I like that - you might want to clarify and say the purpose of GREAT art is to inspire discussion.
There are plenty of other purposes as well.
I think the implied obligation of Greatness dampens creativity among artists, both skilled and not.
Whether one has Greatness isn’t a matter of choosing, either. But you don’t have to be a Great accountant to be an accountant. Or a baseball player.
Certain objects like I-beam girders, steel plates covered in rivits, etc. invoke a sense of industrialism. When you see something that is rusty or corroded in gives the impression of being very old, possibly no longer in use and abandoned. That said, I expect the artist has done more than simply grab a piece of steel frame from a building demo site.
I’ve been to the Tate and other modern art museums. I too have a problem with “art” that looks like bullshit to me. For example:
Large canvases that are painted in a single monochromatic color or with simple geometric shape. Is it a painting or a semiphore flag?
A string of lightbulbs strewn on the floor. That’s not art. That’s garbage.
Nah, I actually don’t expect to get any meaning out of art. It’s a lot like watching a movie for me - it’s entertainment, it’s pretty, it’s interesting, it’s something I probably couldn’t do… And that’s about it. Perhaps my real question would be for people who do find meaning in art - what about it do they find meaningful and, particularly for more abstract art, how do they extrapolate, say, from a chunk of metal some deeper commentary on society, civilization, etc.
For example, some people can look at a piece of modern art that has no meaning to me and, whether it’s because they’re in the know or because they’re grasping at straws or something else entirely, they might come away saying that it’s reflective of the current political climate, similar to the Red Dot painting, or evokes (or is meant to evoke) certain emotions.
I would imagine that, to divine a deeper meaning from a piece of conceptual art, you would either have to know a lot about the artist and the period in which he/she grew up or the period in which he/she created their art or both. Most people don’t have that knowledge, so it seems like such art is lost on most people, myself included.
I find modern art is less accessible to me because to get it, I need to know much more about the times in which it was created. That’s not a bad thing - anything that gives me a reason to dig deeper into a period I’m not familiar with is usually good. But at the same time, especially when I was younger, I found it much easier to appreciate something like Boticcelli’s Venus because it was a pretty picture I could understand and because I knew something of the artist, the technique and the period in which it was created.
Thanks - I honestly do appreciate all the explanations.
But… How can none of it be rubbish? How can none of it be any thing?
Or how can any of it be anything?
This touches on my main issue with modern art, which is that it seems to elevate ideas over execution. I consider myself to be a fairly creative and imaginative person, but I have absolutely no artistic chops. I can barely draw a straight line freehand. This means that whatever wild ideas I come up with, I’m not going to be able to communicate them artistically. I suspect many modern artists are like me, except they do have some technical artistic skill and decide to forge ahead to try and bring their ideas to life.
There’s no question that the suit of armor in the link is a beautiful work of art, with real skill and craftsmanship involved. Contrast that with the Serra pieces, which look like he decided to weld some hunks of metal together to create a shape, arranged it the best he could to try to communicate his vision (whatever that is), and then quit because he didn’t know what else to do with it. Maybe if Mr. Serra was here he’d tell us that he achieved precisely what he set out to achieve, but I’m skeptical. Not being very artistic myself, I’m much more interested in the execution of a work of art than I am the idea behind it.
That’s an interesting statement, in part because I completely disagree but assume you’re not lying. I don’t usually need to know the context of a piece to “get” it – on the contrary, from viewing a few related works, I can often extrapolate a lot about the context. Within twentieth-century art, I can pretty readily infer a lot about the artists and their influences simply from their artwork. Knowing the biographical details is just a cherry on top.
Which isn’t to say you’re dumb or any such thing. It seems like maybe this different way our brains analyze stuff could be part of the reason there’s such a divide over modern art.
A fair view. Personally, though, I think “art” is always something that inspires some sort of thought or discussion. In fact, that’s how I define “art!”
Great art inspires great thought, but crappy art still makes you think. 
Back when the DeLorean was available in any color as long as it was brushed stainless steel, a car writer suggested making some in Cor-Ten to give a second color option. Unfortunately, the added drag from that rough surface might prevent a DeLorean, never a speedster, from even reaching 88mph.
These are good questions. This may sound like a bit of a cop-out, but the answers largely depend on what specific work you’re talking about.
