He did mention music as well, and is basically holding up the whole 20th century as the nadir of art, music, etc. I haven't gotten started on music yet, but my arguments about music will be quite similar.

Hey, there were court battles to wear the American flag as our underwear. If that isn't art, I don't know what is.

andyfox;

Have you ever been to a real art gallery? I don't mean a storefront-style gallery or some silly place on a river walk. I mean a real one, like LACMA, MOCA, MoMA, Guggenheim, etc? A place with a real curator?

The reality of seeing art in a museum vs seeing art in pictures (esp online) are very different experiences. You see the size, the nuances, the paint-strokes, the general aura of the entire experience. Even the positioning of the art is an art.

To complete the list of artists I posted: Duchamp, Rothko, Warhol. (although I said don't look at the URLs, I was really inviting you to look)

You can see the seeds of Rothko's later paintings in his early art. He was a person who deeply studied the relationships of colors. He eventually attempted to create a sense of "object" by removing the object. It's hard to explain how well he did this without seeing his history and without seeing his work in front of you.

I know some people can't stand Rothko and that is fine, but I say that's fine if they stood in front of it and wasn't moved by it. I don't think it is fine if you haven't actually seen a few in person.

Art is part personal and part study of humanities. I don't think anyone claims all art moves them, and that's okay.

For example, Warhol's Shadows is fairly controversial. Personally, it was one of the most moving pieces of abstract art I've ever well... experienced, though for many others, it was "meh, what's the point?"

On the other hand, a lot of people love that starving artist stuff. Apparently a LOT of people like Thomas Kinkade and Norman Rockwell, but I think their work is vapid.

And also, for anyone interested, I found this book to be super helpful in understanding art:

https://www.amazon.com/Humanities-th...art+humanities

It's not distilled for the general audience, but mind-expanding. It made later reading and curator slides much easier to understand. I'm sure you can find an older edition for much cheaper.

I love in La-la land, so yes, plenty of opportunity. Recently went to the (semi-)new Broad Museum, saw giant chairs and assorted other curiosities. I've had the opportunity to visit the New Tate and recently the DIA art foundation in the Hudson River Valley. My thoughts were confirmed.

But you make excellent points. I agree that the curating of an exhibit is in itself an art. Duchamp was a wonderful curator, as was Whistler. It's what is being curated that often puzzles me. I bring up Whistler in that Ruskin considered a work of his that I love "a pot of paint ." So perhaps I'm not just ready for art that doesn't manifest any artistic skill on the part of the artist. As Ruskin wasn't quite ready for Whistler even though Whistler's art, to my eyes, was ever-so-close to that of Turner, who Ruskin adored.

Would you consider Duchamp's readymades a peak? Schoenberg's 12-tone music? Mies's less-is-more buildings? Brice Marden's work?

Barnett Newman said that he considered the world of imagination violently opposed to common sense and that he favored the simple expression of complex thoughts. I think those 2 statements sum up my objections.

Duchamp's readymades were certainly one of many artistic peaks of the 20th century, because of their challenge to the conservative bourgeois art establishment and wider society too to accept that art doesn't have to be restricted to reflecting the beauty of the natural world but can also be man made and found in unexpected places...forcing people to take a new look at art and reevaluate their ideas of what is and isn't art was a major achievement, but you know this already. I guess you just don't enjoy the cerebral aspect of the readymades that can puzzle/bemuse/amuse you and prefer conventional pictures that please you. I'd much rather look at a good Turner for example, but Duchamp's point was that art can be experienced in other ways too eg by thinking about them and their meaning. The fact that pretty much the entire art world now accepts the validity of his view says a lot and leaves your position quite unsupported by anything more than "I don't get as much pleasure from looking at this as I would a painting by xyz", which rather misses the point.

I guess the same applies to music and architecture, both of which would be much worse off without the influence of Modernism. I would consider a world without jazz and rock music, without Glass and Eno, without some of its Modernist architecture, to be a world diminished.

I just looked at some stuff on The Broad website. Definitely not something I'd show someone as a first exposure.

Go to LACMA first. It's totally worth the $10 ticket or whatever it cost to get into the 2 main buildings. I'd walk into smaller building first, since that has plenty of "normal" art with a bit of form-based art. Take the time to read some of the placards.

The skyscraper is going to have some truly large pieces, but likely more focused on abstract, though it depends on who they are featuring.

The Art Walk in Spring Street is a great way to get some exposure to what local modern artists are doing. You will love The Hive, but there are many other cool galleries with all sorts of art, though mostly street art from all over the world.

