Modern, abstract art makes me angry
I wanted to share something I’ve experienced most of my adult life but never quite realized: modern abstract art makes me angry.
There is something about it that makes me unable to even tolerate it. When I go visit the modern art section of a museum, I get annoyed. No problem with the other sections, there is classical art that I like, some that I don’t, but it doesn’t make me angry the way modern abstract art does.
Thinking about it, I wonder if it’s not the fact that it feels like massive waste and absolute snobbism. Thinking that a museum spent hundreds of thousands or even millions on a bunch of material that has no depth or meaning beyond the BS the artist (scammer?) came up with, when that money could have been better spent on virtually anything else (classical art, poverty, climate change…) really gets me.
Or the ridiculous “explanations” about the piece that pretend to be way deeper and smarter than it really is. Chill, it’s just some paint splatters on a surface, it doesn’t mean anything and there is no depth or layers to it.
Or monochromes. Come on. That’s just plain lazy and disrespectful to even call this art and put it on the same level as the masters’ classical paintings.
I’m not only talking about paintings, but also sculptures or installations. I was standing in front of broken glass recently and that was “art.“
I’m sharing this here to discuss, see what others think and feel on that matter.
I like abstract art, always have, but
all of this happens, and on top of that I can confirm that art students these days often (not nearly always, I'm not even sure if it's a majority, but it is common) do this broad category of art because they want to skip the part where they gain skills in traditional techniques, so they do abstract art not entirely by choice but also due to their own limitations. Regarding the made-up meaning, I remember my friend telling me, shortly after she got her masters of arts degree in painting, that she feels the art professors' insistence on being able to explain and defend all her works made her art worse. But sadly this is a trend, people demand it, and on top of that there's a ton of shallow trendy political activism in it.
That said, none of those things are a rule, and the fundamental nonsense is saying that abstract art cannot have meaning or depth. Most music is abstract, it's not trying to imitate anything specific, it's just making sounds for the sake of making sounds because it sounds interesting. Surely you can accept that the same thing exists in visual arts - something can evoke feelings or images while still being abstract. After all human feelings and experiences are often too chaotic and complex to be properly described by words or realistic descriptive images.
Yeah, there is a line to draw, some art truly is just low quality nonsense, and each of us has the line located somewhere else, but certainly good abstract art exists before the line. I think it's also a good idea to try to accept that there are genuine attempts that just failed to produce something good, but maybe helped the author to learn from that and move on to something better - not everything is cynical or lazy, though some certainly is.
I was also standing in front of a broken glass pane that was called art just yesterday: in a room full to the brim with historical and current glass objects, everyday use and purely decorative, showing about 100 years of history of various sides of this art & craft, one of the glass boxes that were otherwise full of stuff was empty, glass smashed and titled "Riot is beautiful", signed by a well known local artist/activist.
Such a thing exhibited on its own would be surface level pseudo-deep crap, but it was made specifically for this exhibition, to be viewed in this context. I know the dude's other work, so I know he has a sense of humor, and also he does genuinely interesting and ballsy things that are political and provocative without being trendy or stupid. So I believe this small bullshit art serves as a something of a reminder that although we're in a museum where every piece is protected, labelled and later archived and the air is climate controlled to conserve the (other, non-glass) objects, there's a real world out there where specifically these kinds of items get used and abused and everything is temporary, and it also aims to give you the thought of what it would feel like to smash all those dumb kitchy golden-rimmed cognac glasses on shelf 37.
It doesn't give you the same feelings as watching a painting from an old master, but it certainly gives you some thoughts despite being a piece of smashed glass with a title and nothing more. I admit that knowing the author is not an idiot, and therefore it makes sense to expect some thoughts to exist behind it, does help.
Your example I think is much more than what I very commonly see at modern art museums.
I've seen a piece of gray clay squished in a hand, and then left to dry. It was "Untitled", no artist statement. A canvas painted red, called "Red" (and given a number, so like "Red #14" or something). Just recently there was an all white photograph, about 4'x4', with a very faint smudge of black. It was "Untitled" as well, but fortunately it had some description written by the museum-- it was a photo in a blizzard of ice fishing huts on a lake, which is pretty much akin to the classic drawing of a polar bear blinking in a blizzard.
So much of what I see at modern art museums are "untitled", with no statement, or description from the museum. In particular, I'm thinking of the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is better about adding some context whenever the artist has given nothing themselves. I completely agree with the OP, going to the modern art museum raises my blood pressure. A lot of that is on the artist, and surely some of it is on the museums themselves.
Edit: here is one on display now: untitled
Ironically, perhaps, Red is part of a series of paintings called Red, Yellow, and Blue in 1921
And the artist said
So he was making a point. But a good museum would have docents or other information for you to get that rather than just being expected to know it. Just displaying art vs educating seems to be a stumbling block. But then some artists want you to get whatever you get from it. So idk, maybe it's intentional.
Honestly museum curators need better feedback mechanisms. The average curator has no clue how to communicate with people. I remember going to a natural sciences museum (a nice one in a big city!) and they had a little photo of Barringer Crater and some text about how it was formed and how large the meteor must have been. Stupid, boring, mundane. The fun thing about that crater is that the guy it's named after, Daniel M. Barringer, threw his life away trying to mine for gold there. He knew meteors could contain valuable materials and the crater was so big the meteor that created it must be worth a fortune. He never found anything because he didn't realize the meteorite wasn't buried underground. It vaporized on impact, spreading all of the gold as a fine dust across miles in every direction. His wife left him as he desperately searched in vain.
People will remember way more about something when they can relate to it. Sure you want to give some of the little numerical facts. But when you tell a human story our social brains latch onto it much better. Compare the information recall of someone that just reads "Barringer crater was created by a massive meteor that vaporized on impact" vs. someone that has imagined a crazed divorced lunatic sifting hopelessly through sand.
Like librarians I suspect there are a lot of good ones out there (my friends just went to a Pokemon fossil exhibit at a natural history museum). But you end up in a feedback loop where the only folks that go to art museums are people who know and understand the art (and students made to go). I suspect there are more feedback mechanisms than most people are actually using and more informational and educational opportunities than most folks use either. I base this mostly on how well the general public reads and follows signs, personally.
It’s a design problem. You need to do user testing. Pull in random people and watch how they interact with your exhibit.
I mean I don't know whether they do this, I know more interactive museums do what you're looking for but I don't know about the training of art curators. Or their docents.
But again, I haven't been to one in a while, so I do suspect more of those things are present today than even I think.
The “political activism” in the arts scene is extremely lame. It’s basically impossible for most artists to do it without it coming across like that David Guetta tribute to George Floyd clip that became a meme.
It’s not that it can’t or shouldn’t be political, but if the “political message” in your art is just the trendiest contemporary thing in the zeitgeist you’re not really saying or doing anything that isn’t fully accomplished by writing the sentence “I don’t like ___.” It doesn’t make me reconsider anything, I don’t broaden my perspective. It’s just signaling alignment with the style of the time.
While I can't speak to what "most music" is (most western music? global music? historical vs. current? etc), I contend that music is interesting sounding because it's not abstract. Brief example: major keys and chords imply happiness and security, minor and diminished keys and chords imply sadness and uncertainty, returning to the "home chord" implies a conclusion and closure - these concepts are anything but abstract.
You could say the same thing about colors and shapes though. They all can have implicit associations and evoke specific things.
And thus Rothko evolved from concrete to abstract to color fields
Those are examples of abstraction, no? Someone telling a story with words is "not" abstract (I mean it is a little abstract, obviously, language is an abstraction of information/experience, but it's about as literal as we can get when it comes to narrative information). Someone strumming strings on a guitar in an order that you have never heard before is significantly more abstract, even if there are components of the sound that you are familiar with. They are not representing concrete components of experience or narrative information, they are representing one particular expression of a feeling about experience.
Notably, things like "major keys imply happiness" are cultural. Cultures with different musical traditions have different associations with components of sound and music than we do. That's another good piece of evidence that musical expression is rather abstract. A photograph is (relatively) concrete: you can show almost anyone in the world a clear photograph of a tree, and as long as they've seen a tree before, they will understand that you are expressing something about trees. If you play the same piece of lyric-less music that you composed about trees for three different people, how many of them will know that you are expressing something about a tree?
