Modern Art

I am a history teacher, and as such, have always had a love of classical art. In the area of painting and sculpture I find that these traditional works have incredible amounts of meaning, subtext, complexity, and…beauty. With a few exceptions, I have had some real problems trying to see anything comparable in much of what is called modern art.

I admit that someone could have written the same thing a century ago, with regard to Picasso or Modigliani, or even 50 years ago with regard to Jackson Pollock. Nonetheless, I feel that a final corner has been passed. In this regard, I’ve run across a couple of experiments which are quite interesting…

We know what we like, and it’s not modern art! How gallery visitors only viewed work by Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin for less than 5 seconds
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365672/Modern-art-How-gallery-visitors-viewed-work-Damien-Hirst-Tracy-Emin-5-seconds.html

The basic fact about art is that you, the viewer, decide how much time you’re going to give it. Other art forms give you no choice.

A symphony is going to take up 40 minutes of your time; a film two hours; a play perhaps three or four hours. But you can choose whether to look at a painting for ten seconds or ten minutes. That’s a good measure of how interested you are by it.

We wondered whether there was a difference between the amount of time people were prepared to give a classic painting, and to modern art.

We set up that simple test. We spent a day sitting in front of four classic paintings, and the works of four famous contemporary British artists.

We counted how many visitors stopped at each; for how long, on average; they spent looking at each work; what the longest examination was; and what sort of gallery visitor each work seemed to attract.
Surprisingly, despite all the controversy, and the public promotion of new British artists, they did less well in this test than the 18th and 19th Century artists.

A child couldn’t paint that – can people tell abstract art from a child’s or chimp’s work?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/14/a-child-couldn%E2%80%99t-paint-that-%E2%80%93-can-people-tell-abstract-art-from-a-child%E2%80%99s-or-chimp%E2%80%99s-work

If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across Painting Number 2 by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors saying, “A child could paint that.”

To which Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner replied: “Could they?”

The duo wanted to test the assertion that abstract expressionist art is devoid of talent – that it could be done by a mere child, or even an animal. With keyboards and enough time, monkeys could surely duplicate Shakespeare, but with a paintbrush and a few hours, could a monkey produce a Rothko?

In any case, both of these articles are worth reading, and interesting in that they superficially present some divergent perspectives in how we look at much of modern art.

Baudelaire the Postmodern
http://www.haberarts.com/postdox.htm

Modern Art is terrible
http://modernartisterrible.blogspot.com