No. I tend to like expansive color sets, in general, in my art. Kandinsky, for instance, is my favorite painter, but mostly his pre-Bauhaus days. Not a fan of the more geometric stuff which looks “cold” to me. “Blue Poles” is probably my favorite Pollock.
Maybe. I do appreciate symmetry. But I also enjoy aggressive asymmetry. They just have different feels to me. Symmetry is quiet; asymmetry is more active, dynamic.
Yes. The second painting looks cohesive and like a composition to me. The first looks like someone playing around and seeing what happens. It looks like an artist unsure of his voice.
But you bring up a good point. My own art tastes are actually quite conservative in my opinion, and you see some of the things that are important to me. That’s why it confuses me and surprises me at how many people still hate Rothko and Pollock, when to me their work is still imbued with a lot of classic compositional principles. I do tend to like order in my art–no doubt about that. “Order in chaos” is the type of art I gravitate towards.
This gives me some insights into why I dislike so much modern art. When I was a kid I got a battery of psych tests for school. On verbal and math sections I scored pretty well. On visual tests I scored slightly above average, but the tester made a note: he thought I would have scored a lot lower, except that I was constantly verbalizing while I completed the tests. In other words, I’d take the visual puzzle, convert it into language, solve it in language, and then convert it back into an image.
Art that I like is art I can access in the same way: I can understand it through language. There’s a story in it, and there are iconic symbols I can understand, and I can talk about it easily. Art that doesn’t have much going on for me linguistically does absolutely nothing for me, and things like the two different Pollock paintings almost defy language (for me), so I lack a means of accessing them.
So how does it work with instrumental music for you? Do you not like it, or do you have some sort of vocabulary that allows you to understand and conceptualize it? Or is it simply that with music, it’s just somehow different, and you don’t need to connect it to language?
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this in public, but I find that when a non-representational artwork connects with me, it often inspires a verbal response that’s kind of…regressive. For instance, when I first saw an image of Ellsworth Kelly’s High Yellow, I actually found myself saying aloud “Sun ball egg!”
And no, I can’t even claim that I was just vocally condensing a more nuanced mental response along the lines of “Well, the position and background of the yellow shape are clearly evoking the sun in the sky, while its non-circular form both strengthens the composition and reinforces the viewer’s mental focus on yellowness by hinting at a bright yellow egg yolk” and so on and so forth. What I was thinking at that moment, and the only thing I was thinking, was “Sun ball egg!” And I enjoyed it.
As I noted above, I don’t feel that I personally get much out of most non-representational art, and I generally don’t seek it out, partly because I don’t want to be caught talking like a toddler in art museums. But I’m glad it’s out there and sometimes I like to take a shot at looking at it, largely because there’s something that feels surprising and fun in the way it temporarily trainwrecks my relationship with language.
(I will leave it to the art experts to figure out why I saw Onement VI and squeaked “Door!” ;))
Looking at the first one makes me very nervous. The second piece feels like the resolution of a chord at the end of a piece of music. It is over, finished, stable. The first keeps pulling on my eyes towards the upper left quadrant. It is restless.
Nobody claims that enjoyment is objective. It’s not. Pleasure is subject to the same psychological priming effects as anything else. If I believe I am about to drink a special bottle of wine, I will certainly enjoy it more than I might otherwise and I’d probably rate it higher on a blind taste test. This doesn’t make me a fraud; I still know if I am drinking vinegar and it would be damned hard to convince me otherwise. So if I saw a badly preserved masterwork in some piece of shit garage sale, I probably would miss it altogether.
I cannot think of a better argument for the importance of museums and art criticism. The right context and priming may be essential to appreciating highly subjective things. It may be easy to fool me about wine, but it is much harder to fool a professional. And even if you can fool one pro, you probably can’t fool all of them. So it pays to listen to what people who devote their lives to art say even if one doesn’t always agree.
Exactly. I happen to think Renoir was not that great - he had a “look” but few of his paintings rise above banal to me. But understanding how Impressionism fits into the Ongoing Conversation about Art, and Renoir in particular, is still good to know and appreciate as part of learning.
Hey - why am I the only one referring to the Ongoing Conversation about Art? It’s important - heck, it frames this whole damn argument. If you look at Art as a set of Rules, then you judge a work based on whether it complies with those rules. If you look at Art as an ongoing conversation, then stuff like “two purple squares and a white line - I mean, come on!” may be part of an interesting discussion about whether it matters
Because either you accept that that knowledge about art is socially produced or you don’t. People clamoring for objective standards already reject this idea by definition, so for them, the conversation (especially one that does not include them) is only so much masturbatory bullshit. To the people who accept it, the idea of objective value is solipsistic and false. The importance of the conversation is self-evident to the people who accept it and totally unpersuasive to those who don’t. The fact that we have these threads all the time suggests that bridging this epistemological gap ain’t easy.
THat’s an interesting point. Music definitely works differently for me, and I’d not thought about that before either. I don’t listen to a lot of music compared to most people (I can go a week without turning music on and not even realize it), but I sing all the time to my baby, and I used to listen to music a lot more. I prefer lyric music, but I can certainly listen to some instrumental music and really enjoy it. I’m not sure what the difference is.
These accusations of reverse snobbery powerfully remind me of Christians accusing atheists of dissing their religion just by professing disbelief. Just because you take issue with someone or some group of someone’s, you aren’t necessarily doing it to be snobbish or to put others down. There is such a thing as simple, honest skepticism. Deal.
Wow. Really, dude? We’re talking about the subjective appreciation of art. Your argument is more like saying “well, because I don’t like sushi, it’s just a bunch of hipster bullshit with no intrinsic worth” than whatever weird religion analogy you’ve got going here. Most people just shrug their shoulders and say, “eh, sushi isn’t for me.” Your objection sounds more like “any schmuck can cut up a fish and serve it on rice. It’s raw. It tastes like shit to me. It’s objectively terrible. Look, here, I took a picture of some cod I stuck on some rice. I, too, am a sushi chef!”
It’s not mere skepticism you’re exhibiting. I’m skeptical about modern art. As I said above, there’s as much, if not more, modern and contemporary art that I don’t like. I don’t really like Warhol, for instance. But if somebody enjoys it or gets something out of it, who am I to say? Warhol has obviously spoken to many people, whether intellectually, culturally, aesthetically, whatever. I’m not saying he’s worthless, and that, I too, can mass produce silk screened copies of Campbell soup cans. He simply doesn’t do it for me, but I have no reason to believe others are lying or delusional when they do find worth in their work. I listen to what fans have to say, learn about about his artistic statement on consumerism, mass production, etc., and, even though I still don’t like most of it, I can understand how some people do.
Okay - so you are saying that you respect that this Newman is regarded as Significant, and you can see why folks who care about that stuff might pay $44mm? You don’t like it yourself and think the amount is stupidly high, but you don’t disrespect folks in the Art world or look down on them? And you agree that “I or a kid can do better” is not relevant when it comes to discussing What is Art? and the value of Significant artworks that shaped the Art world over the 20th century?
If so, then you are welcome to your simple, honest skepticism and more power to ya. Otherwise, you are blowing smoke.
