I had a discussion about this recently

If art is defined as an expression of... something - an artist expression an emotion, a motif, anything - then... modern art like that fails.


A simple geometric shape, alone, has no context - no nothing. A black square? That says nothing about society, or beauty, or life, or anything...

Or three lines? Like, it looks like a design for a banner or something...


In general I hate any kind of art where you have to interpret everything out of the art-piece. I want to be able to understand what I'm looking at from the getgo - I don't want to have to listen to pretensious art critics who think that a black square is 3deep5me and that I'm some kind of pleb who doesn't understand sublime beauty... because honestly, i think people like that are simply fooling themselves


Still, modern art can be good:

http://thewowstyle.com/wp-content/u.....-Paintings.jpg - looks neat. You can tell what it is, but at the same time the style and whatnot doesn't conform to any of the classic methods or styles - its a nice scene

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/me.....art-making.jpg - not sure what the artist's message or intent with the thing is, but it looks neat

https://artbadshah.com/wp-content/u.....-x-18-inch.jpg - mixing hindu symbols with highly stylized forms.


and then you have shit like this: http://www.swarez.co.uk/wp-content/.....dern-art-5.jpg - this is trash in my opinion. Did the artist fill his/her butt with paint and then shit on the canvas? This is not art. Its noise. Put it on the wall in a hallway to add some colorful background noise.

^^^THIIIIIIIS

ya but the idea that you have to delude yourself and others into beleiving that a black square is somehow art... that is the most pretensions bullshit ever

You can do minimalist art that still somehow looks aesthetically pleasing if nothing else:

http://pre08.deviantart.net/8bff/th.....er-d656f0x.jpg

http://orig13.deviantart.net/1006/f.....er-d6788st.jpg

http://www.thegroundmag.com/wp-cont.....rrealism-2.jpg

http://wallpaperz.co/art/minimalism.....art-wallpaper/

http://articles.creativeallies.com/.....40-300x300.jpg - this one is kinda famous even


but this kinda stuff?

http://s3images.coroflot.com/user_f.....3jBiDM38Cx.jpg

https://img1.etsystatic.com/000/0/6......326368707.jpg

this is only suitable - IMO - as "background noise" to make a bland wall look a little less boring when you walk past it. Big companies, public buildings, do that all the time - but I will not call that art, unless given some damn good context for it. Like the last link: If I'm told via the title of the painting that its "The corporate maze" or "The mystery of women" then I could probably accept it... but that's what I meant by context before.

I hate the idea of having to inject my own interpretation on an art piece - because as an artist myself, I really dislike the idea of ignoring artist intent, but at the same time I would claim that with really minimalist abstract stuff then its damn near impossible to convey much of anything.

I don't really see the comparison

Post WW2 there was dadaism, where artists, poets and whatnot tried to produce art as divorced from reality as possible, because with war and nuclear bomb reality kinda sucked. That I can understand.

Hell, doing art to upset the established art world is a time honored tradition for new artists


...but again: a black square conveys nothing. When you present the story like you did, you gave it context though, to which end I can sort of understand it as a "fuck u russian art community, look at me wasting paint and canvas"

I just don't see how that in any way makes artists famous later on.

Now, around the 1860s to 1900s, there was a famous danish artist colony around the northern-most tip of denmark, where rebelous young danish artists came to rebel against the then established art schools: they dared to draw reality as is, not beautified like victorian styles, and drew people with their lovers and mistresses, instead of their husbands/wives - but damnit, you could still tell what they were drawing

and I really do not see the furry comparison. I am at least not aware of a cubist or surreal abstractionist movement among furries. Furries tend to prefer a specific mix of cartoony and anatomicall correctness, warrying from person to person. You can't really compare that to black squares. Oh I get the "trying to get noticed" but that's usually achieved more by consistent improvment and art production, rather than doing weird shit that people can't understand what is

One of the best pieces of modern art I ever saw was on display years ago in Milwaukee Museum. I dunno what it was called but it was hilarious and profound.

It was a section of floor simply taped off. A single, over-turned chair. And a small white oval. On this oval was projected from a little projected a man's face,
and he just sat there, looking about, and every now and then....he'd say something really ridiculous or depressing. Like "We're all going to die some day." or
"Having your molars pulled is extremely painful. The 'video' was hours and hours long so you'd have to be there a looong time to see a repeat. XD

it can contain very deep odors too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

"Manzoni's girlfriend Nanda Vigo, who helped him produce the cans..."

That is one dedicated girlfriend right there.

http://i.imgur.com/5OwwITU.jpg

"Art is what you can get away with," said an artist (read: salesman).

My personal 'favorite': Fountain, in which some dickbag finds a urinal in an alley, plonks it on a pedestal, and puts it on display.

