You mean the thing that looks like an eyeball? I see a lot of eyeballs in that particular painting. It creeps me out-- and it’s the only Pollock that does.
Eh. Pollock could never make the eyeball follow you around the room.
Wasn’t there a documentary a little while back about a truck driver who made a cheap thrift-store purchase for $5, but then it turned out that maybe it’s a Pollock worth millions, and the experts couldn’t really say one way or the other, and possibly it’s going to come down to analyzing partial fingerprints on the thing, but who can say, really?
The story in the OP sounds apocryphal.
I’ve seen lots of Pollock paintings up close and I am a big fan of his work but there is a range of more and less successful expressions of his art. some just are better. you almost fall into them - they are mesmerising. His later phase of black paintings were more miss than hit but occasionally you could see what he was striving for.
Art is supposed to move you. Inspire a response in you.
One way Art has evolved is to question What’s Acceptable in terms of how the observer gets moved. A medieval spiritual tableau evolved into Impressionistic views, to 20th century shapes and bold colors. As society evolved, different images could be used and different emotions became okay to express.
But then, an alternate idea emerged: what if you could get the eye moving, and as your brain seeks to catch up with it, it has an effect on the person? If you relax, and kinda “observe yourself” as your eyes and brain run around, emotions are evoked. You evoke the emotional response by stimulating your observational system. If anything, it’s a bit more direct than filtering a response through one’s asscociations with images.
So the Art evokes an internal response by exploiting the way our eyes function. In Pollock, his spatters have no center and our eyes follow the shapes looking to form mental patterns. With Rothko, the color fields immerse our senses even while the blurry borders keep our eyes trying to resolve what’s emerging from within that blurriness. Either way, as your eyes are unable to land on anything specific, your brain downshifts and you go to a meditative place.
If the Art works for you. It depends on what you expect from it.
I was never a fan of Pollock’s work. I could never understand what the big deal was when people talked about the energy of his paintings. Then we visited the Peggy Guggenheim museum, and I got to see “Alchemy” in person and up close. They have a whole section dedicated to this piece, and just before we came to the original, there was a full size monochrome 3-D copy which only replicates the depth and textures, all in a uniform shade of white, without any of the colors and hues. Seeing “Alchemy” with depth, but no color was like turning on the lights, and I finally got what all the excitement was about. Prior to that, I had only seen flat reproductions with color and hue, but no depth. When I finally saw the original, I saw it with all of the energy I had read about, but never experienced.
I think the reception of Pollock’s work is severely limited by how inadequately it can be conveyed in a two dimensional reproduction, more so, oddly enough, than many sculptures.
Yet many people don’t understand this supposedly “mundane fact,” as we see in this thread and others like it on non-representational art. They believe that Pollock was just making random splashes with no purpose or direction, or that “my kid could do that,” or that people who like Pollock’s work are deluded fools who are being scammed by art critics. It’s difficult to get some people to recognize that Pollock was an artist who invested skill and craft in his work (which is the point of the anecdote in the OP), and that his work might have aesthetic appeal.
Right. The overall impression of a Pollock work (as in many other works of art, regardless of genre) can’t really be understood adequately except by seeing the work at full scale.
While I don’t like Rothko as much as Pollock, I understood his appeal much better when I saw a show with a lot of his works all together at the Whitney in the 1960s.
I loved the Mad Men scene where several of the characters are trying to understand the Rothko purchased by Bert Cooper. Ken Cosgrove, surprisingly, is the one who gets it, while Harry Crane is completely befuddled.
But one can always play that card. Say I simply grant that he was an artist who invested skill and craft in his work, as per the possibly-true anecdote; and say, too, that I quickly grant that his work may have aesthetic appeal.
What happens when someone else does make random My-Kid-Could-Do-That splashes without skill or craft – prompting someone to appear at my elbow and sneer that some people just don’t understand, there’s nothing random amidst all of that purpose and direction; there’s skill, there, and craft; and can you believe it all goes unnoticed by ignorant fools who ignorantly and foolishly think that their kids could do that? Oh, it’s ever-so-very difficult to get them to realize it; one can but laugh, eh, wot?
Should I just recite that bit whenever given the chance, always acting like someone who Gets It when oh-so-many others don’t? Would that cut off all debate?
