Had I read your post, I would have noted the obvious exception. There are no seats in the hallways of the Sofia.
No, there’s nothing wrong with you OP. There might be something wrong with me because I have a pretty similar feeling regarding most movies, TV, and music, but faking liking that stuff is important. But appreciating paintings doesn’t seem like much of a widespread appeal and most people (besides the artsy type) don’t seem to care much if you say a painting is just a bunch of [whatever is in the painting] and you don’t see the big deal. So learning to fake that isn’t a high priority unless, like another poster said, you’re trying to get in a specific artsy girl’s pants.
Sometimes a painting is pretty, but usually the real thing they’re trying to depict is much prettier and still doesn’t warrant as much attention. These same people getting weak in the knees while looking at paintings of some people in front of a sun set or some deformed gray figures are probably best kept in museums so we can keep track of them. Well, you can almost understand (in a sorta autistic way that means you don’t really understand) why gay men or women might like this sort of feely touchy thing where you kinda make things up about what it means, but when you see a supposedly straight dude talking like this it’s easy to start believing you’re missing something in your brain or this is a trick. These people probably don’t get weepy during sunsets or scenic drives or overwhelmed while watching a movie, so where’s the angle? Where’s the game? Are our subjective lives just that much worse than theirs?
In an age before video games, radio, TV, movies, the internet, easily accessible collections of personal music, porn as we know it, and in an era where most books were about insipid boors talking about their dull lives for 1000 pages you could definitely understand the appeal of paintings. Sure, let me see a nice mountainside or some “classy” naked girls. It’d be great entertainment in that environment. But nowadays…I don’t get it. Reading some of their babbling you can see how it seems pretty similar to religion. Names omitted to protect the innocent:
I’ll have what she’s having.
At least it’s not poetry. Now that’s a mystery.
I find that seeing the paintings in person adds a lot to the experience. I’m a big fan of impressionism, for example, because of the way the artist can draw a landscape using essentially a series of dots. Seeing the brushstrokes helps you appreciate the skill that went into making these paintings.
I generally agree with your take on modern art.
Hey, those words are familiar. 
As I imply above, it’s cool if it doesn’t do anything for you. You comparison to religion is pretty apt; I’m not a spiritual or religious person, but art, music, and, yes, poetry can literally give me chills, inspire me, energize me, lift my mood, etc. Not to overstate it, but, since you made the initial comparison, it’d be fair to say it’s the closest to a god I have.
And, although I do love what people consider “modern art” (some of this “modern art” is already over a century old), not all modern art moves me. A walk through the galleries in Chelsea and, I too, think 90% of the “art” I see is absolute rubbish, at best, a con, at worst. I’m a photographer and, my God, do I hate a lot of what passes as fine art photography these days. Ugh. But that 10% that isn’t shit–or at least isn’t shit to me–that makes it worthwhile. It fuels my creative energy and inspires me.
I had that happen when I finally saw Michelangelo’s David. I’d been to Florence many times and never made it to the Academia where it’s housed. There’s a few life size copies dotted around Florence so I just couldn’t see that the original would be all that different.
Boy was I wrong. Apart from being huge, it looks so…real. There’s veins on the hands that look like they’re pumping blood. It looks so alive that you feel you could touch the marble and feel the skin beneath your fingers. Incredible. And makes you realise how superior Michelangelo was to the undoubtedly good sculptors who made the copies dotted around the city.
This is a perennial issue on straight dope and there is no right answer really.
My own view is that, firstly, a book or the web is a poor substitute for the real thing. If at all possible see it in the flesh. After all they were created with that in mind. Dismissing a painting or sculpture you have only seen second hand would be like complaining about the cinematography in “Laurence of Arabia” after watching it on an iphone.
Secondly, I always feel great art should act as a proxy for natural situations, items and forces and the emotions that they bring. None of that needs to be a perfect representation or even recognisable. the feeling is enough and sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. You should never feel forced to “like” something by “experts”.
As poncey as it may sound, you should just let any artwork speak to you on it’s own merits.
My own personal favourite, Turner said it best, " … my job is to draw what I see, not what I know." when he was asked why he painted ships with no portholes.
I personally think he was the greatest ever, a genius and master of much that had gone before and the precursor to so much of what we’d consider “modern” in terms of painting. The link I gave has a section on the left that takes you too many of his greatest works . You’ll see that there is a wide variety of styles and subjects and I’d highly recommend a trip to the National Gallery to look at many of them first hand.
Turner may not be your thing but there is so much there that might be.
