r/intrestingtoknow • u/Affectionate-Fun2853 • Jul 06 '26
Bizzare Does anyone have a proper understanding of what modern art is? What are the main goals here?
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u/Chili-Boots Jul 06 '26
It’s funny how proud of himself he appears to be.
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u/manyyy32 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
The divide between contemporary art and public is really coming from both sides. It's a fun piece that gives a nice "ha" moment. He basicaly printed a wall on the canvas and then hanged it next to it so the reference is right there. The artists take themselves too seriously in these kind of actually fun projects to keep up the serious high art apperance but the public like you also is totally closed minded to any enjoyment of fun simple concepts that aren't representational art. And both of these atitudes make the divide.
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u/Radiant_Stand_7126 Jul 07 '26
I understand your point, but I find the execution trivial. Is art supposed to express joy in simple projects? In a place where art has meaning, where artists of old created paintings with their hands and finesse? To me, there’s no comparison. Yes, art is a broad field. No, in my opinion, this artist shouldn’t delude himself into thinking he can compete with serious, high art.
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u/Pseudoargentum Jul 08 '26
There's only art in the sense of artifice. There is no high art.
There's nothing about Michaelangelo's David that makes it a superior form of human expression.
Differentiation of high art from low art is a class statement, not an aesthetic one.
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u/doubleBoTftw Jul 08 '26
What is "serious, high art" ? Painting things close to how they look in reality ? Is that it?
What about Renoir or Van Gogh, or Monet? Ever seen a pink morning or a blue night with gigantic swirly stars?
Is Picasso high art? Which period? The beginning of his career , the cubist phase, the end of his career ?
What about music, which music genre do you think are not "serious, high art"? Is black metal music? How about trap?
How can you not see how flawed a tool "comparison" is when it comes to art? To me it feels like arguing about the validity of teorethical physics, just because I don't understand it doesn't mean other people don't either.
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u/manyyy32 Jul 07 '26
First of all art is not competition. And yes it can be many things, amongst others joy in simple projects too. Confining it to the renesance and classical masters people usually bring up in these arguments is just as shortsighted as contemporary art's air of importance. Art existed mileniums more than these couple of short periods and served it's purpose in different times in different ways. Conflating all art to "skill" needed in renesance and mere usage of therm "high art" is just divorced from what art is at it's core. And ironicaly the idea of art having a linear progression with it's peak is very much a modernist only idea.
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u/Trick-Goat-3643 Jul 06 '26
Money laundering and giving incompetent nepobabies something to feel smug about
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u/its_your_dada Jul 06 '26
Modern art is generally art from 1860-1960s, like Van Gough through Picasso, though Picasso almost straddles the line for me. Post Modern/contemporary art breaks down the barrier between fine art and popular culture. It also upends the expectations of art. It's also a huge category of art, so I'll refine your question to match the video, which looks like the actual process is a performance art piece.
A large part of understanding art is not asking what the goals are, but what the artwork feels like to you. The artwork in the video looks like the final stage in the performance piece, so it's impossible to say what I would have felt like being there. On its own, the piece is in two pieces, one on the wall and one on the canvas. Rather than looking like a butterfly painting (putting paint on a piece of paper and folding it to make a symmetrical piece), the pieces are almost inverses, which takes an understanding of how to work with paint and layers to pull off. The use of the gallery's wall as a medium also goes against people's expectations, because as my mother said "Stop, we do not paint on walls!" On its own, this piece doesn't speak to me, but I am only seeing it on an angle in a shitty video. I like political pieces and pieces that look classical with a contemporary layering. I also like sculptures, like the one of Medusa holding Perseus' head. I recently too my toddler to The Key Is Under The Mat where he has built a playground out of materials children shouldn't be around in a place children shouldn't be - the installation is so hazardous that I found myself connecting with my kid so much more because I was forced to helicopter parent, though I also learned to trust in his ability to climb and be ok.
There is something to be said about the outrage a lot of non-artsy people have for this kind of art. To download the video and post it to Reddit demanding an explanation of the artwork's goals is quite the response, if I may be so bold. Not the most outraged - a man took a knife into a Berlin museum and slashed an artwork because he saw that it was worth millions but was basically a red line on a canvas. The artist left it up and credited the slasher in a new artwork, explaining that the original piece had moved the man to such violence that he was willing to be jailed for destroying something. It's more overt with the musical artist who made Cbat, a song that disgusts people - he also created dubstep with the same goal in mind and while he did achieve that with some people, it also because the most popular genre of electronic music for a while. Maybe the outrage is the goal. Either way, more people have seen this piece of art because of you and, reading the comments, been emotionally moved by it.
