How Art Became Irrelevant
commentarymagazine.com
commentarymagazine.com
"A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen."
That doesn't mean that art has become irrelevant, only that certain kinds of art are less relevant, and other kinds of art are more relevant.
People change, and the culture changes. When I was a little kid, my mom would read the New York Times and she would clip out articles about what the great novelists were writing and what the great architects were building, and whether New Urbanism would rescue the suburbs. Nowadays, my mom reads the New York Times and she clips out articles about cloud computing, and she talks about whether the USA is investing enough to modernize its communication infrastructure.
Pop music is not as important as it was either. Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena, and a kind of escape into another world, now there are tons of similar escapes (computer games, for example, a huge thing, weren't even available to the common how when pop was huge, nor where social media, chat, YouTube, Instagram, the modern "artistically relevant and high production quality" tv series and tons of other things). Now you can ask 10 people and they wouldn't know a current top 10 song -- whereas in the 70's for example it would be inescapable.
And graphic design has faded too -- there was a brief period in the mid-eighties to early 00s were graphic designers were huge pop heroes -- interviews in magazines, stars like Neville Brody, David Carson that you get to hear about even as a layman, etc. Now it's only other graphic and web folk care about graphic and web designers.
>People change, and the culture changes.
It's also good however to be making judgement calls on those changes too. Else we accept everything and anything as fate.
It still is. Is there any music from the 70s that's been heard by as many people as Gangnam Style? Psy currently has nearly 5 billion total views on YouTube.
And even that it's more due to the video than the music -- even you measured it on "billion views".
How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone other than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in life?
Here's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been made. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.
Give it 30 years, and watch as all these things come back again into pop-culture because those kids from today will be in your shoes, as decision makers at TV/Internet/Whatever companies that push pop-culture -- being guided by their own sense of nostalgia about the things that impacted them as kids.
By being a human, involved with culture, and plain being able to see and place cultural artifacts upon certain contexts.
How do we know that a war has left "deep emotional impact" to lots of people other than ourselves or "possibly the people we interact with most closely in life"? Because we do, we know what war is, we know what it does to people, etc.
In the same way, we know what novelty pop hits are. As opposed to regular pop hits that mostly capture some teens attention for a few years (e.g. Bieber or NKOTB back in the day) and more involved pop that goes deeper.
>Here's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been made. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.
I'm quite atypical in this regard, as despite being mid-late-30s, I follow lots of music and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff, from techno to regular chart pop to some obscure garage-psychedelic or jazz record (I really like from The Residents to Westbam, Deep Freeze Mice and Mingus, and can even hum something like Redfoo's songs).
But even as a teenager, I can tell you that there were lots of novelty hits I went for that meant really nothing for me (or anyone else that forgot about them after their peak) and stuff that had deeper impact, which was of a different kind (could still be pop: it just wasn't a novelty track like, say, Cotton Eye Joe or The Scatman).
Amen. Wish its more common than commonly perceptible.
Bands like Led Zeppelin were indeed cultural phenomena that transcended their music - they represented a lifestyle and way of thinking that was genuinely exciting to young people of the time (not me personally, well ahead of my time).
I'd guess the underground metal scene of the '90s had a similar feel.
I remember when this was part of the national debate around the NEA. The reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was garbage as art. If classic art sought to pull on "positive" emotions and move and inspire; modern art seemed determined to confuse and then move on to outrage.
Somewhere in this dwelling in negative emotions, modern art became indistinguishable from a satire that nobody was bothering to produce. It was an overly serious bunch of belly button dwelling backed by amateurishly crafted production most pre-schoolers regularly produced. Instead it became a game of one-upsmanship and gross-outs devised in the minds of 10 year old boys. Anything that wasn't deliberately trying to rile the audience was laughable "craftsmanship" and interesting in any way. The art scene became incestuous and further and further isolated itself from any potential audience.
Classical art was put out in public places for any passerby to see -- Michelangelo's "David" was displayed in a public courtyard. While it's true that classic forms became tired and formulaic, the modernist movements didn't generally replace those forms with anything of particular value.
There's interesting things going on in art in the modern world, but modern art isn't one of them.
Or, more generally, any potential value of it is subjective, and evaluations of merit aren't actually taking even that into account.
