Well yeah, there is obviously a lot of bullshit in the art scene.
My "favorite" are quite pedestrian looking artworks that only (supposedly) become interesting through some nebulous explanation text full of five-dollar words.
If it tells me that the material is glass from the Trinity tests or sewer sludge, OK I'll take it, that's interesting. I like clever names, too. If the artist otherwise wanted to say something that the artwork doesn't say, that's a failure of the work IMO.
The context is often the most interesting part of the art though (while I admit pretentious wording also often rubs me the wrong way). Like the shroud of turin is just a dirty cloth if you don't appreciate the historicity of it.
That's a phenomena common across mediums. There's a certain point - it doesn't matter if it's visual, sculpture, dance, theatre, literary, or sound - where the work itself seems to become immaterial (and arguably aesthetically horrid) and the focus shifts to the process that preceeds it.
Without an 'in' or background in the often niche cultural (to borrow a word from my art wank school education) milieu it's grown from, that aspect is often opaque. Much like the article states: it's nothing more than a filter and social signalling mechanism.
The same holds true in software and technology. There's an endless continuum libraries, languages, tools and machines out there which have trivial impact on the world but are absolute objects of beauty when you know what's inside.
The reason people complain about "high art" is because we're told that everyone should aspire to appreciate high art, and that people who appreciate high art are somehow better than the general public, even though it's deliberately niche and opaque.
> There's an endless continuum libraries, languages, tools and machines out there which have trivial impact on the world but are absolute objects of beauty when you know what's inside.
Imagine if the SF MOMA were replaced with a museum full of those niche libraries and languages, showing these absolute objects of beauty to the general public, and (implicitly) saying "you ought to appreciate the beauty; if you can't appreciate e.g. the beauty of the Haskell programming language is, you're ignorant".
This! Many, many times I have talked to artists or read their statements, and seen that they are totally out of touch with how to actually communicate with their art. If you tell me your intentions for a piece, what you are trying to communicate, and coming at the piece without that information I see nothing to do with your intentions, you have failed. And the saddest part is when they have expectations that the audience will understand (or care) that all of the "meaning" they are trying to convey falls flat without the words.
I tend to go around the galleries without reading titles or statements. I get more out of it making my own meaning from your work, while being able to pay closer attention to formal qualities.
> they are totally out of touch with how to actually communicate with their art
It sounds like you have a preference for a particular kind of art, and you’re expecting all artists to conform to that preference.
> If you tell me your intentions for a piece, what you are trying to communicate, and coming at the piece without that information I see nothing to do with your intentions, you have failed
This again seems to come from an expectation that all artists produce a particular kind of work. It’s possible that they’ve failed if measured against that particular preference, but that failure is relative to the preference.
To me, a piece that requires context and explanation is just another genre of work, and it’s a genre I appreciate. It can reveal that the creation journey often looks nothing like the finished product, and for many artists, the value of the work comes primarily from the process of expression.
This doesn’t have to be your cup of tea. But neither does it make the work a failure.
Yes, you are correct, it doesn't make the work a failure. However, with my practice and my intentions, I personally do think I have failed if I need a statement to explain the piece. In addition to contemporary audiences, I like to think of how future archaeologists might interpret an artifact, without any explicit context.
> To me, a piece that requires context and explanation is just another genre of work, and it’s a genre I appreciate. It can reveal that the creation journey often looks nothing like the finished product, and for many artists, the value of the work comes primarily from the process of expression.
I can get behind this. The issue for me is that artists who rely too heavily on their statements to impart meaning might be limiting themselves in their visual vocabulary and the conversation. Having known people who get upset when they are trying to convey very specific concepts outlined in their statement, but audience members choose to interpret it differently, the failure, to me, is within them, not the piece.
Part of my problem might be that when I was starting out, the only places in a gallery available for words was the name of the show and the title.
My "favorite" are quite pedestrian looking artworks that only (supposedly) become interesting through some nebulous explanation text full of five-dollar words. If it tells me that the material is glass from the Trinity tests or sewer sludge, OK I'll take it, that's interesting. I like clever names, too. If the artist otherwise wanted to say something that the artwork doesn't say, that's a failure of the work IMO.