What you fail to realize is that the splotches of paint are carefully planned and placed to create the illusion of randomness. 
Many works of art are not just art for the sake of it. They are deliberate messages to other artists, critics, and groups of people. And if you aren’t the intended audience, then you might not pick up the message.
So are my golf shots.
Minimalist art isn’t random. It isn’t even intended to look random.
Yeah, I would agree with this. People will pay millions for an original piece of modern art for the same reason why they’ll pay big bucks for an original Magna Carta or George Washington’s toothbrush or something. Even though they don’t really transmit any information that a copy does not, they create an intangible link to the past. It’s maybe not entirely rational, but enough people seem to believe in it to create reliably high prices.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of modern art, either.
Give me the National Portrait Gallery any day.
That’s not important. What counts is they have the talent but choose not to use it. So there.
…but enough about Lady Gaga.
I’d be curious to hear if the people who think modern art is all just conspicuous consumption and social pressure feel the same way about design and aesthetics generally. Is an Eames chair just an overpriced La-Z-Boy in your eyes? Is Fallingwater just a blockier prefab home?
If not, why do you appreciate the careful design and aesthetics of those things, but not modern art?
I don’t like the types of modern art referenced here, and I also don’t like Fallingwater particularly. As a concept it’s good but it would have been much more pleasing to me to have a more traditional home emplaced there, as the modernist concretey structure contrasts too much with the rest of the scenery.
And while a lot of the fans of modern art are influenced by social pressure and a desire for being in an elite group, I don’t think very many of them do not have a genuine appreciation for the aesthetics of it. About equal to the percentage of people who listen to rap or punk just for the rebellion of it or because all their friends do. That doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, it’s bad enough in my opinion that fewer resources should be dedicated to it. And despite the fact that I am not a dictator, I am allowed to voice my opinions on the relative merits of art.
Of course. But there is a huge distinction between recognizing differences in aesthetic judgment and contending that the other side is just brainwashed or spending money for the sake of spending money.
People don’t talk about the emperor having no clothes when they talk about not liking country music. I don’t understand why abstract art is any different. It’s no easier to paint a Rothko than it is to string three chords together on a guitar and whine about my wife.
Yeah, he’s describing abstract expressionism there in the vain of Jackson Pollack. Kind of the opposite of minimalism, really. I’m not going to have the nth discussion about his talent but, suffice it to say, I find him extremely talented and his work transcendent. Among my three favorite painters.
There’s actually a lot going on i a Mondrian or a Jackson Pollock. People have done interesting analyses of them in terms of fractals and the like. I have to admit that I like both their works, and think there’s more to them than meets the eye or the quick judgment.
However, I have tyo agree about Mike Rothko works, or the Ellsworth Kelly work that appears first in the OP. I’m clearly missing something.
There’s seems to be a sort of labor theory of value at work in your judgment here. A Pollack justifies it’s worth if a lot of intellectual labor went into placing each splotch.
But putting aside the merit of that theory of value, why do you think a Rothko involves less intellectual work? Because the technique is ultimately relatively simple? Is the Old Man and the Sea worth less than Infinite Jest?
Or if your argument that complexity is just more appealing to you as a matter of aesthetics?
I spent a hungover afternoon walking around the Louvre earlier this year. It made me tired and bored to tears. “Oh boy, another Napoleon-as-Greek-god allegory. A countess on a horse. A crowd of rubes around the Mona Lisa. Zzzzzz…”
On the other hand, I spent a hungover morning wandering around MOMA a few years earlier, and I stumbled across the gallery where Franz Kline’s Painting Number 2 hangs. It had been one of my favorite paintings going back to art history class in high school, because of the way it evokes both Japanese minimalism and industrial brutalism at the same time, and I had never seen it in the flesh. I totally forgot that it was at MOMA, so I was utterly gobsmacked when I ran across it for the first time. I spent a good twenty minutes just staring at it, seeing details in the physicality of the thing that I had never seen in photos, and letting a mix of emotions wash over me.
Granted, a lot of abstract expressionist stuff is utter garbage, but then again, a lot of figurative stuff is derivative twaddle. If pure technical execution were the standard by which we judged all art, then Yngwie Malmsteen would be “better” than Jimi Hendrix.
Tiger Wood’s skill is not subjective. It’s evidenced by score sheets.
But on the general topic, I don’t categorically dislike any particular school of art. My favorite artist is Salvador Dali, but there is an abstract painting by Franz Kline called Accent Grave that hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art that I have always liked for reasons that I cannot possibly explain.
However, sometimes when I stroll through galleries and come across something like that all-green canvas, or sometimes even an all-white canvas, I can’t help imagining the pitch that was made to some museum’s board of acquisition:
“Notice the purity of expression…” or some such.
So, yeah, on some things I call “bullshit”. Actually, I usually refer to them as “con jobs”. And I’m aware that people buying these things don’t care about my opinion.
We should hang out.
It’s not a work theory. It’s a matter of whether or not I like it and it engages me. The Pollocks and Mondrians do. For the life of me, though, I don’t see what you get out of looking at a Kelly.
The reason that I like loking at the others, though, seems to be due to the creative work and, at least at an instinctual level, the labor, that gioes into it. So it’s not unrelated. But my valuing the painting is directly do to its effect on me, which rests, in turn, on that merit.
As far as simplicity – I get as much enjoyment out of reading a simply-told story as out of a complex bit of self-referential wordplay. Often more, in fact. So the comparison isn’t apt.
Painting a Rothko (who is not a minimalist, either) is infinitely harder, in my opinion. I can string three chords together and write a song any time. But to paint something as luminiscent as a Rothko? I really don’t know exactly how he does it, how he achieves that glow. It must be in his technique of laying down the paints and the washes and the kinds of paint he uses, because I sure as shit can’t paint anything that resembles and feels like a Rothko. Same with Pollack. I wish I could do abstract expressionism. I can’t. I can draw a face that looks like the person it’s supposed to be a portrait of, but I can’t make an abstract expressionist style painting that works and makes sense to me.
Tom Wolfe described the EXACT MECHANISM by which minimism evolved inThe Painted Word.
It’s all about the money, baby!