We’ve got five days left in 2022, and our RAINN fundraiser is still about $1,000 short of our goal. Let’s get past the finish line! So, there’s this from Matt Yglesias. There’s a couple different ways to read this. I take it that Yglesias means to say that people who have technical skill in the visual arts are uninterested in producing the kind of visual art that most people like. I’m not sure that Yglesias is right on the merits - millions of people go to art museums every year, and the modern/contemporary wings tend to be among the most popular. (Also, plenty of critically celebrated novels sell very well; Hanya Yanagihara’s exercise in misery
"Abstract" art is fine IF the artist has the technical skill to do photorealism. If not, it's just proof of his incompetence.
The larger issue is that ART is a failed medium - very few people have original art on their walls. So much of it actually uses words ("in this this house...") WHY?
Because most artists do not commit to being judged on information theory- how much of the artist intended message is actually passed into mind of viewer?
One last note: the failure of art to pervade every human's life (to hang on their own walls) is largely IMO bc critics don't matter if the artist is judged on message transfer. Without a need for a critic to interpret art, the critic is worthless.
Art is ultimately about meaning, not about form, which is merely how meaning is clothed. If saying what you want to say requires a non-representational form, then that's what you do. At the same time, this isn't an excuse for technical ineptitude; regardless of what you're trying to do, you need to have the skills to actually do it. If an artist were doing abstracts merely because, as the booboisie likes to think, he lacked the skills for traditional realism (which is what "My kid could do that" really boils down to), his paintings wouldn't even be good abstracts.
The flip side of this is the bourgeois fetishization of technique, like rock fans who are impressed by super-fast guitar playing regardless of whether or not the fast playing is actually saying anything. Having technique is important, but it's not enough -- you need to actually have something to say.
I think most often the pushback against non-representational art is who it was created (or at least, very much funded) _for_ and that was largely the millionaire-and-billionaire class and the CIA to clown on the Soviet Realists: https://archive.vn/4RwXU
I absolutely believe Picasso and Mondrian's movement past representation and stuff like Brancusi's Bird in Space were all sincere and brilliant experiments and creations in their own sense but abstract art was very quickly coopted by wealth and the state and corporations and people have a dislike by association for it.
I personally think Tom Wolfe was right in "The Painted Word," that as Wiki summarizes " modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics' theories."
I think the conflation of popular tastes with photorealism is not correct. The most popular painters with the current public of all eras--from Van Eyck to Van Gough to Picasso to Kincaid to Kehinde Wiley--are representational but not realistic. The problem people have with non-representational art isn't that it expresses the artist's feelings rather than the world--so does Van Gough--but that it's so inscrutable that it can't. The most popular purely abstract work, like Pollock, Rothko, or Hirst, is nevertheless so expressive that it overcomes this barrier, and its ability to do so displays the artist's virtuosity--if it was easy there would be more of it.
Thanks for reminding me of A Portrait of Ross, one of my favorite pieces from the Art Institute.
It's interesting to me that the exact same commentary can be leveled at almost any art.
* Mona Lisa -- just a woman's face. So what?
* Expressionism -- smeared like viewing a scene through a sheet of glass coated in Vaseline.
To me, these are the equivalent of someone sneering at more contemporary art forms. If you want to flatten art into something simple, and then look down your nose at that flat thing, there's always an avenue.
I think the profusion of creative works in the modern era (and beyond) have tipped many people's scale on more contemporary art from "highbrow" or "avant-garde" into pretension. Everything seemingly has less value, so acting as if some art has increased significance often triggers a sort of "what's so special about *that*?" reaction, and the increasing abstractness of the art itself triggers people's class insecurities, intellectual insecurities, and cultural insecurities even more.
Thanks so much for this post. I majored in fine art in college, and I find this an impressive, succinct answer to the question of "Why not paint/draw/sculpt NATURE?" I don't think that was exactly the intent of the piece, but it's a question every artist who strays from strict representation is confronted with at some point.
