Seven Thoughts On Contemporary Art
I swear to goodness modern galleries have started using LEDs instead of incandescent lightbulbs, and that it has genuinely ruined a lot of the great wall-art of history.
This is exactly the type of complaint that people make as they get older and compare the memories of their youth, floating around them like helium balloons, with the heavy concrete of contemporary experience, so I would be 0% surprised if this turns out not to be true: either that I'm just misremembering how good the paintings looked the first time, or that the galleries are still using incandescent lightbulbs and I’m simply wrong about this factually.
But I have seen Picasso's Guernica N times in my life, and the first N-2 times were reproductions in books which made me think "eh, I don't get it," and the N-1th time was in person during the Incandescent Lightbulb Period Of History and genuinely made me weep, and the Nth time was in person under what I swear were LED lights, and which (I swear) made the painting look flat and tinny.
Surely we can afford to keep incandescent lights going in the settings where we need them? Or at least find LED lights with the light-profile of incandescents?
Actually this makes me wonder how many works of art I never appreciated because the type of light they were created in – either the natural light of a particular time or place, or candlelight, or whatever the artist was painting with – was not the light I saw them in. It's like how cave art was drawn to live in the flames of a bonfire, or how (surprisingly similarly) pixel art looks blocky to us now but was designed for CRT monitors that added a natural motion.
If you're looking at an artwork in the wrong light literally, you're also looking at it in the wrong light metaphorically, and in some sense you haven't actually seen it.
The piece that unlocked all of contemporary art for me was Carsten Höller's Test Site, a series of slides for grownups installed in a cavernous gallery that, while not strictly measureless, was truly incredibly big.
It was exactly the kind of artwork that gets roundly mocked as What Is Wrong With Contemporary Art, because adults in button-downs and fancy scarves going down big fairground slides is (admittedly) very funny, and the fact that these slides cost millions of dollars to commission and even more to maintain is very easy to mock.
But Test Site isn't actually about the slides, it’s about the feeling you have once you get to the end of the queue, and there's a 15 second moment when you are next up for it, and you don't really want to do it anymore – you're a 50 year old man in a suit, after all, and you suddenly remember being 5 years old and being scared of the slide, too, but the neighbor's kid (who was always braver than you) is shouting come on, go down already!, and you have to do it even though you don't want to, and 20 years later that's what happened with your marriage, too, you knew you didn't want to go through with it, but once you've stood in that metaphorical line for long enough you simply can't cut out, you know?, just what would the neighbors think, and that's how you found yourself in this exhausting stalemate with a woman whose resignation was ultimately worse than her anger, and who finally had the mercy to take the marriage out back and shoot it, which your friends (you are certain, in secret) all think is deeply humiliating, but to you was only a relief, because you would never be brave enough to make that decision, and now everybody is staring at you because it's been 30 seconds already and the line is bunching behind you, and they're getting annoyed because you're at Carsten Höller's Test Site, and they need you to go down the slide so that they can have gone down the slide, and then tell all their friends at brunch how silly it was, but you know what? let them mutter, let them be angry at you!, for once in your life you're choosing you. You turn around and look at them, these people who all your life have passively pushed you to do the things you didn't want to, and you throw your arms up at them in a gesture of defiance and freedom, which (in your minds eye, if not in reality) evokes that broken-winged bird taking flight, and you leave the line.
The artwork Test Site is not actually the slides, it's the feeling you get while standing in line for Test Site, that is the test and you are the site. It is a brilliant work of art even if it is also just a bunch of grown-ups going down a very expensive fairground slide.
In general, contemporary art is more likely to make sense (and be enjoyable) if you treat it less as what does this show and more as what internal experience is this meant to evoke in me? It should be judged not on what it shows but on how specifically, uniquely or intensely it can evoke certain experiences. A lot of it fails at this!, that is also true, but at least we should judge it on what it's meant for.
Much like books (and people), I think some art only makes sense if you meet it at the right time in your life. I don't want to turn into a full-on apologist for everything, I suspect some art (and books) really are just bad. But I try really hard to simultaneously hold in my head the ideas that "this piece of art feels like art-fraud, sight and fury signifying nothing" and "maybe I'm just not meeting it at the right time to understand it."
Much like the lighting issue, even great art will look bad in the wrong context. For example, I swear that the Rothko Chapel is a terrible setting for Rothkos, even though (embarrassingly for my thesis) Rothko himself designed it. (He died before the chapel opened, so I console myself that he would have changed it if he'd seen how he turned out, rather than needing to admit that I'm wrong).
By contrast, the Rothko Room at the Tate is one of the greatest and most profound human experiences I've ever encountered, up there with the Sagrada Familia and... probably a couple other things, but nothing that's coming to mind right now.
Again I don't want to claim that everything is good in the right context, it isn't, but only that there are a lot of complementary dimensions that need to go right for a piece to speak with you, and if it doesn't speak to you when you see it it doesn't necessarily mean the piece is bad.
One big problem with art-viewing is that if you're paying $30 (or lining up for an hour) to see a gallery, you feel like you want to get Good Value from it, and end up spending too much time there, and getting over-stuffed with art, and then not going again.
I suspect for me the ideal viewing time is about 30 minutes, so much of my art-exposure in life came from the few times I lived nearby to a very good, very free gallery I could dip in and out of.
I suspect the distribution of art in our world is highly suboptimal? There's tons of great art undisplayed, and tons of great art concentrated in a few overwhelming locations, and then lots of places without great art at all.
To the extent that there's any viable individual-level response to this, I guess it might be to go to a gallery for half an hour, then sit in the cafe for a couple of hours on your laptop, then go back out for a half-hour, and repeat. I have never actually done this.
My friend S thinks there should be a gallery with very exact replicas of some of the greatest pieces of art in history. I would be into this, and you could do it as a contemporary art exhibit, interrogating the validity of replicas vs originals.
I originally wanted to call this piece "X Thoughts about Modern Art," but Modern Art is technically from the 1860s to the 1970s.
It's crazy to me that the term "modern" will one day mean a specific period of time that is long into the past. We may even have crossed the threshold already where young people see Modern as something old-fashioned?, the same way that New York is extremely not-new, and New College even less so. Perhaps it’s just a mistake to ever name anything after its currentness, if you want it to last.
I'm sure when I was growing up there were people going "well ACTUALLY it's not Modern Art because it was made in 1980," but I also assume that most other people found this annoying. But it's now been 50 years since the Modern era ended, I guess it’s time to move on? We all go down the long slide, like free bloody birds.