Damien Hirst once had a work on display and a janitor threw it out - because he truly thought it was garbage. My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. The guard quickly looked the other way while motioning us to leave.
Working in the gallery world I would read the epic descriptions of works for sale. A lot of ink went in to creating and describing the value of art works that had no apparent worth. It is fashion to be sold and adorn and tell your friends about.
Not all modern art is like this, some works can be appreciated for its intrinsic properties. But this requires more skill, and dedication, and is rather rare.
I value art similar to the rule about food - if your grandmother would recognize it as art then it probably is, if not then maybe not. And all things art - it boils down to opinion. This is mine.
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020724.gif
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020731.gif
http://absurdnotions.org/an20020814.gif
(Images taken from (http://absurdnotions.org/page104.html) and (http://absurdnotions.org/page105.html))
Actually I thought it was Tracey Emin, I searched for it and it was both - and more other occurrences in other countries. https://www.bing.com/search?q=cleaner+throws+away+art&first=...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Nicholas_Serota_Makes_an...
No wonder the janitor thought it was trash and threw it out.
That's a great story and gave me a good laugh. But with a lot of these pieces, there is a strong sense that the object isn't really the artwork, in the same way that a program isn't really the exact bits on my machine.
Recently SFMOMA put up a Sol LeWitt, one of his "Wall Drawing" pieces, which involved some employee of the museum carefully painting it on the wall. At the end of the exhibit, the whole wall got painted back over. In my opinion (and that of the curators of SFMOMA), they weren't actually destroying a Sol LeWitt; the actual piece is something more abstract, including but not limited to the instructions used to paint it onto the wall.
In the same way, most of the wall drawings of Matther Barney are about the act of drawing, not really the artifact that is the result: https://d2jv9003bew7ag.cloudfront.net/uploads/Matthew-Barney...
We'd all be alot better if in circumstances like this, we would say "I don't personally value this" instead of "there is not value in this for anyone."
If there weren't people that valued it, it wouldn't exist. The fact that it exists demonstrates a certain level of cultural value.
It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)
This is incorrect (although I don't know anything about the artist in question). Contemporary art degrees are heavily moving away from teaching craft or even consider it a valid aesthetic or criterion for judgement (along the lines of rejecting the notion of good/bad/better/worse). Was there any identifiable craft involved in this piece? Did the artists remove from circulation the boxes that weren't broken in just the right way? Is the art more interesting to look about than to talk about? Marginally... I find the pile of boxes sorta aesthetically pleasing, but its not clear to me that was even done by the artist (and not the gallery).
What part of this piece are you proposing that a total outsider/complete amateur couldn't create on a first pass? The form of the glass looks to be haphazard, (ie, unimportant the artist). The boxes are off the shelf. What else is left?
That is an interesting perspective. I have always judged art by its aesthetics and its ability to elicit thought / conversation equally.
In my view art becomes shallow when it is purely visually appealing with no conceptual backing or purely conceptual with uninteresting visual components.
Modern Art == "I could have done that" - "Yea, but you didn't"