Modern Art is Terrible

Dali's Best Painting

2011-11-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

No, it’s not the one with the melting clocks. Or the crazy elephants, though those are pretty cool. In fact, Salvador Dali’s best painting is not even in the worthless surrealism school he was known for.

It was his Woman at the Window, painted in 1925.

The difference between this work and his more famous pieces is striking. Here, instead of deranged shapes and animals and dreamy desert landscapes we see a serene, human portrayal.

Everything about this painting is human and realistic. It conveys peace of mind, focus, and consciousness. The images he is known for convey the opposite: conflictions, hallucination, and unconscious nightmare.

The use of color is down to earth and accurate as opposed to the bright and exaggerated colors of his fantastical surrealism, and the effect is to bring the viewer back down to reality. Obviously Dali knew how to use aesthetics to enhance his subject matter and meaning, whether it was sane or not.

There isn’t much to fault Dali on when it comes to his actual painting ability. Even his impressionistic early work before the age of ten is better than what most people could ever manage.

Vilabertrin by Dali at age nine.

But in years later he must have lost his mind or something. He started upholding craziness instead of the calm intelligence and order shown in Woman at the Window.

In that painting we see a glorification of all things rational and progressive. The woman is enjoying the view and feel of the ocean, but she is doing it from inside a manmade habitat that allows her to live in comfort. This is not an ode to despicable naturalism or primitivism.

Notice how the manmade wall takes up more of the image than the natural environment outside. Dali, whether he realized it or not, was making an important point about the value of nature. He was pointing out how it is only a value to the degree that it helps man achieve his happiness. Nature is seen through the eyes of man in this painting, literally and figuratively. No doubt modern environmentalists will be disappointed with this.

Instead of lame naturalism, Dali upholds mankind controlling the earth around it and taking pleasure in the accomplishment. This is the kind of stuff a rational artist would feature. It boggles my mind how the same man could go from this to any of his nonsensical later paintings.

People of course mistakenly call the portrayal of beauty and order in Woman at the Window out of date or unoriginal. They regard it as a nice picture but an unimportant one. Some of them, like a weak commenter on a previous Dali post, call it something they’ve seen a million times.

The irony is that you won’t find any artists these days making work as great as this. What you will find are a million poseurs producing the same paint-splattered-against-a-wall pretentiousness that is modern art. A painting like this is extremely rare, and the rationality it conveys will never be out of date.

Live Modern Art Painting Video

2010-10-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

Thanks to YouTube, we can now see crazy modern art being made LIVE. And this particular video is of Jonas Gerard.

As far as modern art goes, it gets a lot worse than this. The paintings that Gerard produces fall into that category of 'colorful and nothing more' that so many others are a part of. All you can say is that their work is colorful, and you're thankful for at least that. You COULD be looking at some Jackson Pollock mess of ugly colors, or the even more pretentious monochromatic stuff that is fashionable now.

So this is really abstract art at its unimpressive best. Some of these types of paintings are better than others, depending on the colors chosen and their placement, but in the end they all offer the exact same thing; a purely sensory experience. Unfortunately, I don't think that color is an end in itself.

Modern Art's Exploration of Shapes

2010-10-19T08:38:00.001-07:00

For some reason, at some point, modern artists started taking an interest in basic shapes like circles, squares, triangles, stuff like that. Whether it was to have more in common with kindergartners or just to do something new might never be known, but one thing is for sure: it's not interesting, and it's not art.

This particular piece (the artist responsible, I do not know) shows two circles on opposite ends of a solidly painted canvas. They are different colors.

That's as far into it as you can go I guess. I will say it looks like the kind of surface I've played miniature golf on, but something tells me that's not what I'm supposed to be getting out of this.

Many very famous artists did this kind of work, maybe we'll take a look at some other examples later, but it's all really the same; Just a few basic shapes and colors. The return to simplicity philosophy that surely inspired it is misused; when considering modern art paintings, a return to simplicity would be great, but I would go more in the direction of having simple images that actually portray something that can mean something to my life.

I think there is also the cliche "redefining art" motive going on behind stuff like this. I mean, that's always in the background of modern art, so maybe it's not worth mentioning, but you don't get to just declare things redefined. You don't get to keep expanding definitions to fit your expanding lunacy. Some of us liked what art was, especially when shown its new replacement.

I really don't know what artists are thinking about when they make this kind of stuff. You want to assume they are just led astray by society or something, but it's hard not to consider them purposeful frauds at some level. You have the ability to reject the standard nonsense of the times and make something that's actually art, you can't just claim ignorance forever.

