Should we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
I love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
I like bananas.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
That's postmodern art, not modern art.
So that's a post-banana?
Okay, this is a bit too far xD. But I wouldn’t put this in the same bucket as Pollock. I genuinely find his work interesting.
Modern art is weird.
https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/
5 replies →
Should we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
[flagged]
I love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
This could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.
1850? I wager we could go all the way back if we tried.
> (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art
1 reply →
Indeed. Once galleries became significant buyers of art, scandalous art became an attractive thing to produce: it commanded outsized attention.
The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
« Too many notes, your majesty »
https://youtu.be/H6_eqxh-Qok?si=zGXsyHk_XF3Gu2o_
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
There is nothing to understand, bunch of jerks signaling sophistication or laundering money while poisoning the soul of men.
3 replies →
Contemporary art is the mirror of our time.
[dead]