Meaning is overrated. I visited the Metropolitan many years ago and stood before that painting by Pollack. It's large, impressive, it has a mesmerizing quality if you're open to seeing it as a singular work by an interesting artist and human being.
There is a photo that always chills me, and it is the picture from outside the Auschwitz camp in Poland. You see a single line of railroad track that goes straight through the tower of the outer building. Without context, this picture insignificant. Knowing what it is you are seeing and why it exists gives it a unique presence.
Meaning is something we treat like a sample tray that can passed around for every one to have their fill. Context is more personal, and I would say more relevant than meaning. Or, as Michel de Montaigne said: "What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you."
".....how many people if shown – say - Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring would think it a great work of art even if they didn’t know it was famous and valuable? And now ask yourself (hypothetically of course) how many would think that about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon if they’d somehow never seen – or even heard of - Cubism or any other type of abstract painting? And now ask yourself if you would know that Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow - is a great work of art if no one had ever told you so?" https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
Explain what Beethoven's 7th Symphony "means." Some things don't have a single concrete meaning that can be easily conveyed in words. Indeed, the whole purpose of some art is that it is trying to convey something that is abstract.
That's not to say that all modern or contemporary art is good, or that there are no hack artists. And that's not to say that you have to enjoy Jackson Pollock or any other particular artist. There's far more artistic endeavors than one person could ever enjoy in their entire lifetime - I love Pollock's work, but if you don't, just shrug and move on, I'm sure you'll find something you love soon enough. But I hope that everyone finds something at some point in their life (be it painting or sculpture or music) that they find both beautiful and ineffable.
Let me explain something here that seems to have gone unmentioned but is crucial to understanding the point here. Prior to the invention of photography, art served a very non/trivial function in our society: it actually showed what things looked like. If I was in Amsterdam in 1685 and wanted to know what it looked like inside a cafe in Paris, the only way would be to look at a painting someone did. Therefore it made sense for paintings to look as realistic as possible, that’s what people wanted/needed.
Eventually as time went on and society got richer there were so many paintings of Paris that artists had to differentiate themselves so they needed to convey things like movement, effects of light, and change in their work in order to differentiate themselves (impressionism). Think Claude Monet paintings. This coincided with the invention of photography, and within a few decades the idea of art as serving the purpose of showing what something looks like was more or less dead.
So fast forward to the early 20th century, photography is everywhere, if I want to see what the Russo-Japanese war looks like, the newspapers are printing up actual photographs from it. Why would any artist paint a scene from the war when they can take literal pictures for an even better result? At the same time you have literal moving pictures developing so conveying movement in your painting is also becoming obsolete. So what is the role of art?
At this point art became purely about “expressing” things, expressing the purely subjective human experience in ways that can’t be captured in a photograph. So you had artists like Picasso (who culturecritic and his fans often talk shit on) who were aiming for maximum emotional impact above all else. That’s where you get works like Guernica and the like. Would that work have any impact whatsoever if he just painted a literal scene of the nazi bombing campaign in Spain? Obviously not.
Eventually, artists started experimenting with the process of painting and creating the art itself. This is where Jackson Pollack and the abstract expressionists come in. Whether this is your cup of tea or not, it represents a real evolution in role art and artists play in our society. Within the context it was created, Jackson Pollack paintings make perfect sense.
I’m all for making public art more beautiful and uplifting, but culture critic’s ideas about art are pure midwittery.
I'm reminded of the special case of courtroom illustrations, where photography (in the US at least) is prohibited but we still want to know what's going on in a visual sense. Thus, rapidly produced semi-realistic illustrations of people sitting or standing in court rooms.
The Cultural Tutor (I think his handle is culturaltutor) is the only account of that sort that I follow. Even when he does not necessarily like something he still tries to make a case for the greatness of the art pieces, or at least the appeal of said art pieces. Regardless, I think that, in art, much of the "meaning" comes from the observer. Sometimes you discover more about yourself than the piece itself.