Head down the Art's District by Alameda to see a ton of local art (and a pocket of LA culture like no other area).

LA has a seriously under-rated arts culture, but there is plenty to see, and certainly, you can start with the more palatable stuff first, then start looking into Moca, Getty, ArtCenter, Japanese Museum, The Broad, etc.

I love this painting at the LACMA. It's called The Orator, painted by Magnus Zeller around 1920.

I had a wooden stool in my livingroom for years. I had drilled a hole in the seat with a brace and bit, and then stuck the front fork and wheel from a bicycle in it.

It was fun to spin. I never had a guest not give it a try. At Christmas I'd shine colored lights on it. Kids liked it, especially. It was also useful for truing wheels.

After a decade or so, a guy was restoring a PX-10 and wanted the fork, so I gave it to him.

It was the most fun I'd ever had with art, modern or otherwise. Given that Duchamp gave up art to play chess, I think he was just entertaining himself with some of this stuff.

Good post.

My point is not that I don't get as much pleasure from a Mies glass box than from a Greene and Greene bungalow. It's that the justifications for much modern art--in Mies's case, that less is more--is either patent hogwash, sophistry, or an excuse for a lack of talent. You can call a piece of tape a "zip" but it's still just a piece of tape. Less is not more. A painting does not have a life of its own. There is no one "spirit of the time." Rothko did not imprison utter violence in every inch of his pictures. Some things written for pay are worth printing.

Thank you! We also have great 20th century architecture here, from Irving Gill to Lloyd Wright to Vista Hermosa Park to . . . .

It may be true of Minimalism but the justification of Modernism isn't necessarily that less is more. It's that the rhythms and stripped down space that post industrial revolution humans experience in the age of the machine are reflected in the art of the era (just as pre industrial art focussed on the natural world and Biblical/historic/pastoral scenes), and sometimes the former are intentionally repetitive (eg rock music) or the latter dominant (eg ambient music). So I disagree that there is no zeitgeist, and I believe the role of art is to reflect it.

I think maybe you just don't like the modern world very much (I do have some sympathy with this view), and so take exception to its art.

There's likely some truth in your last paragraph. That said, we're going to have to agree to disagree. There is no one zeitgeist that reflects "the spirit of the times." The so-called spirit of the times was an excuse by artists to give The Man the finger (a sentiment that I am generally in accord with) and to make their art look like they wanted it to look. Certainly this was true in architecture, so just pick one category. A flat roof does not reflect the spirit of the times. Why should a skyscraper's outer skin reveal the inner construction? Why is ornament a crime? Frank Lloyd Wright simply wanted his buildings to look cool. He didn't care if the roofs leaked, or if the furniture was uncomfortable. And that's OK. I like cool-looking buildings. Just don't tell me they're "organic." Or that they reflect the spirit of the prairie. They're not and they don't.



There is much to admire in

Art is definitely a reflection of the times. Warhol wasn't the only one doing commercial-style art. You have Jeff Koons, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and so many others. They all were, in their own ways, coming to grips with advertising.

There's all sorts of pressures. Art, music, and architecture are trendy, like the world around us.

That painting looks a bit like a Stanley Spencer.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Spencer

The cancer of word pretension is ubiquitous (a good art word) in the art world especially when sycophant critics and the artist team up to give explanations or introductions about the artist or their work, at a gallery show or a short exhibit in a museum. The wording is so flamboyant that I skip over most "artist's statements". This happens most often in modernist works, where justification for the show is needed, because the artist is actually a parasite on society.

I note that the words and/or phases: Juxtaposition, intersectionality, deep cycle universal truths, parallelism, physical egalitarian momentum, and palletized cultural megatropolis, did not show up on your list. If your tonality futurist self-inflationary cognitive abilities had been better tune to the universality and true harmonic spiritual beingness and nothingness of the earth goddess, you would not be making such egregious errors.

I rest my case.

A story from my youth

I was at the modern art museum in Madrid years ago. I was a college kid, young, impressionable, ready to soak in some culture. There was a tour going on for a bunch of American University students, and I decide to tag along to get a free education. The tour was being led by their professor, and if you looked up cliche in the dictionary, a picture of this guy would've surfaced. He walked, talked, and dressed the part of a modern art snob, and seemed to know what he was talking about.

About 30 minutes into the tour, we pass a sculpture. It was a series of numbers in a spiral. I don't remember the professor's exact words, but I'll paraphrase. "You see how these numbers increase exponentially, with no apparent order or pattern. It really helps to illustrate the randomness of our universe, and what chaos we live in sometimes."