Incidentally the painting linked too above was one of those that truly knocked me out. It is massive and foreboding. For anyone who has ever been face to face with a vicious snowstorm it will take you straight back there, it is wonderfully evocative, and that is the artist’s genius.
At least two people have mentioned Turner in this thread and I just wanted to say that he’s also my favorite artist. A genuine master.
It is?
I agree with this. You cannot believe the colours that van Gogh used, for instance, until you’ve seen them in real life. Similarly, Monet’s Water Lillies don’t look especially impressive on paper until you see them displayed on a wall.
So true, and it isn’t just the colours of Van Gogh, impressive thought they are, it is the texture, they really are 3D. One of the few painters who makes you want to run your fingers over the canvas.
I’m a straight guy who’s not moved by or even all that appreciative of *most *paintings. But you seem to be implying that the painting of something doesn’t really add much to it (or is always strictly inferior to the real thing), and I definitely disagree there. Painting allows the artist to depict the thing (scene, person, idea, etc.) in question however he wants, framing it exactly, highlighting certain things, downplaying others, making weird juxtapositions, etc. Photography allows you to do some of that, but painting gives you the most flexibility in terms of completely stylizing the depiction. Also, the thing in question may never have existed the way it’s being painted. And just the fact that someone’s choosing to paint something (given all the time it takes) does make we think about it way more than if it was just a random still from a video or something.
In short, the artist has a lot of room to be pretty damned interesting. Unfortunately, for me, while I can appreciate the skill involved, I’m just not all that moved by 99.9% of the paintings I’ve seen. But occasionally one will speak to me, and my eyes can’t turn away, and I can’t help but get lost in what the artist was trying to convey, by some strange feeling that’s being invoked. I don’t get all weepy or claim to have a profound epiphany, but those select few works are definitely a major success in my eyes; as paintings, they’ve captured me in a way that other media can not.
While knowing some art history can be helpful, it not really the main thing as far as appreciating a painting, as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes there’s just something about a painting that happens to strike me emotionally. Here are two examples from two entirely different periods, bioth of which I could stare at for a long time:
First is Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle:
Second is “Bathers at La Grenouillère” by Monet:
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-oscar-monet-bathers-at-la-grenouillere
I can’t explain why I love those paintings so much – It’s purely an emotional reaction.
The attitudes that regularly crop up in threads like this baffle me.
I don’t like spectator sports. I’d rather watch paint dry than watch a football game on television. The few times I’ve been dragged to a stadium to see a live event, I spend most of my time staring off into space and daydreaming. I find watching a bunch of guys run around in circles chasing after a ball about as interesting as listening to a long Sunday sermon.
However … I recognize that this is a matter of MY PERSONAL TASTE. There are lots and lots of people who, unlike me, find spectator sports exciting and fascinating. They’re clearly getting something out of it that I’m not. And I suspect that if I spent some time learning the ins and outs of various sports, teams, and players … I wouldn’t be quite so bored by it. I imagine that a big part of why it bores me is that I don’t know much about it. I don’t know enough to perceive the underlying strategies, or even to tell if an individual play is amazing or mediocre.
But it would never occur to me to accuse sports fans of FAKING their interest in sports: “Oh … you don’t REALLY like football! You just PRETEND to like it in order to fit in! After all, it’s just a bunch of guys running around in a big field. I could do that!”
Why is it so hard to grasp that some people might have a different experience when they look at art than you do? They’re not faking it to show off and make you feel like a philistine. They really are experiencing something that you’re not.
With the invention, and subsequent finessing, of photography from the mid-19th century onward, representational art - classical painting and sculpture - couldn’t compete and therefore became obsolete. Modernism was born out of this, as a struggle to find out what visual art was if it could no longer be representational. Like a deductive proof, artists started showing what art wasn’t in order to find out what it was. It first threw away traditional subjects and themes (realists began painting Real People, not biblical allegories), then it threw away photorealism (Impressionism), then it threw away perspective (Cezzane), then it threw away time (Futurism, Cubism), etc. This reductive process eventually lead to abstraction and, finally, the “tile” you mention - minimalism. Minimalism is about when Modernism exhausted itself, right around the 1950s, when there simply were no more elements to take away from visual art - everything had been taken away.
If it makes you feel any better, paintings like the one you mentioned lead to proclamation that painting was “dead” and modernism as well. This lead to various movements in the mid-60’s and onward, like Conceptualism and Post Modernism, which pretty much all dealt with the stupidness of an “art-object” anyway.
