Modern Art, and Why it is Mostly Bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNI07egoefc

Yesterday I watched a video called “Why Modern Art is so Bad”. In the video, the narrator, Robert Florczak, compares modern art “with older art” and he deliberately explains why he thinks modern art standards are low compared to art in the past. He also explains how modern art mostly praises everything that is new or different and it seems that the only thing that matters is shocking people or making statements. For example, imagine if someone stood on a stage and sang a song out of tune just because they felt like it was art, would you applaud that person? Would you even go through hearing the whole song? Well, I personally wouldn’t. In my opinion, in order for the quality to restore itself someone must put a standard of what is good and what is simply a statement.Art is undefinable, and anyone can be an artist, but it is mostly in the visual arts that the focus has shifted to mere statements rather than masterpieces that combine big ideas with beauty. This is shift can be seen in both art galleries and in the way society praises what is different rather than what is unique.

Nowadays, people expect you to like the pieces shown in galleries and museums just because they were done by someone or because they were different, or revolutionary. I personally don’t see anything revolutionary about a white canvas, I have seen lots of them before, yet there is a purely white painting in exhibit in the San Francisco museum of modern art. There are many pieces like the one I just mentioned that are highly overpriced and overpraised. As the video mentions, before we used to carve rocks now we just exhibit a rock, because who would bother carving it? This is exactly what showcasing a white canvas does.

Now you might be thinking that I am just another kid that does not understand art, and I might be, but in my opinion there is a big difference between artists that do and artists that say. Artists that do, not only know their craft, but they implement it to its maximum potential with purpose behind it. Take an artist like Dali, his pieces not only express big ideas, but they are also crafted in a way where the lightning and the elements in the piece work in perfect harmony to make the piece stand out and be noteworthy of the “masterpiece” title. Like Dali, there are many “modern” artists like Picasso, Warhol, Van Gogh, in between others that knew/know what they were doing and did it in a unique and amazing way, although, in my opinion, there are more artists that just say than those that do.

The problem nowadays is that artists confuse what is unique to what is just merely different. I feel that people praise these artists not because they are good but because society says that they have to be good because they are “unique” where they are just plainly different. Just as there are many rocks in the world, there are also many canvases in the world and they are not made for artists to hang them in an exhibit, they are made to be painted on. I saw this contrast between different and unique at the Rousseau exhibit in the Musée d’Orsay. What shocked me the most about the exhibit was that a was being piece praised simply because he messed up the perspective. This doesn’t make sense, why would something be considered good because the artist messed up. Part of the problem is that people are scared that if they say they dislike something they will be regarded as immature. You can see this in the video when the narrator says that he showed a picture to his students of a “painting” by Jackson Pollock and what he got were responses from his students praising the image. In fact, the image was actually a close up from his studio apron. This shows how people just praise art because they are expected to, not because they understand it. This is why so many pieces are starting to be merely different rather than unique.

The video “Why is Modern Art So Bad?” Ends with a powerful message, the art world is only going to change if people stop purchasing “bad art”, or if people stop praising it. In my opinion, just because it is art it doesn’t mean that it can’t have a quality standard, but how do you put a standard in art? Personally, I don’t really know, but if I had to guess I would say that it should be about what people really think is good both visually and conceptually. Finally, I have to agree with the video that in order to change the current art world people need to stop purchasing things that other people say is good when it really isn’t, because in the end if no pays for it no one does it.