What the Hell Was Modernism?
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I think that the turn back toward classical forms, towards a broader audience, and largely the turn inward (the self as the primary concern of the work, rather than it's form) really is a wonderful new wave across many genres, and makes for an wonderful time to be a consumer of art.
If there's nothing of lasting value there, that would be - ironic.
I wouldn't go that far, but I also don't think you can recreate it with construction paper and Elmer's glue. As the OP says, a big element in Modernism is breaking (up) with the past, and you can only really do that once.
The thing that gets hung on a wall is a snapshot of a process, and in Modernism the process is more important than the snapshot.
What hasn't changed is the use of art as a status marker for the rich and powerful. Those glorious Classical and Renaissance pieces were painted for the same reason.
In Modernism the-thing-on-the-wall is more of a repository of intellectual, cultural, and historical and commercial associations as a thing to look at for its own sake. The obvious manual labour - the representational brushstrokes in traditional art - were replaced with the intellectual labour of commercial self-justification as a value in itself.
Essentially it's a semi-corporate sales exercise - which of course captures the culture around it much better than classical figurative painting would.
If you want to experience the great works of classical literature, you can get them from any library in the world. If you want to experience the great works of classical music you can again pick up a CD at your local library, and most mid sized cities in the world have halfway decent symphonic orchestra with a rotating reportoar. If you want to experience the great works of art you have to jet set off to a dozen+ cities around the world.
Also, sorry, but *repertoire.
Ironic - modern art has such a lack of this same openness, that the classic techniques it despises were nearly lost. It was not enough for modern art to be accepted - classical art had to be driven out from contemporary galleries:
The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, 'How did you learn how to do animation?' I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation.
Then I said, 'What am I telling you for? You're teaching at the Slade and it's famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.'
'If the students want to do that,' he said, 'then they've got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.' At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn't even on the curriculum!
-- Animator's Survival Kit, page 32. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-OTUJDZcAzLcDhFbVN3TjdwUnc/...
So really the odd thing is not that they stopped doing life drawing classes. The question is, why did they continue for so long? It would be rather like doing an engineering course where a core competence was the construction and maintenance of steam engines.
My friends who did mechanical engineering had to take classes on tool making.
Meanwhile nowadays you have metal sculpturers who cannot weld.
Not the same ones as you would pick perhaps.
> The question is, why did they continue for so long?
Well, as said in the original quote, it's apparently also good for internalizing a sense of weight for animation. So presumably they continued at least in part because it's good for things that aren't as obsolete as portraiture -- animation isn't the only way to make money in art these days, but it's not exactly in low demand.
I'd wonder why they dropped it, but at a guess, it's some combination of low demand (first they make it non-required, then students who don't realize the broader applicability stop taking it) and higher cost (you need to hire one or more models).
I think the arts are in a weird situation because they're sort of like an ascended craft. Basically, when the bread-and-butter of portraiture died, art had enough social clout to be able to survive without it, doing just art, without any particular service attached. That rapidly unpinned art from any particular set of skills - so now you get artists who do dance, or cut holes in buildings, or send postcards.
So while some of the traditional craft side of art has value to other industries, it's not really that important to what art has become.
Doublin art studio: https://www.dublinartstudio.com/monday-life-drawing.html
Edinburgh university course: https://www.course-bookings.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/courses/DP/dra...
For beginners: https://www.course-bookings.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/courses/DP/dra... Yeah, it totally disappeared.
I was at the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg. I'd done museum tour after museum tour in both Moscow and Petersburg. Nearly all of this art was classical/neo-classical or romantic, rococo, etc.
By the end of your 1000th neo-classical painting, you get exhausted of the sameness of the realistic style. The themes, colors, sensibilities all appear similar.
Then I walked into the modern and post-modern hall and there was a massive Matisse painting on the wall. The bright blue was such a revelation. You see a painting like that after 400 years worth of realistic painting style and it takes your breath away. It was particularly impactful when contrasted against the neoclassical architecture of the museum itself.
The worst way to appreciate modern and post modern art is on a computer screen. These things have to be experienced in person. For one, their sheer size can't be captured on screen. A 12' x 10' canvas has a visual impact that's not possible to replicate anywhere. Second, their experimental quality has to be contrasted against the dominant art forms of their time. Anyone can technically paint like Matisse. But they didn't.
That reminds me (in a rather postmodern way, I suspect) of an interview I recently read with a celebrity whose claim to fame is basically nudity:
Anyone can show their boobs. But they don't.
And your statement "Anyone can technically paint like Matisse. But they didn't." That's probably because noone wants to paint like a child and wants to be considered a good artist not a joke.
