I’ve been into visual (and literary) art as long as I can remember. Like just about everyone, I drew as a child. Drawing is a way of communicating, just as talking and writing are, and it’s as fundamental to our brain development as written and spoken language.
But, unlike so many people, I didn’t stop drawing in those murky years around adolescence. I didn’t always improve, but I kept at it, and it’s fed me in a way that music does for so many of us. Art — including good writing, music, and the rest — touches the soul.
Anyone wonder what these images are?
So, when I look at trends in modern art, I often find myself scratching my head. What would a Paleolithic wall painter make of, say, abstract expressionism?
The fellow or fellows who painted scenes of the hunt and signed it with stenciled handprints, were talking to the gods or to each other, and it’s a pretty good guess they expected their paintings to be understood in the context of their culture.
When a modern artist creates, he or she usually does so with the same assumptions: People who see your work may argue about its meaning, but you’re communicating something here, and you trust some people will get it. Occasionally, though, we’re faced with the artist — visual, musical, literary — who is more interested in self expression than he is in communicating ideas. This is in line with a modern trend in our culture, in which our perceptions are overwhelmingly altered by our conceptions. In other words, I can only perceive what my psychological baggage allows me to perceive.
Which I call bullshit.
Sorry.
It’s absolutely true that I’ll never fully understand you, nor you me, because each of us has matured in different circumstances and come to different conclusions about things. We’re subject to both nature and nurture when it comes to how we understand and interpret life.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expect to understand what someone, especially if she’s a writer or visual artist or movie maker, is trying to say. In fact, that’s the primary joy of all art: figuring out the artist’s point of view and message! Later on, you and I can go out and argue about it over cups of coffee — another of the great joys of art — and maybe even come to better conclusions than the ones we had when we first beheld the object of art in question. (I’m including art events as well as art objects here, by the way, like movies and plays.)
So, when a visual artist starts selling canvases for tens of thousands of dollars each, I believe I have the right to ask why, if what I perceive doesn’t make sense to me. “It’s the artist’s sense of angst over modern urban reality” only goes so far, when all I see are painted scribbles and splats. The power of group-think and intellectual competition (“Dude, what? You don’t see what he’s saying here?!”) have a lot to do with how valued a lot of art is in the past century or so, in my opinion.
As always, my opinion is subject to change (but please come equipped with a good and calm argument).
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to quietly point out what I see the emperor wearing — or not wearing, as the case may be — when realistic or design-based abstract art is put down for being decadent or bourgeois. Artists who understand design and form and all that the Renaissance brought to light continue to gain my highest respect, and they’re the ones I wish to emulate in my own work.
Cool.