Modern Art is Trash

Rant originally by Comrade of Scorn

modern art is trash

well modernist and postmodernist art really

is trash

this is by design

I've yelled about that a lot, but its probably not the place

well its kind of long to explain

so I hope you're fine with a long-ass elaboration

modernism sort of started around the 19th century

The common criticism of modernist and postmodernist art usually goes

"Its ugly"

or "Its trivial"

or my personal favourite "Its so basic a five-year old could have made the exact same thing"

while true, this is tiresome to go into isn it?

Because its not the real question to be asked. Of course major art works of the 20th century are mostly ugly. Mostly offensive. And for most, yes a five-year old could have done the same thing. The important question is not there. These points are inarguable but besides the point

the real question you should ask to realize the distinction from classical and romantic art to modernist art to postmodernist art

is "Why"

Why is it that its adopting this mode of thinking

Why would anyone think its worthwhile to pour your skill and creativity into things of utter triviality that by SELF-PROCLAMATION are to be taken as meaningless, disgusting and worthless

before I go on, I should probably note something some of you might be jumping at

Its very easy to just point the finger at the cynics who learn to play the system for their 15min glory and a fat check from a foundation, or at hangers on who only pretend to like this garbage so they get invited to parties in the "right circles"

BUT

thatd also be besides the point

Every field has its cynics and its hangers on, and that is by no means unique to art

They might exist, but they are never the ones in the driver seat

The real question is this Why is it, cynicism and filth come to be the game you have to play to make it in the art world?

you following with me so far?

so, first point

The theme that modernist and ESPECIALLY postmodernist art was and is nested in a broader cultural framework begins right around the end 19th and early 20th centuries. In spite of occasionally invoking "Da art for Da artsake"and attempts to withdraw it from life altogether, art is undeniable always something with a place of significance

Probing away at issues about things that all forms of culture should by all accounts be probing

Artists are people who think and feel very intensely about important things.

Consider: Even if some artist declared "My work has no significance, there is no reference to anything in it, and it has no meaning!"

that... would simply be taken as a significant, referential and meaningful claim

What counts as a significant cultural claim at any time is entirely dependent on what is going on in a broader intellectual/cultural frame.

Which is to say the world of art is not an environmentally sealed dome

unaffected by goings on around it

Its themes might have internal developmental logic, in art inspired by other art and so on and so forth

but the themes themselves have never really originated from the inside of the art world itself

Second theme

Postmodern art is actually not significantly a break of modernism. Its just an overclocked version of it

Despite variations that postmodernism can offer, postmodern art has never really challenged any of the frameworks of modernism in any significant way. There is more continuity than discontinuity between the two.

In short, Postmodernism is an increasingly more and more narrow set of variations on what from Modernism was already a narrow set of themes

Allow me to illustrate the main line of development

First, modernism's themes

Whats the main themes of modern art?

Standard history of art would generally tell you something to the effect of the last modernist art sort of dying off around the 70s, with all its "theming and strategies" utterly exhausted, and lo and behold now we have a few decades of postmodernism behind us

The big break with the past occured right around the end of the 19th century

Up until that point art was more of a.... hm

Well, I'll call it a "vehicle"

A vessel

meant to contain sensuousness, meanings, passions, thoughts

that sort of thing

The goals of older art were primarily things like illustration of a thing, beauty, originality, insights etc.

The artist was not just someone who thought or felt a thing, but someone who mastered a craft, so as to create a work representative of those thoughts or feelings in a sublime manner

An artistic master essentialy, creates a representation of some signficance and universal appeal to humans

A combination of the inner world of thoughts and emotions with expression outwardly through skill into the tangible, physical world

The artist in a sense is an exalted being - a creator of objects that will exalt the senses, the mind and the passions of whoever experiences them

The break from this comes with the first ever modernists of the late 1800s, who set themselves systematicaly to the project of "deconstruction"

Isolating all the elements of art, and eliminating them or otherwise flying in their faces

The causes for this break where things like the increasing "scientism" quote-unquote of the 19th century

And of course for anyone who had shaken off the religious heritage, that suddenly meant they had to feel desperately alone and without guidance in what looks to be a vast, sterile and empty universe

This then followed up by the rise of philosophical theories like subjectivism, standpoint theory and irrationalism, leading many to distrust the faculties of both perception(empirical) and reason(logical)

which right up to that point where the kings of civilization

of every single civilization in fact

on the globe

the ancients never had it in their heads that reasoning and perceiving things cannot yield truth

they took it for granted that if you can logically surmise something then it surely must be true

but thats a tangent

that I shall not get into right now

The point is, this philosophy, then coupled with the scientific theory of evolution and entropy also brings with itself the pessimistic account of human nature and the destiny of existence.

Add on the spread of things like liberalism and the free market, causing their opponents on the political left(many of whom members of the artistic avant garde) to see political development in itself as just a series of deep disappointments

and then add on top of that

the technical revolution, further spurred on by a combination of scientific advancements and capitalism

leading many to project futures where humans themselves are dehumanized and then destroyed by the very machines they build to improve their lives

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity and beauty have simply altogether disappeared

The new theme was - art is a quest for meaning

Not a quest for sublimity, or beauty

The question became

"But what is the truth of art?"

instead of asking what is the truth of what the art is about

The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand for a recognition of the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying, horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible.

That claim mind, is not unique to modernism, although you'll notice the number of artists who sign up onto that claim is rather uniquely modernist

Some past artists have indeed believed the world is ugly and horrid - but they still used the more traditional and quote-unquote realistic forms of perspective and colour to say as much

The innovation of the early modernists was the idea that form has to match content. Art SHOUDLDNT use classical forms of perspective and colour because those presuppose order, and an integrate and understandable reality

the first guy who ever got there was Edvard Munch

with The Scream in 1893

See, if the truth is that all of reality is ultimately just a horrid, disintegrating swirl

then... Form and content should just express this

Second guy who ever got there? Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon(1907)

If the truth is reality is just fractured and empty.... Then form and content should just express this

And then Salvador Dali's surrealism stepped EVEN FURTHER

If the truth is that truth is unintelligible, then art can teach this lesson by using realistic forms AGAINST the idea that we can distinguish anything objective or real from the irrational and subjective dream

The second and parallel development within modernism is Reductionism. If we are uncomfortable with the idea that art or any discipline can tell us the truth about any sort of objective reality, then we will retreat from any sort of content and focus solely on art's uniqueness.

Consider

If we are concerned with what is unique in art, then each artistic medium is different. For example, what distinguishes a painting from literature? Literature is here to tell stories - so painting shouldnt be like literature; and instead it must focus on its own uniqueness

So, here's one truth about painting

Paintings are twodimensional surface and they have paint on them

So what should you do to be a reductionist there? Simple, instead of telling a story, you as a reductionist assert that to find the truth of painting, the painter should deliberately try to deconstruct and eliminate anything at all that could be eliminated from a painting and see what is left

and THEN!

when all this "chaff" is gone

you'll know pure "essence of painting"

with nothing tacked on

Since we're eliminating, in the following 'iconic' pieces from 20th century art, its not often whats on the canvas that counts

I've often myself said "What isnt there counts for just as much as what is"(edited)

imagine taking that statement

and driving it into the extreme

"What is signficant is what you remove and isnt there"

Many elimination strategies have been pursued by earlier reductionists

IF

lets say

for example

One traditional painting aspect is that the painting illustrates some sort of a thing

Then the first thing we should try to do ourselves, is eliminate any content that is based on some kind of alleged awareness of a reality being illustrated

Deli's Metamorphosis here pulls you double duty:

Dali challenges the idea that what you call reality is actually anything more than a very bizarre and completely subjective psychological state

and going back to Picasso's painting from earlier

note their eyes

If the eyes are the window to the soul

Then those souls are just frighteningly vacant arent they?

or if you read it backwards

If the eye is the window to the world, then they are seeing nothing at all

So, suppose we eliminated from art any connection to a reality, be it the one that can be perceived or the one that can be reasoned about

What else can you eliminate

Well how about this

One skill on painting is the idea that you can represent a 3d object on a 2d surface

Then if you want a "pure essence of painting" you ought to elminate the pretense that it illustrates a dimension higher than itself

Sculptures might be 3d but paintings are not sculptures

so a "pure painting" shouldn't contain the concept of the three dimensional as a notion(edited)

Presenting the first step to real garbage postmodern art

Barnett Newman's Dionysius from 1949

no, this is not the wrong image

this is a postmodern masterpiece

yes its a green background with two horizontal lines

and one of them is kind of red

thats it

just... Paint on canvas

and ONLY paint on canvas

meaning basically nothing in a higher dimension

But wait, what else?

Ah right, paints have a texture

Texture does lead to a bit of dimensionality if you look at it some

So, Morris Louis in 1961 demonstrated for us how to get rid of that too with his Alpha-Phi

there you go

even closer to true 2d

with the paints so thinned out that they just have no texture

as 2d as it gets

Reductionism in a nutshell - dimensionality done away with

You think correctly

What else is there?

How about becoming more true to the base idea of a painting

WHAT IF!

we painted a thing that itself is twodimensional in the first place

presenting to you Jasper Johns' ""White Flag"

literally a painted-over american flag

since the flag image is also twodimensional

this is EVEN MORE twodimensional than before

you could also check out Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl from 1963

or this one

WHaam!

Those "paintings" are essentialy just big comic panels blown up onto a large canvas, but the image of a flag or the image of a comic are in themselves twodimensional

so a 2d painting of them sort of retains the essential concept that its 2d, while smuggling in some illicit content

as you might be noticing

content that we were supposedly eliminating earlier

Which is kind of cheating

and Lichtenstein later made a piece specifically to mock it

called Brushstroke(1965)

See, if painting is literally just the act of making brushstrokes on canvas.... Then obviously the truest way is the product looking exactly like what it is - a brushstroke on canvas. Full stop.

and of course on that joke, that line of development ends

So far in the quest to find out what "essence of painting" is by way of reduction and deconstructiom, I've presented the idea of playing around the gap of 3d and 2d

but there is actually a lot more to it

For example, what about composition and color differentiation? If a classical painting skill is composition, then as Jackson Pollock's pieces can illustrate for you, you can eliminate careful composition by way of randomness, or if for example a classical skill in painting is understanding color range and differentiation - then we eliminate those

An example

Kasimir Malevich's White On White from 1918

a white-ish square on a more white background

or Reinhardt's "Abstract Painting" from 1960-66

Which brings that particular line of development to a close

by depicting a VERYVERYVERYVERYVERY black cross on a slightly less black background

Well here is another

IF

a traditional art object is something special or unique in a certain sense

then you can eliminate the art object's status as such by making art out of excruciatingly ordinary things

Like Andy Warhol painting soup cans

or reproductions of tomato juice cartons

Or in a variation on that theme, if you feel like sneaking in some cultural criticism, you can show how Da Kapitalismus takes things that are special and unique liiiike

Marilyn Monroe, and reduce them to 2d massproduced commodity

Marilyn(Three Times) from 1962:

OR

if art traditionaly is about the senses and has to be embodied in perception

then we eliminate the sensuous and perceptual altogether as in conceptual art

Joseph Kosuth's It Was It

Kosuth first created a background of typeset that reads I quote

"Observation of the conditions under which misreadings occur gives rise to a doubt which I should not like to leave unmentioned, because it can, I think, become the starting-point for a fruitful investigation. Everyone knows how frequently the reader finds that in reading aloud his attention wanders from the text and turns to his own thoughts. As a result of this digression on the part of his attention he is often unable, if interrupted and questioned, to give any account of what he has read. He has read, as it were, automatically, but not correctly."

and then overlaid with the following in blue neon

"Description of the same content twice.

It was it."

