Comment by bigstrat2003
15 days ago
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
Indeed, I would not be surprised if there was someone calling the first cave paintings awful vandalism.
I just thought of mid 1800s, since around that time people got really experimental with different styles of painting.
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.
The conflation of art with the art market is a good litmus test…
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This might shock you, but most art is made by artists. Artists also tend to spend lots of their time consuming other art. This informs the type of art they create.
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
Contemporary art is the mirror of our time.
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