Went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this weekend. A lot of really remarkable art is there, and I always enjoy going. But to be really blunt, for every piece that’s remarkable and unique and thought-provoking, there are 9 others that are just trash (in my naive estimation). And this is supposed to be one of the finest art museums in the world. How is this possible?
I see stuff that I consider far more interesting, creative, and ultimately beautiful in any online gallery, like d’art for one example. And you know – as an absolute certainty – that none of those artists will ever make it to the SFMOMA. They’re all teaching art classes in junior high schools, or working at an aaron brothers, or pumping gas or whatever, and that’s where they’re likely to stay. These aren’t hypotheticals; these are the actual typical jobs; I hang out there on occasion, and have conversed with many of the artists there. There’s nobody there that’s getting major exhibits.
I’m not whining about the art world being tough where the top 1% of the top 1% still aren’t good enough to make it to the top. Why is it that so many that do manage to make it to the top seem to just suck?
How is this possible? Am I really so proletariat that I don’t get what fine art really is? Or is it really a big farce?
90% of anything - high art, low art, sonnets, limericks, whatever - is crap.
You didn’t tell us what you saw yet. Perhaps it was an exhibition of relatively new art and the bad hasn’t been sifted from the good yet. Quite a few people were famous and thought to be a surefire candidate for timelessness in their day, and are regarded as insignificant now. (Pavel Tchelitchew is the one example that always pops into my head. Poor guy. I read they used to have this huge work of his at the top of the stairs in MOMA and now it’s in storage.)
Perhaps you don’t ‘speak the language’ yet, for want of another word. I can’t explain why seeing a Jackson Pollock or a Richard Diebenkorn or a Marsden Hartley makes me weak in the knees when a person has closed their eyes to the possibility that paint splatters can be art or insist that art must be beautiful or look like stuff.
I have no idea what your reactions were so please don’t think that I am ascribing them to you. Whatever your reaction, don’t throw up your hands and say, “ah, it’s a big scam,” because that’s frankly lazy thinking. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought to myself “Yes, it’s a big scam, and everyone’s fooled but you. But don’t tell, please! You’ll put a lot of people out of work!”) :rolleyes:
This is completely incorrect, and is the reason why so many museums and gallaries are stocked with crap. One’s response to a given artwork is certainly subjective, and everyone is free to love or hate anything they see. A person may think a Thomas Kinkade painting is pretty (I enjoy some of them) but they sure as hell don’t belong in an art museum. As a painter his skills are mediocre at best, and his paintings are neither original nor revolutionary. A museum should contain exemplary specimins of a given field. Unfortunately, many museums fall into the trap of exhibiting stuff that some bureaucrat likes, as opposed to stuff that demonstrates unmatched talent or originality (or hopefully both.) The problem is exacerbated by modern art, where gallaries have decided that abstractness is a substitute for talent. Good abstract art requires dedication and skill (e.g. Picasso, Pollack, Warhol) not the ability to collect garbage and hot-glue it to a piece of plywood. (An honest-to-god exhibit I saw at MoMA).
For modern art, I’ve found that good descriptions help a lot. Last time I went to the Guggenheim, almost every piece had a couple of paragraphs of history and intent nearby. A piece that is just a bunch of pencil lines on a wall might actually have a very interesting idea behind it. If you walk in not knowing anything, you’re obviously not going to “get” stuff.
I’m not sure how I feel about this in a broader sense, since I’m uneasy with the idea that an explanation is required to appreciate something properly.
In “The Painted Word” Tom Wolfe spells out some of the reasons why a lot of modern art is crap, especially that minimalist stuff. A fun read, too.(Basically, artists started painting whatever they thought art critics would like, because that’s the key to critical acceptance, which is what gets you in galleries, which is what gets you the big bucks).
Yeah, I think a lot of it is crap and nobody likes to say that. I recently started a job as a librarian at our local art museum, so I’ve been trying to brush up on my art knowledge - I read the new exhibit catalogs that come in and keep up with the periodical literature. A lot of it is more likeable if you read about it, either in the periodicals or the exhibit catalog - “Oh, I guess I can see that” or “Oh, evidently it’s about Matthew Shepard. I think he’s the red line.” And while I think it should stand on its own, I can appreciate that with a little more knowledge coming into something you can occaisionally appreciate it more.
