Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Love it or Hate it: Modern Art



This sort of streamlines what we were talking about in class yesterday. Someone mentioned that she is drawn to modern art because it depicts an "emotional state," while others of us cannot seem to find a basis to appreciate those certain kinds of artistic renderings that look, frankly, as though they were drawn with crayon. It's always interesting to look at an issue in terms of an equation that outlines the opposing forces within the social discourse. This one strikes me as wildly accurate.

6 comments:

  1. Hahahah..this picture made me laugh. When sitting in class yesterday I felt that out of the two paintings we looked at (the landscape and the other), the landscape one was a lot more eye pleasing, but the other was a lot more open to interpretation. I feel in modern society we are always questioning, always finding diferent ways to look at things, and not everything has one simple answer. The second painting, therefore, represents our society well, and for that reason, I feel like it would fit perfectly in an extremely modernly-decorated spacious apartment. I don't know if any of this makes sense, but in essence, I've definitely given the two paintings a lot of thought since yesterday's class, and feel like the second painting has its own uniqueness and creativity. Sure, "anyone" could do it, but could anyone justify the meaning behind it and influence another's emotional state?

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  2. I love this picture. The thing that I just still don't like about modern art is that in my opinion it has no discourse. It is essentially, in my opinion, an someone with too much free time and most often too much brightly colored paint rolling around a canvas to see what happens. There is no symbolism, no signified, no signifier, and no discourse between different parts in my opinion. Therefore, if anything that we have learned in the class is true, most modern art has no meaning.

    Once again this is just my extreme view of the genre

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  3. Good points, alice. So now let me turn to the musical equivalent of modern art: punk rock. Click here for a distillation of the famed DiY ethos. Perhaps thinking "anyone can do that" is, in fact, different than being able to do it yourself? If so, then isn't that fairly static criticism--oh, I could do that if I wanted to--something about which we, as critics, should be suspicious?

    Also, here's some noise that, supposedly, you could make on your own. Cobain probably would always do it better, though.

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  4. I would argue against the "I could do that" reaction to modern art in that not only did the person making the claim not reach the original conceptual leap to do so, but also that most modern artists (including musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, dancers, the list goes on) train in the tradition of their art form for years upon years before they begin to subvert those traditions with less traditional work. The way I see it, one has to know the rules before he or she can break them; without a traditional basis to manipulate, contemporary art is in my opinion typically meaningless. Speaking as a lover of both traditional and contemporary art forms, I don't appreciate modern art without such a traditional grounding when I view it, ie two sculptures in the New York MoMa that looked to me like giant rhinocerous terds (sorry for the offensive language, but that was my gut reaction). Ok, I could ramble on about art and the interaction of tradition and modernity within it forever, trust me, so I'll stop now...

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  5. I do believe that traditional art is completely necessary in appreciating what we now call "modern" art. There needs to be something to compare a work of art to in order to analyze and observe it. As human beings we are constantly passing judgements and analyzing based on preconceived notions. Just like we stereotype the people walking beside us on the street, we also judge art in a similar way- comparing the piece of art to previous works and what is the widely accepted "norm." Although I would like to point out that modern art is usually only prized when a well-known artist's name is attached to the work of art. I could probably create a similar replica of what we observed in class although it would be worthless and probably mean much less. Even though we associate modern art with abstraction and personal emotions what does this really mean? I'd like to argue that modern art has shifted from traditional art in the sense that precision and detail is less important and the name of the artist composing the piece is more prized.

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  6. In response to Nick: I understand where you're coming from, but wouldn't you say that maybe modern art inspires too much discourse, rather than none at all? Because it is unencumbered by form and it typically doesn't display recognizable images, the meaning can be open to interpretation (try referring to Chapter 1 Section 4 of Representations and looking at the different approaches to discerning meaning in objects: what do you think applies to modern art?). Perhaps it is a subjective experience that means something different to everyone, so the discourse often seems muddled or contrived.

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