I know from experience I would get accused of being a philistine, but I think it’s at least worth considering that there’s a kind of intelligence to the enduring popularity of certain art in the world market. Some works of art, like the great cathedrals of Europe, will live forever. You don’t have to convince anyone that they’re astounding and beautiful or teach them how to appreciate them. They demand such appreciation, irresistibly. They are embodied statements of aesthetic and philosophical value.
A whole lot of contemporary art simply is philosophically and aesthetically bankrupt. It is small and shallow and mastubatory and simple. Popular art doesn’t have to work very hard to outcompete it on the most basic metrics of value, lazy and uncreative as it often is. And neither can compare much to the products of the past that still captivate and inspire both the general public and aesthetic specialists.
Picasso mattered to artists, as an important contributor to the internal social and political and ideological dialogue that goes on within the field of human creative production. He mattered and still does matter far less to the general public, who largely relegate his works to the realm of curiosities and baroque amusements. I don’t think you can blame them, nor correct them, for that. Picasso’s interest is largely of internal value to the discipline, not objective value to the human aesthetic experience. Because my kid could, and does, do that.
Contemporary art is largely self-referential. It’s more about the discipline of being an artist and your relation to it than the artistic content itself, or the world it addresses, or anything accessible to the passerby. It does not draw you into its truths and down into its depths through the irresistible current of universal human experience and aesthetic representation. It’s very elitist and impenetrable, often indistinguishable as art to the common man.
What inheritance of art will our culture leave behind? Half of our contemporary art is in danger of being cleaned up by janitors for being indistinguishable from uncreated, unintentional, meaningless objects and clutter. Future societies likely couldn’t even recognize half of what we we call art as a human creative product from the general wreckage of whatever is left behind. And so much of our artistic content is so deeply embedded in the contemporary relationships and content of art criticism that, without being able to access them, finding the objects only as themselves, they would be largely vacant of meaning or value and be unintelligible.
That’s a real flaw of modern art. We haven’t really created. We haven’t made something with its own life that can live and speak after us. We’ve made automatons to reflect and point to and serve us. We have just made little signposts pointing back to ourselves. And that is a weak and uncreative godhood.
Mr Nobody's Patented Blog 