#stunt muppet #muppet look #i believe this is a thing you like to talk about?
YES YES IT IS okay i have a whole lot of feelings about abstract and non-representational art
because yeah, once photography became more common and widely available, people who painted started to question what they painted for. They started to wonder what made something art, what distinguished a painting from a photograph - if photographs could depict “objective” reality (insofar as such a thing even exists), then maybe the strength of painting lay in what photography, in that day and age, couldn’t capture, like feelings or impressions or the tricks the eye plays when seeing an object.
and so they asked, well, why does this portrait feel so comfortable and warm and this one feel threatening and stiff? what elements of the picture suggest that? is it the lighting? the way people are posed? can you play up those elements, exaggerate them, make the figures express the feeling instead of the other way around? what would happen if you did?
and for that matter, people continued to ask, why do we find a certain change of lighting comforting? why do we respond to someone wearing a red shirt or a blue dress differently to someone wearing a white one? what is it about red? or black? or green? why does the shape that people are standing in, the way the figures are placed in a frame, change how we feel about it?
art in a way started to become about psychology - it became about thinking and about why we think and how. because photographs (again, at the time) weren’t engaging with that nearly as much, art started to move towards a “why” of photographs. why that pose? why that color?
that’s when you start to get art like the one under “art now”, right, because look at it. REALLY LOOK, okay, don’t just shrug and walk away because “anyone could do it”. look at that exact shade of orange. do you ever see just a big swath of one color in nature? no, you see hints of it. where have you seen it? what does it remind you of? for that matter, what about the little stripes on it? does that make you feel like there’s depth to the painting - something inside it? why? after all, the painting is a flat plane*, so if you do get a sense of depth from it that’s your brain interpreting signals its familiar with. isn’t that incredible, that all it takes is a few little lines on a single color? isn’t it strange how one person will see depth and another won’t?
*and for that matter it ISN’T a flat plane, there are variations in the height of the paint on the canvas and how much it’s built up, and it protrudes slightly from the wall instead of being recessed into it - does that do anything to the sensation of depth? while we’re on that note, do you ever look at a representational painting and think about how you, the viewer, are looking into it and see it as having space and depth when it really doesn’t - only it does, but not the same space and depth as is represented in the picture?
and that’s without even getting into larger cultural shifts like the World Wars - and it’s hard to overestimate the effect that WWI and WWII had on even the “mainstream” art world - and the greater voice of underrepresented and oppressed groups like women, POC, and LGBT artists and the increasing technological sophistication of photography and the advent of video and widely-available audio recording and the increasing use of galleries to display art rather than private residences and it is still art, okay, representative art is art too but that doesn’t mean this isn’t it’s just focusing on something different and if you dismiss non-representational art as lazy or a con i will sit your ass down in the nearest chair and yell at you about marcel duchamp for an hour
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