated it. I didn’t understand it at all. Years later, when I read Far From the Madding Crowd, I suddenly understood what Hardy was writing about. I ended up spending about a year reading almost all of the Wessex novels, and I still consider Hardy to be a favorite author.
The Art Deco style, in general. For most of my life it appeared so clunky and blocky to me, but a few years ago, some switched got flipped in my head and now I love it. Take something like this architectural ornamentation – it’s quite involved, but because of the regularity of the geometry in the design it doesn’t look busy at all, but clean. That seems to be the hallmark of Art Deco design in general, and I find that intensely aesthetically satisfying now in a way I didn’t in years past.
Like, when I went to Chicago last year and saw the Carbide Carbon Building in person, I just about died. …The Big Death or the Little Death, I don’t know which, but the perfection of that architecture’s ornamentation – very detailed but ultimately clean, orderly, thoughtfully-planned – did something to me.
Jackson Pollack and Picasso. Originally thought it was just a mess, but now really appreciate their works.
And old movies like Casablanca. The first time I saw it, I thought: boring and trite, but mostly unrealistic. But after seeing it again, I could appreciate the work as a human drama and stylistic art. Who needs realism in art? I can look out the window if I want to see realism.
80s music in general, and Michael Jackson and Prince in particular. I grew up in the 80s on classic rock and hated the synthesizer big hair pop crap of the time. Then I got really into grunge, and as a movement it was basically a refutation of 80s pop. For the entire decade of the 90s I despised 80s music.
Then, I think it was a few years after Beck’s Midnite Vultures album came out which had a heavy Prince influence, I decided to pick up Purple Rain. Whoa! It really was like nothing I had listened to before. Like I never really opened my ears when listening to Prince before. Then I bought Thriller and totally grokked how it had become the most successful album of all time. Since then I’ve gone back and explored a lot of the 80s music I had been prejudiced against for a long time. The Smiths, The Cure, The Police, Devo. There was a lot more going on that decade than hair metal and synth pop. And it turns out that some of the hair metal and synth pop was pretty good too.
I had a similar experience with American Gothic. Pure cliché, right? I had forgotten that clichés become clichés because they were once powerful images.
If you’re in Chicago, do yourself a favor and go to the Modern Art wing of the Art Institute. You may think that American Gothic is hackneyed and simplistic. You will find that you are wrong.
Took me a little while to warm up to The Pink Floyd as well. Same with Neil Young. Couldn’t get past his singing to hear the song. Of course, they are two of my favorites now. I flat wore out a few Floyd CDs.
I thought that would be the case with Radiohead, too, but I just can’t seem to fall in love. Given them plenty of chances, too.
My dad was a Pratchett fan, so growing up, I’d always try to read the Discworld books. I found them way too advanced and boring until around 12 or 13, when something clicked and I decided they were unquestionably the greatest books ever written in the History of Time. Then, later on I got to go back and get all the more, er, “adult” jokes that had flew over my head the first time around.
(Reading Pratchett fairly young also meant that I got none of the pop culture references, so later on when I discovered, say, Buddy Holly, my first thought was "Oh! Just like in Soul Music!)
As an aside, I love cummings, and I teach third graders this poem. I don’t think they really get the emotion of it, but they love the puzzle aspect. For me, the poem is a brilliant example of how a poem’s form can enhance its meaning; in this case, the form is completely inseparable from the meaning. It’s not a poem that can exist in oral form.
My contribution is fairly common: it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found myself able to appreciate 19th century literature. These days I’ll rank The Count of Monte Cristo among the best books I’ve ever read, but there was zero chance I wouldn’t tackled it when I was younger.
When I was a kid, my mom loved old movies. I couldn’t see the appeal. But it turns out I do like old movies, I just don’t like the same ones as my mom.
When I read Moby Dick in high school, I hated it. A few years later, I was browsing in a bookstore, saw a copy, and bought it on a whim. I read it cover-to-cover, and loved it.
I was in high school in the 1980s. I hated Disco, and loved New Wave. About a decade later, I realized that New Wave was just Disco with bad haircuts.
When we read Great Expectations in high school English, I was very unimpressed by it, and when I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities on my own, I couldn’t even finish it.
For graduate school, we had to read Great Expectations again. It really clicked with me then and I’ve been a Dickens fan ever since (and I finally finished A Tale of Two Cities).
