As I recall I didn’t read the titles immediately when I first saw them. I thought they looked like Romantic landscapes first, then read the titles and had my suspicions confirmed.
What I’m saying this that you’re probably not going to find ANY abstract art funny if you don’t have some context to work from. Acquiring that knowledge would mean WORKING to know more about art in general – composition, history, techniques, etc. – including more about abstract art. You would be working to build a knowledge base that would allow you to get the joke.
It’s like learning French in order to be able to laugh at a French comedian.
Well, again, this is like asking, “Can an English speaker ‘get’ a joke that’s told in Portuguese?” and insisting that somehow the abstract sounds of the vowels and consonants must convey some kind of humor, divorced of all linguistic context. Since that seems to be where you’re going, I’d say the answer to the OP–working within your idiosyncratic definitions of “non-representational,” “art,” and “funny,”–is “No.” If you’re going to respond to any example offered by continually narrowing the definition of those terms to specifically exclude the example, then again, “No.”
Alternatively, using the more widely accepted definitions of the terms “non-representational,” “art,” and “funny,” and not adding the additional and bewildering condition of excluding any and all relevant context, the answer, as evidenced by the many examples in this thread, is an emphatic “Yes.”
If “art snob” can be defined as “anyone who’s put enough effort into understanding the history and context of art to be able to ‘get’ the humor in some abstract art,” then anyone who speaks Portuguese can be called a “Portuguese snob.” Acquisition of a particular area of knowledge–engineering; Portuguese; art–does not automatically make one a “snob” in contrast to others who have not acquired the same particular area of knowledge. It is as pointless–and as Rorschachian–to call someone who ‘gets’ abstract art a “snob” as it is to call someone who ‘gets’ engineering a “snob,” simply because they understand how a bridge stays up and I don’t. To call someone a snob for using terms like “negative space” is as silly as calling someone a snob for using terms like “torque.”
Ah! Since you have the non-representational art-to-English dictionary close at hand, perhaps you can tell me what blue swash-green circle-red triangle means.
