Why Modern Art is Absolute Crap

[Hym]

There is an abundance of very skilled artists in the world today. So many out there when you look for it. This is a fun thread because we see the absolute crap that has been made, sold and even exhibited in contrast with so much craftsmanship and imagination, like the pencil drawing and the time lapse video of the super-realistic drawing of the M&M's, both shown above. Like acting, unless it is in an ensemble, or music unless it is in a large band, art, unless it is created as a group endeavor, or is used to provide insight and inspiration, is fraught with the smell of self-absorption. For some of us it defeats the purpose of being in society of like minded souls. It's not a criticism, just a fact of life in the art world.

I would suggest having as much fun with the b.s. as possible. Come up with an idea, sell the product and make some money off of the idiots who pay so much just for the novelty of it all. It was tough wasting any of the time we could have used developing our skills, with so much to learn and then having to go thru watching and listening to such stupidity during my years at a credentialed art school.

Another big disconnect with me while at that school was the presence of a big stainless steel, cubist sculpture outside in the courtyard. That shiny instrument made some amazing tones when we'd hit it with our hands, a stick, anything. The dumbest thing about it was that we weren't allowed to play it, to make songs with it, to make a concert with the instrument we saw everyday! How did that ever make any sense? If I had made that piece of art I would have engraved a note or a poem on it that would demand it be played whenever people, especially art critics and teachers were in it's presence, with the threat of it being removed if the courtyard remained silent in it's presence.

Now, when I go to the closest city where art is it's main product I see some of the same junk I saw decades ago and it seems I'm still sifting thru it to find the craft, the insight and the inspiration, instead of having to write it all off as just enjoying another walk up and down Canyon Road. The last time I was there I spent my time trying to find the owner of this big lost dog, convincing a gallery owner to let me print pictures of it to post on telephone poles so that the owner, who had to live somewhere nearby, could reclaim that cool gift of a dog. . (The gallery owners who helped were cool, especially the lady who didn't hesitate to take the time to figure out how to transfer my pictures of the dog to the right file and then make such good color copies to post.) As usual I found no art but the one we find in communicating and sharing, giving a f###. I mention this because the first gallery owner I asked was a real, he don't give a sh## jerk whose employees couldn't, on his command, take the few minutes or spare the ink to help out that cool, monster of a dog. He reminded me of all the callous art world pricks I met as an art student.

Damn, Hym, you got some gripes going on here! Get it out Bro....Get it out of your system. We're here for ya.
And....?

I saw such a disconnect from humanity, within the new halls of the elitist art world, with it's sanctimonious self-absorption and pandering to the lowest common denominator, .....yes....I was repulsed by almost all of it. I left it for my sanity, my humanity.

I gave most of my art away and was turned off by the whole scene, the focus of this thread. I knew that I wouldn't have the patience or the income from my art to do it long enough to do it full time, even as I had some deeply developed skills in recreating the human form with my hands, using clay, paint, wood and metal. I never sold anything or even tried to, knowing that I would rather move on and try other skills out, which I have done in building, health research, linguistics, etc.....a lot like many I know.

Loving the intricacies of the body as art means it takes a lot of time to create something worthy of the effort, unless we are talking about clay, which is, in smaller pieces, quicker to create in. i also would bet clay is a medium that other master masseuses are good at. Never lost the craft or the creativity, which most don't. I see with time passed that I've developed more skills, may be some day to let them live in some more work that is accessible, tactile, interactive.

Artists want to be inspired by the works of those in their trade and amongst all of the professions involving such subjectivity of the buyer, the distributors and the gallery owners it is a tough world to make a living in, which accounts for how much poorly made art there is out there and the reason for so much copying, which is distinct from taking cues and insights from the works of others. Then again, the real art is there to be found if you look for it in the living, art that can be touched, sat on, climbed, played on.


Geez, I can see that this struck a chord or two or three in me. Well, thanks Doctor BMJ and All for allowing me some time on the couch!

[Ewan]

Well this started over a hundred years ago. From 1915. Interesting spiel by the Tate, (bolded below).

Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square

Philip Shaw
Kazimir Malevich 'Black Square' 1915
Kazimir Malevich
Black Square 1915


Time has not been kind to Kasimir Malevich’s painting, Black Square (fig.1). In 1915 when the work was first displayed the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving. In 1916 the artist, in a characteristically bold and provocative mood, declared the square to be the ‘face of the new art ... the first step of pure creation’.1 Malevich gave his ‘new art’ a name, suprematism, announcing a few years later that ‘To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling’.