I've often thought similarly to what you're expressing about AI art. It seems to me that the direction to go in which AI can't follow is towards the indefinable, or, perhaps as you've put it, human interiority. I don't find AI particularly scary or upsetting for that reason. The human touch in art will always have value somewhere, somehow, because no piece of traditional artwork can be exactly replicated. Not even shitty crayon drawings by one's four year-old.
Yglesias banned me from commenting on his substack after calling me names in a big snowflakey move, so I am a bit biased about his character and his journalistic acumen, but I do share a bit of his perspective on the problem with abstract art "quality" assessment.
I do think the eyes and minds of people are different enough to explain to some degree the honest difference of opinion with abstract art. My wife for example is a fantastic natural photographer and I have noted that she sees and processes light and color differently than I do. She will be mesmerized about particular vista or sunset that I don't catch as quickly... but with more focus in observation I can "see what she sees" to some extent.
However, the problem I have with abstract art is the lack of common criteria of merit. This then leaves most of us to question our own judgement, and probably too opens up the arena for shysters to sell their amateur junk at a professional premium. One perspective I have is that abstract art seems to be a product that takes less effort than, for example, representational art.
It is almost like the artists are just throwing a bunch of crap on the wall hoping they will get lucky and it will go viral.
Now, I am someone with a design gene, with some artistic skills... and I am attracted to some abstract pieces for reasons that I often cannot explain. It is true that art, I think all art, is good when it elicits an emotional response. I think in general that is the primary function of the artist and his/her work. However, I think that a lot of abstract art is just crap... stuff that might be done by a monkey or an elephant with a brush strapped to his tail or trunk. Because there are no guidelines for merit, it is really almost impossible to brand any abstract art as crap.
Meanwhile I just painted a straight coal-black line off-center on a large 2-meter square stark white canvas with a smudge of ocean-cream color at one corner, and I think it should sell for a reasonable $800,000. Let me know if you are interested!
I don't really care if art is representational or not, but there is something to be said for the idea that painting is a visual medium, where a skilled painter can manipulate the sense of sight in subtle ways.
Somehow I never actually see contemporary art in a museum that takes advantage of this. You get various paintings, getting further and further from representation as the 20th century goes on, but still using form and color to produce an artistic effect.
Then after a certain date, all art pieces you see in museums are weird conceptual objects, like LED slogans, or just a slashed canvas, or a copy of another painting with goop sprayed on it. Not that this can't be compelling art, but it's a different kind of thing.
But I do wonder, there must be some technically excellent and artistically brilliant painters working right now, probably more now than ever in history, and I would like to see what their paintings look like, representational or not. But I have no idea where to see them -- not in museums. Maybe you have to be a rich art collector now.
Interesting piece, agree with a lot but not all of it.
I'm not sure the split you establish between representative art and abstract art based on the latter showing human emotion and the former not doing so is entirely valid.
First of all, it's subjective, but second of all, are there not just as many examples of abstract art which we might find cold or lacking in emotion? Are there not huge swathes of the visual art world that are mired in posturing and linguistic cliche? Entire fields of work intended to provoke discussion or debate about form or what is and isn't art? Is there not an entire cult, from the book shop to the art gallery, of tepid academic language being used in great detail to explain and justify and fence off art that is extremely divorced from people's daily lives or experiences or emotions?
I don't think everything should be accessible to all, I like lots of relatively obscure things, especially in music, but equally I think it's possible to be frustrated with many abstract works across a range of media and not be a poptimist.
Ultimately we could poll every commenter here and none of us would agree which forms of abstraction are worthwhile and interesting and which are a waste of time, but we probably would see a lot of strong and varied opinions either way.
I guess I feel like besides in music, where poptimism has a real foothold (and where I find abstract stuff constantly interesting for most of my adult life, as well as liking pop or whatever), a lot of other artforms could stand to be interrogated about how they consistently evade the public imagination and why.