So, the painting is significant and meaningful, but not because of what it looks like. After modernism, the “idea” behind a work became more meaningful then the “visual”, which means that most work of the past 50 years can’t really be judged or evaluated on simply how it looks. Artists themselves largely don’t care how the work looks anymore, as everything has pretty much already been done concerning aesthetic.
WTF??? 
I mean seriously WTF???
To appreciate modern art, you have to disconnect your criticism from the difficulty of actually making the brush strokes. In other words, it’s tempting to look at a painting that’s nothing more than a few slashes of brush lines, and pronounce it ‘junk’ just because it didn’t take much physical dexterity or effort to create.
But it’s not necessarily the painter’s technical skill that makes art great (although you’d be surprised at how much technical skill goes into a lot of modern art, even when it looks simple). It’s the painter’s vision, and his or her ability to get that vision across to the viewer that makes for great art. It might just be a way to express a powerful emotion like fear or loneliness or menace, or it might be a story in a picture, It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the artist found a way to represent what he is seeing or feeling in a way that viewers can understand. Or maybe he’s found a way to cause people to have deeply personal feelings, different for each person.
A Sonnet or haiku is not in concept inferior to a novel, even though it uses far less words.
Abstract art is interesting because it removes the boundaries holding back an artist. Anything can happen. There are always possibilities for the discovery of completely new ways of expression. That makes it risky as well, which makes it even more appealing.
The problem with this kind of art is a combination of Sturgeon’s law (90% of everything is crap), and the lack of a framework in which to judge it. This leads to a lot of crap being held up as great art, and it leads to a lot of political influence in the sense that the worth of such art is often influenced by political forces in the art community - gallery owners, judges, art critics, and wealthy buyers. There are no objective standards.
But don’t let that stop you from enjoying the great stuff. Just try hard to understand what you’re looking at. Before you go to a gallery, look up the art that is going to be on exhibit there, and then research it a bit before you go. Learn what the artist was up to, why he made the choices he made. Look at other pieces of similar art, and try to understand what makes them different.
Ignore the pretensions of the art snobbery. That means don’t just accept what they tell you, but evaluate art on your own terms. Also, don’t reflexively hate art just because there are a lot of art snobs about. That’s all a sideshow.
Recently I was in Munich, and managed to get to a number of museums there. The Neue Pinakothek was awesome. It’s a museum containing artworks from 1700 up to about 1900.
To give you an idea of what I liked, and why, here’s a couple of examples:
Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller - Young Peasant Woman with Three Children at the Window
This painting was finished in 1840. I loved this painting for several reasons:
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The expressiveness of the subjects. The mother’s face shows a weariness, but she’s friendly and warm. The children are happy. And yet, it’s a family living a hard life. It tells me there’s a greatness about the human spirit - that we find a way to enjoy life no matter how hard it is.
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The quality of light. You can just feel the warmth of the sunshine - and the oppressive darkness inside the house. It’s beautiful.
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The Composition. Framing the painting inside a painting is interesting. Look at how the children are arranged. The brother and sister in the corners are facing in, the little child and the mother facing out. The proportions are great. The picture seems in balance. Even the fact that the children are weighted to the left of the picture is balanced by the hinged door on the right. Everything looks to be exactly in the right place.
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The technical ability. The artist was brilliant. The painting is almost photorealistic, and captures the expressions in the faces of everyone in the painting. The boy manages to look a little impish, the older girl is looking at her brother with a knowing smile. The artist captured all the little details that bring a scene to life.
Contrast that painting with this one: Tired of Life - Ferdinand Hodler.
This was painted in 1892, and is a painting of five old men the artist saw sitting outside a home for paupers. You have to see this painting to really appreciate it, because it’s huge. It fills most of a wall. And the museum cleverly put it near the exit, when you’re starting to feel a little tired yourself. You come into the last gallery, and here are these five old gents staring at you.
Look at them. Those men are done. Ravaged by lives full of disappointment, pain, and failure, they are penniless and sick. They have no loved ones, no money, no home. Life kicked them in the teeth, and now they just want out. But being old men, they’re too tired to do anything but just sit and wait. The middle one may have tuberculosis - all of the artist’s siblings and his parents all died of tuberculosis as I recall, so you can imagine what he was feeling when he painted these people.
But then look at the first guy on the left. He’s sitting a little straighter than the others. His hair is freshly cut. He’s looking the painter straight in the eye. His skin doesn’t have the sickly yellow tone of the three next to him. He’s even got a slight look of calm anticipation to him. You get the sense that maybe this guy’s got a round or two of fight left in him.