Edit: I remember once the Cultural Tutor talking about brutalism, and he said something on the lines of "well, these things really aren't too nice to the eye, but take a look at what they can also do inside the same art genre", showing beautiful brutalist modern architecture.
You are looking for more logical consistency than a discussion about art can support.
Culture Critic is not asking his question in good faith. He is well known to prefer traditional work. There is nothing wrong with that preference. There may be something wrong with his categorical denigration of gestural abstraction. If he would, he should answer the question of whether any example of gestural abstraction is better than any other example. If his answer is no, that it's all just flung paint and none of it means anything, then he is not qualified to make judgments about it. Those of us who enjoy abstract painting and appreciate the stakes involved have judgments about it possibly worth considering.
For better or worse, history stopped supporting the creation of traditionally-styled art in the way that it had in prior centuries. Such making is still possible, but doing so does not mean the same things as it did at the time of Bernini, to pick someone. The artists were more conscious of this than anyone, and they changed what they were doing, which is why Marini did not sculpt like Bernini. The inability to appreciate that may not be "midwit" - that's too grumpy - but it's not terribly nuanced either. "Trad" artistic virtues don't guarantee anything except traditional-looking results, and there's a great pile of mediocre work that fulfilled that mission to look a particular way.
Art critic hat off, artist hat on - I don't take my work seriously in the sense that it might save lives or change the world, I take it seriously in that the problems of art-making are interesting and worth addressing with intelligence and vitality.
To your point #1, almost all people form their views of the human condition not relative to the long sweep of history but relative to recent generations' expectations. The extraordinary period of relative (at least in the West) peace and progress in the decades leading up to the First World War raised expectations which the subsequent few decades then cruelly knocked down.
1. This painting is corny. It's the kind of painting your mom likes. It's safe, familiar, anodyne, mainstream, the kind of painting you would encounter as bland, generically tasteful decoration in a boring rich person's house, or on an NPR tote bag. It's like Waterlilies, The Mona Lisa, or Washington Crossing the Delaware. A total snooze.
2. This painting is an experiment in image-making, perception, and interpretation. What are paintings? What can they do? Paintings, no matter how realistic or representational, are also recordings of physical gestures as they intersect with the 2D plane of the canvas and the chemical properties of paint. In the most powerful paintings the image exists in the tension between the gesture and the thing-being-pictured. What happens if we push that tension all the way, until the thing-being-pictured is the gesture, and the paint, and the canvas, themselves. Could painting become a kind of dance?
3. This painting is a fuck you to conservative artworld expectations. Painting is not a well-behaved poodle performing the same old tricks for boorish collectors, sclerotic curators, or crypto-fascist social media influencers. You can't tell me what to do. You can't make me submit to your paint-by-numbers preconceptions, to make something nice, to make something pretty, to make something whose meaning is obvious and easily understood. I will piss in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace. And a hundred years later they will still be talking about me, arguing about this painting, because this is what art needs to escape your zombie clutches and stay alive.
4. This painting is about the 20th century revolution in physics. First Einstein showed us that our deeply-held intuitions about space and time, the ones that linear perspective had made fundamental to our techniques for generating pictorial space, were only clumsy surface-level approximations, and that the truth was something far stranger, far more difficult to imagine or understand. And then quantum mechanics told us that even Einstein's crazy picture was far too sane, that the world was actually a differential equation over an array of complex numbers. In his own way, intentionally or not, Pollock was wrestling with these profoundly destabilizing transformations to our collective understanding of the universe. And finding something beautiful in them.
5. This painting is about the 20th century revolution in the foundations of logic and math. Like Gödel, Pollock turned the machinery of painting in on itself, to determine the limits of what could be shown, what could said, what could be known, and what could meant.
6. This painting, and its surprising success, is part of a secret CIA operation to boost the status of abstract expressionism, and American art in general, as part of a clandestine propaganda campaign to offset Europe's cultural influence during the cold war.
