A while back I stumbled upon a website with a 16 question quiz entitled "Art or crap." This funny little quiz shows 16 images which you must decide are either, well, the title pretty much explains that. You are scored as you go and beware, you may feel a little foolish. In fact the exercise seems to add to the argument that much of modern art really is foolish and requires very little skill, to say the least. A blue canvas is only a blue canvas whether it is on a museum wall or not. While they may call it priceless, I may say it isn't even worth the price of the materials.
But is one person's trash another's treasure? I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You must ask yourself what you, as an observer, consider art to be. Can you stare into a blank canvas and see beauty? Is this what the artist intended, did the artist intend for you to do anything?
We must think of extremes here. Does a few crayon scribbles on a canvas splattered with paint rate the same respect as a well thought out painting which took years to make? Obviously not, but I suppose its all about the artists intentions.
But is one person's trash another's treasure? I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You must ask yourself what you, as an observer, consider art to be. Can you stare into a blank canvas and see beauty? Is this what the artist intended, did the artist intend for you to do anything?
We must think of extremes here. Does a few crayon scribbles on a canvas splattered with paint rate the same respect as a well thought out painting which took years to make? Obviously not, but I suppose its all about the artists intentions.
Kitsch
We must not forget "Art" can be a pretty broad term. Not everything can be lumped into one giant group. Consider the little Christmas statues that somebody designed and are mass produced, or the statues of religious icons sold commercially. It takes some skill in coming up with these little trinkets and sometimes people have to paint them by hand. Examples such as these can be labeled as "kitsch." Here the term applies to commercially produced items, which in reference to the art world can be considered lower quality. The basic formula is the repetition used to mass produce.
This unfortunate label can be attached to artists who have basically saturated the market with a basic model for their work. Artists such as Thomas Kinkade have used and abused their style to the point where the value lessens which each new addition. He has copied his own style time and again, failing to come up with anything new and has become too commercial.
Another aspect of kitsch art can be a subject of some controversy. This is the idea that artwork can carry the stigma of kitsch if it has become too pretentious to the point where it seems to try too hard. The photo-realism of William Adolphe Bouguereau leaves no mystery about its subjects and almost insults the intelligence of the viewer by making every grain of sand visible. It's a shame so many believe this, because his paintings obviously took a tremendous amount of skill.
You have these little crafts you can get at a Christmas Bazaar and anything you can buy that is mass-produced, whether its hand-painted or not. Kitsch can be anything considered to be tasteless or inferior. These items are on the low end of the totem pole.
If you wanted to put levels to art you may say that such kitsch artists and commercially driven producers would be at the bottom. Next you may find graphic artists, then illustrators, animators, and then fine artists with the exact order being debatable. These ideals seem to have been the norm in the art world. And speaking of the norm and the status quo, what if you wanted to break away from all that?
The Dada Movement
Here we have a movement based on defying conventionalism and values. Pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp (see one of his readymades at the top, and his "Mona Lisa With a Moustache" below) strove to break free from the art world and produce their own chaotic "anti-art."
The funny thing about rebellious anti-art movements is that they always end up getting assimilated into the system. The Dadaists did not consider their works to be art, but of course its all considered art today. Some say this was the prelude to abstract expressionism.
Marcel Duchamp was also famous for taking a urinal, writing the fictional name R. Mutt on the side of it, calling it "Fountain," and putting it in a museum. It was this type of "found art" that made him noteworthy, and his practices would certainly be emulated. A point of interest here is that he was a trailblazer and the first to do this type of thing. Anybody who takes a wheel and screws it into a stool these days is not an artist and their work is, well, kitschy.
Minimalism
Dadaism as a movement did not last very long and after several years came big movements such as surrealism with Rene Magritte and his mysteries. Magritte would paint a picture of a pipe and write underneath it "This is not a pipe." It didn't matter to him whether or not people understood his pictures. Perhaps he was making a statement on art in general.
Eventually came abstract expressionism with its emotionally charged realism-defying principles. Artwork didn't have to be about any specific subject at all. It had to do with expressing yourself with basic human feeling. So instead of painting a landscape of a city, one might draw a few lines and splatter a whole bunch of paint on it.
Minimalism can be considered a reaction to this. If art is going toward the direction of leaving actual representative form behind, we may as well predict where art can lead us. Throughout art history of the 19th and 20th centuries you had a pattern of subtraction as far as visual arts went. Why not just skip ahead and make art nothing.
And that is what the minimalists seemed to do. If a number be assigned to their art it was certainly zero. Art in its most primitive form is essentially nothing, a blank canvas, a black square. In contrast to the abstract expressionists, the minimalists did not consider their art to be expression at all. It simply was what it was: plain cold geometric forms. A blue canvas was simply a blue canvas.
Art of the Future
While the minimalists certainly had a strong message, it is impossible to predict the art of the future. Is the art world patterned with endless subtraction? After a blank canvas is there anything left to subtract?