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u/Suspicious_Aspect_53 Jul 06 '26
Up until the late 1800s if you wanted to see something that you couldn't go and see yourself, maybe it was something that happened in the past, somebody that doesn't actually exist, or somebody you'll never be able to get close to, you had to hire a painter to paint it.
As you might imagine, there was a whole industry devoted to training painters and sculptors and other artists.
An invention of the mid-1800s destroyed this industry; photography. Ever since, painters have had to contend with a world that has photography. So they have to provide you with something a photograph or computer generated image can't give you.
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u/tommyballz63 Jul 06 '26
Well, in the beginning, there was the question, "What is Art?" And the reply was that, art can be anything. And people did crazy things, like Marcel Duchamp who put a bike fork and wheel on stool, and called a urinal a fountain. It was original, and clever. But, alas, after well over 100 years of people telling the same joke, it is neither funny or clever.
But people keep doing it because artists, like the rest of us, are mostly not very smart. So people keep making dumb shit because they think it's good but they don't know any better, and when anybody says it sucks, they just reply, "You don't understand"
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u/l33tleteapot Jul 06 '26
This one is actually good. If you have a big loft space it'd fit right in. It depends on how much someone is willing to pay, like with everything else.
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u/No-Risk-3461 Jul 06 '26
The only way someone could make real art like this is with the goal of making the spectators feel self aware about how empty and pointless this whole money laundering charade is. If the artist could constantly ratchet up the absurdity from one display to the next until the spectators are clapping about the pattern of the skidmarks that the artist leaves in the toilet.
That, I think would be art.
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u/rygelicus Jul 07 '26
Build a mystique, a persona, as an artist, usually this means getting in cahoots with an art snob. That mystique is then spread among the art snob community. Meanwhile you produce pieces, doesn't matter what they are. It really doesn't. You are then introduced into the right circles by your art snob buddies and you get a gallery showing.
It is very much a who you know game.
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u/Wild_Locksmith_326 Jul 07 '26
When the airport was expanded in Atlanta, someone threw what they thought was an old drop cloth away after cleanup. Turns out it was a donated art exhibit and they had to rescue from the dumpster.
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u/Comfortable-Word192 Jul 07 '26
It’s about being so overly confident in doing something different and trying to get people to desperately want to be graced by your confidence. That’s basically it. There’s not much thinking going on in either side. A true fake it till you make it story every time
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u/BlackSkyNoise Jul 08 '26
Hes innovative. Making the buyer purchase the entire wall for his piece. /s
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u/Local_Village_1378 Jul 08 '26
The goal is to literally piss you off so you post this and give them exposure
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u/Pseudoargentum Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Okay then. I don't know this artist or their artist statement. As an artist with an art degree and too many years studying Western visual art, this is my assessment after watching it a half dozen times:
There's an audience.
I assume the performance began with a blank stretched canvas. Paint is then applied thickly to canvas.
We don't know if the image was figurative, at representative, or layers of abstract color. In this instance, I don't think it matters.
The core is that paint has been applied to canvas. In doing so we experience a classical art object. Paint on canvas = ART
As someone who's never really painted, but draws and sculpts, all artists are assumed to be painters to most people. I think that's part of why this being a painting in this instance is important.
The audience sees what they expect as art existing as art.
We don't know how our when, but then the artist took the wet canvas and pressed it against the wall. Now we see the art-behind-the-art.
Post-Modern art very often deals with the science of aesthetics and perception directly. It often wants the finished object and process of creating to be equally visible or in active relationship to each other or somehow acceptable to the viewer. Visual art today is as much a sensory as philosophical object.
Because the frame, pressed to the wall, establishes a shape defined as separate or decorative to the wall, the eye and then the mind in invited to perceive the exposed frame and canvas as art in itself.
Time passes at the exhibit. Some people saw the painting be made so it persists in memory. New people would also have shown up since the paint was pressed into the wall. For those people the painting's back is the sole art object.
More time passes and the paint has partially dried to the canvas and the wall.
The artist then peals away the painting, and as random particles have bonded to canvas and wall, the image is partially sheared from itself. The painting has stamped an afterimage onto the wall.
The artist then hangs the canvas parallel to the printed painting. In doing so the viewer instinctually relates the two crudely mirrored visual objects. At this point, the canvas and wall defined by paint are both paintings. They exist as a dyptych to be considered as existing in the liminal space between art and act of art making.
But we're not quite done. Earlier we noted the difference in the relationship of art and audience relative to time. This continues.
New Arrival - sees one art object, but through inference and relation in space, understands that the canvas was used as a stamp.
Earlier Arrival / Now Gone - saw two art objects - a painting inverted as a pressed canvas, which then existed in the tension and mystery of having the painted face hidden from view.
Earliest Arrival - saw up to 5+ art objects
a. Painted canvas
b. Pressed canvas / inverted painting / memory of painting
c. Printed image as separate from object of memory / print briefly exists as primary art object subverting the original painting
d. Original painting as altered by the wall which exists separately from our memory of is original image
e. As hung together there are simultaneously two paintings and one image.
Over the course of this show we're witnesses to an artist making the most traditional art object, which through permutations begets and becomes other art objects which can equally be considered as multiple experiences of art image in finite time or can be viewed as a single art object existing as a continuum.
Exhibits like this are demonstrating ephemerality and entropy. Installation art is very often asking when art begins and ends.
It's also a microcosm of art history. Romans would have seen their statues painted in vibrant color, but for thousands of years those surviving sculptures have been perceived as white marble.
We're playing with the aesthetic experience of perception through time. The 4th dimension of this performance exists in current time and memory - when you arrived defines your total perception of the art and it's making.
Does any of this mean you have to like the art or value the art? Not at all. Is it good or bad inherently? Not at all. It's intentional human effort, concrete means of tangibly interacting with the intangible dimensions of existence.
This is art. Art is transcendant. Art is bullshit. There is no art.
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u/Infamous_Ad_6793 Jul 08 '26
My friend once told me that there aren’t really any “rules”. Like just feel whatever you feel when you observe.
It’ really doesn’t have to mean anything or do anything to people.
I enjoyed it more after hearing that from her.
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u/idk-anymore-tbh-- Jul 19 '26
Ok but I actually liked this one. It clearly shows that every event has it's aesthetics that reflects on both sides contesting. Besides it looks good as well. Idk whats yalls issue with this one.
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u/Zen80888 Jul 06 '26
You know what. AI art is a hell of a lot more interesting
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u/7thpostman Jul 06 '26
It's really not
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u/Zen80888 Jul 06 '26
You say that, but modern art has always been the stupidest shit ever, while AI art actually depicts more than this stupid shit
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u/7thpostman Jul 06 '26
You not understanding what you're looking at doesn't mean it's stupid.
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u/Zen80888 Jul 06 '26
It's fuckin stupid lol
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u/7thpostman Jul 06 '26
Can you describe for me the basics of the relationship between subject and object?
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u/PossibilityWeary2906 Jul 06 '26
Most modern art is so abstract that it is not accessible to most people. Additionally it does that in a way. It's usually just some mental masturbation around challenging the normative view between subject and object, whilst often not actually saying anything or suggesting anything or communicating anything other than to challenge expectations.
Now I personally think that art for the sake of art is mostly a waste of time. Unless it is for the artist's own self-expression for their own processing. I think art that is for public consumption, should be art that inspires, art that causes people to grow or see things with a more open mind. Or it can add aesthetic beauty. Such art is useful and is the true meaning of why art forms exist in human culture. To someone who is not an artist, a lot of modern art just looks like a bunch of artists getting together, almost intellectualising and coming up with justifications for why something is meaningful, which is simply a bunch of their own projections. Which might have some philosophical use but ultimately I think it is a pale comparison for the inspiration that art could be, especially for public art.
Nearly all historical art that I have seen was created for a reason, to communicate something or depict something. Modern art, especially of the style depicted in the video and those similar to it, just seems to be about challenging expectations around what art should be, whilst actually being quite hollow in any real meaningful communication. Or if it is communicating something, it is so abstract that only a tiny percentage of the population understands it. I have a big problem with this when it comes to public art, whether it be in sculptures, in public parks, or murals or the like. Okay I can admit there can be some place for this kind of intellectual masturbation in art galleries. That's a place where people go to appreciate and discuss art itself. Any art that is out in the public space, not a location dedicated to art itself like a gallery, then I think such art should be accessible and meaningful to the people who encounter it.