For example, huge swathes of what's voguish in 'literary' fiction and non-fiction, or poetry, or a massive majority of what constitutes visual art. I'm all for people questioning why the abstract route is taken in these fields, and highlighting the rivers of bullshit and grifterism that exist.
For example, as someone who has studied two creative writing MA's, my conclusion to an extent is that reduced budgets lead to a massive failure to teach people technical elements of writing. People are pushed towards abstraction in the absence of learning representation, like someone who can't play three chords on a guitar trying to make a Pharoah Sanders record.
Sometimes this is dressed up as a deliberate political approach, like the three-act structure or whatever was created by white men, story is a chauvinist construct, life and its dark political realities are too complex for novels that aren't set out in fragments and written by people who are poets not novelists. Which... fine, teach other forms, whatever, but I was in diverse classes and most classmates of whatever background in the end wanted more technical teaching.
In literature in particular in the current moment there's a lot of latent assumption that what is abstract or based in provoking the kind of tedious discussions of form that dogs visual art has more value than a story with characters and specific places and tangible objects and weather and perhaps a writer's moral standpoint which a wider range of people could read and enjoy.
Again, it comes down to opinion but I do think abstraction is still worth questioning in many of its guises, rigorously. I don't agree with the quotes at the top of the piece, this is more in response to your article.
This is all true, but to take a kindlier perspective on Yglasias’s tweets, it is puzzling that modern taste has moved away from beautiful landscapes. Being in them, sure, but there’s something cheesy about putting them on walls. And this isn’t a class thing specifically, all classes (here in Britain at least) seem to find it passé to accept mere majesty as decoration.
I’d love you to write more about Poptimism at some point. I say this as a fully paid-up Poptimist, at least musically, life changed by Britney Spears etc. But I’m puzzled by the current position of it in media and especially US media. There seems to be an abandonment of discernment, a view that what is popular is automatically good. There was a point to Pitchfork telling me Gold Soundz was the best song of the 90s because I hadn’t heard it and gave it a try. Hated it, but nonetheless. Telling me Mariah Carey’s Fantasy is the best song of the 90s accords far more with my personal taste but seems entirely pointless: I’ve heard Fantasy. Everyone’s heard Fantasy. Telling us it’s the best song of the 90s isn’t useful information. So what’s your role?
To return to art critics, there’s more to write about in non-representative art. There’s more room to overlay autobiography, politics, philosophy. But there’s always discernment, curating, why your five-year-old’s art is not the same as Rothko’s. Would there be any use for them if all they said was ‘what you like is good’?
This is the very much the theme of the first story in the French Despatch. It is my favourite of the four but they are all fantastic in a fantastic film. Incidentally Scott Sumner had some interesting points to make about the fact that the very best art is often made soon after the technique or technology becomes available. He came on my podcast to chat about movies in general. If you haven’t come across his short but numerous movie reviews they are worth seeking out. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503
I think modern art appeals to people who see it as an intellectual challenge to defend. It appeals to a verbal type. It doesn’t really matter that a few candies in the corner of the room isn’t really anything, the very fact that the writer can explain the art makes it art.
Any actual skill in the art wouldnt work here because the clear brilliance of, say, Michelangelo’s David is obvious to anyone.
The distinction that needs to be made here is between narrative and non-narrative art. On a deep level, I suppose, all art is narrative. In bad art, the narrative is simplistic—that is to say bogus, because life is not simple. There are many really talented representational artists working today. They would probably satisfy Yglesias (if he wasn't just talking out of his ass). What sets them apart from the hacks is that they don't tell false, sentimental and simplistic stories about what they are representing.
A friend just built a new house and hasn’t had the time to put anything on the walls yet. When you walk in you soon sense that something is off. At some fundamental level all that blank wall space doesn’t feel right.
When talking about Rothko or Picasso or Pollack one reason for their popularity is that they look good/impressive hanging on the wall. You hang a Rothko in your Manhattan aerie it instantly solves that “something is off” problem. It especially solved it as the decor of the wealthy became more simple and less ornate due to efficient manufacturing in the post war era.
