Andy Worhol, my long time false perception.

[Rev. Rye]

In the art world, creating a whole new style AND getting a lot of publicity over it will guarantee a big following. Then again, the art world can be largely arbitrary.

For instance, the last time I went to the Art Institute, years ago, I saw this painting in the modern wing:

Sometimes, there can be more to abstract art than meets the eye, like Yves Klein creating an entirely new shade of blue and plastering it on everything, but, sometimes, I just don’t fucking get it.

Warhol, Picasso, and Pollock found new ways of revitalizing an art form that grew less and less vital every year since photography was invented. Warhol took the everyday bits of modern culture and turned them into art pieces. Picasso helped create cubism, imagining a single subject from several points of view and putting them on canvas simultaneously. Jackson Pollock hit upon the idea of Drip Painting and, in the process, distilled the whole medium into its very essence. There’s a reason these names are still remembered. Now, if only I could figure out Cy Twombly’s deal.

[Belacqua]

Sometimes, there can be more to abstract art than meets the eye, like Yves Klein creating an entirely new shade of blue and plastering it on everything, but, sometimes, I just don’t fucking get it.

I think Klein is a good example of how marketing has taken over the art world, at the expense of other values. What you say here is what Klein himself would say, but I think it makes sense to question its value.

The color of blue he uses is just a synthetic ultramarine that was already commercially available. (Real ultramarine is powdered lapis lazuli, and is wildly expensive. In the middle ages it was more expensive than gold, which is why it was reserved for Mary's dress and other prime locations.) Klein mixed it with a particular kind of medium which gave it a distinctive look, and then, as you say, "plastered it on everything." 

To me this is a gimmick. Once you hit on something that looks a bit distinctive, you can do it over and over until it gets famous, and then you're just famous for being famous. The museum in Grenoble buys one because the museum in Paris has one. There is nothing particularly creative about it, and compared to all the things painting can do -- think of the real greats like Breughel -- it is about as empty as it can be. 

But that's the world we live in -- marketing. 

Warhol, Picasso, and Pollock found new ways of revitalizing an art form that grew less and less vital every year since photography was invented. 

Again, this is something I've heard a lot, but have come to question. It's true that portrait painters and people who made their livings selling picture postcards to tourists (which used to be engravings) lost a lot of business. But painting has always been far more than recording likenesses. Contrary to popular belief, art had not lost any vitality due to photography. It was going strong. 

Warhol took the everyday bits of modern culture and turned them into art pieces. Picasso helped create cubism, imagining a single subject from several points of view and putting them on canvas simultaneously. 

See, I'm going to be very tough on what you say here, although it's nothing personal. This is how people talk about the arts these days, and I'm reacting strongly because I've come to dislike it so much. 

It's true what you say about Warhol. He did "elevate" consumer goods to art status. This was his gimmick, in the beginning. And it's what got him famous, in a world in which gimmicks get you famous. 

Picasso, on the other hand, had the whole weight of European art in his background. Cubism may have gotten famous because people received it as a gimmick, but to Picasso it certainly wasn't. Before Brunelleschi's one-point perspective, artists were quite free to combine different views of things. Egyptians did it, Gothic artists did it. Even Renaissance artists, while showing off their mathematical perspective skills, cheated whenever it made the picture better. 

As soon as cubism became popular in the art world, Picasso abandoned it. To his great credit, he was far too wonderful of a genius to be satisfied with a gimmick. 

Again, I come across as if I'm scolding you, but it's because, in my view, art has been severely dumbed-down by the notion that each artist is great because he has one "deal" which may be "got." 

Jackson Pollock hit upon the idea of Drip Painting and, in the process, distilled the whole medium into its very essence. 

To me, Pollock is an example of the failure of the modern art world. He started drawing and painting in the great tradition. He was impatient because, as he told people, Picasso had already done everything and there was nothing left for him to do -- which is a tacit admission. 

The drip paintings, to me, are a reduction -- a removal of just about everything that painting can be. It's destroying the village in order to save it. And frankly I think there is nothing to see in them. We are impressed by them because they are famous. But seriously, they are just as beautiful, in the same way, as a house painter's drop cloth. If we are in an aesthetic mood and look at the cracks in the sidewalk, they are just as nice. 

The idea that it "distilled" painting to its "essence" is a bit of propaganda made popular by Clement Greenburg. It isn't true. What is the "essence" of painting? Greenburg said it was flatness -- acknowledging the materiality of the painting -- and a lack of subject matter. But artists had always acknowledged the artificiality and flatness of their objects -- they had just done it in more sophisticated ways than Pollock did. Again, look at Gothic painting to see all the wit and charm of the non-mathematical perspective and the play between illusionary depth and real flatness. 

To say that painting's "essence" is a lack of subject matter just ignores the fact that since Altamira, paintings have always had subject matter. To deny that depiction is part of painting's "essence" is just ideology. 

But today people talk about art as if it was commodity goods. And as with the better mousetrap or faster computer that you have to put on the market if you want to succeed, many consumers and artists think of painting this way, too. 

Like Bryan, I had to get over this way of thinking. I remember in Jr. High school thinking that the way to be a great artist was to do the Next Big Thing, and that if you could just know what that is you'd be great. I thought that Monet, for example, was great because he got to Impressionism before other people. But after you get to know what really makes a Monet wonderful, that view falls away.