Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Do opera-lovers dress up, fight traffic and pay seriously high ticket prices to hear singers of the calibre found in the average locker room shower stall?

Of course not.

Would fans of Olympic figure skating competitions tolerate a performer doing nothing but circle the rink like teenagers at the Rockefeller Center ice rink?

Never.

What about art museum-goers -- do you think they would plunk down the better part of 20 bucks and jostle the crowd to gaze at the works of somebody who can't convincingly paint a human face?

Uh. Um. Well, it seems that they actually do.

So the question before the 2Blowhards readership today is Why is lack of skill tolerated in the graphic arts, but seldom elsewhere in the arts realm?

Okay, okay. There are exceptions. The main example that comes to my mind is that, for decades, pop music singers have been allowed by their audiences to possess average (or worse!) singing voices. That's provided said voice was distinctive or that it conveyed emotional overtones listeners found enjoyable.

Nevertheless, in general, rare skill tends to be rewarded in the arts: think instrumental soloists, ballet dancers, actors, and so forth. People are seldom willing to go out of their way to witness things that they themselves can do or surpass.

Maybe that's why I tend to be impressed by representational painters who have superb technical skills. But I'll admit that technical skill isn't everything when it comes to graphic arts. An outstanding artist will deliver more than a technically excellent, yet lifeless, image. A great artist needs to "set his stage" compellingly and create an emotional aura to his painting if it is to be recognized as great.

Wait!! you say: back up a bit. That opera singer can be seen as being just a puppet of the composer and director -- those are the folks who do the heavy creative lifting. And semi-ditto for a Heifetz or a Yo-Yo Ma and their ilk: although they have some interpretive elbow-room, they remain subservient to composer's creativity. The ballet dancer is a tool of the composer and choreographer. The creator of the work is king, in other words.

I don't think so. For example, the composer's work exists only in his mind and on paper until it is performed. And if the performance sounds lousy, it doesn't matter how great the composition is. So composed music is really an unavoidable partnership between performer(s) and whoever writes the music and (if singing is involved) words. A sculptor might have to rely on technicians to help realize the final object. But painters are responsible for the whole shot; besides coming up with the concept, they necessarily do the execution. (Yes, in the classical studio system, the master had students and assistants. But that's seldom the case today, and it doesn't affect the discussion.)

Some will argue that innovation in art is important -- perhaps the most important thing. I disagree. If a great artist plies his trade and stumbles onto something that others perceive as innovative, well that's fine by me. But I place more stock in a great artist making lots of great paintings, innovative or not.

And some will contend that creating a good abstract or surrealist or conceptual or ironic painting requires a good deal of skill. I agree that some skill is usually present if a good painting results.

However, I contend that the highest skill in painting is the ability to create a convincing human likeness without resorting to tracing a photograph or other mechanical tricks. We humans are highly experienced at looking at other humans, so a sub-par painted image can be fairly easy to detect. Picasso was not top-notch when painting people, and this is one of the reasons I don't consider him a great artist: his greatest skill was in public relations.

Highly skilled landscape and still-life painters can be regarded as great artists provided that they can give that extra spark that brings the scene to life. Because we are familiar with the outdoor world and the objects commonly used in still lifes, we have the capability of verifying how visually (and emotionally) true such works are.

Abstract and other art derived from or influenced by Modernism is difficult for us to independently evaluate; in many cases, all we have before us to deal with are color and design. Perhaps that is why the art-viewing and art-buying public has a tendency to rely on "experts" to validate the "quality" of the art they are contemplating.

I suspect that the uncertainty / reliance factor is something the current Establishment treasures because it gives them power. And that power would be lost if normally-intelligent people could judge art for themselves as they can opera singing, piano playing and so forth.

Later,

Donald

Indeed, "for decades, pop music singers have been allowed by their audiences to possess average (or worse!) singing voices". I wonder who got away with it first. Certainly not Bob Dylan, though he's the most obvious living example. Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams (Senior, of course) were singing unsweetly way back in the '40s and even (I think) the late '30s (I'm too lazy to look up the exact dates). On the womens' side, Kitty Wells (still around, last I heard) came along in the early '50s.

Posted by: Dr. Weevil on August 24, 2007 12:46 AM

Your way of viewing art as an athletic event continues to baffle.

Posted by: BP on August 24, 2007 1:34 AM

My definition of art: the physical expression of an artist's sensibility. What is the function of art: to entertain. My favorite artist: Yves Tanguy. Another: Edward Hopper.

Norman Rocwell is a more skillfull artists than Hopper if you only consider the exactness of realistic technique, but I find Hopper's art to be far more entertaining.

Pat Boone has a "better" voice than Hank Williams, but Williams is far more affecting to me.

Posted by: Peter L. Winkler on August 24, 2007 1:42 AM

One possible explanation:

Gombrich, E.H., The preference for the primitive

Posted by: ortega on August 24, 2007 4:25 AM

The creative arts are no different from any other discipline in that most people will enter and leave their occupations unheralded and unknown. Some, on the other hand, will become great at what they do and it will, and should, have very little to do with technical proficiency.

Many, many people take art classes and become technically very skillful, but only one can become Picasso (no doubt you are unfamiliar with his ability to render an almost photographic likeness at the age of subjects by the age of 13). In the same way, many people are taught to play the piano, and that is all they will ever do, they will not write music for the piano that will break hearts over centuries later. Many people will be taught to play guitar, but they will never play like Sabicas or write and play Knocking on Heavens Door, or Dying on the Vine, both sung in the unique timbre of the creators.

As long as an artwork is honest and comes from somewhere inacasessible to most people, they will overlook what you describe as technical failings. After all, what good is technical ability without vision or imagination?

In your musical analogy a technically proficient boy band singing a song written by a committee, through Auto-Tune or Pitch-Doctor (devices that even make their caterwalling sound in key in 'live' concerts, would represent the zenith of modern pop music. It is a ridiculous premise, give me Piaf's warble, Doctor John's flat notes, Cohen's rasp and Dylan's nasal twang, any day.

I agree, you are probably a technically good ballet dancer, or a bad one, I couldn't care less because it's all poncing about in tights to me. As for opera, it always struck me as an artform invented because the Aristocracy is too stupid to follow a real plot. Whatever floats your boat, I suppose.

Posted by: Rod on August 24, 2007 7:54 AM

This is a complicated issue, one that people will always be inclined to disagree on. As an artist myself, it's also something I've given a good amount of thought to.

(I apologize if this comment is rough around the edges—I'm still coffeeless and I have to run to work in a few.)

The question, as I see it, is about what's more important: the mode of expression or the expression itself.

The example I like to use in conversation is also musical. The opera singer has put decades of his/her life into training that voice and perfecting technique, which is totally worth admiring. But this emphasis on on technique does something to limit what the singer can express.

In contrast, take the late grunge band Nirvana. There's very little skill and Kurt Cobain's voice is far from perfect yet the group produced some of the angriest, angstiest, most depressing music ever.

Can the opera singer be angry and angsty and depressing as well? Most definitely. But it's not the same. There's a different intensity and a different quality and a different context.

But though the opera singer can't equal Nirvana's rage, at the same time Nirvana can't reproduce the incredible spectrum of style and emotion the opera singer can. They're stuck in that niche they carved out for themselves (unless they had decided to reinvent themselves or unless Cobain decided to take antidepressants).

This same principle applies to all the arts.

With that, I have to run. I don't have the experience to say anything about the art market or the gallery system or anything like that, so maybe someone can fill in those areas.