Offensiveness doesn't seem even remotely relevant; some people may enjoy works that others find offensive. On the other hand, foring others to involuntarily fund "art" without using any measure of the value provided either to the people viewing it or to the people funding it (and utterly disconnecting those two groups) seems ridiculous, and leads to problems like this. And then you get into definitions of "art", and criteria for what should and shouldn't get funded.
With all the myriad ways of connecting with potentially interested audiences today, much of the rationale for speculatively funding art no longer exists. If you make something people find worthwhile, you don't need public support, and if you're not, you shouldn't receive public support. Produce samples, get people interested, find patrons (or customers, or both), build larger projects, repeat. And if you want to work on something that nobody else cares about enough to fund (or that you don't care about seeking funding for, for any number of reasons), that's called a "hobby".
That doesn't mean that "culture" devolves into exclusively "pop culture". It doesn't take a large number of interested people to provide a substantial amount of funding; a very small amount of money from a thousand people can fund a career for one. So this certainly doesn't mean that only the makers of mass-market popular culture can get funding; quite the contrary.
Defining "art", or setting criteria for receiving funding, then becomes irrelevant for anyone other than philosophers or art critics. If people like something and want to support it, they can.
> Or, more generally, any potential value of it is subjective, and evaluations of merit aren't actually taking even that into account.
Art is art, there doesn't need to be some line in the sand where things are suddenly "good" or "art", or "bad" and "garbage". But there's definitely some kind of range of quality, and subjectively if the work isn't moving the audience, it's not subjectively "good".
I think you tap into the notion that "good" can be different for different audiences, and I think that also makes sense. I'm not particularly moved by most religious art, but I recognize it as art because of its capacity to move others.
Trying to create a precision semantic framework around art is a fool's errand. But I think there needs to be some kind of recognition that there's a kind of ordering in art that happens. The stuff on display at the MoMA or the NGA's Modern Art wing or the Tate Modern? Somebody ranked that better than anything else they could have spent their limited conservation funds on. It was more "worthy" than other pieces. So this ranking happens de facto no matter what any philosophy of relativism in art pretends to be about.
I saw the original series in the early 90s in a retrospective in Manhattan, and your characterization of it as "garbage" is shallow and erroneous.
First off, they are large prints, and beautifully colored and detailed. They have a beautiful, aestheticized quality. The series of photos also uses other bodily fluids like semen, milk, and blood -- fluids which are highly symbolic, especially for Catholics (Serrano is a believer).
Seen as a body of photos, it comes off as transgressive, sure, but also suggestive of processes that run the world -- reproduction, excretion, nourishment, care for young. But also, at the very same time, richly symbolic in the Catholic tradition.
As a point of reference, if you are familiar with the works of Gilbert and George (NSFW: http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/16976_cspread1.jpg), who have also worked with large scale photos of shit, semen, etc. -- Serrano's works are not provocative in the same way. His series was actually rather philosophical and meditative.
I was raised Catholic. Milk and semen are not symbolic to Catholics. Neither is urine. Blood is, sort of, but dowsing a statue in it would be to miss the meaning of it entirely. That's saying something because lots of things are symbolic to Catholics.
The entertainer, Madonna used to drape herself in Catholic symbolism as well, even filming her music video in Churches and featuring herself having affairs with the statuary. I don't think anyone of any intelligence attributed any more to it than an attempt to shock the audience. I'd argue that Madonna's work is more aesthetically pleasing that Serrano's, (a framed turd is still a turd,) and that's really the only differentiator in this case.
Of course, blood has a very central role in Catholic services and doctrine. Milk is also heavily used symbolically in the bible (Hence I have said to you, "You are to possess their land, and I Myself will give it to you to possess it, a land flowing with milk and honey." I am the LORD your God, who has separated you from the peoples.) -- but is probably not specifically Catholic. Semen and that type of "seed" are indeed used a lot in Christian symbolism. I don't know about urine.
So...the significance of these fluids is considerable. People may and do recoil at the notion, but there it is.
Have you seen the full series of Serrano's work from that time period? That's what I'd invite you to do, rather than judging His intentions from small photos on the Internet. To see if there's anything in it for you.
Yes, I remember Madonna's work from that era that engaged those kinds of symbols. It was just designed to shock, as you say, just pushing buttons. (She has done better work, "Vogue" still stands up.).
