Modern Artist's Technical Abilities

Cafe Society
1

Everyone is familiar with the “my kid could have drawn that” reaction to some “modern art”. My question is if this is true on a technical level.

There are (at least) two parts to art - the artistic vision, and the technical ability to express it. In the old time drawings you simply couldn’t get by without technical skill. My question is if this is also true of the more abstract art.

In sum: can a person with great artistic vision but with no technical facility for drawing become a great artist using one of the techniques that do not involve faithful renditions of recognizable objects?

2

Since this is about art, I think it is better served in CS than in GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

3

The terms “modern” and “abstract” are so broad, as to be virtually meaningless. My own art is abstract, in the sense that it’s either totally non-representational or only representational in a sort of symbolic sense. Yet it is extremely precise and detailed, to the point that it doesn’t allow for even a small mistake. And I have developed my techniques over a period of several decades. “Faithful renditions of recognizable objects” isn’t the only kind of art that requires rigorous technique.

4

Not exactly what you asked, but much modern art employs technical skills that are different from those used in drawing. These are still technical skills, even though they are not traditional ones.

One of the more frequent targets of the comment “anybody could do that” are the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.

However, it has been found that Pollock’s paintings are not just random but employ fractal patterns. The complexity of Pollock’s paintings cannot be simulated by the average person; in fact Pollock’s later paintings have higher fractal dimensions, showing that he knew the kind of effect he was looking for.

5

A lot of modern art is about the language of the medium, which is a lot harder for the layperson to understand. Pollock, as mentioned above, was painting a foreground, middleground, and background, except his were completely flat, frontal planes. Cezanne did not just suck at still-lifes, he was trying to paint the background and middleground as if it was the foreground, so he used no depth illusions or anything. Etc.

6

Who is or isn’t a “great artist” is certainly a personal judgment.
In the art world there’s wide agreement that someone can be a great artist without being able to paint in the style of the high Renaissance.
Personally, I like Van Gogh more than I like Titian, even thought his “realistic” works were pretty mediocre.

Other thoughts:
In western society I’d say that the closest approach to unanimity regarding something being “great art” (across all education and income levels) is achieved by Michaelangelo’s sculpture… and then Renaissance painters.

Impressionism is incredibly popular, but there are still huge numbers of people who think Monet shouldn’t have made things so blurry.

In contemporary art, most of the biggest names maintain very high levels of craftsmanship and presentation compared to their less successful brethren… but almost anyone in the 21st century would be put to shame by Rembrandt when it came to painting lively, representational portraits.

In the world of contemporary fine art, you are expected to produce things that are distinct from what has been done before. There’s still a market for traditional, representational painting, but it’s in genre’s such as “western art” or “wildlife art” or “corporate portraiture.”

7

Do you have a link? I’d love to see your work. I probably have, but I can never match poster names with stuff I’ve seen.

Re: the "my kid could do that"thing …um, no he probably can’t. Even if you aren’t doing faithful renditions, there are design rules that need to be followed. You can’t just throw paint on the canvas. There are balance and color and texture considerations.

8

If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the documentary “My Kid Could Paint That”. It’s about exactly this subject. And it’s not just about the one little girl who might or might not be a savant abstract-expressionist, but about how non-experts relate to abstract and non-representational art in general.

9

I took an art class once that taught me something that I just had to spend 5 minutes googling to really remember again. There was an artist named Sol LeWitt who, to quote the wiki… “he transformed the idea and practice of drawing and changed the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. LeWitt’s art is not about the singular hand of the artist; it is the ideas behind the works that surpass each work itself.”

The thing about him that I took away from the class is that he didn’t create a lot of his sculpture, he simply defined it in terms of math/measurements. Some sculptures were created that way as unique commissioned works, but others he considered the definition to be the art, and if anyone wanted to make their own sculpture based on his definition, he was OK with that, because it wasn’t the physical sculpture that was art, it was the idea behind it. Since the class was at Ohio State, we were all familiar with one of his works, which he designed at the University’s request but didn’t actually build himself:

It’s my understanding that anyone who goes out and gets white blocks of stone in that size and arranges them in that manner can claim to have a LeWitt sculpture, even though he’s dead.

Of course, many large sculptures necessarily require teams of people with an artist simply directing the activities. Architects may consider themselves to be artists in that regard. In that vein, movie/stage directors, composers, conductors, etc etc etc.

There was also a guy that I don’t want to google about right now who was a proponent of the idea of “found art.” That is, some rusty artifact in a field somewhere is just a rusty artifact, but bring it into a studio and it’s art. No effort required aside from vision. From what I’ve seen, a lot of modern sculpture involves “found” objects like this. edit: Found object - Wikipedia

But if you’re talking about conventional art-that-hangs-on-walls, I’d imagine that Warhol’s simpler silkscreens can be pretty easily recreated by someone with silkscreen experience but very little artistic talent. And Lichtenstein’s comic book style paintings probably wouldn’t be very technically challenging, especially with a paint-by-numbers approach.

Anyway, that’s everything I know about art.

10

If you can successfully transfer to the physical medium the idea you have in your mind, that’s all the “technical” skill you need, though I think the word “practical” works better in this context.

11

I would think that’s an artistic rather than a technical skill. IOW that once he came up with the idea of what to do anyone could have actually executed it. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you.

12

I watched a documentary about modern abstract art where the artists talk about letting their inner child come out and play again instead of following the “rules” of traditional art. Since that’s exactly what children do - experiment, play, or just generally screw around - that’s why most people get the “my three year old could draw that!” reaction.

You still have to have some idea of what the rules are in order to bend or break them.

Of course, modern art follows Sturgeon’s Law like any other genre - 90% of it is utter crap, some guy farting into the wind and being “avant garde” for its own sake and missing the point entirely. But the remaining 10% is real talent, and even if you can’t understand the mind of the artist you still have to admit that there’s something going on there.