The guy on the right is also staring at the painter. But his eyes are a little wild, with maybe some anger in them. Or fear. Whatever it is, he looks a little shell-shocked, like he doesn’t know what hit him.
Anyway, I’m sure not everyone sees the same thing when they look at those paintings. The point is to really look at them with an open mind. Try to understand what attracted the artist to the scene. Try to put your mind in the minds of the artist or the subjects, or in the case of a landscape, try to put yourself in the scene and see if it comes to life for you and inspires some emotion.
Beautiful post, Sam.
Thanks.
One other thing I noticed about that painting that I never saw before until I started writing the last post about it: Have a look at the painting in terms of progression of life from the men on the outside to the man in the center. On the far left, the man still looks determined. But the person to his right looks like a similar man, but with the determination replaced by disappointment and failure. He looks like what the man on the left might look like if he had a little less strength of character, or perhaps after being kicked by life a few more times. The man in the middle is near death - the end result of that progression.
The man on the far right looks angry. Maybe a little aggressive. He doesn’t think life has treated him fairly. Perhaps he’s annoyed at having to pose for the artist. Now, the man to the left of him looks like the same kind of person, except his anger has turned into bitterness and resignation.
It’s almost like the two sides show a progression to the middle of different aspects of human character in a deeply unfair world. The angry passionate ones turn bitter and resentful, then die. The quiet determined ones become disappointed and apathetic, and then die.
Am I reading too much into it? Perhaps. But that’s okay. Great artists create paintings of such emotional depth and complexity that they can open the door to multiple interpretations. There’s no right way to look at a painting. The artist may not even have known what he was really seeing - he just knew that the scene moved him, and he was inspired to paint it. His eye was good enough to capture the essence of those men. You can imagine that in the real session, there were moments of lightness, maybe even some joking. A break for a borrowed smoke. Maybe some arguments took place. The artist had to see through all that, and know exactly what aspect of these men’s lives was important and needed to be recorded.
Great photographers do the same thing. If you think abstract art doesn’t represent skill, then think about photography - at the base mechanical level, photography is the setting up of a camera and the pushing of a button. But to a great artist, a camera gives him or her a way to capture a scene that moves him or her, or that captures the essence of something that they believe needs to be preserved and highlighted. It’s the content that matters, not necessarily the technique, although it often takes great technique to capture the photographer’s vision.
If all that processing, interpretation, and imagination is involved in the appreciation of art, what do you need the original work for?
That is what my first thought might be, but I sense that art aficianados may use the work as a seed for further creation of art in the mind, much like the way I use the threads and posts here on the SDMB.
You mean as opposed to reproductions in books?
In my experience, I can appreciate a painting only so much on the web or as a reproduction. Personally, my reaction to art is mostly visceral. It either hits me or it doesn’t. I don’t really worry about interpreting the work, just feeling it, if that makes any sense. Painters like Rothko and Pollack and even my favorite, Kandinsky, leave me tepid in their reproductions. Rothko, especially, is somebody that needs to be experienced to understand. Until I saw a Rothko in person, I wanted to dismiss his work. It just didn’t do anything for me printed on a page. But in person? Oh my. As I said above, it felt like a spiritual experience. I don’t put any “meaning” on his paintings. All I know is when I see one, they “vibrate” and “glow” and resonate with me.
Pollack is similar. Kandinsky, too. The power of the vivid colors, the energy of their strokes, the microscopic details that can only be appreciated by examining a work in person–all that is missing in the reproductions and, for me at least, is where a lot of my visceral reaction comes from. I mean just the colors and paints themselves–a four color press cannot reproduce a lot of those hues and gradations of tone. Plus the three-dimensionality of the works. Somebody mentioned Van Gogh upthread, and I agree–his work looks “pretty” on a postcard, but transcendent, sublime in person. I remember seeing “Starry Night”–perhaps the most cliche Van Gogh–for the first time at MOMA in 1998. I figured such a familiar painting would have lost its power of me. I was wrong. It was like I was seeing the painting for the first time: the colors and contrast are so much more intense, and oh the three dimensionality of it! Thick mountains of paint in the sky creating texture and movement that’s not reproducible on a press. There’s so much more energy and emotion in the real thing.
Anyhow, if painting doesn’t speak to you, perhaps analogies with music might help, if music is your thing. Listening to a Beethoven concert on a radio is quite a different experience than at an orchestra hall, where the music is really around you and you can hear and spatially identify every nuance of the performance.