But I honestly can’t stand a good 70% of the modern art exhibit stuff and the gallery ads for it. It dosen’t mean anything to me even after I look it up and see that the big black square is supposed to signify the artist’s lifelong battle with hemerrhoids. And modern art is at a disadvantage often - with older stuff, even if it dosen’t do anything for me personally I can still appreciate it. But a lot of this crap… if art dosen’t mean anything then I think it fails its purpose.
Actually here on the SDMB there are frequently threads about how much they hate modern art.
If you think about it, the job of running the modern art museum is much tougher than running one dedicated to say impressionism. Sure, if your running the impressionism museum you have to raise loads of cash to buy up the right peices. But everybody agrees already on what works or artists are the best examples of impressionism.
Of course with Modern Art it harder than that.
Then again, look at the your local 18-plex. How many of those movies do you really want to see?
Look at the TV guide. How many of those shows have no appeal to you.
Great Art endures the centuries. But of course, modern art hasn’t been around for centuries. So for modern art it has to be a throw it on the wall and see what sticks method of sorting out what is good and what isn’t. (pun intended) So sure you go to a modern art museum and if one in ten of the peices works for you that’s a really good average I’d say. Do you really think you could run the modern art museum and have everybody like every peice you displayed?
But I’m really glad you started thread after actually visiting a museum and not just after seeing some news article on Yahoo. For far too many people modern art is the ultimate strawman for them to attack.
I think you mean “Philistine” rather than “proletariat.”
We also need to define some of the other terms being used here. By “modern” art, are we talking about Modern art as a period–from c. 1900-1960–or are we talking mainly about contemporary art?
We’ll also need to define “crap”–is that referring to technical incompetence, lack of creativity, lack of intellectual substance, or all of that and more?
With any art period, context means everything. It’s impossible to fully appreciate Italian Renaissance without understanding the dual heritages of Catholicism and classicism. After almost 600 years of exposure to Renaissance art, the visual style is easier to grasp, but you have to keep in mind that many viewers in the Renaissance were a bit bewildered with linear perspective (though they warmed up to it pretty fast).
Modern art requires a great deal of familiarity with the artist’s philosophical as well as artistic context–if you don’t know how much Piet Mondrian was into Theosophy, then his carefully asymmetrically balanced squares and lines don’t mean anything (I used to hate Mondrian because I found his work so boring–I’m still not as aesthetically moved by it as I am by, say, Kandinsky’s work, but now I can appreciate it more).
So those text cards that SmackFu describes are really useful for understanding modern art, and what the artist was striving for.
The problem that I see with contemporary art is that much of it has become fairly self-indulgent. And there are too many artists who rely more on the message behind their work than on the work itself–many times the technique suffers (and then you have to question if it’s really “art” rather than a theatrical statement).
Maybe I’d agree with your assessment of the SFMoMA (I’ve never been there)–but maybe I wouldn’t. In any case, I think that the statement that 90% of fine art is crap is too sweeping and needs to be qualified in more specific terms.
Regarding Jackson Pollack: how this guy is regarded as :great" is beyond me…most of his “paintings” resemble paint spatters. I have a workbench cover which looks a lot like his “Broadway Boogie”…or was that Mondrian?
Anyway, it didn’t take a lot of skill to drip paint onto canvasses. By this standard, Thomas Kinkaid is a genius!
Broadway Boogie Woogie? Mondrian. Regarding the bench: did you intend to have that paint on your bench? Was it a vision of yours or was it an accident? Also, Kinkaid never used the paint dripping technique… so… what are you trying to say there?!
[ul]
[li]With any art period, context means everything. [/li][li]Modern art requires a great deal of familiarity with the artist’s philosophical as well as artistic context.[/li][li]The problem that I see with contemporary art is that much of it has become fairly self-indulgent. And there are too many artists who rely more on the message behind their work than on the work itself–many times the technique suffers.[/li][/ul]
One element of context for some involves the horrors of art school and art academia. Often art students reference specific things within what they have been taught. Sometimes these references are so oblique that you practically need to also either be a student or teacher to understand them. Plenty of times these works end up considered good, museum-worthy pieces, because people within the institutions “get” these works. It doesn’t matter how much the regular person gets the art.
Self-indulgence, alongside context, spawned the spectacle of Philip Guston. He was a decent abstract expressionist in the 50s, but by the 80s he started doing awful, hideous paintings of jokey comic strip elements, and soon he was lauded as one of the most brilliant painters ever. Every art critic was tripping over themselves to worship and praise him, as if no one else besides him and Lichtenstein ever reference comic strips and comic books in their paintings. And then just as soon as he was a huge deal, no one cared any more. I suspect in about 10 years all Guston pieces will be in storage.
