Modern Art

I've basically inhaled Burne Hogarth's entire series of instruction books. They have vastly improved my artistic skill. I am deeply indebted to them. But I did not think I would find in Hogarth a kindred spirit with respect to one of my favorite secondary pastimes: ranting about how modern art sucks. What follows is partially a regurgitation of Hogarth's ideas and partly my mediations and attempts to understand them.

My objections to modern art are pretty predictable. I draw very well from both sight and the imagination, and the fact that you can call something which exhibits no particular technical skill "art" annoys me to no end. In this I am hopelessly prejudiced. But I had also always had the sense that modern art was odious to me because it is opaque to deeper analysis, and - at least Hogarth would argue - it is opaque because it rejects traditions, rules and norms.

It is obvious that modern art is a rejection of tradition: what you might call the evolutionary continuity of western art. But modern art does not propose that there should be a new tradition, that the old tradition was inadequate, it asserts that the whole idea of tradition and even culture is faulty, and thus each artist must invent an artistic language of their own, supposedly out of whole cloth. Thus, while we can speak of past artistic periods - Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic - in broad and sweeping terms, modern art is so vast and varied in its permutations that there are almost as many movements as there were periods in the whole of Western Art:

Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Die Brücke, Orphism, Surrealism, Syncronism, Vorticism, Dada, Expressionism, New Objectivity, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Suprematism, Art Brut, Arte Povera, Tachisme, Neo-Dada, Kinetic art, Land art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Op art, Outsider art, Pop art, Spatialism, etc.

The irony of this explosion of expression is that, in order to express yourself, you need a common language and culture. For example, even though we technically speak the same English that Shakespeare and Elizabeth I did, people routinely misinterpret Romeo and Juliet as an unalloyed story of true love, because the virtues and stories of our time privilege young, capricious lust over family, safety, duty and decorum. So we can see where, when the artist speaks with a totally idiosyncratic artistic language, not only can art critics not agree on what is good art and what is bad, they cannot agree on what a piece means and are routinely duped into mistaking the scrawlings of a chimpanzee or faulty electrical work for the work of an artistic genius.

The Modern artist might respond that they are working with deeper emotions and feelings than language can express. We might consider, then, their art to be something like a song sung without words. Indeed, you can still get quite a bit across without words, and indeed the listener can discern quite a bit if there are words they can't understand. How many people actually know what the Ode to Joy's lyrics mean?

But either this is a bad metaphor or their conceit is false, because we still have a lot of shared non-verbal communications (screaming, crying, laughing, shouting, grumbling, and moaning, as well as all of the mysterious, seemingly-intrinsic meaning that can be imparted by the melody of the music itself), whereas our common visual experience is wholly rejected by the bulk of Modern Artists in favor of nonfigurative art. Figure and reality, indeed, have become dirty words. Realists, impressionists and some post-impressionists were attempting to create a visual style which corresponded to the phenomenon of perception. Even abstract and surreal artists were trying to create something which had at least a partial basis in reality. But, next to the photographer and the moviemaker's ability to capture stunning, near-perfect recreations of sense perception, the artist seems to have huffed off and spurned objective reality altogether.

What we are left with, then, is whatever associations our mind - in its infinite capacity to create order out of chaos - can make between a piece and our personal memory - idiosyncratic again. Thus, while much has been said, nothing can be plausibly said to have been communicated.

Creative restriction - which the Modern artist rails against - can actually fire the engines of creativity. One of my English teachers remarked that you know you're a poet when you can write a good, 14-line sonnet, just like you know you're a musician when you can write a 12-bar blues song. Even for the seasoned professional, "What shall I draw?" or "What shall I write about?" presents a daunting challenge. Imposing restrictions - be they "Write in Iambic Pentameter" or "Draw human beings doing something" - allow the artist to focus on expressing themselves more acutely and subtly. The sheer number of options presenting the artist who can draw anything at allin any style overwhelms the mind.