Good thing I am here to help rid the world of this waste of time "art", we have to start calling people on this stuff or else it will never end.

MIT's Simmons Hall Is The Ugliest Dorm I've Ever Seen

2010-09-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

And that is saying a lot.

This building, designed by typical modern artist #205,483,672, Steven Holl, currently graces the space right next to Briggs Athletics Field at MIT. It's called The Sponge, and in typical modern artist fashion, Holl got his inspiration for it while bathing in a tub. You can always expect deep inspirations from these people.

Here is a very good article explaining the design and building process of the dorm written by a faculty member involved in its oversight (or lack thereof). Not only does this article talk about how much of an apparently pretentious loser the architect is, but it also illuminates how universities are inept bureaucracies that make it impossible to actually create a good environment for their students.

For example, the ridiculous safety concerns that forced the dorm to be constructed even worse than it was originally planned. One of them was a fear that too many people would leap to their death if allowed onto terraces. MIT is worried about this for some reason. Maybe they have bigger problems. Instead, they'll just treat their students like children who cannot be trusted to heights.

Then there's also the deadlines and money factors that forced the acceptance of a stupid design on the oversight committee. Maybe they shouldn't have locked themselves into working with a crybaby modern artist who has been given way to much power in life.

Although the architect cannot be blamed for the design damages caused by irrational university squabbling, the article mentions how little was done by Steven Holl's team to address any concerns in any meaningful way, and that his artistic vision was the important thing in the matter.

What artistic vision is that? This joke of a building? It doesn't even look like a sponge. It looks like a one of those massive soviet-era construction projects abandoned midway through. It's cubist, cold, and sterile. Steven Holl has no artistic vision, just a rekindling of that same old boring modern art dogma.

From other things I've read, the dorm today is complete with unmovable and impractical furniture designed and selected by Holl. Students have complained about the rooms being cold, their floors feeling isolated, and other such consequences of modern art in practice.

The thing about architecture is that it shows you inescapably the realities of bad design. When someone sees a stupid painting it seems harmless enough, but take that same artist and put them in charge of designing a building, and you'll have a real problem on your hands.

Modern Art as Expressing Emotion

2009-12-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

It seems that no matter who you talk to, art to them means the expression of emotion. It has been repeated by mindless drones throughout our culture so much that no one even thinks twice when they hear it. The purpose of art is to express emotion. Of course.

Look! Emotion!

So, the purpose of art is to express emotion because... people... need to know... how the artist feels? because people have a need to have... emotions expressed to them?

No. Let's put an end to this bizarre notion that emotion is an end in itself, that experiencing emotion brought on by no evaluation and leading to no further action is somehow beneficial, and that art exists to make that happen.

I say brought on by no evaluation because thats what modern art paintings try to do, isn't it? Artists like Jackson Pollock would tell you that their splatters of paint show intense emotions or some nonsense like that, but emotions do not come from no where; they cannot come from nothing.

Looking at random paint splashes cannot lead to emotion because emotion comes from judgements and evaluations of elements of reality. You don't get random emotions throughout the day for no reason, but if you see someone getting beaten up, you will probably have an emotional reaction, and the reason you have that emotional reaction is to prompt you into further action, which you need to decide to either take or suppress. Emotions happen because of a reason, and they happen for a reason.

With this in mind its easy to see where modern art has gone wrong. Artists today have bought into some idea that emotions exist in their own independent world and that experiencing them totally cut off from reality is desirable for some reason. The end result of this is paintings which are 'emotional' abstractions that exist independent from reality. Modern artists offer nothing real to evaluate or judge, they just expect you to be moved into arbitrary emotions by meaningless colors and shapes.

So what is the real purpose of art? The real purpose of art is to concretize judgements and evaluations about elements of reality; to bring mental abstractions and ideas about life into physical form. The evidence for this is clear.

What did the first artists paint? Did cavemen make splashes of colors on their walls for decoration or to express how they felt? Or did they draw pictures of things like animals and other humans? Cavemen did not have a need to be intellectual frauds and phonies, so they did not waste any time with anything that resembled what would now be called art. They created images that expressed real world evaluations and judgements. They drew things like animals being hunted because being able to hunt and eat animals meant life to them; it was everything.

Only something so real and important could bring them to produce art, and when they later looked at that art, without language or any complex means of communication, they could all understand. They looked at their drawings and were inspired by something they recognized as important, and this probably lead to great emotions which helped them hunt more animals and survive.

The purpose of art is not just to express emotion; art is not so shallow.