Another element of self-indulgence: remember Julien Schnabel? He kept saying he was doing really important art. And he talked a good game. Soon other people were hypnotized by him, saying he was doing really important art. And people were believing him. And that mattered enough to get his work in the hands of collectors and museums. In retrospect, will his art matter at all in another 10 years (if if even matters now)? Probably not. Like Warhol, he was good at business art. Unlike Warhol he isn’t very good at art art.
Time though is often the best perspective through which to view art. The art marketplace is speculative. Some art is acquired with an element of faith, that the art will become more important over time. But again, it’s often in the eyes of the beholder, and everyone sees differently.
Regarding Jackson Pollack, I don’t know why they bother to print photos of his work. It turns it into exactly what people mock it as. I always thought it was crap. But in person, it’s way more interesting, almost like a wall of sculpture rather than painting.
The Abstract Expressionists pushed modernist art to its extreme–their works are almost entirely about painting as an object in itself. Pollock’s action paintings are a good example of this–they’re as much about the process of painting as they are “finished” products. Personally, I find those works very, very beautiful (there’s a certain quiet rhythm that pervades his works), but SmackFu is right–they have to be seen in person to be appreciated.
Warhol is largely responsible for shifting attention to the consumption of artwork rather than the work itself (though he borrowed a lot of this from Duchamp’s precedent). For me, this opened the door to a lot of crap–artists seem to have reacted by producing the most vacuous artwork (e.g., Jeff Koons), or by taking the opposite extreme and overloading their work with heavy social messages.
I agree with mrunlucky’s assessment of Schnabel and Guston–I’ve never cared for their “work.”
Years ago, I read an article about the late Willem De Kooning, the late Dutch abstract artist. The implication was, that for the last few years of his life, he(De kooning) was incapacitated due to senile dementia. However, a steady stream of paintings kept emanating from his studo…it seems that his daughter and son-in-law were in on a good scam. Nobody caught on for quite a while, because de Kooning’s works are also highly abstract.
How couldone authenticate a Jackson Pollack? They just look like paint spatters to me.
In a battered paperback on my shelf titled * The World’s Greatest Hoaxes * by Richard Saunders (Playboy Press, 1980) I found the following:
In 1964, a Swedish journalist gave some paints and brushes to a chimp at Sweden’s Boras zoo, and displayed a half a dozen of results in a reputable gallery in the city of Goteburg under the name Pierre Brassau. (One painting sold for ninety dollars.) Several local Goteburg critics went wild, one of them writing: “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”
In 1924, a writer and literary critic Paul Jordan Smith, who’d never had an art lesson or done a painting of any kind, got fed up with what he saw as silly art fads. He sat down in front of a canvas and produced a crude sketch of a woman eating a banana, which he named “Exaltation,” and displayed it under the name Pavel Jerdanowitch, claiming to have found the Disumbrationist school of art. A distinguished French art journal wrote him asking for further examples of his work. Smith eventually produced six more canvases, all created in a few hours, and drew praise from critics around the world, among them Havelock Ellis. An example: “This artist has a directly individual manner and uses his brush to symbolize his sentiments. He explores the heights and does not hesitate to peer into the depths.” The hoax lasted until 1927 and was only exposed by Smith himself.
In 1961, a mysterious Hungarian pianist named Thomas Blod sat down at a piano in London’s Wigmore Hall and played furiously for four hours. But not a single note was heard; the strings had all been disconnected from the keyboard. The audience, though somewhat perplexed, stood and applauded generously at the end of the performance. Thomas Blod, however, was an alias for an eccentric Cambridge antiques dealer with an odd sense of humor and a seething hatred for modern music. (One couple came back stage and praised the concert because it was “so quiet.”)
Look, hoaxes like these wouldn’t be possible if an awful lot of silliness wasn’t going on in the art world. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every piece of art that I don’t understand must be a hoax or a fraud or a piece of crap, but let’s face it. A lot of people who pay big money for pretentious art they don’t understand are yahoos on the same scale as the trailer park denizens who send their welfare money to television preachers.
In * Breakfast of Champions, * Kurt Vonnegut suggested that modern art is a conspiracy to make poor people feel stupid. I think there’s some truth in that.
