Why Art isn't Terrible

Modern Art!

If you've lived a life anything like mine, I'm sure you've found plenty of artwork that most people don't appreciate.

As a kid I saw a Jackson Pollock painting for the first time and decided I was doing everything wrong. If he could make millions on such paintings what was I doing in school?

I still haven't answered that question but I have several points that make me appreciate the artwork of the last 2 centuries.

First, I've realized how much work people still put into learning styles they never practice. This is kind of a given point, but needs to be stated for those out there who think artists don't study to produce an original work.

More importantly I've learned that artwork isn't supposed to transport you away from your reality.

Looking at a great landscape is a great place to start illustrating this point. When we look at many paintings of classical scenes or the natural world we often feel like we are brought out of our day to day life and into something new, only to return when we move on.

With this attitude its easy to be dismissive of the realism of more recent artists. Who can feel transported away by a haphazard painting of homeless workers put together without any traditional perspective or by the cubist figures of guernica?

The problem isn't the painting its our attitude. Art doesn't have to be trans-formative; it can be informative as well. Most often the painter intends his work to be both. Take guernica, for example. A horrific event is captured there in a style that is not at all intended to draw us out into some transcendent reality. It's meant to inform our reality with a snapshot of a catastrophe.

My favorite example illustrating this point is Catch 22, by Joseph Heller. At no point while reading the book is the reader drawn into some fantastic world that transforms the one he lives in, but all throughout the work we see the nonsense of war portrayed nonsensically, as it should be.

All this is to serve as a warning: there is plenty of bad artwork, but few eyes keen enough to judge artwork fairly.