Is Modern Art Shit?

How I Opened My Eyes to See That Yes, It Is.

I used to hate modern art. I used to see an old chair on a wall or a light installation and scoff because all I saw were pretentious people with too much time and money on their hands. But lately, I’ve opened up to it; I’ve dropped my egotistical self-preservation and let myself say three words: I don’t understand.

I recently was shown a modern art piece. It was a video of a pair of lips licking a clear substance off of a surface set on a loop. And, strangely, I didn’t scoff. Instead, I thought about the implications of my initial thoughts and feelings towards the work and used those as a springboard for reflection.

It’s hard to see where there’s room for art in our modern unreflective lives, which is perhaps why modern art often deals with the perverse or idiosyncratic. Perhaps these are the only remaining avenues for honest expression, since our lives are inundated with content and media and information, and we are rewarded for productiveness and quantitative results. Or maybe I’m full of shit.

I think that by allowing myself to open up to the possibility that this art was in fact something more than a mere facimile of something called artsy I allowed myself the possibility to allow myself the chance of being wrong. I used to complain that modern art showed no technical skill, that I wanted to be shown something that I could not do given the space and time. Some would say that the simple fact that this person DID make this piece makes it art. This reasoning a farce because it completely excludes the notion of intention. All art is intentional.

Sure, there is art in unintended things, but even those artists who strive to capture that art and show it to the world display a level of deliberateness in the act of exposition. So though there may be a lack of technical skill in modern art, but art itself is rarely technical. Anyone who has been to the Vatican, or has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel will marvel at the technical prowess of Michaelangelo, but this is not the art. The technique is not used to showcase the technique itself (at least in good art), but rather to convey something else in the art. So the very lack of technicality in modern art may in fact be integral to the thing it conveys.

Perhaps this thing is a yearning for something inherently untechnical, unhinged from convention or concept. I think it points toward a desire to be unbound by technicalities and facimilitude and familiarity.I will hold that if this is the case, that very nature of the art is esoteric to a fault. It walks such a fine line between genius and bullshit that it often comes across as a crude or juvenile scapegoat for digging deeper, though nobody said that art had to be sophisticated or mature.

So next time you’re in a museum and you see a lawn chair and a pink flamingo set on fire in a white room, before you scoff, just remember that it’s supposed to be shit, and you’re not supposed to like it. It would be terrible if you did.