Reply to "I can do that too" when looking at art in museums

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[quote=Anonymous]A few things.

First -- people are using the term "modern art" really loosely in this thread and it's not a loose term. It refers to a specific period of art that we are actually no longer in. The modern period is generally considered to have lasted from 1860 to 1975. It includes a whole variety of different movements from impressionism to abstract expressionism to cubism to surrealism. People in this thread are talking about certain mid-20th century artists and drawing broad conclusions about modern art and you're really talking about a teeny tiny part of the modern movement. Also when you talk about more contemporary artists like Koons who may be inspired by certain modern movements but are not really considered part of the "modern art" era.

Yes it was short cited for people to label the era "modernism"! But they did and now we sometimes have to struggle with the vocabulary.

But one thing to consider is that the vast majority of successful modern artists were technically extremely skilled and their work could not easily be recreated by an amateur. And even if at this point someone could recreate it they would be doing so by employing techniques that did not exist before those artists invented and perfected them.

And I want to reiterate the comments from a few other PPs that sometimes these works are deceptive in their simplicity. I think Rothko is one of the best examples of this. People will look at one of Rothko's color field paintings and just be like "whatever that's just blocks of colors on canvas -- I could do that." But I suggest going to the Rothko room in the Phillips Gallery or spending time at one of the permanent Rothko exhibits at the National Gallery. They are not just blocks of color. There is a painstaking process of layering very thin applications of paint to create the impression of depth and variation that he sometimes spent months or years constructing through a long process of trial and error. And many of his paintings are designed as part of a series so he had to create these fields on multiple canvases in a way that complemented each other and created the desired effect.

Sometimes looking deeply at a Rothko can make me feel lost or light headed and I'm not the only one who experiences this. It is hard to explain but seeing those work in person up close especially when you are in a room with just one set of paintings designed to be shown together can be a strange experience. I am a great lover of classical art as well as many of the less abstract modernists like Picasso or Kandinsky or late-impressionists like Caillebotte and don't always love truly abstract art. Yet I find Rothko to be a powerful and technically virtuosic painter.

So I guess what I'm saying is that if you say something like "I could do that" or "my kid could do that" without really spending much time really looking at these works and allowing them to impact you. Approaching them with openness and seeing if you can understand why people like them or find them worthy of space in major museums. I'm not saying you'll love it all but I think you might *appreciate* it enough to understand that the creation of these works was not easy or accidental or cynical in the vast majority of cases.[/quote]

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