But Serrano is really, as I said, more aesthetic and philosophical than just a shock artist. That's why I counterposed Gilbert and George. That's what trying to shock looks like. (Those photos are life size, e.g. http://www.candidmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ins..., so they make quite an impression.)
the symbolism may be in their exclusion and denial from the catholic cult. in many of its strains catholicism is so exalted you're only supposed to have an eternal soul, your body is filthy.
which brings us back to modern art is just juvenile satire. my take on this is it's necessary (and won't stop being necessary as long as there are new people coming to this world) but in now way should be the only or the most cherished form of art.
Um, nope. That's called Manichaeism and it was condemned by the Catholic Church as long ago as the 5th century. The body is considered sacred in Catholic beliefs, but it doesn't have any special symbolism that would make something like Piss Christ make sense.
The problem with art nowadays is simple: it doesn't speak to us, humans, it doesn't help us through depression, it doesn't accompany our joys, it doesn't make us dream, hope, imagine the future, have nostalgia about the past, it doesn't help us with any of our human feelings. Like the OP said, it's an incestuous thing (or "intellectual masturbating", as one of my friends would say), with some stupid multi-millionaires and billionaires mixed in this whole thing who provide the funding.
Two examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauer-betlehem.jpg
http://nypost.com/2013/10/21/new-banksy-artwork-has-fans-flo...
He's not an amazing artist to me, but I think he's clever, and I respect his work.
Your definitions of "classic art"[1] and "modern art"[2] have to be pretty narrow to argue this. I know anyone can pull a few counter examples to any objectivist statement on the arts, but I have a very difficult time believing any argument that's based on the earnest belief that classic art drew on "positive" emotions while modern art is driven by "negative" ones. What kind of art are you looking at?
Just want to point out; that Jeff Koons piece is displayed publicly.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Francisc...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Bilbao.K...
It's the old "if you mistake a bush for a lion that's fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you are dead" cognitive bias. I've thought for a long time that it manifests in art via shock, negativity, outrage, etc. being a cheap route to profundity. You have to work hard to make positive art profound because the bar is higher... you don't get the easy free profundity points negativity gives you.
This video brings up the notion that modern art has been reduced to nothing but personal expression. And I think that's the problem. Artists aren't that special and I'm not particularly interested in their expression, I'm far more interested in what expression art can inspire in its audience...and modern art hasn't been effective at doing this.
If art is about mimicking the real world, some will be much better than others and there will be only one best
If art is about capturing the perfect moment to inspire emotion, one could argue there are a thousand ways to do it.
If you believe artists should all speak in the same voice, i would say many would lose interest. If you allow artists to speak in their own voice, the cream will rise to the top. Naturally, the most sellable and marketable products will be given the limelight (pop art as an example) and omce those go out of fassion, a new fad will arise
As much as i agree that many modern peices look like they are pictures mixed with bleach, i dont think that is a bad thing. We have a free art market today while in the old world only the best were commissioned.
However, an artist that only talks about his own personal experience will not make art that anybody else wants to see. There has to be some sort of connection to the lives of other people around him, otherwise his art is meaningless to all but himself. And meaningless art is a contradiction in terms.
Art should be an interpretation of the real world that its audience can somehow relate to. Artists aren't all that special as people, but they can be special in that they can get other people to think about the world around them in a new way. Of course, all interpretations factor in the view point of the author/artist, and that's OK - else we really would have a whole bunch of artists producing identical stuff, and who wants that? The important thing is that somehow, the audience has to be involved in the work of art.
And by the way: what's so bad about some artists being better than others? Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? After all, nobody would claim all programmers are identical in skill, so why should all artists be?
There was a recent exhibit i found particularly interesting where the artist used real dead bodies. This was interesting because he was legally alowed to and others would pay to go see it. The art itself is not appealing but it applies to the fourth wall. Our world today is filled with so many loopholes and rediculous businesses that an art peice like this reflects on it. If the artist did not speak selfishly, these kind of rediculous loopholes may never be exposed. But in the same notion, would should look at our own lives and recognize art is not a unique case, obvious and loud but far less damaging in many regards
modern art = i could do that + yeah, but you didn't
(credit to Craig Damrauer)
To me, good art is the combination of a couple things: skill and vision.
Vision, the intent to express some idea (hopefully interesting) is absolutely needed. Even if I don't understand it, I can respect that someone is trying to make a statement of some kind.
Skill, of some sort is also needed for me to call it art. If there was no craft involved in the creation, no practice, no iteration... then I don't consider it worthy of my time. Show me something that you can do that I can't, basically.
