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Modern Art Is Rubbish

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06:49 / 03.09.02

I give up. I must just not be intelligent enough to understand modern art. God knows, I've tried. I've stared at it, tried to get inside the artist's head to approximate his state of mind or his emotions when slinging it together, tried to look at it on a purely evocative level. But I'm throwing the towel in. I just don't get it.

Went to the Tate at St Ives last week. Came out angry. £4.25 to get in, five galleries to see, out in about quarter of an hour. I just found this stuff offensive, I'm afraid.

Bits of perspex glued to pieces of wood. A load of kiln-fired clay arranged like a prehistoric landscape (that was actually quite good, but lacking some toy dinosaurs to liven it up), and a load of slate arranged in a semicircular pattern on the flat roof. Stick a bit of mortar on it and it would just be a patio.

I know it's a tired old cliche to sit down with your arms crossed and say: "I don't understand this shit. I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Give me a painting of that nice lady with the blue face any day," but that's how I feel right now.

What was especially galling was that most of the pieces in the Tate were given to the Inland Revenue "in lieu of income tax". That would be nice, wouldn't it? Maybe I shouldn't bother paying tax next year, just rattle off a few features and interviews as my "gift to the nation".

Still, fair play to the buggers. If you can con enough people into believing a bag of cow shit is art, then you deserve all the money you can fleece out of the rubes.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

07:20 / 03.09.02

That seems remarkably un-Revenue. How interesting. I must ask whether I can donate old manuscripts as part of my tax.

Did you check out the building itself? I always feel it would make a fantastic disco.

And do they still have the exhibition of paintings from the Operating Room? Those were pretty amazing, and well worth seeing. You have to remember that the Tate is seasonal, and that you're also in the heart of St. Ives, which fostered one of the most annoying abstract art schools, and which is still feuding with New York about who invented their particular brand of spattered canvas.

The Newlyn School, from around the corner, was noted for stunning landscap art, and I suppose the St. Ives thing was a rejection of that, at least in part. Check out Stanhope Forbes instead...

I don't suppose there's a Karl Weschke collection in the Tate? He's a marvellous painter, and he's from just around the corner. I'd put money on your liking his stuff - especially if there was a sequence.

With Modern Art in general, I do it at speed, and if something catches my eye, I stop. Otherwise, I'm gone.

The Natural Way

07:23 / 03.09.02

Sax, what's "modern art"?

Con men?

I'm sure the Sun and The Mail would agree with you.

Yr entitled not to like something, yr entitled to call a work bullshit, but yr generalising big time and that's not so good.

And why isn't this in the arty forum?

07:31 / 03.09.02

Of course I'm generalising, Runce, because this is partly a tongue-in-cheek Mail-style rant to express how I feel because I have no other way of expressing myself, being not very art-literate.

The reason it's not in the art forum, and I say this at the risk of raising the ire of other moderators, is because I wanted a more general response to the underlying question, which is: who decides that art is art? If I want to piss on a canvas, how do I get it in a gallery?

And Modern Art is my catch-all term for piss-on-a-canvas and bits of perspex.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:08 / 03.09.02

What about piss in persepex (David Serrano, take a bow).

It might help us a bit if we knew whose work you were struggling with at St. Ives. Maybe they were just shit...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:24 / 03.09.02

Tate St. Ives.

This is linked to the Creativity/cynicism discussion. Is art doomed to have theoretical underpinnings - "This mud is mud from Lake Victoria, steeped in blood, and I have made it into a teapot to symbolise western consumer greed"? - or can it be immanent again?

08:32 / 03.09.02

Ah, Nick got there first. If you poke about a bit on there you'll see some work by Richard Long, basically consisting of huge whitewashed walls on which were painted lists of places he'd been to on long walks around the British Isles, Nepal, etc. Now some of this was very poetic and had a strange kind of internal rhythm, and one in particular was a mass of seemingly-random emotive phrases, observations and place names, arranged in a circular/"flat globular" pattern. Now this is similar to stuff Kerouac did in his zen-Catholic phase, which I think is great. My "problem" with this was... I think it's "poetry", not "art". Am I too stuck in the mud with unnecessary labels? Does it matter if a poem is stuck on a wall and called art?

And then you've got this:

then you've got this

Which, if you stick a deckchair and a barbecue on it, is a very nice patio. Why is what my dad used to do called "building" and what Richard Long does "art"?