So all of these frauds and their super-reality meaningless emotional abstractions (their splatters of paint, in other words) are out. Pay them no mind. They offer nothing of value to anyone who lives in reality. Support artists who produce paintings that make valuable judgements of real life. Support art work that inspires action and ideas beyond the initial emotions.

Dali: The Great Masterbator

2009-12-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves Salvador Dali. His charming strangeness seems to win universal praise from art critics and the general public alike, even if they all admit he's a bit off. But with The Great Masterbator he goes beyond his normal antics and creates something truly sickening.

I was really into surrealism when I was younger, and I'll have to excuse myself for that. I know that people who like this kind of thing aren't really thinking about it at all and just kind of saying "that looks interesting so I guess it's good" because that was the depth of my thought about it at the time. Now I realize how superficial it mostly is, but I won't deny that this painting has some meaning.

I've read it has something to do with Dali's conflicted thoughts on sexuality and STDs and nice stuff like that. Clearly you get that kind of picture from this painting, but I don't think it has to be conveyed in such a bizarre manner. Surrealism can work if you are trying to display the nature of time, dreams, and memory or something like that, but it serves no purpose here.

Here Dali is just inexplicably glorifying the gross and nonsensical. There are ways to make the same point without all of the additional randomness. In the end, this painting exhibits the same mentality as torture porn films like Hostel and other "shock" trash like that.

I've actually seen this painting in a museum in Spain, up close and personal. Imagine a crowd of people standing around looking at this thing. It was uncomfortable.

If any of them were anything like me, they walked away a little bit disgusted and bewildered, and maybe a little bit regretful for having had that imagery brought into their lives. This painting is certainly Dali at his most perverse.

One thing I do give Dali credit for is his use of clear and vibrant colors, which always seem to bring life to his pieces. That's all great. If only his subjects could be something more than maniacal, sexual abstractions.

Dali is kind of frustrating because he's obviously a great painter, but he always has to fill his paintings with some arbitrary weirdness. This isn't always true, though; there is one painting I saw in that same museum which I would have to consider my favorite of his work:

This is what all his paintings should have been. No craziness, no representations from the super-reality of the subconscious or whatever surrealists think they're doing. Just an actual image that can be understood and enjoyed.

Julian Schnabel's Paintings

2009-11-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

This is one of the famous plate paintings that helped launch Julian Schnabel's interesting career. These were a big hit because they were different and unique. To the wealthy second-handers of the New York art scene, this is all that matters. People with too much money to spend and no ability to think for themselves made Schnabel a star, and he ran with it.

Most of his paintings are either portraits on smashed dishware, or blots of color such as this one:

Even though his work in this vein is more abstract and meaningless, it's at least more pleasing to look at. Instead of broken plates and stale colors, a few of his huge abstract paintings are actually bold, vibrant, and quite striking, especially given their size.

The problem is that he is only one of a million modern artists producing art in this fashion. The ease of just throwing some nice colors around attracts all kinds, unfortunately for Schnabel, who seems to be searching for something new to do which will be as celebrated as his more kitchen related work.

To give you a better idea of this guy, here is a nice little piece on him (resembling the Big Lebowski) by CBS:

Highlights of the video:

- Schnabel painting purple squids on old maps

- his baby-like reaction when faced with the slightest inkling of negative criticism

- his avoidance of owning up to having an ego

It's funny that he would be so inspired by the Rembrandt painting. Well, not really that funny, that's what real art does. What's funny is how he thinks that random blots of paint can do the same thing, but as long as there are people out there who also think so, he'll have his fans.

Julian Schnabel's paintings, as meaningful art, are really pretty terrible across the board. The ones representational at all convey a disjointed, disintegrated view that is typical of modern intellectuals. No philosophy, no principles, just a grab bag of vague nihilistic ideas. His plate portraits, in their broken up mess and chaos, take a dim view of human individuality that I find offensive.

As far as his abstract work, it may have some decorative value, but nothing else.

His films, however, including one on his fellow New York modern artist Basquiat, are all worth watching, and can be great at times. Not many directors can match his resume and its only a few films long at this point. My advice to him: spend less time vandalizing old navigational charts and more time making films.

Oh, and one more thing:

The Joan Miro Blue Paintings

2009-11-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

Blue I and II - Joan Miro

The Blue paintings by Spanish "artist" Joan Miro are classic examples of modern art confusion. According to Wikipedia, Miro was against the standard forms of painting because they supported the bourgeoisie, so he wanted to destroy those conventions.