If your "art" consists of a couple common items that took all of ten minutes to put together, that is not art to me. You may be making a statement, which is great, but it is not great art.
So? The "yeah, but you didn't" about a lot of modern art is different than the "yeah, but you didn't" about someone saying "I could be a hollywood star", "I could win the Tour de France", etc.
In the modern art's case, people could totally "do that", and that they didn't only proves that they didn't bother.
But the 'you didn't' part is more about self-promotion and networking than aesthetics.
If you park your abstract canvas on the desk of Important Gallery and wait for them to offer you an exhibition, you'll be waiting a long time - unless you've already made a name for yourself through self-promotion, networking, and (cynical?) cultivation of galleries, patrons, and important collectors. Or you've been already been canonised by same as The Next Big Thing.
So from the point of view of art-as-marketing, you couldn't do that.
Put crudely, no one cares unless they can make money from your work (top tier galleries, collectors) or cultural capital (national galleries, museums.) And money isn't going to happen unless you're already on the inside having come up through art school and made the right connections, or you're enough of an edgy outsider to have a bankable story.
I have a fine arts background (design and painting lessons at an art school, etc.), so yes, I know that it can be hard to create some abstract art. But that's only the case if you have a specific hard visual end goal that you need to get to.
In most modern cases the only difficulty is only "conceptual".
That said, I don't think art is good only when it's "ealistic", or that art is good only when its hard to execute. Some modern pieces can still be both hard -- requiring a whole team to create -- and crap.
So, I agree that conceptually challenging art can be good too.
But for most of modern art I have the impression that the conceptual part is also a half-thought gesture to just make something to sell, often by an idiot who wouldn't understand a true concept if it bit them in the ass, and who just goes through the motions. Or by someone who thinks that he's creating some painful manifestation of his unique experience, but is just producing stale, cliched crap.
>But the 'you didn't' part is more about self-promotion and networking than aesthetics.
Exactly. Which I don't consider the important part of what art should be about.
>So from the point of view of art-as-marketing, you couldn't do that.
Well, except if I was cynical, devoted the same time, and was into ass-kissing and socializing.
Which might be hard, but it's hardly laudable.
And now you've circled back around to what I think I'm poorly stating as a central point. Modern art exists only as a way to sink wealth into physical goods. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to mean anything, it just has to be expensive and likely to grow in value.
Al freír de los huevos, lo verá.
And you got the parts wrong: it's the artist presenting some crap that's more like Quixote (although often an insincere Quixote who doesn't even himself believe in the crap he makes), and the critic that's more like Sancho.
Are you implying that the artist is some kind of special person, whose training or inherent sense of aesthetics etc, make him produce stuff that laymen can't produce?
Because if you are, then besides the obvious fact that lots of artists are even less training in the arts or aesthetics than some laymen, you also ignore that the whole point of 20th century art was that art is not some special "sphere" but it belonged to everyone and even kids could do it just as well as "artists". Down to snubbing traditional art education and history.
Dadaism and surrealism were all anti-artist in that sense.
Good artists are/aren't special in the same way that good programmers are/aren't special.
You need an expert opinion to see through the fake reviews and artificially inflated prices. There is a way. Among artists, it's generally accepted who has more raw talent, who's more prolific and so on. It's never absolutely clear but it's clear enough. As an artist, you work with these other artists and it becomes apparent after a while. Spoken or unspoken. Matisse respected Picasso. Picasso respected Cezanne. Cezanne respected Monet, and so on. Those aren't fake endorsements. It's not like a sport where you just follow a predetermined formula, add up some points and choose a winner. It's about perception, which is what artists really do. The painting is the end result of how that artist lives and perceives the world--that's the raw talent. But if you're not in that environment, you're not going to notice it. You get movements like Impressionism, where somebody like Monet earns respect from peers and that reputation spreads and it expands from there.
In a different section there was a large room filled with everyday objects wrapped in tin foil. In the room next door was an empty room, over which in the corner an "artist" had emptied an entire can of self-hardening foam and in an another corner an "artist" had welded together two large steel plates that looked to have come direct from the steel mill.
Bored with this, I went to see the "special exhibit" which was a Mark Rothko exhibit split into two sections: one where he painted giant rectangles using different colors, and one where he painted giant rectangles using the same color on top of it self (red on red, black on black, etc.)