10:05 / 03.09.02

The next Tate Modern Director will be a Valencian named Vicent Todoli. In the last years he was Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal where he does a great work.
In a last interview I read, two weeks ago, about his work the journalist ask him what is the definition of art to him...and he in a simple way said "art is everything an artist says it is art"...
Of course the discussion around this answer can be very deep and even touch the ethics. But the work of art and the art in itself, during all the twenty century, change it's role. And it's painfull for most of the persons to accept it. Maybe what most of the persons try to look for in art didn't exist anymore...and maybe the art don't have the explicit and literal meaning it have several centuries ago or to be more accurate don't have the same role that have before the photograph invention...

(And of course there are dissemblers...but that is is another discussion)

11:16 / 03.09.02

"A load of kiln-fired clay arranged like a prehistoric landscape (that was actually quite good, but lacking some toy dinosaurs to liven it up)"

Still laughing at this. The Tate was shut when I was last in St Ives, well the cafe was open and to be honest I wanted to see the building - which is modern, and fantastic - and have coffee. A workmate of mine has a print from the Tate in St Ives on his wall, of a great painting that relatively modern - I don't particularly like a lot of what is popular (or well regarded) modern art (Tracey Emin's bed, Rachel Whitehead's house cast), but there's plenty that I do like, and I have found some galleries in Penwith that sell/show some marvellous stuff. Did you go to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden? I'd also say the Minack Theatre (although it's somewhat older than what you saw) is a major work of art, too.... just that the best stuff often isn't in galleries. Or, as has been suggested, wasn't there when you were.

And Sax - if you were in St Ives, why didn't you drop in on my mum and have a cup of tea? Hmm?

11:48 / 03.09.02

Modern art isn't especially my thing, either. But then my favorite books are 19th c & my favorite composer is Beethoven, so...

I still go to look at it, though.

Re: the art-value, or more pointedly, the money-value of such things... the more I talk to my bosses & the other artists at the studio, the more I think there are definitely two levels of game in art. I'm on level 1 here, where it's just me and my drawing and is it turning out right? Level 2, as it's being unveiled to me, is where something else is done to the art, and this isn't quite clear to me. It has something to do with investing the art with its value & I mean big-time value, like G. Richter can sell his paintings for *millions* of dollars and be shown in museums, to be seen by people who see paintings in museums. Sorry this isn't too clear... but it's like an extra finishing process at the end of the assembly line, and it's practically a craft in itself. Or it's like every piece of art is *two* pieces, sort of.

12:47 / 03.09.02

Sax:

"And then you've got this:

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/images/long_atlantic.gif

Which, if you stick a deckchair and a barbecue on it, is a very nice patio. Why is what my dad used to do called "building" and what Richard Long does "art"? "

Because your dad would have created it for practical reasons, ie to be used as a patio, and Long has created his to be used as art (to be looked at and/or inspire thoughts or ideas, which in this case might simply be "isn't slate lovely?").

A simple but not foolproof formula to use is that if someone has made something for no practical reason then it is probably art. If your dad built one of his patios and deliberately placed it in a context whereby it could only be looked at, then he could be said to have turned it into a work of art. On the other hand, if he contrived it so that it appealed to the eye as well as providing a sturdy surface for deck chairs, then it would be both building and art - ie craft.

I'm not a big fan of Richard Long, but I have to say that if I'd been told that his arrangement of slate were a patio I'd have to remark on it's loveliness.

13:42 / 03.09.02

Modern Life is Rubbish. Not Modern Art.

14:19 / 03.09.02

SFD - I think I did see your parents... but I thought they were an art installation called Shall we put another bar on the gas fire, dearie? And I didn't go to the Barbara Hepworth gallery, unfortunately. But I did go to the beach and have an ice cream.

Saveloy - fair point regarding "if it has a purpose it's functional and if it doesn't it's art". I think perhaps I'm either old-fashioned or just attracted to (even vaguely) representational art.

Persephone - Do you mean art only becomes art when someone deals in it? Or am I misunderstanding you slightly (not difficult - back at work and brain hurts).

Justin - Yes, I know. Did you see what I did there?

15:06 / 03.09.02

please ignore this post, it's an attempt to sort out a bizarre browser problem

We're The Great Old Ones Now

15:23 / 03.09.02

Ah, but is it art?

