Every so often I see someone commenting on a viral video of teenagers making fun of art that they believe could easily reproduce. Despite all the art features coming from different people, different cultures, and different eras because of its extreme nonrepresentational style it has been colloquially deemed “modern art”. You see the same conversations over and over again, making the art impressive and the talking points frustrating. Imagine decades later people are still talking about your work debating the ethics of the institutions surrounding it. A pettier part of me wants a thousand more color field paintings to be given a million dollars each, and a thousand more taped bananas to make the headlines for being sold for the cost of a house. I want entire rooms filled with white paintings to be in museums with cultural esteem in major cities all over the United States. Works from Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have been keeping art alive and fresh for successfully ragebaiting people decades after the artist has passed.
Despite the immense enjoyment I get from seeing people continue to fall for the same old tricks in the current day, I’m also eerily aware of how easy it is for large numbers of people to fall back on anti-intellectual talking points. And while the word has been overused and misused in recent times, I think there is a real threat of fascistic tendencies when art is reduced to visual aesthetics.
Fascistic beliefs such as ideas of a grand return, unchecked power structures, and the suppression of difference in exchange for societal unity and dominance sows its seeds in culture. Those who are swept up in its belief system are often manipulated by people who have much more power and influence that could benefit further from a fascist government. These are the people who are reacting to a world that they believe has fallen apart, desiring to take control of society within a party that they are ideologically aligned with. It is not illogical and the most devout soldiers do not see themselves as deliberately evil. To the fascist believer the suppression of difference alongside the safe previous structures of power is necessary for having a prosperous society.
Culture and fascism are intertwined, as a good society must push their finest on display. If the institutions that are supposed to represent the best of society showing things that are nonsensical, going against common sense and our “natural” intellect for aesthetics, how far have we fallen?
To the dissatisfied, a good society is reliable. Even if there are people at the bottom, it is assumed that the person participating in its system is exempt, and those who are at the bottom have the possibility of escaping by joining and conforming. The current world has failed after decades of promised innovations and concessions, where there is now a hunger for commonsense, with straightforward, no-nonsense thinking.
This line of thinking tends to hold relevance in the online world, everything is catered to the viewer’s comfort while also being completely stripped of context. All visual media is contextless, and non-representational art makes no attempt to make itself palatable or immediately comprehensible. The user is forced to reckon with a piece of art that gives itself no qualities to be immediately loved but somehow is priceless among institutions of immense cultural respect. When the viewer is forced to reckon with a space where participants are expected to derive meaning for themselves as well as have research into understanding the piece in front of them, the inconvenience is threatening and illogical. It doesn’t help that there are artists that do not try to hide the deep corruption of money laundering within the art world, but the sudden expectation of institutions to justify the art’s notoriety solely by visual means indicates the difficulty to develop future intellectual movements.
I genuinely believe that the people who reduce art to aestheticism do not have the attention span or capacity to derive or find meaning in art that is not immediately palatable to them. When someone reduces everything they encounter like it was made in a void without history or intention is living a pathetic life. The individual is perpetually confused despite not putting in the effort but still trying to assert their opinion like they should automatically be let into the club. This isn’t even beginning to touch on how capitalism's final goal is to generate surplus value from all aspects of life, including the cultural and personal. Reducing art to its visual qualities with no focus on its intellect creates a breeding ground for mindless recreation and automation with none of the effort or intention that can enhance the visual experience.
Trying to understand or even appreciate non-representational art is not even barred from everyday life. There are local art shows with tickets sold for cheap, there are plenty of art books that are sold in book stores, and even art books in the public library. There is nothing stopping the user from opening their phone and reading a wikipedia article on the artist, there is no law against someone asking a museum volunteer and engaging in conversation.
When I brought the subject up with a friend, she gave me her personal insight between art that has a double appeal for both being aesthetically appealing to a general audience while also having a deeper meaning that caters to the more knowledgeable in art. Extreme non-representational art seems to be solely catering itself to a niche audience, instead of trying to emulate or romanticize the real world and by extension captivating a larger population.
