animated marginalia

Mmmm...modern art, so tasty and gratuitous.

well, I think it's either interesting, a bit inaccessable, disturbing, or some mixture of all three.

can you give some examples of contemporary art?

Yeah - if contemporary just means it's being made during this decade, then I couldn't say, because it's too varied. If it's a style you're referring to, how else can you describe it?

"Contemporary art" will usually be defined as stuff made in the last decade or two...but the things that hit the high profile circuit. Pieces shown at the Whitney Biennial, at the Armory shows, pieces creating a stir, pieces that have challenged conceptions of taste, art, and ideology, etc.

We're talking Jeff Koon's pop art sculptures, Felix Gonzalez Torres' candy piles, Kiki Smith's disturbing sculptures, and Spencer Tunick's installations/living sculptures of thousands of naked volunteers. That kind of stuff.

(These links are PG-13 at best, so click with discretion.)

I'm not so much a fan of all this. If you look back at more classic art there was real talent. I couldn't paint that.. or sculpt that. Even if it wasn impressionism, and not, say, a rembrant or something. There was still real talent behind it.

This stuff is just crap. Its whoever can be the most outlandish or shocking. And it seems like the level of true "talent" required is minimal. I'm pretty sure I could take a picture of a dining room table, or a pile of candy. Maybe I'll but 100 #2 pencils and put them in a coffee mug, set it on my desk at work and take a photo from an odd angle and name it something sweet like "Reflections of graphite". I'll make millions.

I dunno, i find that pile of candy pretty sublime.
"Ideal weight 700 lbs" Genius.

Experimental art's all well and good; let's just not pretend that it has any merit...i mean necessarily has any merit. This stuff wouldn't annoy me except that i suspect people make money by doing this...and it's not considered comedy.

Typical complaint:
--I could have done that crap.

Lame response:
--But you didn't. The artist thought of it (signing a toilet, etc) first.

Gratifying conclusion:
--Novelty = great art. Let's go burn something...or take a dump on a sidewalk if that's been done to death.
I am daily confirmed an artist.

i don't know a whole lot about art, but i tooled around the modern art section of the met last week, and had to wonder what the story was behind the large canvases painted in only one or two colors. since i read your sip, elissa, i know that text does much of the explaining for such pieces. so i guess it's furstrating to me that the met and moma don't tend to provide a whole lot of explanation for the contemporary stuff, which would enable at least me to better enjoy what is happening in front of my face.

i guess the odd thing about contemporary art is that while some of it appears to be such that anyone could make it (see comments above), few can understand or appreciate it. that seems to be in many cases the opposite of the era where art was for mimetic/aesthetic purposes.

and if someone could just explain to my why i'm supposed to enjoy looking at art that is just shapes and lines, and no people or landscapes or animals or plants, i'd appreciate it. seeing circles and rectangles doesn't do a whole lot for me.

Thanks to everyone who responded; this is helpful. Obviously, answering your questions and objections is not going to happen in a five sentence blog comment. Oh well. A common thread, though, seems to be the disjunction between what you expect art to be (a display of talent, something beautiful, etc.) and what it appears to be (mindless crap). There *IS* a lot of bad contemporary art out there -- one liners, purposefully obtuse pieces, and so on -- but there's some great stuff, too, even the things that don't fit a traditional conception of "art." I think that two big parts of grappling with contemporary art is knowing (a) what to expect for function and (b) what questions to ask for interpretation and judgment. Really, a big cultural education initiative is needed; a stronger, educated, critical response from the public would probably result in better, thoughtful, honest art.

Anyway, I'll let you know when I have a book out ;)

Thanks, folks. I appreciate your honesty and questions!

Elissa,

As you know, I'm a big fan of contemporary art and when I finally got a chance to go to the MoMA a few months ago, it was a delightful experience. That said, I'm beginning to wonder if your conclusion is correct. I used to agree with the idea that what we need is a better public understanding of what modern art is and how to understand it. Recently, however, I've started wondering if it really is more of a failing of contemporary artists to create art that connects with ordinary people in a compelling way.

I'm really not sure where I come down on this, but I have started wondering. Isn't some of the best contemporary art fairly easily accessible? Is obscure art that takes a few semesters of art history and theory to understand really that great? It seems that contemporary art has removed itself from mainstream cultural conversation. There seems to be so much room for art to contribute to conversations our culture is having.

Anyway, just some early morning, pre-coffee ramblings...

jj, i appreciate that. i guess that as a historian-critic in the making, i tend to think more about what folks in my discipline need to do: educate. on the other hand, i do agree that a mutual effort by artists to abstain from the purposefully obscure would result in a better art scene over all.

i think there's a weird disjunction, though, between how folks today look at other visual "stuff" (advertisements in particular) and how they look at "art" in a museum. we tend to see ads associatively, looking for recognizable visual cues that connect with other images (not necessarily reality). when we look at "art," however, we continue to expect something mimetic, something that shows obvious "skill," or something self-explanatory. i mean, i do that. i have to consciously ask myself, "what images does this contemporary piece relate to? what can i connect this to or contrast this to?"

in that sense, artists today -- much more so than the abstractionists, minimalists, and other formalists of the 60's and 70's -- really do seem to be engaging in the cultural conversation. there's less reference to, say, Lacan, and more concern with race, politics, and gender. perhaps there is a movement back towards accessibility.

so, pretty much, everyone should work hard and meet in the middle. poof.

I'm late to the party here, but a quick interjection:

Novelty and accessability aside, it seems to me that the great attribute of contemporary art (really, anything from Picasso on, assuming we're talking painting) is ugliness. I don't necesarily mean that every modern artwork is aesthetically displeasing; simply that traditional forms of beauty (particularly the representative form, in which you were trying to make your work evoke pretty things in outside world) have been shattered and replaced by forms that intentionally supparate. This, I think, is why so many people claim to dislike art, or say they could do it themselves: they don't, actually, and they couldn't, but they don't want to admit the one thing that is true about "Woman Bather with Raised Arms" or "Puzzle Bottle." That one true thing is that the works are ugly. They may be daring, and endlessly fascinating, but they violate the aesthetic principles that delighted eyes for centuries, and most eyes don't see any good reason to change just because the art world tells them to. But no one says this, because it makes them sound like phillistines on the sidewalk, and no one likes being a troglodyte.

You can name me plenty of exceptions to this rule (so can I, having a soft spot for Chegall) but I think it holds true as a general concern.

I was in the Met the other day with a friend. We were sitting on a bench across from a series of canvases displaying a spectrum of colors. My friend pointed at the colors and said, "which is your favorite?" I was confused by the question, but my friend just shugged and said, "it seems as good a question as any."

It may be selfish, but the reason I like contemporary art is because it can be about me. It hasn't been hallowed by centuries of criticism, it's just there, waiting for any interpretation. Some people are asking for more explanations from the artists, but I prefer the minimal and the meaningless. Then I can ask myself the questions. "What is that shape in the corner?" "Why those two colors?" And I don't have to be bothered by stark answers.