Contemp art is d-bag

[Conservationist]

Consider modern classical music. One long-suffering audience member said it reminded him of a bus crash. Though read any of the top music reviewers, and you'll find them exulting over this tuneless mess.

Or take modern art. For a mere $140 million, you can buy a painting by Jackson Pollock called "No. 5." I forget if this is the one that hung upside down in a New York gallery.

But if you laid a piece of canvass on the floor of a chicken coop for three months, "No. 5" is what it would look like.

So too modern sculpture. I still recall the horror of local citizens in Kingston, Ont., many years ago, when the city commissioned a centre piece for MacDonald Park and the "artist" erected two huge sewage culverts with sludge spilling out.

The eyesore was improved one night when a bunch of engineering students from Queen's University temporarily transformed the culverts into perfect representations of a Coke and Pepsi can. But the sculptor insisted on returning to his vision of a bombed-out septic field.

You find modernity's palsied hand in updates of the Bible. Thus "Mary was with child" is rendered as "Mary had fallen pregnant," while "through a glass darkly" becomes "puzzling reflections in a mirror."

http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Cooking+become+last+true/5911315/story.html

It's too painfully true. We've replaced everything difficult with prole-friendly stupidity.

[Von List]

I remember visiting the Museum of Modern "Art" in NYC when I was 19. Among the "genius" works, there was an off-white canvas that was 9 ft. square, a pink florescent light standing in a corner, and a box of hammers sitting on the floor which at first most people thought was a left behind by workmen.

I wonder how much money was paid to the "artists" for these?


I have no clue what modern art is supposed to do. People say that sitting in front of a giant red canvas with a black dot in the middle is supposed to make you feel something....or something....but I don't get it. I have been told that I "just don't understand what the artists is trying to do" and treated like a moron if I even raise the point that it looks like trash a child could do in his garage.

I mean, am I missing something? Should I be impressed by an opened soup can sitting on a glass shelf?

[fallot]

I mean, am I missing something? Should I be impressed by an opened soup can sitting on a glass shelf?

Well, I guess if it is presented in a way that actually says something; it's worth something. While the form of modern art is tied to its general "emptiness", that doesn't mean these methods and objects can't be used to express the profound. Have they ever been? No clue. Whatever you're missing, I'm missing too.

Last line of that article: "It is by nature, and by breadth of ownership, a labour of the common man and not of the elite". While correct from a certain perspective, the elite here are the elite of cookery itself who maintain these traditions no matter what. The cooking comes first, so it is great. If breadth of ownership really contributes though, I guess all these metal "listening" normals aren't so bad. Somehow I don't think it matters quite as much, though it matters. The article very accurately identifies the concern that so often intrudes, "money" (selfishness).

[Somnambulist]

Budding black-metalists/extremists/radicals/traditionalists/discontents could probably secure their spot in Valhalla by torching a modern art museum (when there's no one inside, of course) or desecrating modern public sculpture.  Modern art, in the Jackson Pollock sense, is symbolic evil par excellence.

[Goluf]

Consider modern classical music. One long-suffering audience member said it reminded him of a bus crash. Though read any of the top music reviewers, and you'll find them exulting over this tuneless mess.

Or take modern art. For a mere $140 million, you can buy a painting by Jackson Pollock called "No. 5." I forget if this is the one that hung upside down in a New York gallery.

But if you laid a piece of canvass on the floor of a chicken coop for three months, "No. 5" is what it would look like.

So too modern sculpture. I still recall the horror of local citizens in Kingston, Ont., many years ago, when the city commissioned a centre piece for MacDonald Park and the "artist" erected two huge sewage culverts with sludge spilling out.

The eyesore was improved one night when a bunch of engineering students from Queen's University temporarily transformed the culverts into perfect representations of a Coke and Pepsi can. But the sculptor insisted on returning to his vision of a bombed-out septic field.

You find modernity's palsied hand in updates of the Bible. Thus "Mary was with child" is rendered as "Mary had fallen pregnant," while "through a glass darkly" becomes "puzzling reflections in a mirror."

http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Cooking+become+last+true/5911315/story.html

It's too painfully true. We've replaced everything difficult with prole-friendly stupidity.

You've inverted part of the author's meaning. He's attacking intellectualism and esotericism in art by advocating for the good ol' days when music had "tunes", and every artist was a photo-realist. Not that I'm supporting shit like Jackson Pollock, but this guy would have the same problems with Burzum as he does with Schoenberg. If you're going to attack a piece of art, at least do it for some other reason than it makes your brain hurt; this sort of neo-romanticist longing for simplicity is not the same as a demand for high quality, and it certainly is not a call for more elitism to insulate serious art from "proles". In fact, the desire for such insulation from those very people is what produced music like Stockhausen in the first place.

Tying yourselves to the fools that write these sorts of articles is a dangerous game.

[chpinhlf]

Modern art doesn't have a point. It's about enjoying the prestige of being thought profound (and the money that comes therewith) combined with an aversion to skill and effort.