I think part of @V17's explanation ("it's just making sounds for the sake of making sounds") maybe indicated to you that they meant that music was arbitrary, which it definitely isn't (or at least, most of the time it's not). That's true of abstract visual art, as well, for what it's worth. In all forms of art, the artist has an experience that they are trying to craft for their audience, and they do so with intention. That doesn't mean that there's no abstraction, though! And nearly all non-lyrical components of music are quite abstract, though of course it varies across genres, styles, and traditions.
The entire genre of magical realism begs to differ.
Right, I mean, poetry also exists. You can obviously use language abstractly! You can use any expression abstractly if you try hard enough. I was just drawing a contrast between concrete communication of concepts like happiness and sadness, which is often done with language ("He felt sad") and abstract communcation of those same concepts via musical arrangement.
Yeah I just meant like, any specific sentence in something like “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” is a pretty straightforwardly understood sentence. It doesn’t seem “abstract” in the way a Jackson Pollack does at a glance. The abstract aspects of it become clearer once you start taking it together as a whole. It’s almost like the inverse of an impressionist painting.
While I agree that music has some things that are not abstractions, I think there is an issue with the example. Major keys implying happiness is a perfect example of something that is purely abstract. The concrete things about music are things like the fact that an octave is the doubling of the frequency of a tone, or that a perfect fifth is a tone with a frequency ratio of 3:2 to the original tone. The meaning that we pull from the music itself is an abstraction; when we hear a tone, a tone above in ratio of 5:4 (major third) and a tone above that at a ratio of 3:2 to the original (fifth), then we, given the history of Western Music, parse those concrete things as the abstract concept of "happy". Those same intervals do not necessarily correspond to happiness in other musical cultures; happiness can be a minor second, or atonal, or a number of other things.
Sorry if this seems like an overly pedantic reply.
Edit: also sorry for not refreshing before finishing my reply and seeing other comments on this. Mine is a real pile-on sort of comment.
...those are western cultural associations with a lot of natural, biological, philosophical, and mathematical baggage behind them...
So are associations between colors, and texture and emotions/concepts/etc.
I don't see how a major chord signaling happiness, and a smooth color yellow signaling happiness are not the exact same level of abstraction.
In western culture, dark colors = gloom, sadness, shame, fear. Light colors = openness, happiness, hopefulness, purity. Warm colors = belongingness, familiarity, cool colors = sterility, professionalism. Clean lines = uniformity, cohesiveness, order. Messy lines = chaos, self expression, emotion.
There's nothing more abstract about a painting that just conveys raw emotion using color and texture versus a random EDM song you'd hear in a night club conveying raw emotion using sine waves and distortion, for instance.
But... the fact that they're "merely" abstractly representational of concepts is admitted right in the description you gave: you used the word "imply". To be less abstract would be to use familiar noises directly; a crying boy, a gunshot, a beating heart, the sound of a spoon scraping the bottom of a stirred pot. But then, is that music? Or is that sound?
I'd argue that definitionally music is an abstraction of sound just like art is an abstraction of visual phenomena. In both cases the goal is to play within a particular sensation; hearing or seeing.
And heck, it's not like the idea of "keys" and "chords" and even "notes" are naturally occurring, they're of course entirely human artifice. We assign the names to the frequencies and the names to the relationships between the frequencies to abstract the physical reality of sound and create a kind of shared language in Western music, but these facets of music are not hard rules.
This is just to say that there are absolutely cognitive and cultural associations we have to make in music, and there are absolutely musical artists who experiment with challenging the form and ideas of music and people who are interested in playing with our assumptions about what music even is the same way that there are visual artists who work more abstractly. It's possible to play with the underlying language and form itself within it in both mediums.
Did you know there are different sets of scales we rarely hear in the west? I wish they'd gone over this in at least one of the many music classes I've taken in my life, it would have been really interesting to play with when I was a kid.
List of music scales from around the world. Scroll down to the Ragas section, it's where the scales begin to sound off to a western ear.
yes, i did
They imply those things…. in OUR culture because we have constructed that meaning for them, the same with resolving chords or melody progressions. Those things aren’t like “facts” of music. Different cultures can see things like happy/sad music as completely different.
The point of music is still abstract. It’s a representation of a feeling, and they way that is expressed varies wildly from culture to culture.
The Godzilla theme is, interestingly, in a major key despite being intended as kind of ominous and threatening it also sort of makes you want to root for the monster.
You should remove the &si= query parameter from the YouTube link. It’s low key doxxing you.
It's also a setting that can be turned off
Clean URL: https://youtu.be/GGp2oWR7bWk
Go watch "Jacob Geller - Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism".
I would posit that this post displays a much higher degree of snobbism than any piece of modern art.
It seems as though you're accusing artists of... lying about the meaning of their work? It's difficult to respond to this in a way that isn't much harsher than I would like to be over the internet. This talking point is pretty well established as blatant anti-intellectualism, I would implore you to at least try treating these works with the same minimum level of respect that you treat "classical art".
You should really watch the video I linked above. I think calling colour-field painting "lazy" is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Many of these painters are putting incredible amounts of effort into getting the particular qualities of their work.
I'd really love to hear more about these "levels" of art that you've mentioned. By what standard or metric is this nebulous authority ranking artwork?
Ignoring the fact that the amount of money that galleries are spending on modern artworks pales in comparison to the amount of money that it would take to tackle those existential crises, is preservation of culture not worth spending money on? Like it or not, modern art is a part of modern culture. Also, you're barking wayyyy up the wrong tree if you're worried about missapropriation of funds, there are better places to start than modern art.
This is needlessly uncharitable. What did you aim to achieve making this point? The criticism of modern art seems obvious to me: it, at minimum, appears extremely low effort. Pointing this out, or being irritated by high value being assigned to what one perceives as low effort is not snobbism.
A meaningful contribution to this post would be to point out how the OP underestimates the level of effort involved, which you did in the case of monochromes (while also accusing the OP of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm not sure what you were trying to accomplish with a cheap shot like that.)
Not for nothing, but one can interpret the video as associating criticism of modern art with Nazism, which is ridiculous.
There's a nicer way to say it, for sure. However, I remain steadfast in my opinion that disregarding modern art wholesale displays a higher degree of elitism (which is how I chose to interperet "snobbism") than the modern art itself. The point was to call out what I would consider a hypocrysy, or at least a lack of self-awareness.
You're mistaking my mention of the Dunning-Kruger effect for the common misconception. The Dunning-Kruger effect is not "dumb people are too confident" (which would be a cheap shot), it's "inexperienced people in a field tend to overestimate their ability in that field", which perfectly applies to OP calling modern art lazy compared to the "masters" (I did make the assumption that OP did not consider themselves an artist, but the OP has lumped themselves in with "laymen" in a different response so I think I was probably correct in that assessment). I linked the wikipedia page to prevent this exact source of confusion, the fourth sentence makes a distinction between the correct and incorrect use of the term.
I agree, it is ridiculous. I don't think that it's fascist to dislike modern art, and I was certainly not implying that OP is a fascist. The individual points that eventually result in Geller's contention of "the fascists want you to hate modern art" do a great job at refuting the standard rhetoric of "modern art is lazy/meaningless/deceitful/etc." regardless of that final angle.
It's extremely tepid to act like artists are flouncing about and wasting everyone's time. People got sent to prison many times over the past hundred years for making abstract art, under the Nazi regime, but also the USSR and other totalitarian states. That's how widely held that opinion is.
It's fun to point at the banana or a white canvas and ask wherefore art, but in most cases, these are genuine works of expressive intent made by someone who has devoted no small part of their life to said expression. The idea that it's a conspiracy to dupe the average person is deeply cynical and an extremely superior posture, and rude on the base level. It's snobby to assume you have the correct form of artistic taste.
But maybe you're right. It's actually far less charitable to snobs to describe someone looking over a stranger's proverbial shoulder at their canvas and loudly proclaiming "oh, you think you're better than me, huh?" as one. Snobs might at least have an argument aside from aggrieved antiintellectualism.
Everything done with skill and proficiency appears low effort if you don’t know what goes into it and don’t care to learn. Thats why such dismissals are snobby. The basic question one could ask is, if scamming in this way is so easy, why aren’t more people doing it?
Why are a bunch of mostly very young schmoozers with dubious business sense able to pull it off and how would you execute the “scam” if it’s actually as easy as all that?
Effort involved does not make something "art". Period.
