Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age | Hacker News Reader

Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age

nytimes.com

26 pointsprismatic14 comments

It was a mistake for NYT to package it this way, and a mistake for the curators to allow their choices to be promoted this way. (The artists, I'll cut a little slack, because curation like this is not their business.)

It's the ideas of 2 particular curators and 3 artists, and identifying "canonical" pieces of contemporary art is just not something even the best curators with a lot of prep time are able to do well - it seems like they had mostly "a recent afternoon in June".

The NYT magazine tends toward clicky, buzzy stuff for people to talk about at Sunday brunch, and they have definitely done that.

Amazing how wildly different these works of art are, but still they all have one thing in common - they are utterly devoid of beauty.

As much as modern art likes to break rules, it has an iron-clad rule of its own - beauty is taboo. How else to explain so many so very different artists all deciding to forsake it?

You should see art more! James Turrell, Jeff Koons, and Anish Kapoor, all referenced in the article, all have lovely works, and are all very popular and influential, both with the gallery-going public, and with artists.

The article features a work by Catherine Opie, that is hard to look at. I recently saw a collection of her mid-1990s photos of LA freeways, taken of less-trafficked interchanges in the wee hours — no cars. They are lovely, architectural abstractions, and very different from the piece shown. She has another series of storefronts that is just as beautiful and closely observed, but also not shown.

http://jamesturrell.com/work/type/projection-pieces/

https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/freeways

> You should see art more!

The more art I see, the more I dislike modern art (yes yes, ambiguous label, sue me).

The best I could say about the art of the artists you mentioned is that some of it is interesting, though not very. But when compared to masterpieces such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Leighton#/media/File:... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_..., I'd get upset that galleries would waste more than a few square feet on modern art, to say nothing of the current sorry state of affairs.

Will anyone remember these works of art in ten years? Twenty-five? Fifty? One-hundred? Beyond that?

Given that some of these works are 50 years old, I'd say yeah they're already remembered.

Longer term, people will remember Jeff Koons. Maybe Barbara Kruger, too.

Are the works that are remembered necessarily best at defining the age in which they were created?

I think most of the time works that brought something new to the table and artistic tradition is remembered through time. Also if the artist is a master of the craft, popular and says something is his best work, that work is usually remembered.

Being different or radical doesn't guarantee that it's art. At least it shouldn't. The problem with contemporary art is that it turned into a who knows who business. When the craft part of art is overlooked and idea part is praised over everything else, everybody who are splashing paint onto canvas and writing something cool for descriptions can label themselves as artists. This is art schools' fault for the most part since they are trying to squeeze the love of beauty and classical art out of students.

Trying to fit things into neat, easy to opine about boxes is basically NYT's MO, so I understand why they try to do it, but I don't think doing that is as culturally valuable as they think.

I doubt these represent an "age" better than any random piece of viral agitprop on Twitter.