
How Art Became Irrelevant - signor_bosco
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-art-became-irrelevant/
======
lkrubner
This argument is often made, and has been common since the 1960s. Many good
essays have been written, and are worth reading, but in the end they can all
be boiled down to this: popular arts have become somewhat more important and
fine arts have become somewhat less important. Movies are still important, pop
music is important, graphic design (of magazines and web sites and apps) is
more important than it has ever been before. But the elite edge of art is less
important to the public, in the ways mentioned here:

"A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is
no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen."

That doesn't mean that art has become irrelevant, only that certain kinds of
art are less relevant, and other kinds of art are more relevant.

People change, and the culture changes. When I was a little kid, my mom would
read the New York Times and she would clip out articles about what the great
novelists were writing and what the great architects were building, and
whether New Urbanism would rescue the suburbs. Nowadays, my mom reads the New
York Times and she clips out articles about cloud computing, and she talks
about whether the USA is investing enough to modernize its communication
infrastructure.

~~~
coldtea
> _Movies are still important, pop music is important, graphic design (of
> magazines and web sites and apps) is more important than it has ever been
> before._

Pop music is not as important as it was either. Musicians used to be huge
cultural phenomena, and a kind of escape into another world, now there are
tons of similar escapes (computer games, for example, a huge thing, weren't
even available to the common how when pop was huge, nor where social media,
chat, YouTube, Instagram, the modern "artistically relevant and high
production quality" tv series and tons of other things). Now you can ask 10
people and they wouldn't know a current top 10 song -- whereas in the 70's for
example it would be inescapable.

And graphic design has faded too -- there was a brief period in the mid-
eighties to early 00s were graphic designers were huge pop heroes --
interviews in magazines, stars like Neville Brody, David Carson that you get
to hear about even as a layman, etc. Now it's only other graphic and web folk
care about graphic and web designers.

> _People change, and the culture changes._

It's also good however to be making judgement calls on those changes too. Else
we accept everything and anything as fate.

~~~
mrob
>Musicians used to be huge cultural phenomena

It still is. Is there any music from the 70s that's been heard by as many
people as Gangnam Style? Psy currently has nearly 5 billion total views on
YouTube.

~~~
coldtea
That's a novelty hit, not a cultural phenomenon in the sense of something that
affects culture. It was forgotten as soon as the next thing came along, the
same way Harlem Shake or whatever were, and it never had any deep emotional or
cultural impact to those who saw it in the first place.

And even that it's more due to the video than the music -- even you measured
it on "billion views".

~~~
_cudgel
> it never had any deep emotional or cultural impact to those who saw it in
> the first place.

How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone other
than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in life?

Here's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all the
deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you _have been
made_. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because
you now view the world through the eyes of an adult.

Give it 30 years, and watch as all these things come back again into pop-
culture because those kids from today will be in your shoes, as decision
makers at TV/Internet/Whatever companies that push pop-culture -- being guided
by their own sense of nostalgia about the things that impacted them as kids.

~~~
coldtea
> _How could you possibly know what had a deep emotional impact on anyone
> other than yourself or possibly the people you interact with most closely in
> life?_

By being a human, involved with culture, and plain being able to see and place
cultural artifacts upon certain contexts.

How do we know that a war has left "deep emotional impact" to lots of people
other than ourselves or "possibly the people we interact with most closely in
life"? Because we do, we know what war is, we know what it does to people,
etc.

In the same way, we know what novelty pop hits are. As opposed to regular pop
hits that mostly capture some teens attention for a few years (e.g. Bieber or
NKOTB back in the day) and more involved pop that goes deeper.

> _Here 's an alternate proposal for you: You've grown as a person, and all
> the deep emotional impacts that music might be able to make on you have been
> made. To those still growing, you aren't able to assess the impact, because
> you now view the world through the eyes of an adult._

I'm quite atypical in this regard, as despite being mid-late-30s, I follow
lots of music and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff,
from techno to regular chart pop to some obscure garage-psychedelic or jazz
record (I really like from The Residents to Westbam, Deep Freeze Mice and
Mingus, and can even hum something like Redfoo's songs).

But even as a teenager, I can tell you that there were lots of novelty hits I
went for that meant really nothing for me (or anyone else that forgot about
them after their peak) and stuff that had deeper impact, which was of a
different kind (could still be pop: it just wasn't a novelty track like, say,
Cotton Eye Joe or The Scatman).