Nor does your video justify colour-field painting as not lazy or state that "incredible amounts of effort" were performed to create the paintings, just that the ingredients included were/are difficult to replicate from a restoration standpoint because there were no notes or records of what was used to make the color. My grandmother didn't write down any of her cooking recipes either, as a result it is difficult to perfectly match the flavors of my youth with her. That doesn't mean that my grandmother's grilled cheese sandwich is art or that there was "incredible amounts of effort" in her family favorite soup either.
I actually do agree with this statement, which is why I think that even the examples of modern art that are demonstrably "easy" (an example of this would be something like the work of Emmanuel Beranger, who does a lot of work based on simple body movements) sit on equal footing as works that required decades of craftsmanship.
I find it hard to see this angle. I would argue that a skilled restorationist being unable to recreate the work that is infront of them is akin to a skilled musician being unable to replicate music that they're listening to. Even if it's an iterative/improvisational process (which is to say nothing about the skills that informed the decisions that rothko was making behind closed doors), I would imagine two musicians of similar skill would be able to copy one another.
Even if a piece were incredibly difficult to reproduce/restore, I don't see why that would make it better art and not just more difficult technique.
So either the restorationist, presumably chosen for the confidence in ability to restore a Rothko, did a poor job or the comments about the restoration "not being right/lacking depth/blah blah blah" are full of it and likely of the sort that would complain no matter what since that it is no longer "original". Since I'm highly doubting the museum would trust a Rothko to any restorationist found on the street, it's likely the latter.
That said, there's still nothing in your video to defend colour-field painting as not lazy or that creation of a color to take the effort stated.
Feeling some level of disdain towards abstract art is pretty standard for a normie but then why engage with it?
You can just not walk into those exhibitions if they make you angry.
Or is your point a much more severe one, that abstract art should not exist, hence your anger? That would be unreasonable.
I couldn't disagree more, modern abstract art is where all the good stuff is. Reproducing reality is a very limited method of conveying meaning, sometimes to really get an idea across or give the viewer something to really think about, you have to go for more of a vibe.
It really depends on how a person views art. If you view art purely as a medium for conveying human meaning, then you won't have any issues with abstract modern art. If you view it as a demonstration of human skill, you'll have problems with many examples, because there are many modern art movements that intentionally de-emphasize the role of technical skill in art.
I also think that people who denigrate abstract art as "low skill" say that entirely as an assumption. They just imagine that it's easy because the outcome is simple or chaotic-looking, but that doesn't mean no work or thought went into the final piece. Just because a layman observer can't recognize where skill and knowledge were applied doesn't mean that they weren't applied.
I feel like it's a generally accepted truism that many things that look easy aren't. There are often tons of little choices that someone gave thought to that most people would have trouble picking out, but that they can catch the overall "feel" of... when you do something well enough, people don't notice because it just seems natural and cohesive and inevitable.
We often in other fields say "so-and-so makes it look easy!" when we want to say they are particularly good at something, or "if I'm doing my job well, you won't even notice". But apparently when it comes to visual art, we don't feel the same way. :)
I'm not saying that it's always the case and every abstract art piece has some massive hidden depth, but for abstract art to be good, thought and craft and skill and knowledge do in fact have to go into it.
Honest question here, how is that even possible to argue? All art is execution. Even when you tape a banana to a wall, it matters whether the fuckin' banana sticks.
Sure, but taping a banana to a wall takes a lot less skill than painting Sistine chapel.
Skill is multi-factorial too: skill to paint accurately is one type of skill. Another type is determining how to generate soemthing that will make people feel things they wouldn't normally.
The former is being in tune with the medium, the latter is being in tune with peope (and the medium).
Yeah, but in 2019 there was already a pretty good guideline on how to paint the Sistine Chapel, namely the Sistine Chapel. Maurizio Cattelan was a trailblazer in banana-taping.
(I'm mostly joking?)
No, I actually think this is the point. Comedian (the banana piece) is art in part because it's novel. It makes you feel something because nobody had taped fruit to an art museum wall before. But now, if I sneak into the MoMA and tape a grapefruit up in the exhibit spaces, that's much less artistic. Cattelan had the thought "what if I taped a piece of fruit to the wall"; I would be having the thought "what if I copied this other thing". (And, of course, I chose to copy Comedian because execution of the copy requires a wall, a piece of fruit and a roll of tape. Nobody talks about bootlegging the Sistine Chapel or what that would mean, because it's obvious nobody's going to do it.)
Novelty isn't the only thing that makes art, but it is something that makes art. Modern art trades a lot on novelty, which tends to ruffle the feathers of the sorts of people who think the value of a piece of art is determined by the amount of effort that went into it.
(If I do my bootleg with a peach, does it become art again due to commentary on fruit as metaphor for human genitalia?)
I'm hiding behind a little irony here and didn't want to get into it but you put it well. What if he picked a different day? What if he was thrown out? What if the banana fell off?
I also was looking at the Wikipedia article to find Meth Fountain had done this before with a half-eaten croissant. But we're also here because he failed to realize bananas are goddamn hilarious, so.
Ehh...he was far from the first person to do something like that in general. Just because other people were too afraid of consequences or didn't like art museums or thought it was whatever doesn't make it inherently more artistic.
Sure, but other people didn't use a banana.
Source?
Taped a banana to my wall a little earlier. Stayed stuck. Don't have Sistine chapel available to paint, my drawing of it didn't look accurate though.
Thank you for your service o7
That gives me an idea for a piece of modern art: It's Michelangelo at a desk with a heap of bananas on it, pondering formulas for modern glue. He looks tormented, anguished.
The scene is AI-generated.
I think this comment is art in it of itself
I was thinking about making it myself using ChatGPT, sharing it, then someone else could be the one to get famous for it.
Your opinion is your own, of course. If you don't like it, you don't like it. Certainly not all of it is pleasant to look at -- that's not the intent of much art, I don't think art necessarily means "pretty" so much as "evocative," -- but again taste is very personal.
Keep in mind, though, that most of the weirder stuff wasn't really intended for you -- "you" meaning a casual viewer who likes art for the aesthetic and not the meaning. Marcel Duchamp's famous la Fontaine (a signed urinal) was never intended to go in someone's house to look nice. It was aimed at the art world itself, designed to provoke the exact question about the meaning of art. You need the context to appreciate it, but that doesn't mean that it's inherently stupid. Lots of things in life only make sense in context. Should an elegant bit of programming irritate me because I don't know how to code? Is a poem in Arabic objectively unbeautiful because it sounds guttural to me, not knowing what it means?
Again, this is all taste so if you don't like it, you don't like it. The only thing I'd really reject is the suggestion that money spent on art could've gone to a better cause. Nothing survives that test, and just because you don't think abstract art is worthwhile doesn't mean it's objectively worthless. (Think of all the things you like that could easily fail that same test. Music? Video games? Films? Fine dining?)
My wife is an artist - went to fancy art school, works as a graphic designer, etc - and I'm about as opposite of that as you can get.
We've gone to a lot of art museums through our travels. I try to think about modern/postmodern art is that it's a conversation that artists were having with themselves about the form, color, shape, etc. It can be a bit frustrating if you're seeing it for the first time and not following the conversation from the early threads.
I've heard an analogy that makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm not an expert in abstract art of any kind so I don't know how true it is. Paraphrased:
Essentially saying that memes/art have been referencing other works in the field for so long that you can't truly understand some modern works without understanding the history of what came before. So to an outside observer a lot of memes and art can look like nonsense.
That does make sense. And I don’t get most memes either for the same reason. I have no interest in learning the history of the memes just to understand them though because they’re overall not very appealing to me.
It could be the same for the art: because I don’t feel anything looking at it without a PhD in “how we got there”, I’m not interested in learning about all the previous layers to get this one.
Unlike a more classical painting: even without knowing the artist, the historical context, the techniques you can still get what it represents and appreciate the little details in it. Of course you’d get even more out of it once you know all about these extra pieces of information but you don’t need them to get something out of the piece. I suppose that’s what I mean when I talk about elitism/snobbism.
I'll give a counter example. The Mona Lisa, by modern standards, is not a particularly technically impressive painting. It's good, but there are literally millions of more realistic looking paintings of people.
Despite that, 10 million people pay to see it in person every year. It's the most famous painting in the world by a massive margin, and none of that has to do with how technically impressive it is. Almost none of those people have any real history with art.
It has everything to do with the historical context, the artist, and the techniques.
The only difference is that with the Mona Lisa, almost everyone knows something about the context. With most other art, they don't.
