Those art pieces are literally poison to a young aspiring artist’s mind. It condemns them to a life in poverty, chasing dreams of becoming high profile abstract-postmodernist-whatever artist selling shits in jars, instead of focusing on making what the world really needs the most:
spoiler
gay furry porn
You either die dignified and impoverished, unrecognized in your own lifetime, or you live long enough to afford a custom alpaca fursuit.
A fursuit of an alpaca, or made with alpaca fur? Or both?
an alpaca wool fursuit sounds like it would melt the wearer.
Well, I’ll let you know that big dragon mommy milkers are superior
My favorite thing about art is that if you look at it and you hate it, that’s still a completely valid take
Art museums became way more fun once I realized that
I am going to MOMAs all over to laugh at the stupid shit some artists pull off. Laughed my ass off at the taped banana. I am not even interested in what the artist thinks or means. I am entertained, that is what I expect of art.
Like in London, there was this big-ass room dedicated to a giant chair and a giant table, you could walk under. Heated, in the middle of a freezing winter. Like, the homeless were freezing out on the streets, and here we are as a society, heating a room for a chair and a table nobody could use. Just take in the absurdity, and you have to laugh at this shit to compensate and stay sane.
taped banana
It was called “Comedian” and it was a fantastic piece of art.
It was a derivative, unoriginal piece of art
This is very true for me. Same for a lot of history museums, which are full of historic arts and crafts.
Like, some native art is just old craft, not actually good art to me, but some ancient cultures had a wild perspective and the art matches.
I just like the way it looks.
That’s cool. Don’t let any douche like me talk you out of that. 🙂
The bell curve is in fact 3 dimensional and you took the upper 0.1% of the orthogonal axis to the one depicted.
Sir, I laughed and upvoted. I am unable to share as my wife is a visual arts grad and I want to be able to get laid in the future.
I understand.
It’s money laundering
I like it. Generally, when abstract and contemporary art is well executed, I find it to be thought provoking and exciting to experience. One of my personal favourite paintings is Asger Jorn’s “Stalingrad”.
It is entirely useless to look at that painting on a tiny screen on a search engine because it looks like shit online.
However, in real life, you enter the room where it is hanging and it is HUGE. Whites and blacks and blues ans yellows and reds in a turbulent mix on the canvas and if you sit down on the bench and soak it in, you start to feel the emotions Jorn was trying to evoke in the viewer. War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you’re supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
I’m always exhausted when I look at that painting, but I do it every single time I’m at the Asger Jorn museum.
There definitely is shitty abstract and contemporary art out there. I have seen my fair share of bullshit pieces, but it is sad to me how some people entirely close themselves off to this aspect of art just because it is different. But, at the end of the day it is a taste thing, and that is okay.
Counter offer: that’s all expectation bias.
You read
War is hell. War in the deep of Russian winters is worse than hell. It is blind, cold, desperate chaos and you’re supposed to fight in this inferno while being able to tell friend from foe, but they all look the same, their blood looks the same in the snow and dirt beneath them.
then you conjure up the feeling with some art museum self-gaslighting. Maybe the art is the prompt?
Modern dance and modern art (including free form poetry etc) that try to leave rules/form/structure behind are, to me, rorschach content with accompanying flavor text that makes them smell faintly of the artists’ farts. This is to other forms of art what whiteclaws are to flavor.
I quite strongly doubt that any abstract or contemporary art in isolation gives any specific, repeatable feeling to anybody outside of maybe “chaos”. Its fine if you like it (I don’t obviously) but I think adding specific feelings that you wouldn’t get without the title is oversell and over-hype. It’s like establishing the canon for a book or story using the fanfiction for that story or just the authors opinion: if you didn’t actually write it in the main work, it doesn’t count (I see you J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, etc). Put the story IN THE STORY.
But then, this is all just one man’s polemic.
That’s a fair point of view, but that is literally the point of art. Not just abstract and contemporary art. The more context you have with a piece of art, the more it will make you feel and think about what it is trying to communicate.
Try and look up the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko.
In isolation, you’d look at that painting and see a sad jester in a chair. You may feel something, but it won’t be very deep.
When the context is added for that painting, it starts taking on a completely and much more complex meaning. The most basic takeaway with context is “while the politicians, kings and nobelmen are partying, only the jester is understanding the severity of the country’s predicament.”
But if you take the time and start diving into the meaning of the comet outside the window, the cultural and historical significance of the court jester Stańczyk to Poland’s history and culture, the letter on the table, the fact that Matejko used his own face as a reference for the jester, dive into Matejko’s own life and his views, interests and concerns you will get a much greater and much more nuanced interpretation of what you’re looking at. It will basically educate you on something you most likely know nothing about.
That is what art does.
Asger Jorn’s Stalingrad is the same for me.
It is so miss the point of art to think that you should be able to just glance at it briefly and get anything out of it.
Art is also not supposed to be pleasant or pretty. It is supposed to move people. There is tons of art out there that bores me to tears or that I think is bullshit, but others may connect with it where I couldn’t and that is worth something.
