And that’s cool, too. If dogs playing poker does it for you and impels this kind of emotional reaction, that’s what art does.
I, too, didn’t see the appeal of Rothko until I saw one of his works in person at the Art Institute of Chicago - I think it was Purple White and Red. It was a pretty impressive piece of work, and light-years beyond what you see on the printed page, but if you asked me what was so impressive about it, I couldn’t really pin it down.
I think the music analogy offered by TruCelt is a good one – people often talk about how they not get abstract art, but they forget that music is almost totally abstract, and yet readily appreciated near-universally. A melody, on its own, does not represent anything – there is no thing ‘out there’ in the real world that is in some form mirrored or captured by it. It’s a series of noises, following some rules or guidelines defining what makes a series of noises sound pleasurable, rather than cacophonic, to human ears (or better, human brains). Yet, apparently, those abstract sequences readily invoke strong feelings in many listeners, as is attested to by the continued popularity of music.
Now, the effect is a strong one wrt sounds – most people can readily pick out a ‘wrong’ note in some melody; even more, it’s quite an uncomfortable thing, causing sometimes even physical reactions. On the other hand, good harmony can be extremely pleasurable. Neither of these is due to anything the melody represents; there is no direct ‘message’ attached to a melody that can be examined and judged. Rather, the judgement happens on a different level, emotional rather than rational, though this is often a phrase that invites a good amount of woo. In fact, if we understood the workings of our brains perfectly, I believe we also would understand rationally why some particular combination of sounds has a certain impact upon us – but we don’t, so all we have to go on is the experience of that impact.
With visual stimuli, the effect is more subtle, and perhaps less universal. Certainly, some color combinations are more appealing to us than others, but it’s not clear how much farther things go. Works like those of Pollock and Rothko provide an indication that there is something to the idea of ‘visual melody’: some combinations of colors, textures, shapes, and dimensions just evoke immediate emotional responses – they have an impact, without necessarily being tied to conveying any sort of message to be rationally examined.
Perhaps a reason for the difference in how we appraise visual and auditory stimuli is just that we’re more used to our visual sense delivering representational data: to us, how the world is is mostly how the world looks, not how it sounds, smells or tastes. A picture is expected to be a picture of something, while there’s not even such a concept as a ‘melody of something’. So these senses are more easily liberated from their representational duties: everybody can appreciate the good taste of a meal, or the smell of a buquet of flowers, without calling into question if what the chef does is ‘art’; we can enjoy the taste for its own sake more readily than we can enjoy a sight in that way.
It’s also interesting to speculate a little about where abstract art comes from. One idea would be that with the advent of photography, painting lost its representational function – pretty soon, pictures were predominantly taken, not painted; it’s faster, cheaper, and perfectly reliable. This both robbed art of its primary use (well, one of them, at any rate) and liberated it – art became free to explore the possibilities inherent in visual media. On the one hand, there thus was a crisis: if not representation, then what was art supposed to be about? On the other hand, art came to be created for its own sake, with itself as the primary object. Both these strands led to a certain kind of ‘self-reference’ within art: questions like: ‘what is art?’ or ‘what is the object of art?’ became the object of art, and such self-reference has the potential of creating qualitatively new phenomena – as one simple and rather literal demonstration, think about what happens if you point a camera to a screen that show the camera’s output, and thus, make the camera’s output its own object. This simple visual feedback already may cause quite interesting and novel features to appear, which are devoid of any immediate representational content – and thus, wholly abstract.
I just have to wonder if some people (judging by their tone in these sorts of threads) think we’re making up our appreciation for these works. I admit, I like modern art, especially non-representational art, and it moves me in ways that classic art doesn’t, for whatever reason. I suspect part of the reason is because I’m a photographer, always dealing (at least on the most basic level) in the representational, and when I go to see art, I want to see something I can’t imagine; something I’ve never seen.
But I get the feeling from some posters that this appreciation is some sort of put-on. I just don’t get that attitude. There’s plenty of contemporary art I think is a load of shit (Damien Hirst, I’m looking at you; don’t like Warhol, either.), but people like Rothko and Pollock speak to me, visually. I really do think Pollock is the greatest American painter. If these painters don’t move you, that’s fine. But it’s not like we’re making shit up when we’re describing our emotional reactions to them.