Looking forward to some good replies!

Posted by: Jon on August 24, 2007 8:19 AM

Picasso was not top-notch when painting people????????? Go see his Museum in Barcelona and you will see marvelous drawings of faces and expressions from his time in art-school. He was a really gifted painter. That he chose not to use it most times is true. But he did possess the skills.

I agree with you main argument however. I would maybe go further. Just a nitpick.

Posted by: RZ on August 24, 2007 8:22 AM

OK, non-1:30 am response...

I'm going to mostly stick to music because that's what I know best. Look at the last song of Schubert's Die Winterreise. It does not require any technical skill to speak of to play, and more remarkably it does not display much technical skill in composition. The left hand of the piano plays an open fifth drone on the tonic (A-E) throughout nearly the whole piece, occasionally moving briefly to the most obviously related chords D minor and E major. The singer's melody does nothing but outline these chords. The right hand of the piano echoes the singer's melodic fragments note for note. There is no development--a very small amount of musical material repeats from beginning to end. There are no technical problems that would prevent a ten-year-old who had studied piano from writing this piece, but of course no ten-year-old ever did. So what makes it great?

By contrast, you take a third-rate Romantic, like Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose music is incredibly complex, and obviously took an enormous amount of compositional skill. It's also incredibly difficult to play. Yet the music is in fact very bad. It seems obvious that technical skill can't be used as a way to evaluate art by itself.

Of course you need to have enough technical skill to realize your artistic vision. If I tried to paint a portrait of someone in the traditional style, it would be dismissed out of hand because I lack the technical skill to do it, even if I had an increedible vision in my head of how it should be. So to that extent skill is important. But once you've shown enough skill to get in the running, doesn't evaluation of traditional art become just as subjective as evaluation of abstract art? Don't most people rely on experts? Returning to music, most people can't distinguish a good performance Mozart from a technically accomplished but bad one, in my experience.

I also wonder where your criteria leave a lot of visual art. What do you make of medieval art? The Chinese and Japanese traditions? And more broadly, what is the point of deciding on one standard by which to judge all art and refusing to consider that there might be other worthy artistic goals? What do we get out of this?

Posted by: BP on August 24, 2007 10:34 AM

Dr Weevil -- He wasn't the first, but I recall a time in the 60s when there was a flurry of commentary regarding Louis Armstrong's singing and how his style and emotion trumped the technical quality of it.

BP -- I'm not sure what you mean by my linking of art and sport. FWIW, I consider competitive figure skating a form of dance, not sport.

All -- I was careful to make the point that technical proficiency was not enough to guarantee greatness. I suppose an example of this would be William Bouguereau, the late 19th century Academic-style painter. Technically, he was a master, but today most viewers find something wanting emotionally/psychologically. OTOH, his 19th C. audience seemed to be quite happy with his work. So who knows? We might simply be dealing with a shift in viewer preferences.

As for Picasso, it is true that he did produce work that showed promise from a respresentational perspective. Yesterday, before I posted this article, I noticed a painting in a book about his early life that would qualify. It was a student painting of a choir-boy. However, Picasso quickly abandoned this style and began his long, slow descent into buffoonery.

My thrust is that arts normally call for a strong core of technical skill. Given that, the artist (that is, painter, dancer, musician, actor, etc.) adds other elements to create greatness. I'm not sure how well those other elements can work in the absence of core skill. But there are exceptions to every rule ...

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on August 24, 2007 10:57 AM

I'm with you on this one. Abstract impression, and Modernism in general, turned most of the arts ("classical music," by definition, is a holdover) into something that cannot--indeed, must not--be accessible to the masses. Ever since, they've been a pathetic forum for self-described intellectuals to battle for social capital: "If you don't 'get it,' it's obviously because you're an uneducated, insensitive oaf." These sorry snobs look down on Rockwell because anyone can understand and appreciate his work; it requires no specialized knowledge. And therefore, in their minds, his work lacks "depth." The Modernists turned all kinds of art forms into a sort of public masturbation, IMHO. William Butler Yeats caught on to the fraud that would become Modernism way back in 1896, when he wrote this diary entry:

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hipping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, "After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God."

The Savage God doesn't give a damn if you have technical prowess, which is why some of the most amazing artists of the 20th century (Willy Pogany leaps to mind) have been utterly ignored by art historians, critics, museums and galleries. But history will rediscover them eventually.

Posted by: Matt Thorn on August 24, 2007 11:03 AM

One of my music teachers said "You have to know the rules before you an break them." He was referring to Coltrane, but of course that statement can apply to any artist. I mostly agree with it, and I think taken by itself, most here would agree with it. But then when presented with the art of someone who is following this dictum, such as Picasso, most here would balk and say his art is crap.

As with the post on narrative fiction, and most other on art here at 2B, I'm baffled by the need to set up a wall between what you like and what you don't. For me, a piece of art works if it works. Meaning, did I enjoy it? Did it make me feel or think or just have a pleasurable experience? All kinds of art have done that for me.

"I was careful to make the point that technical proficiency was not enough to guarantee greatness."

OK, but what about artists who do not display proficiency (whether by choice or not) in physically accurate renderings, yet whose art is highly evocative and enjoyable? Have they failed?

Posted by: the patriarch on August 24, 2007 11:17 AM

"These sorry snobs look down on Rockwell because anyone can understand and appreciate his work; it requires no specialized knowledge. And therefore, in their minds, his work lacks "depth." "

I enjoy Rockwell a lot. His ability to capture iconic moments, almost to create iconic moments, is amazing. I would argue, though, that much "specialized knowledge," as you say, is required to appreciate him, namely the specialized knowledge of the culture and events of mid 20th century America. Nothing wrong with that, but I have my doubts as to Rockwell's ultimate longevity for that reason.

Also, I think you misrepresent people who enjoy modern art greatly when you say we look down at representational artists, or that we think those who don't enjoy modern art are too dumb to "get it." I personally don't care if you don't like it, but nor do I think any less of you.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 24, 2007 11:29 AM

Columinst Spengler over at Asia Times summed this up really well in his column "Admit it - you really hate modern art" http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IA30Aa03.html

It's the most lucid analysis of the topic I've seen so far.

Posted by: D. Popovich on August 24, 2007 12:04 PM

"Why is lack of technical skill tolerated in the graphic arts?"

Well, for one thing, it's very rare. The ability to combine that which makes art art - and I'm not going to get bogged down in the definition of art, other than to say that the divide between art and illustration is clear: call it reach, what the artist is trying for above and beyond capturing a likeness, be it in a portrait or landscape - with terrific hand-eye coordination is very rare indeed. Think John Singer Sargent or Richard Parkes Bonington and then think of the legions of artists who have tried for but couldn't approach their level of dexterity, their "touch."

It is simply a very hard thing to do: to paint a picture that convincingly conveys the look of the world and has that spark that makes it art. This explains the awkwardness which is and has been so large a factor in the history of art (think of Poussin's difficulty painting faces, think of Cezanne, Van Gogh) and would not be tolerated for a minute in a professional musician. How many artists at one time or another in their careers have thrown their hands up and exclaimed in despair, "I can't paint?" Many. Renoir, for one. Yes, believe it or not, Renoir. He became dissatisfied with his inability to paint the figure firmly and had to return to square one, as it were.

Sorry about the name dropping but I wanted to underline the point: painting is hard.

Posted by: ricpic on August 24, 2007 12:15 PM

These issues of "skills" will become very confusing in the future.

