Unregistered

Whenever I look at Modern Art I think of the story of the two cavemen who went hunting and for the first time ever saw an elephant.

They both rush back to their caves and "A" tells his missus what he has seen. She asks him to draw it on the cave wall. He picks up a soft stone and draws a large oval with four short thick legs and insists it has a tail at each end. She asks him what colour it was and he says "A muted grey - a bit like that squirrel we had for lunch yesterday."

Caveman "B" tells his missus and on the wall draws something which looks like a pile of elastic bands on a crumpled paper handkerchief, he being more of the "abstract school"

Now this is my problem. Would you Modern Art buffs tell me which caveman you would give the Art Prize to.........and why. Leonardo

dcardillo

both would share in the prize: caveman A for his attempt to express "objectivity," caveman B for his attempt to express "subjectivity." My question: what is the prize?.... a slab of mastadon meat perhaps?

Unregistered

unregistered,

Your question indicates some confusion about Modern Art. A lot of comments along these lines stem from certain notions about what art ought to be -- realistic and "beautiful" for starters. Add to that the fact that Postmodernism, especially, often plays with the expectations of the viewer and your frustration is understandable.

But you might start by realizing that your expectations are only that, and that all art is an abstraction -- indeed, even human sight is an abstraction.

And you might look at historical context. Modern Art begins in the late 1800s -- new sciences like psychology are being formed -- you have the influence of Darwin -- the Impressionists have access to the brilliant colors of new paint dyes. Then you have the slaughter of two world wars, the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb. And the influence of the camera cannot be overlooked.

If you have a grasp of history up to the present, you can have a grasp of art movements, and enjoy Modernism/Postmodernism.

Take a look at Picasso's use of African masks, for example. My understanding of masks is that the wearer is sometimes meant to take on the character, even the spirit, of the mask. Now, we would describe the artwork of these masks as abstract, but I assume that they're meant to get at something more real in a way -- the underlying siginifiers of human existence, perhaps. This sounds a lot like what Freud was talking about with the id and so forth. And there's the whole notion of symbols and launguage in its broadest sense. It's only natural that painters would use all of this. Indeed, even if you look at art more to your liking, I think you will find that the imagery is often imagined and idealized -- there's a whole subtext, an iconography, just as with the Moderns.

-Bernardo