What do you think of this argument re. modern art?

Yeah. That article is supremely dumb. From the stupid second-person set-up of the lead paragraph to the insinuation that all modern art boils down to the premise that “By inflicting sufficient ugliness upon us, the modern artists believe, they will wear down our capacity to see beauty.” Much of modern art is pure beauty. Kandinsky, especially, conveyed the intangible through stroke and color. His paintings hit me with a visceral power that no representational painter ever has.

Gah. At first I felt okay responding simply to the quote in the OP, but then I felt a nagging obligation to read the entire article. Damn this board and its high standard of discourse!

I don’t know jack about music, but I know enough about art to know that the author seems a bit muddled about the differences between abstract and non-representational art, because he seemed to flip back and forth with his examples.

And his point about the time commitment needed for atonal music would pretty well work for just about any art/music comparison. don’t you think? I personally would find it agony to sit through The Ring cycle, and I’m fairly sure it’s not atonal. Now, I understand that the author is looking at demographics, not me personally, and I agree that more people would sit through Wagner than through Schoenberg, but that seems to speak more about the differences between Wagner and Schoenberg, and not very much about Kandinsky.

Perhaps a poster better informed about music could add some comment about this bit from the article: “After decades of philanthropic support for abstract (that is, atonal) music, symphony orchestras have given up inflicting it on reluctant audiences, and instead are commissioning works from composers who write in a more accessible style.”

Is this possibly true? I am not a musical person, but I do find myself at a number of mainstream orchestral performances each year, and I haven’t noticed a wealth of atonal music. If you count people influenced by it – like if I had to name an example I would have said Copeland, but I see the author chucks Copeland out because he’s not atonal enough (or made too much money, I guess) – yes, there is that, but please fight my ignorance if atonal music has taken over orchestral programs to the extent that it is the reason that attendance has declined.

In the interest of ignorance-fighting, could you give a quick primer?

I don’t like the article.

I also, however, don’t think the author is telling the readers what they really like. I think the author is explaining who he intends to be the audience of his article.

So, for example, s/he says “there really are people who really do like this kind of art, but you’re not one of them.” (Words to that effect.) Since one of those people who really does like the art could in fact be reading the article, such a person is supposed to realize she is not one of the “you” being addresssed.

-Kris

The down and dirty version is that abstract art can be art that represents some sort of thing, and it could range from a thing that is vaguely recognizable although unrealistic (like the violin in Violin and Pitcher) to more abstract concepts that don’t have a exact visual point of reference in the real world (like this Stuart Davis which is a painting of jazz music – we agree that jazz music is a thing, but it’s up to anyone to figure out what it looks like).

That gets us into into abstract expressionism, which includes non-representational art, which isn’t representing anything, the idea is that you’re looking at the the paint itself (or other media, whatever), the color, the lines, the shapes. It’s not a painting of anything. Mark Rothko would be an example of this.

Now of course, plenty of artists covered quite a range throughout their careers, and this whole thing is a continuum, and while you could even say that all non-representational art is abstract but not all abstract art is non-representational, it’s pretty sloppy for someone writing about it to allow “abstract” to stand as a shortened “abstract expressionism” and then go off on Damien Hirst by citing his works that aren’t abstract in the first place, much less examples of Hirst’s abstract expressionism pieces. (Although probably not nearly as sloppy as writing a sentence that long.)

Thank you delphica. So Motherwell’s Moby-Dick paintings, for example, would be abstract but not non-representational.

The bit about ‘philanthropic support’ seems very much to be talking about American classical music institutions in particular. But in general, no, there’s never been enough unusual music (of any form, not just Schoenberg-era atonality) to drive people away.

There’s some truly idiotic (or possibly disingenuous) comments in the article:

This tells us nothing about music or art, and everything about the monetary fetishisation of paintings. If all poor composers are to be deemed unworthy, we’re not left with much to choose from. The author then has a muddled meander through comments about lifetime earnings (Copland and Berg), and the ability of composers writing in a ‘more accessible style’ who can draw large crowds (notably, no example given).

In general, it doesn’t seem that the author really knows much about music. I call bullshit on the description of Wozzeck as “a compromise between Schoenberg’s abstract style and conventional Romanticism”. He’s writing for an audience who probably have no idea whether this is true or not. “Aha, he’s not a true serialist, so no wonder people do kind of like him slightly” is a miserable attempt at avoiding being challenged over cherry-picking particular examples of ‘unsuccessful’ music or composer. Note that Berg’s violin concerto is also no such compromise, and perhaps the only serial composition which now has a position as part of mainstream concert repertoire.

I don’t think that abstract expressionist art is comparable to atonal music in the first place. Non-representational and abstract art is a response to photography and the increasing ability of people to paint realistic scenes. Painting a realistic bowl of fruit or landscape or portrait is snoozeville, can anyone get excited over the skills of Thomas Kinkade? In order to get people emotionally invested in a work, you need to show things that are unrealistic, change the world in ways that evoke interest, or create a new world of your own and present it for view.

You don’t need atonal music to do that, each song is a new world, designed from scratch. Maybe using some consistent concepts, but the variety of inputs allow you to make something unlike anything that came before it. Tonal music is actually already like abstract expressionism.

But that comment’s not supposed to be telling us anything about the relative quality of the two works. In fact, the force of the comment rests on a presumption that the two are of approximately the same artistic worth.

-FrL-