That’s Simon Schama; it was an excellent show. (He’s also a historian of the world beyond art; keep an eye out for his other shows & books.) He loved Rothko, although he was speaking as somebody who’d actually seen the paintings; TV & books & the internet are good for background but actually looking at a picture is the only way to see it. He, also, found the Rothko Chapel so strong it was upsetting; yup, Rothko finished those paintings & then ended his life…
But the Rothko Chapel is part of The Menil collection of museums, which I’m glad to have in Houston. The de Menils & people like Walter Hopps, founding director of the collection, actually* knew* the artists & worked with them.
Well, let me start with Pollock. Despite liking a wide range of art, I’d always thought Pollock looked silly…on paper, that is, never having seen one in person. Then one day I was at MOMA and there was a bench in front of one of his works, so I sat down out of curiosity and absolutely fell in love within half a minute. What you don’t get on paper is the incredible physical energy that must have gone into the painting, and how intricate and complex it looks close up. So yeah, he did it by flinging paint, but I don’t care…the painting (second on page) has as distinct physical presence, and when I used to travel to NYC quarterly I stopped in at least a couple of times a year (for that and one of Monet’s late bridge paintings).
Now, Rothko. I was at some random museum many years ago and came upon two of his paintings. “Rothko!” I said to myself. “A true hero of modern art, I’ve heard!” So I studied those two paintings for a while - IIRC both were two-tone, one color on top, one on the bottom - and truly came away scratching my head. So to the OP: no idea. I suspect he might mark the actual line between meaningful modern art and self-important bullshit, but I’m not confident in that judgment.
The best part of this is that we all believe that it is true for you.
If anything, I think the appreciation for Rothko is coming from your subconscious. “This is really good art! You’re supposed to like it!”, and not a conscious decision to seem more cultured.
I don’t actually believe this about all Rothko fans, though. I’m sure there are people out there who, with no knowledge of his work, would have the aforementioned “religious experience” when seeing one for the first time. There’s also some who like it because they’re supposed to. The exact proportion of these types is obviously open to interpretation.
My comments were about why some art is considered “great” and why it is so valuable in financial terms, not about any particular individual’s reaction to it.
I grew up near the Rothko chapel and I went there a lot. Seeing it is person is a lot like seeing it in pictures for me. Meh.
In art school, I was met with snigger for liking Pollack (along with some impressionists painters) but no one laughed at you for liking Rothko. My first exposures to Pollack was pretty much like everyone else… ‘anyone can do that’ sorta thing and it took me a while before I clearly see what he was doing and appreciate. Whereas Rothko I saw something there like something ‘substantial’ very early and as time went on I appreciate him more but no revelation like I had with Pollack.
Those are two different questions.
- Some art is considered “great” because many people like it a lot. But it’s very difficult to explain why it’s great to someone who doesn’t get it.
There are things I don’t get - opera being a good example. I can’t stand it. To me, it’s people spoiling perfectly good classical music - which I do like - by warbling horrendously over the top of it. I like a few examples of opera singing, but most of it just irritates me.
However, I am humble enough to realise that the failing is mine. There are people who adore opera and who get a huge amount of joy out of it. They’re not foolish and they’re not being duped, they’re just into something that - for whatever reason - doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t get it. I’ve tried to get it, but I’m just not built that way. That doesn’t mean opera is bad art, and I’d defend anyone’s right to enjoy and love and adore and pay large amounts of money to enjoy opera. That’s great, as long as they don’t expect me to have to listen to it, I’m glad they’re enjoying it.
- It’s valuable because people are prepared to pay lots of money for it. That should be simple enough for anyone to understand.
Well, I sincerely doubt that (there’s plenty of “good art” I don’t like, and I didn’t know much of anything about Rothko the first time I saw him, just glanced through his work in modern art books–as I said many times before, I was predisposed not to like his work based on what I saw in books.), but even if it were true, it’s immaterial, as my reaction to his work is my reaction to his work. Whether it’s impelled by some sort of odd subconscious desire to want to appreciate “good art” (which I think is a weird hypothesis) or not, the end result is the same.
On the other hand, I have no trouble believing that there are at least some things I like because other people like them, too, or even because it’s something one ‘ought to’ like – it’s just part of how our judgments are formed. Lots of things, for example, require a second (third, fourth…) look in order to be appreciated, and without other people’s praise, I probably would have been less likely to give them the required attention. There is such a thing as an acquired taste, and in order to acquire it, one must perhaps persevere despite an initial dislike, or at least indifference. Few people like their first coffee or beer, but hang in there, and both can become fantastic treats. This isn’t any less sincere than appreciating things immediately, ‘out of nothing’, i.e. in some kind of social vacuum – which doesn’t really exist, anyway.