7. This is a painting of Charlie Parker. An attempt to translate the fabulous, messy, aliveness of bebop into color, and movement, and shape.
8. Pollock was a misogynistic asshole, and this painting is more of his macho bullshit.
9. Paintings are not jpegs. Paintings are objects on walls. You walk into rooms and look at paintings and move between them and most of them are perfectly pleasant but leave you cold. And occasionally one reaches out and catches you and makes you stop and makes you vibrate and makes you aware of the air in your lungs and your feet on the floor and that your eyes are things and your brain is a thing, a thing that vibrates. And then, eventually, you find yourself back in the room, and you look around, almost embarrassed, and you look back and the magic trick isn't happening anymore, or maybe it still is, or maybe it's just a trickle, and you don't want to have to make it happen, you want it just happen, you want it seize you, like it did before. This particular painting probably doesn't do that for you, most paintings won't. But some will, and discovering which ones do is one of the most meaningful activities a human can pursue.
The shock of the two world wars isn't about the human condition, it's about the effects of industrialisation on humanity. The world had seen many bloody wars before 1914, but nothing like the apocalyptic shelling at Passchendaele. The world had seen genocide before 1941, but nothing even approaching the Fordist assembly lines of murder at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Human beings as individual organisms haven't changed much in millennia, but the conditions in which we live have been transformed beyond recognition over the past two centuries. An old master painting was made by a human very much like you or I, but a human who lived in a world that is totally alien to ours. In the 20th century, sentimental and heroic scenes became the stuff of "socialist realism" - works intended to obscure rather than reflect human nature.
The chaos in Pollock's paintings isn't a moral judgement on the net benefits or harms of modernity, it's a depiction of a chaotic world, or at least a world that *feels* much more chaotic for the alienated individuals living within it. It was wholly rational for a 17th century painter to depict a king or a general as a heroic and powerful figure, but it would be wholly irrational in a world where market forces and technological changes make a mockery of any attempts to guide or shape human progress. The things we rightfully celebrate about capitalism - the ability of a student with a brilliant idea to become richer than Croesus overnight, the Darwinian ruthlessness of the market in establishing new and better norms - cannot possibly coexist with the values and aesthetics of pre-modern art.
A great deal of contemporary art is complete garbage, but that's only half the fault of vacuous postmodern buffoons. The other half of the blame lies with conservatives and classical liberals, who have withdrawn en masse from seriously engaging with the arts. That retreat (and the continuing unwillingness to stage a counter-offensive) has profound and ongoing effects that spill out from culture into all aspects of our lives.
The great philosopher Michel Foucault explained that the actual, though unarticulated, goal of modern art has become the destruction of everything which art has been thought to be. Its
fundamental characteristic is a rather shrill militancy, an irascibility - as perfectly dramatized in the twitter dialogues above cited by Bryan.
Abstract art is good at demonstrating various principles of art in isolation. A classical painting will demonstrate many principles at once: color, composition, form, lines, anatomy, lighting, perspective, etc. But an abstract painting can choose to demonstrate only a subset of these, which is not only interesting to look at (a bit like the appeal of haiku), but is also a useful educational tool for artists who are studying them. Any remotely competent artist or art critic can tell the difference between a 6 year old splashing paint onto a canvas and the work of Jackson Pollock, but that also doesn't (necessarily) mean that his reputation is all that well deserved. Some principles of art are much easier than others to master, I do think its plausible that a 6 year old who is taught for a couple months could produce something similar, but the same cannot be said for classical art.
Meaning is overrated. I visited the Metropolitan many years ago and stood before that painting by Pollack. It's large, impressive, it has a mesmerizing quality if you're open to seeing it as a singular work by an interesting artist and human being.
There is a photo that always chills me, and it is the picture from outside the Auschwitz camp in Poland. You see a single line of railroad track that goes straight through the tower of the outer building. Without context, this picture insignificant. Knowing what it is you are seeing and why it exists gives it a unique presence.