~~~
srean
> and still have deep emotional impact from all kinds of stuff

Amen. Wish its more common than commonly perceptible.

------
bane
> Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix immersed in a jar of his own urine was
> called "Piss Christ."

I remember when this was part of the national debate around the NEA. The
reason that the people seeking to defund this stuff was that it simply was
garbage as art. If classic art sought to pull on "positive" emotions and move
and inspire; modern art seemed determined to confuse and then move on to
outrage.

Somewhere in this dwelling in negative emotions, modern art became
indistinguishable from a satire that nobody was bothering to produce. It was
an overly serious bunch of belly button dwelling backed by amateurishly
crafted production most pre-schoolers regularly produced. Instead it became a
game of one-upsmanship and gross-outs devised in the minds of 10 year old
boys. Anything that wasn't deliberately trying to rile the audience was
laughable "craftsmanship" and interesting in any way. The art scene became
incestuous and further and further isolated itself from any potential
audience.

Classical art was put out in public places for any passerby to see --
Michelangelo's "David" was displayed in a public courtyard. While it's true
that classic forms became tired and formulaic, the modernist movements didn't
generally replace those forms with anything of particular value.

There's interesting things going on in art in the modern world, but modern art
isn't one of them.

~~~
mturmon
There is a lot more going on in Serrano's work than these kind of off the cuff
comments give him credit for.

I saw the original series in the early 90s in a retrospective in Manhattan,
and your characterization of it as "garbage" is shallow and erroneous.

First off, they are large prints, and beautifully colored and detailed. They
have a beautiful, aestheticized quality. The series of photos also uses other
bodily fluids like semen, milk, and blood -- fluids which are highly symbolic,
especially for Catholics (Serrano is a believer).

Seen as a body of photos, it comes off as transgressive, sure, but also
suggestive of processes that run the world -- reproduction, excretion,
nourishment, care for young. But also, at the very same time, richly symbolic
in the Catholic tradition.

As a point of reference, if you are familiar with the works of Gilbert and
George (NSFW:
[http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/16976_cspread1.jpg](http://www.harpersbooks.com/pictures/16976_cspread1.jpg)),
who have also worked with large scale photos of shit, semen, etc. -- Serrano's
works are not provocative in the same way. His series was actually rather
philosophical and meditative.

~~~
astine
"The series of photos also uses other bodily fluids like semen, milk, and
blood -- fluids which are highly symbolic, especially for Catholics (Serrano
is a believer)."

I was raised Catholic. Milk and semen are _not_ symbolic to Catholics. Neither
is urine. Blood is, sort of, but dowsing a statue in it would be to miss the
meaning of it entirely. That's saying something because lots of things are
symbolic to Catholics.

The entertainer, Madonna used to drape herself in Catholic symbolism as well,
even filming her music video in Churches and featuring herself having affairs
with the statuary. I don't think anyone of any intelligence attributed any
more to it than an attempt to shock the audience. I'd argue that Madonna's
work is more aesthetically pleasing that Serrano's, (a framed turd is still a
turd,) and that's really the only differentiator in this case.

~~~
ta0967
_Milk and semen are not symbolic to Catholics. Neither is urine._

the symbolism may be in their exclusion and denial from the catholic cult. in
many of its strains catholicism is so exalted you're only supposed to have an
eternal soul, your body is filthy.

which brings us back to _modern art is just juvenile satire_. my take on this
is it's necessary (and won't stop being necessary as long as there are new
people coming to this world) but in now way should be the only or the most
cherished form of art.

~~~
astine
" in many of its strains catholicism is so exalted you're only supposed to
have an eternal soul, your body is filthy."

Um, nope. That's called Manichaeism and it was condemned by the Catholic
Church as long ago as the 5th century. The body is considered sacred in
Catholic beliefs, but it doesn't have any special symbolism that would make
something like Piss Christ make sense.

------
codingdave
Art is exploding these days. Maybe not "fine art", but when I was growing up,
everyone said, "Oh, no, I cannot draw." Today, the internet is full of art
being created and shared. Even by teenagers or other folk who "can't draw".
Anime is popular, and many people and trying out that style as well. Painting
is as popular as ever, and the crafting movement, too. The geek culture of the
internet has spawned people making geek art in all kinds of media.

Not much of this (if any) is going to show up on gallery walls, and I am not
even claiming that I like much of it. But it is art. And it is absolutely
relevant to the people creating and viewing it.