The number series was the following

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 (classic fibonacci sequence)

I won't even mention the shape of the spiral, as most of you can probably guess what it looked like

Being an Engineer and a math hound (and not so much of an art history buff), I had heard enough, and quietly left the tour. I'm not so much of an art snob, but I am a math snob, and this sequence/shape is very important to lots of things in our world including nature, music, architecture, etc... It is anything but random, and anything but chaotic. It is the opposite of those things in fact.

While that is only one example, it left a clear impression in my mind that many of these art 'experts' are just bull**** artists.

This 3-hour long piece uses one note:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/a...ngle-note.html



Not anything new, as Ligeti did this very thing many years back, except instead of "D," he used "A" if you can believe the sheet music..

Update: There's a new book of analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings called Pollock's Modernism by Michael Schreyach. The author claims that "the artist subjected the phenomenological interdependence of sensation and cognition in our embodied experience to pictorial scrutiny." Among other things, he claims that the blue thread--which comes on bolts of canvas, indicating that the end of the canvas is approaching--left in several of Pollock's paintings "announces a distinction between the actual and the virtual, the empirical and the projected, the literal and the representational." And Schreyach's analysis of Pollock's statement that "Painting, I think today--the more immediate, the more direct--the greater the possibilities of making a direct--of making a statement" is that Pollocks' "verbal unevenness indicates that he entertained a combination of options. His tangled answer may have resulted form juggling three conceptually discrete, yet practically overlapping, categories; the artist's literal activity, the work of art as judged by a beholder to convey effects of immediacy or directness, and the artist's 'statement'."

Really? Pollock was inebriated more often than he was sober and his verbal "unevenness" was the mark of a confused mind made even more confused by alcohol. It's much more likely that he was simply too lazy to remove the blue thread than anything else.

The author summarizes his argument in the last line of the book: "Once we have dedicated ourselves to seeing Pollock's modernism with the goal of trying to understand his statement, we assume responsibility for the standpoints--his and our own--that we have willingly chosen to occupy."

A truly Trumpian pronouncement.

Read an article by Schreyach on Pollock in which he traces how various formalist critics, Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg, approached Pollock's work, while also incorporating later criticism by Rosalind Krauss among others. I found it thoughtful. His conclusion:

"But I tend to think that Pollock’s project of separateness is not motivated by a radical renunciation of communicability. Rather, it originates in the desire to insist that one’s own meaning, and its expression, is not contingent upon a viewer’s interpretation. The commitment with which Pollock pursues pictorial intensity and tautness of feeling asserts his expression, and his meaning, as his own. In the difference between the indexical and iconic interpretations of Pollock’s paintings is the difference between the literal and the re-created framing edge, between the shape of the canvas and its format, between limits that are actual constraints and limits that are created—paradoxical as it may sound—as the condition of expression."

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Andy, Would that book be useful as a doorstop or perhaps to fill a hole in your basement?

Link for people's perusal:

abstract-painters-that-marked-the-20th-century

Wassilly Kandinsky out classed all the other abstract frauds in my opinion. I'd hang one of his paintings in my living room. Pollock's output would be exiled to the bathroom or more probably the barn.

That Schreyach fellow produces some first-class gibberish. I'm not swallowing any of it however. I'd rather read Giovanni Boccaccio - His work is not so slapdash and it sticks, and will last for ages.

Klee though? I suspect you're every bit as pretentious about your understanding of art as Schreyach.

Also, there are plenty of great art works you wouldn't want in your living room.

Possibly, but I have the good sense not to try and inflict it on other people.

As to your second comment, I agree. I consider most of Botticelli's paintings and frescos as so much trailer trash art - not fit for the living room or even the basement. Others will disagree. And that is that. Art is contentious and its assessment even more so. But still, I think that I would try and fit a Henry Moore sculpture in my living room. It would be fun. Degas' little dancer would also be a wonderful addition.

On page 200, Scheryach says that Merleau-Ponty "clarifies the recursive relation of "one to the other" and quotes Merleau-Ponty:

The relation of reflection to the unreflective is a two-way relationship. The founding term, or originator is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, which prevents the originator from reabsorbing the originated, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived from it, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest.

[end quote]

This is connection with an area of a painting in which Pollock applied undiluted solvent over the wet paint.

I wish academics would learn to avoid this sort of thing. Merleau-Ponty has more to offer, but I have no idea how he's using it to explicate Pollock.

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