Are there bulshitters and bulshit art out there? Absolutely. One of my favourite horror satirea Velvet Buzzsaw very much takes the piss out of the art scene and the silly snobs in it.
But I think it is a mistake to think that having context for an art piece is somehow cheating when all art ever made has a title and an intent and context by default.
Very succinctly so I don’t end up writing another wall, I generally agree with you on these points. Where we differ I think is that I feel context can add depth and richness (as in the Jester painting) but that the work itself should contain some INTRINSIC depth and richness.
The analog discussion I think we are having is “are placebos good medicine?”. Do you feel better after taking them? Sure. I suppose that makes it hard to say they are not medicine. At the same time, it’s the act of consuming them that gives them the effect, not anything to do with the content.
I genuinely disagree with you on the placebo argument, but that is okay.
Sometimes I like an abstract painting or sculpture because of shape, color, composition and so on. I don’t think abstract art would be popular with many people is the works didn’t stir something in them just by how they looked.
Again, I completely respect that this type of art doesn’t do anything for you, but I think you are entirely wrong in claiming that there is nothing to abstract art unless there is a title for context. That isn’t true. Abstract art can evoke all kinds of emotions in people without any context. Disgust, euphoria, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, calmness etc. It is not a trick that an abstract art piece can evoke emotions. It is simply a matter of the art piece being created by someone who has an eye for composition, color theory and is in tune with the emotion he or she intents to transfer onto the canvas.
the work itself should contain some INTRINSIC depth and richness.
This may apply to some art, but it is not necessary for all art.
Also forgot to mention that one of my all time favourite contemporary art pieces was a long table in a small room with let’s say 50 identical white vases lined up on either side. Next to the vases, on the table lay a bunch of cheap permanent markers. Out of the 50 identical white vases stood maybe 10 white vases with gold leaf patterns on them.
All the vases were scribbled over with drawings and words except the vases with the gold leafs on them.
I picked up a marker myself and drew on some of the plain vases, but it took me a bit of courage to start drawing on one of the gold leaf vases. At least one other person had drawn on one of the gold leaf vases but only on the white parts. I found myself instinctively doing the same.
It made me think about a lot of things. What we put value to, why, even when we are given the go-ahead, most of us still hesitate to destroy something that we perceive to be valuable even if the only difference between it and the other pieces is cheap gold patterns on the side.
Furthermore, nowhere did it say that you weren’t allowed to smash the vases, but nobody had done it. You could probably do whatever you wanted to do to these vases, ans yet people only allowed themselves to do the safest form of vandalism.
I thought about the other people who had written and drawn on the vases. I felt their presence and the thoughts they had gone through when interacting with this piece. I thought about the artist and their intentions with it. The fact that I interacted with their piece made it very clear that all the thoughts they had put into their piece was realized in me as part of the installation.
I have no idea what the made of that piece was. Not a clue. But it still affected me because of how well it was executed and I understood the message(s) the artist intented. Maybe not all of them, but the main point, I got.
Contemporary art can be so amazing if one opens themselves up to it.
That sounds like a different kind of art altogether. The experiential kind of art where the point is the unspoken discussion between the artist and the audience, or just a commentary on the audience, is pretty cool. Marina Abramović is an icon of art in that category I would say.
That is contemporary art. :)
Counter offer: that’s all expectation bias.
Counter counter offer: The title and description (and sometimes a biography of the production of the piece) are an integral part of the art.
Speaking here as an art noob who generally knows nothing of what the pieces are supposed to mean or what their societal context was when they were made and what forces they were pushing against etc:
When my arty partner drags me into art museums with huge abstract modern art pieces with just big splotches of heavily textured color (I’m thinking in particular of one giant piece filling a wall with jagged black heaps of paint) they do in fact make me feel feelings.
In my case, as in OP’s case, they were really bad feelings. I would prefer not to feel really bad and I don’t like that art. But I certainly couldn’t call it ineffective fart-huffing!
Give Pollock crap all you want, but the guy popularized one of the most fun painting techniques ever, regardless of how you feel about his stuff.
Seriously, splatter painting is really fun to do even if there’s no real reason to it, and if anything, who says art has to have a reason behind it? Just straight-up having a play around throwing paint on something (in fact, there are entire places dedicated to that exact thing cropping up over the last few years) is as valid as drawing a scene out with an actual story behind it.
Also that scene from The Big Lebowski, which yeah, looks like a ton of fun!
If you can find it, Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay for Esquire called “Jack the Dripper” which was reprinted in his essay collection Fates Worse than Death. He argues that Pollock was a) absolutely able to produce quality traditional art and b) accessing his sub- and unconscious mind when making drip paintings in a way that anyone interested in the human mind should be fascinated by.
Still better than AI art.
I don’t like AI slop. But this kind of “art” is not much better. This is human slop.
Low effort bullshit to impress art “connoisseurs” (people with money)
When the end goal is (in)fame and money, we can’t argue with the results
Indeed.