Meaning is something we treat like a sample tray that can passed around for every one to have their fill. Context is more personal, and I would say more relevant than meaning. Or, as Michel de Montaigne said: "What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you."
".....how many people if shown – say - Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring would think it a great work of art even if they didn’t know it was famous and valuable? And now ask yourself (hypothetically of course) how many would think that about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon if they’d somehow never seen – or even heard of - Cubism or any other type of abstract painting? And now ask yourself if you would know that Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow - is a great work of art if no one had ever told you so?" https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/deconstructing-deconstructivism
Art doesn't have to have meaning. Sometimes, it's just pretty to look at.
True enough, but both attributes are in the eye of the beholder.
I just replied, but in the wrong box.
Explain what Beethoven's 7th Symphony "means." Some things don't have a single concrete meaning that can be easily conveyed in words. Indeed, the whole purpose of some art is that it is trying to convey something that is abstract.
That's not to say that all modern or contemporary art is good, or that there are no hack artists. And that's not to say that you have to enjoy Jackson Pollock or any other particular artist. There's far more artistic endeavors than one person could ever enjoy in their entire lifetime - I love Pollock's work, but if you don't, just shrug and move on, I'm sure you'll find something you love soon enough. But I hope that everyone finds something at some point in their life (be it painting or sculpture or music) that they find both beautiful and ineffable.
Let me explain something here that seems to have gone unmentioned but is crucial to understanding the point here. Prior to the invention of photography, art served a very non/trivial function in our society: it actually showed what things looked like. If I was in Amsterdam in 1685 and wanted to know what it looked like inside a cafe in Paris, the only way would be to look at a painting someone did. Therefore it made sense for paintings to look as realistic as possible, that’s what people wanted/needed.
Eventually as time went on and society got richer there were so many paintings of Paris that artists had to differentiate themselves so they needed to convey things like movement, effects of light, and change in their work in order to differentiate themselves (impressionism). Think Claude Monet paintings. This coincided with the invention of photography, and within a few decades the idea of art as serving the purpose of showing what something looks like was more or less dead.
So fast forward to the early 20th century, photography is everywhere, if I want to see what the Russo-Japanese war looks like, the newspapers are printing up actual photographs from it. Why would any artist paint a scene from the war when they can take literal pictures for an even better result? At the same time you have literal moving pictures developing so conveying movement in your painting is also becoming obsolete. So what is the role of art?
At this point art became purely about “expressing” things, expressing the purely subjective human experience in ways that can’t be captured in a photograph. So you had artists like Picasso (who culturecritic and his fans often talk shit on) who were aiming for maximum emotional impact above all else. That’s where you get works like Guernica and the like. Would that work have any impact whatsoever if he just painted a literal scene of the nazi bombing campaign in Spain? Obviously not.
Eventually, artists started experimenting with the process of painting and creating the art itself. This is where Jackson Pollack and the abstract expressionists come in. Whether this is your cup of tea or not, it represents a real evolution in role art and artists play in our society. Within the context it was created, Jackson Pollack paintings make perfect sense.
I’m all for making public art more beautiful and uplifting, but culture critic’s ideas about art are pure midwittery.
I'm reminded of the special case of courtroom illustrations, where photography (in the US at least) is prohibited but we still want to know what's going on in a visual sense. Thus, rapidly produced semi-realistic illustrations of people sitting or standing in court rooms.
The Cultural Tutor (I think his handle is culturaltutor) is the only account of that sort that I follow. Even when he does not necessarily like something he still tries to make a case for the greatness of the art pieces, or at least the appeal of said art pieces. Regardless, I think that, in art, much of the "meaning" comes from the observer. Sometimes you discover more about yourself than the piece itself.
Edit: I remember once the Cultural Tutor talking about brutalism, and he said something on the lines of "well, these things really aren't too nice to the eye, but take a look at what they can also do inside the same art genre", showing beautiful brutalist modern architecture.
