Duchamp is more widely regarded than Dali, Escher, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, and Monet?

While I agree that many artists and musicians made their legacy on odd-ball works, I also contend that they had plenty of normal and brilliant work that is often ignored. I consider this a bit unfair to the musicians and artists, in many ways, but then again, they did express art for the time they were in.

Dadaism, like cubism, surrealism, and futurism, was a short-lived trend as well.

Not sure if more highly regarded, but most certainly the most influential. I'd consider Monet 19th century rather than 20th, and I've seen Pollock's floor, where there's as much art in what was spilled than as was on the canvas. I'll take the worst of Turner, Manet and Courbet who were still able to give The Man the finger without abandoning art, over the best of Escher and Rothko. (My definition of art of course.)You make excellent points. But Warhol claimed his soup cans had tremendous meaning for him because he used to drink Campbell's soup. Robert Venturi was right: less is a bore.

Without cheating (looking at the urls uner the img tags), do you recognize who some of these paintings are by?













Sometimes, it is unexpected. No artist did just one thing,

You might look at early Mondrian, too.

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I believe the top one is an early work by Pollock (and a bad one, IMHO). The second is the famous Nude Descending A Staircase by Duchamp. The 3rd is Picasso. I admit to not knowing the others.

I'm not saying there aren't good works to be found. I'm saying the absence of a subject, the abandonment of tonality, the insistence that less is more, the idea that the viewer or listener has to make the work of art more than the creator--these things contributed to a lot of nonsense in the art world. Maybe it was always thus.

I recommend the book Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That. I contend that your five year old could have done most of it and, what's more, come up with better reasons for why it is important art than the artists.

Andy,

I think five year olds, like many artists, wouldn't provide explanations. I'm not sure why Rothko moves me, but his work does. And a five year old couldn't have done that.

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Seeing a Rothko in person is very different than seeing a picture online so keeping that in mind, I have tempered some of my disdain for something like Damien Hirst's Shark in a Tank.

Did any of you ever see the documentary "My Kid Could Paint That"?

It is about a little kid who paints abstracts and sells them for reasonably good money. I believe there was some talk of a hoax where one of the gallery owners/artists was actually making the paintings rather than the kid.

In any event I don't understand this type of art. And it all looks like a kid or more likely a semi-talented adult could do any or all of it to me. Art, especially any type of abstract art is about 100% subjective. Did anybody see that insanely ugly piece of crap that sold last month for 110 million to some Japanese billionare?



I have seen better graffiti on condemned buildings.

This is so true. I didn't "get" Rothko until I saw one in person. From reading, I knew he was layering shades and attempting to mix colors that don't mix (blue and orange), but seeing it in person, on a 25 foot canvas is almost transcendental. The internet shows 10% of the actual painting, showing his work as blocks of colors. That is not what a Rothko is at all.

A 5 year old couldn't do it.

FWIW, I'm not moved by Pollock's splatter paint. I can appreciate what he was doing and I can appreciate why others like his work, but I see his work and think "meh."

That fight between intellectualism and emotionalism is, for me, the experience of art. Challenging yourself to not dismiss something because "a 5 year old could do it" is part of the joy of it. When faced with the actual work, it does become hard to justify that a 5 year old can take a 30 foot canvas, layer paints, and create something built on art and human history.

This is kinda cool. Where was the building?

I've sat in a room full of Rothko, and it sucked. I preferred My Bed by Tracey Emin:



Up close, it's dirty and disgusting, and it reminded me that I've slept in beds like that.

South Side of Chicago. Take your pick

They had an Ansel Adams on Pawn Stars the other day:



The first to consider photographs as art, they were saying. This has to be in the plus column of modernism, I would think.

The defense rests.

http://www.theartsdesk.com/tv/bricks-bbc-four

In your OP you start by saying you acknowledge Modernism as a valid art form but one that you think has produced poor art. This is an interesting opinion that's worth debating, though hardly a new one (a hundred years ago GK Chesterton was suggesting the death of classicism and claiming that in the music of Sibelius he could detect the sound of machines).

You then follow it by questioning whether it's art at all. As art is anything designated as such by an artist this is wrong (as is your view of Cezanne's technique).

Dada was an attempt to highlight the horrific stupidity of WW1 by mirroring that irrationality in art. If the death of one man can result in the deaths of millions, why not question what art is and why until that point it was assumed to have to mirror the beauty of nature?

Said Virginia Woolf, "On or around December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a*garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered or a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that, but a change there was, nevertheless …"*

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And Ezra Pound:
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old ***** gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization, Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.