How am I, as a viewer, supposed to know who's better? The steel plates at least took some logistics and welding skill to transport and make. But...meh? If that entire museum sunk into the river it was next to with all the works of art in it, would humanity be any poorer for it?
As for that curator, that show, maybe they're trying to build up some emerging artists by connecting them to Rothko, who we recognize. Important questions are: Who was first (to wrap tinfoil objects) and how serious were they about it, and how does it fit in context with past work? Hypothetically, a wrapping of tinfoil might be more meaningful if you're familiar with that artist's body of work, maybe there's a certain "tinfoil" sensibility you would miss without familiarity with the artist's past work. Or is the tinfoil more a reaction or comment? Sculpture must be held accountable for choice of material, so the choice of tinfoil was deliberate for its properties or public connotations or both. Duchamp's urinal gets a lot of attention, but at that time in history it was a new idea and he had the respect of his peers already. So I think sculpture more requires you learn the history, they tend to get more conceptual than painters and it ends up involving philosophy sometimes. But also you get a feeling for materials and how they're put together, similar to the feelings you get when entering someone's home, you can't literally explain it, but you sense it's there.
Writing this on my mobile btw. Just in terms of craftsmanship, that would impress an engineer, that's a whole different world and there's "craft" museums, where it's not about concepts as much as it's about the tools and the work and perfecting the work process, the engineering. Sculptors need some craftsmanship to be taken seriously, but it' primarily about the ideas and concepts. Personally, I appreciate craftsmanship so I might gravitate to work that's less philosophical and more about structure, space and craftsmanship.
Last point about field paintings. It may just look like one boring color. I agree these are boring, but there's two areas to consider. First, there's a lot of choices involved. How was the canvas constructed, a flat color painting becomes a sculptural object, how are the corners wrapped, is it cotton or linen or oil or latex? Also there's different chemical pigments for different reds, so red isn't just a number on a color wheel. It might cost thousands of dollars to get that much of a certain pigment. Also what kind of oil was used? Is it glazed? How was the paint applied? How was the glaze applied? Endless decisions just to make a one color painting. Then you get into all the strange "color therapy" stuff that I never learned, but some people take colors and the physiological effects very seriously. Also hanging and lighting pieces like that in context with other work, maybe the curator has some ideas behind that, there could be a regional or historical connection. It's not for everybody and I usually rush past the really plain field paintings, but I definitely enjoy some of the abstract expressionist painters that incorporate fields of color.
Perhaps they think of pseudo-art as a simple attempt to rake in money from collectors, pieces made only to fill space in corporate office parks, or work they could "get from any art student." They become wary, as in their mind they don't want to be conned by a pseudo-artist or amateur.
Of course, that mindset assumes that pseudo-art exists or at the very least acquiring it is prevalent threat.
One popular and respected local artist (now owner of several galleries bearing his name) once told me, "I have to finish one painting a day to support myself as an artist." Are those paintings pseudo-art because he intended to make profit off something he knew would sell? I struggle to think of people who know his work and wouldn't consider it "art" or him an "artist."
Is the corporate sculpture fake simply because of where it's displayed or who contracted the artist?
Just because the student's name isn't popular or their skills are still lacking refinement, should they be denied the ability to become a master? If they do manage to make that transformation and their early work becomes more valuable than ever, why only then is it not pseudo-art?
Obviously, I'm not asking you to answer these questions or even acknowledge their relevance. It's just sort of a train of thought your comment kicked off.
Not much of this (if any) is going to show up on gallery walls, and I am not even claiming that I like much of it. But it is art. And it is absolutely relevant to the people creating and viewing it.
We have an entire generation of people growing up knowing that they can create. Whether those creations use traditional art media, digital media, crafts, or something entirely new, the point is that the creative process is alive and well, vastly more so than when I was young.
Creativity is everywhere and in our daily lives and basically infused into every corner of the new culture. Damn near everyone is a photographer, and a hefty number of us don't suck at it either. We're writers, critics, performance artists, musicians and videographers with a huge shared publishing platform. We can share and sell our creations and art with huge audiences with ease. Problems are approached as creative exercises. I'd even argue that the code we write may be art - I profess to find great beauty in some of it.
It's pretty cool that as weird as Snapchat is to some of us, and as creepy as Facebook is, they're popular mostly because they allow people to share their creativity, as mundane as it may seem.
Yes, some if not much of it is pedestrian at best, but the rate at which we consume art, and the ease with which we can create and share art is mind-boggling for those of us that remember "before."