For example, let’s talk about minimalism for a minute. We all understand the importance of form, color, and balance in evoking an emotional response. If you take a picture of a fiercely scowling man, standing over a prone body, against a red background, you’ve got a lot of elements there that are communicating “anger.” Minimalism is a sort of experiment to see how much of that imagery you can strip away and still communicate that emotion. Mark Rothko did this with color. This image doesn’t have any “meaning,” but I get a strong sense of emotion from it, just by the contrast of the black and the blood red. Piet Mondrian did the same with balance. Notice in this painting how the large empty space is balanced by the two smaller colored squares on the left, with the blue square in the lower right acting as an anchor. Mondrian is interesting to me because his work is almost like a template for how to arrange figures in a painting. It’s like seeing the wirework underneath a 3D figure.
So, coming to industrialist minimalism. First, we have to figure out what’s being minimized. We can look at things like Diego Rivera’s murals at the Chicago Museum of Industry to get our toe-hold in the concept of industrial machinery as art. That’s a fairly straight forward, almost narrative work. There’s a clear sense of progress, industry, building wealth, and so forth. Now, what can we strip out yet still evoke that? How about the workers? That gives us something like this. I’m not sure what that machine is supposed to be, but it’s a well-oiled, functioning piece of equipment. We still have a lot of the same associations as we did with the Rivera mural. Can we strip it down a bit more? Let’s try this. That’s not a machine, it’s just a bunch of gears welded together. It’s not functional, but it evokes the functional. The gears don’t do anything, but they were clearly once designed to do something. We could go further. If a bunch of gears still carry that original meaning, what about just one gear? Okay, that last one is clip art, not fine art, but I hope it illustrates my point.
So, that’s one answer. Want another?
“What is art?” is one of the more well-worn questions out there. Personally, I think art is a way of looking at things. A few years ago, I was at the museum of modern art in Madrid. In the courtyard, they had a work that was just a ten foot by ten foot sheet of steel, about an inch thick. That was all. Just a giant steel plate, slightly rusted. Pretty easy to dismiss as “emperor-has-no-clothes” art. But if you stopped to really look at it, you could see that as the rust flaked away at the surface of the steel, it made these fantastically intricate patterns. It wasn’t the result of any human intervention, just the natural process of oxidation. Same as you could see on any chunk of rusting steel, if you stopped to look. But mostly, we don’t stop to look, because it’s the sort of thing we see a hundred times a day. Putting it into a museum is a way of saying, “Look at this. This is art, and it’s no different than a thousand things you see around you every day. There’s art everywhere, if you just take the time to look for it.”
Eh, not really. I’ve got almost no formal education in art, beyond a high-level survey class I took my second year in college. I do have a degree (just a bachelors) in English literature, which probably helps some, but I’ve got very little knowledge of artist’s biographies, or who was a contemporary of who, or what movements inspired what works, and so forth. I’m nowhere near an expert, just an interested amateur. The most important thing I’ve learned about art is that the more of it you see, the more of it you understand. If I see something that baffles me, I try not to just write it off, I just file it under, “Stuff I don’t get yet.” You never know when you’ll come back to it, and suddenly realize that it’s saying something very important to you.
I’ll give it another angle: most people don’t appreciate virtuosity.
In the music threads, for example, there will be discussions of great guitarists, and some of the greatest of them will display their skill in wordless, almost tuneless, displays of virtuosity. Lots of people hate these guys. They want songs; they want melody, lyrics, verses and choruses, a hook and a bitchin’ beat. They want to participate knowledgeably in the music, and if you’re not a guitarist yourself, or spend years studying, you just can’t be sure you know what Mr. Great Guitarist is up to – that, and you can’t sing along.
Similarly, great artists create for other artists; the knowledge of art history, theory, materials, and techniques that allows artists and aficionados to “get” their work isn’t there for the ordinary viewer, and the ordinary viewer will feel confused at best, and swindled at worst. There’s nothing to sing along with, and you can’t dance to it.
Add to that the fact that 90% of everything is crap, and it’s no wonder some of the 10% gets dismissed as “rubbish.”
Funny. That’s also the definition of trolling.
Trolling aims to inspire anger and other such emotions, not thoughtfulness and perspectives. It’s also dishonest.