How could representational paining technique support a certain group? Maybe I dont understand the context, but his apparent answer was to make paintings that represented nothing, except subconscious fantasy (at least, thats what they say).

If he wanted to be against the bourgeoisie he could have tried making actual art that would inspire emotions and thoughts against them, instead of just making colorful designs. Here are some of his own words about what inspires his paintings:

"How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..."

Right. Does this sound like the creation of valuable art to you? Shapes on the ceiling that some supper-less Parisian hallucinates?

There's really not much more to say about this particular series of paintings. While they are at least somewhat pleasing to the eye in color and composition, unlike Jackson Pollack's work, they are not art. They represent nothing but some guy's delusional ceiling-watching, and because of this, inspire nothing.

We'll get back to a few more Joan Miro paintings, some of his other work is more interesting to look at, despite it still being meaningless.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crazy Paintings from a Crazy Man

2009-10-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Based on what I learned from Julian Schnabel's film Basquiat (which was pretty good), Jean-Michel was an insane homeless guy who became internationally famous for making paintings that look exactly like what you'd expect from an insane homeless guy.

His work universally depicts humans as deranged maniacs. No coincidence. Obviously, this is how he saw the world and the people in it; confusing, jumbled, and nonsensical.

Art is always very telling of the artist and the people who react to it, even bad art. By criticizing it I'm not denying that it accurately expresses Basquiat's feelings and values - it clearly does.

But that does not make it good. Just like when someone expresses a stupid opinion and you say to yourself (or out loud), "who is this dumbass?", when someone expresses crazy, absurd values and feelings in art you should have the same reaction. Basquiat's weird graffiti paintings do not inspire contemplation nor emotion, only momentary curiosity, at best.

Fools around the world still buy these pieces for millions of dollars. They are paying huge sums of money for something deemed valuable on the pure say-so of others, with insecurity as their only motive.

The Modern Art Beach

2009-10-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

'View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg'

This painting, by Piet Mondrian, was done all the way back in 1909, which explains why there is the slightest bit of a recognizable subject, as opposed to the complete randomness which would become favored later on by him and others.

The funniest part of this unappealing clash of colors is that it would probably be considered too realistic and traditional to be hip enough for today's art world.

That being said, the colors used betray a dismal and nauseating view of the world. Anything remotely aesthetically pleasing is avoided. He lived in the Netherlands during this time I believe, and maybe the bleak weather there just got to him.

A beach is usually a scene of happiness, leisure, and escape for humans, which makes it all the more striking that Mondrian portrays it in this manner. You get the sense that he did this with no hope for humanity in mind, and only a surrender to vague nihilism to comfort.

Apparently he was into all sorts of crazy spiritual naturalism and theology, from what Ive read. It seems reality was as unclear to him as he paints it. It's amazing how art always shows the true nature of the artist and those who identify with it. Only delusional, out of focus people could get something positive from this piece.

For the rest of us, it is only interesting and valuable in the sense that it allows us to peer into the psyche of a man in a certain time and place, and by extension learn about what might have been a general view of things for a culture, either consciously or unconsciously.

It never surprises me to see this kind of art coming out of Europe in the lead up to World War I. Pieces like this show how the views of men were distorted, unhappy, and anti-rational, and this kind of general mindset among a culture will always lead to great destruction and suffering.

We will take a look at more of Piet Mondrian's work later on, when he becomes part of the "let's paint shapes!" movement.

Jackson Pollock: Untitled

2009-10-18T13:52:00.001-07:00

What better way to kick off the Modern Art is Terrible blog than with the consummate modern artists himself, Jackson Pollock.

This is an interesting piece. It appears to be paint splattered onto a canvas. I wonder if the fact that its untitled has anything to do with the fact that you couldn't possibly derive any meaning from it?

Apparently, art merely has to be something that exists. That seems to be the only thing this mess has going for it. I know all the Jackson Pollock defenders will tell me that he was expressing his overflowing emotion by spilling all this paint on a canvas, but I dont buy that, and even if I did, it wouldn't change anything. It doesnt matter what Pollock thought he was doing when he made this, the result is right here, and its not expressing anything.

The truth is that this guy is a genius artist, in a sense. In the sense that the con can be considered an art, and many wealthy idiots are ready to confirm this with their wallets. Recently a Pollock painting was purchased for 140 million.

This blog is going to explore the wasteland of modern art and its leading inhabitants like Pollock. Focusing mainly on paintings, but also on other things like music and film, we will go from one emperor to the next, pointing out the lack of clothes.