A Divine Gas

[elfs]

So, I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening at the Seattle Art Museum. I'm afraid I'm only a little bit happier with the SAM than I am with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I visited earlier this month. The new space is quite beautiful, and the lighting is much better, but I miss the majesty of the old marble steps with the Middle Eastern lions watching as you ascended into the space.

It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace.

There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum?

SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There's modern art out there which just doesn't say anything sensible to me, but what I found fascinating was a series of BBC programs in which Rolf Harris went off and tried to do art in the style of various artist. Including Warhol. And, having trained as an artist, he was getting into both the why and the how. It gave me some context for some of the modern stuff.

And ever since the renaiisance, art has been loaded with allusions and symbols. A Consrable landscape is saying more than "look at the opretty picture", But the information content in the picture was high.

Modern art, even a photorealistic can of soup, sometimes seems to be all context and no content.

And that, to me, makes your stories better art than 90% of the modern visual art I see reported. It isn't great art--the balance between context and content isn't right for that--but you have the craft skills that too many artists don't display.

As it happens, I can see how I can put that idea into a piece of modern art. Imagine a telegraph pole standuing in the middle of that emptry space, the wires running into the hard-to-see distance of the chamber, and down to a little table. There's a battery, and a telegraph key, and a sounder.

Well, that's clever, I suppose, but is it art?

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

It has always seemed to me that art must involve a communication between the artist and the person viewing a work; if you don't get anything from the work, perhaps because you can't figure out what it is that the artist was trying to 'say', then the artist has failed. Now, it is equally inevitable that an artist may be able to communicate via their art with some people but not with others; because of the nature of art, it will be highly subjective. One of the things that depresses me about a lot of modern art is that, in a growing number of cases, the galleries feel that it is necessary to post a description of what the artist was trying to convey with a work, so that people can look at it to try to see how the artist conveyed their message, instead of being able to convey a message without having to have a Cliff's Notes explanation leading them by the hand.

I suppose that the "I know what I was trying to convey; if you can't see it, then it's your inability to appreciate my art, not my inability to communicate with you" attitude is a big contributor to perceptions of modern art -- and the artists -- being pretentious and inappropriate. But, then, seeing what the artists whose work we value now had to do to make ends meet during their lives, and how few acquired their reputation during their lives, I suppose that someone with astigmatism and a blowtorch may eventually be ranked with the other Great Masters. Just not by my standards.