Please try and explain to me why this is art.

[PCPlumsTruncheon]

I don’t claim to understand art at all and I am totally not in the ‘all modern art is rubbish’ camp. I love Tracey Emin’s stuff and I try to be open minded about cultural stuff.
I went to the Tate Modern yesterday and saw this. My immediate feeling was ‘Why the fuck is in one the world’s most visited art galleries followed by ‘I could do that’.
I’m not looking to be persuaded that I should like it - there was stuff that I saw that wasn’t my thing but I could still appreciate it IYKWIM

Something, something, something...tiny humans, largely unnoticed but eviscerated, smothered and destroyed in the framework of a huge infrastructure. Stuff about intestines relating to being livestock, that lots of drugs are swallowed, death, distortion, stuff about The Drugs Trade/War on Drugs being a huge structure that ignores the individual human lives that are involved...

Makes sense if you look at what the artist is actually trying to say.

Wouldn't want in in the front room, but it's made you stop and think and discuss what the artist could be trying to say. So it's done its job.

MitziK that makes a lot of sense. It would make the art more accessible if the pieces were given more context in the gallery to help people like me who find them hard to understand otherwise.
I suppose there are others who would find this level of 'spoon feeding' undermines the experience though ...

Oh god, you've just reminded me of a art installation I saw years ago in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It was essentially a newspaper front page about the death of Saddam Hussein that the artist had bunged glitter on. Read the plaque beside it and discovered that it wasn't glue that had been used to stick the glitter on. It was semen.

I've just looked it up online to check my memory was right and it's called 'Gotcha!'

Takes all sort, as my grandma would say...

We saw some scrunched up Kit Kat wrappers in an exhibit (breeze blocks on the floor) at Tate Modern many years ago. The blurb didn't even clarify If the wrappers were part of it or not

OP, I think your piece should be titled Frantic. Frantically trying to cleanse ones body but never getting satisfaction from todays toiletries, thus, unfinished a strewn bottles.

I know someone doing an art masters. They are the loveliest person but their art is nonsense to me. Think a potato masher painted gold and stuck on the top of a beach ball. Just bizarre.

We went to The Baltic in Newcastle and it was literally just filled with bent pieces of wire with cloths hanging off the ends. Oh, and the odd button.

we went today, some of the paintings we enjoyed but the majority of it is a load of old wank. The worst was an actual Sainsbury's receipt encased in glass wtf?!

Clearly your souls lack the depth to appreciate such art work.

The agony of a hospital bed when you are feeling dmaamged and chipped like the enamel, and tgr lingering hope of humanity never achieved.
The dolls symbolise the corruption of the world, which we all choose not to see, bound by a world which has no respect for any living creatures as demonstrated through the intestine twine. Your inability to see it is cultural a customising to ignore pain that isn't your own.

And yet the welding shows that we are all shackled together, no pain exists on an island or in a vacuum.

We all need to see Art like this with a view to making the world less dark and scary

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an artist that sometimes makes work that can be described as conceptual (and I promise I am never trying to take the piss out of the audience, I work on the basis that if it's good enough, people will get something from it).

Anyway... I kinda like that piece, even without the dolls (like someone mentioned the pig intestine probably disintegrated and they fell off). But the rusty child's cot and the steel bar cage definitely say hospital, institution, prison, and I'd be thinking what happened here, where is the child - it gives me the shivers, and if it provokes an emotion I would consider it art!

I think part of the problem is that galleries insist on using bollocks artspeak to describe work which immediately alienates 99% of the population. If we were better at talking about art, more people would engage with it, but there's almost a sense of making it deliberately out of reach to prove how "clever" we are. I rage against that, my old lecturer taught me if you can't explain it to a 5 year old, it ain't good enough!!!

Most modern art is shit. Bold statement I know but it is. I once saw a dining chair wrapped in chains proclaiming to be art. Makes a mockery of true artwork imo.

