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Sure - color field paintings are big and kinda hypnotic. When you are in the same room and looking at the painting, you can…“lose yourself” in one in a pretty cool way.
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I could close my eyes, walk outside and point to anything, ANYTHING, and make a similar statement.
Lets try shall we, OK, I ended up pointing at a 4x4 used as a gate post. I’ll just metaphorically yank it up and toss it on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum. The dirt at the bottom represents the elements of life from which we spring but yet holds us back, anchored to the earth. Ripping it out of the ground was an act designed to free it from confinement. The post itself is a timeworn example of how mankind has forced conformity out of a free-form soul, laid bare and lifeless to be used by others and then discarded as it decays. The hinges born into the side of the post is the link to a gateway. Closed it shows us our limitations, open it allows only the limits of our imagination.
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Cool; you don’t like or care about what Color Field paintings do - you think you can achieve the same impression by staring at pretty much anything. Great. But you seem to take issue that others feel differently. That’s not okay.
Some folks cite songs that are Punk or Metal that they love because of how they make them feel. If someone says “It’s noise, and any feelings you get from listening you can get from other sounds or songs” - why listen to metal if you can listen to machinery, right? - then does that mean that Punk and Metal aren’t music?
As for your fence and gate - hey, weirder / more ordinary things have been put in galleries and declared Art.
Like Duchamp’s urinal titled “Fountain.” Or Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, better known as the painting of a pipe with “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (French for “This is not a pipe”) written under it. Because those things make us think about what art is and means and can be, and wonder whether you can even get meaningful answers to those questions.
If no one ever pushed the boundaries of art, we’d still be doing the equivalent of cave paintings. Look at ancient sculptures and pottery - they had decent enough tools to create art but still didn’t manage to produce anything very “realistic” to our modern eye. Last I read anything on the subject, there was question as to whether they could even understand how to draw things in a very representational way, or that it would be possible. Well, we’re pretty much nearing the limits of realism, or photorealism, to the best of our current understanding and comprehension. Why should we be limited by that as the technique? Is our art forever going to be hyper-realistic computer-drawn landscapes and still-lifes? Why not see if a shape or a color can convey emotion or meaning?
That’s central to what I have been stating, and why I also cited Duchamp’s signed urinal. “Art” as a concept speaks both to artistic objects (the Thing) AND to the emotions and messages being shared (the Idea).
When it comes to Art as a Thing - there are debates between what is Art vs. what has merely been well-Crafted. If MOMA takes an iPhone and adds it to their Permanent Collection, is it a well-crafted object or has that particular iPhone become Art?
—> to me, that is an interesting discussion to have.
When it comes to **Art as an Idea **- there are debates about what is an Idea that is powerful enough to stand as Art, like we are having here. It is okay, appropriate and YMMV to look at attempts of “Art as Idea” and say “that’s a stupid idea.”
—> to me, this is also an interesting discussion to have.
The point: it is good and productive to have discussions about What is Art? where you discuss whether a certain work is more Craft vs. Art or meant to be about an Idea but fails in some way. It is not good or productive to have discussions that are punctuated by “that’s not art; it doesn’t have the effect you think it does; it is nothing more than Emperor has no clothes…”
Prof Periwinkle offered an interpretation of the piece, and it may even be the artist’s own interpretation, but it’s still just an interpretation. Just because someone can tell you the meaning they attach to it, that does not in itself explain the value of the thing. Moreover, if we can tell you how people back in the artist’s time understood it and why they thought it was important, that will explain why those people did pay a lot of money, but does nothing to explain why anyone should.
I personally have a visceral dislike for interpretations of abstract paintings which assign propositional sentences and symbolism to them. That makes them… no longer abstract. Seems to miss the point. There are some critics who agree with me, and some who don’t. (Some actually insist that every work, even the most abstract one, is in reality bluntly representational. I attended a talk by one of these guys. He’s an expert and I’m nothing but I feel convinced he was wrong. But it’s an interesting idea.)
Saying this thing could potentially produce such-and-such an effect is meaningless. Anything can mean anything in the proper context. The question is does a real physical work actually produce an actual effect in the real people who view it?
You seem to want your art to be entirely conceptual. You’re treating art works like they’re ideas – theoretical abstractions that have a Platonic existence that is disconnected from their physical presence. You’re assuming that meaning is an fixed, objective quality that these idealized works are infused with. And so from this perspective … how can an uprooted fence post possibly be art? It clearly doesn’t have an objective meaning when it’s stuck in the ground. How could transferring it to a museum imbue it with meaning?
