Susie Hodge

Come on, you know you've thought it--while viewing a "masterpiece" of abstract art, you mutter, "A kid could do that." Here Susie Hodge, author of How to Survive Modern Art, explains why the best examples of modern art are actually the result of sophisticated thought and serious talent. From Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain and the scribbles of Cy Twombly to Mark Rothko's multiforms and Carl Andre's uncarved blocks, Hodge addresses critical outrage with a revealing insight into the technical skill, layering of ideas, and sheer inspiration behind each work. In cleverly organized chapters such as "Objects/ Toys," "Provocations/Tantrums," and "People/Monsters," Hodges thoughtfully and definitively lays bare the perception that modern art is mere child's play.

Modern Art Explained

Why Your Five-year-old Could Not Have Done that

Gavin

An attempted defence of the current reigning artistic paradigm: low-skill, high-concept, contemptuous of past, audience, and self; identitarian. Call it anaesthetic conceptualism. It is also a nice illustrated catalogue of some recent objects that have managed to piss various people off. 150 years ago, we direly needed people to make art larger, to stand against the Academic approach of Nice Hard Mimesis Only. The problem is that since the 50s many artists replaced that shallow spectacle of mere mimetic skill with the even shallower spectacle of empty originality and flashy cynicism. This book has such a patronising presentation; it could have been named "How to explain conceptualism to your five year-old". (I guess that could have been an intentional irony, but to me it just told me what she thinks of anyone sceptical of the trend. But some kudos for being clear, since this makes the hollowness of her points blatant.)

I have to applaud her; unlike the rest of her curator peers, she has at least attempted to justify a gigantically expensive, creativity-draining, status-hogging practice with close readings. I should also thank her for tacitly admitting that the only hermeneutics that can justify anaesthetic conceptualism is a small-minded and super-conservative intentionalism (i.e. 'what matters about the work is what the artist meant').* "It doesn't really matter how the object looks; what really matters is how deep the creator was and how much history you can project on it." But this philosophy of art is convincing to no-one not already invested in the great tedious playground. I dislike most of this art, and this way of talking about it, because I want to love art.***

Anyway, this is a useful catalogue of the kind of low-skill pieces that have only recently been possible and that you need to know about to move in certain presumably unbearable circles.





* Though the so-called intentional fallacy is not actually a fallacy** - it does not make sense to say that someone is literally mistaken to think that the creator's view of an artwork is the only relevant one, since aesthetic interpretation doesn't admit of literal error - instead it's just an incredibly limited and superstitious philosophy - along the same lines as deontology in ethics. It makes art a small and mostly ancient thing, while aesthetic experience could instead rise to each of the potential billions of minds that come to it, and it always takes place in the present, with entirely novel meanings generated, far beyond the ken of any creator.


** I'm aware that 'fallacy' has found usage outside of its original meaning, 'a failure in logical reasoning'. But the new usage, committed for instance by Beardsley, is something shitey like 'a horrible belief I don't like boo'. I'm generally torn between a descriptive and a prescriptive philosophy of vocabulary, but in this case the bullying and sloppy-mindedness of the new usage makes me deny it outright. Some words are too important to give up. (Mostly epistemology tbf.)

*** This is an unforgivably poncey thing to say, not least because I don't think I really mean it. If crap artists had not usurped a good portion of all the species' attention and reverence, I don't think I'd care what modern art was like. But as it is they are cheaters - even the great ones. They cheat themselves into immortality and perceived profundity via the handy expedient of prettiness and vagueness or ugliness and vagueness. In a way, they and we cheat malaria victims of huge sums, while the very people who claim to care about global injustices cheer us dumping more money into it, while saying things like 'life isn't worth living without art'. Well, maybe it wouldn't be, but life is not worth living if you're dead either, and there is enough art already.

Magdalene Lim

A good introduction to modern art pieces for the clueless. Some art pieces were interesting while others were just a load of bull.

Why Your Five-year-old Could Not Have Done that Modern Art Explained

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