We have an entire generation of people growing up knowing that they can
create. Whether those creations use traditional art media, digital media,
crafts, or something entirely new, the point is that the creative process is
alive and well, vastly more so than when I was young.

~~~
themartorana
Yes, a thousand times yes.

Creativity is everywhere and in our daily lives and basically infused into
every corner of the new culture. Damn near everyone is a photographer, and a
hefty number of us don't suck at it either. We're writers, critics,
performance artists, musicians and videographers with a huge shared publishing
platform. We can share and sell our creations and art with huge audiences with
ease. Problems are approached as creative exercises. I'd even argue that the
code we write may be art - I profess to find great beauty in some of it.

It's pretty cool that as weird as Snapchat is to some of us, and as creepy as
Facebook is, they're popular mostly because they allow people to share their
creativity, as mundane as it may seem.

Yes, some if not much of it is pedestrian at best, but the rate at which we
consume art, and the ease with which we can create and share art is mind-
boggling for those of us that remember "before."

~~~
spdionis
The problem actually is that we have inflation in art.

------
carsongross
_" Today's art has given us nothing that bears the slightest resemblance to
our own lives, touches our fears and cares, evokes our dreams, or gives hope
in time of darkness. Today's art is no longer a part of life, no longer in the
domain of the common man, no longer an enriching, ennobling and vital partner
in the public pursuit of civilization, no longer the majestic presence in
everyday life that it was in the past. It is not that the public has failed
art; it is art which has failed the public."_

\--Frederick Hart

------
alricb
Invocation of Orwell... check. Piss Christ... check. US-centrism... check.
"Western culture"... check.

Well that's a pretty standard Decline of Civilization article there. Well
done!

There are issues with modern art and sophomorism, yes; essentially, the big
problem with art is artists, and the way they learn to spew bullshit about
their production.

There are also big problems with architecture, which is really a τέχνη, and
not really an art in the fine arts sense; big architecture spends a lot of
time on arty one-upmanship and not enough on the practical matters that make a
building work and last.

------
suncanon
This article is really not true at all. Art is not becoming irrelevant, it is
just changing.

We are bombarded with audiovisual media now. A painting, a song, or even a
"shocking" performances is much less valuable in a supply/demand sense than.
(500 years ago, something as beautiful and pure as a painting was very rare!)

But new forms of art have replaced them. Relational art (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_art)
) is a popular one. Relational artworks use humans, not media, as material. A
relational artist might say that what is rare and valuable today is not visual
media, but human connectedness and meaningful experience. A relational artwork
might try to help a community solve a social issue, or create social
connections that would not otherwise exist.

These new forms of art are not evaluated on how shocking they are. They are
evaluated on how they affect the world.

------
pdiddy
I would find this article hilarious if I weren't horrified that people may
take it seriously.

In the 50s, people could identify Buckminster Fuller, Saul Bellow, or Jackson
Pollock. Many educated people now could identify Frank Gehry, Toni Morrison,
or Jeff Koons. But having a cadre of public artists who "shape in meaningful
ways our image of ourselves or define our collective values" is a very narrow
way framing the issue and has not been the trajectory of art for decades, if
ever.

Look at that reception to Marina Abramović's _The Artist is Present_. People
stood in line for hours. I saw a segment about it on CBS Sunday Friggin'
Morning. The public is engaged with art, it's just not the art that the writer
wants them to be engaged with.

~~~
frankydp
Social and political commentary by its nature, will alienate a large portion
of its consumers. The strange morphing of the definition of Art into only High
Art, I think leads to the opinion of the author, and the disproportionate
amount of High Art that is exclusively commentary leads to an obvious
disengagement by big chunks of the population.

Through out history the majority of artist have been craftsman that create for
the sake a client, state, or church. Sometime in the last couple centuries
working artist have become taboo, and that meaningful creation for a purpose
other than that of the "pure" artistic value has been pushed out of High Art.

The fact that art the Author classifies as art, is not modern media form(TV,
CINEMA, DIGITAL) seems to ensure that the prophesy should be self fulfilling.

I do not know of any contemporary ceiling painters.

~~~
ruraljuror
I wrote the original comment (but logged into the wrong account, woops).

You make a good point about commentary, and it seems like the NEA Four would
like to cast art specifically in that light, but of course any narrow
pigeonholing of _art_ is bound to fail.

