this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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The only pure art is made by children, adults are merely making a crude approximation of it. A scribble of a 2 year old is more a more profound expression of humanity than the entirety of modern art.
If that sounds stupid, it's because assigning meaning to art is stupid. Art is nice, art is pleasing, art can have meaning, but meaning doesn't make something art.
This was kind of a deliberate point made by early modern artists. Picasso was making beautifully realistic paintings as a teenager, and he, as an adult, (and others) deliberately painted with the perspective of a child.
I think you understand modern art more than you let yourself realize. There is an undertone of reaction against modern art that runs through our society and gets into our thoughts, beliefs, and ideologies that we’re not all consciously aware of. I had a similar perspective to you on it, then I started spending more time looking at art, thinking about art, and eventually creating art frankly as a way to stop getting into unproductive online arguments all the time. For me, developing an understanding of modern art and architecture led to an appreciation of it (obviously not all of it). I’m not saying you have to like it or even will like it, but I think you could come to an understanding of it if you tried (and I’m also not saying you have to try).
I mean I get it, I just don't like the commercialization and pretentiousness of a lot of it. Everything that we experience is art. From the vastness of the universe down to the smallest particles, all of existence is incredibly beautiful and mind-blowing. Your art as an expression of who you are is beautiful and valid, but saying "this incredibly financially successful 'art' that I'm having others crank out in my workshop is a statement on the absurdity of commercial art" isn't.
Banksy was super cool conceptually at first, it was basically a modern Western sand mandala. If you got a chance to see it and experience it then you were lucky but eventually it was going to be covered over. That's really cool and meaningful. Now there are thousands of framed Banksy pieces that rich people keep in their living rooms as shows and stores of wealth. That's meaningless, it's nothing. So much of modern art is J.K. Rowling coming in after the fact and saying "oh by the way Dumbledore is gay." The piece should speak for itself and so much modern art doesn't.
Edit: I thought about it a little bit and I was kind of hedging on the child thing, but that's pretty much how I actually feel. Expression of the artist's humanity is artistic but it's harder to actually accomplish, and a huge amount of popular modern art fails at that in my eyes.