Personally I get annoyed by artists who pretend that they aren’t making pretty things for rich people to hang on the wall.
"Abstract" art is fine IF the artist has the technical skill to do photorealism. If not, it's just proof of his incompetence.
The larger issue is that ART is a failed medium - very few people have original art on their walls. So much of it actually uses words ("in this this house...") WHY?
Because most artists do not commit to being judged on information theory- how much of the artist intended message is actually passed into mind of viewer?
One last note: the failure of art to pervade every human's life (to hang on their own walls) is largely IMO bc critics don't matter if the artist is judged on message transfer. Without a need for a critic to interpret art, the critic is worthless.
Beautifully put!
Art is ultimately about meaning, not about form, which is merely how meaning is clothed. If saying what you want to say requires a non-representational form, then that's what you do. At the same time, this isn't an excuse for technical ineptitude; regardless of what you're trying to do, you need to have the skills to actually do it. If an artist were doing abstracts merely because, as the booboisie likes to think, he lacked the skills for traditional realism (which is what "My kid could do that" really boils down to), his paintings wouldn't even be good abstracts.
The flip side of this is the bourgeois fetishization of technique, like rock fans who are impressed by super-fast guitar playing regardless of whether or not the fast playing is actually saying anything. Having technique is important, but it's not enough -- you need to actually have something to say.
I think most often the pushback against non-representational art is who it was created (or at least, very much funded) _for_ and that was largely the millionaire-and-billionaire class and the CIA to clown on the Soviet Realists: https://archive.vn/4RwXU
I absolutely believe Picasso and Mondrian's movement past representation and stuff like Brancusi's Bird in Space were all sincere and brilliant experiments and creations in their own sense but abstract art was very quickly coopted by wealth and the state and corporations and people have a dislike by association for it.
I personally think Tom Wolfe was right in "The Painted Word," that as Wiki summarizes " modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics' theories."
I think the conflation of popular tastes with photorealism is not correct. The most popular painters with the current public of all eras--from Van Eyck to Van Gough to Picasso to Kincaid to Kehinde Wiley--are representational but not realistic. The problem people have with non-representational art isn't that it expresses the artist's feelings rather than the world--so does Van Gough--but that it's so inscrutable that it can't. The most popular purely abstract work, like Pollock, Rothko, or Hirst, is nevertheless so expressive that it overcomes this barrier, and its ability to do so displays the artist's virtuosity--if it was easy there would be more of it.
Thanks for reminding me of A Portrait of Ross, one of my favorite pieces from the Art Institute.
It's interesting to me that the exact same commentary can be leveled at almost any art.
* Mona Lisa -- just a woman's face. So what?
* Expressionism -- smeared like viewing a scene through a sheet of glass coated in Vaseline.
To me, these are the equivalent of someone sneering at more contemporary art forms. If you want to flatten art into something simple, and then look down your nose at that flat thing, there's always an avenue.
I think the profusion of creative works in the modern era (and beyond) have tipped many people's scale on more contemporary art from "highbrow" or "avant-garde" into pretension. Everything seemingly has less value, so acting as if some art has increased significance often triggers a sort of "what's so special about *that*?" reaction, and the increasing abstractness of the art itself triggers people's class insecurities, intellectual insecurities, and cultural insecurities even more.
Thanks so much for this post. I majored in fine art in college, and I find this an impressive, succinct answer to the question of "Why not paint/draw/sculpt NATURE?" I don't think that was exactly the intent of the piece, but it's a question every artist who strays from strict representation is confronted with at some point.
I've often thought similarly to what you're expressing about AI art. It seems to me that the direction to go in which AI can't follow is towards the indefinable, or, perhaps as you've put it, human interiority. I don't find AI particularly scary or upsetting for that reason. The human touch in art will always have value somewhere, somehow, because no piece of traditional artwork can be exactly replicated. Not even shitty crayon drawings by one's four year-old.