So clearly, even with classical art, the actual technical skill on display is not the entire story, or even a significant part of the story for some pieces.
I think seeing the Mona Lisa has even less to do with the historical context, the artist, and the techniques for the vast majority of the masses at this point compared to simple FOMO and momentum because millions of people go to see it. No different than many of the most famous tourist attractions. Taken to a more depressing extreme, it's like how there are some celebrities that continue to be famous and popular primarily for being famous popular.
All of that stuff, the FOMO and momentum is historical context though. There are dramatic stories behind the Mona Lisa, thefts, conspiracies, etc. it all adds to its allure.
Its context is why it's such a famous piece of art. The only difference is that it's one of the few pieces of art where the general public is aware of that context, instead of just people in the art world.
I like abstract art quite a lot, and I have for a long time. I know a lot of people who do not, and that's fine. What I don't really understand is people who say they don't like art but do like music. I understand this primarily as a criticism of abstract art, in particular. I think they may be closing off a form of experience they already accept in music. Music does not need to be representational to be moving, or interesting, or beautiful. I think visual art can work the same way.
I'm not particularly educated when it comes to art. When I view art I judge it based on how it makes me feel. If I enjoy looking at it, great. If not, I move on. Things that make me enjoy looking at something include colors, shapes, blends, textures, lines, edges, materials, etc. It can be realistic or not. It's not necessary for visuals to be concrete. Visuals can provoke emotions and thoughts. They can be complex or minimal and be interesting or not. My own internal reaction is all that is required for me to enjoy art.
Some abstract artists have indicated a desire to make art more accessible by emphasizing the visual experience over academic analysis. Even when deeper meaning is available if I don't enjoy looking at it, it's not for me. Picasso's paintings don't appeal to me, for example.
I was in NYC at a museum a few years ago and they had sketches of people and animals and architecture by Jackson Pollock on display. They were amazing, and very realistic representations. You might look at his drip paintings and think there's nothing there but a bunch of paint splattered all over the place but he was clearly a highly skilled artist. I think he knew what he was doing.
As someone who only somewhat recently started appreciating the more recent art waves - @Evie I'd love to see your take on this
Personally, sure, in that set there's got to be a subset you subjectively won't vibe with. But there's also great things too.
For instance, the amazing @faye_luna recently told me about Yves Klein's blue painting, where he mixed a pigment for the first time in history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue), and I think that painting is beautiful and has a strange charm to it even if it is just monochrome. Or, Faye once also told me about Teresa Margolles's "Bandera I", basically a flag dyed with blood collected from execution sites in Mexico. They're just monochrome, sure, but they have a lot of subjective art value and merit for me. Or, again, see @faye_luna's photography work "Gash" from last year's timasomo. It's easy to go "oh, it's just a polaroid with a string in it, everyone can do it", but it evokes an emotional response to me and it actually speaks to me in some way. How is it meritless art?
Then there's the other stuff. It's easy to go, "oh, it's just meaningless bullshit made to launder money and scam people", and surely such examples exist, but it doesn't have to be like that. There is plenty of "modern art" that can mean something to you, once you're ready for it. I can look at some of those sculptures and installations and be like, yeah, that honestly does describe how I feel right now.
Thanks for pinging me. I don't have anything particularly insightful to add at this point -- everyone's mostly said what I would have said I think, and visual art isn't really my area of expertise.
I do have some thoughts though.
I've always loved a lot of the postmodern art stuff, in particular abstract impressionism. Two of my favorite paintings of all time are Rothkos; I spent probably hundreds of hours sculpting a facsimile of one of them in Minecraft in an attempt to replicate for the other people on the Tildes server the feeling I got seeing one in a museum in Chicago. But a few years ago I had a therapist who saw the art hanging on my wall in the background, and apropos of nothing, basically made OP's exact point, albeit with a bit less anger, a bit more skepticism and humility.
So like a couple of commenters here did to OP, I implied they were a fascist for thinking that and sent them the Jacob Geller video (ridiculous). I do kind of like that video -- when I first saw it I was all 'heart eyes' over it because Jacob dwells a bit on a specific Rothko painting that I love, the one I built in Minecraft, and he seemed to have a very similar experience with it that I did. I felt very seen. But I think it sort of makes the emotional case that disliking modern art is inherently reactionary, when really, there are lots of good reasons to dislike modern art. Many of them come up in this thread.
I'm more of a theatre critic myself, at least by education, and I first got into Rothko in high school through the stage play RED, which, looking back, is maybe artistic malpractice for the way it depicts Rothko's depression. But what it gets mostly right is in its emphasis of the obsession Rothko had with creating perfect, un-replicable pigments to get the exact right color, texture, value, reflectivity of his colors for the color block paintings he was known for, resulting in enormous canvases with unimaginable depth that can't really be reprinted or experienced through a screen. They're a very strong case for "aura," and against mechanical reproduction. And the play also gets into the way the commodification of his art deeply frustrated him -- as it frustrates all artists.
Having both that appreciation of technique and the emotional investment in Rothko as a person absolutely made me more charitable to his art when I did eventually see it. There's no denying that. But other abstract pieces have also had a huge impact on me without the surrounding context, even when made without apparent skill.
A small example: This (bitwarden link) is one of the paintings I have on my wall, that my therapist reacted so negatively to. When calling them a fascist didn't work, I instead was forced to do what I should have, all along, and explain why I liked it and what it meant to me. It was bought for me by one of my Ladies at a popup event at a comics shop in Texas, I believe, and I haven't been able to find the artist online. I think it's fairly amateur, not the most developed painting; probably, a skilled enough child could make something like it. But I really like the imagery it conjures for me, which is of course facilitated by some neat ideas the piece has.
So there are reoccurring spine and face motifs here, obviously, right? There are a lot of these little spine constructions along the edges of the canvas, with skull-shaped objects attached in some cases; in the upper right corner there's literally just a mask. But there are a lot of elements elsewhere in the painting that seem to trick my pareidolia into seeing faces where there maybe are none (primed by the more identifiable human elements, probably). In the center of the painting, for example, I see a distorted smashed head with bulging eyes and a thick lolling tongue. That plus the highly saturated red everywhere and the muddy purple-brown makes me think that this is a painting of gore, the destruction of the human body, the rendering of it from something obviously human to something unrecognizable and meat. I'm not going to go into why that resonated with me so viscerally (hah) at the time. But now I like the painting for a different reason: because it's vivid, and a little amateurish, and at one point it meant something to me. Even if my interpretation isn't what the artist intended (I've tried to find them online, to tell them how much I love their work, but haven't been able to with only a signature to go off of), that's worth a lot, and now in the painting I see, with fondness, my younger self, how passionate and clumsy she was in her own creative processes, and the ways she looked for meaning.
So, okay, what we're getting at is the reason I love art -- pretty much all art -- which is its power to create or surface emotions, in both the artist and the viewer. That shared experience of emotion then connects creator and viewer, even if they experience the art very differently. I've always disagreed with the notion that art is communication, because it feels like an oversimplification. For me, art is a facilitator, a medium for collaboration; not to be trite, but it's a third space. Experiencing it alone is valuable because it's people-watching, even if you can't take in the conversations the artists are having, or what the fuck they're talking about. Experiencing it with others is valuable, because now we get to talk about art, how it affected us. And like with the "Gore in Red and Blue" on my wall, our relationship with works can evolve over time, creating or responding to new ideas and sentiments. You lose that when you treat a work as a static object, as a mere reproduction or representation of reality, as a simple statement.
A while back, my lady and I saw this neat sculpture at an Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. A lot of the photography work, the exploration of Chinese cultural objects there, meant a whole lot more to her than it did to me; meanwhile I was a lot more fascinated by some of the more abstract, noncontingent sculpture stuff. But we both really loved the bike sculpture, and it was really fun to just walk around it and feel the way it directed us, the abortive sense of motion it created. And then to talk about it after (this is also why I like going to museums on second or third dates, by the way -- loser behavior, I know.)
Anyway. I'd hate to have any of those avenues closed off to me because I let my experience with art, even art I dislike, to be wholly dictated by a disgust reaction. That's my point. I think it's important to empathize with art, to be charitable to artists (who are almost always in the trenches, man!) just like you would with the people around you. We pour so much of our selves into our work, after all. It's rare for art to be truly cynical or soulless -- except for machine art, but that's another essay.