In fact, they already are.

I talk often with programmers and engineers about these "skills" issues. I seldom find that they disagree about the basic premises. In the future, and not too distant future at that, all humans will have a computer chip planted in their brains that will exponentially increase their memory capacity, computational abilities and communications. Humans will be able to buy "behaviors" and "skills." These will be available as sort of vending machine choices.

What will skills be when this becomes reality? Will the game just ante up by a factor of hundreds or thousands?

And, back to the present. Who said Hank Williams didn't have a great voice? He has one of the signature, brilliant voices of country music. Certainly, he sings with a nasal twang. You might find this unpleasant, with its hints of redneckery. I don't. He yodels. Does it well. Hank had a great range, and a beautiful tenor. Everything about his voice screams "trailer park" to a city slicker.

This is precisely one of the reasons Hank has endured. He's plain folks. The folks who love Hank despise the "high-falutin'" pretenses of city slickers.

Hank is the patron saint of country music for good reason. He is the greatest songwriter by far. No contest. And, he is the greatest country singer by far. No contest. His greatest songs seem to have fallen out of the Heavens, perfectly formed. The two greatest lines of American music are, and always will be:

And as I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could cry

What I'm saying is: Don't diss a god.

Yes, Bob Dylan is a complete disaster when it comes to singing. I can't listen to him. I almost always turn off the radio when he starts in with that horrible voice. This does not diminish his skill as a songwriter. George Harrison turns "If Not for You," into a masterpiece. Dylan should just quit singing. Godawful.

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on August 24, 2007 12:23 PM

BP -- Thank you for mentioning non-Western art. I need to emphasize that I'm Western-centric when it comes to art. Anything that's not derived from the Greeks (in part, at least) is largely off my radar.

I've seen lots of Egyptian, Assyrian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese art over the years, but I really don't relate to it well. So, when I write about art here, it should be assumed I'm dealing with art in the Western context unless I state otherwise.

I might add that I majored in commercial art in college, so my experience as an "artist" is Western-centric. And I hold my pathetic self as a yardstick against others' works: if what I see is something I can do, then it probably isn't really great. Because I had to deal with the technology of it, I have a bias towards evaluation of painting in that context. C'est moi.

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on August 24, 2007 1:01 PM

"if what I see is something I can do, then it probably isn't really great."

I think that statement, one that many make when criticizing art, should be qualified as "when I see something I could reproduce." I mean, I can play most of Miles Davis' solos note for note, they're not that technically difficult, but no way in hell could I have come up with them.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 24, 2007 1:27 PM

You don't seem to value the most important skill of all -- which is to touch the audience, whomever that might be. What would be the interest in "art" that is merely a flawless representation of reality done without mechanical aid? I might as well go listen to that Indian woman recite the decimals of pi to 10,000 places from memory.

What you brush off as "setting the stage" and "creating an emotional aura" strikes me as the main object of art, not merely necessary preconditions. What's lost in a lot of these "anybody could do that" discussions (when you're discussing a Picasso, not an "artist" who presents a blank canvas, which if it is art, is of a very minor form) is that in reality, almost nobody can do that. I can't believe that more than 5 or 10 people in the country could doodle on a large canvas in such a way that it would affect me like Guernica does.

Does Guernica affect you in that way? Maybe not, which is perfectly okay. But that it affects so many others is what makes it art, in my opinion.

And Louis Armstrong has a great voice. :-)

Posted by: JewishAtheist on August 24, 2007 3:39 PM

I think that statement, one that many make when criticizing art, should be qualified as "when I see something I could reproduce."

Actually, "the patriarch" wrote in one sentence what I was trying to say with my whole post.

Posted by: JewishAtheist on August 24, 2007 3:45 PM

You think that much painting is just a racket? Of course. Now, someone mentioned Armstrong: just the other day I was listening to him and wondering why his singing worked so well. Rhythm, phrasing and such, no doubt, but also I decided that he had unusually good control of volume. But then I'm a musical ignoramus.

Posted by: dearieme on August 24, 2007 3:52 PM

Addition, semi-unconnected thoughts:

Doesn't the fact that your way of approaching art doesn't work for non-Western art sort of disprove your contention that your way is natural and universal, and other ways are artificial and elitist? It's one thing to say that people only like Western academic modernism for its social cache. But surely entire other civilizations can't be fooling themselves?

I was in the Japanese rooms at the Met in New York last week and it occurred to me that in a way Japanese paintings reflect better than Western realistic paintings the way we perceive the world. A Western landscape painting packages all of the visual detail in a landscape in a canvas for us to take in all at once, but when we're actually in a landscape we only see bits of it at a time, and certain things--bright colors, things that are exceptionally beautiful, people and animals, etc.--stand out in our attention while others recede to the background. And the sense of open space you get actually standing outside is lost in all but the largest Western-style canvasses, while Japanese paintings tend to retain it. Why is accurate reproduction of every visual detail the goal?

As for pop singing: it isn't really true that it doesn't take skill, and by "skill" I don't just mean a quirky, individual voice. I mean pretty traditional singing skill: most pop singers, even ones with really odd voices, have strong voices, know how to breathe, and have control over pitch. Of course there are exceptions. But really what separates Louis Armstrong, to use an example above, from an opera singer is the timbre of his voice, not singing technique.

Posted by: BP on August 24, 2007 4:50 PM

Well, I feel something very similar in poetry, the trashing of form by people who couldn't to save their lives do a twentieth of what Millay did, let alone Browning. And on the lowcult side, utter crap like "Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep" continues to garner admiration. People will quote Frost, or little quips from Larkin, but it doesn't seem like there's much appreciation for the talents that made those men great.

My heart is even more in popular music, as my hopes keep getting raised by songwriters like Aimee Mann and Gillian Welch, but overall today's song lyrics are an immense wreck. Mushy cliches, stolen jokes repeated ten times, lyrics that don't fit the melodic rhythm or produce coherent verse structures, pre-adolescent emotional palettes, dominate airplay.

The professional lyricists of the first half of the last century weren't always profound, but they tended to be both precise and playful with words. As listeners, we've lost that standard. And yes, to me it is a standard of basic competence.

Posted by: J. Goard on August 24, 2007 5:10 PM

It's probably because I have been reading Ortega y Gasset lately (getting ready for a conference) but lately I tend to think of these phenomena as results of the Revolt of the Masses. The "mass man" feels himself to be undistinguished, but he knows he has feelings. He hears Bob Dylan singing with an undistinguished voice, and eloquently expressing feelings that he, the "mass man," has, and so he completely identifies with him. The exceptions to this phenomenon might be explained away in various ways. Eg., opera goers insist on exceptional skill, but almost all operas are cultural fossils from a past era, which was dominated by aristocratic ideas of excellence. And so are the people who like them. Und so weiter.

Posted by: Lester Hunt on August 24, 2007 5:17 PM

Donald – "I contend that the highest skill in painting is the ability to create a convincing human likeness without resorting to tracing a photograph or other mechanical tricks. We humans are highly experienced at looking at other humans, so a sub-par painted image can be fairly easy to detect."

"I was careful to make the point that technical proficiency was not enough to guarantee greatness."

You have adopted a systemic hierarchical approach to determining the quality of paintings; this is your opinion, which is fine. You should choose exhibitions to attend and trust your reaction to them based on this criterion.

However, when you move beyond this to impugn those who have a different aesthetic as being delusional or part of some evil art conspiracy you go way too far. First, as noted by the patriarch

".... you misrepresent people who enjoy modern art greatly when you say we look down at representational artists, or that we think those who don't enjoy modern art are too dumb to "get it."