You are looking for more logical consistency than a discussion about art can support.
Culture Critic is not asking his question in good faith. He is well known to prefer traditional work. There is nothing wrong with that preference. There may be something wrong with his categorical denigration of gestural abstraction. If he would, he should answer the question of whether any example of gestural abstraction is better than any other example. If his answer is no, that it's all just flung paint and none of it means anything, then he is not qualified to make judgments about it. Those of us who enjoy abstract painting and appreciate the stakes involved have judgments about it possibly worth considering.
For better or worse, history stopped supporting the creation of traditionally-styled art in the way that it had in prior centuries. Such making is still possible, but doing so does not mean the same things as it did at the time of Bernini, to pick someone. The artists were more conscious of this than anyone, and they changed what they were doing, which is why Marini did not sculpt like Bernini. The inability to appreciate that may not be "midwit" - that's too grumpy - but it's not terribly nuanced either. "Trad" artistic virtues don't guarantee anything except traditional-looking results, and there's a great pile of mediocre work that fulfilled that mission to look a particular way.
Art critic hat off, artist hat on - I don't take my work seriously in the sense that it might save lives or change the world, I take it seriously in that the problems of art-making are interesting and worth addressing with intelligence and vitality.
To your point #1, almost all people form their views of the human condition not relative to the long sweep of history but relative to recent generations' expectations. The extraordinary period of relative (at least in the West) peace and progress in the decades leading up to the First World War raised expectations which the subsequent few decades then cruelly knocked down.
Weren't you taking a break from social media.
> Explain what this painting means.
1. This painting is corny. It's the kind of painting your mom likes. It's safe, familiar, anodyne, mainstream, the kind of painting you would encounter as bland, generically tasteful decoration in a boring rich person's house, or on an NPR tote bag. It's like Waterlilies, The Mona Lisa, or Washington Crossing the Delaware. A total snooze.
2. This painting is an experiment in image-making, perception, and interpretation. What are paintings? What can they do? Paintings, no matter how realistic or representational, are also recordings of physical gestures as they intersect with the 2D plane of the canvas and the chemical properties of paint. In the most powerful paintings the image exists in the tension between the gesture and the thing-being-pictured. What happens if we push that tension all the way, until the thing-being-pictured is the gesture, and the paint, and the canvas, themselves. Could painting become a kind of dance?
3. This painting is a fuck you to conservative artworld expectations. Painting is not a well-behaved poodle performing the same old tricks for boorish collectors, sclerotic curators, or crypto-fascist social media influencers. You can't tell me what to do. You can't make me submit to your paint-by-numbers preconceptions, to make something nice, to make something pretty, to make something whose meaning is obvious and easily understood. I will piss in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace. And a hundred years later they will still be talking about me, arguing about this painting, because this is what art needs to escape your zombie clutches and stay alive.
4. This painting is about the 20th century revolution in physics. First Einstein showed us that our deeply-held intuitions about space and time, the ones that linear perspective had made fundamental to our techniques for generating pictorial space, were only clumsy surface-level approximations, and that the truth was something far stranger, far more difficult to imagine or understand. And then quantum mechanics told us that even Einstein's crazy picture was far too sane, that the world was actually a differential equation over an array of complex numbers. In his own way, intentionally or not, Pollock was wrestling with these profoundly destabilizing transformations to our collective understanding of the universe. And finding something beautiful in them.
5. This painting is about the 20th century revolution in the foundations of logic and math. Like Gödel, Pollock turned the machinery of painting in on itself, to determine the limits of what could be shown, what could said, what could be known, and what could meant.
6. This painting, and its surprising success, is part of a secret CIA operation to boost the status of abstract expressionism, and American art in general, as part of a clandestine propaganda campaign to offset Europe's cultural influence during the cold war.
7. This is a painting of Charlie Parker. An attempt to translate the fabulous, messy, aliveness of bebop into color, and movement, and shape.