But this rarefied, intellectualized approach to aesthetics completely ignores the role of the viewer. An aesthetic experience is the result of an actual viewer engaging with an actual work. You can’t say “work X means Y” without also adding “to viewer Z in context W”. Maybe your hypothetical fencepost in the Guggenheim would work the way you describe, but it probably wouldn’t. The interpretation you supplied is a very personal and idiosyncratic one, and it’s unlikely that many viewers would arrive at it. And, since we’re all free to make our own aesthetic choices, you have no power to dictate to the rest of us what your fencepost will mean.
I agree wholeheartedly that these are interesting questions to discuss. You have stated your case and points with more clarity than a number of art lecturers and museum curators I’ve heard. So: do you want to start the thread or shall I?
This is not necessarily true, and I suppose it depends by what you mean by “modern.” Most of the art being discussed here is at least a half century old. I honestly do not feel you need a background to appreciate it. I got into abstract expressionism not knowing what the hell it was about (and I’m still not sure I can articulate any philosophy), only that I find most of it beautiful. It’s that simple. You don’t need a Ph.D. in art history to appreciate it. For some, it may help knowing where the artist is coming from, and sometimes you have to ease yourself into it via similar or earlier artists to see the progression, but sometimes, it just hits you right away with its beauty.
That’s how I felt when I first saw a Kandinsky. Or when I first saw a Gerhardt Richter in person (more his expressionist-styled stuff–the photorealist work leaves me cold.) I don’t care if people think it’s “Emperor’s New Clothes.” It doesn’t matter. They’re still beautiful things to behold and, for me, intensely spiritual.
The more conceptual contemporary art does puzzle me and sometimes aggravates me. Some of that looks like a sham to me. But then I think about the artists I love and how many people think painters like Pollock were a sham, I just shrug my shoulders, different strokes for different folks, and move on. More time to spend on things I love rather than yelling about things I hate that other people love.
At the end of the day, I’m a simpleton when it comes to this. I don’t care about the philosophy of art. I don’t care about the history. I don’t care about any of that stuff. All I care about is how does it make me feel? I like beauty, so I gravitate to beautiful things, which is what abstract expressionism is to me.
I am sure that if you started a thread or two about specific examples of the types of questions I cited, it would be interesting - you’re the professional
That has NOTHING to do with Art - you are frustrated with Economics. Prices are set by what folks are willing to pay. QED. Could be a sports team; could be a painting; could be groceries at the store.
This. All this. My art background is public school art classes, but I’ve picked up stuff here and there. I’m not as big of an abstract expressionist fan but I enjoy looking at it and discovering new works.
But I do love Richter’s Woman Descending a Staircase. I didn’t see the big deal when I saw a photo of it, but standing there looking at it, it looked huge (it is over 6 feet tall, but seemed larger) and had a luminous quality to it. It springs to mind first when I think of the Art Institute now, even faster than the Ferris Bueller-triggered Sunday on La Grande Jatte/blue Chagall windows.
I wouldn’t say it’s “pissed away”. Some rich guy is slightly poorer and some other rich guy is slightly richer. It’s not like someone made a painting out of $1000 bills and lit it on fire.
The economics of it are another matter. Regardless of any piece’s artistic merit, I’m sure a lot of the price of art is driven by hype and wealthy people trying to one-up each other’s pretentiousness.
Your work is what we call “outsider art.” It could be by a mental patient, a hillbilly, or a chimpanzee.
And that’s a Richter that doesn’t particularly resonate with me, but this stopped me dead in my tracks at the Art Institute. Richter is an amazing artist with an incredible range. For me, he’s my favorite living painter and one of the undeniable Masters.
:dubious: Pssst—the Occupy protest is over thataway. What we’re having here is a discussion of the technical aspects and art-historical significance of a well-known Abstract Expressionism/Color Field painting, extending to include some broader issues about those genres and modern non-representational art in general.
I second this recommendation and would be interested in reading Prof Pepperwinkle’s thread!
Yep, lots of thoughtful discussion to be had here.
To summarize Magiver and a few others: there is an objective Bad, Good and Better in Art, and we must all agree on how each piece should be judged. Anyone who disagrees is a poopyhead. And anyone wanting to discuss what constitutes Art is a twit, because the definition has already been decided (see Objective Bad and Good above). QED.
Yeah, because people who buy $44 mil paintings would totally give all that money to feed the hungry or cure cancer if only they realized that non-representational art is bullshit.
Listen, I’m a big ol’ liberal, but even I think that people coming into a discussion of art to whine about the fucking waste of money is rather counterproductive.
