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Comment by prewett | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why people like Rothko's work. I look at his stuff and say "I could do this myself with 2 - 3 colors of paint and 10 minutes with a paint roller." What am I missing here? Is his talent understanding his market or artistic (or both)?

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Of course it just comes down to preference, but as someone who finds his work beautiful even in reproduction one point of context is that many (maybe all? not sure) of his pieces were made for very specific spaces, to enhance the environment -- restaurants, etc. I think this is why I've never found seeing them in a museum to be a significantly transcendent experience either. It's my understanding that they were made to be lived with, even if just for a few hours, and to have a conversation with the space they were meant to be installed into. Not things you study and focus your attention toward specifically, but things that transform the environment you're in. My favorite Rothko experiences are just prints that I've found a proper home for in my apartment, honestly.

So it's the painting version of ambient or furniture music, art which aspires to the condition of Erik Satie's or Brain Eno's compositions.

Rothko's work doesn't come across well in reproductions. The scale, texture, and subtle color variations all matter.

I felt much the same as you until I saw them in person. In particular at the Rothko room at the Philips Collection in Washington DC, with Rothkos on all the walls.

In any case, Rothkos aren't about representation (obviously), but about the feeling the painting brings about in the viewer. For me it's best not to assign them any meaning at all, but just take them in.

Nothing comes across for me from pictures in books or online though. It's a completely in-person experience.

My wife and I spent hours looking at them when SF MoMA had an exhibition a few years ago and we both left the exhibit pretty frustrated. They just don't speak to me, whereas I could stare at a Jackson Pollock painting for ages. Well, de gustibus non est disputandem and all that...

It's a good point that it'll still come down to the eye of the beholder.

I guess my point is that it's unlikely you'll ever appreciate him if all you see are jpgs and pics in books.

I did see one at the Houston Museum of Art, was very large, (to my eyes) uniformly brown except for a roller-wide of slight other-color brown. I also went to the chapel in Houston. It was all black (vertically rolled) with a black (horizontally rolled) swath on the bottom in a dim, concrete building. I didn't like the feelings of dark, gloomy, and depression they evoked; not really what the word "chapel" inspires in my mind.

I'm not really a modern art fan, but I'll try to keep an open mind next time I see some. Scale, texture, subtlety, I'll keep that in mind. (Certainly the scale is impressive!)

There are hundreds if not thousands of artists who can recreate some of the most famous and technically difficult paintings of the past 1000 years and yet they're lucky if they can sell their original work at a garage sale.

Art has very little to do with reproducing what the eye can see, in fact some of the most renowned art does exactly the opposite.

If you're confused by Rothko I hope you never come across Duchamp.

In an age where our pocket phones take excellent pictures, I can see how representative painting does not do well.

I never said I was expecting representative art. I'm confused by your statement "some of the most renowned art does exactly the opposite [of reproduction]," though. Could you explain it?

I'll freely admit I'm not much of a modern art fan. I'm not sure that colored stripes really clears the bar, even if you make the gigantic (although as another poster said, maybe I need to see them in their intended setting). I feel like just as art is more than simply reproducing a scene, art is also more than just producing a feeling.

I looked up Duchamp, yeah, not a fan :) I think I probably understand the works better than Rothko, though.

> If you're confused by Rothko I hope you never come across Duchamp.

As Seth Godin says, the first guy to install a toilet in a museum was an artist, the second was a plumber.

If Rothko or Duchamp cause confusion, I think the fault lies with preconception of art. It's not all intended to please the eye or the ear, in case of music. Some of it is intended to inflame the mind. Some of it is intended to amuse the mind. Some of it is intended to amuse the artist and his/her friends. I enjoy art as a special kind of light, in which many people will reveal themselves to me in ways they usually try to hide.

Some of the most important software in my life is code I could have written myself.

But I didn't. The developers did. It's still good software.

I don't appreciate art for its technical difficulty, I appreciate it for its aesthetics. There are a lot of Rothkos that look really nice.

Referencing my much downvoted comment currently at bottom, Rothko (I had to look him up) is a prime example of exactly what I'm talking about.

Quite possibly I just don't get it. But what I suspect is something along the lines of wine snobbery. The experts all agree. Even if it really tastes like paint thinner. No one wants to appear undiscerning or unenlightened. To me, this is not art at all. Not beautiful, not enlightening, not interesting and serves no functional purpose with the possible exception of giving art folks something to talk about. The first person who thought of using fire. Now THAT is an artist.

Whilst I broadly agree with your sentiments, you should also get out more, and open your eyes. Whilst not knowing Rothko doesn't imply your insular views, life can become more interesting if you don't close off alternative experiences.

> The experts all agree.

No, they don't.

> To me, this is not art at all. Not beautiful, not enlightening, not interesting and serves no functional purpose with the possible exception of giving art folks something to talk about. The

The difference between you and some subset of experts is that art experts are far more likely to divorce their own reaction to art from their evaluation of whether it is art.

That art experts recognize, say, abstract expressionism in general or Rothko's work in particular as art doesn't mean that they like it, or that it does something for them personally (and the same is equally true of, say, photorealism as of abstract expressionism.)

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