8. Pollock was a misogynistic asshole, and this painting is more of his macho bullshit.
9. Paintings are not jpegs. Paintings are objects on walls. You walk into rooms and look at paintings and move between them and most of them are perfectly pleasant but leave you cold. And occasionally one reaches out and catches you and makes you stop and makes you vibrate and makes you aware of the air in your lungs and your feet on the floor and that your eyes are things and your brain is a thing, a thing that vibrates. And then, eventually, you find yourself back in the room, and you look around, almost embarrassed, and you look back and the magic trick isn't happening anymore, or maybe it still is, or maybe it's just a trickle, and you don't want to have to make it happen, you want it just happen, you want it seize you, like it did before. This particular painting probably doesn't do that for you, most paintings won't. But some will, and discovering which ones do is one of the most meaningful activities a human can pursue.
10. This painting means nothing to me.
modern art is dogshit
I think every art piece has a subject?
And to me it seems like that painting is about the inhuman and the newfound chaos of technology and science.
It makes me think of particle physics, of cells, molecules, of gases and atoms.
Its a painting that attempts to visualize the abstract, the things we could never see ourselves and can now through machines.
In retrospect the first steps towards digital graphics.
The shock of the two world wars isn't about the human condition, it's about the effects of industrialisation on humanity. The world had seen many bloody wars before 1914, but nothing like the apocalyptic shelling at Passchendaele. The world had seen genocide before 1941, but nothing even approaching the Fordist assembly lines of murder at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Human beings as individual organisms haven't changed much in millennia, but the conditions in which we live have been transformed beyond recognition over the past two centuries. An old master painting was made by a human very much like you or I, but a human who lived in a world that is totally alien to ours. In the 20th century, sentimental and heroic scenes became the stuff of "socialist realism" - works intended to obscure rather than reflect human nature.
The chaos in Pollock's paintings isn't a moral judgement on the net benefits or harms of modernity, it's a depiction of a chaotic world, or at least a world that *feels* much more chaotic for the alienated individuals living within it. It was wholly rational for a 17th century painter to depict a king or a general as a heroic and powerful figure, but it would be wholly irrational in a world where market forces and technological changes make a mockery of any attempts to guide or shape human progress. The things we rightfully celebrate about capitalism - the ability of a student with a brilliant idea to become richer than Croesus overnight, the Darwinian ruthlessness of the market in establishing new and better norms - cannot possibly coexist with the values and aesthetics of pre-modern art.
A great deal of contemporary art is complete garbage, but that's only half the fault of vacuous postmodern buffoons. The other half of the blame lies with conservatives and classical liberals, who have withdrawn en masse from seriously engaging with the arts. That retreat (and the continuing unwillingness to stage a counter-offensive) has profound and ongoing effects that spill out from culture into all aspects of our lives.
The great philosopher Michel Foucault explained that the actual, though unarticulated, goal of modern art has become the destruction of everything which art has been thought to be. Its
fundamental characteristic is a rather shrill militancy, an irascibility - as perfectly dramatized in the twitter dialogues above cited by Bryan.
1950? No, I'm pretty sure that was the painting created in the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski.
I agree personally about brutalism, but it's a classic example of "eye of the beholder": https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/06/brutalism-architecture.
Abstract art is good at demonstrating various principles of art in isolation. A classical painting will demonstrate many principles at once: color, composition, form, lines, anatomy, lighting, perspective, etc. But an abstract painting can choose to demonstrate only a subset of these, which is not only interesting to look at (a bit like the appeal of haiku), but is also a useful educational tool for artists who are studying them. Any remotely competent artist or art critic can tell the difference between a 6 year old splashing paint onto a canvas and the work of Jackson Pollock, but that also doesn't (necessarily) mean that his reputation is all that well deserved. Some principles of art are much easier than others to master, I do think its plausible that a 6 year old who is taught for a couple months could produce something similar, but the same cannot be said for classical art.