(edit: expanded on some points a little to make them connect better)
Thats me! I know you didn't ask for me to reply justifying my comment that wasn't aimed at you, but this comment was a good prompt for me to reflect on why I sent that video, so oh well!
I don't think that it's fascist to dislike modern art, and I was certainly not implying that OP is a fascist. The individual points that eventually result in Geller's contention of "the fascists want you to hate modern art" do a great job at refuting the standard rhetoric of "modern art is lazy/meaningless/deceitful/etc." regardless of that final angle.
With that said... I think there is value to reflecting on this from the mindset of "my opinions on this topic are shared by fascists" because it invites people to say "okay, well I know I'm not a fascist, so what's the real root of my opinion?", which is the exact journey that I've seen thus far with OP's replies in the thread. It seems we've narrowed it down to a anger at didactics.
Another point is that it's difficult to have this part of the discussion (which is probably where my mind would go first, if I were to have this conversation in real life about a real painting) because the OP is seemingly criticizing all modern art. Bringing up a singular example could just be an exception to the rule.
Yeah, sorry for projecting my younger self onto you a bit there. I mean, this actually gets into my specific criticism with the video right? Because there are a ton of reasons to dislike modern art that have nothing to do with fascist leanings, everything to do with taste, or critique of capital, or even just fetishization of craft and form -- which, yes, fascists do, but so do a lot of others. I think Geller paints the association between disliking art and fascism too strongly; I think a lot of fans of contemporary art, do, too, in a way that feels a bit adolescent to me now (because I did it when I was a bit more adolescent).
And yes OP is criticizing abstract art as a cultural institution and so one good example of it doesn't totally own them but I'm not really trying to convince them to like art that they think is bad. I want people to be open to connection with each other even over things they dislike so, you know, that's why I open myself up talking about abstract art that I like. Not to be convincing, but to be vulnerable, in the hopes that OP or anyone else will start to see the value in reciprocating that.
I don't know if I would go so far as to say that, only because he's pretty focused on how fascists dislike modern art, not how disliking modern art is fascist. My mistake was bringing up the video in a discussion about modern art rather than one about fascism, and pointing the association in the wrong direction.
Also an excellent point! The same thought was in my head, but I suspect it was drowned out by me trying to fight the lizard part of my brain going "this guy is wrong!!!!!!!!!!".
I'm going to push back on this, because I hear it a lot online (I'm sure there's some sort of fallacy someone already named after it but I'm too lazy to look it up.)
We all share a lot of opinions with fascists. That doesn't mean you're a fascist, or your opinions come from the same place, or that they're negative. Facists believe that strong families are good. Ok, so do I, so do most people. Facists believe that preserving wilderness is good. Okay, me too. Facists like food, drinks, music, and so on and so forth. Hitler was a vegetarian. Having the same opinions facists have isn't worth examining.
Having the same opinions facists have about how to rule a country is.
Honestly, I didn't notice any of that without you pointing it out. Even after you pointed it out, only the big spine on the top left stands out and I can now see the "mask" as a 3d semi-profile view of the mask instead of just a mess of paint. A lot of people are like me and see literally nothing in these types of paintings, even after looking for a decent amount of time.
I just want it to be clear that while you seem to think it was obvious (not sure if you were being at all facetious), it's not even slightly recognizable to many of us.
I often forget that looking at art, and pulling meaning out of it, is kind of a learned skill. Especially with abstract art. So that's fair; I do have a bit more experience analyzing this stuff than most people and things that seem obvious to me might not be to everyone. Not to say that I'm an expert or that my interpretation is in any way objective, of course.
Myself, I see a wilted rose bush alongside wilted flowers of the daisy family, over a large body of water containing (and surrounded by) various creatures, including, among others, an octopus, a duckling, and a poodle dog. Like you, I do see some negativity portrayed in it, but I'm seeing it more as a post-apocalyptic painting (perhaps due to climate change) rather than gore
What do you think the difference is, if there is one, between looking at and pulling meaning out of (abstract) art and doing the same with nature (pareidolia). Finding everything from simple shapes to elaborate scenes and figures in clouds is a common leisurely pastime. Seeing faces in things is especially common.
Because the art was made with intentionality, by a person. I trust that they put care into imbuing it with significance and meaning, so I can in turn draw significance and meaning out. That's not to say that I don't get emotional over nature, over a lovely view or whatever. And it's also not to say that I'm sure to pull the same things out of art as were put into it. Interpretation and critique are, themselves, generative and creative processes. But when I look at a work, I know that the person who made it made it for some deliberate human reason, and that changes the way I engage with it.
This is the point where the human intentionality as a key factor breaks down for me personally. If their intended message is lost or completely different for a reasonable observer, and the piece is too abstract to have at least an agreed upon foundation to derive from, I don't see the human creator's intentions as being relevant.
I know art, like many things, has boundaries nearly impossible to pin down, but I'd like to push a bit further since you've clearly spent a lot of time reflecting on art. Do you get anything out of art made with intentional techniques, but unintentional results? Like arranging some basic unhardened clay outside before a heavy storm arrives to naturally alter and erode it. Or intentionally selecting the state of something already occurring to preserve identically (unstylized). Is it simply the intention to create art that matters, or the techniques, or must the intention flow through to the result (even it it doesn't make it to the observer)?
Well, I think we're really getting into the weeds of my internal world and the way through which I look at art -- my specific lens; so don't think that any of what I'm about to say generalizes.
My approach to art, and art criticism, is always to have my emotional experience with the work, and then, once I've experienced it emotionally, to step closer, and squint, and try to work out what qualities of the work produced that effect. I could write a whole lot more about that. But the point of having human intentionality behind the art doesn't really affect the first part of that process, the "experience" phase. Instead, it's an insurance policy for the second part, a promise that, when I'm analyzing the work, there is something to find, and that the creators of the work genuinely did try to create something that would have some kind of meaning, or produce some kind of effect on the audience. I absolutely have had the experience, by the way, of loving a video game, and then, as I'm analyzing it, realizing that I probably loved it for the "wrong" reasons. That what I got out of it probably wasn't intended. This kind of emergent experience as a result of the interaction between me and a work actually can sour me on the art a little bit but it also reinforces my point about art as a medium for collaboration between creator and audience.
As a postmodernist, I don't really particularly care about the techinques used to make a work of art (asterisk), at least not for the purposes of making a judgment of quality or from separating 'art' from 'non-art.' There are certainly categories of creative processes that tend to produce works that I tend to have little interest in engaging with, little reaction when I do engage with them -- a large, fuzzy category I describe as "machine art." AI, the studio system, you name it. But, to take your clay block example. It makes me think of Pollock and his drip paintings; he would, quite famously, set paint buckets swinging over canvases like pendulums, letting paint drip out from holes in the bottom, to produce some of the most popular and "valuable" works of the 20th century. And on the one hand, I never really liked Pollock's work, none of it that I've seen has particularly resonated with me. So maybe that emergent process of making art tends to produce art that I don't like. But a lot of creative processes are pretty generative and are more focused on a system for creation, a kind of exploratory play than a final, visualized outcome, and I'm not really prepared to dismiss that out of hand. Great Expectations was serialized, published one chapter at a time, and you can tell by how incohesive and episodic it is -- but it's a classic for a reason. And I've gotten a lot out of roleplaying games, which are only systems in and of themselves; to take the Pollock example, a manual for bucket-swinging; to take yours, a guide to clay-block arrangement.
That's all to say that because art deals inherently with human subjectivity, I don't have a hard line on what processes I think are valid or invalid, what will affect me or not. I try to have my experience of the art unencumbered by all of that stuff. Nothing ruins a horror movie like imagining the guy spraying blood on the actors out of a water gun from just out of frame. Human involvement is only important to me in two ways. First: a guarantee that this means something, that there was thought put into it. Second: as a story in its own right -- as a creative myself, I care a whole lot about how people create, how they put their works into the world. And having the context of a work's creation can absolutely, in retrospect, enrich it.
Do you not see any hypocrisy between declaring that modern art shouldn't be called art, and calling its proponents "snobbish", despite you bring the one with the more restrictive definition of art?
Not to sound like I'm accusing you of anything, because I'm not and I think a lot of people have this innate dislike or disinterest of modern art (for classist reasons I suspect), but it might be worth reading up about this other group of people who infamously didn't like modern art and seeing why you're drawing similar conclusions to them.
Personally, I've little love for classical works of art. Once you've seen one portrait of white Jesus you've seen them all, it's all too Christian for me.