15:49 / 03.09.02

Well, that rather depends on whether Saveloy is using the statement to inform us of an actual situation he is embroiled in, vis-a-vis having browser problems, or whether the statement is a more other-contextual comment on the state of his life in general.

17:04 / 03.09.02

*looking at Saveloy's sentence with my head tilted and a finger on my chin*

My poor little half-baked idea wants to go back into the oven, Sax. What I'm getting at is, there's art and there's {art} & they could be in the same piece. But I do think that the first art (the kind that no one deals in) is still art, definitely. But the two arts aren't not interrelated, if you know what I mean. I'm not sure that I know what I mean...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

17:33 / 03.09.02

That's not half-baked at all.

By the way, this conversation is now found art.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

18:41 / 03.09.02

Some modern art I find utterly movies (like Dali and the like) because it gives me a new way of looking at the world. Duchamp's work is also something that I love because it gives me a new way of looking at the world, such as his painting of a pipe that says underneath "This is not a pipe" in French. The first time I saw it, I just laughed, and when people would say "I don't get it" I woudl have to tell them "It's not a pipe..." wait for them to say it is and then "It's a painting of a pipe."

Cubism didn't make any sense to me until I actually studied what it was supposed to be. I still don't LIKE it, but I understand it.

However, because art isn't being made for people any more and is instead made for art critics, art teachers and galleries, artists seem to want to deal more with the medium of what they are using than the outcome. To me, that's like making a movie about your movie camera and being upset that everyone isn't as thrilled as camera manufacturers.

Tryphena Absent

19:16 / 03.09.02

I don't think you're meant to like cubism, it's so ugly, I don't like surrealism either. I do, however, have a real thing for the Russian Avant Garde. I think it's absolutely beautiful.

19:25 / 03.09.02

I always thought there were two things that make up a piece of 'art':
the craftmanship behind it, and the inspiration that makes it unique or important to the artist.

Sadly the 'is it art?' translates to modern music, with hideously complicated pieces that rely on some bizarre pattern or meaning that really doesn't translate.

My brother and I went to the Tate's Picasso and Matisse exhibition a month ago. We weren't so impressed, definitely preferring craftmanship to inspiration too rarified for us to understand.

21:01 / 03.09.02

MAGRITTE

21:07 / 03.09.02

Duchamp's work is also something that I love because it gives me a new way of looking at the world, such as his painting of a pipe that says underneath "This is not a pipe" in French.

This is not Duchamp. This is Magritte.

Duchamp is the urinal guy.

06:10 / 04.09.02

Now the so-called "urinal" school of art I do like. Armitage Shanks and Twyford Downs being the leaders in the field, in my opinion.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

07:13 / 04.09.02

I don't think you're meant to like cubism, it's so ugly

I like cubism and I don't think it's ugly. Some of it is, and those aren't the ones I like. Obviously.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:33 / 04.09.02

I'm not sure modern art cannot be both ugly and good...Barney I find pretty ugly but also kinda good. Likewise "The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even", my favourite work of art about soup before Warhol got in and the action and ruined it for everyone.

10:28 / 04.09.02

That's not ugly!

Janina, I'm going to Russia in a couple of weeks, maybe I'll be able to check out some of the stuff you linked. Although I have to say that my admittedly cursory scanning of it left me with the phrase "sub-Cezanne" flitting through my head. That's not as much of a dis as it may sound.

As far as the Russians go, though, give me some icon painting and social realist propaganda any day.

10:31 / 04.09.02

oh, and I forgot to say: harmony, how can you think that Matisse and Picasso lack craftmanship? I felt a little sad when i read that.

12:12 / 04.09.02

Mc Lentil I do see that Matisse and Picasso were both extremely good technical artists. The point I was trying to make was that I felt what they were trying to communicate was buried beneath the style with which they executed their images.

12:43 / 04.09.02

Matisse and Picasso were both extremely good technical artists.

everyone can be extremely good techical ... just a matter of work...

The remaining is what really matters ... the technical by itself it's just an

crafts apprenticeship.

13:39 / 04.09.02

It's about soup?

The Return Of Rothkoid

13:46 / 04.09.02

It's all about soup.

13:59 / 04.09.02

everyone can be extremely good techical ... just a matter of work...

The most pernicious myth of punk rock and modern art alike.

14:04 / 04.09.02

Maybe soup can be a good analogy to art!!!

14:12 / 04.09.02

Because it rarely ever tastes like what it's meant to?

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