True to these principles, Black Square is radically non-representational. The slab of black paint that dominates the canvas works as grand refusal, repudiating nature in favour of abstraction. As such, the painting may be read in terms of the Kantian theory of the sublime. Favouring flatness over depth, Black Square conveys, in the words of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ (1790), ‘the feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy’ in an estimation of ‘formlessness’ or ‘magnitude’.3 The experience of viewing the painting thus involves a feeling of pain brought about by the breakdown of representation followed by a powerful sense of relief, even elation, at the thought that the formless or massive can nevertheless be grasped as a mode of reason. In other words, the failure of the black square to represent this transcendent realm serves ‘negatively’ to exhibit the ‘higher’ faculty of reason, a faculty that exists independent of nature.
The Kantian theory does not, however, fully account for the significance of this work. Malevich himself regarded his minimalistic geometrical forms as the secular equivalents of Russian icons, a form of painting which aspires to present the divine as pure or unmediated reality. This idea is corroborated by a comment from the diary of the artist’s friend, Varvara Stepanova, dating from 1919: ‘If we look at the square without mystical faith, as if it were a real earthy fact, then what is it?’4 There is, however, another way to understand the sacred quality of Black Square. In the course of a comparison between Malevich’s square and the readymade art of his French contemporary Marcel Duchamp, the Lacanian theorist and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek makes the following observation:

The underlying notion of Duchamp’s elevation of an everyday common object into a work of art is that being a work of art is not an inherent property of the object. It is the artist himself who, by pre-empting the ... object and locating it in a certain place, makes it a work of art – being a work of art is not a question of ‘why’ but ‘where’.5
What Malevich’s painting does is ‘simply render – or isolate – this place as such, an empty place (or frame) with the proto-magic property of transforming any object that finds itself in its scope’, even a black square of pigment, ‘into a work of art’.6 Through its stark distinction between the void of creation (the white background/surface) and the material object (the dark, material stain of the square), Black Square thus ‘expresses the artistic endeavour at its most elementary’.7 As Žižek goes on to state, the feeling of the sublime is experienced in the tension between the empty or ‘Sacred Place’ and the material object – the artwork – that appears in this place.8
Malevich’s discovery of black abstraction is sustained in American art produced in the aftermath of the Second World War. In black paintings by Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko we see a related preoccupation with the fraught relations between darkness and perception, with the obfuscation of vision as a principle of sublime incomprehension.

Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies in the School of English at the University of Leicester and Co-Investigator of ‘The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language’.

Now I kind of think the bolded and underlined text are more true than not, but how can you artistically represent meaninglessness. Abstract Art apparently. He knew it was meaningless when he 'created' it.

[Isserley]

I came across this today and couldn't belive it.. my 3 year old would paint something better.
Anyway these paintings are by Cy Twombly, one of the most expensive contemporary artist.
His works have consistently achieved high auction prices, with all top ten sales surpassing $15 million since his death in 2011.






Welcome to the world where people are praised for minimal effort and true talent mostly goes unnoticed.
Its pitiful that people consider that to be art and actually pay to see it and the fools that purchase stuff like that.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

^^ The word 'garbage' is far too good for that.

I recently saw this from PJW, over the sale at Sotherby's of a banana taped to a wall that went for $6.2million!



But hang on a minute. Before you slap your forehead, consider a possible other angle to this, which several of Watson's alert commenter-base brought up. For quite some time, allegations have been bandied around that Modern Art was all a front; that these massive sales of what is essentially trash was cover for a prolific and highly-organised money-laundering scam, possibly linked to underworld sex trafficking.

Though allegations, and entirely without substance, it does make sense! And more sense than someone forking out 6million for an effing banana!

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kT_8TyB_5KE

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Here's a refreshing form of modern art that is actually worth the price of admission. This is an impressive creation, and I imagine quite spectacular to view close up. As a style, and a statement, I appreciate this, and I would genuinely call it "art".

Massimo
@Rainmaker1973
Artist Nicky Alice's multi dimensional art: the "Tesseract"
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1883389404233830836

[Isserley]

This is not really art, rather modern fashion show, but still disgusting enough to be presented on this thread.

Robert Wun Fall couture 2025

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qg7mpu8jtcE

[Michel Leclerc]

It has been known for some time already (at least since the Fluxus art movement and its radical critique of the "art" world) that the shift of the art capital from Paris to New York in the late 30s coincided with the U.S.Empire’s final move towards hegemony. Intelligent discourse on art in the educated world evaporated, massively capital was pumped into New York galleries and their art magazines with as central objective: to discourage socially committed and relevant art of which the artists in Latin America were representative – being associated with “the communists” and their “socialist realist” art works.

At first it did not go entirely as planned, because American artists themselves did not interpret or mean their work that way but rather as a protest against U.S. reality – in painting Pollock, De Kooning and other “lyrical abstraction” representatives – in music Cage and Carter, soon Feldman, in literature the beats. Only fifteen years later the destruction of artistic expression by pop music (equally occultly subsidised), drugs and sex for sex’ sake achieved the goal: the artist as (would be) billionaire, of whom Warhol became the example.

The populace, who had never understood the essence and the requirements of an artist’s calling in the first place, then added their excellent taste to finish the work – and now, in the aftermath, where genuine artists cannot pay the material with which they work any more, they complain, dance on torn canvases, destroy musical instruments and burn books. And crap on it.