Godwin's law achieved within about 90 minutes!
I don't fully understand the reference. The Nazis had a whole thing about "degenerate" art (for obvious reasons), not about aesthetically unappealing art. What lessons is the OP supposed to draw about themself from reading about this?
I understand the point they were trying to make, even though I wouldn't have jumped to a Nazi comparison to do it. Criticism of modern art was basically part of Hitler's appeal to populism. It was "degenerate" because it supposedly wasn't produced by hard working blue collar German men. It's the same playbook Trump is running now; highlighting things they view as elitist or decadant and holding them up as examples of a society in moral decay.
It's a very, very popular opinion that modern art is self absorbed naval gazing wankery done by kids with trust funds who haven't worked a day in their lives. Thus, for a fascist, an easy way to score brownie points with your base is to denigrate it and instead point to real art done 500 years ago with mostly Christian themes.
The reason why it works is that most people think modern art is bullshit though. You can't really call someone Nazi adjacent because they share a belief that most people share. After all, the Nazis jumped on it because it was popular. It's not the other way around.
I understand this is a mostly US-centric audience. I don’t live in the US. Never have, never will. I didn’t start this discussion with any US political angle or debate.
My opinion has nothing to do with race, or a particular country’s art being superior to all others, nor am I calling for censorship (or worse). The only common theme here seems to be modern art.
A few things helped me to add some nuance to my appreciation of art in general.
If I had only one recommendation for you, it would be to read The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich. Nothing has changed my perspective on art like this book has. It dispels many misconceptions (such as the one about art evolving towards more realistic representations) and enables deeper appreciation of artistic movements and techniques by putting them in their historical context. Honestly one of the most important books I've ever read. It's thick but totally worth the time and about half of it is pictures.
You know what's even worse than art with a stupid, made-up description?
Art without a stupid, made-up description. We went to see an Anne Truitt exhibit recently. It was just pillars that she painted. We couldn't come up with any justifications, emotions, etc. I was searching for something, anything that would explain the intent or decisions of any kind. There was nothing. It was free and we felt like we didn't get our money's worth.
Yes. I think that’s insulting. Like it’s obvious and you’re an idiot for not getting the obvious.
Whether you like the art piece itself is orthogonal to feeling insulted by the way it’s presented.
Honestly, I didn't even get that sentiment. It just made it feel like slop, or, to be generous, like it was just a bunch of stuff that the artist enjoyed making without any real sense of art...but I'm pretty sure it was intended to be high art.
There's probably a survival bias at play, people looking at modern art from 21th century in 200 years (if we make it there...) will probably think it's great, because they'll look only at the few good pieces.
That said we also live in very self-aware, cynical, merchant society, so our art reflect that, so maybe it won't age well at all.
It made you feel something.
It made you form an opinion -on a given piece, and on art as a whole- and then explain that opinion not only to yourself but to strangers on the internet, whom you then asked for their opinions. These people weren't even there with you to view the piece(s) in question; they may never have seen it/them, and maybe they never will.
But now a bunch of people are thinking, and sharing those thoughts, and connecting with one another.
Sounds like (pretty successful) art to me.
It may be worth distinguishing between craft and art. The former could be thought of as the object itself and the process of manufacturing it into a final state through technique. The latter is the engagement in a cultural narrative of call and response; its resultant meaning is mostly derived from that history, not physicality. I’d say craft is usually present in art, even bad art, but they’re different ways of engaging with the human experience.
With that said, just because a work of art has meaning doesn’t make it aesthetically beautiful. Some art is intentionally designed to make the audience uncomfortable. Other pieces aren’t meant to convey any particular meaning, but to invoke something emergent from the audience. Art isn’t always successful and indeed, much art is simply tasteless or bad.
By “modern” maybe you mean “modernist” or “postmodernist” (“modern art” might include some impressionists or post-impressionists, like Van Gogh, whose works can be abstract but whom I assume you aren’t referring to). Much art from these mid–late 20th century movements is visually uninteresting to me, but the intellectual exploration that informs them is interesting and has lots of relevant implications for society today.
Reading the answers in this thread, I think where I draw the line (heh) is whether a layman can get something out of the art piece without extensive knowledge in art or history or any of that particular piece’s context.
A Van Gogh painting is “self explanatory” on some level: even if you don’t know about where he lived or who he was, you can still appreciate the compositions and understand/describe what he was painting.
Unlike, for an extreme example, a monochrome. Unless you have 15 minutes worth of explanations you’re unable to tell even what it is supposed to be. And even then, it seems completely arbitrary and made up (to me)
I think, at the end of the day, what you're maybe experiencing is that some art just doesn't have you, @preposterous, as you are in July of 2026, as the target audience. Unlike how we consume, say, music — via channels and streams and playlist segregated by genre and taste — visual art is often experienced in museums, which are aggregators. They tend to aggregate across taste and genre, because... well, there are a lot of reasons, some are interesting and some are silly. But either way, a museum must serve perveyors of very many different preferences for visual arts, and so some of those pieces are, almost by definition, not for you (at least, not right now) — they're for someone else!
I think that's fine? I think it would be sad if museums didn't show monochromes (or, worse, artists didn't create them) because you didn't like them. I do like them (like @Evie mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I was first really introduced to Rothko via the play RED), and so do others. They're there for me!
I think that lots of other art has qualifications like this as well. Industrial metal is extremely dense and unapproachable for many unfamiliar with it — I suspect you would need far more than 15 minutes of background to develop an appreciation for it. Same with Free Jazz, or any number of other genres that are built on extensive iteration on and dissection of specific musical traditions.
Do you feel the same way about movies? Sequels? Cinematic universes?
For example, I am not really interested in Star Wars. I don't know much about it. A friend dragged me to some Star Wars movie because he did not want to go alone; I barely understood it because I didn't have the context of the movie's characters, events, or the broader cinematic universe (overall I actually really dislike the "cinematic universe" thing). It was spectacle in some ways, sure, but I was definitely missing the kind of knowledge that I would need to appreciate the film. I came away from that movie feeling neutral-to-negative. But angry? Insulted? ...
Does that mean the movie was bad? Would the movie have been better if it had been appealed to me specifically, someone who doesn't really know or care much about Star Wars? Probably not; it was targeted at the people who are already invested in the universe and aware of its previous stories and conventions. (For example, it had to be explained to me what someone's lightsaber colour implied about their character, something that fans would pick up on.)
Some things simply require a baseline of knowledge and context to appreciate. That does not make them bad. In fact it often makes them better, in my view, because when your target audience is "anyone" then you're not likely to be able to say or do anything that complex or interesting. A piece of art not being targeted at you, and being appreciated by the target audience instead, should not make you angry...
Like... someone who doesn't know how to do algebra won't be able to do calculus, for instance. There are many people who can do calculus and who speak to each other about it, who build things on top of it, who use its principles to do interesting things. People who aren't educated in math might miss stuff, but it's not like the people having these conversations are intentionally being snobby or exclusive, they're having conversations among each other where a baseline can be assumed so they don't have to get bogged down in re-explaining algebra every time they want to do something higher-level.
Some forms of creation are just as much for the creator's fulfilment and experimentation as it is for the audience, as well. It's artists in conversation with each other, looking at each others' works, learning from their processes, even just literally showing that they have solved some PRACTICAL problem like working with a difficult material or producing some visual effect in a new way. It's open source.
All meaning is made up; all ideas are conceived of by people.
But yes, that's a useful distinction in many public spaces. My city has a famous mural program whose subjects tend to be tangible. One of the purposes of the program is to make people feel represented in their city, which is why many murals feature diverse portraits and activities. This has various direct social benefits, like incentivizing neighborliness and perhaps reducing crime. This is a highly utilitarian use of art which is only loosely connected to the "meta-narrative tradition" that the avant-garde spearheads. The murals can convey obvious, simple meaning without much explanation. But teleological utilitarianism is only one branch of philosophy.
Abstract composition can have simple, appreciable value to laypeople. I would delineate "good art" from "good simulacra." Color theory is a legit thing: combining warm or cool tones (or whatever) with some skill (or luck) produces a work that has a real psychological effect, whether or not the output imitates a physical object/scene. Someone else in the thread mentioned sound, instrumental arrangements of which have minimal obvious correspondence to the real world; music theory is kind of the aural equivalent to color theory.