Each time this topic arises I offer any number of anecdotes and examples to counter various points (like how all "real people" hate abstraction), but they are dismissed because they do not reinforce the pre-conceived notions about who likes what and why.

I have eclectic tastes on most art forms. I love some atonal music and hate some. I like Dylan's voice. Opera leaves me cold, even though I can appreciate and admire the technical proficiency of operatic vocalists. To echo the patriarch, I love certain highly skilled (by your definition) representational painters who include the human figure in their work.

The aesthetic conversational threads about painting, color, scale, form and so forth that run from Matisse and Cezanne through Picasso and Hofmann to Pollock and Stills and on through Olitski and Noland to certain of today's abstract painters interests and delights me. I get a great deal of mental and emotional stimulation and pleasure from these paintings.

Shall I deny my reactions because they do not confirm yours? Are the technical issues and expertise these artists deal with to be dismissed because they are not the technical issue you hold in highest regard? Should I confess and apologize for having debased and errant tastes?

Posted by: Chris White on August 24, 2007 5:21 PM

Donald Pittenger writes:
"I suspect that the uncertainty / reliance factor is something the current Establishment treasures because it gives them power. And that power would be lost if normally-intelligent people could judge art for themselves as they can opera singing, piano playing and so forth."

Normally intelligent people can judge opera singing and piano playing to the extent that they are aware of/immersed in/knowledgable about the arts in question. I enjoy opera but know very little about Opera. I can't tell a Mozart aria from a Verdi. I can't tell a mezzo-soprano from a colouratura. I probably could rectify this if I made an effort to learn more about opera, though. As a largely intuitive lover of abstract art, I suspect appreciating this branch of art involves a letting go of craft-centric art appreciation theory, so it's a completely different ballgame from craft-intensive forms.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 24, 2007 6:07 PM

[Sigh]

This was only a blog post and not a book, so I don't have room to explain things at great length. Still, I must not be making things as clear as I should. Here are more replies:

Patriarch -- I do not mean that I'd try to duplicate it. My intent was that art executed at my level of competence probably isn't so hot. And that level is in the lower realm of the journeyman range.

Jewish Atheist -- I stated in the post and in a previous comment that more than technical skill is required for greatness. And I didn't "brush off" "setting the stage" and "creating an emotional aura" -- these were needed to lift art beyond the level of technical competence. That is, all three elements and probably some others not mentioned are usually required (though exceptions can also be found).

As for Guernica, I've seen it in person several times when it was at MoMA, and I'm sorry to report that it didn't touch me in a positive manner: it strikes me as being a messy cartoon. To affect me, Picasso would have done better had he painted realist blood 'n' guts. I'm fully aware that my position is far remote from conventional wisdom regarding that painting.

Chris White -- Yes I have a hierarchy of sorts, though I haven't formalized it. We all have some sort of yardstick, and mine is what it is. I don't expect readers to fall into line with my position; rather, my aim is to toss out ideas and provocations while doing my feeble best to be entertaining.

As far as I can tell, the only group I disparaged was a small group of critics, dealers and others that I loosely classify as the Establishment committed to the cause of Modernism. So what it is that you read in many of my posts is my form of push-back against the indoctrination I got while in art school and later on in various media.

I've made no secret that I consider Modernism (and the various flavors of PoMo) in architecture, painting and various other forms of art to have been a wrong-taken road; other Blowhards share this perspective to one degree or another. And I consider much of what I see in ArtForum and in trendy, big-city galleries to be pretty awful, and I'll say so in this blog. I will be happy to see those kinds of art cut down to size in the commercial marketplace and in the marketplace of ideas, though I would never suggest that they be censored or eradicated.

And, in my best some-of-my-friends-are manner, I admit to liking some Modernist works. For example, I'm rather fond of Franz Kline's Abrtract Expressionist paintings -- the ones with the bold, black brush strokes.

Aaron White -- You are right that I exaggerated the bits about opera singing and musicianship. I myself usually cannot tell whether a performance is competent or great. But I can tell if it is sub-par or outright lousy. In the field of painting, "sub-par" and "lousy" can be hard to detect for non-representational art.

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on August 24, 2007 8:42 PM

Chris White, as usual, takes the fact that most people hate modern art and find it loathsome as some sort of personal attack. Don't be so senisitive. You can like anything you want, and enjoy it thoroughly--nobody is stopping you. The rest of us just think it sucks, that's all.

As far as Picasso being such a genius--spare me! I've seen his early drawings, and they are no great shakes. The stuff he was doing a few years later is much better, but not different from what other 18-20 year olds were doing in ateliers all over France at that time. If you were to compare his paintings to others in the French Salons, you would see that he was a good painter, but not exceptional. He found a way to get attention by smashing things apart, and a willing audience of similar intellectual decadents to watch him. I think he pissed away whatever talent he had.

I love the false dichotomy--that realistic painting is often cold, so modernism is just as good as realism because it also has flawed work?--as if a good technical rendering weren't far superior to a cold abstract painting! Technical mastery and emotional content aren't mutually exclusive. They aren't automatically present either, but at least the artist got something right.

But what if a realistic painting has everything going for it? You know, museums are littered (literally!) with supposedly "great" modern painting that few people look at and enjoy. Time after time, when I go to a museum, I see the crowds in the rooms with the great realistic painting, the stuff wher everything is working together. I find the works far superior to the modern stuff, and it looks like I'm in good company. Seems to me again that the modern art proponents are a little touchy on this issue, that what they like is not popular, hence the scorn for popularity. I think they need to be a bit more mature and deal with the loneliness!

I draw and paint all the time, and I do it pretty well. I do it in my spare time, and sell work too (but because I want to remain anonymous here, you'll just have to take my word for it. Maybe I'll show something you guys some stuff later on, but I'd change my handle after that. I like to stay incognito). So I know a thing or two about it that others might not.

I agree with ricpic entirely--painting well is tough! Just like in any art form, It takes multiple skills to be a great one--not just technical proficiency. There is also the ability to compose a picture effectively, to pick a subject that others would be interested in (that the artist is interested in also), and the hardest of all skills, the communication of emotion.

We all admire those at the top. And I agree entirely with the patriarch that its much easier to copy what somebody has already done than to create it in the first place. Donald's experience with drawing gives him a greater appreciation of what is going on with the "technical rendering" than others I believe. And so be it. Let him enjoy that specific mastery. If others aren't turned on by it, well, that's your preference. I'm in league with Pettinger!

To the modern art proponents--you know that I like to poke you guys with a stick on this issue, and then watch you jump. But do you realize how far out of the mainstream your aesthetic is? My question to you guys, and the modern painters themselves is "If you want to communicate something to other people, why are you speaking to them in a way that repulses them?" I think its a good question, and each artist needs to answer it.

My suspicion is that many modern artists have dumped technique because it is too hard to master, and they want to rid themselves of that burden and get on with telling everybody what they think. Okay, fine, but don't expect us to all listen to you "sing in the shower". There's more to be said about the world around us than the usual modernist topics, like the pleasure of a sunset, or of a young, beautiful face. Reject the burden of representation if you will, but you surrender a very powerful tool in your arsenal, that speaks to many people, and has a broader range than modernism. Others will not be so quick to praise you if you back away from the challenge of technique. Nobody likes a quitter.

