Two AIBUs: 1- To want to to talk about Art 2- Modern Art AIBU?

[questionzzz]

Hi everybody, yesterday we (I and two DCs) had the privilege of travelling to a big North American city (we live in a smallish town) and, being a bit of a culture vulture, one of the things we did was visit the city art gallery. Since nobody IRL seems to want to talk about "Art", here I am.

So one floor had an exhibit called "Self-portraits", and it had works through the centuries by the great masters, eg Rubens, Rembrandt, also David Hockney, Lucien Freud, and it was absolutely fascinating.

The second floor was showcasing important / influential "Modern Art", and I guess here is where the AIBU really begins. Basically I know there are tons of parodies and satires about Modern Art (a particularly charming episode of Jeeves and Wooster comes to mind), and I know the standard smart-ass answer to "I could have drawn this" is "But you didn't". But really? Huge monochrome canvases, just white, or red, or yellow. Other canvases, not so huge, covered with random squiggles and splashes. (not Jackson Pollock). Or lines of black and white (not op-art as far as I could tell). Or circles of pastels. I am a mere layman, but you couldn't help comparing the workmanship gone into the works of the first floor, not to mention the sheer beauty and wonder, which is what I guess is considered "real art", to the "Modern Art" .

I know there are tons of works by professional critics explaining exactly what is so arresting and important about the squiggles and the monochromes. And depending on the circles you move, you are either "edgy" to say you think it's shite, or a provincial peasant (I am the latter, I would say). But, there you go, I think "Modern Art" (not the Hockney and Freud- but the squiggles and scratchings and monochromes) is shite, and a scam. AIBU?

To kinda answer my post, I think people feel that they have the right to disparage artists because there is a belief that art belongs to everyone, that everyone is an artist.

Which on some levels is totally true.

But it then follows that if everyone can be an artist, then everyone can be an art critic and that public opinion and what is most popular is best.

hmmmmm

The Tate modern in London did nothing for me whilst my friend was mesmerised by it all! We are thankfully all different

Yes everyone is different and it's totally fine to like what you like!

But it's not totally fine to think you can decide what is art and what isn't when you don't understand the context and history of the art you are looking at.

I think that it's fine to tell people like me, who think that much(not all) modern art is bollocks , that we haven't done our homework if it wasn't that our money helped pay for it..

I can't help but see something sinister in the way art no longer requires the same kind of skill, the way that art is no longer apprenticed and no longer takes years of small-group study with a master to create -- instead, it's something just about anyone with an art school degree could produce, and which ones are selected for becoming famous are practically a lottery.

The result is that rich people can speculate and trade in goods that essentially have zero intrinsic value, and are propped up solely by the notional value they have. They are not beautiful, nor are they difficult to reproduce, even in exact miniscule detail. Art is now a bigger investment category than any time in the last 100 years, because the market for particular artists is no longer driven by aesthetic preferences but instead by cults of popularity, boom and bust cycles like a particularly volatile stock market.

And when none of the art is particularly skillful or aesthetically valuable, artists are essentially fungible in a way they've never been before, and their works become primarily a commodity for speculators rather than a source of cultural pride or personal aesthetic pleasure.

If modern art is too difficult to understand by many of the 'general public' due to their lack of knowledge on art history and their lack of understand of the context of the art then it's questionable that it receives any funding from grants and charities. Who would want to support something that is so elitist and inaccessible.🤔

OP, I'm not sure whether you posted to fulminate or because you're baffled by appreciation of modern art. If the latter, there's a book called Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That that might interest you--it has a wonderfully simple & straightforward presentation for laymen and would probably be a huge help to anyone who doesn't 'get' modern art. Not saying that it would make you like it any more, but it might help you understand it a bit better.

Ellisandra I totally get what you mean about Yves Klein's IKB 79.
To me it also represents an entrance to life & an entrance to heaven & love.
When I look at it I feel like I'm being given a massive hug.
That's just my musings.

Actually, if the audience requires a degree in art history to get anything at all from an artwork, then I’d suggest that the artist hasn’t really done a great job.

Art can be highly conceptual and still be accessible to lay audiences. If you are going to put your work on public display, then you should be at least attempting to communicate something to the public. Sure, the art history buff might get more from your piece, but it shouldn’t be entirely inaccessible to the public.

I used to work in a historic house where for six months we hosted a contemporary art exhibition. The idea was that new pieces (carefully chosen) were put next to some of the older furniture / building to show different stories.

I must admit, I was like you and didn't 'get it' at first and had a hundred volunteers to convince it was a good talking point. By the middle of the exhibition all the volunteers began having their favourites and would vigorously defend it to others....and their favourites weren't just the 'pretty' ones.

