Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
A lot of abstract expressionist and other experimental art pieces suffer from preservation issues, often due to unorthodox techniques and materials such as thick application of paint. It's too bad because you can't properly perceive the texture of real paintings and their sense of light and space when you look at a small wikipedia photograph on a backlit monitor.
I think that you can gain more out of art and, perhaps, a particular artist if you understand their work in context. In this case, understanding what led to Abstract Expressionism and how it influenced artistic development.
You mean the CIA plot during the cold war, with the idea that it would make Russian art/culture seem dated when they didn't take it up?
Or so I've heard...
[0]http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/how_the_cia_turned_americ...
I love photorealism, and some of my most memorable experiences with painting are from scrutinizing Old Master style works in art museums, but Rothko just scratches an entirely different itch for me.
The first time I saw his stuff, even in a tiny thumbnail on a shitty CRT, the big bright colored shapes, simultaneously rigidly geometric and softly organic hit me somewhere in the back of my monkey brain. I found them soothing and a bit electrifying at the same time.
I was really excited to see some in person at the Guggenheim, framed the way the artist intended. These massive paintings sit at ground level and when you stand in front, they become a doorway into something both desolate and calming.
One thing Rothko forcibly reminds me is how neutered idea of color is in our day to day lives. We're so digital we tend to think a color is just some RGB value boxed in by the limited gamut of an LCD. It's like we listen to music only in 8-bit mono and have forgotten what more there can be.
But if you see an actual painting in the flesh, done by a master who spent a career focusing almost entirely on color, you realize what a powerful thing it can be and how much more your visual senses can be stimulated than they almost ever are.
Looking at a Rothko to me is like hearing a pipe organ in an ancient cathedral. Instead of a flurry of tiny precise notes that make you think "gosh, what a skilled technician", he just lays out one long, monumental chord that you feel in your bones.
Incidentally, the color gamut of screens should hopefully improve somewhat with next-gen screens targeting Rec. 2020. But where it really gets interesting is if the next-next-gen starts approaching the full range of human vision. At that point maybe the colors and textures available in digital art will become a strict superset of traditional paintings.
This may be true but it's important to remember that even then, the experience of physically being present with a work in a certain environment will always be different from looking at it in a rectangle in your room. Being there matters.
Even if we have full immersive VR, there's still the experience of going there that's different.
That room though, had the same soothing and electrifying effect on me as you describe. I've never forgotten it.
[0] http://media.gotraffic.net/images/iVyuHiHB9LCw/v15/640x-1.jp...
With Rothko the technical sophistication of the work isn't what you're meant to engage with (although really they are quite challenging to paint - they're not really solid blocks of color, and most people would find it very difficult), but the emotions it makes you feel.
There's a great exchange in Mad Men between Sal (an artist) and Ken (an accounts manager) about a Rothko painting that's been delivered to the office. It sums up these two competing views of what art should be:
Ken: "I don't think it's supposed to be explained." Sal: "I'm an artist, okay? It must mean something." Ken: "Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you're to feel something, right. It's like looking into something very deep. You could fall in."
Sal isn't impressed by the Rothko, because he - like many people - thinks that art should either have some overtly obvious meaning, or be technically valuable. Ken thinks the art is a conduit to your own emotions and understanding, and its lack of inherent meaning doesn't make is less valuable. Neither is right or wrong here, and those two opposing views frequently clash in most creative fields. Rothko is to the art world as Cage is to music, for example.
As for photo realism, have you seen the movie "Tim's Vermeer"? It's a great look at a possible technique for that and the movie is very interesting.
I think Rothko's stuff is art, no question, and that he has something to say. I have nothing against Mark Rothko, but I feel quite hostile to the critical establishment that has fetishized him into the role of cultural gatekeeper, using the reaction towards his work as a sort of socio-cultural litmus test designed to maintain a certain degree of inter-cultural homogeity. In short, I feel like curators make a big deal of him, though perhaps unconsciously, as a means of keeping people out rather than inviting them in.
On the other hand, in one visit to the Berlin Alte Nationaegallerie, I saw paintings that I will never forget. "The Iron Rolling Mill", by Adolph Menzel, "In the Troops Quarters outside Paris," by Anton von Werner. The Blinded Samson. These are truly masterpieces, to my mind.
They're actually more like vintage painted Instagrams, enhanced in an unnatural way for effect.
E.g. The Menzel has obvious impressionist features, especially in the background and the smoke around the ceiling. The von Werner has very weird lighting, with a source behind the viewer, or possibly off to the left, or the right, and another equally bright daylight source from the room behind.
This is not to be critical - they're both very good. But they both have abstracted light and form, and neither is a pure representation of physical realism.
If you want photorealism, Van Eyck pretty much nailed it in the 15th century.
Which is kind of the point with art - you get more points for inventing a new visual language, not for copying an existing one.
That's why Picasso is so famous - he totally killed traditional representation when he was starting out. But it was too easy and boring for him, so he moved on to other kinds of painting and drawing.
Modernism is partly about violently stripping away non-essentials, so first we had Guernica, then Rothko - and now we have Jony Ive and Material trailing along at the end of the trend, before everyone rediscovers 3D about five years from now.
The most interesting thing about photorealism is that it actually opened new ways for painting, i.e. photography was used as a tool to better understand visual perception.
In art history, you won't often you find someone explaining what Estes, Close and those guys from the 60s and 70s were trying to do without also seeing a nod to Van Eyck and Vermeer.
The first time abstract art made sense for me, when it suddenly clicked, was looking at a painting by Rothko.
Art can be challenging, but that can be part of the wonder of it, to introduce people to entirely new, previously unimagined ways of seeing things.