Funny thing is that "Fountain" is actually a protest against this sort of art. It is literally a piece of art that says quite explicitly and with self-awareness "I could do this and you would still call it art, you pompous idiots"

You realize Fountain was a joke, right?

It was Duchamp making a grand joke about how artists could shit out anything, slap it with the "art" label, and people would still eat it up like it were the be-all-end-all of artistic expression. It was done against the stagnation of contemporary art, both modern and traditional, and its use of the same motifs over and over (modern taking Cubism, Impressionism, and Fauvism motifs; traditional taking Romantic and Baroque techniques) to the point where they had nothing new on the table.

I've seen this at art galleries. So much lack of variety. It literally is just like walking into a bathroom, looking at a urinal for five minutes, and walking out. That's how boring it is.

Duchamp takes this thought, literally takes a urinal, sends it to be exhibited at a show, and calls it art because, after all, it was produced by a well-known artist, so therefore it is art. Getting mad at Fountain is like getting mad at Tim & Eric because they rely on gross-out humor, too-loud sound effects, and deliberately-shitty editing - you're not really getting mad at the work, but at the state of repetition in the industry, both art (latch onto a motif and do it OVER AND OVER) and media (latch onto popular comedies and milk them OVER AND OVER; sleek editing that hides every single mistake; no concern for what the common man thinks; the overreliance on standards of beauty and celebrity).

Relying on that guy in the Prager University (I should tell you it's a right-wing university) video is like relying on Brad Jones (exploitation video maker who fires his friends for no good reason besides "they didn't do the thing I liked" and proceeds to smack-talk about them on the Channel Awesome forums; known for competely missing the point on why Malick has a non-narrative style and why Tim & Eric do the things they do) for legitimate critiques on Terrence Malick and Tim & Eric or relying on Doug Walker for any critiques on Matthew Broderick's acting technique. It doesn't work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60tYKEgrXIk&feature=youtu.be&t=23

I agree with him.

I think this sums the general hatred for modern art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN9iJCZ5Il8

tl;dw and personal thoughts: while I support all kinds of expressions as forms of art, I can't deny that it's baffling, if not upsetting when people achieve fame and recognition with no visible effort at all. A straight, black line on a white canvas is worth thousands of dollars and will be displayed in museums. It feels cheap and unfair to those that actually spend so much work and time on their trade.

When you see huge and high resolution images of someone's wrinkled, hairy asshole sell for tens of thousands...those conspiracy theorys that modern art is just a money laundering scheme seems to make a LOT of sense...

The thing about associating Rothko and Malevich with all of modern art - which has proven to showcase extremely technical works by Duane Hansen (photorealistic statues), Chuck Close (photorealistic paintings made on a grid system that take years to perfect), Damien Hirst (as much as I don't like YBA, the fact that he can procure all of these pricey things and exhibit them with the same abandon as somebody like Marcel Duchamp), Salvador Dalí and the Surrealists, the Duchamp brothers and Dadaism, and all of Impressionism (which that guy in the video smashed down since it led to statues of soldiers pissing) - is a really bad argument since it boils down modern art to minimalistic and conceptual works.

You know, Thomas Kinkade is technically a modern artist. And yet, his art feels as empty as, say, those paintings of Italian landscapes they sell at the antiques mall down the road. His paintings, while skilled to a T (this guy worked as a background painter on Ralph Bakshi and Walt Disney films), don't have anything to say. They don't elicit any reaction from the audience beyond "that painting looks pretty."

Whereas you take something as capital-U Ugly as "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" or "Guernica," you're going to feel an emotional reaction despite it looking more similar to the minimalist works of Bauhaus and De Stijl (well, they're more in vein with Cubism, but). Calling modern art bad devalues 100% of Picasso's work - even his technically-skilled work dealt with the same pessimism and isolation modern art does.

And I could sense that when I saw that video that the man has no value for performance art (probably sees it all as Interior Semiotics) or pieces like Judy Chicago's Dinner Party that are meant to be conceptual (but have little motifs that relate back to each culture she refers to at each spot of the table) but have strong partisan messages behind them. He looks at art as pure skill - which is sad, since there are great artists out there. He doesn't want to consider any punk-like movement to art as legitimate.

I'm sorry, but if we have pop and punk rock overshadowing prog-rock and modern classical (the ultimate in skill), then why do we have to make every artist paint like Jacques-Louis David just to legitimize them?

thanks for the response(s). art would be incredibly boring if technical skill was the only criterion for good art. getting sick of these youtube talking heads. seems like they want a world devoid of individuality. remember the last time a very powerful political leader felt the same way?! hahahahaa oh dear lord.

Honestly, when I first saw this video, I was wondering why this same university was defending free market economics, American Exceptionalism, and Islamophobic suspicions.

And then I realized that Comstock wasn't killed - he merely got his own monetized YouTube channel.