Believe me, in 1000 years no one will care about Modernist artwork.
Additionally, the fact that you're judging the relative worth of a piece of art based on it lasting for 1000 years is pretty sad, in my opinion. What is wrong with art being created for a specific time and place? Life is ephemeral, and there is beauty in that.
Modern art is not art in the sense it's not a highly crafted work. It's minimum effort.
The time frame was given to acknowledge the fact that we think this is "art". In the future we will know this is junk and not art.
I really dislike most pop art, but at least it's art. A big yellow square canvas in no way should constitute artwork.
There are literally factories in China where painters paint replicas of classic art works at scale. They paint hundreds, even thousands of such pieces every year.
They're undoubtedly very skilled painters. But would you call their work "art"?
How much time and effort something takes has no bearing on whether or not it is art. Something that takes 5 years to make isn't automatically better than something done in 5 minutes.
Painters like Picasso and Matisse were also classically trained and had all the skills to paint like the painters of old. They just chose not to.
Exactly my point about Picasso, his early work was awesome. What everyone likes from his is terrible.
Like other wealthy men, you too dabble in collecting some art. You own a few romantic pieces with exceptional craftsmanship. You proudly display them in your living room amid all your fancy, ornate furniture.
But something is amiss. All your artwork starts looking the same. And why wouldn't it - all these artists have honed their craft at similar art schools. They look good but they've started looking a little repetitive. Like something out of a factory.
You have to see artists like Matisse in this context. Try placing yourself in the shoes of someone from their period. Realistic art was dead because there can't truly be any further innovation in it (and the camera would make it obsolete anyway). The themes, the styles, even the figures had been all tried and put on canvas over the last several centuries.
A Matisse in this context is very new, very exciting, and very full of life. It's bright blue in dimly lit 19th century homes. It's a yellow dancing figure in a room that has only see scenes from the Bible and Greek myths painted.
This is the reason why its art.
"Looking pretty" is just craftsmanship. If it makes you feel something - even acute hatred - its art.
This is what I'm trying to state. Art is craftmanship then to you, since you can't understand that art requires skill or talent.
Postmodernism isn't just "not modernism" or the art that happens after modernism. Postmodernism is art that only makes sense in the context of modernism. It involves pastiche, genre criticism and meta-analysis.
This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.
I'm not a fan of postmodernism at all, but it's easy to see where it gets its ideals from and why it was the natural next "step".
Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains where nobody can see it unless they choose to travel and explicitly enjoy the sight, and leave the old streets and traditional houses in the city because they are there for a reason. The modernist architecture would have had a much better reputation had they just succumbed to their rightful position, and acknowledged that in their exploration they were still prototyping and far from having deliverables.
Besides a few notable examples of poor execution (20 Fenchurch Street in London, Richards Medical Research Laboratories off the top of my head) can you point to an instance where a piece of modern architecture was detrimental to the cityscape it inhabited?
I think there is a lot of value in bold new design, and it is worth taking risks, but it encourages two sorts of copycats: the developer who wants to make a statement on the cheap, which allegedly gave us the back side of the New York By Gehry, and the second-rate architect who wants to express himself rather than serve the community, which results in a rash of undistinguished architectural misdemeanors, rather than high-profile cases.
Now that the high tide of dogmatic modernism seems to have passed, its excesses offers sites that can be redeveloped without losing anything of value.
Edit:
Some of the depictions of hell around the early renaissance can make one cringe just as much as some "modern" art. The flying wanker from the Roman Pompey ruins is also a hoot.
The lack of perspective in medieval art is still a curious puzzle, because the pre-Christian Romans had be using fairly decent forms of perspective. The knowledge existed. It's as if the early Christians intended the result to look abstract and symbolic to remove it from mortal-hood.
There are parallels in Islamic art as well, where the artistic focus is on calligraphy and architecture as opposed to the more regular forms seen in the West before and after the medieval period.
Before that, in the classical era it was more about raw skills through practice and reaching some kind of wonderkid level of excellence measured by popular standards that were tied to complexity, e.g. the most realistic painting or most beautiful form of an object. One example, to stay in the realm of type would be script calligraphy, where letterers learn script styles and try to reproduce them as best as possible.
Postmodernism gets rid of the systems and indirection and is more about direct human expression and originality, without trying that hard to reach an ideal or make the most realistic like in the classical era. The example in type would be freestyle hand lettering or graffiti writing, or even normal handwriting, and accepting and embracing the imperfections that are generated by your own body which results in your own recognizable style.
Plus they lived in an area of London that was pretty rough back in the day, long before it was trendy.
These days their work has been swamped by a tidal wave (including sharks, and other creatures in formaldehyde...) but they were among the pioneers.