The other change is that there is less of a gulf between "fine artist" and the common person who likes to "do art".
I would however like to see people made aware of the fact that they are "making art": Not so that they can be conceited about it or high-brow, but so they can understand their connection to all the art and artists that have come before.
--Frederick Hart
Well that's a pretty standard Decline of Civilization article there. Well done!
There are issues with modern art and sophomorism, yes; essentially, the big problem with art is artists, and the way they learn to spew bullshit about their production.
There are also big problems with architecture, which is really a τέχνη, and not really an art in the fine arts sense; big architecture spends a lot of time on arty one-upmanship and not enough on the practical matters that make a building work and last.
We are bombarded with audiovisual media now. A painting, a song, or even a "shocking" performances is much less valuable in a supply/demand sense than. (500 years ago, something as beautiful and pure as a painting was very rare!)
But new forms of art have replaced them. Relational art ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art ) is a popular one. Relational artworks use humans, not media, as material. A relational artist might say that what is rare and valuable today is not visual media, but human connectedness and meaningful experience. A relational artwork might try to help a community solve a social issue, or create social connections that would not otherwise exist.
These new forms of art are not evaluated on how shocking they are. They are evaluated on how they affect the world.
In the 50s, people could identify Buckminster Fuller, Saul Bellow, or Jackson Pollock. Many educated people now could identify Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison, or Jeff Koons. But having a cadre of public artists who "shape in meaningful ways our image of ourselves or define our collective values" is a very narrow way framing the issue and has not been the trajectory of art for decades, if ever.
Look at that reception to Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present. People stood in line for hours. I saw a segment about it on CBS Sunday Friggin' Morning. The public is engaged with art, it's just not the art that the writer wants them to be engaged with.
Through out history the majority of artist have been craftsman that create for the sake a client, state, or church. Sometime in the last couple centuries working artist have become taboo, and that meaningful creation for a purpose other than that of the "pure" artistic value has been pushed out of High Art.
The fact that art the Author classifies as art, is not modern media form(TV, CINEMA, DIGITAL) seems to ensure that the prophesy should be self fulfilling.
I do not know of any contemporary ceiling painters.
You make a good point about commentary, and it seems like the NEA Four would like to cast art specifically in that light, but of course any narrow pigeonholing of art is bound to fail.
I would quibble with your statement that artist would create art for the sake of the client, state, or church. Certainly they were patronized but that influence while significant doesn't tell the whole story. The contemporary concept of the working artist and the relationship to the public was revolutionized by Warhol. This article only mentions him twice in passing, so again I don't really take it that seriously.
I would suggest Sol Lewitt as a ceiling painter, but not sure where that rabbit hole would take us.
Its a classic holiness spiral. How do you denigrate the average american slightly more than the last guy without offending, or being ignored, by the average american? Its the confusion of art with political propaganda.
Now do not get me wrong, of course artists must engage in a dialogue with the society in which they live, and of course art is a great way of expressing political and social opinions. But when the fundamental purpose of art - the creation of something beautiful - is lost, all that remains is politics masquerading as art. And no wonder nobody wants to see that.
It is perfectly possible to produce art containing both: beautiful content and a strong message. Just take the Expressionist artists and poets of the Great War as an example. Wilfred Owen, Georg Heym, Otto Dix - they all produced incredibly strong anti-war art (poems and paintings) that still displayed a very high standard of artisan skill. There are many, many other examples, from many different points in history.
What happened to that legacy?
> Witnesses to a knife attack at a Miami art show thought they were witnessing a piece of performance art.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
But not that much trouble in major cities. Even the Detroit Museum of Art just managed an expansion. The Cleveland Museum of Art is expanding. In SF, in the last twenty years there's been the new Asian Art Museum, the new DeYoung building, and the SFMOMA refurbishing. On the other hand, the George Lucas Ego Museum was banished to Chicago, and the Grateful Dead museum didn't get built. The City of San Francisco has access to a huge stainless-steel peace symbol, but nobody wants it in their neighborhood. The classic fine arts are still winning.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=high+art&year_...
Which is a great shame, because there is incredible beauty in those art forms that many people nowadays miss completely. All because we somehow gave the high culture/classic arts the labels "snobby", "stuffy", "boring", "unintelligible"...
It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art.
Art that is exactly at your level may give you some temporary pleasure, but little else. The German classical poets saw art as a means of educating peoples' personalities. If you always stick to what you can already understand without a problem, when are you ever going to grow?