Some modern art is shit. Some modern art is clever and funny and moving. Unlike the work of the old masters we've not had the benefit of time to weed out the shit/faddy of the moment stuff yet. But the best thing about art is that your/my/some highly respected critics opinions are all equal when you're stood in front of it!

Context is everything. I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia years ago. The worst thing there was an iron bed frame, very much like that one. Standing in the middle of a stone floor in a former school. From context, it was too easy to imagine back to the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Everyone was quietly crying and no one could look at each other.

However I can't feel like that in an art gallery reading a little card. Does that mean the artist didn't do their job well or did I fail to appreciate it?

Someone once told me to never buy a piece of art I could create myself.

That pic of the metal thing at the beginning is utter shite. Where the fuck would
You showcase that in your home? If I left the tin the garden the "any old iron" man would have it for scrap.

Clearly your souls lack the depth to appreciate such art work. There's nothing wrong with peoples souls. Some of us just have a line to the tickle factor.

DD, aged 7, saw this last year. Her verdict? "I don't think this person thought very hard about their art".

It's a visual representation of how empty of values our society is.

I think it's quite interesting... from just looking at it you can tell it is sad/uncomfortable, possibly to do with a hospital bed, possibly to do with death because the bars look burned, then the linking bars make you think of societal structure... you get a sense it's perhaps about a society ignoring deaths at its core caused by some sort of problem.... wouldn't have picked up it being about the drug trade though...

I really like modern art I think at it's best it expresses stuff that other art forms cannot... it's always interesting to look at. I think the more of it you look at the more you can sort of pick up what's going on with stuff. It's not always 'about something' though... sometimes it's just having fun with process or shapes or whatever.. I think you can pick that up too when it's the case.

I dont k how much about it but I enjoy looking at it... I think alot of people do it doesn't have to be this elitist thing. You can pick up quite alot from just looking and thinking about what it reminds you of, how it makes you feel etc

gamerwidow I went to Tate Modern a few years ago with a couple of 11 year olds. I did notice a couple of people seemed to be reacting to my (quietly) talking about the shadows in Exploded - why the room was lit that way, why the piece were on threads, how we were part of the work as our shadows mixed, but dismissed it, as they were probably annoyed I was speaking rather than standing in silent reverence.

We got to a bit which had something like a curved bench. I reminded them they weren't allowed to touch it, but how about they followed the outline with their hand and see what that made them think of. Playing aeroplanes. As we walked into the next bit, I glanced back and saw some adults doing the same and smiling. I'd imagine they were thinking about childhood, playing in the park, grass and sunshine as well. I thought it was a very intelligent piece of work, to have a lump of grey concrete(?) make people feel/think of such things.

By the end of our day, I'd accidentally got a few people shuffling backwards and forwards to look at how a Pointilist picture changes with distance - not deliberately/overtly, but again spotted as we left. I liked that, as they looked happy and I'd guess that they might do the same at a later date.

Some art is about passive observation and being told what to think/feel, some requires engagement and interaction. Both are more useful if you approach them not just in terms of aesthetics, but what they could be saying/trying to get you to think about. I like both.

The bed gives me the shivers.... It is like those really institutional ones that you see in news footage of orphanages. With it being part of of a shelving unit it is almost like the children are faceless commodities to be used and disposed of.

Oh, and, by the way, I detest Arty Wankspeak. It excludes, rather than inviting anybody in. Mostly used, in my opinion, because people haven't got the ability or balls to say 'try following the surface with your hand and tell me what it reminds you of'.

MitziK it’s great you are so good at making the art accessible for those 11 year olds (and others) they were lucky to have you with them.
It would be great to have people equally talented at helping people engage with the art employed by the museums.

I’m getting the hang of this now

I love Tate modern. It's so challenging. Mean half the time I roll my eyes or mutter expletives under my breath and walk past the exhibit very quickly. Which makes my party friend laugh.
My theory on an awful lot of art is that the artist was thinking, "I wonder if I can get away with this". And cos of people pretending they get it, the artist does, indeed get away with it.
I say this as a great art lover. Of all kinds.