Admit It - You Really Hate Modern Art
"Admit It - You Really Hate Modern Art" is an excellent essay by someone who writes under the pen name of Spengler. Here is some quotations:
"The most striking difference between the two founding fathers of modernism is this: the price of Kandinsky's smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg's music."
"Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall?"
"When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape."
For the entire essay, see
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IA30Aa03.html
"The most striking difference between the two founding fathers of modernism is this: the price of Kandinsky's smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg's music."
"Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall?"
"When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape."
For the entire essay, see
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IA30Aa03.html
posted by C. Siegel at 9:41 AM
2 Comments:
Charles, that was a great piece. I'm glad you enjoyed it too.
I used to think that if I just tried hard enough, I'd learn to appreciate modern art. I don't know what made me think I had to; since I've become a traditionalist, I've thought it was OK to appreciate the classics of bygone times, while believing that little of worth was produced in the 20th century. If we live in an age of little beauty, that's all the more reason we need beauty in our lives, not the ugliness that modern artists would like to give us instead.
That was a magnificent clever article one of the best I've ever read.
I understand contemporary/Modern art fully,I understand all the idotic socio-political concepts that were ushered and beaten into the piece but yet it still somehow retains it's vapidness and dishonesty no matter how much headwork and meaning they attempt to attach to it.
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