In the end it worked because we were able to tell a story with it - using both the old and new to start conversations with visitors. However I would point out that at no point was there a canvas with a dot on it!

Artists and art institutions have to write the equivalent of phd's that show her he audience engagement and value for money in order to get public funding. Arts funding is such a tiny percentage of governmental spending and in total crisis anyway, with the arts sector being incredibly resourceful to survive , despite offering massive value for money in terms of societal benefit, jobs , tourism and regeneration. I'd rather see the defence budget able to be explained and justified.

You don't need a degree anyway to understand comtemporart art. You just need an open mind and a willingness to learn a little. Maybe book onto many of the free tours and events that organisations like the Tate offer to engage and inform their audiences. You've only your preconceptions to lose!

lucydogz we really enjoyed the swings, but that's because they were swings, not because they were art.

I liked the view from the new bit!

Exhibitions that you pay for are usually better. Also some great art is in private collections and unless they loan it out - or make a gallery we will never see it.
Tate modern exhibitions are better than the main collection. In London the Saatchi gallery is great, but it's a private collection.

90% of art from any given period popular or unpopular won't make it into the anuls of history and be considered great art.

So looking back 100 years you can pick, about 50 great artists? How many do you think we're living at the time, making art.

Lots of contemporary art won't stand the rest of time, that doesn't mean it's all shit. but really only time can be the censor.

And a lot of art is a visual representation of the history of our time, it shows in a very immediate way, how the world around us is. That's true from the very beginning.

Lots of people just want pretty aesthetic things around them, fine, but museum art can be a lot more challenging to our perceptions of life.

Constable was rejected from the royal academy for being too modern! Van Gogh sold one picture, Gauguins family rejected him, impressionist was an insult name given to them. etc etc. You could go on. All the people that have pushed boundaries are still around.

As someone else said, just keep an open mind, try and do a little reading.
No one complains when they have to read up or learn about music or science or literature to get a better understanding of the context.
But because art is visual it seems to get a lot more of a hard time.

Anything I personally don't use or enjoy shouldn't be publicly funded... Roads I don't drive on, schools I don't use, and any programming on any BBC medium that I don't like or understand should be immediately cancelled for being elitist.

@Curunina
Haha I feel the same.

What I miss with modern art is that other art forms - music, literature - a skilled artist can expect to influence my emotions without me needing to know anything about how the effect was achieved or how was done in the past or whatever. With some abstract art, I find that the only emotion that gets elicited from me is the feeling of being silly for wasting 20 quid on the ticket to get in.

I also feel as if some of it's quite heavy handed, compared to literature. I saw the BBC lady explaining Lubaina Himid's stuff at the Turner Prize ceremony on telly this week and you know, maybe it was the BBC lady trying to boil it down into three sentences, but she's pointing out this figure of a young black woman and there's a basket of books in front of the painting and the BBC lady says that's supposed to signify the young woman's desire to learn. And I thought, if you did that in a book -
"Judith sat down heavily on her luggage and put down her basket of books by her side. Art, philosophy, politics. She'd carried them all the way through the voyage, heavy and awkward, but her desire to learn was strong."

• it would be like at the level of a Dan Brown. It's so semaphored! And that's the Turner Prize winner. It just seems a bit thin on ideas.

I feel bad saying that. She seemed lovely when she won it, as well. Perhaps I should apply myself a bit more and try to understand it.

But you do have to understand certain things to get the most out of literature or music. You have to understand the language it is written in, the vocabulary.. you even understand the context of literature from simply the words forming a book to more expansively that literature that has gone before. Same with music, you understand the different genres and their contexts and associated behaviours etc.

Traditional representational art is the same. The vast majority of us understand the basic language and vocabulary of a 2d representation image, as it's been established in our culture for centuries. We don't have to be taught each time we look at a painting that this is a 3D scene collapsed into a 2d image, we don't need to be taught about perspective, about notions of beauty, of narrative. We know these things, so we are able to quickly read the artwork and then respond.

Modern art is only a century (ish) old. Contemporary art much younger. The general population has not absorbed it's rules, languages , vocabularies etc. It'll take longer to be absorbed into our culture.

So most people will take a small amount of learning to get the most out of contemporary art as opposed to renaissance art. But learning is never wasted and the experience can open new ways of thinking! And galleries are generally very good at providing ways to access this learning. Mainly for free!!

But you do have to understand certain things to get the most out of literature or music.

To get the most out of it - but I think good works, be they music, literature, painting or whatever, should be accessible on a number of different levels.