However when a larger population is exposed to “modern” art, a common critique is its supposed lack of skill. Those that degrade a Mondrian by asserting how easy it would be to recreate his work devalues themselves by assuming that they are unable to paint works like the Mona Lisa, it perpetuates the idea that advanced artistic skill is something that someone is naturally born with but not an instrument that is honed and perfected over time. Through social media it has become clear that artists time and time again are capable of recreating the Mona Lisa with ease. This criticism is further null when automation can recreate these pieces in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the cost. Both Mondrian and Da Vinci have taken a painstaking amount of time to reach their style, despite first impressions assuming that one artist puts more effort compared to the other. This isn’t even mentioning how artists like Mondrian and Rothko are the result of automation and the industrial revolution, creating conversations and debates of what art was, and what art could be.
Imagine if we reduced all relics of culture in the same way we reduce art. It’d be hilarious If I walked up to the Acropolis and immediately started judging it for its state of destruction, asserting that it should make its worth immediately apparent in a vacuum and rejecting historians attempting to explain its purpose and value through its history. Imagine if I judged the melodies of jazz for its experimental sound that challenges my tastes, or the lyrics of the Beatles for their avant-garde word use. The worst part about criticism against extreme non-representational art is that the people who critique it don’t even go to enough art museums to understand that this kind of art has its own museum for a reason. If you wanted to see fancy representational art of european portraiture and classical scenes there are historical houses and museums with that style, non-representational art isn’t forcing the viewer to like it but it is actively challenging the viewer to justify its praise; and despite its critics there is a substantial population that defends and seeks for that kind of art to be accessed.
If we lived in a society limited by representational art the culture would be horrifically stagnant. If we were left to be constrained by a vague idea of art and a popular aesthetic there would be no real reason to continue pursuing art. All art would be expected at the minimum and vaguely satisfying at best. I’ve spent my life in and out of countless art museums, and I can say despite being able to differentiate the mannerist from the baroque, nothing could compare to the mental revitalization that comes with artistic experimentation.
The worst part about discussing this is that I don’t even like all non-representational art! Anish Kapoor’s work is too large for me to fully appreciate, Jeff Koon’s intentional tackiness is visual gore, and there are some pieces of Jean Michael Basquiat that I find lacking in person. These are all simplified statements that don’t scratch the surface of my critique towards these artists, but I have been exposed to enough art to formulate an opinion and I have trust that my appreciation for Modern Art is well-rounded enough that I can express controversial opinions. A well versed disagreement is infinitely more respectable than a sweeping statement on the loss of aesthetic common sense for modern art museums.
This “unappealing” form of art, just like all other kinds of visual art, is an artifact of cultural conversation compressed into a single object. When you see Duchamp’s ready made sculptures you see a culmination of research, experimentation, ideology, and effort put into one object. And if those people find that unworthy of museum acclaim, then the same should not be applied to historical museum artifacts. What’s the difference between the Gwion Gwion Rock Paintings and Matisse’s Dance without context? To the critic against all forms of “modern” art, it feels as if they view it all within a contextless vacuum, watching how nonsensical objects and ideas are being celebrated in a powerful cultural institution. It reflects an equally nonsensical and indifferent universe to what should be making sense to them. If there is no emotion making itself obvious then there is nothing else to pull them in, there is no reason to engage despite no other efforts being made.
It was a single video of people posing by paintings they believed they could make that has sparked the old and trusted debate about why art like “that” should be featured in museums. And looking back on it, I think the video itself was a sham. I’m sure that there were hundreds of paintings and sculptures that the video creator deeply enjoyed and appreciated, but the video was framed in such a way that those who had seen could assume that it was all that museum had offered. I wonder if the creator showed the art they enjoyed, if there would still be comments of ridicule against their taste.
I remember being younger in the 2010s and stumbling upon a youtube video of a journalist discussing the controversy of all-white paintings in museums. In the end, he came to the conclusion that those paintings were featured and his work wasn't because of this common defense: “You could have made it, but you didn’t”– which is applicable for all “modern art” but I don’t even think that defense matters. In the end it isn’t about how insignificant or absurd something seems as it still holds profound historical or cultural relevance. It requires a kind of effort to go to a museum and it takes even more effort to try to understand and appreciate something that doesn’t ask for your appreciation in the first place. It takes no effort to glance at a blurry video frame and declare multiple intellectual movements as a lazy cash grab.