How I Came to Tolerate Modern Art

I feel like with a lot of modern art we ask the same question we ask children when they run to us waving their latest masterpiece. “That’s lovely. But, dear, what is it?” I felt exhausted looking at pieces of work 5 year olds could do that we tagged with prices that could significantly reduce the public deficit. Art seemed to have been hijacked by pranksters selling us their mass produced, used-car products. But then I read Danto’s After the End of Art.

Arthur C. Danto, a philosopher by training, turned art critic by accident, laid out a history of art, that in a few pages suddenly made me, an enemy of abstractionism, wish I had a Rothko, or the greatest idol of my adversaries, Black Square on a White Field, by Malevich. Exactly as it sounds, this is a black square on a white canvas. I wanted this? What happened to me?

To start with, we must look back to Florence where Vasari, scribbling away with ink and pen, extremely puffy sleeves, and a pretentious hat, was writing the first art history. Before Vasari, there wasn’t really “art” as we know it. There were craftsmen who decorated temples and adorned public spaces and even painted, but the art wasn’t really considered or critiqued. Vasari stretched back and pulling the threads of history showed that art was progressing. Painters were improving in every age from rough images to more and more life-like masterpieces. These artists were perfecting mimesis. Each new generation of artist learned, then improved upon what was done before. Until the 1960s this was the basic understanding of art’s progression.

Clement Greenburg took his theoretical hammer to that narrative of art, shattering forever a strict progression in mimetic skill as art’s trajectory. Looking back just a few decades to the Dadaist, Cubist, and Impressionist, Greenburg said that art was no longer about trying to paint life to perfection, but instead to capture a philosophy of the world, or to relate an emotion through a work. Art had become about more than skill. It was now about content.

As a philosopher, Danto couldn’t help but note the parallels of art to philosophy. When Immanuel Kant turned thinking’s guns upon itself in Critique of Pure Reason, exploring what could be learned about reason through reason, he opened the door for art to follow suit. Modern artists no longer desired to copy the world to perfection. Instead, they wanted to know what art even was, or could be, or should be. While all arts bear this exploration, painting was the purest and most concentrated medium.

In the works of impressionism, we begin to see the movement towards favoring the lay of paint on the canvas over the image it is trying to portray. By the time Jackson Pollock is drunkenly splashing paint according to his muse, we see that color and paint are the only image the piece has. Gone is any representation. All that is left are the questions of what it means and is it art.

Imagine that reality is a line running up and down on a graph, and that art is horizontal line. Clearly art is a thing separate from the objects of the world. Our cars can be beautiful, but they are not art. Even a toilet can have bold lines and elegant curves, but it is not art. Right? Wrong, according to Marcelle Duchamp. In his Found Objects exhibit in France he placed a urinal, unaltered in anyway, and called it, “fountain.” While he has been, even for me, a lightning rod for those reacting against modernism, Duchamp himself would probably smile at your anger. He was himself critiquing art with that work. He anticipated what is happening today, at the turn of the century. As modernists questioned what art was, the horizontal trajectory of art began to rise until it became one with reality. Suddenly, there was no way to tell the difference between a work of art and reality.

Andy Worhol’s piece Brillo Box, shows this perfectly. He copies exactly a piece of household, factory made packaging and places it in an art gallery. What is the difference between his box and the box every American could buy at their most conveniently located supermarket?

For Danto, it was the narrative. Worhol was part of pop-art that was just progressing beyond modernist thought. While the Cubist thought they had discovered what art really was and wrote it in their manifestos, (just at the Dadaist had before them), every new art phase was marked by its narrative parameters. Yet now, as Warhol’s piece showed anything could be art, there were no longer any rules for art.

As Greenburg replaced Vasari, Danto has called for Greenburg’s theory of art to be dethroned. No longer is there a progression of skill, nor of content in some linear story. This doesn’t mean there is no longer art, however, it simply means that art has different questions to deal with than what it is itself. Most importantly, it means that there will probably not be a central theme or movement to artists working today. No longer will there be a school or cubists or impressionists dominating the art market. There will just be people doing this or that. Since there is no longer a wall to break down, an artist can’t do art that pushes the boundaries of what art even is.

What does this mean for us? Does it matter that the painting on your wall isn’t part of a grander story of art if it is your favorite, or it reminds you of some important memory or time in your life? I hope not. And even now, that artists have perfect freedom to create is only possible because of the artists’ advances in thought and skill before hand. Art is still important. No one can argue that. They can only argue about what they like and why.

Starting conversations, especially over difference, is one of the most important facets to having a strong democracy, a reasoned and tested opinion, and a graceful heart. Further, capturing important ideas or memories or hopes in art is enough justification for making art. Even just making a room more comfortable to be in gives a utilitarian reason for art to exist. But that isn’t the point. Art will continue to happen. We just probably won’t see anything “new” in the sense of it has never been done with paint on canvas. We will just have experiments in thought and beauty.

While I agree with Danto, I also feel that in fifty years there may be some kind of narrative of the artists of our time. Historians may have bad eyes from all their reading, but their hindsight is a sharp twenty/twenty through whatever critical lens they are using. I am sure they will find something to say about our art.

For me, as an artist, I am both excited and crushed by Danto’s declaration of the end of art. On one hand, I am excited that I can work in so many mediums and be able to justify it as art. I am crushed that there is not even a chance for me to be a break through artist, as there is no barrier to break through. Still, Danto’s book has done something else for me. It has helped to understand how a museum can buy a painting as big as a room of red blending to orange before it becomes a bright yellow and call it art. Before, I thought it an utter waste, a joke! Now, in the context of this grand sweep of history I get that Rothko’s art wasn’t about nothing, but in fact was a bold, philosophical exploration in the vein of Kant’s skepticism and questioning. Danto’s book has turned my hatred of abstractionism into a respect for what it was trying to accomplish. Most importantly, Danto has helped me to understand that our art often reflects the prevailing philosophical mood of our time. Distilled in image, we can get a grasp on what the greatest minds were struggling with. As the Vasarian artists were just gaining a handle on skill and techniques, those in the Greenburgian period were searching for the limits. Like the pluralistic views on politics, religion, and philosophy that we advocate, art has no limits except acceptance. What do we have to search for today? Perhaps just the ground to stand on to even start a conversation.

 


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