Yglesias banned me from commenting on his substack after calling me names in a big snowflakey move, so I am a bit biased about his character and his journalistic acumen, but I do share a bit of his perspective on the problem with abstract art "quality" assessment.
I do think the eyes and minds of people are different enough to explain to some degree the honest difference of opinion with abstract art. My wife for example is a fantastic natural photographer and I have noted that she sees and processes light and color differently than I do. She will be mesmerized about particular vista or sunset that I don't catch as quickly... but with more focus in observation I can "see what she sees" to some extent.
However, the problem I have with abstract art is the lack of common criteria of merit. This then leaves most of us to question our own judgement, and probably too opens up the arena for shysters to sell their amateur junk at a professional premium. One perspective I have is that abstract art seems to be a product that takes less effort than, for example, representational art.
It is almost like the artists are just throwing a bunch of crap on the wall hoping they will get lucky and it will go viral.
Now, I am someone with a design gene, with some artistic skills... and I am attracted to some abstract pieces for reasons that I often cannot explain. It is true that art, I think all art, is good when it elicits an emotional response. I think in general that is the primary function of the artist and his/her work. However, I think that a lot of abstract art is just crap... stuff that might be done by a monkey or an elephant with a brush strapped to his tail or trunk. Because there are no guidelines for merit, it is really almost impossible to brand any abstract art as crap.
Meanwhile I just painted a straight coal-black line off-center on a large 2-meter square stark white canvas with a smudge of ocean-cream color at one corner, and I think it should sell for a reasonable $800,000. Let me know if you are interested!
I don't really care if art is representational or not, but there is something to be said for the idea that painting is a visual medium, where a skilled painter can manipulate the sense of sight in subtle ways.
Somehow I never actually see contemporary art in a museum that takes advantage of this. You get various paintings, getting further and further from representation as the 20th century goes on, but still using form and color to produce an artistic effect.
Then after a certain date, all art pieces you see in museums are weird conceptual objects, like LED slogans, or just a slashed canvas, or a copy of another painting with goop sprayed on it. Not that this can't be compelling art, but it's a different kind of thing.
But I do wonder, there must be some technically excellent and artistically brilliant painters working right now, probably more now than ever in history, and I would like to see what their paintings look like, representational or not. But I have no idea where to see them -- not in museums. Maybe you have to be a rich art collector now.
Interesting piece, agree with a lot but not all of it.
I'm not sure the split you establish between representative art and abstract art based on the latter showing human emotion and the former not doing so is entirely valid.
First of all, it's subjective, but second of all, are there not just as many examples of abstract art which we might find cold or lacking in emotion? Are there not huge swathes of the visual art world that are mired in posturing and linguistic cliche? Entire fields of work intended to provoke discussion or debate about form or what is and isn't art? Is there not an entire cult, from the book shop to the art gallery, of tepid academic language being used in great detail to explain and justify and fence off art that is extremely divorced from people's daily lives or experiences or emotions?
I don't think everything should be accessible to all, I like lots of relatively obscure things, especially in music, but equally I think it's possible to be frustrated with many abstract works across a range of media and not be a poptimist.
Ultimately we could poll every commenter here and none of us would agree which forms of abstraction are worthwhile and interesting and which are a waste of time, but we probably would see a lot of strong and varied opinions either way.
I guess I feel like besides in music, where poptimism has a real foothold (and where I find abstract stuff constantly interesting for most of my adult life, as well as liking pop or whatever), a lot of other artforms could stand to be interrogated about how they consistently evade the public imagination and why.
For example, huge swathes of what's voguish in 'literary' fiction and non-fiction, or poetry, or a massive majority of what constitutes visual art. I'm all for people questioning why the abstract route is taken in these fields, and highlighting the rivers of bullshit and grifterism that exist.
