Why, lookie — Peter Bagge has put together a cartoon that’s awfully evocative of my visit to the Tate Modern last year. Thanks for reminding me, Pete.
(via BoingBoing)
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Ars gratia artis
Why, lookie — Peter Bagge has put together a cartoon that’s awfully evocative of my visit to the Tate Modern last year. Thanks for reminding me, Pete. (via BoingBoing)…
My dealings with modern art I guess haven’t been as bad as portrayed in the Comic. I’ve come to the conclusion that for every 100 pieces utter drek, there is at least a few that are cool, neat, or at least thought provoking.
When I went to DC/Maryland on vacation once, My Sister and I decided to go to DC and see the sites. One of the places that we went to go look at was the http://hirshhorn.si.edu/ “target=”new”>Hirshhorn. This is where I discovered the joy of really horrible modern art. On one floor they had an exhibit by a woman from New Mexico that was of horses as if they were drawn by a 5 year old…on 10’ x 10’ canvas. All white on brown.
Reading the descriptions of the paints we found that she painted things that were going on in her life using the horses. So there was a horse giving birth, a horse flying, a horse with a broken leg, and so on for fifty paintings. After the first room my sister and I had a contest to come up most horrible critique of the paintings in question. So, at least horrible Modern art had some redeeming value.
Thankfully they had one artist that had an interesting take on a shtick. His paintings were diptychs or triptychs of a page out a book that he had been reading. My Sister and I being avid readers were fascinated by this concept. About half of the paintings were done on books one or the other of us had read. Mostly it was “Huh, that’s not how I pictured it, but it works”. It was fun to see how someone else saw the book in his minds eye. One the way home that evening we stopped by the B&N to look up some of the pages from books that we had not read. The whole exercise pointed out that once you have a picture in your mind of scene from a book, it becomes fixed. We now had the Artist’s view of the book in our heads.
The Hirshhorn also has a sculpture garden with several Rodan’s…much fun.
Now in other Modern art experiences. A positive one was when I was in Paris, and they had an exhibit of degenerate art that was banned by the NAZI’s. I liked most of it. I could see why they had banned it though. The painters were all guys that had been in the trenches during WWI and painted everything they saw or remembered in a nightmare-esque way. Very moving.
And remember…Modern art will always provide great comic relief.
Certainly there’s modern art that’s worth the viewing, though I remain hopelessly representational in my tastes, with a bit of romance and classicism thrown in. As I commented in the Tate Modern post, though:
Observation #1 — when the story behind the art, or the explanation of what it means, is more interesting than the art itself, that’s a problem.
Observation #2 — When art’s purpose is primarily to comment about art, it’s a very short slope to self-indulgent tripe.
I stand by those observations.
My images from the Tate Modern
* The grate on the floor in not art, but part of the building’s heating system. The thing on the wall that look like a heating fixture is not part of the building, but is art.
* My trip to the Tate Modern was greatly improved when I hooked up with Jackie and played the “name that art piece” game. My favorite – “I cleaned up the garage, now get off of my ass” installation piece.
It certainly made for great anecdotes …