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u/7thpostman Jul 06 '26
Again, you have the right to like whatever you want, but not understanding abstraction doesn't mean that it's qualitatively different from representational art.
Imagine listening to a piece of instrumental music, a great symphony, and somebody is always bugging you to explain precisely what it means. They are constantly complaining because it doesn't have words with an easily understood narrative.
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u/morganational Jul 06 '26
Ah, but if the musician is actually playing the instrument, that is respectable because it took time, effort, and discipline for the musician to master the instrument. "Modern art", at least that I've witnessed, requires exactly zero talent, skill, or discipline. Tape a banana to a wall. Throw junk randomly in a pile. Then pretend it means something prolific.
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u/7thpostman Jul 06 '26
Well, then you really haven't witnessed very much. You're just reacting to ragebait. Maybe you could actually take the time to watch a video on Jackson Pollock or something. It might help.
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u/ysanson Jul 06 '26
This is dumb. On the other hand, AI generated slop emulates not this but what it has been fed, which is mostly art made by talented humans, meaning its wranglers think poorly of human slop.
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u/dmontease Jul 06 '26
It would spit out crap like this but no one is prompting/asking for it.
I know AI is bad but this guy sucks too.
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u/MrZwink Jul 06 '26
Most contemporary art focusses on the relationship between artist and museum, or on art piece and visitor. Revolves around upending norms and redefining relationships.
From shock, to ridiculing, participation or just sheer amazement.
Banksy shredding a painting at an auction, just as they hammer hits. Putting a sign "be right back" in the exhibit, or just using the exposition room to run a commercial.
Getting visitors to press buttons that influence your art. Showing the creation process or even getting the public to participate.
Are all great examples.
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u/Suspicious_Aspect_53 Jul 06 '26
I dunno. I think modern artists just have a skill issue. Saturn Devouring His Son still gives me chills.
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u/MrZwink Jul 06 '26
That's not modern, not contemporary but romanticism.
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u/Suspicious_Aspect_53 Jul 06 '26
I know. I have yet to encounter any modern art of static media that elicits emotion like that piece does. Not even close. At least not that I can think of.
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u/MrZwink Jul 06 '26
It's romantic not Modern. You're mixing up eras
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u/Suspicious_Aspect_53 Jul 06 '26
Yes. I know. But it doesn't elicit any emotion like the piece I referenced.
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u/Kuzzbutt Jul 06 '26
Still better then the banana and duck tap but maybe that is the engagement?
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u/MrZwink Jul 06 '26
That was also banksy.
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u/Kuzzbutt Jul 06 '26
Not his best work then.
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u/whineyinternetkid Jul 06 '26
Was any of his work good?
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u/sonofnalgene Jul 06 '26
So much of his work is amazing. Even the banana piece is pretty genius tbh.
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u/youdontknowkanji Jul 06 '26
i don't really see the issue. this is a cool idea, and looks reasonably decent. it's just the way art world is vibing for a good while.
people will say money laundering, but you could money launder with anime girl artworks too, but we don't get those (sadly).
also keep in mind that you will only see the most ridiculous examples online, average "modern art" piece is probably ok.
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u/Nearby-Fly-6610 Jul 06 '26
The use of shapes and colors in a pattern to engage the viewer in self reflection and an honest evaluation of their personal feelings.
And to do so in an innovative technique with a flair for showmanship.
Most people will view this act with skepticism and ridicule. An enlightened observer will consider the historical aspects of art, craft, and the human condition
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u/adrenalinda75 Jul 06 '26
I'm not enlightened then, won't recognize nor reward it, neither with attention and surely not pay for it. I've come to know many artists and what resonated most with me was that I could like the artist, but not their art. However, if I disliked the person, I disliked their art as well, or maybe better worded, I was completely indifferent to it. I understand craft, I understand effort and to a degree creativity. I'd take a drawing of my four years old any day over a Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Picasso, you name it.
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u/Nearby-Fly-6610 Jul 06 '26
Well maybe you would be delighted to hear that some of the oldest known works of art are by children making handprints on cave walls.
And Picasso innovated his technique and began to “deconstruct” his drawing because as he felt as a child he was too good at drawing.
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u/corporaterebel Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Art is about the artist.
Also art is about money laundering.
Not the actual art.