To me Rothko is everything that's ever been wrong with modern art summed up in one person. He's virtually the worst of the worst well know modern artists. A pretentious, talentless hack who, with no discernible skill or even an interesting process or story, managed to ride a wave of modern art garbage that was fashionable for a hot moment and put him on the radar. He's as detestable as the people who made him famous, a group who turned the field of visual art into a talentless, skill-free, farce that the art world is only now starting to recover from, but has churned out tens-of-thousands of "artists" who think using words like "semiotics" and "human condition" while randomly rubbing paint on a flat surface produces something that moves us forward as a species.
The only kind thing I think I can say about his work is that, like raw sewage, at least it's all instantly recognizable no matter where you see it. Huge "lookatmelookatme" canvases with squares painted on squares in whatever color the paint bucket next to him happened to have in it when he decided he need to make some money that month to make rent. Work laid on canvas in a herculean effort that must have taken no more than 60-90 seconds of the artist's labor and preparation -- cranked out with all the flourish of a fast food hamburger -- over 800 pieces.
Being able to instantly recognize his work is important because it lets me immediately know to avoid that part of the gallery, it's saved me the world over, from the NGA to the Tate Modern.
I sound like a modern art hater, but I'm not. There's a lot of great modern art out there, even some that takes quite a bit of work on the part of the viewer to appreciate. But I've never found anything even remotely interesting about Rothko's work. It has all the "art" of an amateurish custom bedroom paint job. I find it inconceivable that nobody has bothered to write the 20 lines of code necessary to just algorithmically generate an unlimited supply of this wall garbage.
My summary is that I think he's a con man who figured out how to insert himself into art circles and game rich pretentious patrons into parting with their money, who then justifying the purchase of trite oversized dentist office paintings by building a minor cult around him. Then to complete the image of the tortured artist, publicly lamented the fad that had grown around him, insisting that nobody "got it" that nobody "understood his work" yet refused to provide any coherent explanation of what it was about.
Heaven save us from modernists.
Thought experiment: what if Rothko and other modern painters were the ones being conned? What if wealthy people, lusting for something different with which they could lavish themselves and the world (in their name of course), just needed a few naive but hopeful people who considered themselves artists or painters? What if, in exchange for money and acclaim, they were pressured to produce but never clarify for fear of losing their livelihood, feeling disgraced, or lost after spending so many years exploring a certain path?
I don't mean for any of those to come off as loaded questions, just riffing on the topic while curious about how people here have approached the topic themselves.
Source here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...
The influenced ugly architecture styles in question: International style (e.g. Bauhaus), Constructivist architecture, New Objectivity, Plattenbau. [1]
Whereas we have beautiful architecture styles (1900-today): Postmodern architecture, Neo-Futurism, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Baroque Revival architecture, Vienna Ring Road style, Art Nouveau, New Classical architecture, Expressionist architecture, Heimatstil, Historicism [2]
Tourists visit historical and modern cities because of the beautiful buildings. Nobody wants to travel and take photos of Plattenbau, Bauhaus or New Objectivity buildings. For some reason, many new buildings in Europe and Asia are still constructed in the ugly and sterile concrete box style of the Cold War era.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Style_(architectu..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Objectivity_(architecture), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-futurism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamline_Moderne, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionist_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_Revival_architecture, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatstil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Ring_Road, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Classical_architecture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism_(art)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
That these buildings would be less prevalent in tours is hardly surprising given that they are new, primarily functional (this is another matter for debate), and do not strive to give one the same feeling of erudition as might be found in an "old" building. I would be very surprised to hear of postmodern architecture being more popular on tours than others, however.
Debates on the values of these movements are fierce and alive amongst architects and other designers. The New Yorker article that you linked is interesting but captures barely a sliver of the whole story (which we do/can not necessarily know). The reason I was probing above in my response to bane is because we all tend to fall short on a topic when opinions become fortified by singular viewpoints.
I think you got it, what I meant with "nobody". Sure there are fanboys and followers for almost every niche, what should matter are the mass of normal tourists. Some cities (and their city planers) understand that, some don't.
> they are [...] primarily functional
Sure, functionality is usually a requirement. But bog-standard sterile concrete box architecture is just laziness/tasteless or constraint by the budget. (that's another debate).
Coming back to the former debate-topic, there has been a certain influence in Modern Architecture.
I also don't think that the laziness you describe is limited to modern architecture. Plenty of modern movements have hinged on the idea that earlier styles were lazy recapitulations of styles which to varying degrees were meant to cost less and look either familiar (popular) or expensive. They may be right, but then they are stretched thin by a long line of enthusiastic practitioners eager to make a name themselves. That's nothing unique to architecture, and as broad as my interests are there are plenty of structures from the classical to the contemporary that range fall over the map in terms of intrigue and beauty.
That's as far as I can stretch my attention for now. Hail Antoní! https://bjornandannette.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/wp-barce...
Rothko, if you read about his life (I've spent way too much time trying to cultivate an appreciation of his work for my own good), despite having virtually no talent or skill, really wanted to be an artist and appears to have become convinced that his future was the life of a professional artist. Over his career he pivoted his work fairly specifically towards positive criticisms and buyers.
So I think your question boils down to "did the critics and buyers collude to con an eager artist into produce trivial nonsense?". I don't think this is necessarily the case. I think all parties participated equally in producing an environment where stupid inane bullshit could become the bleeding edge art fad, but maybe not with that specific goal in mind.
> What if wealthy people, lusting for something different with which they could lavish themselves and the world (in their name of course)...
I definitely think there's something there. When it's rarity and exclusivity that you're after, the focus of adoration can definitely become an absurd McGuffin.
Also, they're pretty big. The sheer size of them males a difference.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VHMlBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg...