Modern art is rubbish
Would somebody care to enlighten me about the genius of Cy Twombly? At the weekend I visited the Tate Modern show on this 'master of modern painting' and I left none the wiser. My knowledge of Twombly was limited before the show. I knew that he is an American who has spent much of his life in Italy and also that he had something to do with period following Abstract Expressionism, but that was it. I'd never gone to a gallery and had my attention grabbed by one of his pictures. That is still the case.
I'm not opposed to abstraction on principle, I've never uttered the words "A three-year-old child could do that" in response to an artwork, but I have to admit that those words echoed around my head as I wandered through the show. I would have been more receptive to room upon room of splatters, smears and lumps if they hadn't been so boring to look at. Standing in front of a white canvas covered with pencil scribbles I willed myself to feel or think something... or at least something other than, "I hope the later work is better". Despite their titles, Murder of Passion and Crimes of Passion II were no more exciting. The text panels around the gallery mentioned "heightened eroticism and sensuality" but I couldn't feel any heat in these pictures. The paintings were dry and academic, an impression heightened by the continuous references to mythology and poetry. Orpheus, check; Bacchus, check; the great god Apollo, check. I usually find myth and legend very resonant, but in this case I remained resistant - they just seemed like empty references. Jonathan Jones makes a lucid case for Twombly as "the greatest painter of the city since Turner" and his comparison of one graphic artist with another ("Banksy is a thick person's idea of a radical artist. Twombly is a thinking person's") has ensured that people have taken notice of his article, but I'm not buying it. I'm afraid it will take more than slagging off Banksy to convince me that Twombly is a genius.
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Yes
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It means what you think it means, the reaction created by the dialog between the artist and viewer. If the dialog consists of "A child could have painted that", then that is it's meaning for you.
With a little practice, you could run off drivel like I just did yourself. You really need to get out more.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
I can't say twombly is a genius. but i do like some of his paintings, i also like modern and contemporary art, as i like old types of art like Turner and Caravaggio.
(that was not a comparison).
I go to art galleries and like them not always but i go to them because i know i like art. I like that it changes, it has changed,it is right that i changes.
as everything changes.
I would like to say art is for every person alive, but some people are not interested, if that was your 1st visit to a gallery then maybe you should consider that you are not really that interested engaging with art. You should not waste your time or your money and stick to something you do like in the future.
and whatever it is i hope you enjoy it more than you did Cy Twombly
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I'm a few months ahead of this article!
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10347167954
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Hi che don john
It looks like only your friends have permission to read this note. I take it that your response to the exhibition was similar to mine.
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I havn't seen the exhibition, but made a rant about modern art a few months back to wind up a friend who studies it. Even titled it 'Modern Art Is Rubbish'(Blur was the inspiration there)! I'll try make it so that the note is available for public viewing
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AGD, expecting to lure MK by experiential hyperbole, expressed the typical mistake many art lovers make: believing their enjoyment and experience of art is an immediate, non-intellectual, emotional response which is a primary human reaction. In this context, ‘Distinction’, a sociological study of taste by Pierre Bourdieu is inspiring: it demonstrates how taste (and even the basic, supposedly ‘immediate’) response to art is a product of background (class, family, geography), education and profession. This is precisely what has always given ‘mass culture’ the image of being democratic – one does not need to develop an ‘aesthetic disposition’, or, in other words, specific knowledge, in order to ‘read it’. In order to understand Cy Twombly’s importance (even if not, necessarily, to like his work) MK would have to have a more in-depth knowledge of 19th and 20th century art, a knowledge which ‘explains’ Twombly. There are many explanations to art moving away from representation; a common one is that art’s role as a documenter of reality was appropriated by the camera, and consequently art transformed to be a mode of expression of the artist. Alternatively, it could be argued that the artist’s freedom from the aristocratic court (the result of the rise of middle class society and emergence of an art market) meant that art was no longer subordinated to anything outside of art (commissions from clergy and aristocracy) and turned to study art itself (in other words, copying reality seemed a redundant type of work). Also, by the late 19th century the level of technique was so developed, that many artists could paint works which a few centuries earlier would have been considered masterpieces – the development of realistic techniques was exhausted. All these are quite complex stories, but, in any case, fine art today is no craft. Instead of coming up with jazz as an example, AGD should have brought up prog rock, that awful 1970s genre (well, except for a few exceptions I suppose) which was all about virtuosity, about boasting one’s ability to play guitar or drums. MK, I am sure, would agree that such technique-craze has little value musically, even when speaking of mass culture, and that genre’s with less emphasis on technique (punk? Low-fi?) can be much more exciting even though their musicians can hardly play their instruments. And, by the way, a good intro book to modernism for philistines is Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.