Posted by: BTM on August 24, 2007 8:53 PM

Donald;

Your excellent post could be easily transferred into a diagnosis of contemporary architecture, with "building" substituted for "painting". At about the same time, skill in the Arts was abandoned, and the primary reason for the art object -- to give emotional nourishment to human beings -- was suppressed. Now, several decades later, almost everyone has forgotten what it used to be like. We gaze at the section of older art in our museums as if looking at a lost civilization -- one that mysteriously disappeared because of climatic disaster (!).

I used to be a painter, and I agree with you entirely. After Franz Kline, inspiration seems to have dried up in the US art scene. That sterile wasteland of the Art world did not stop people from making tons of money, however. Ocassionally, I see neglected painters with talent -- and thanks to you for spotlighting some of them, and bringing them out of the cobwebs. You are doing a great service for the true history of American Painting. In several centuries, when all the trash has been identified as such, we will hopefully re-discover some forgotten masterpieces of our time.

Best wishes.

Posted by: Nikos Salingaros on August 24, 2007 10:23 PM

Nikos -- Thank you for your kind words.

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on August 24, 2007 11:42 PM

Have to disagree, Donald. I think you're too rigid. I am, myself, a representational painter. And I have to admit that at the SF Art Institute when I was there, too many people got by without the basic rendering skills. But if all you want is a good likeness, stick with photography.

Many abstract painters used to baffle me. Why did I like Pollock? And Franz Kline with his fat black multi-directional swipes of the brush? And Mondrian's grids? At the same time, Rothko's abstractions seemed overrated.

What I discovered when I looked at the earlier art of the abstract painters I liked is that they really had chops as representational painters, too. Pollock's obvious influence was Thomas Hart Benton -- and Pollock did him well. Both Kline's and Mondrian's wonderful landscapes could be seen in their abstractions. But Rothko's early paintings did little for me.

I think before you dismiss painters who seem not to paint the things you like to see, check their early work. You might need to advance your viewing techniques just as they advanced their painting techniques.

On the other hand, many of these painters, indeed, cannot paint. But new art takes a lot of looking at before it registers.

I'm a music lover, but not a musician. Years ago I only wanted to listen to music from the classical and romantic periods. Even late Beethoven took me some getting used to. And few listeners of his time wanted to hear the Grosse Fuge.

For my 22nd birthday, my mother, who knew only that I liked classical music, bought me the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Each of its four movements is introduced with a grating chord on the solo violin. Why I listened to it more than once, I'll never know. But I did. Forty-five years later it is the one piece I've listened to more than any other. I love it, love it, love it. But nobody who has heard it only once loves it. Because of its dissonance it's easily put aside.

I think painting and all the arts are like that. You have to be willing to be disappointed. What if you invest ten hours viewing a painter others tell you is great, but come away without getting it? Possibly there's nothing to get. But maybe it's going to take awhile for the art to bring you around. You're not going to know if you say, "this guy can't paint a recognizable face," and walk away in disgust.

Louis Corinth, a greatly skilled, but unremarkable German representational painter from the early 20th century, suffered a brain injury in his fifties. After that his paintings became skewed, strange, and wonderful. They are the paintings he's remembered for. And rightly so.

For an artist to paint in one way for his entire career simply because he's "good at this sort of thing" seems to me to be a waste of a career.

He owes it to himself to disappoint his fans once in awhile.

Posted by: Fred Wickham on August 25, 2007 2:44 AM

BTM – Chris White, as usual, takes the fact that most people hate modern art and find it loathsome as some sort of personal attack. Don't be so sensitive. You can like anything you want, and enjoy it thoroughly--nobody is stopping you. The rest of us just think it sucks, that's all.

"Seems to me again that the modern art proponents are a little touchy on this issue, that what they like is not popular, hence the scorn for popularity. I think they need to be a bit more mature and deal with the loneliness!"

"I draw and paint all the time, and I do it pretty well."

Donald Pettinger - "As far as I can tell, the only group I disparaged was a small group of critics, dealers and others that I loosely classify as the Establishment committed to the cause of Modernism. So what it is that you read in many of my posts is my form of push-back against the indoctrination I got while in art school and later on in various media.

"I've made no secret that I consider Modernism (and the various flavors of PoMo) in architecture, painting and various other forms of art to have been a wrong-taken road; other Blowhards share this perspective to one degree or another. And I consider much of what I see in ArtForum and in trendy, big-city galleries to be pretty awful, and I'll say so in this blog. I will be happy to see those kinds of art cut down to size in the commercial marketplace and in the marketplace of ideas, though I would never suggest that they be censored or eradicated."

The quotes above seem to contain all of the key elements in this discussion.

Those with different aesthetics like the patriarch and me, who offer comments that defend our own appreciation of abstraction &/or modernism yet make no attack on traditional styles or representational art, are subjected to various dismissals, insults and provocations for the temerity of actually appreciating and enjoying some modernist art.

It demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of how museums and galleries and auction houses work to simultaneously aver the vast popularity traditional art, and then posit that the Art Establishment (in the pocket of some cabal of evil modernists apparently) won't give the people what they really like. Trust me, even museums (especially museums?) MUST attract a broad cross-section of the public in order to survive. And, lo and behold, all sorts of people will go to a museum or gallery exhibitions to see works by Picasso and Pollock and (I'm with you guys on this one) Damien Hirst. Now, some may go simply to say they went, they saw, and it's still crap (like Donald's visits to see Guernica), but the presumption is, if enough people attend, it is, by definition, a popular exhibition. And a wealthy class of bidders will pay millions for these works at auction. Galleries and auction houses need to sell art, they'll sell what sells and they do ... including all sorts of art you or I might find bizarre or badly done or boring or incomprehensible.

In short, if there weren't a solid and substantial audience and clientele for modernism IT WOULDN'T BE SHOWN, or at least not so prominently and regularly shown. The fact that it is indicates that it DOES have a constituency. And, just maybe, those who like abstraction or other modernist works are more mainstream than 2BH would like to admit.

Then there's the "I paint" and "I resisted the indoctrination of art school" theme. The experiences of a given art school student, studying commercial art nearly a half century ago, shaped that person's aesthetic, which is fine, but very specific. How much today's art scene reflects that experience is, however, suspect at best. In general, my own experience over forty years of dealing with artists is that artists almost always dismiss most art that does not conform to their own style and practice. Which is fine, but an artist is, therefore, the last person I'd trust to have a good overview of art. Artists can explain and critique art that is within their aesthetic orbit as it were and be exceptionally helpful and instructive when they do. They can also immediately dismiss, with hardly a glance, any art that falls outside their own aesthetic.

There is here the distinct whiff of sour grapes; why isn't the art I (we, the vast public) love given more respect by THEM, why doesn't it command higher prices?

I sometimes get the sense that this battle is taking place in a time warp that has us lost at the beginning of the Cold War.

Posted by: Chris White on August 25, 2007 10:17 AM

I find myself on board with Chris White and others who are opposing Pittinger here.

A big part of the appeal of high art (and I know the term high art will be sneered at by the Blowhards) is its implicit celebration of idiosyncrasy, freedom and the individual spirit. That's what appeals to people who are interested in high art. So, to the extent that abstraction and experimentation are more successful in expressing idiosyncrasy, freedom, and the individual spirit, they will be more acclaimed as high art.