However, one also must realize (which most here thankfully seem to do) that people who haven’t yet acquired some taste aren’t therefore less refined, or cultured – certainly, there are wine snobs that look down their nose at people who, like me, just fail to see what’s all that great or cultured about fermented grape juice, but I think that says more about the person than about the subject of their attention.
Of course, this means that there is necessarily an element of fad or fashion to art, additionally to its inherent subjectivity – art is not great or bad in and of itself, rather, the value of art is a judgment ultimately made by society. So some artists, and some kinds of art, may bubble to the top, while others, though perhaps not in any way objectively ‘less worthy’, might fail to. This introduces a certain element of apparent randomness that I think is off-putting to both art devotees and outside observers – the former tend to insist that there is some objective measure of greatness that only the initiated can properly recognize after all, while to the letter, it often seems that art is great because somebody said so, and everybody else followed suit.
Neither is quite correct, though: rather, the value of art is a judgment made by society at large; it is both objective in the sense that there is a definite judgment that is arrived at, and subjective in the sense that there is no fact in the outside world that determines greatness over rubbish. But thinking about it, how could there be? Whatever art is, its appreciation is certainly a function of our aesthetics – and while there is perhaps a fact to how our aesthetics are, I don’t think many would argue that there is any objective necessity for them to be that way (though in some way, one can probably find some evolutionary justification – but even that is then contingent on the particular circumstances of our evolutionary history).
Mostly it comes down to people being stupid and susceptible to group-think. There is nothing more profound in any abstract that doesn’t exist in a landscape painting. If done properly they are pleasant and stimulate pleasure in the brain, like looking at a nice sunset. People are surprised that abstract can have a similar effect and then are talked into thinking theres even more to it by the art cult followers and on and on.
Apparently the whole genre only became popular because the CIA sponsored abstract artists to make the soviets feel inferior with their emphasis on realism during the cold war(which also apparently worked). Millions went into pumping up the value and esteem of these artists with fake auctions and art shows and real purchases to set the value high. The emperor has no clothes, just don’t tell your wannabe art teacher that, her head might explode.
Its basic psychology. For instance if you tell someone a wine is very god and expensive they ill rate it much higher and enjoy it more than if you didn’t. (HUMONS = STOOPID)
If I’m reading all that correctly, I don’t think I would disagree with it.
ETA: This is a response to Half Man, Half Wit. The “group-think” response I completely and utterly disagree with. I’ve always loved abstract art, and it had nothing to do with the CIA. (What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what in the fuckity fuck is that all about?)
I didn’t say you shouldn’t, but you should also be judging abstract by the same criteria you would any art. Is it interesting, Is is pleasurable to look at, Is it orginal, ect ect. A lot of abstract art lovers convolute the topic because they think there is some hidden genius that takes a devoted person to understand ect.
link to one of many articles about CIA’s connection to Pollack, abstract art’s success
Yeah, there’s a reason artists don’t like to explain their art. If the painting is really about morning bowel movements and critics think it’s a fierce condemnation of corporate consumerism, the artist comes off a lot better by keeping his mouth shut.
Abstract art has a lot of baggage because some people think it’s all a put-on or Rauschenberg had blackmail photos of the major museum curators. And, y’know, sometimes that was probably the case. But a lot of it is really wonderful, and seems to be representing something that’s not tangible or visual (like a painting of a specific musical chord, or of a recognizable emotion).
Art: It’s not just for slackers and poseurs anymore!
You write as though the only possible response to a landscape painting is “ooo … pretty” when, in fact, its perfectly possible for a landscape to trigger something profound.
And no one is claiming that abstract art is MORE profound than representational art. Only that it’s different. And that people can have enjoyable encounters with abstract art without being “stupid” or “susceptible to group think.”
Art isn’t necessarily “really” about anything, and it sure as heck isn’t necessarily “really” about the artist’s intentions - and for works like Johns’ “bullseye” paintings (and his flag paintings, too), that probably goes double. When the subject of your work is a powerful, iconic symbol that has been put to use in a squillion different contexts, that work is going to contain some semiotic overflow that goes beyond whatever the artist “intended”. If you call Johns up and asks him, and he tells you that he actually had his cat Fluffy’s anus in mind when he painted those bullseyes, that doesn’t suddenly “really” make them paintings of Fluffy’s anus.
(That applies to all art in various degrees, by the way, not just representations of Fluffy’s hypothetical behind.)