I would quibble with your statement that artist would create art _for the sake
of_ the client, state, or church. Certainly they were patronized but that
influence while significant doesn't tell the whole story. The contemporary
concept of the working artist and the relationship to the public was
revolutionized by Warhol. This article only mentions him twice in passing, so
again I don't really take it that seriously.

I would suggest Sol Lewitt as a ceiling painter, but not sure where that
rabbit hole would take us.

------
veddox
Whatever happened to beauty in art? Much of the article focuses on art whose
only purpose seems to be so "say something", to shock its viewers, to do
something nobody else had ever thought of doing before. At which point in time
did we lose the mother of all art - beauty? Aesthetics? Craftsmanship?

Now do not get me wrong, of course artists must engage in a dialogue with the
society in which they live, and of course art is a great way of expressing
political and social opinions. But when the fundamental purpose of art - the
creation of something beautiful - is lost, all that remains is politics
masquerading as art. And no wonder nobody wants to see that.

It is perfectly possible to produce art containing both: beautiful content and
a strong message. Just take the Expressionist artists and poets of the Great
War as an example. Wilfred Owen, Georg Heym, Otto Dix - they all produced
incredibly strong anti-war art (poems and paintings) that still displayed a
very high standard of artisan skill. There are many, many other examples, from
many different points in history.

What happened to that legacy?

------
miahi
This event[1] happened after the article was written, and it shows that it's
true: people started to actually expect this kind of violence in art.

> Witnesses to a knife attack at a Miami art show thought they were witnessing
> a piece of performance art.

[1]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12035779/Knife-
attack-at-art-show-mistaken-for-performance-art.html)

~~~
cLeEOGPw
Really, how can people value art when it is indistinguishable from everyday
life?

------
Animats
There was once agreement on what "high culture" was - classic paintings,
symphonies, opera, and ballet. Those are the art forms that have stone palaces
downtown. Those forms have lost some social significance in the last few
decades, which means that the hangers-on, the gallery operators, art
historians, and collectors don't have the status they used to have. The
institutions with the stone palaces, especially below the top tier, are having
some trouble getting contributions.

But not that much trouble in major cities. Even the Detroit Museum of Art just
managed an expansion. The Cleveland Museum of Art is expanding. In SF, in the
last twenty years there's been the new Asian Art Museum, the new DeYoung
building, and the SFMOMA refurbishing. On the other hand, the George Lucas Ego
Museum was banished to Chicago, and the Grateful Dead museum didn't get built.
The City of San Francisco has access to a huge stainless-steel peace symbol,
but nobody wants it in their neighborhood. The classic fine arts are still
winning.

~~~
dredmorbius
"High art" is a ver 19th century concept.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=high+art&year_...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=high+art&year_start=1600&year_end=2015&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chigh%20art%3B%2Cc0)

------
cousin_it
IMO it's a big mistake to feel that art should be above the viewer. Good art
should be exactly at your level, speaking to _you_ and enriching _you_. Given
the choice between "guilty pleasure" and "conspicuous consumption", good art
should aim for the former. For example, the video game Loom speaks to me, the
webcomic Homestuck speaks to me, the drawings of M.C. Escher (derided by the
artistic world at the time) speak to me. Modern art doesn't speak to me at
all, I feel like it's talking to someone else who died a while ago.

~~~
veddox
Art should not be above the viewer in the sense that it seems to say "You're
too dumb and too uneducated to understand me".

It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him to
broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an appreciation
for the craftsmanship that goes into art.

Art that is exactly at your level may give you some temporary pleasure, but
little else. The German classical poets saw art as a means of educating
peoples' personalities. If you always stick to what you can already understand
without a problem, when are you ever going to grow?

~~~
cousin_it
> _It should totally be above the viewer in the sense that it should get him
> to broaden his horizons, to deepen his thinking and to cultivate an
> appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into art._

Right, that's exactly how I feel about Homestuck and how I don't feel about
modern art.

------
sanoli
On the discussions below of whether something is art or not, I once read a
good (not perfect) rule: "If something has to be on a museum for you to know
it's art, it isn't".

~~~
zhkirill
That's an interesting quote. Yet, where else art should be?

~~~
veddox
Note that the quote doesn't say "if it's in a museum, it isn't art". What is
means to say is that you should be able to recognize a true work of art no
matter where you see it. (I dare say you would recognize a Rembrandt or a
Monet even on a rubbish dump.) If you see an object, and the only reason that
you classify that object as "art" is because it's in a museum and some poster
tells you that it is "art", then one should question whether that object
deserves the accolade of being called so.