Art is much more complex than this, of course, and there are all kinds of schools of thought on the subject. All I can say is art is what you make of it. If you want it to be art, it is what you think it is. If you are an art dealer and some crazy artist is charging a million dollars for a pile of junk and you want to put it in a museum, more power to you.
Perhaps art gets bored with itself and the art market must constantly change. As with anything there are fads and fashions and whats hip today is forgotten tomorrow. As artists I think we can follow Warhol's prediction that in the future everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.
So be optimistic. Paint, sculpt, splatter, tear, create, destroy and call it "priceless" while you're at it.
But is it art? You tell me.
We must not forget "Art" can be a pretty broad term. Not everything can be lumped into one giant group. Consider the little Christmas statues that somebody designed and are mass produced, or the statues of religious icons sold commercially. It takes some skill in coming up with these little trinkets and sometimes people have to paint them by hand. Examples such as these can be labeled as "kitsch." Here the term applies to commercially produced items, which in reference to the art world can be considered lower quality. The basic formula is the repetition used to mass produce.
This unfortunate label can be attached to artists who have basically saturated the market with a basic model for their work. Artists such as Thomas Kinkade have used and abused their style to the point where the value lessens which each new addition. He has copied his own style time and again, failing to come up with anything new and has become too commercial.
Another aspect of kitsch art can be a subject of some controversy. This is the idea that artwork can carry the stigma of kitsch if it has become too pretentious to the point where it seems to try too hard. The photo-realism of William Adolphe Bouguereau leaves no mystery about its subjects and almost insults the intelligence of the viewer by making every grain of sand visible. It's a shame so many believe this, because his paintings obviously took a tremendous amount of skill.
You have these little crafts you can get at a Christmas Bazaar and anything you can buy that is mass-produced, whether its hand-painted or not. Kitsch can be anything considered to be tasteless or inferior. These items are on the low end of the totem pole.
If you wanted to put levels to art you may say that such kitsch artists and commercially driven producers would be at the bottom. Next you may find graphic artists, then illustrators, animators, and then fine artists with the exact order being debatable. These ideals seem to have been the norm in the art world. And speaking of the norm and the status quo, what if you wanted to break away from all that?
The Dada Movement
Here we have a movement based on defying conventionalism and values. Pioneers such as Marcel Duchamp (see one of his readymades at the top, and his "Mona Lisa With a Moustache" below) strove to break free from the art world and produce their own chaotic "anti-art."
The funny thing about rebellious anti-art movements is that they always end up getting assimilated into the system. The Dadaists did not consider their works to be art, but of course its all considered art today. Some say this was the prelude to abstract expressionism.
Marcel Duchamp was also famous for taking a urinal, writing the fictional name R. Mutt on the side of it, calling it "Fountain," and putting it in a museum. It was this type of "found art" that made him noteworthy, and his practices would certainly be emulated. A point of interest here is that he was a trailblazer and the first to do this type of thing. Anybody who takes a wheel and screws it into a stool these days is not an artist and their work is, well, kitschy.
Minimalism
Dadaism as a movement did not last very long and after several years came big movements such as surrealism with Rene Magritte and his mysteries. Magritte would paint a picture of a pipe and write underneath it "This is not a pipe." It didn't matter to him whether or not people understood his pictures. Perhaps he was making a statement on art in general.
Eventually came abstract expressionism with its emotionally charged realism-defying principles. Artwork didn't have to be about any specific subject at all. It had to do with expressing yourself with basic human feeling. So instead of painting a landscape of a city, one might draw a few lines and splatter a whole bunch of paint on it.
Minimalism can be considered a reaction to this. If art is going toward the direction of leaving actual representative form behind, we may as well predict where art can lead us. Throughout art history of the 19th and 20th centuries you had a pattern of subtraction as far as visual arts went. Why not just skip ahead and make art nothing.
And that is what the minimalists seemed to do. If a number be assigned to their art it was certainly zero. Art in its most primitive form is essentially nothing, a blank canvas, a black square. In contrast to the abstract expressionists, the minimalists did not consider their art to be expression at all. It simply was what it was: plain cold geometric forms. A blue canvas was simply a blue canvas.
Art of the Future
While the minimalists certainly had a strong message, it is impossible to predict the art of the future. Is the art world patterned with endless subtraction? After a blank canvas is there anything left to subtract?
Art is much more complex than this, of course, and there are all kinds of schools of thought on the subject. All I can say is art is what you make of it. If you want it to be art, it is what you think it is. If you are an art dealer and some crazy artist is charging a million dollars for a pile of junk and you want to put it in a museum, more power to you.
Perhaps art gets bored with itself and the art market must constantly change. As with anything there are fads and fashions and whats hip today is forgotten tomorrow. As artists I think we can follow Warhol's prediction that in the future everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.
So be optimistic. Paint, sculpt, splatter, tear, create, destroy and call it "priceless" while you're at it.
But is it art? You tell me.
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