Monochromes can have some visual intensity in context, but I agree that they're a hard type of abstraction to interpret. I usually don't find them interesting at face value. When we see these pieces in a museum, they're often from a particular moment in the meta-narrative, like Malevich's Black Square (1921). (Perhaps ironically, the simplicity of this form was supposed to represent an experiential democratization of art, in contrast with symbolic religious paintings, which always require detailed interpretation from "the experts.") I don't think many 21st century artists are producing this exact sort of work because the commentary of "geometric abstraction that highlights the supremacy of non-referential artistic feeling" has already been made. There's always more that can be said, but imitations of that output, without new context, are on the boring side. I like the craft of abstract expressionism most when it has complexity.
So much work in the academy, and the museum, is ultimately not meant for laypeople. Not every one is meant to absorb every thing. But such activity in nominally public institutions seems to clash with the principle of public funding and with the financial incentives of any large non-profit organization. It feels upsetting to some non-art appreciators that some (miniscule, but non-zero) subset of public tax dollars goes to institutions creating art whose collections contain a subset of material they won't ever engage with. That's a real emotion—a critiquable one, but legitimate. And big museums are always trying to attract people outside the art world to come and spend their money at the institution, sometimes while paying their directors immense salaries, which can feel unfair given some museumgoers' relative economic condition. It could be said that when the museum invites a large number of people who lack all the narrative context of the art into exhibits that essentially require that context, without priming them, curators are perpetuating the ideological disconnect. Museums could structure their exhibits linearly, with a historical pedagogy, to ensure that everyone can easily understand everything. However, that is pretty didactic. It also assumes audiences are paying attention and want to read a lot of difficult intellectual material, which isn't a universal desire for casual attendees. It might strip out some of the non-linear narratives happening, too, and could be a boring way for art enthusiasts to engage with the material (it's their space too). It's kind of a non-solvable problem.
...your reactions aren't entirely unfounded; lazy art has festered in the margins for as long as patronage has been a thing, just as in any industry where commerce offers quick opportunity for easy money, but it's not at all exclusive nor even endemic to modern styles...that said, older art tends to survive on merit whereas newer art hasn't yet been subjected to the same historical and contextual filters of appreciation, so the signal-to-noise of modern art may take a bit more work to appreciate...
...today, historical filters are fairly easy to grok, but what about contextual filters?..they're really two ways of looking at the same phenomenon, although context comes more freely after history has done most of the heavy lifting for us...so much of understanding art is dependent upon context but, in our modern age of mass-media saturation which frames our perception of the world around us in layers upon layers of unspoken and even unconscious assumptions, the tyranny of invisible cultural paradigms profoundly colors our perception of reality, and at its heart, modern art is about breaking through those paradigms to show naked truths which lay hidden on the other side...
...robert hughes' the shock of the new was a landmark documentary series worth watching entirely on its own merit but, as an exploration of modernism and the paradigm shifts which fueled the movement, it may help transform your appreciation of modern art (and that is in fact its mission)...
The Shock of the New
...it's fair to call the shock of the new the modern-art counterpart to cosmos; they were both productions of the same era, aired with landmark companion books, and critically-lauded as triumphant surveys of their respective fields by celebrated educators...
I saw a girl chew through a 20lb+ brick of Double Bubble and I thought it was so incredibly stupid at the time, but 25 years later it’s that and this other table halving performance/demo that stick with me.
It’s good that all art isn’t universally loved and there’s nothing wrong with not liking something. Banana on a wall is goofy, but I love it and what it represents to me.
I’d love to see Robert Rauschenberg‘s Erased de Kooning Drawing in person. Is it a white sheet of paper? Pretty much. :)
As for explanations, I am in the camp of ‘one a work is released, it outs no longer the creative or interpretive property of the artist’ — so ignore their story of it doesn’t speak to you.
I can find some abstract paintings at least aesthetically pleasing, but "controversial art" like the banana duct-taped to a wall really feels like insulting the audience.
I would go to more art expositions if it weren't always about some low-effort snob. I saw many times "artists," who basically record their exotic vacations in a blurry way and sell it as a deep, life-changing experience, for me, art should represent some beauty, tragedy, or emotion in a clearer way since it is exposing the view of someone else to teh public.
Interesting questions. I’d say as long as I can remember it annoyed me that we’d consider this art. But anger feelings are more recent.
Personally, I draw the line based on how tenuous the relationship is between the artifact and its explanation, along with the amount of work and craftsmanship required to produce it. Of course this very loose “definition” can be stretched and bent to the absurd to demonstrate that it’s invalid, I’d argue it’s more of a heuristic I use.
Can I ask how you feel about Lex Marie's "because I love you"?
Just because it's abstract and modern (I mean idk the specific movements here but it's colloquially modern at least) but I think the meaning is more accessible and relatable? And that maybe that inaccessibility or unrelatable quality is why you're struggling with it.
in case you don't want to read it or this angers you, please don't feel obligated
It's made by striking a canvas with a belt dipped in pain, repeatedly.
From the artist:
"This piece is me sitting with the idea of discipline in Black households often being tied to love, protection, and survival, and how harm could exist in the same breath. It's me reflecting on my childhood and on the choices Ive been thinking and making as a parent myself. My practice often mirrors what I'm actively moving through as a parent. Right now, that's raising an 8-year-old boy and being in the thick of navigating disciplining in my household. It forces me to confront what's been passed down, what I was taught, what I believe works, and what I know doesn't. In doing so, I'm not only revisiting how I was disciplined, but how my mother was, how my friends were, how my community still is. This work lives in that confrontation between care and harm, inheritance and choice and in the questions I ask myself daily about what kind of love I want my child to feel and remember.
She has a similar one made of belts on wood in a pattern I'd describe as a parquet floor maybe that is both about discipline and skin tone and is called "watch your tone." But without a title and a backstory it looks like belts on a wall.
Either way it's fine if this art isn't for you, I think it angering you is perhaps a bit of a warning sign that you're letting something that is functionally harmless upset you so much.
Thanks for the link. When I looked at the art, I didn’t get it. Even reading the explanation didn’t connect the artifact with the explanation. But then I saw that it was made with a belt and it made more sense!
I won’t lie, I don’t find it very interesting. I appreciate the connection between love, the physical violence and the connection with beating up one’s own children “out of love”. It feels that if I paid to see it I’d be disappointed. Maybe the theme doesn’t speak to me?
This makes me realize though that my feelings about abstract modern art might actually not be about the amount of skill involved (I had the classical paintings in mind, that took a great deal of mastery to make). I’m thinking now that it’s more about being able to connect the artifact with what it represents. In your example, I get the connection. It doesn’t speak to me for whatever reason but I don’t feel insulted because I can understand the connection with the artifact. Unlike a monochrome or paint splatters where there is (to me) zero possible connection between the artifact and any explanation for it.
That’s actually helpful, thanks!
Gotcha so for me I felt this work (and the companion made of belts) evoked a lot of pain - the artist herself had to hit the canvas in the same way that parents would use a belt on a child, and evoking the same way that slaves were whipped, over and over again. Maybe there was catharsis in the work too, but I felt the desire to break patterns of generational trauma. I didn't experience this abuse as a child but I am familiar enough with it, and can connect it to my own experiences, that it speaks to me.
I think there are reasons and connections for monochrome and paint splatters too. The all red/blue/yellow paintings of a Russian artist saying he had basically ended painting by putting the three primary colors in every spot on a canvas, you could just mix them as appropriate to create anything had a point. It just required learning his why. Without it, it doesn't resonate so much.
But I'm glad this helped. I think the default assumption should be that there is a reason for each artwork, and if we don't get it then that's ok, it wasn't for us, or the museum let us down, or out of context it doesn't mean as much. (Van Gogh benefits from context too for example, knowing what was going on in his life and with his mental health around the time of a particular painting can give insight.)
After reading what everyone else wrote, let me try to put some of my feelings on the subject into my own words.
I "get" the concept of art being a conversation the artist has with themselves, and I also get that the point is for each piece to evoke something in the viewer. But isn't there also a fundamental contradiction there? When you take these pieces and put them in a museum, gallery or public place, there is an expectation of good communication.
No industry professionals or commercial creatives from any specialization can get away with poor communication and justify it as "that's what art is for". If I create an advertisement or direct a movie or whatever, and nobody gets it, and I say "oops, it's art" - most people wouldn't be surprised, exactly, but they would still be angry like OP if they spent their hard-earned money into something and then they're told they just don't get it, unless that's very specifically the expectation they had at the start. And the only reason they wouldn't be surprised is that poor communication between an artist and people engaging with their art is common enough for there to be a derogatory use of the moniker "art" to signify "something impenetrable".