------
pervycreeper
> Fifty years ago, educated people could be expected to identify the likes of
> Saul Bellow, Buckminster Fuller, and Jackson Pollock. Today one is expected
> to know about the human genome and the debate over global warming, but
> nobody is thought ignorant for being unable to identify the architect of the
> Freedom Tower or name a single winner of the Tate Prize (let alone remember
> the name of the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature).

Artists have failed to keep up with the times in terms of scientific
knowledge. Humanity's understanding of, and relation to the universe is
completely different compared to a century ago. Those on the soft side of CP
Snow's Two Cultures have responded to their waning relevance by denying the
importance of their technical counterparts, however, world culture cannot be
fooled so easily. Scientific literacy is now as necessary as the ability to
use language, and there's no going back. Our artists will now have to keep up
or else they will become obsolete.

~~~
coldtea
> _Artists have failed to keep up with the times in terms of scientific
> knowledge._

Then again, that's not their role.

Besides scientists have failed to keep up with the times in term of
aesthetics, emotional development and morals too.

~~~
selimthegrim
Uh, substantiate this?

------
rdtsc
Of course there was talk about the end of art for many decades now. At least
when going to college in early 2000s I remember there was already enough
written about "What comes after post-modernism". At least the art critics are
busy -- talking about end of art.

The part about art auctions and art pieces being sold for more and more money,
make sense. With growing inequality it makes sense to cater to the few super
rich. You can sell them paintings, or custom hand made golden watches, or
what-have you.

But yeah the middle class, which is supposedly erroding, like to go to museums
because, well they are there when they visit a new city, but they'll probably
not be spending $5-10K buying paintings or sculptures.

There is a mention of digital and film, and that is a valid point. Video games
are art, design is art as well, so is film. Movies and shows are popular
still. Perhaps peformance art and other traditional forms are in decline but
digital lives on.

Digital art and music is also combining. I found about vaporwave a few years
back, for example :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave)

It is kind of fascinating, it combined early Internet and computer art --
images of Windows 95 load screens, with a synth music. It has elements of late
80s and 90s nostalgia, it both glorifies and makes fun of consumerist culture.

