i never realized how much i hate modern art until i took a class in modern art
it’s so pretentious. like half of the pieces we’ve looked at have been purportedly commenting on elitism in art and income disparities when the piece itself sold for thousands of dollars to be put in a museum for rich people to look at. you’re supposed to look at barren canvases with vague splotches of color and meditate on the nature of life, navelgazing for an hour. bitch I can do that in my own home for free. most of the time the pieces themselves don’t require any skill, it’s just an asshole with some bright idea that ~~~no one has ever thought of before~~~ (which is bullshit, originality is a myth) and the gall to pretend that they’re saying something meaningful. A bunch of postmodernists specialize in literal plagiarism but with a different title. wow so edgy. really thought provoking. you sure are making a statement that’s relevant and people care about.
the most egregious example is this bullshit:
this is an overhead view of a plaza wherein some famous guy was commissioned to design a public art piece for. The brick and nonfunctional fountain was already there. The sculpture? a literal wall of iron bisecting the courtyard. this guy was paid over 100k to design this.
Now, this is located in a city, smack dab in the middle of a bunch of office buildings. Workers who had to spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing menial desk jobs had to look at this ugly piece of shit. You want to have a nice picnic during lunch break with your work buddies? tough shit. You get tilted arc instead fucko. You can’t see from one end of the courtyard to another because some dick thought rebar sheet metal was more important. It also impeded movement between the buildings so that you have to go around this fucking obstacle instead of just fucking walking from one side to the other.
So yeah, these workers got pissed, because you’re making an ugly place even uglier for obscene amounts of money without thinking about the ppl who actually have to look at it every day (who had no say in the design). There have been countless studies done on stress and related health problems in office workers and having to look at ugly as sin shit like this piece of work actually contributes to stress and decreases mental and physical health (as opposed to pretty scenery or plants etc).
When the designer was told what people thought of his masterpiece, he threw an absolute shitfit. “art doesn’t have to be pretty”, he said. “art isn’t for the public”.
while it is absolutely true that art doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing to be meaningful or relevant, putting this fucking monstrosity in a place where people are forced to look at it day in day out, in addition to the ugly buildings and streets and shit that comprises the rest of their lives is just kind of a dick move. Yes, people are painfully aware that life and art and all that shit isn’t always pretty. they’re the ones who have to live with that fact, not some pompous asshole who thinks he’s god’s gift to man because he put some metal wall in a plaza.
And yeah, not all art is for the public. Art can be self-expression or just for your own enjoyment. But if you are being commissioned by the state, paid hundereds of thousands of tax dollars to make a PUBLIC art piece, yeah, it’s for the public! saying that other people have no say in what that public art piece looks like, implying that if other people don’t like your art that they just Don’t Understand True Art TM, is this hugely egotistical self-masturbatory elitism that puts the artist above the working people (when like the whole point of art is supposed to be disrupting this kind of bullshit thinking).
But that’s not even the best part. This fucking douchebag, upon being told that people don’t want this metal wall in their courtyard and that they want him to move it, freaks the FUCK out about how he “designed it just for this space and taking it out of its context would destroy it”. Which like, yeah context is important when understanding the meaning of a piece. but literally the only meaning of this piece was “i got paid obscene amounts of money and im gonna use it to make the ugliest thing i can think of literally just because”. If you move it out of the context of the plaza it wouldn’t be impeding foot traffic or being an eyesore to the workers who are forced to spend their days there, which is destroying the purpose of the work. So in the end this guy opts to have the piece destroyed rather than moved because he can’t stand to have his ~~~high art~~~ removed from its PurposeTM which is to be unpleasant. i dont give a single goddamn fuck about ‘advancing sculpture’ or whatever the fuck, if it’s causing people stress on top of their already stressful lives just because you thought it would be great to create this atrocity in a place where no one can escape from, you’re not ‘advancing’ anything, you’re just being a dick.
So now the space has been converted to a rather plesant little oasis with plants and lots of benches.
anyways thats my dissertation on how much i hate contemporary art and find it to lack relevance or meaning to the people it supposedly represents or defends. it takes itself too seriously and imposes arbitrary and hypocritical statements on the nature of art at the expense of any real substance. in the world we live in, pretty things for the sake of being pretty, having stories that are entertaining and engaging and relatable, having fun and feeling good in a world that devalues those things, etc. are far more impactful and radical than anything sitting in a museum created by some millionaire who jacks off to their “fine art”. thanks for coming to my ted talk have a good night
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