For example, as someone who has studied two creative writing MA's, my conclusion to an extent is that reduced budgets lead to a massive failure to teach people technical elements of writing. People are pushed towards abstraction in the absence of learning representation, like someone who can't play three chords on a guitar trying to make a Pharoah Sanders record.
Sometimes this is dressed up as a deliberate political approach, like the three-act structure or whatever was created by white men, story is a chauvinist construct, life and its dark political realities are too complex for novels that aren't set out in fragments and written by people who are poets not novelists. Which... fine, teach other forms, whatever, but I was in diverse classes and most classmates of whatever background in the end wanted more technical teaching.
In literature in particular in the current moment there's a lot of latent assumption that what is abstract or based in provoking the kind of tedious discussions of form that dogs visual art has more value than a story with characters and specific places and tangible objects and weather and perhaps a writer's moral standpoint which a wider range of people could read and enjoy.
Again, it comes down to opinion but I do think abstraction is still worth questioning in many of its guises, rigorously. I don't agree with the quotes at the top of the piece, this is more in response to your article.
This is all true, but to take a kindlier perspective on Yglasias’s tweets, it is puzzling that modern taste has moved away from beautiful landscapes. Being in them, sure, but there’s something cheesy about putting them on walls. And this isn’t a class thing specifically, all classes (here in Britain at least) seem to find it passé to accept mere majesty as decoration.
I’d love you to write more about Poptimism at some point. I say this as a fully paid-up Poptimist, at least musically, life changed by Britney Spears etc. But I’m puzzled by the current position of it in media and especially US media. There seems to be an abandonment of discernment, a view that what is popular is automatically good. There was a point to Pitchfork telling me Gold Soundz was the best song of the 90s because I hadn’t heard it and gave it a try. Hated it, but nonetheless. Telling me Mariah Carey’s Fantasy is the best song of the 90s accords far more with my personal taste but seems entirely pointless: I’ve heard Fantasy. Everyone’s heard Fantasy. Telling us it’s the best song of the 90s isn’t useful information. So what’s your role?
To return to art critics, there’s more to write about in non-representative art. There’s more room to overlay autobiography, politics, philosophy. But there’s always discernment, curating, why your five-year-old’s art is not the same as Rothko’s. Would there be any use for them if all they said was ‘what you like is good’?
This is the very much the theme of the first story in the French Despatch. It is my favourite of the four but they are all fantastic in a fantastic film. Incidentally Scott Sumner had some interesting points to make about the fact that the very best art is often made soon after the technique or technology becomes available. He came on my podcast to chat about movies in general. If you haven’t come across his short but numerous movie reviews they are worth seeking out. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503
I think Matt is mostly objecting to the hoppy beer crowd. Folks who think things can only be real and authentic when they are unpleasant.
I think modern art appeals to people who see it as an intellectual challenge to defend. It appeals to a verbal type. It doesn’t really matter that a few candies in the corner of the room isn’t really anything, the very fact that the writer can explain the art makes it art.
Any actual skill in the art wouldnt work here because the clear brilliance of, say, Michelangelo’s David is obvious to anyone.
The distinction that needs to be made here is between narrative and non-narrative art. On a deep level, I suppose, all art is narrative. In bad art, the narrative is simplistic—that is to say bogus, because life is not simple. There are many really talented representational artists working today. They would probably satisfy Yglesias (if he wasn't just talking out of his ass). What sets them apart from the hacks is that they don't tell false, sentimental and simplistic stories about what they are representing.
A friend just built a new house and hasn’t had the time to put anything on the walls yet. When you walk in you soon sense that something is off. At some fundamental level all that blank wall space doesn’t feel right.
When talking about Rothko or Picasso or Pollack one reason for their popularity is that they look good/impressive hanging on the wall. You hang a Rothko in your Manhattan aerie it instantly solves that “something is off” problem. It especially solved it as the decor of the wealthy became more simple and less ornate due to efficient manufacturing in the post war era.
Personally I get annoyed by artists who pretend that they aren’t making pretty things for rich people to hang on the wall.