Here are few example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE),
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw),
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyEusKu44wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyEusKu44wc),
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0fVy0Td64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0fVy0Td64)

~~~
bane
Vaporwave, Retrowave, etc. are all interesting throwback forms that seem to be
grounded in reproducing and modernizing a certain audiovisual
aesthetic...without being specifically constrained by the forms being paid
homage to. I find this movement very cool.

For decades there's also been a few "underground" digital art scenes that are
unusually vibrant and have gained some measure of respect outside of their
specific milieus. The demoscene in particular has become famous for
audio/visual and _technical_ excellence that almost requires an educated and
informed audience to appreciate on deep levels, but is also at least
entertaining to non-in-crowd viewers.

------
necessity
When you call any and everything "art" it is bound to become irrelevant.

------
solidsnack9000
> ...the making of art was far too serious to be left to sentimental clients
> who might mistakenly desire a narrative painting with a clear moral message,
> or a facsimile of a villa they had admired in Tuscany.

> “We are making it out of ourselves” is a fair summary of the revolution in
> patronage the modern movement had brought about, in which the artist himself
> had now been transformed into his own patron.

So at some point, artists stopped working for a living. And who doesn't want
to do that? But work has a curious way of keeping things grounded and
relevant.

------
coliveira
Fine art has become irrelevant as a consequence of the mass consumer society
we live in. Once upon a time there was a class of people who were viewed as
being above everyone else in terms of artistic skill and taste. Whatever you
want to call them, they were a result of a parallel elite social and economic
group that was viewed as being above the others. They elected their group of
painters, musicians, architects, etc.

Modern society has shaped a world where the mass of people dictates what is
interesting or not based on the money they pay for that product. So, the
Beatles are viewed as important, not because their musical skills were better
than thousands other musicians, but because they were consumed to a point of
making a big difference in our society.

In a mass society, there is a huge pressure to lower the quality of
everything, because this means that more and more people will be able to enjoy
it. That's why people are not creating the next 5th symphony, they're creating
instead the next Justin Bieber song. In such a world, fine arts have no power
because they are not able to move lots of people in the same way that a video
game or the next Star Wars movie can.

------
nan0
A documentary about modern art I recently watched. I was never really good at
interpretation of art. I did find this interesting This is modern art - Hollow
laughter (BBC documentary)
[https://youtu.be/ZK7EJOfULSA](https://youtu.be/ZK7EJOfULSA)

------
liamconnell
One of the author's first arguments is a common one, but one that I think is
an oversimplification: That after WWI art started depicting the awfulness that
Europeans had suddenly been exposed to, and therefore became "unpatronable" in
the traditional sense since it wasnt pretty pictures of lily pads anymore.

Look up fin de siecle Vienna if you aren't familiar with it. Decades before
the war, artists in every discipline were pushing in weird directions (not
necessarily in a bad way!).

I think its important to recognize this. Then more than now art was an
important aspect of everyday life, and I dont think they write in history
books that "many people in Austria and Germany were going batshit crazy" was
an important part of the classic WWI "powderkeg".

------
noir-york
The article is a fascinating read. Reminded me of a discussion in a class a
long time ago about art and what it means; I settled on defining "art" as any
artifact labeled as "art" and that someone is willing to pay for, excluding
the artist's mother.

An operational, if cynical, definition. But it will have to do until we go
back to not being afraid to judge, to offend, to debate views that are not
"politically correct" (the recent Rhodes statue "controversy" being a
ridiculous case in point)

------
moron4hire
I love art. My wife and I "consume" a lot of art museums. We always go to at
least one wherever we travel. We love the provocation of thought that seeing
really good art achieves. I've gotten fairly good at interpreting art. On
occasion I've even been called an artist, though I personally don't consider
myself one, for a variety of reasons, but mostly due to motivation.

All that is to say, I'm not your typical suburban luddite who signs off on
abstractionism as just "squiggly lines anyone could do".

But lately I have to stop and consider that maybe fine art is less relevant
today because fine artists are less relevant. I mean, it's not exactly like
the latest artists have anything particularly new or surprising for artists to
say. For example, "End War" is a popular topic. Way to go out on a limb there,
buddy.

Our post-post-modern era of art is just _boring_.

And it's not just boring. It's increasingly rather shoddy work, too. Where
some artists have attempted to cross disciplines and bring new ideas into the
academic art sphere, it's significantly devoid of any meaning, derivative, and
poor imitations of the forms they are copying. You can apparently get really
far in art school if you can find some corner of culture that your Baby Boomer
art professors haven't seen and pass off your tutorial sessions as "new".

For example: while visiting my sister in Des Moines, Iowa, we visited the
local Des Moines Art Center. All told, an absolutely fine museum of modern
art. There was a wide selection of different pieces from both artists I
recognized and ones I didn't yet know. But there was one piece that really
stuck in my craw.

"Icon" by Rashaad Newsome
([http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/exhibitions/singlechannel5...](http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/exhibitions/singlechannel5-Rashaad-
Newsome)) is a wanton appropriation of 90s-era demoscene visuals with poorly
choreographed dance sequences unconvincingly greenscreened on top. Content-
wise, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect an art-school sophomore to
make.

Now, to some extent, better visuals in 3D graphics aren't exactly at the
disposal of anyone who isn't specifically making a career out of 3D graphics.
I'd not be able to make much better, and I studied computer graphics as a
concentration in my computer science degree 10 years ago.

But that's rather much the point. Modern art museums are not supposed to be
the refrigerator door of art school iconoclasts looking for a pat on the back.
The cubists weren't _bad_ painters. They were specifically playing with
representation and form. You can see it in the confidence of their lines, in
their cohesion of their color choices. They had spent years studying painting
to gain the fine motor control and insight to forge a new path.

Not flat-textured quads that you could learn how to make in your first hour of
playing with THREE.js.

You have to do something with what you're making. You have to use every detail
of your piece. There has to be intention. It's not so much that the visuals
were poor. It's that they weren't the point of the piece. There was no part of
the piece that relied on the fact that the visuals were poor. They were a
distraction from whatever else was trying to be made.

This is just the freshest example I have in mind. Hell, I even was hired to
build a piece for an artist once[0]. I hated the piece I made. I thought I did
a poor job, all my seams were showing and joints weren't aligned properly. I
did the best I could in the time and budget, and the artist was more than
satisfied. She received high praise for her show. But to me, it was a bad
piece, because I didn't do what I thought was a particularly good job in
making it.

[0] No, I don't understand how it makes sense for an artist to pass off
another person's work in their own show, but apparently it's a real thing and
she paid me for it anyway. This is why I don't consider myself an artist. I
don't understand how the "aht" world works. There is an unspoken code for how
things work. And apparently, the feeling is mutual, hence why I finished
college with a computer science degree, rather than the fine art degree I had
been accepted for.

------
fengwick3
This article, with its bold assertions and dubious use of evidence, seems to
be written by someone capable precisely the wild and imaginative leaps need to
appreciate modern art. That aside, is it really true that high culture was
part of the common conversation? Fine art seems to have always been confined
only to the aristocrats. Whether pop culture is increasingly banal is a more
contentious point than what the essay argues.