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Before you beat me about the head for pedantry, I think it useful to discuss definitions so that we can more clearly understand the things we are talking about and I see various different implied usages of the term "modern art" in the discussion above.
I am confident that the general usage for the relevant terms, with some flexibility on the start and end dates:
* Modern Art: Art from the Impressionists (say, around 1880) up until the 1960's or 70's.
* Contemporary (sometimes Post-Modern) Art: Art from the 1960's or 70's up until this very minute.
For myself, I adore most modern art, but often struggle with contemporary art.
It's perhaps interesting to look at these definitions in the context of the work under discussion above. Thus, the Turner Prize entries are definitely "Contemporary" and looking at the subject matter for the original "The Shock of the New" programmes, 6 were about "Modern Art" and two about "Contemporary":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/shock-new-eps.shtml
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Ballettlover: your distinction between 'modern art' and 'contemporary' seems to echo the 'modernist' vs 'postmodernist' differentiation. While there is clearly a transformation in the art produced since the 1960s, it must be stressed that the work of the last decades referred to non-mainstream modernism as the forefathers [duchamp rather than picasso, schwitters rather than monet]; so some continuity exists, even if there is also considerable change. Also, i think the importance of 'the new' has been ressurected: in the 1980s art was very much about referring to previous art [even classicist] whereas today, the referrants are often veiled by the insistance on the importance of novelty, a return, in this sense at least, to modernist positions. But in regard to MK position, don't you find his insistance on a visibility of craftmanship a bit odd considering his love for skiffle, a musical genre which is more about attitude than virtuosity?
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“Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.”
Shakespeare – Love’s Labours Lost.
Art is what we see, or should I say, it is the image in portrayed in front of us. Modern art has managed to shroud itself in a veil of “hidden meaning”, that it has a deep and hidden meaning lying below the surface waiting for someone who is exceedingly cleaver to work it out and show the world how cleaver they are.
After all ‘A pile of bricks is a pile of bricks’.
If the artist or some cleaver individual has to try and explain their work of art then the artist has failed to create a work of art that the viewer can see, grasp, understand and appreciate.
Whilst I was walking in the hills near my home I came across the remains of a dead lamb, which had been partially eaten and was in a certain amount of decay, generally to the average person not the most pleasant of sights. The question is ‘If I had carefully gathered up the carcass and mounted it on a pretty wooden plinth and put it in a glass case full of formaldehyde and put it on public show’ would it suddenly made the transition from rotting carcass to become a work of art ?
Who knows, it may well have held a certain fascination, as being locked in a never ending state of suspended decay, but because it was on display does not automatically confer on it the status of a ‘Work of Art’.
Likewise putting a dead black sheep with a golden horn in a tank of formaldehyde does not make a work of art, that is unless your name is Damian. You know what they say ‘a fool and his money are easily parted’.
There are thousands of wonderful artists creating fabulous works of art, go out and find them.
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Addendum to the previous comment ... sorry about all the question marks .. have no idea how they managed to get into the text.
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I think this boils down to a cultural divide. I was at art school 5 years ago and many fellow painters loved Twombly whilst, like you, it all seemed to me like the emperor's new clothes.
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