The perceptual appeal here is basically nonexistent

the piece is entirely an enterprise in concept

and there you go

the painting is altogether eliminated.... from a painting

a painting with no painting in it

Inevitably, we'll have to talk about a certain Marcel Duchamp, the daddy of modernism who preemptively saw the end of the road DECADES before the fact

And made a mocking-artpiece titled "Fountain" in 1917

This was him making his quintessential statement about where art was headed for. He knew his history, and given recent trends, where it was going, he knew what people had achieved, and how over the centuries art had been a vehicle calling upon the development of human vision, and how it wasnt just something that required feels or concepts but craft and skill.

And he knew its power to exalt the mind and the senses

So... He went shopping in a plumbing store

He didnt make the urinal, note(edited)

He bought it, so as to further hammer in the point - this urinal is identical to countless others mass produced in factories at the time

Seeing it isnt exciting or ennobling - just something in poor taste

So by buying literal a regular urinal and saying "its art" he was sort of "summarizing" where everything was going

Over and above that he picked a urinal specificaly, rather than anything else trivial and lame like maybe a sink

He wanted the urinal for a message

"Your art is something I'd piss on"

In modernism, art becomes a philosophical enterprise rather than an artistic one.

But there is a still deeper point that Duchamp's urinal teaches us about the trajectory of modernism. In modernism, art becomes a philosophical enterprise rather than an artistic one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to do art but to find out what art is. We have eliminated X —is it still art? Now we have eliminated Y —is it still art?

The point of the objects was not aesthetic experience; rather the works are symbols representing a stage in the evolution of a philosophical experiment.

In fact if you consider for a second, you will notice that in almost every case, when it comes to a modernist or postmodernist artpiece, the actual piece itself is excruciatingly ugly or boring or worthless, and the only thing remotely stimulating about it is the discussion around it

Which is to say

modernist and postmodernist art is not in a museum or an archive for its own sake or because its a good work

But for the same reason a scientist puts lab notes in an archive

A kind of record of thoughts at various stages

Or, to use a simpler analogy - the purpose of these 'art' objects is considered to just be built as roadsigns along a highway, rather than being made as a landmark in its own right.(edited)

That was Duchamp's point

And later he contemptuously noted that most of the critics completely missed the point

he said

"I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty"

That urinal is not art - its a device used as a part of a mental exercise in figuring out the question: why is it that its not art?

And modernism had no answer to Duchamp's challenge

by the 1960s it found it had reached a dead end. To the extent modern art had content, its pessimism led it to the conclusion that nothing was worth saying. To the extent that it played the reductive elimination game, it found that nothing uniquely artistic survived elimination. Art became nothing.

In fact Robert Rauschenberg was often quoted as saying "Artists are no better than filing clerks"

And Andy Warhol found his usual smirking way to announce the end when asked what he thought art was anymore: "Art? —Oh, that's a man's name."

Its funny.... But in that sort of... Kind of cringe-inducing mortifying fun I specialize in

Welcome to my show

And here we come to Postmodernism at long last

Postmodernism's four themes

Where could art go after death of modernism? Postmodernism did not go, and has not gone, far. It needed some content and some new forms, but it did not want to go back to classicism, romanticism, or traditional realism.

As it had at the end of the nineteenth century, the art world reached out and drew upon the broader intellectual and cultural context of the late 1960s and 1970s. It absorbed the trendiness of Existentialism's absurd universe, the failure of Positivism's reductionism, and the collapse of socialism's New Left. It connected to intellectuals such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and it took its cue from their abstract themes of antirealism, deconstruction, and their heightened adversarial stance to Western culture. From those themes, postmodernism introduced four variations on modernism.(edited)

ONE

Postmodernism reintroduced content

But only self-referential and/or ironic.

As with philosophical postmodernism, artistic postmodernism rejected any form of realism and became anti-realist. Art cannot be about reality or nature—because, according to postmodernism, "reality" and "nature" are merely social constructs. All we have are the social world and its social constructs, one of those constructs being the world of art. So, we may have content in our art as long as we talk self-referentially about the social world of art

TWO

Postmodernism set itself to a more ruthless deconstruction of traditional categories that the modernists had not fully eliminated. Modernism had been reductionist, but some artistic targets remained.

For example, stylistic integrity had always been an element of great art, and artistic purity was one motivating(if with a misguided idea of purity) force within modernism. So, one postmodern strategy has been to mix styles eclectically in order to undercut the idea of stylistic integrity. An early postmodern example in architecture, for example, is Philip Johnson's AT&T (now Sony) building in Manhattan—a modern skyscraper that could also be a giant eighteenth-century Chippendale cabinet. The architectural firm of Foster & Partners designed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters (1979-86)—a building that could also be the bridge of a ship, complete with mock anti-aircraft guns, should the bank ever need them. Friedensreich Hundertwasser's House(1986) in Vienna is more extreme—a deliberate slapping together of glass skyscraper, stucco, and occasional bricks, along with oddly placed balconies and arbitrarily sized windows, and completed with a Russian onion dome or two.(edited)

If we put the above two strategies together, then postmodern art will come to be both self-referential and destructive. It will be an internal commentary on the social history of art, but a subversive one. Here there is a continuity from modernism. Picasso took one of Matisse's portraits of his daughter—and used it as a dartboard, encouraging his friends to do the same.

or how about Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q from 1919

literally just Mona Lisa but with a beard and moustache on top

Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning work with a heavy wax pencil and called it a new art piece

In the 1960s, a gang led by George Maciunas performed Philip Corner's Piano Activities (1962)

which called for a number of men with implements of destruction such as band saws and chisels to destroy a grand piano.

Niki de Saint Phalle's Venus de Milo (1962)

A life-size plaster-on-chickenwire version of the classic beauty filled with bags of red and black paint

Saint Phalle then took a rifle and fired upon the Venus, puncturing the statue and the bags of paint to a splattered effect.

which leads us to

THREE

Postmodernism allows one to make content statements as long as they are about social reality and not about an alleged natural or objective reality and—here is the variation—as long as they are narrower race/class/sex statements rather than universalist claims that are not social constructs at all

Postmodernism rejects the idea of a universalist notion of anything and substitutes the claim that we are all constructed into competing groups by our racial, economic, ethnic, sexual et cetera circumstances. Applied to art, this postmodern claim implies that there arent any artists at all, only

what I'll call 'hyphenated' artists: black-artists, woman-artists, homosexual-artists, poor-Hispanic-artists, rich-Hispanic-artists and so on.(edited)

Conceptual artist Frederic's PMS piece from the 1990s is helpful here in providing a schema. The piece is textual, a black canvas with the following words in red:

WHAT CREATES P.M.S. IN WOMEN?

Power

Money

Sex

unquote

Here is another example, of considering power

Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys(1985-86)

This is a piece on huwhite supreeemism and powahr]

Jane says those are three south african whites on a bench

Their skin is ghostly or corpselike white

and they have monster heads

and their hearts have surgery scars, suggesting they are heartless

BUT.... The three of them actually arent doing anything evil or objectionable

They're just casually sitting on a bench

If they werent monstrous-looking you may as well assume they're just waiting on a bus or watching passers by

The theme? Huwhite Peeple dont even realizes that theyr naturaly monsters

As for money?

Money. There is the long-standing rule in modern art that one should never say anything kind about capitalism. From Andy Warhol's criticisms of mass-produced capitalist culture we can move easily to Jenny Holzer's Private Property Created Crime (1982).

In the center of world capitalism—New York's Times Square—Holzer combined conceptualism with social commentary in an ironic manner by using capitalism's own media to subvert it. German artist Hans Haacke's Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored—out of petty cash (1991) is another monumental example. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of brutality behind the Iron Curtain, Haacke erected a huge Mercedes-Benz logo atop a former East German guard tower. Men with guns previously occupied that tower—but Haacke suggests that all we are doing is replacing the rule of the Soviets with the equally heartless rule of the corporations.

Now for Sex. Saint Phalle's Venus can do double-duty here. We can interpret the rifle that shoots into the Venus as a phallic tool of dominance, in which case Saint-Phalle's piece can be seen as a feminazi protest of supposed Patriarchamalel toxic masculine destruction of the prettiful pure ultragood femininity.