Let me start with a literary example. Take two novels -- say, a standard, competent mystery novel, and an experimental novel by Claude Simon. On Pittinger's theory here, the standard, competent mystery novel is a more admirable accomplishment, because the author succeeded in mirroring, with great verisimilitude, certain aspects of "real life." Claude Simon, on the other hand, writes an impressionistic miasma of prose, and therefore Pittinger, I expect, will dismiss him because he is doing the literary equivalent of abstraction.

However, in dismissing Simon, I think Pittinger's preference for the genre work would reveal the shallowness of his view of art. He is neglecting the real nature of Simon's accomplishment: Simon has succeeded in writing a novel that, precisely because he refused to follow genre conventions and be limited by rules of verisimilitude, is more expressive of individual experience and consciousness. It has the potential, for a certain kind of reader, of being more expressive of human life/consciousness/etc. It triumphs as a kind of individual expression, even when it fails to mirror reality in the ways that genre readers expect.

I think that a similar phenomenon occurs in art. On Pittinger's theory, those silly Microsoft Paint masterpieces (for example, watch person replicate the Mona Lisa with MS Paint ) that occasionally get sent around in e-mail are a higher form of art than the abstraction and experimentation that fills the Whitney, because the MS Paint works required substantial technical mastery to pull off. But really, we know that the MS Paint works are not better than the Whitney pieces, because those triumphs of verisimilitude are shallow technical achievements, and fail at that more important task of art -- expression of idiosyncrasy, consciousness, individuality. (Read some of Richard Rorty's essays in Philosophy and Social Hope about the role of liberal arts in expanding our awareness of possible modes of life; I think that abstract art has a similar role, in expanding our awareness of ways of perceiving and understanding the world visually.)

Everything we perceive is abstract, on some level. Look at experimental films like those of Stan Brakhage. Probably a failure on Pittinger's theory, because they are abstract and "require no skill"; a Spielberg epic would be far more admirable. But Brakhage, and other pioneers of abstraction, are doing the artistic equivalent of a kind of fundamental scientific research in consciousness and perception. When you are amazed by the dazzling perceptual delights of a killer title sequence in your favorite Hollywood blockbuster, you can thank Brakhage and others who did their pure research. Their abstraction, far from being irrelevant, actually advanced the scope of possible expression and even philistines, without realizing it, are enjoying the fruits of their work.

One quirky book I like is Lanham's "Style: An Anti-Textbook." In that book, Lanham criticizes English teachers who perpetuate the view that there is a single, preferred, neutral style of English; instead, Lanham urges us to revel in the texture, idiosyncrasy, and pleasures of jargon and slang in our language ... there is no "neutral" language. What Pittinger seems to be pushing here is a view of verisimilitude as a "neutral" accomplishment that we can all recognize and appreciate, and everything else is a sneaky attempt to avoid the difficulty of mastering that neutral accomplishment. But I think this way of looking at art reflects a deep misunderstanding of what art is.

Posted by: jayder on August 25, 2007 11:25 AM

Fred Wickham - Lovis Corinth. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Posted by: ricpic on August 25, 2007 3:05 PM

Fred wrote:

"You might need to advance your viewing techniques just as they advanced their painting techniques."

jayder wrote:

"[T]he appeal of high art [...] is its implicit celebration of idiosyncrasy, freedom and the individual spirit. [....] So, to the extent that abstraction and experimentation are more successful in expressing idiosyncrasy, freedom, and the individual spirit, they will be more acclaimed as high art."

Presumably he means "more successful" than representational art. He goes on to tell us that the "more important task of art" is the "expression of idiosyncrasy, consciousness, individuality." And we would have known this if we had read various books and essays, or better yet had attended art college or gotten an M.A. in art history.

The bottom line, folks: we don't "get it" on accounta we ain't got that specialized knowledge. Am I the only one who found it ironic that jayder gushes about Lanham for urging "us to revel in the texture, idiosyncrasy, and pleasures of jargon and slang in our language," while adhering strictly to the exclusionary language of academia?

I think the example of literature was poorly chosen, because in fact you rarely see in literature today the kind abstraction that I crudely called masturbation, that BTM more politely called "singing in the shower," and that jayder called (in the case of Simon) an "impressionistic miasma of prose" (a phrase that in itself might be called an impressionistic miasma of prose). Why don't we see much over-the-top abstraction in literature anymore? Because writers rather quickly caught on to the fact that if you wanted to tell stories about people that would actually move readers, you had to do so in a language your readers can actually comprehend. I graduated from Penn State's Creative Writing program back in 1987, and all of us students did plenty of experimenting, as students should. (Lucas did THX1138 as a student long before he did Star Wars.) Our teachers were pretty indulgent of us, but most of us eventually realized, I think, that while experimentation is fine for the classroom, it needs be tempered with common sense ("common" as in "shared by many" and "sense" as in "sensibility"). jayder offers a specific example of experimental literature, but the other side he refers to generically as "genre fiction," perhaps because he has not noticed that successful "genre writers" (J.K. Rowling, Ursula K. Leguin, Tolkien, Michael Chabon, etc.) are in fact quite distinctive.

In the world of art schools and galleries, however, the tyranny of Modernism has yet to crumble, and a living can be made from it (by a handful of the lucky) because there will always be plenty of nouveau riche around who are willing to lay down absurd amounts of money in order to buy themselves some social capital.

By the way, I spent a year in Boston, where the Museum of Fine Arts has some great John Singer Sargent paintings. I visited the museum three times while I was there, but it was the John Singer Sargent room I lingered in longest.

Posted by: Matt Thorn on August 27, 2007 5:23 AM

As usual, Chris White mislabels disagreement with his views as a personal attack.

Yet again, we are told that a painting has value because somebody spent a lot of money on it. The same must true of Elvis's old underwear.

Once again, he finds a way to discredit all informed opinions that disagree with his own by saying that those who agree with him are somehow more knowledgeable--they are less biased, more open-minded, more educated. Sure, buddy.

Not once will the issue of quality be addressed because the modernists have no answer for it. At that point, it will be stated that modern paintings must not be judged by the same set of standards as traditional paintings, yet somehow deserve the same cultural status. Of course, the general public must be excluded from this discussion.

My own solution is to avoid looking at any modern art. There's so much quality realistic stuff that the modern junk just doesn't make the list.

One last thought! Remember how modernists are so fond of saying that its only how an individual feels and responds to any art form that matters, yet they are so quick to dismiss and downgrade somebody like Donald's point of view. Where did the freedom go? When did calling modern art junk become somehow personally offensive? That doesn't sound like freedom to me--its sounds like dogma.

Posted by: BTM on August 27, 2007 2:10 PM

Matt Thorn wrote:

"The bottom line, folks: we don't "get it" on accounta we ain't got that specialized knowledge."

I've seen much the same argument advanced in comics circles as an excuse to dismiss manga. Manga befuddles many fans of Western style cartooning, with its foreign style of pacing, page layout, and (yes!) heavy, expressive use of abstraction. So some fans act like one has to make manga one's field of study, as Mr. Thorn has, in order to understand it.

But kids know better. Kids dig manga intuitively. And they understand abstract art intuitively, as well.

A local museum had an abstract exhibit which included comments children had written about the various pieces. The kids found imaginative ways to engage and enjoy the work, while some grown-ups crossed their arms, scowled, and griped that the paintings didn't look like anything. The kids got it.

It reminds me of the teacher who drew a circle on a chalkboard and asked high schoolers what it was. They all answered "A circle." But he drew the same circle for some young kids and got over a hundred answers: "The moon," "a plate," "an owls' eye."

Some folks like to assert that the resemblance of abstract art to childrens' finger painting proves that abstract art is junk. How sad. Have you ever heard a child sing? Have you ever heard a child sing beautifuly? Have you ever heard a skilled, trained singer perform with less enchanting results that that untutored child? Technique is all well and good, but the coronation of technical skill and conventional artistic means robs us of a fulelr range of beauty, and the dismissing of abstract art is a warning sign of the arteriosclerosis of the imagination. I have no artistic training, yet a Kandinsky or a Gorky pleases my senses in the same way that a walk around me neighborhood does. No special knowledge needed: just receptive eyes.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 27, 2007 2:41 PM

"Fulelr" means fuller. Sorry for my slop proofreading.

I posted before seeing BTM's post and it could be argued that I exemplified much of BTM's description of modern art fans, so I should point out that I dig Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper and other representational artists as much as anyone on this board. Like or dislike whatever you please; it doesn't have to be us vs. them.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 27, 2007 3:13 PM

BTM – "As usual, Chris White mislabels disagreement with his views as a personal attack."

A] Would you care to point out where you think I said any such thing? I believe aesthetic tastes to be personal and, as such, they cannot be "right" or "wrong" which is where I argue with various of the 2BH crowd who seem to think that their aesthetic taste has been proven by history to be the only true and correct aesthetic possible.

"Yet again, we are told that a painting has value because somebody spent a lot of money on it."

B] This (again) is one of those areas where my attempt is to argue that if everyone agreed with the traditionalist views of 2BH then there would not be a market for modernism. If there IS a market (and a pretty good one at that) then this fact contradicts the idea that modern art has no supporters.

"Once again, he finds a way to discredit all informed opinions that disagree with his own by saying that those who agree with him are somehow more knowledgeable--they are less biased, more open-minded, more educated. Sure, buddy."

C] And again, where did I say anything remotely like this willful distortion? See, [A]. I have no problem with you or Donald or anyone else having whatever aesthetic tastes you may have. I do not presume anything about inferior or superior knowledge or education. I do think that those unwilling to entertain the idea that anyone else might actually, honestly, appreciate modernism, or that there is anything in modernism TO appreciate are being close-minded, but so what?

"Not once will the issue of quality be addressed because the modernists have no answer for it. At that point, it will be stated that modern paintings must not be judged by the same set of standards as traditional paintings, yet somehow deserve the same cultural status. Of course, the general public must be excluded from this discussion."

D] You will search in vain for anything I might have written that discounts the issue of "quality", only the idea that one can select a single, specific, yardstick for all paintings (or other art forms) by which "quality" can be determined. In this discussion the idea that quality must demonstrate the technical ability to render the human figure accurately in paint, with the illusion of three dimensions, is so specific and limited as to set aside most of the art produced since the cave paintings.

One more time, can you find a reference to any statement of mine that dismisses or excludes the general public? In fact, every time I mention members of that "general public" who DO appreciate abstraction it is ignored or dismissed because this does not conform to the received wisdom here at 2BH.

"My own solution is to avoid looking at any modern art. There's so much quality realistic stuff that the modern junk just doesn't make the list."

E] So? Don't look. Just don't tell me what I should or shouldn't look at and enjoy.

"One last thought! Remember how modernists are so fond of saying that its only how an individual feels and responds to any art form that matters, yet they are so quick to dismiss and downgrade somebody like Donald's point of view. Where did the freedom go? When did calling modern art junk become somehow personally offensive? That doesn't sound like freedom to me--its sounds like dogma."

F] Let's see, on the one hand we have a view that says there are many different aesthetics, one is free to like or dislike whatever they wish, and we can let time and the marketplace of art objects and the ongoing discussion of aesthetic ideas work it out over the long arc of time. On the other we have the view that a venal group of revolutionaries, dedicated to the overthrow of thousands of years of tradition, fought or snuck their way into the academies and museums to institute the tyranny of modernism that still holds off the forces of good, popular, traditional art and that these modernists must be purged from their positions of power to restore the proper order of things.

Which sounds like freedom and which like dogma?

Posted by: Chris White on August 27, 2007 4:53 PM

Chris White

False dichotomy--I say modern art has very few proponents, and Chris White exaggerates it to say I think there are none, and the market for modern art proves that there are at least some fans. Please refrain from false dichotomies when making points, and read my posts.

BTM – "As usual, Chris White mislabels disagreement with his views as a personal attack."

"Would you care to point out where you think I said any such thing?

"Those with different aesthetics like the patriarch and me...are subjected to various dismissals, insults and provocations for the temerity of actually appreciating and enjoying some modernist art."

Having no common yardstick is not just problematic for judging quality between different genres of painting, but also in determining quality within any specific genre of painting. We went over this before. There is not one, NOT ONE, standard for judging modern art that cannot also be used to judge realistic painting--color, design, form, meaning, etc. I challenged you modernist proponents to list your criteria for quality within the modern genre. You guys tried to back out of it, but eventually you listed some concrete qualities. Then I made the above point, and you backed off quickly, because you realized that the "different standards" argument was just a large slice of baloney.

You modernists are the ones trying to impose a point of view on everybody else! You are the ones who are telling people to consider ugly modernist painting as the equivalent of the best of realistic art! They have rejected it, but you guys keep pushing them, saying that they just don't understand it. Modernists really are infiltrating the museums and academia to try to control the money and the debate. All anyone has to do is look around and be honest about the situation. I mean, that's one of the main themes of modernist art--breaking the "rules"--the rules of traditional art, meaning realism! Of course, the rules were enforced in the ateliers, museums, galleries, etc. many years ago. But now that the situation is reversed, we are supposed to believe the modernists are not trying to control the art scene, that they are still the victims and outsiders, when the opposite is the truth? Nuts!

You always frame the debate as an attack on you or your ideas, but I don't care about your tastes. People are making a negative judgement of the deficiencies of modernism based on a QUALITATIVE basis, and you guys just run, run, run from that argument. Do it if you want, create silly arguments about how modernism can't be judged like any other forms of art, but nobody believes you or the falacious sidetracks and false dichotomies. I sure don't.

Posted by: BTM on August 27, 2007 5:56 PM

BTM wrote:

"Having no common yardstick is not just problematic for judging quality between different genres of painting, but also in determining quality within any specific genre of painting. We went over this before. There is not one, NOT ONE, standard for judging modern art that cannot also be used to judge realistic painting--color, design, form, meaning, etc. I challenged you modernist proponents to list your criteria for quality within the modern genre. You guys tried to back out of it, but eventually you listed some concrete qualities. Then I made the above point, and you backed off quickly, because you realized that the "different standards" argument was just a large slice of baloney."

I tried to draw up a chart which would demonstrate exactly the qualities I seek in a work of visual art, but then I realized that charts are abstract art, so I abandoned the project.

I just don't get the alleged animosity towards abstract art. I say alleged, because you-every one of you, I'll warrant- like at least some abstract art. Have you ever worn a paisley tie or polka-dot shorts? You've worn abstract art. Have you ever admired an oriental rug? Then you like abstract art. Do you like any instrumental music? Then you like abstract art, since instrumental music is abstract. A Bach cantata doesn't sound like anything in nature; it's totally abstract. (Exceptions: musicque concrete or whatever it's called, which uses real-world sounds rather than abstract ones, and that recording of dogs barking Jingle Bells. If that's all the instrumental music you have time for, consider yourself a true abstraction-hater.) Why people cheerfully accept abstraction for the ear yet reject it for the eye continues to baffle me. It'a an odd double standard.

I enjoy abstract art on an intuitive level. I cannot construct a procrustian explaination of why I like it, but I can't construct a procrustian explaination of why I like Mary Cassatt, either.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 27, 2007 6:37 PM

A side comment to Aaron White (no relation) -

Although I never take my own advice on this, allow me to warn you that BTM has very little sense of humor or proportion and is prone to absolutes without ever accepting that his opinion is only his opinion, not the final cumulative wisdom of the ages while differing opinions are, by definition, crazy and ill informed.

Despite having mentioned a variety of excellent and lauded representational painters that I also greatly admire and appreciate (e.g. Jamie Wyeth, Brett Bigbee), the fact that I like some abstraction seems to negate this as well. It gets back to the whole US vs. THEM nonsense that so many here seem to want to perpetuate.

"Modernists really are infiltrating the museums and academia to try to control the money and the debate. "

"The rest of us just think it sucks, that's all."

"nobody believes you or the falacious sidetracks and false dichotomies. I sure don't."

Posted by: Chris White on August 27, 2007 7:46 PM

"You modernists are the ones trying to impose a point of view on everybody else! You are the ones who are telling people to consider ugly modernist painting as the equivalent of the best of realistic art! They have rejected it, but you guys keep pushing them, saying that they just don't understand it."

Wrong. I've stated before that I don't care whether you like modernist stuff or not. I do care when I get labeled a dupe for liking it.

"There is not one, NOT ONE, standard for judging modern art that cannot also be used to judge realistic painting--color, design, form, meaning, etc."

So damn wrong. In another post a few months back, I listed criteria that I use when judging ANY art, including modern stuff. The criteria you just mentioned - color, form, meaning - all can and are used. The ONLY criteria not conditionally used when judging modernist painting is physical accuracy in the rendering. If that criterion is paramount to you, then you will not enjoy modernist art, and that's just fine with me. That criterion is not paramount to me, however. That is not to say I don't enjoy representational painting, but when viewing a piece of art that is not meant to be representational, it doesn't even occur to me to consider it. And that's not to say I enjoy ALL modernist painting. Some of it sucks ass, in my opinion, including some big names like Mondrian. That dude leaves me cold. But some very thoughtful people do enjoy him, so I chalk that up to my brain just not being wired for Mondrian, because I can't discount the tastes of a large number of people.

That last thought is what it all comes down to, in my mind. Some people are wired for modernist art, it just strikes them. Some aren't wired for it. That's pretty much where it stands for me. Conversely, some are wired for, I don't know, Kincade. My parents certainly are. That's fine with me, I hate the dude's art, but my parents aren't stupid people by a long shot, so there must be something there I'm not seeing.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 28, 2007 10:47 AM

Rereading BTM's comment, I may have misunderstood him. When you say this:

"There is not one, NOT ONE, standard for judging modern art that cannot also be used to judge realistic painting--color, design, form, meaning, etc."

are you saying that all the criteria used for modernist painting are also used for representational painting? If so, OK, but what is your point? Should modernist painting have criteria unique to it? I don't think so, it's all painting after all.

I may be totally misunderstanding your comment, and if so, I apologize.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 28, 2007 11:12 AM

Just to stir the pot a bit here ...

Aren't y'all conflating a couple of things that maybe deserve separating-out?

1) General useful attitudes towards the arts?

2) The modernist presence in the art establishment.

As for 1), I'm a pluralist myself, enjoy many different kinds of visuals, fail completely to enjoy some others, think that artists play many different games, and also think it's OK for people to prefer what they prefer, though I tend to hope they'll cut each other a little slack and also not get too snug within their own pocket of taste, though what's really wrong with that, etc ... I do think that at some level there are in fact some hyper-general statements that can be made about the arts, but that they need to be made cautiously and respectfully.

As for 2), well, most of the museums, publications, and schools *are* in fact run by people who subscribe to One Standard Account of art history. This seems to me hard to dispute. I've known art journalists and critics and people who work at museums and galleries, and, while many of them have private beefs with the art world's version of things, as professionals they're virtually required to sign on with the One Standard Account. Also, many of us have gone through art-history educations of the "it all led to modernism and then to Damien Hirst" sort, only to emerge into the real world and wake up to the fact that that's a very blinkered and misleading account. So it seems to me that beefing and bitching about this isn't just legitimate, it's healthy.

(Now ducks to dodge tomatoes thrown from both the left and the right ...)

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on August 28, 2007 11:23 AM

I live in Birmingham, Alabama, which is probably why I have a hard time relating for New Yorkers who feel overwhelmed by Modern Art. We do indeed have various strains of modernist art around here, but in my experience most folks here have purely representational art onm their walls, so the cruel victory of abstraction and Concept Art remains a rumor rather than a manifest reality.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 28, 2007 12:48 PM

"Relating for New Yorkers" should of course be "Relating to New Yorkers," while "onm" should simply be "on." Sorry.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 28, 2007 2:05 PM

So if a paisley or polka dot tie is "art", why stop there? My khakis must be art too--I've seen monochromatic paintings--and so must my shoes! I be the paper towel roll in my kitchen is also sculptural art!--the list goes on and on.

If this isn't the exact point I as making--that when you lower standards and erase forms, you can't make heads or tails out of anything--I don't know what is. Anything is art if you just consider it to be so. A true gem of an argument for us traditionalists to chuckle at. Thanks.

patriarch--yes, I said that the same criteria can be used to evaluate both modern and representational art. If so, it means that the two can be directly compared, and the old argument that modern art is a different animal than representational art is not true.

Also, glad Chris White came back and turned the tables, instead of falsely claiming a personal attack, now he makes them against me. I can't tell if he's an art lover or a lazy susan.

Posted by: BTM on August 28, 2007 2:20 PM

Although I am no follower of fashion I have no doubt that any clothing or costume designer would concur that clothes are, or can be, art. There's hardly anything countertraditional about that claim. To reiterate a few points: Do you despise oriental rugs? They are, after all, abstract art. Do you abhor Bach's cantatas? They are abstract art in a sonic medium.

Anyway, while everyone has the right to dislike, say, Rothko, I feel that if souls could be photographed they would look like Rothko canvasses. The typical Kandinsky canvas is like an equation of the shape of the light outside my front door. Abstract art is, for me, like feelings in visible form. While representational art imitates the appearance of God's handiwork, abstract art imitates the additive and subtractive processes by which God's handiwork is formed. One need not care for it, just as one need not care for mathematics or theology, but there's no shame in loving it.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 28, 2007 3:31 PM

First of all, very nice explanation of the appeal of modernist art, Aaron White. I couldn't agree more and wish I would have explained it as eloquently.

Secondly, BTM, you write:

"yes, I said that the same criteria can be used to evaluate both modern and representational art. If so, it means that the two can be directly compared, and the old argument that modern art is a different animal than representational art is not true."

I'm not sure where anyone argued that modernist art is a different animal than representational art. I certainly didn't. It's all painting in the end and can be judged accordingly. But judging a piece of art based on whether it is an accurate rendering of the subject when that wasn't the intent of the artist seems to me to be wrong-headed.

Posted by: the patriarch on August 28, 2007 4:22 PM

Oops. I shouldn't have claimed cantatas are abstract, since they are choral rather than instumental and one can argue that any vocal music is a product of the human voice and thus representative of the human voice or something. Bach's, or most anyone's, instrumental music is abstract, though.

Patriarch, thanks.

Posted by: Aaron White on August 28, 2007 5:07 PM






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