You don't have to step in at this point to lecture me on how all art is subjective, the artist is dead once the piece is out there, you can interpret it how you like, etc. I enjoy some abstract art myself. But I think a truly good abstract artist whose work is unambiguously worth engaging with is actually good at conveying their message, no exceptions. People respect them more because when they're in our museums, town squares and parks, they're actually saying something to us that we can understand, rather than (unwittingly or not) insulting our intelligence.
You're talking about design, not art.
These are two distinct things: Design is used to convey specific information to an audience, art is a way for an artist to impart meaning onto media. Art does not require that the meaning sticks the landing on the other side, or that the meaning that you receive is the same one that is imparted.
What is abstract about something that is easy to decypher?
I can kind of agree. I am not a particularly artistic guy, so Im maybe not a great person to weigh in on what constitutes artistic merit. But I think of abstract art as similar to that avant garde style of fashion where models come out wearing bizarre impractical clothing. Its not really meant to be taken as an outfit people would actually buy and wear its more intended to spark someones creativity by being weird and different than the norm. Like art intended for other artists.
I guess the issue that I take with it is that I feel that not just anyone could successfully make abstract art, you have to already be accepted as a valid artist for people to put that kind of consideration into your work. Any kind of art could be considered deep as long as the audience is willing to think deeply about it, but only certain artists are considered important enough to be worth that effort. This is the common complaint you will hear from casual art observers, that anyone could make a splatter painting or tape a banana to a canvas, and its only considered high art when an established artist does it.
This ties in to the suspicion that people have that high end art is a money laundering scheme for the rich. This is conspiratorial thinking, but whenever I see an expensive piece of modern art I have a suspicion that some rich guy is artificially manufacturing hype around that artist, because they already have purchased other pieces from that artist for cheap, and if they make them famous they can instantly turn those pieces into multimillion dollar assets. Which is kind of a corruption of artistry, if true.
It's true that a lot of people do believe this, but it's actually one of the most policed aspects of the intersection of art and taxes.
That's one of those truisms where the need for such rigorous evaluations demonstrates that this absolutely did, does, and will occur though.
And that the effectiveness of such is only good as the hype not hitting the panel.....which I would say is far from assured.
Well thats good to hear that society are taking action against that kind of financial dishonesty.
But I was thinking more of the actual art market. Like if you buy a bunch if paintings from some unknown artist for $50 each and then use your connections to get them a gallery showing or an art exhibit or something, then other art collectors will think they are a rising talent and will buy their art for $5000 because they assume the art will appreciate in time. So the people who have sway over places like galleries can pick winners and losers based on what would benefit their own financial interest, or the interest of their friends.
Doing something like this shifts the selection process of "good" art away from artistic merit and toward networking and knowing the right people, which could disproportionately benefit the rich and powerful or their kids who dont want to work a desk job. I feel that this would be especially at risk for more abstract art, because its much harder to challenge someone if they assert some random work is a masterpiece when really abstract art is concerned, whereas more detail or skill oriented art styles demand at least some level of perceivable talent.
Art is not presented in a museum on its visual merit alone. Collectors are interested in provenance and context, which is difficult to fake. Such fraud at scale is impractical in an institutional context—conflict of interest rules prevent curators from donating works they have a financial interest in, acquisitions committees (who are also experts) have no obligation to accept anything in particular, valuations require third-party appraisals, etc. What you describe is technically possible but not common. The ethical codes are robust, and this is a competitive field with a high barrier to entry. There are much easier and more lucrative ways to scam people.
Said apprehension might be the wrong focus altogether. Instances of theft/forgery become narrative elements of the art, because meaning also comes from a story, not just an object. There exist claims that the Hatata could have Italian authorship, not Ethiopian as predominantly believed, which would have various cultural and academic implications. Even if true, this wouldn’t erase hundreds of years of subsequent scholarship, it would just produce an additional, different reading.
Well first consider that many pieces in a museum were not paid for and are on loan from the owner (personal collection, the artist themself, or another museum).
I think it's important to remember that the museum curator is just a person. They aren't the arbiters of what is and isn't art. Art museums with big white walls and lines you shouldn't step past hold a very narrow scope of what art can be. When you see a piece that you like in a museum just enjoy the piece. Don't let its presence in a museum be the reason you think it's art. When you see a piece you don't like likewise don't feel like you're wrong for not understanding its appeal. You just don't agree with the curator and that's fine. Move on.
If you can't walk around a city and realize how much art you're seeing (not just architecture, but street art, performance art) you're missing out. Try getting into photography a bit. It trains a mental muscle for recognizing aesthetics and the instinct to frame and record what you see. I'll walk around a city and the textures of a building or buildings will catch my eye and I'll stop in place to take a photo. But I could see someone grumpily state that this isn't art. They walk by the same building every day! It's nothing special and can't be shown in the presence of high art like renaissance paintings.
A funny anecdote about abstract art: I was on a second date with a girl. First date was coffee. It went okay, but didn't get a strong signal because she seemed a bit nervous. I figured we should go to a museum so we could have more to talk about. I asked if she'd like to go to SFMoMA and she said yes. We get there and she flat out refuses to discuss any of the art. They have some of the types of pieces OP is upset about, but also lots of interesting immersive installations, photography, sculptures, etc. Any time I asked her what she thought about a piece she'd wall up and say she didn't know anything about art, despite any prodding. I couldn't even get her to say if any one piece in a room was appealing.
However as we got into the more abstract pieces she spoke up. There were some interesting hanging metal sculptures, which she remarked reminded her of baby mobiles. I agreed. Then we went into a room with 4 large paintings of different textures, some fabric-like. She said they reminded her of a baby's blanket. Those were the only two comments she made! I realized I'd accidentally Rorschach tested her. Totally fine for her to be thinking about that. But I never got any real information about her so there wasn't a third date.
I don't have anything intelligent to say on the matter, but I wanted to share a piece that I'll probably never see in person, but that has interested me for years! 20:50 is sculpture (per the artist) which is a room that appears half-filled with recycled motor oil, creating a darkened reflection of the ceiling and walls enclosing it.
It really does feel like it's saying something about the modern world's dependency on oil, but after having watched that interview, it sounds like the artist just wanted to make a big mirror 😅 still seemed important to me.
The prices are often silly but I think you have to put it aside. Yes, the art market is a racket, but it’s someone else’s money and it probably comes from a rich donor. They can afford it. The artist’s cost of materials was probably not that high.
If you compare with the amount of money that goes into making bad or mediocre movies, there is plenty of “waste” there too, but usually we don’t think about the cost.
That could be a US perspective. I live in Europe and museums are (at least partially) funded with public money which is diverted from other more worthy (imho) public causes.
That seems like a narrow view. In Germany (for example), public spending on arts and culture is something like €15 billion. Public allocations to museums is around €5.6 billion. Across ~7,000 museums, that's an average of €800,000 each, which is a rounding error in a national budget of €476.3 billion. Besides:
That's a 68% ROI. From a strictly economic perspective, these services are an asset to society.
It's okay to dislike something out of principle. The deontological view, if it defines modern art as inaccessible or not truly public, might cite a duty to spend only on more egalitarian services. That's a different logic than a consequentialist ideal that budgets ought to be allocated according to greatest impact, as you imply.
I'm not generally a fan of abstract paintings when viewed in isolation, but I don't get annoyed by them. I just don't spend long looking at them in museums, because I generally prefer them when they're incorporated in something else (I do think they work well in some interior design spaces, as low-distraction backdrops on phones or computers, etc.).
A big part of the reason abstract art doesn't annoy me because it's absolutely everywhere. It's on most of the products at the supermarket, it's in every home (interior design is almost always abstract unless the room is designed to be heavily themed, which I honestly dislike a lot more than abstract design), a lot of clothing is abstract (graphic T-shirts, floral prints, etc. excepted), and most household objects (vases, small kitchen appliances, woodturned legs on furniture, etc.) are just kind of some artful shape that's not depicting anything in particular.
Abstract design is just kind of the norm. Paintings and sculptures that depict something in particular are a strange exception — no doubt a cultural fluke that evolved out of the need/desire to keep records of what things look like before the invention of photography.