Right, that's exactly how I feel about Homestuck and how I don't feel about modern art.
Artists have failed to keep up with the times in terms of scientific knowledge. Humanity's understanding of, and relation to the universe is completely different compared to a century ago. Those on the soft side of CP Snow's Two Cultures have responded to their waning relevance by denying the importance of their technical counterparts, however, world culture cannot be fooled so easily. Scientific literacy is now as necessary as the ability to use language, and there's no going back. Our artists will now have to keep up or else they will become obsolete.
Then again, that's not their role.
Besides scientists have failed to keep up with the times in term of aesthetics, emotional development and morals too.
The part about art auctions and art pieces being sold for more and more money, make sense. With growing inequality it makes sense to cater to the few super rich. You can sell them paintings, or custom hand made golden watches, or what-have you.
But yeah the middle class, which is supposedly erroding, like to go to museums because, well they are there when they visit a new city, but they'll probably not be spending $5-10K buying paintings or sculptures.
There is a mention of digital and film, and that is a valid point. Video games are art, design is art as well, so is film. Movies and shows are popular still. Perhaps peformance art and other traditional forms are in decline but digital lives on.
Digital art and music is also combining. I found about vaporwave a few years back, for example :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
It is kind of fascinating, it combined early Internet and computer art -- images of Windows 95 load screens, with a synth music. It has elements of late 80s and 90s nostalgia, it both glorifies and makes fun of consumerist culture.
Here are few example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyEusKu44wc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0fVy0Td64
For decades there's also been a few "underground" digital art scenes that are unusually vibrant and have gained some measure of respect outside of their specific milieus. The demoscene in particular has become famous for audio/visual and technical excellence that almost requires an educated and informed audience to appreciate on deep levels, but is also at least entertaining to non-in-crowd viewers.
> “We are making it out of ourselves” is a fair summary of the revolution in patronage the modern movement had brought about, in which the artist himself had now been transformed into his own patron.
So at some point, artists stopped working for a living. And who doesn't want to do that? But work has a curious way of keeping things grounded and relevant.
Modern society has shaped a world where the mass of people dictates what is interesting or not based on the money they pay for that product. So, the Beatles are viewed as important, not because their musical skills were better than thousands other musicians, but because they were consumed to a point of making a big difference in our society.
In a mass society, there is a huge pressure to lower the quality of everything, because this means that more and more people will be able to enjoy it. That's why people are not creating the next 5th symphony, they're creating instead the next Justin Bieber song. In such a world, fine arts have no power because they are not able to move lots of people in the same way that a video game or the next Star Wars movie can.
Look up fin de siecle Vienna if you aren't familiar with it. Decades before the war, artists in every discipline were pushing in weird directions (not necessarily in a bad way!).
I think its important to recognize this. Then more than now art was an important aspect of everyday life, and I dont think they write in history books that "many people in Austria and Germany were going batshit crazy" was an important part of the classic WWI "powderkeg".
An operational, if cynical, definition. But it will have to do until we go back to not being afraid to judge, to offend, to debate views that are not "politically correct" (the recent Rhodes statue "controversy" being a ridiculous case in point)
All that is to say, I'm not your typical suburban luddite who signs off on abstractionism as just "squiggly lines anyone could do".
But lately I have to stop and consider that maybe fine art is less relevant today because fine artists are less relevant. I mean, it's not exactly like the latest artists have anything particularly new or surprising for artists to say. For example, "End War" is a popular topic. Way to go out on a limb there, buddy.
Our post-post-modern era of art is just boring.
And it's not just boring. It's increasingly rather shoddy work, too. Where some artists have attempted to cross disciplines and bring new ideas into the academic art sphere, it's significantly devoid of any meaning, derivative, and poor imitations of the forms they are copying. You can apparently get really far in art school if you can find some corner of culture that your Baby Boomer art professors haven't seen and pass off your tutorial sessions as "new".
For example: while visiting my sister in Des Moines, Iowa, we visited the local Des Moines Art Center. All told, an absolutely fine museum of modern art. There was a wide selection of different pieces from both artists I recognized and ones I didn't yet know. But there was one piece that really stuck in my craw.
"Icon" by Rashaad Newsome (http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/exhibitions/singlechannel5...) is a wanton appropriation of 90s-era demoscene visuals with poorly choreographed dance sequences unconvincingly greenscreened on top. Content-wise, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect an art-school sophomore to make.