Regardless of how people feel about Pollock’s work, there was art before expressionism and art after. He and others undeniably changed the conversation about art forever.
Can’t tell which people hate more, the art, the artist, or the admirers of the work.
At least it’s not made by AI.
Say what you want about this meme, but it sure as shit sparked a debate.
I’d much rather the CIA spent their money on this.
Yeah, yeah op. You have no idea of the what’s and why’s or any context for why plenty of modern art looks like it does and why it is important in art history. You know what you like. And you like what you understand. And if you don’t understand it, you feel intellectually lesser and have a knee jerk reaction to protect yourself - by taking a meme format that says you have all the smarts and people that understand it are below yourself.
You can keep doing that, or you can get curious and ask the what’s and the why’s and see if you can appreciate things from it that aren’t immediately obvious. That is how people grow.
I upvoted the OP message. And I upvoted yours too, because both of you are so right.
The OP message you responded is a person in the middle of the curve bell that things they are at the end of the curve, while they are in the middle.
Right. Because any statement about art is equally valid just because anybody can form an opinion.
What’s up next in brave culture truths and insights of arts? James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Erik Satie, Arnold Schönberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauchenberg, Jenny Holtzer, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney are all shit and everybody who thinks otherwise are a simpleton because we are so smart hue hue hue.
A circle jerk of ignorance. Enjoy.
You know when everybody on both Lemny and Reddit are up in arms that American mainstream culture celebrate anti-intellectualism?
This here is a prime example.
Nothing intellectual about claiming something is more than it actually is and being pretentious about it.
What is it then and what is it not?
Third year art major?
I have a MA in Fine Arts many many years ago actually, so I’d consider I have some actual weight in the field and not only shallow opinions confused as equal to knowledge and facts.
But I should know better than to vent because every time this sort of post is a living illustration of the Dunning–Kruger effect on a bandwagon.
Respect.
Tbf lots of stuff in that style, including some of his, is trash.
Edit: and if context is beauty: a lot of people making it didn’t understand, and it was overpromoted by the fucking cia to contrast the literal style pushed by the ussr. So it’s literally an anti-communist plot by yhe cia. Show me some other ‘anti communist’ things.
Yep. If you look into history there are plenty of examples of political powers promoting arts of all tradition for their own purposes.
But you know who were on the fronts of practically banning modern art in the first place? Check out Entartete Kunst, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art. So does that make all traditional and figurative art problematic now?
And you know what other art was “not understood” by it’s creators until later? Oh, boy. Fucking most of it, because a lot of art is expression and exploration, and theory is the understanding after, despite academics and theorists in fine arts have been trying to center the entire scene around themselves rather than the artists for the better part of the 1900s until today.
Im saying if, as is pretty strongly stated upthread, beauty comes entirely from the context, and the piece does not factor, by that metric, this genre is ugly, disgusting, vile.
I did not say that it is the case. I am responding to someone who defended this genre by saying people who dont like it do not understand the history.
Please read before replying.
Damn, my dude. You sure have impressive reading skills to find all of that in “this is shit”.
Not to mention the truly phenomenal, remarkably exceptional, astonishingly outstanding writing skills required to wield, utilize, employ, and make strategic use of a dictionary, thesaurus, lexicon, and vocabulary compendium in order to lend, bestow, confer, and imbue an exaggerated, inflated, and artificially magnified impression, illusion, and semblance of substance, gravitas, and argumentative weight.
+! im a fucker whos fucking good at fucking writing.
Of course you are, dear.
A shame communication has two parts.
You’re equating an appreciation of significance with an appreciation of aesthetics.
What if I told you that art is much more than aesthetics. Clearly this is news to both OP and yourself.
Did you just not read my comment?
I must like the emperor’s new clothes!
“New”. Heh.
This is only tangentially related, but it astonishes me (it doesn’t) how often people defending AI art wield Pollock as a weapon out of jealousy for his relative success and not because they actually like him. Same with the toilet. And the banana.
[edit] I think I might have meant to respond to a different comment of yours, but ah well.
I always find it funny when somebody mentions The Fountain as an example of this stupid “modern art” (as in contemporary) and I get to tell them that it is from 1917. Like dude, if you missed out on the last hundred years of what art is, maybe you should humble down on your opinions.
People don’t have to like everything, but I find it frustrating how people think their uninformed opinion is as valid as someone that knows and understands what it is, why it is what it is, and how it is important in a historical context.
There are plenty of topics I know very little about. I may have ideas and opinions about things, but I would never imagine myself being superior to people who are actually knowledgeable of the field.
Guy got paid by the CIA, stole the whole idea, but rich people buy it, must be art!!
Bet you explain Matisse the same way.
![[OC] Personal opinion on Jackson Pollock's drip art](https://fedia.io/media/57/a6/57a68784da258ac88cbf772d4cc1c57c31be67a0f7ddda1a203f62c49fd84eff.jpg){kind=link}