~~~
noir-york
> is it really true that high culture was part of the common conversation

Been to a European city lately? At the centre of each you will find cathedrals
and palaces, as well as churches dotted throughout. High culture was indeed
part of the common conversation.

Fine art was financed by aristocrats to showcase their power and status and
what better way to demonstrate that status than by plonking it in the centre
of town for all to admire.

~~~
rdancer
Historically, the vast majority of people in Europe would live in a village,
and lived and died within a radius they could comfortably cover on foot in
half a day. The urban population has only recently risen about 50%
worldwide[1] (but that includes slums).

[1]
[http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_p...](http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/)

~~~
noir-york
I come from a (tiny) country where the population lived in such small
villages. Village were built around a church which would be richly decorated -
paid for from inheritances of gold, precious jewellery and money left by rich
and poor villagers alike.

The difference between villages, towns, and cities was the scale of the
patronage and the riches. Even tiny village churches would, over hundreds of
years, acquire highly valuable paintings and gold and silver works of art.

------
vinceguidry
For anyone as confused as I am about the shortness of the article, you have to
click X on the little box to put in your email to see the rest of the article.

~~~
mirimir
You can just close that nagging window :)

------
randomsearch
I'm a geek who has in recent years dabbled with visual art, film, and a little
performance art. I have a close relative who's an artist. I've built artworks
with artists over the last few years, one of which is currently on 'tour'
overseas, and I've built my own artwork that has been shown alongside work
I've built with others. Hence I have first-hand experience of the contemporary
art world, but very little formal training as an artist, and hence an
outsider's view of the state of things.

I've always been into art and primarily I love modern art, that is 1890s-1970s
art. To avoid confusion, it makes more sense to use "contemporary art" to
refer to art made today, which a lot of posters seem to be referring to as
"modern art".

The art I've made with artists has been very political, and I've been very
happy about that. One of the films I made this year was also very political.
As part of my work, I've been privileged to spend time in artists' studios and
go to a lot of contemporary exhibition openings.

Coming away from this, my conclusions have been that (a) the artists I've been
working with are exceptional, in that they _are_ engaging with society, but
(b) most of the art I see is made for artists, that can't be understood or
appreciated fully without a length explanation of how it relates to some
previous work, or some theme in art. It rarely says something deeper or
philosophical about society or our lives. For example, I may walk into a small
exhibition space and find a few wooden blocks displayed on the floor. Or a
piece of twine spread around a room. I ask my artist friends to explain it,
and there's no clear consensus or understanding. I think describing this as
"Art Becoming Irrelevant" is a very kind way of putting it. I would describe
it as "art for artists".

It's been a bugbear of mine for a while that in a world with so many pressing
problems, where democracy is failing us, that artists have a huge
responsibility to stand up and do something about it, rather than walking away
from the mess and building more abstract installations.

One final point is that many posters are describing video games as "art".
Whilst I think video games _can_ be art, there is a very big difference
between "art" and "something that looks nice" or "something beautiful" or
"something enjoyable". Art is defined by intention, amongst other things.
There are great podcasts on this by Grayson Perry, which I cannot recommend
highly enough:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/downloads](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/downloads)

[edit: typo]

~~~
et1337
I think games might be one of the few artistic mediums currently immune to the
estrangement described in this article. For example, "Her Story", a decidedly
"not beautiful" game with somewhat off-putting visuals, received some major
awards along with booming commercial success.

"The Beginner's Guide", a cobbled-together concoction of deliberately
unplayable, half-finished games, was another smash hit.

Both critics and laymen love these games.

In the film industry for example, works like that would end up in the fine art
echo chamber.