My point was merely that we have an aesthetic appreciation of sunsets, despite them not having a point, a message, or whatever: it’s ultimately just a fact of human neural wiring. Much of non-representational art can be viewed as exploring these brute facts of human neural wiring, of experimenting with what triggers some sort of aesthetic response, and how (while bracketing the why).
And that’s the same as with music: some triplets of frequencies sound good together; others don’t. The reason for that isn’t some innate superiority of the former kind of triplets, or some point or meaning they carry that the others lack—it’s simply that we find the former appealing, but not the latter.
Or, putting it another way, the only point to such art really is to explore the space of human aesthetic sensibilities; but to me at least, that’s a perfectly fine thing to do.
And in the end, even if it’s all really bullshit, then well, I guess I’ve been scammed into having a good time at the museum, which, worst coming to worst, still means I’ve had a good time, even if I’ve had a good time for the wrong reasons. 
What am I, chopped liver?
I think, HMHW, in my post above I describe exactly what you are referring to. How Pollock, Rothko and others exploit the “brute fact mechanics” visual-mental sensory system to trigger responses in us.
It approaches how it moves you as Art in a completely different way than representational art whose imagery and aesthetics trigger the response.
Yes, I think we are broadly in agreement on these issues. It’s just no fun to argue with those you agree with!
I mean, you can sort of draw an easy (and no doubt over-simplified) line starting out with the invention of photography relieving art from its representational duties, to the impressionists trying to come to terms with what it actually is that one is doing in art (“Well, all that we really ever paint are just patches of light, right?”), culminating in things like pointilism, to the expressionists rejecting this outward-pointing conception of art in favor of exploring what art does to the viewer, to finally abstract expressionism fully separating this exploration from figurative representations.
But to the extent there’s anything to that story, I’m sure it has been told much better than I could—then questioned, refined, rejected, and replaced by something an iteration or two closer to the truth.
So I just concentrate on trying to grasp what it is, to me, that draws me into these paintings.
I don’t much care for Pollock, but then I’m not very moved by most visual art; a friend once described me as a narrative junkie, and that’s unfortunately pretty true.
That said, I don’t understand your question. What does “My-Kid-Could-Do-That” even mean? Your kid could splash a bunch of paint on a surface and call it art? Well, sure, nobody disputes that. It’s neither controversial nor interesting. Your kid’s splashes move you about as much as a Pollock artwork does? That’s cool. Your reaction to art is your own. Your kid’s splashes move other people as much as Pollock does? If that’s true, your kid is truly remarkable. Or do you mean something else?
Okay, I feel better
No, that’s pretty much it: if I find that some paint on a canvas moves me, then I’d happily appreciate it regardless of whether a skilled craftsman splashed stuff on there with purpose and direction or whether some kid did it at random; and, if there’s high resale value, then I’d love to buy it for some almost-as-high dollar amount regardless of whether a skilled craftsman splashed stuff on there with purpose and direction or whether some kid did it at random. Why wouldn’t I?
And if it doesn’t move me like that, or have that resale value – well, then, I still won’t care whether there’s purpose and direction and skill and craft on display, or whether it’s just some randomness from a little kid. Why would I?
I think you’re missing my point. I’m saying that comparing Pollock’s art to a sunset is greatly devaluating Pollock’s art. There’s no intelligent design behind a sunset. If you argue that there’s no intelligent design behind a Pollock painting, you’re essentially agreeing with those who claim that Pollock just randomly threw paint at a canvas.
I’m not saying there’s no design behind a Pollock painting, but I am saying that it’s not that design that makes art worthwhile (there has been very intelligently constructed dreck), but rather, what that art manages to evoke. Ultimately, you can always say that a given artwork could have been produced by splattering paint randomly at the canvas—that goes even for classical works of art, like the Mona Lisa. It’s not very likely, but the possibility exists. So if it devalues a work of art if it could have been produced without intent and design, then there’s no art worth a damn. Consequently, I don’t think looking for ‘what is the artist trying to tell us’ is a very fruitful way of appreciating art.
Sure. But that’s not why folks are talking about Pollock. He doesn’t do much for me, but he clearly does a lot for a helluva lot of people, way more than yer average kid with a can of paint does. Folks talk about his patterns in an attempt to understand how it is that he moves people.
The reason I care is because I notice the effect he has on others, and other people are interesting to me. I’m am curious about what it is about his works that moves others.