My Introduction to Modern Art

 In September 2022 I was in New York for work and one weekend I paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I am not an art fan, in fact I think the only previous time I was in a gallery was a school tour in Dublin when I was 10. However, museums are a great place to kill a few hours alone in a city so off I went to MoMA armed only with the knowledge that Jackson Pollock seemed to regularly be an answer in the art round of University Challenge.

The exhibition started on the fifth floor with work from the mid 1800's and descended in chronological order until you reach contemporary art (works done by living artists) on the first floor. Initially I liked some of what I saw and was indifferent about a lot. One part that stood out to me was how Picasso's abstract cubism style influenced more modern works that focused on shapes and symmetry without depicting an image. 

I do not know if my interpretation is correct, but as I descended through the galleries I got the impression that a story was being told as the styles evolved through the decades. However, I had no idea what this story was. Kind of like listening to a song in a foreign language, you understand that the lyrics have a message, and it even sounds nice, but you have no idea what they are actually saying. So driftng through the first couple of floors I enjoyed trying to recognize patterns between different artists, particularly across different eras, but I still had a sense of lacking some appreciation for what I was seeing.

This feeling of pleasant contentment shattered once I hit work from around 1980's and onwards. I didn't mind paintings becoming more minimalist featuring shapes and lines and little else. I actually quite like symmetry and contrasting colours. But modern "sculptures", and I use that word as condescendingly as possible, were totally lost on me. The ones I recall were not aesthetically pleasing and required no skill in artistic craft. The "art" seemed to solely rely on the "message the artist wanted to convey" according to the plaque beside each piece. Can something be art if it requires a detailed explanation why it is so? As I wandered through the final floor I was falling into further into state of bewilderment and infuriation. I felt as if the art world was playing some inside joke on the uninitiated. 

For example, here is Robert Gober's Untitled work from 1986.

According to MoMA:

Robert Gober’s art is deeply engaged with everyday life—and at the same time profoundly disruptive of it. He emerged in New York in the mid-1980s, presenting deceptively simple sculptures of ordinary objects. Gober created Untitled using materials purchased at a local lumberyard and a neighborhood store. Far from commonplace, though, this bed is surreal: a personal space of dreaming and desire that is strangely generic, recalling a dollhouse copy or a vague childhood memory. Untitled appeared at a moment when the personal was overtly political, when queer communities in New York were fighting for equal rights, and the AIDS crisis was just beginning. Eternally empty, Gober’s “bed” evokes both unfulfilled longing and unfathomable loss.

This is one of the most pretentious, vomit inducing paragraphs I have ever read. This is a bed. It is eternally empty because it is in a museum. Move it 100m east onto 5th Ave and I assure you it would not be empty. The mental gymnastics required to relate it to the AIDS crisis I could not fathom. This was one of many examples of taking an unremarkable object, assigning a seemingly arbitrary meaning to it and calling it art. Surely the emperor has no clothes here?

The wave of confusion and incredulity that washed over me that afternoon stuck with me. I began to visit the modern art museum of any new city I went to. I was happy to view these artworks because they made me feel things, even though the feelings were rage and disbelief that a curator would spend money on these. 

My disenchantment reached new heights when I came across Jean Michel Basquait...

You would be forgiven for wondering why I have included a photo of your toddler's most recent Crayola escapade. This is actually one of many widely celebrated pop art works by JMB that hang in museums all over the world. Go figure!

At this point I decided I want to learn about modern art from the inside. I want to understand why celebrated artwork no longer requires artistic skill. There is clearly something I am fundamentally misunderstaning about the whole industry. Luckily, I came across "What are you looking at?: 150 years of modern art in the blink of an eye" a book by Will Gompertz. Will was director of the Tate gallery in London for seven years. He knows his stuff. Most importantly the book is written in language that is totally accessible to art newbies like myself, and it is dramatized in a way that makes the artists characters so doesn't read like an academic text at all.

Having just finished the first chapter I already learned more about modern art than I could in a week in a gallery. So it turns out the idea of using everyday items as symbolic sculptures came from a French artist called Marcel Duchamps who entered it tried entering a signed urinal into an exhibition in New York in 1917. He was of the opinion that art is in the idea rather than the craft and that an artist can take an ordinary object, remove it from its typically context and it becomes a de-facto artwork. His urinal entry was a tongue in cheek protest against the conventional opinion of what constituted art. He thought that only the artist can determine if something is art. The judges of this exhibition, aside from himself, did not agree and the urinal did not get put on display. However, it was photographed by the esteemed photographer Alfred Steiglitz thus immortalizing the symbol. 

The initial response to Duchamps' urinal was one of confusion and repulsion. Very similar to how I felt wandering around the ground floor of MoMA. I began this book with the attempt to answer the question "can you just slap a meaning on an inanimate object and call it art?". Well, modern art enthusiasts believe you can. That is a very fundamental change to my worldview. This book is going to be fun.