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That some are duped easily by pretense and fashion is nothing new to the world of art. I reject or ignore what I think is garbage or hucksterism no matter what age or zeitgeist produced it. The judgments of others, or experts, can be considered in your estimation of the worthiness of the art in question but also personally rejected. Much of Andy's comments stand on that basis. He thinks much* Modernism art garbage or just a con - I think he is correct. But I rely on my own independent judgment as final, for me. I don't think much of Andy Warhol. Others think a great deal of this Artist and his influence. Yet I enjoy and think well done much of what most consider Modernism in the art world. I thoroughly enjoy Salvador Dali just for a single example.


*Some, or all?

I agree that much of Modernist art is a con, but that is a symptom of the spread of charlatanism throughout Western culture in general, and there's nothing dishonest about much modern art until the post WW2 period and the rise of conceptual art, performance art and a lot of the post modernism.

I'm not a fan of Warhol either but his attempt to forge a new art that reflects the here and now is certainly a valid form of expression.

Tracy Emin's bed and in fact all of her art I put fairly and squarely in the gimmick/money making section, but Hirst not so. I went to his retrospective a few years ago and was surprised to see that the has a very strong and refined sense of colour and left with a deeper appreciation of his art.

Then there are the great Modern artists whose names we all know and who produced far too many great works of art to list.

So no, Modern art is not bunkum, but its forms and spaces can be more difficult to appreciate than classical or baroque representative art.

So I know I said "the defense rests" above, but I wanted to take one more shot at explaining my objections to modern art.

First, let me apologize for being a techno-peasant: despite having posted here since the Johnson administration (and I'm talking Andrew Johnson), I don't know how to post a picture. The work of "art" I'm going to talk about here is "Untitled" (USA Today) by Felix Gonzales-Torres. You can see it here: http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/30...usa-today-1990 and on pages 36-37 of the aforementioned Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not have Done That: Modern Art Explained by Susie Hodge.

The work in question is a pile of candy. Trust me, that's what it is: just a pile of candy. Ms. Hodge explains that it is "candy, individually wrapped in red, silver and blue cellophane," which she also tells us "are the colors of the US flag." Ms. Hodge is British, so we'll give her a pass on only getting two or the three flag colors correct, which is a lot more than she gets correct about the work.

Ms. Hodge explains that Gonzalez-Torres "surreptitiously and incisively . . invoked viewers . . . to contemplate the past, present, and future." He does this, apparently, because the work is "variable and constantly altering as people take the candy." Further: "Variable and constantly altering as people take the candy, the pile is depleted, implying deterioration before death; the instability and change are an allegory for the world."

In a word: hogwash. It's a pile of candy. There is no allegory for anything. Just because Mr. Gonzalez-Torres and Ms. Hodge think it is doesn't make it so. I understand that in modern art, it is up to viewers, more than the "artists," to decide what a work is about. But any nonsense that I or Ms. Hodge or anyone else claims to see in a pile of candy about deterioration or instability is exactly that: nonsense. Mr. Gonzalez-Torres and Ms. Hodege claim that "Gonzalez-Torres was expressing his feelings about gay rights and AIDs, as well as highlighting political volatility."

He was not. He may have said he was, but the pile of candy was not doing so. I might just as well say I was doing the same thing when I ate a cherry from the plateful I had in my kitchen tonight.

In general, the more four-syllable words or more in an explanation for a work of art, the less veracity (joke intended) there is in it. In Ms. Hodge's summary of "Untitled" (USA Today)" she uses "configuations," "nonconfrontational," "considerations," "surreptitiously," "incisively," "deterioration, " "instability," "allegory," and "equilibrium." All in one paragraph.

Ms. Hodge sums up her analysis of the work by saying that the viewers of the candy "all have the opportunity to become involved, to make changes and, ultimately, to affect the equilibrium of society." I have no idea what she means by "the equilibrium of society." But I am sure the pile of candy has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Now the defense truly does rest. My apology if I have violated the spirit of The Lounge.

By his own estimation he was. His early work is quite clumsy. When he edged towards abstraction it became less obvious. IMHO.

It seems you have more of an issue with the postmodernists.

I'd never heard of Gonzales-Torres and that piece of art is terrible, as are many others that were also poorly conceived.

You still need to explain how this invalidates modern art, though. I could instantly find you a pop song or a film that's as gimmicky, shallow and exploitative in its own domain as Gonzales-Torres's art, but no one would take that as evidence that those media are bad art forms.

You should be using the peaks to assess the merits of different art forms, not the troughs.

WTF is it with Americans and their flag?