What passes as “good art” these days is completely relegated to the art community and utterly unintelligible to regular people. Is there any wonder that people dismiss it as a waste of resources? It’s every bit as bad as NFTs, academic turf wars, and Twitter purity spirals [1]. It’s yet another warning sign of the impending decline of civilization, if Toynbee’s thesis is to be believed.
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
I suggest dating that at around 19 BC, when Virgil created the absolute masterpiece that is the Aeneid, probably the greatest work of Latin literature that has ever existed... as a nationalist propaganda piece designed to justify the existence of the newly-formed empire and to retroactively proclaim the divine and heroic heritage of the Roman emperor of the time.
Whatever his reasons, Michelangelo created something which awes and inspires millions of people every year, regardless of religious affiliation or belief. Cattelan, on the other hand, has succeeded only in reminding the public how utterly irrelevant modern art has become: a lame joke for people with too much money and too little taste.
This work (Michael Heizer's) is a lot more beautiful and interesting than typical modern art (such as Cattelan's Comedian). I would even go so far as to call it an anachronism: it has all of the sincerity and none of the cynicism.
My original comment was about modern art in general. The more I look at Michael's work, the less I think my previous take applies to it. I think it's an exception to the rule, however.
Comparing old art and contemporary art is irrelevant for this reason. You’re comparing what we remember from one era to what’s currently being experimented.
It would be very reductive to describe art as “something that’s beautiful”. A more general definition would be “a creation that makes you react”. You may be in awe or caught with disgust; in both cases the artwork creates a reaction.
Cattelan’s art is built on provocation. Whether you like it or not, this is some kind of art.
Seems to me most people never started doing paintings like Michelangelo did, most likely because they were not capable and recognized their own limitations.
It’s a bit more complicated; Michelangelo was not a random artist painting alone in his workshop and you wouldn’t have been able to do what he did just because you were technically able. He was active durant the High Renaissance (like Raffaello and Leonardo), a period that ended with the Sack of Rome and the end of the Republic of Florence. It’s not that you couldn’t do it after him, it’s that the conditions that allowed him (and Raffaello, Leonardo and others) to do what he did were gone.
I read many times that this happened after the 2 world wars. At least as far as western art is concerned.
I’m no art critic, but you’ve only described one purpose of art as far as I can see.
Art is about communicating emotion. Some art attempts to make you feel “happiness and clarity into the human condition”, sure - but other works make you feel all kinds of things, including horror in disillusionment.
I think this is why I see some value in at least the idea of Dada, while others look at it and see nothing worthwhile. In fact, in that case, the reaction of those people is itself part of the installation. I remember coming to that conclusion in a city museum, where someone had taken a (new, obviously) toilet bowl and installed it as a water fountain. I had never heard of Duchamp at the time, but I immediately felt like I was seeing something that was, in fact, “art”.
I came away from it thinking things like “we all have preconditions that color how we see the world”, “objects with common uses can fit other uses”, “just because something fits a purpose, doesn’t mean it’s a good choice”, “people are pretentious for scoffing at this without even considering why it was created”, etc. The point is, it caused me to feel things, and think about things that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
My youngest child at the time was probably 3 or 4, and I remember her sitting in a stroller and looking at me like horns had sprouted from my head when I took a drink from it. I filled one of her sippy cups from it, and she refused to drink it.
On one hand - it was just a porcelain fixture with municipal water piped into it, like every other fountain that we’d ever used. On the other, the mere fact that it looked like something that she associated with human waste meant that she was unwilling to consider that it was clean.
The way other people looked at me when I drank from it carried between amusement, shock, and outright disgust. At that point the bystanders became the “art”. Hell, my actions became the art when I drank from it. A couple of others followed, some shook their heads, etc.
So… yeah. I got wordy there, but from my perspective I’d say that anything that evokes emotions in others is in fact art.
Over 13,000 nuclear warheads exist today and nothing is more crazy than that.