When I go to an art museum, I want to see the craziest shit they can throw at me. I like looking at the old paintings and seeing the layers of paint and admiring the talent that went into it, but throw something titled Red #2 or Untitled and shit is about to get real. I want to have to figure out if there is actually art there or not. I want to look at the goddamn wall and think it’s art and have the curator tell me that it’s just a wall. I want the curator to tell me a dick joke and then tell me it’s part of an art exhibit. I want to eat pasta and look at paintings of absolutely nothing.
Look I fucking love modern and contemporary art. They are my favorites. But shit like this is really just gallery world people trying to replicate the bombastic success of Rothko and alike. It’s just trying to be edgy in the right way to sell millions. No siree, none of that for me. Please and thank you.
Someone actually made a similar comment on a Youtube video on white paintings that I found really insightful and wanted to reproduce here:
An excellent comment. I love weird and wonderful modern art, but art being used as a way to launder money is upsetting, which is why socialism is the way forward.
I mean I 100% agree with that. I don’t hate the individual artist that does art like that. I mean we all gotta survive, capitalism and all.
I just despise the art gallery world, of art being commodified. That forces people who dream of being artists to sell their dream short to “appease the art market”.
I mentioned him, and I fucking love Rothko. His paintings were some of the ones that had the biggest emotional in me impact seeing them in person tbh.
And for contemporary stuff, I love artists like Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin (their work Weather Line was SOOO good).
Like I’m down for weird shit. But indeed, when it’s commodified for a tax break or money laundering, what are we even doing then? As a freaking species.
do you have any examples of pieces you like? im trying to be open minded but my mom’s an artist and sometimes modern/contemporary feels like pretentious andy warholism. i can appreciate technique and art history and i don’t care much for realism, but if i’m seeing 4 perfect triangles on a canvas i feel like i’m missing any form of atmosphere, emotion, depth, message
it lowkey reminds of me of musicians who care more about the math of music than anything else and end up producing something plain and soulless. most i’ve seen (probably mostly cherry picked tbh) just feels inoffensive and uninteresting, and i guess that’s subjective, but it kinda looks like something you’d see it in a minimalist fortune 500 office that’s maybe a step above corporate memphis