Mainstream feminist art includes Barbara Kruger's posters and room-size exhibits in bold black and red with angry faces yelling politically correct slogans about female victimization—art as a poster at a political rally.

observe here

Jenny Saville's Branded (1992) (NSFW) is a grotesque self-portrait: Against any conception of female beauty, Saville asserts that she will insist to be distended and hideous—and shove it in your face.

FOUR

The final postmodern variation on modernism is a more ruthless nihilism. The above, while focused on the negative, are still technically dealing with an actual 'thing' - namely power, wealth, and justice toward women. How can we eliminate EVEN more thoroughly any positivity in art? As relentlessly negative as modern art has been, what has not been done?

I know! How about gross-out!

Entrails and blood: An art exhibition in 2000 asked patrons to place a goldfish in a blender and then turn the blender on—art as life reduced to indiscriminate liquid entrails. Marc Quinn's Self (1991) is the artist's own blood collected over the course of several months and molded into a frozen cast of his head. That is reductionism with a vengeance.

Weird sex shit: Alternate sexualities and fetishes have been pretty much worked over during the twentieth century. But until recently art has not explored sex involving children.

herein we get Eric Fischl's Sleepwalker(1979) (NSFW)

a pubescent boy masturbating while standing naked in a kiddie pool in the backyard. Because as we know there is no reason to hunt pedos at all and we should stop the witch hunting!(edited)

This is NOT NEW as I have repeatedly said

its been around for a long LOOOOONG ass while

its just gotten more obvious in the last decades

but its been around for centuries

not convinced yet?

Fischl's Bad Boy (1981) (NSFW) shows a boy stealing from his mother's purse and looking at his naked mother who is sleeping with her legs sprawled

Very Freud, surely

How about  Paul McCarthy's Cultural Gothic (1992-93) and the theme of bestiality. Yes. Yes actually. People in the art community and fuckin experts and critics say this shit is a masterpiece

In this life-size, moving exhibit, a young boy stands behind a goat that he is violating. Here we have more than child sexuality and sex with animals, however: McCarthy adds some cultural commentary by having the boy's father present and resting his hands paternally on the boy's shoulders while the boy thrusts away.

and of course

a preoccupation with shit and piss

Again, postmodernism continues a longstanding modernist tradition. After Duchamp's urinal, Kunst ist Scheisse ("Art is shit") became, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. In the 1960s Piero Manzoni canned, labeled, exhibited and sold ninety tins of his own excrement (in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000).

Andres Serrano generated controversy in the 1980s with his Piss Christ , a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist's urine.

In the 1990s Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) portrayed the Madonna as surrounded by disembodied genitalia and chunks of dried feces.

In 2000 Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi paid homage to their master, Marcel Duchamp. Fountain is now at the Tate Museum in London, and during regular museum hours Yuan and Jian unzipped and proceeded to urinate on Duchamp's urinal. (The museum's directors were not pleased, but Duchamp would be proud of his spiritual children.) And there is G. G. Allin, the self-proclaimed performance artist who achieved his fifteen minutes by defecating on stage and flinging his feces into the audience.

So again we have reached a dead end: From Duchamp's Piss on art at the beginning of the century to Allin's Shit on you at the end—that is not a significant development over the course of a century.

So lo and behold here we are

Postmodern art played itself out in its narrow range of assumption and its basically just a set of minor variations on the exact same thing

Even the gross-out at this point is so mechanical and repetitive that people actually just fucking take it

So what next?

It is helpful to remember that modernism in art came out of a very specific intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century, and that it has remained loyally stuck in those themes. But those are not the only themes open to artists, and much has happened since the end of the nineteenth century.

We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has just about doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets.(edited)

I put forward

That... You should attempt a different starting foundation if you truly want to make art

because this one leads here

in the shit and piss

you might have been laughing at the millions of sexualities and the very notion that anyone would allow something like that... But well

Deep down you all knew very well

there was only one way this was going to end

Did you expect me to be positive?

no

this is just a pisshole

kill the postmodernists and use it to fill out the grave they dug for themselves

they are wretchedly broken beings

this is a mercy

The End