Now, to some extent, better visuals in 3D graphics aren't exactly at the disposal of anyone who isn't specifically making a career out of 3D graphics. I'd not be able to make much better, and I studied computer graphics as a concentration in my computer science degree 10 years ago.
But that's rather much the point. Modern art museums are not supposed to be the refrigerator door of art school iconoclasts looking for a pat on the back. The cubists weren't bad painters. They were specifically playing with representation and form. You can see it in the confidence of their lines, in their cohesion of their color choices. They had spent years studying painting to gain the fine motor control and insight to forge a new path.
Not flat-textured quads that you could learn how to make in your first hour of playing with THREE.js.
You have to do something with what you're making. You have to use every detail of your piece. There has to be intention. It's not so much that the visuals were poor. It's that they weren't the point of the piece. There was no part of the piece that relied on the fact that the visuals were poor. They were a distraction from whatever else was trying to be made.
This is just the freshest example I have in mind. Hell, I even was hired to build a piece for an artist once[0]. I hated the piece I made. I thought I did a poor job, all my seams were showing and joints weren't aligned properly. I did the best I could in the time and budget, and the artist was more than satisfied. She received high praise for her show. But to me, it was a bad piece, because I didn't do what I thought was a particularly good job in making it.
[0] No, I don't understand how it makes sense for an artist to pass off another person's work in their own show, but apparently it's a real thing and she paid me for it anyway. This is why I don't consider myself an artist. I don't understand how the "aht" world works. There is an unspoken code for how things work. And apparently, the feeling is mutual, hence why I finished college with a computer science degree, rather than the fine art degree I had been accepted for.
Been to a European city lately? At the centre of each you will find cathedrals and palaces, as well as churches dotted throughout. High culture was indeed part of the common conversation.
Fine art was financed by aristocrats to showcase their power and status and what better way to demonstrate that status than by plonking it in the centre of town for all to admire.
[1] http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_p...
The difference between villages, towns, and cities was the scale of the patronage and the riches. Even tiny village churches would, over hundreds of years, acquire highly valuable paintings and gold and silver works of art.
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It's a victim of chronic upstaging like the rest of the humanities.
I've always been into art and primarily I love modern art, that is 1890s-1970s art. To avoid confusion, it makes more sense to use "contemporary art" to refer to art made today, which a lot of posters seem to be referring to as "modern art".
The art I've made with artists has been very political, and I've been very happy about that. One of the films I made this year was also very political. As part of my work, I've been privileged to spend time in artists' studios and go to a lot of contemporary exhibition openings.
Coming away from this, my conclusions have been that (a) the artists I've been working with are exceptional, in that they are engaging with society, but (b) most of the art I see is made for artists, that can't be understood or appreciated fully without a length explanation of how it relates to some previous work, or some theme in art. It rarely says something deeper or philosophical about society or our lives. For example, I may walk into a small exhibition space and find a few wooden blocks displayed on the floor. Or a piece of twine spread around a room. I ask my artist friends to explain it, and there's no clear consensus or understanding. I think describing this as "Art Becoming Irrelevant" is a very kind way of putting it. I would describe it as "art for artists".
It's been a bugbear of mine for a while that in a world with so many pressing problems, where democracy is failing us, that artists have a huge responsibility to stand up and do something about it, rather than walking away from the mess and building more abstract installations.
One final point is that many posters are describing video games as "art". Whilst I think video games _can_ be art, there is a very big difference between "art" and "something that looks nice" or "something beautiful" or "something enjoyable". Art is defined by intention, amongst other things. There are great podcasts on this by Grayson Perry, which I cannot recommend highly enough:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/downloads
[edit: typo]
"The Beginner's Guide", a cobbled-together concoction of deliberately unplayable, half-finished games, was another smash hit.
Both critics and laymen love these games.
In the film industry for example, works like that would end up in the fine art echo chamber.
This description reminds me of John B. Calhoun's "beautiful ones" [1] (the "mouse utopia" experiment). If any readers are running across this for the first time, be sure to read the Smithsonian's article with a caution about imputing too much predictive power from Calhoun's findings to human behavior and settings. [2]
Of particular interest to our current social web-saturated world, is one modern researcher's related Calhoun-like experiment translated to human participants concluded that "Moral decay could arise 'not from density, but from excessive social interaction,'"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1...